John Ridley
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Y’allywood Babylon: The 20th SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable
This year’s 20th anniversary edition of the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Savannah Film Festival, which lays claim to being the largest university-run film fest in the world, continued its two-decades-long tradition of mixing Hollywood wattage with downhome southern hospitality. Once again the fest honored an eclectic mix of celebrity guests of all ages (elder statesmen and women included Richard Gere, Sir Patrick Stewart, Aaron Sorkin, Salma Hayek Pinault, Holly Hunter, and Kyra Sedgwick, while the “youngsters” featured the likes of John Boyega, Zoey Deutch, Robert Pattinson, Andrea Riseborough, and Willow Shields). The festival also played host to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 6, 2017 -
Screenwriter John Ridley Talks 12 Years a Slave
12 Years a Slave — the title of Steve McQueen’s latest, taken from its source material, the Solomon Northup memoir — is one of the most direct and descriptive of recent cinema history. But consider further the subtitle of Northup’s 1853 book: “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.” It’s one of the film’s extraordinary achievements that, as it lands in theaters nationwide with the headwinds of an Oscar frontrunner, it tells, on its most basic level, that story. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 16, 2013 -
Writer/director John Ridley Talks about his Hendrix Pic, All is By My Side
With so many overstuffed biographical dramas barreling from cradle to grave, the creative possibilities of the intimate biopic, one focused on a formative and often little known period in a subject’s life, are often neglected by writers and directors. Thankfully, though, that’s the approach taken by screenwriter and second-time director John Ridley to one of the most iconic and fan-obsessed-over cultural figures of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix. Starring André Benjamin (Outkast’s André 3000) as the iconic singer and guitarist, All Is By My Side focuses on a year or so in Hendrix’s life and how a song written for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2013
