David Robert Mitchell
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Cannes Dispatch #6: Under the Silver Lake, Burning
While there are discoveries to be had at this festival, Cannes is notoriously light on unknown quantities; Yomeddine is the only debut in this year’s Competition slate, and who knows how or why that happened. It’s a festival that prides itself on grandiosity and presenting the vanguard of arthouse filmmaking, albeit with some degree of familiarity, which means that much of the excitement of coming to watch movies here stems either from promises fulfilled or witnessing the occasional familiar face move in a new direction. Invigorating as these latter cases are to behold, they inevitably arrive with mixed results, as exemplified in […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2018 -
What’s in a Word?
“Adele Romanski is an independent producer who, Academy Award– and Golden Globe–winning producer whose …” This is what my assistant, April Moore, sent back to me in March of this year when I asked her to please take a pass at revising my bio. (I needed to provide it as part of closing a loan against the tax credit for a television show I was producing.) It had been about a year since I had updated my bio. April made quite a few changes to the document, but striking out the word “independent” was the one I obsessed over. Why […]
by Adele Romanski on Sep 14, 2017 -
“We Didn’t Have to Add Too Much Creepiness”: It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis
Many a book and an infinite number of film studies thesis papers have noted the link in ’80s teen horror films between sex and death – though the actual inspiration for that correlation likely has less to do with Reagan-era conservative mores than the target audience’s bottomless appetite for nudity and gore. The connection between a character’s carnal desires and their demise has never been more explicit than in the new horror film It Follows, in which young Detroit suburbanite Jay (The Guest’s Maika Monroe) finds herself stalked by a murderous supernatural force following a sexual encounter. The force can take […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 31, 2015 -
“It Was a Bit of a Rough Ride”: David Robert Mitchell on It Follows
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell has only released two films, but he has already shown himself to be a fascinating and diverse filmmaker. His first outing, 2010’s Myth of the American Sleepover, was a simple teen drama following a bunch of Detroit teenagers as they, well, had sleepovers. But for his sophomore effort, Mitchell created a horror film, and an excellent one at that. Despite the shift in genre, It Follows is very much a David Robert Mitchell production. It also follows a group of Detroit teens as they live their lives, and by focusing on creating believable characters, goes beyond genre […]
by Alec Kubas-Meyer on Mar 19, 2015 -
Meta Hairy: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows
Unlike dopamine-inducing mood enhancers, the opening sequence of unique hybrid It Follows aims for atmosphere, not climax — though that, too, will come. It is cinematic foreplay, simultaneously tease and microcosm. Over the span of several minutes, David Robert Mitchell succinctly anticipates not only the plotline of the narrative, but also its themes and infrastructure. He privileges ambience over character development even more in this genre-bending teen/horror movie than he did in 2010’s Myth of the American Sleepover, the film about growing pains and friendship among youth in suburban Detroit that put him on the radar of film scene machers. Myth was primarily […]
by Howard Feinstein on Mar 12, 2015 -
“I’m Pretty Sure She Saw Something”: David Robert Mitchell on It Follows
Lo-fi horror films have enjoyed a modern renaissance ever since The Blair Witch Project, and while the quality of the genre is often overcast by the sheer quantity of its offerings, the profit margins all but ensure Blumhouse and comrades’ staying power. As such, it’s nice to see an aesthetically exacting, relatively high-concept pallet cleanser take its turn in the spotlight. Last year, we had The Babadook, and this year, all signs point towards David Robert Mitchell’s absurdly entertaining, expertly crafted It Follows as the genre’s banner breakout. Mitchell’s sophomore film has myriad virtues — a Carpenter-worthy score from Disasterpeace, and a foreboding use of wide pans, for starters — but it’s […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 11, 2015 -
Sundance 2015: Mistress America and It Follows
Modern media has a perverse fascination with pinpointing the motivations of the millennial. When not publishing extensive reports on “hookup culture,” many publications are transfixed by the generation’s ostensible desire to simultaneously better themselves and the world, while still being unable to get it together and move out of their mom’s basement. With Mistress America, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have created a precise portrait of a woman who embodies the ephemeral essence of a do-it-all, self-entitled millennial without dispensing any blanket, generational theses. This character, however, is not the film’s purported protagonist — that would be 18-year-old aspiring writer Tracy, played by a nicely understated […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 25, 2015 -
Parting Shot: Maika Monroe
Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell developed rich, resonant teenage characters in his independent sleeper, The Myth of the American Sleepover. With his sophomore feature, It Follows, he again essays the emotional lives of attractive, sexually adventurous suburban youth, this time within a high-concept genre framework. It Follows is eerie, Carpenter-esque horror, the tale of a slow-moving demon who shuffles steadily, invisibly and scarily toward a single victim. Here that’s mostly Jay, played with real “Final Girl” charisma by Maika Monroe, who has quickly emerged as a strong lead and supporting player in several notable films. She co-starred opposite Zac Efron in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2015 -
The Myth of the American Sleepover — A Hammer to Nail Review
It’s easy to be judgmental about the characters of David Robert Mitchell’s teen drama, The Myth of the American Sleepover, about the escapades of several adolescents on their last night of summer. You can judge one girl for betraying her friend for their shared object of affection; or one guy for stalking a pair of twins whom he once had a crush on. But to do so would be to sell the film and its characters short. The Myth of the American Sleepover isn’t about actions and events, but moments and gestures. Through the impressionable eyes of a handful of […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jul 22, 2011 -
HOW TO CREATE WORD OF MOUTH (AND PROMOTE “THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER”
I’m posting an email I received from producer Adele Romanski here (with permission) for a couple of reasons. The first is that I completely endorse the message, which is trying to get everyone to go see David Robert Mitchell’s Myth of the American Sleepover (pictured) when it opens July 22. The film is a gem — visual, expressive and fresh, with the screen loving its young actors. Mitchell gently guides his ensemble tale of young summertime love and impending adulthood through, in places, the intimate crevices of a European art film without any trace of pretension. The film has an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 11, 2011
