Abel Ferrara
-
Abel Ferrara Talks His Venice and Toronto-Bound Pasolini
At 1985, Evan Louison sits down in Rome with Abel Ferrara, learning more about the director’s Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the murdered Italian director. Below Ferrara talks about the film’s relationship to fiction, non-fiction, imagination and the subconscious. Read the complete interview at the link. AF: He was a part of a tradition, a movement — Rosselini, Antonioni, & Bertolucci after that. I’m sure if you’re hard pressed you could call it all the same style. These guys are working with the same DPs, & a lot of the same actors. He wasn’t the only one using guys right […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2014 -
Screening Abel Ferrara’s Director’s Cut of Cat Chaser
After Cat Chaser, Abel Ferrera was reluctant to give up final cut again, not without a fight anyways. The erotic thriller’s 1989 theatrical release, complete with a clunky voiceover ghosted by another actor because leading hunk Peter Weller refused, has a fundamentally different character from Ferrera’s director’s cut currently housed in the basement at Anthology Film Archives. Last Tuesday, Anthology screened the only known copy, on video with time code, a rough audio mix, and without a score, for the first time maybe ever since it played on the Fox lot to studio bigwigs in the ’80s. That’s the last […]
by Whitney Mallett on Jul 28, 2014 -
Cannes News, Weekend Round-Up: Controversy Over Kisses and Dominique Strauss-Kahn
While we took the weekend off from keeping tabs on news in and around Cannes, here are some highlights we missed: • Over at the Montreal Gazette, Liz Ferguson rounds up photos of red carpet activism, ranging from nearly the entire cast of The Expendables 3 holding papers reading “Bring our girls back” (after riding down the streets in two tanks) to Jauja director Lisandro Alonso, star Viggo Mortensen, screenwriter Fabian Casas and other cast members bearing a sign reading “We want the trophy” in Spanish — a message of support for Buenos Aires’ Club Atlético San Lorenzo de Almagro, […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 19, 2014 -
Reviews and an NSFW Trailer for Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York
Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York is set to screen in the Cannes market on the 17th — the same day it will be released on VOD in France. No word yet on the date of the U.S. IFC release, but our appetite is whetted by a new, very NSFW trailer found on Italian television that beats the rather prosaic one that dropped online a few days ago. Watch it below. The trade reviews are out too, which suggest the film revisits the intensity of Ferrara’s classic Bad Lieutenant even as it also explores the actor/role psychodrama of Dangerous Game. […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2014 -
4:44 Last Day on Earth — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth premiered at the 68th Venice Film Festival. It’s being released theatrically by IFC Films on March 23, 2012.) A number of recent films have collectively suggested that the more global, or even cosmic, the crisis, the more intimate the response. This was done most recently in Perfect Sense but also last summer’s Another Earth and, to a lesser extent, The Tree of Life, about which it might be more accurate to say that the cosmic is crafted from the intimate. (Melancholia breaks from this trend somewhat, and its cold remove is part of what makes it so disconcerting a film.) This art-house apocalypse continues in […]
by Michael Nordine on Mar 22, 2012 -
Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Director Abel Ferrara
The original King of Indie Abel Ferrara made a stop at Emir Kusturica’s Küstendorf Film and Music Festival this January to screen his latest film 4:44 Last Day on Earth. The Loisaida-set film paints a picture of addiction at the end of the world, starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh. Ferrara felt very welcome at Küstendorf, Emir Kusturica’s wooden village high in the mountains of Mokra Gora. “We just kinda have a connection, other than I look like him,” Ferrera told me of the famed Serbian director, minutes before entering a workshop to discuss the film with students who had descended […]
by Ariston Anderson on Feb 6, 2012 -
THIS IS WHAT THE (OBSCURE) MOVIES DID TO ME IN 2011
They moved me. Often deeply, in ways I failed to articulate to myself until much later. That is, of course, the whole reason I go to the movies, to have some sort of visceral, emotional (or intellectual) response, be it laughter or sadness or pain or empathy or disgust or profound understanding. Why else do it? Nothing, beside having those emotions, meets the criteria of entertainment, at least for me. See, I’m one of those lucky few that gets to travel the world just to see films. Crazy, I know, especially in this era of not so cheap oil, but it’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 5, 2012 -
ABEL FERRARA ON “KING OF NEW YORK” AND “4:44” AT THE NYFF
Perhaps the chilliest press conference I ever attended, one in which the conflicts of the movie seemed to drift right off the celluloid into the audience and then back onto the stage, occurred when Abel Ferrara’s The King of New York played the New York Film Festival in 1990. I was thrilled by the film, particularly its concluding adagio, in which Christopher Walken bleeds out in the back of a taxi cab stuck amidst the traffic of Times Square. The lights came up, and Ferrara, Walken, Wesley Snipes and some others from the cast walked onstage. The questions were contentious. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 10, 2011 -
Take Shelter — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Before world-premiering in the dramatic competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Take Shelter was picked up by Sony Classics. It went on to win the Grand Prize at Critics Week, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize, in Cannes. It opens theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the official website to learn more.) [DISCLAIMER: I am very good friends with several of the key collaborators involved with the Take Shelter production. Ordinarily, I would absolve myself from writing a review based on far more tenuous connections, but in this particular case, I […]
by Michael Tully on Sep 29, 2011 -
21st Century Man: Abel Ferrara
In person, Abel Ferrara is a whirlwind of gestures and jokes, of quick smiles and vulgar asides, digressions piled upon digressions, even if he’s much sharper and in control of his staccato New Yorkese vernacular than he lets on. Ferrara, who will turn 60 this year, has had one of American indie cinema’s strangest and most fascinating careers, one which has taken the Bronx native from the old 42nd Street’s row of exploitation and porn cinemas to the Croissette in Cannes. Often we talk of middle-aged artists mellowing, but Ferrara maintains a manic, youthful energy that is both infectious and […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2011
