James Marsh
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Fact or Fiction: The Toronto International Film Festival
If The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is to be judged on the world premieres it attracts, this edition of the festival was far from vintage. Artistic Director Cameron Bailey signaled a change in policy this year when he declared that no film playing at Telluride would be allowed to debut in Canada until after the all-important first weekend. He even broke with tradition by declaring the exact status of films playing at TIFF, and, since the program is announced before Telluride reveals its line-up, anyone that cared would know many of the films that would be playing at Telluride […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Sep 18, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: The Theory of Everything
The life of Steven Hawking is given what looks like a gauzy, romantic approach in this trailer for The Theory of Everything, directed by Man on Wire‘s James Marsh. Eddie Redmayne stars as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his love, Jane Wilde. The film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and is in theaters November 7 from Focus Features.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2014 -
Tell Me Something: Creative Advice from Documentarians
We’ve all probably had that feeling: you’re in the middle of a project and its shape has formed in your mind, but it’s still fuzzy around the edges. You think you’re going in the right direction, but you don’t know what the final destination is yet. You need some sort of creative road map of practical steps to get the project back on track, to clarify your ideas and refocus your creative energy. Brian Eno suggests taking a hot shower. But for me, talking with other artists who’ve gotten through these challenges before is the best way to get my own creative gears back in motion. It was […]
by Jessica Edwards on Mar 19, 2013 -
EIFF 2012: IN DEVELOPMENT
We’re over half way through now and I’m starting to panic. I keep hearing about great films that I’ve missed (The Mirror Never Lies is spoken of only in superlatives, and The Unspeakable Act is another one I’m late to the table for, Tabu, Kid-Thing and more) and rocking events that slipped by while I was elsewhere. Chris Fujiwara told me about an event where he and some of the Filipino filmmakers who are in town did a live musical accompaniment to a film, and I don’t know where I was for Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Q&A after a screening of a […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on Jun 28, 2012 -
A Pregnant Pause Before the Reborn Edinburgh Film Festival
When it comes to Edinburgh, I’m no festival virgin. However, this is the first festival in the 15 years I’ve been attending either as staff, filmmaker or delegate, when I will be seven-and-a-half months pregnant. I will be waddling, Marge Gunderson style, from cinema to cinema, hopefully securing seats on the end of the row (leaving me with the perfect excuse to pop out early). I will NOT be quaffing vats of dry white wine, or even whiskey (sob) but that means I will hopefully remember the names of everyone I meet and won’t be dozing off during the more […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on May 31, 2012 -
Project Nim — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Project Nim is being distributed theatrically by Roadside Attractions. It opens in theaters July 8, 2011. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) In December of 1973, a two-week old chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky was taken from the arms of his mother and given to a human family in the hopes of settling a raging intellectual debate. In a famous study, the linguist (and now-famous political philosopher) Noam Chomsky had asserted that language acquisition was solely the domain of human beings, an innate quality existing within and discovered by humans through experience and exposure to language, which combined to […]
by Tom Hall on Jul 7, 2011 -
THE TRUE/FALSE FILM FESTIVAL 2011
There’s nothing like a parade to celebrate community spirit. When I arrived in Columbia, Missouri (aka CoMo) throngs of revelers in homemade costumes were marching down the main boulevard to kick off the 8th edition of the True/False Film Fest. The aptly named documentary festival ran from March 3-6, and community spirit was evident in the grassroots event dedicated to the audience experience. Columbia, a small city just north of the Ozarks, counts more than one quarter of its 108,000 residents as advanced degree holders. The University of Missouri (aka Mizzou) is the largest among several schools, and its prominent […]
by Rania Richardson on Mar 9, 2011 -
“PROJECT NIM” DIRECTOR JAMES MARSH
During the past decade, some of the movies’ most crowd-pleasing moments can be found not in ballyhooed Hollywood blockbusters but in documentaries. Doc like Spellbound, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and The King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters are best seen with an audience ready to cheer. The most dazzling example of this trend just might be James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the exhilarating story of Phillipe Petit, a small Frenchman with big dreams. Marsh recounts how the daredevil Petit strung a wire between New York’s Twin Towers and then proceeded to dance between the two skyscrapers — perhaps the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 20, 2011 -
“PROJECT NIM” | director, James Marsh
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 9:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] When you embark on any historical documentary or film about events that have already run their course, the biggest prize you’re after is visual images and archive [materials] showing elements of your story. On Project Nim, which is the life story of a chimpanzee who was brought up like a human child, we knew from various contributors that there was going to be sufficient archive of the chimp to embark on the film but we didn’t know the extent of it. Often the biggest surprise on a film project is […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2011 -
Dancing in the Clouds: Director James Marsh on Man on Wire
James Marsh has wrestled before with subjects — both fictional and real life — whose obsessions have fueled eccentric and, at times, even extreme behavior. In The Burger and the King (1996), based on David Adler‘s book, he chronicled Elvis Presley‘s lifelong habit of compulsive eating. Wisconsin Death Trip (2000), based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lesy, traced the origins of a bizarre strain of murders, suicides and odd happenstances in a small Wisconsin community of the 1890s. And in his debut feature, The King (2005), which Marsh scripted with Milo Addica, he dramatized a story of misguided faith […]
by Damon Smith on Jan 19, 2009
