Aaron Katz
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“It Was Important to Me Not to Fetishize a Classic Vision But to Look to the Present for Inspiration”: Director Aaron Katz on his L.A. Neo-Noir, Gemini
His fifth feature, and the first following his co-directed (with Martha Stephens) breakthough comedy Land Ho!, Gemini returns writer/director Aaron Katz to the character-based neo-noir of his earlier Cold Weather but with the cloudy Portland grays of that film replaced here with a sunlit sensuality befitting the picture’s L.A. setting. Indeed, shooting in his new hometown for the first time, Katz looks for inspiration to the kind of ’80s thrillers — American Gigolo and Bad Influence in particular — that found their treacheries and ambiguities within the city’s sunlit highways, dark nightclubs and oversized mansions. And while city geography is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2018 -
“Everything Seems to be Licorice”: Land Ho!’s Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz on Shooting in Iceland
Land Ho!, co-written and co-directed by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, is an odd-couple two-hander like Katz’s previous Cold Weather and Quiet City, and a progressively rural odyssey like Stephens’ Pilgrim Song, accented by the hues of regional color familiar from both directors’ palettes. But given the film’s Icelandic setting, perhaps another frame of reference is also called for. In interviews, the filmmakers frequently discuss the remoteness of the Icelandic landscape, its incongruity with the day-to-day lives of their characters, and, above all, its mysterious and “otherworldly” beauty. In Iceland, where I currently live, this view is not necessarily reflective […]
by Mark Asch on Jul 10, 2014 -
Park City Critic’s Notes #4: European Road Trips, Higher Learning, Black Iconoclasts and More
It thins out, Park City, usually starting on Monday, but dramatically so by Tuesday. The big premiere parties have come and gone. The agents and sales reps and industry professionals are mostly headed to whatever coast they call home. So too is the sponsored corporate food; if you’re looking for a free Morning Star veggie burger at what is usually a quaint restaurant called The Eating Establishment, you’re out of luck by Day 7 of the Sundance Film Festival. As the sales continue to trickle down, terms almost never disclosed anymore, all that continues is the movies, of course, the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 23, 2014 -
Five Questions with Land Ho! Directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens
Co-directed features aren’t too common in the independent film world, and even less so from already established auteurs. But Land Ho! finds two of the American independent scene’s most promising young directors – Aaron Katz (Cold Weather) and Martha Stephens (Pilgrim Song) – joining forces. A buddy, road trip comedy about a pair of aging ex-brother-in-laws (Paul Eenhoorn of This is Martin Bonner, and Earl Lynn Nelson) on holiday in Iceland, the film is already being hyped as one of the most promising discoveries of this year’s festival. Land Ho! premieres today in Sundance’s NEXT section. Filmmaker: A full-on directorial […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 19, 2014 -
Land Ho! | Directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? Making a movie […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2014 -
Can Microbudget Filmmakers Graduate to the Big Time?
Independent film has long been considered the farm leagues for Hollywood’s majors. But with fewer specialized distributors and a risk-averse studio system, do up-and-comers still have the opportunities they once did during the ecstatic exuberance of the sector’s heyday? The crossover success of former DIY filmmakers Lena Dunham (with HBO’s Girls), Sean Durkin (who is developing The Exorcist TV series) and the Duplass brothers (with their studio-indies Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home), suggests that breakthroughs are still very possible. And yet, for every Jeff Nichols (Mud) or Zal Batmanglij (The East), there are numerous filmmakers who have made […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 19, 2012 -
LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY SIGN DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH K5
Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, the producing duo behind Gotham Award Best Picture winner and Oscar nominee Beginners, have signed an output and development deal with sales, finance, and production company K5 Media Group. The deal marks an alliance between two rising indie powerhouses. Knudsen and Van Hoy have been building their reputation for the past ten years. In 2004, they founded production company Parts & Labor and steadily accumulated a body of festival circuit sleeper hits including Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, and Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still. More recently, the duo produced […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Feb 1, 2012 -
Seven Overlooked Independent Films Of 2011
The world doesn’t need another list of the best films of the year, but after considering my own recent lists, I realized there were a handful of movies‹excellent independent work that has largely flown under the radar‹that even I initially overlooked. Here are seven bold American low-budget movies from 2011 that may have been forgotten in theatrical release, but should make for essential home viewing (if you haven’t seen them yet) in 2012. And I’ll be among the first in line to see where these young directors go next. 1. Silver Bullets. All I can say is that I […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 2, 2012 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/13/01
Here are a few of the articles in my Instapaper this week. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has his usual excellent selection of Underground Film Links, including this link to “Foreign Cinema: Whither San Francisco’s Experimental Film Legacy,” by Kimberly Chun at the Bold Italic. She visits Canyon Cinema and and various local filmmakers, looking for scene described in the Pacific Film Archive’s first book, Radical Light. Chuck Tryon watches (and likes) The Fighter with his Massachusetts-born fiance and notes the reference to the documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell: A look back at the documentary shows […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2011 -
Cold Weather and Everything You Wanted to Know About Genre
Honestly, what the hell is up with genre these days? It’s a tricky thing to get a handle on, but we all have an idea of what’s happening in the independent film world: as production financing has dried up in a world where cinema is, simply put, not generating as much revenue as it used to, independent filmmakers who might be more at home making “art” flicks have decided to mix their interests with more familiar genre narratives. Catfish, which generated more intellectual-thought-content-per-minute than any other 2010 release, was sold as (and contained elements of) a Blair Witch-esque thriller, set […]
by Zachary Wigon on Feb 2, 2011
