Fall 2012
-
How to Do a Festival Q&A
The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2012 -
FCP X and the Future of Editing
Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.
by David Leitner on Nov 19, 2012 -
Marion Cotillard Q&A
Filmmaker last interviewed Marion Cotillard in 2007, just prior to the release of the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose. Cotillard’s stunning performance as the legendary French singer won her numerous Best Actress accolades, including a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. She was subsequently inundated with Hollywood offers, which lead to Cotillard working with a string of great directors, including Michael Mann (Public Enemies), Christopher Nolan (Inception and The Dark Knight Rises), Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) and Steven Soderbergh (Contagion). All of the above-listed films have boasted all-star ensemble casts, but Cotillard has failed to […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 9, 2012 -
New Media, New Cuts
The future of editing may not lie in the tools editors use but the new formats that feature their work.
by Randy Astle on Nov 1, 2012 -
Adult Friend Finder: Writer/Director Sean Baker on Starlet
Dree Hemingway is a sweet porn star and Besedka Johnson — Best Actress winner at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival — is the mysteriously bitter older woman she befriends in Sean Baker’s sun-streaked relationship drama, Starlet. Interview by Scott Macaulay.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 1, 2012 -
Locarno Film Festival
What to say of a film festival at which the most highly anticipated — and, as it turns out, best — entry is an 83-minute-long documentary about fishermen with no real dialogue or narration that was shot on a dozen GoPro cameras, many of them tethered to a commercial fishing boat? A number of things come to mind, all of them complimentary, but what first bears mention is how well matched the 65th Festival del Film Locarno and Leviathan were for one another. Had it premiered at Cannes or Toronto, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s film would likely have been […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 1, 2012 -
Toronto International Film Festival 2012
The increased emphasis on red carpet and premiere status in Toronto seems to have left the festival with an identity crisis. Compared to festivals like Locarno and Rotterdam, which have hit their stride in promoting the new guard of international cinema, just a quick glance at this year’s program guide makes it clear that the “Festival of Festivals” is in the midst of redefining itself. Wavelengths, formerly a sidebar of avant-garde shorts programs, has expanded to include the section previously known as Visions. Many of the more interesting films in the festival could be found here, including the much-buzzed-about Leviathan […]
by Lori Donnelly on Nov 1, 2012 -
Toronto Film Festival 2012: In From the Cold
The 1970s were a time of reckoning for the radical social transformations of the 1960s; with the left shattered by the specific political interests of its sectarian ideologies, and the mainstream culture seeking a shift inward, toward the ethos of the self (and, ultimately, its apotheosis in the greed of the 1980s), the ’70s are often overlooked as the era in between the good times. This year’s Toronto International Film Festival featured several films that grappled with the 1970s and its legacy, each specific to its place, each an examination of the politics of life in the era when everything […]
by Tom Hall on Nov 1, 2012 -
ro*co Goes iTunes
“I think we, as an independent filmmaking community, focus way too much on the U.S.,” says Annie Roney, the Sausalito-based founder of documentary foreign sales agent and distributor ro*co films. “There’s a whole big world out there of potential viewers for documentaries. And I think the hunger for them is growing worldwide in the same way that it is here.” Helping to quench that hunger is a new partnership between ro*co and the London-based Bertha Foundation that will enable films from the ro*co catalog to be available digitally in international markets via iTunes. “We share a common goal with The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 1, 2012 -
Joke’s on You
At first glance, Rick Alverson and Tim Heidecker don’t seem like obvious collaborators. Alverson, indie filmmaker with two features under his belt, and Heidecker, on-half of absurdist Adult Swim comedy duo Tim and Eric, command vastly different audiences. But The Comedy finds the two joining forces — Alverson behind the camera and Heidecker in front — to create one of the year’s most challenging films, a dense character study more unsettling than it is funny. Set amidst the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the film follows affluent aging hipster Swanson (Heidecker) as he widdles away his days, unemployed and rudderless. While […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Nov 1, 2012
