“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” – David Foster Wallace The new tagline for the James Ponsoldt movie The End of the Tour is, “Imagine the greatest conversation you’ve ever had.” I initially took issue with this tagline. Ponsoldt’s film is based on a book arranged around a transcript of an unpublished interview […]

Here’s the first trailer for James Ponsoldt’s David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, which picked up several nice notices out of Sundance, if not from his family and literary estate. Starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as the Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, the two-hander winds through a leg of the former’s book tour for Infinite Jest. A24 will release the film on July 31.

Are you one to meet your heroes? By reading, watching, listening to their work, do you feel a connection to them? Or are they enigmas whose mysteries you need to crack? In the world of contemporary letters, few figures loom as large as David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling, wickedly funny, fiercely observant works grappled with both the necessity and near impossibility of sincere, non-ironic expression in the age of commodified mass media and a meaningless public discourse. In essays about punctuation and cruise ships, tennis stars and cooked lobsters, and in stories and novels including his protean cultural phenomenon, Infinite […]

James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now, one of the most beloved films of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and a summer counter-programming hit, is out today on Blu-ray and DVD. Writing about the movie in this magazine, Scott Macaulay wrote, “Shot widescreen in Ponsoldt’s hometown of Athens, Ga., The Spectacular Now is a wonderfully nuanced tale of two young people falling in love, as well as an honest drama about life choices and the fight to transcend failures that in the haze of adolescence only seem inevitable. Scott Neustadter and Mike Weber’s script is directed with heart by Ponsoldt, and lead actors Miles Teller […]

A new, occasional column here at Filmmaker, “The Shooting Schedule” looks at film production through the prism of a single shoot day. I peruse a film’s call sheet and production report and ask the director questions solely based on what I see there. To launch the column, I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than my friend James Ponsoldt, whose third feature, The Spectacular Now, opens today. A contributor to Filmmaker — and a director whose first feature, Off the Black, Robin O’Hara and I produced — Ponsoldt has made with The Spectacular Now an indelible teen romance […]

At the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Filmmaker magazine asked a series of directors to talk about the films they were excited about at this year’s event. Here James Ponsoldt, director of The Spectacular Now, offers his recommendations.

James Ponsoldt is no stranger to the Sundance Film Festival. His last two feature films, Smashed and Off the Black, both premiered in Park City, with Smashed winning a Special Jury Prize in 2012. The Spectacular Now, Ponsoldt’s third film, premieres today. Working from the novel by Tim Tharp of the same name, (500) Days of Summer‘s screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber adapted the story about a popular high school boy with an emerging drinking problem who finds himself drawn to a girl of a lesser social status. Miles Teller (Project X) and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) star […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 8:30pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] This past summer, I traveled to my hometown of Athens, Georgia, and shot a movie in the neighborhoods and streets of my childhood. Our film’s production office was the recently vacated office of Athens’ local heroes, R.E.M. On weekends the cast and crew partied in local bars and rock clubs (the Manhattan, the 40 Watt Club, the Georgia Theatre). I saw my parents all the time. It was a dream — a second childhood, balmy and green, somehow better than the first. I was so, so lucky. But […]