Ben Kasulke
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Back to One, Episode 105: Hannah Marks
Mega-talented multi-hyphenate Hannah Marks started writing Banana Split when she was still a teenager. It was loosely based on her real life. She rewrote it with her writing partner Joey Power as her acting credits piled up in stuff like The Runaways, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Then, after she co-directed her first feature (with Power), After Everything, she was able to get Banana Split made with herself in the staring role, directed by Benjamin Kasulke. In this half hour, she talks about the ups and downs of standing her ground and seeing the dream of […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Mar 31, 2020 -
Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke on Shooting Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room
Ben Kasulke has literally dozens of credits on his iMDb page, but running throughout his career are collaborations with two directors: Lynn Shelton and, more recently, Guy Maddin. And what’s remarkable is how different those collaborations are. With Shelton, Kasulke affects a seemingly casual, on-the-fly naturalism, never allowing his cinematography to deflect from the actors’ moments. With Maddin, however, Kasulke is working in service to an entirely different aesthetic, one in which a film’s look is part and parcel of its meanings. In Maddin’s work, Kasulke’s lensing takes us far away from the present, back to times when film both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015 -
MARIELLE HELLER AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART 2: “LESSONS EVERYWHERE”
Marielle Heller, a New York-based screenwriter, actor and playwright, is attending the June Sundance Directors Lab with her project, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. “In the haze of 1970’s San Francisco, a teenage artist with a brutally honest perspective tries to navigate her way through an affair with her mother’s boyfriend,” is its description, and the film is being adapted from the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Here is Heller’s second post from the Sundance Resort in Utah. Read the first here. The way the Sundance Lab is set up, you don’t always know how or when you’re going […]
by Marielle Heller on Jun 27, 2012 -
CARSON MELL AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART ONE
The Sundance June Directors Lab is underway, and blogging here at Filmmaker from the Sundance Resort in Utah will be two of the Lab’s filmmakers. First up, Carson Mell, attending with his dark comedy, Ajax, about “a band of alcoholic astronauts and a young woman adrift in outer space [who] become at odds with one another after discovering the purpose of their mysterious mission.” I remember when I was first moving from a community college to a “legitimate” film/art school my dad told me that the best part about it would be how intimidated I would be by the other […]
by Carson Mell on Jun 7, 2012 -
That’s What Friends are For: Writer/Director Lynn Shelton on the Collaborative Process Behind Her Poignant Comedy, Humpday
Lynn Shelton has worked in a variety of creative forms for most of her life, but seems to have found her true voice in the role of writer-director. A Seattle native, Shelton spent her formative years immersed in painting, writing poetry, taking pictures and acting. She was a stage actress for ten years (and was told she was destined to work in film), and subsequently studied for an MFA in Photography at NYC’s School of Visual Arts. She then began working in film, both as an editor on movies such as The Outpatient (2002) and Hedda Gabler (2004) and as […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 17, 2009
