Listen Up Philip
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Shooting on Film? At IFP Screen Forward, Debating the Merits and Pitfalls in a Digital Age
In this era of digital projectors, ALEXA cameras and minimal, DSLR-enabled budgets, the art of loading rolls of film into a magazine and shooting with a 16 or 35mm lens is fast becoming a fading practice. And yet, there are those determined storytellers who dare to pull it off. But is shooting on film on a low budget even possible these days? A Wednesday morning panel at the IFP’s Screen Forward conference comprised of cinematographer Frank DeMarco (All is Lost, Margin Call), producer Adam Piotrowicz (Listen Up Phillip, Queen of Earth). cinematographer/producer/director/editor Ferne Pearlstein (Imelda) and director/producer Ari Taub (79 […]
by Anisha Jhaveri on Sep 24, 2015 -
“I’ve Gotten Carried Away with Graininess in the Past and I Probably Will Again”: DP Sean Price Williams on Queen of Earth
The major studios’ current preference for selecting the shepherds of their franchise properties is to pluck directors from the relatively obscurity of indiedom. Colin Trevorrow went from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World. Josh Trank moved from Chronicle to Fantastic Four. Jon Watts leaped from Cop Car to the reboot of the reboot of Spider-Man. Alex Ross Perry opted for the opposite approach. After his breakthrough film Listen Up Philip, Perry stripped down his budget, cast, and crew for a character piece about a pair of female friends (Elisabeth Moss, Inherent Vice’s Katherine Waterston) whose relationship unravels during a week-long […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 10, 2015 -
Psyched: Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth
In his compact, unnerving new chamber film Queen of Earth, Alex Ross Perry packs a potent, inventively off-key punch with his combo of a brilliant pre-credit emotional breakdown scene and the baroque calligraphy of the main title and the credits themselves upon its completion. He holds the face of the anguished Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) in tight close-up in the former, her hair mussed, tears and mascara forming rivulets that slowly cascade down her cheeks. Her interior pain is palpable. Off-camera, longtime boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) tells her it’s all over, justifying his infidelity and assailing her “suffocating overreliance.” Some of […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 26, 2015 -
Great Expectations: Alex Ross Perry on Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex was an oblique gloss on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while his higher-profile follow-up, The Color Wheel, stole the font of Philip Roth’s ’70s hardcovers for its credits, as well as that writer’s abrasive fearlessness and sexual disreputability. Literature hangs heavy over Listen Up Philip as well, not least in its subject: a young, New York novelist on the precipice of success being mentored by a Roth-like literary titan. That writer’s spirit is still present, but the major structural reference is William Gaddis’ behemoth debut The Recognitions, whose main through line is a pure-spirited and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip
“You sound like you’re bragging,” an ex tells novelist-on-the-cusp Philip (Jason Schwartzman). “That’s because I am bragging,” he answers without missing a beat at the start of this trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s acerbically witty, keenly anticipated third feature Listen Up Philip. Entering limited release on October 17 and hitting VOD four days later, Perry’s follow-up to The Color Wheel has great parts for Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss as his long-suffering girlfriend and Jonathan Pryce as the young writer’s Philip Roth-esque mentor. (Dig the title card font, taken from the hardcovers of Roth’s ’70s novels.) It’s a funny and depressing work […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 18, 2014 -
Kumiko, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Warpaint Highlight Sundance Next Festival
It’s rare that I can recommend nearly every program at a film festival, but that’s the case with this weekend’s Sundance Next Festival in Los Angeles. With events taking place tonight at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and then this weekend at the theater at the Ace Hotel, the Next Festival is intimate, very cool and with a strong multidisciplinary bent. Alongside several artistic feature highlights from this year’s Sundance Film Festival are shorts, panels and bands, making each program something of an event. Check out the complete line-up at the festival’s site, and here are a few picks of mine: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2014 -
Four Nights in D-Town: The Third Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival
A few days before the summer solstice, I arrived on an oddly cool night in Dallas for the Third Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival. A driver picked me up from the airport and whisked me directly to a pre-festival soiree at a bar called Wild Detectives where everyone seemed to know each other already. A few houses from the corner of East 8th St. and North Bishop Ave., Wild Detectives is proof Dallas’ zoning rules are the envy of lushes everywhere; the bar is a two-story house right in the middle of a residential neighborhood! That neighborhood, from which the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 24, 2014 -
Interview with Listen Up Philip Producer Katie Stern
Katie Stern is that inexplicable combination of inviting, accessible, and tough as nails. When I went to photograph her at the color correction of the film she produced, Listen Up Philip, she was wearing all black, despite my suggesting filmmakers wear a splash of color. “It’s just what I’m used to wearing,” she says, a true New Yorker. “But I did wear lipstick – and that’s not normal for me.” In the color correction suite, Stern was the only woman in a small sea of men, including the film’s director, Alex Ross Perry. The film was on the big screen, […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 22, 2014 -
Listen Up Philip | Director Alex Ross Perry
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? While it is […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2014 -
Sundance 2014: First Teaser Trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip
In advance of its world premiere on Monday, Alex Ross Perry has released a teaser trailer to his latest, Listen Up Philip. Clocking in at under two minutes, the clip features various men and women addressing Jason Schwartzman’s titular character. One gets the sense that Philip’s not the most agreeable fellow, and his ego has grown even more insufferable on the eve of the release of his second novel. Co-starring Elisabeth Moss, Krysten Ritter, Jonathan Pryce, Josephine de La Baume, Jess Weixler, Dree Hemingway and Keith Poulson, this idiosyncratic ensemble looks to promise some of Perry’s brand of quick wit. Watch above.
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 17, 2014
