“Independent filmmakers have always been very good about making their films, but they’ve had to rely on other outside advice [with regards to distribution],” said filmmaker and Slamdance founder Paul Rachman at the Filmmaker Summit, a Saturday-morning confab here at Park City hosted by Slamdance and the Open Video Alliance. Indeed, with the collapse of traditional acquisitions-based models for independents and the flourishing of DIY strategies and new platforms, perhaps the largest growth business in independent film right now is in seminars and conferences devoted to its future. This one condensed a lot of thought from some of the key […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 6:30 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Women Without Men was my first feature-length film, so numerous challenges had to be faced throughout the process of its making. First of all I’m a visual artist — a photographer and a video artist — so I had never written a script or had worked with a producer, professional actors, or a large crew before. Also the film was based on a well-known novel by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. This novel was written in a style of magic realism, an extremely difficult piece of literature to readapt […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 6:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] There were a couple of reshoots during production, most of which were short and painless. But after we shot a pretty complicated scene at a time-sensitive location, I watched the footage on the camera in my car while the cast and crew went and got dinner, and I knew that the scene was unusable. So I had to go meet up with everyone, who were so relieved to be done with such a tricky scene, and tell them that we had to do it all over. The […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The hardest decision I made on this film was mustering the courage to deconstruct my film completely in postproduction. I don’t know if other directors had similar experiences with their films, but when I first pieced Night Catches Us together, while I was pleased with it, it no longer felt as creative as I’d hoped. Something was missing — though I couldn’t determine what. At first I was too overwhelmed and exhausted to confront the problem, let alone address the ways I needed to fix it. But eventually, […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] In Daniel Woodrell’s novel, the protagonist, Ree Dolly, has two younger brothers. We decided to cast these roles in Missouri and held auditions during preproduction. We were excited to find Isaiah Stone for the part of the older boy, Sonny, but we struggled to cast the younger boy. We auditioned a lot of boys, and then paired different boys with each other. We thought we were getting close, but something was holding me back. The boys we were moving toward were not from the rural areas in which […]
This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue. Hell can be many things — being buried alive in the Iraqi desert, for example, or perhaps just watching your screenplay slowly disintegrate on the shelf during never-ending studio “development.” The opposite of most screenwriters, Chris Sparling knows the former but not the latter. He went directly from struggling indie director to successful Hollywood scribe when the screenplay for his horror thriller Buried was picked up, cast with a major up-and-coming star, and thrown before the cameras in just six months. And now it’s receiving its U.S. premiere at the […]
UNTITLED (WOMEN OF ALLAH). PHOTO COURTESY OF GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK. “It’s very flattering to be interviewed by a film magazine as opposed to an art publication,” said Shirin Neshat. “I am very flattered anybody would think it’s worth talking to me.” Widely-acknowledged as one of the most influential contemporary Middle-Eastern artists (and apparently one of the most modest), Neshat and her work are staples of museums and galleries around the world, while remaining relatively little-known in film circles. That changed this year when she burst onto the independent international film stage with her first feature film, Women Without Men. […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] Finding locations with no budget was by far the hardest thing we had to do. There are two specific examples that I think are interesting: We had a one-page scene that took place in an operating room. Finding an actual operating room was impossible so the decision became do we change the scene or do we fake the location? In the end our brilliant production designers Ryan Kravetz and Eunice Bae dressed a corner of a room with a few boxes of medical-looking equipment, hung a curtain […]
The filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman work together in New York as Supermarche, and are prolific producers of music videos, commercials and feature films (Opus Jazz: NY Export, premiering on PBS this Spring, is their latest.) They also share an office with Schulman’s younger brother, Yaniv. One day Yaniv got an email from an eight-year-old girl who wanted to paint a picture of one of his photographs (a production still from Opus Jazz that had run in the newspaper.) Egged on by his brother and Henry, Yaniv said yes, and instigated an intense correspondence not only with the girl […]
Producer Ron Simons is blogging from Sundance with his first feature, Tanya Hamilton’s Competition title, Night Catches Us (pictured). Here’s his second post. Well I am here! The journey was not without its complications, but I’m here. While the flight to SLC was not delayed (actually arrived 15 minutes early), there were a number of disgruntled passengers sharing the flight with me. While I was uncomfortably sleeping (having slept only an hour and a half last night due to packing), another poor soul was suffering across the aisle from me. Apparently the gray haired gentleman boarded the non-stop from JFK […]