David Wain
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“Nothing Irritates Me More than When the Cinematography Steps on the Story of a Movie”: DP Kevin Atkinson on A Futile and Stupid Gesture
Comedy writer/director David Wain returns to the Sundance Film Festival for a fourth time with A Futile and Stupid Gesture, his feature on the rise and fall of the National Lampoon empire. The film stars Will Forte as Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney and is based on a 2006 book by Josh Karp. Wain tapped Kevin Atkinson to shoot the film after the two worked together on Wain’s Childrens Hospital and the prequel and sequel to Wet Hot American Summer. Below, Atkinson discusses his experiences as DP on the project with Filmmaker. A Futile and Stupid Gesture hits Netflix on January […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 6: Madeline’s Madeline, Of Fathers and Sons, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, The Price of Everything
Context is everything — I’m writing this final Sundance dispatch at a remove of a day/continent from Park City, back in NYC, with a day’s pause between marathon-writing while reconsidering the chronological melange of what I saw and what, if any, narrative can be extrapolated about this year’s fest. My feeling, overall, is of a weak year, despite having (per usual) missed some of what appear to be the standout titles (Mandy, alas), which framed my response to Madeline’s Madeline, the last film I saw there. Is this a great movie? With a day to think about it, I’m not sure […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2018 -
“How Do You Give Meaning and Structure to Decades of a Person’s Life?”: Director David Wain | A Futile and Stupid Gesture
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? A Futile and Stupid Gesture was my first experience doing a biopic, which I learned is a daunting task. How do you give meaning and structure to decades of a person’s life, in the course of one movie? And Doug Kenney’s life was defined by chaos. So we knew that in shooting, it was important to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2018 -
Six Questions for David Wain About Wet Hot American Summer and They Came Together
Moving with shark-like restlessness between webseries, TV and film, the prolifically talented David Wain has been on a particular roll of late. For his next project after last year’s tragically underseen/dumped romcom parody They Came Together, Wain has come back strong with Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a Netflix miniseries prequel to his most widely/cultishly beloved film to date. Wain will be in conversation with his longtime collaborator Michael Ian Black at IFP’s Film Week on Sunday, September 20 (details and tickets here), and agreed to answer a few questions by email beforehand. Filmmaker: Like a lot of people who enjoyed They Came Together, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2015 -
The Top 10 Movies, in Their Own Ways, of 2014
I’m not much for year-end listmaking — the release calendar variables for potential inclusion are pretty limited, so it feels like a pointless exercise in rearranging the same 20 pieces as everybody else, and I’ve probably written about the movies in question enough for the time being by year’s end. It is, nonetheless, the tail end of the season where people put out their lists and justifications, so I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles, released in the US in 2014 unless otherwise noted. Best DTV Casualty Few people have reshaped the multiplex landscape as much in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 12, 2015
