Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Livia Bloom interviewed Bright Star writer-director Jane Campion for our ’09 Toronto Film Festival coverage. Bright Star is nominated for Best Costume Design (Janet Patterson). Chaste is not a word often associated with the films of Jane Campion. From the boudoirs of The Portrait of a Lady to the rough frontier bedrooms of The Piano (1993), Campion is known for her steamy, sultry visions of intimacy. But in her latest film, […]
Filmmaker Miao Wang, a Beijing native now based in Brooklyn, is currently racing to finish her feature doc Beijing Taxi in time for SXSW, where it’s scheduled to world premiere. She needs to raise $11,000 to cover post-production expenses and is just under half way there with five days left to go at Kickstarter. From the Kickstarter page: BEIJING TAXI is a feature length documentary that vividly portrays Beijing undergoing a profound transformational arch. Through a humanistic lens, the intimate lives of three taxi drivers connect a morphing city confronted with modern issues and changing values. With diverse imagery combined […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Il Divo writer-director Paolo Sorrentino for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Il Divo is nominated for Best Makeup (Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano). If Paolo Sorrentino represents the future of Italian cinema, then the country’s filmic output certainly should be exciting in years to come. The highly accomplished writer-director was born in Naples in 1970, and first became involved in filmmaking in the mid-90s when he […]
Indie film champions are often fond of comparing what we do to indie music. If bands can tour, why can’t we? If bands can sell merch, then we should too. If recording artists can form boutique labels, then why can’t film distributors? Like, for example, Oscilloscope, the film label of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. At Flavorwire, Judy Berman takes this assumption to task in a piece called “Why is Indie Film Dying While Indie Music Thrives?” She bases her assessment of indie film’s slow-motion death on Edward Jay Epstein’s “Can Indie Movies Survive?”, which I found to be a pretty […]
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
In the new issue of Filmmaker, Esther Robinson penned “The Big Art/Little Debt Plan,” which discusses the relation of filmmakers to risk, their films, and their money. She reached out to several filmmakers by email, and their responses helped shape her article. We are running several of the responses Esther received here on the blog. Below is the one from Paola Mendoza, director of Entre Nos. What strategies did you employ to stay no/low debt during your production? My strategy was pretty simple: I refused to go into debt. While making art is the essence of who I am, I […]
Baltimore director Matt Porterfield’s (Hamilton) latest film Putty Hill premieres this month at the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum. On the film’s nicely-done website, Porterfield describes coming up with a five-page treatment that would use 15 locations when financing for a larger project, Metal Gods, fell through. About the result, he writes: Putty Hill is not quite like anything I’ve ever seen. On a most basic level, it is an amalgam of traditional forms of documentary and narrative realism. But it is an approach to realism in opposition to the anthropological, lyrical, and romantic currents present in most of the genre. […]
In the new issue of Filmmaker, Esther Robinson penned “The Big Art/Little Debt Plan,” which discusses the relation of filmmakers to risk, their films, and their money. She reached out to several filmmakers by email, and their responses helped shape her article. We are running several of the responses Esther received here on the blog. Here is Jonathan Goodman Levitt’s. What strategies did you employ to stay no/low debt during your production? I’ve had to take on a lot of more roles myself than would be ideal for the film, or for me personally. Life has been pretty much on-hold […]
The South by Southwest Film Festival unveiled its lineup for this year’s fest, which will take place in Austin, Texas March 12-20. Out of the 119 titles shown this year some of the highlights will be the opening night film, fanboy fav Kick-Ass, as well as Mark and Jay Duplass’s Cyrus, Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, Michel Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart and Bernard Rose’s Mr. Nice (pictured). The full list of films are below. HEADLINERS CyrusDirectors and Screenwriters: Jay and Mark DuplassWith John’s social life at a standstill and his ex-wife about to get remarried, a […]
Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi’s keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn’t shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi’s portrait of the subjects very […]