Sophia Takal
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“And For The Real Hero Close Ups… You Wanna Use The Stuff You Find Inside Baby Diapers.”: D.P Mark Schwartzbard on the Practical Snow, Fire, and Black Goo Blood of Black Christmas
DPs don’t often rank up to their title linearly. Mark Schwartzbard did. Trying to break into the industry after film school, he sent letters to productions but never heard back. He got an internship where he cold-called companies like Coca Cola and offered them product placement in return for Cola. Eventually, the production company he interned for offered him his first loader gig for deferred pay. He loaded and A.C’ed for years on features and commercials and eventually bumped up to camera operator. He pulled focus for the length of Borat and operated on Bruno. Dayplaying, he experienced such New […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 25, 2019 -
“All These Other Misogynists Waiting to Pounce”: Sophia Takal on Black Christmas
Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 18, 2019 -
“It’s Not Purification, It’s Something Else”: Sophia Takal Scorches Social Media Self-Care Celebrities in her Blumhouse Horror Feature, New Year, New You
In Blumhouse’s first female-directed feature film, New Year, New You, Sophia Takal (Always Shine, Green) sticks four friends from high school (played by an all-female cast toplined by Suki Waterhouse, Carly Chaikin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Melissa Bergland) and their hidden grievances into one of the women’s sealed residence for a New Year’s reunion. The four are connected, molded and torn by a tragedy in their past that Takal reveals through sharp cuts of glass shattering and blood inking through a pool. Danielle (Carly Chaikin), now a social media self-care icon who claims to mix amongst the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 28, 2018 -
Trailer Watch: Sophia Takal’s Award-Winning Always Shine
In Sophia Takal’s Always Shine, two actress friends (Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis and Masters of Sex’s Caitlin FitzGerald), leave Los Angeles for a weekend getaway in hopes of reconnecting. But as the two women’s suppressed jealousies and deep-seated resentments bubble to the surface, they lose grasp not only of their relationship, but also of their own identities. Check out the trailer to the film, which earned Davis the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival award for Best Actress, above. Always Shine will hit theaters on December 2.
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 19, 2016 -
Screwball Comedy, Marriage and Filmmaking: Lawrence Levine and Sophia Takal on Wild Canaries
A loose-limbed caper comedy that lovingly mashes Hollywood screwball conventions with Brooklyn relationship drama, Lawrence Michael Levine’s sophomore picture, Wild Canaries, tries two things most independent films don’t, and largely succeeds. It’s narratively complex — maybe not Inherent Vice-level, but this mystery thriller about an engaged pair of armchair detectives investigating a possible murder in a rent-controlled apartment is strewn with crosses, double-crosses, disguises and clues. Even more impressively, Wild Canaries shoots for a quality that is often a byproduct of independent cinema but not a goal: entertainment. Inspired, says actor/writer/director Levine, by the “Nick and Nora” Thin Man movies […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Wild Canaries Directed by Lawrence Levine
Lawrence Levine’s comedy thriller Wild Canaries is opening February 25 at the IFC Center and on online platforms. Below, from our print magazine, are my comments after the film’s premiere at SXSW. And, check out the trailer above. Most independent films don’t have enough plot. That criticism can’t be leveled at Wild Canaries, Lawrence Michael Levine’s loose-limbed caper comedy. Levine and his wife, the actress and director Sophia Takal, star as a Brooklyn couple who become convinced their upstairs neighbor was murdered to gain control of her rent controlled apartment. Influenced by the “Thin Man” movies as well as Woody Allen’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
Lady Vengeance: V/H/S — Horror Movie Litmus Test
The most important thing to know about V/H/S is that it is more than the sum of its gimmicky-on-paper parts, which include found footage film, genre anthology, and snuffy homage to the recent history of lo-fi horror. Although it is not entirely free of the inherent unevenness of the omnibus film, V/H/S works surprisingly well as a whole because of consistency in the aesthetic, clever writing, and tongue-in-cheek humor across multiple directors’ vignettes. The setup involves a group of 20-something delinquents whose primary activity is shooting prank videos of a slightly racier nature than the likes of Jackass. When they […]
by Farihah Zaman on Oct 5, 2012 -
Sophia Takal, Green
In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 7, 2012 -
FACTORY 25 ACQUIRES SOPHIA TAKAL’S “GREEN” FOR WORLD DISTRIBUTION
On of our favorite independent films of 2011, Sophia Takal’s debut feature, Green, has been acquired for distribution by Factory 25. Factory 25 will debut the film theatrically next month, with runs planned at reRun Theater in Brooklyn, Chicago’s Facets and other venues, will release the film digitally and on VOD platforms in November and will issue a DVD next Spring. Writer/director/actor Takal was selected as one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2011, and Green scored a Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham nomination. Here’s the lede of my “25 New Face” profile of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 9, 2012 -
Can Microbudget Filmmakers Graduate to the Big Time?
Independent film has long been considered the farm leagues for Hollywood’s majors. But with fewer specialized distributors and a risk-averse studio system, do up-and-comers still have the opportunities they once did during the ecstatic exuberance of the sector’s heyday? The crossover success of former DIY filmmakers Lena Dunham (with HBO’s Girls), Sean Durkin (who is developing The Exorcist TV series) and the Duplass brothers (with their studio-indies Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home), suggests that breakthroughs are still very possible. And yet, for every Jeff Nichols (Mud) or Zal Batmanglij (The East), there are numerous filmmakers who have made […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 19, 2012
