Andrew Bujalski
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Trailer Watch: Andrew Bujalski’s There There
Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls, Computer Chess, Funny Ha Ha) returns with his seventh feature film as writer/director, the pandemic-esque film There There. The film features an ensemble cast, including Jason Schwartzman, Lennie James, Lili Taylor and Molly Gordon as narratively connected yet visually isolated characters, with Bujalski filming each individual performance separately before joining actors with their scene partners in the edit. In an introduction to his interview with Bujalski after the film’s Tribeca premiere back in June, Vadim Rizov describes There There‘s narrative setup: “After a disorientingly shot-at-home sax solo from musician Jon Natchez (whose quarantine-vibes solo sets […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 18, 2022 -
“A Giant Greenscreen Marvel Movie, Except We Couldn’t Afford the Greenscreens”: Andrew Bujalski on There There
“We’re not sure how to describe it,” Bujalski told the Cambridge Day‘s Tom Meek of his seventh feature, the Tribeca premiere There There. “We’re just gonna put it on the screen and let everybody else tell us what we did.” That promised a strange film, and There There delivers. After a disorientingly shot-at-home sax solo from musician Jon Natchez (whose quarantine-vibes solo sets provide interludes between segments), There There begins the first of six narrative sequences centered around pairs of unnamed characters with Lennie James and Lili Taylor, who’ve spent the night together for the first time. They’re introduced in rigorously locked-off shots […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 17, 2022 -
“Would You Mind Going to Video Village?” Andrew Bujalski on Support The Girls, Hollywood Casting and the Patriarchy
The last time I interviewed Andrew Bujalski, he’d thrown a number of viewers for a loop with Results, his gym-set, quasi-romantic comedy starring Guy Pierce and Cobie Smulders. The overt weirdness of Computer Chess was one thing, but Bujalski feinting at a mainstream-leaning movie with honest-to-goodness name actors, a perky score and the promise of two hot people hooking up for a happy ending was a proposition that seemed to fry the expectations of both veteran Bujalski viewers (who didn’t see it coming) and people who didn’t know his work at all (and didn’t get the normal romcom they expected). I’m firmly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 24, 2018 -
“You Have to Forge Your Own Path”: Rick Linklater Headlines an Austin Film Society Tribute in Karlovy Vary
As a native Texan and dutiful SXSW attendee traveling to the Czech Republic, I was thrilled to hear that Richard Linklater and the Austin Film Society would be the subject of a Tribute at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The 53rd edition of the Czech-based event that concluded July 7 screened an early print of Linklater’s $23,000 indie phenomenon Slacker (of which he introduced wearing an Astros baseball jersey); Eagle Pennell’s 1983 cult classic Last Night at the Alamo; Robert Rodriguez’s inaugural low-budget hit El Mariachi; and Tom Huckabee and William Van Overbeek’s surreal, image-laden doc Death of a […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on Jul 12, 2018 -
Watch: Andrew Bujalski on Chantal Akerman and Je, Tu, Il, Elle
This is fun: Andrew Bujalski, who was a student of Chantal Akerman’s at Harvard, speaks before an Austin Film Society screening of Je, Tu, Il, Elle, recalling his initial, intimidating encounters with her and noting Jim Jarmusch’s debt to this film in particular.
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 6, 2016 -
Watch: An Andrew Bujalski Book Trailer for Karen Olsson’s All the Houses
We don’t normally post book trailers over here, because a) that’s not our remit b) they are, by and large, perfectly dreadful. This is a little different though, since it’s been made by Andrew Bujalski to help promote his wife Karen Olsson’s second novel All the Houses — as he wrote in an email, “I directed a ‘book trailer’ (not that anyone seems to know what a ‘book trailer’ is).” The novel concerns a family haunted by the father’s involvement in Iran-Contra. That makes for an excuse to playfully intercut between questions to Olsson (who sometimes cracks up at her inability to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 10, 2015 -
Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results
Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Andrew Bujalski’s Results
Still one of my Sundance highlights, Andrew Bujalski’s Results is nearing theaters on May 29. An off-kilter, comedic take on the love triangle, Results concerns two trainers (Cobie Smulders and Guy Pearce) and their wealthy new client (Kevin Corrigan). You can check out my take from Sundance here, and Vadim Rizov will have an interview with Bujalski in the Spring issue.
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 15, 2015 -
“Trying to Play, More or Less, ‘By the Book'”: Results | Director Andrew Bujalski
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? I confronted plenty of fears, don’t know that I *conquered* any of them per se. On this movie I was taking most of the ideas & philosophies I’d developed over the last 15 years of work and tossing them out, trying to play instead, more or less, “by the book.” Of course I still made plenty of unconventional decisions and I suspect the movie is as idiosyncratic as anything […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2015 -
Sundance 2015: Results, Entertainment and The Witch
He may not be your bag, but it’s tough to deny that Andrew Bujalski is one of the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today. So distinctive that even when he sets his sights on the pseudo-pedestrian genre of the romantic comedy, he finds a way to completely reconfigure the shape of its central love triangle. In Results, Trevor (Guy Pearce) is an Australian in Austin who owns the Power 4 Life fitness studio, living and breathing his own advertising mantras about self-improvement. The recently divorced, suddenly rich Danny (Kevin Corrigan, brilliant) is new in town and eager to buy […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 29, 2015
