Atom Egoyan
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West Memphis Redux: Atom Egoyan on Devil’s Knot
The West Memphis Three case was the subject of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s much-lauded Paradise Lost trilogy (1996, 2000, 2011), as well as Amy Berg’s 2012 West of Memphis. Each documentary chronicled the ongoing evolution of a uniquely American tragedy: the wrongful convictions of three teenage outcasts in the grotesque slayings of three eight-year-olds in West Memphis, Ark on May 5th, 1993. In Devil’s Knot, Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s fictionalized retelling of the events, the teenagers who stand accused — Jason Baldwin (Seth Meriwether), Damien Echols (James Hamrick), and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (Kris Higgins) — are clearly railroaded by local law […]
by Brandon Harris on May 9, 2014 -
IN PRODUCTION: “DEVIL’S KNOT,” “UNTITLED NICOLE HOLOFCENER PROJECT,” “CAN A SONG SAVE YOUR LIFE?” AND “ONE SQUARE MILE”
“In Production” is a regular column which focuses on notable independent films that are currently shooting. After four documentaries (three of which were produced by HBO, the other by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh), the story of the West Memphis Three gets the narrative treatment courtesy of director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter). Devil’s Knot focuses on three young men, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. who were wrongfully accused of murdering three children as part of a satanic ritual. Appearing in the lead roles are newcomer James Hamrick (a Wesleyan drama student) as Echols, Seth Meriwether (Trouble with the Curve) as […]
by Byron Camacho on Aug 13, 2012 -
FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: SPRING, 1995
Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb was our cover story in Spring, 1995. Consensus was that our cover, which was an illustration by the film’s subject, R. Crumb, didn’t really work. Newsstand distributors mistook the issue for a comics magazine, leading to retail confusion. Also in the book: Swimming with Sharks, Basketball Diaries, My Family, and Berenice Reynaud interviewing filmmaker Lourdes Portillo about her The Devil Never Sleeps. Liza Bear interviewed Atom Egoyan about his Exotica, who spoke of the film and his impending fatherhood: Filmmaker: You were becoming a father while Exotica was in production. What effect did being an expectant parent […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2010 -
FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: WINTER, 1994
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Winter, 1994. Today, most of our Filmmaker covers are original photography, but back in the day, we didn’t have the budget and were forced to work with supplied art from distributors. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who went on to The Deep End, Bee Season, and, most recently, Uncertainty, made their debut with Suture, a formally challenging meta-thriller with a wobbly poster that produced for us a somewhat inscrutable cover. We took their key art, cropped it, colorized it yellow […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2010 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER (SUNDAY MORNING LINKS)
Here are articles of interest I’ve bookmarked over the last few days in my Instapaper. * In the Edmonton Journal, Atom Egoyan discusses the rise and what he sees as the slow decline of independent production, linking it to not only external forces (technology, economic cycles) but also the fusion of independent production with a particularly American urge for self-expression. Egoyan speaks in a matter-of-fact tone. Able to transcend the pettier concerns of a frequently petty industry, thanks to a sophisticated world view, trenchant sense of humour and healthy dose of Canadian humility, Egoyan sees the shifting business model as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 18, 2010 -
JENNIFER KROOT, “IT CAME FROM KUCHAR”
George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 7, 2010
