LET ME THINK ABOUT THAT…

By Scott Macaulay

The problem with our sound-bite culture is that stuff that’s not a sound bit rarely makes it onto a news. But as any good film director can tell you, sometimes a person saying nothing can communicate so much more than an actor delivering the most eloquently written monologue.

Over at The Huffington Post, director Alex Gibney blogs about his new doc, Taxi to the Dark Side, and, more specifically, Alberto Gonzalez. He poses the question, “Is Alberto Gonzalez stupid?” and wonders whether the Attorney General’s testimony last week is truly as hapless at it appeared or whether there was a grand strategy at work.

Here’s an excerpt from his posting about Gonzalez and then a clip with the A.G. from Taxi, which has its premiere at Tribeca this week.

[Gonzalez's] brilliant moment in Taxi to the Dark Side comes when he is being grilled by Senator Carl Levin and Senator John McCain about the rules of evidence proposed by the administration in its version of the Military Commissions Act. Sen. Levin recites a litany of torture techniques – including waterboarding and forced nudity – and asks Gonzales if testimony obtained through these techniques would be admissible in the military commissions proposed by the Bush Administration. “Well sir, I think most importantly, I can’t imagine such testimony would be reliable,” says Gonzales. He cleverly sounds like he has answered the question, but he hasn’t, and so the proceedings move along.

Then John McCain asks Gonzales if testimony obtained through illegal inhumane treatment would be prohibited. After this question, Gonzales pauses, starts to speak, stops, seems to search for mendacious inspiration – does he hear the words “my precious”? – tries to speak again and then finally, after a chilling pause of 20 seconds he answers, “The concern that I would have about such a prohibition is what does it mean, how you define it?”

Brilliant! Torture: it depends on how you define it. The answer is insipid, immoral and obscene.

But, in a Machiavellian context, it is not wrong.

… Read the rest

GET CONNECTED AND GIVE BACK

By Jason Guerrasio

On Saturday, April 28 the IFP will be doing a special Producing 101 panel with Waitress producer Michael Roiff, and veteran producers Lydia Dean Pilcher (The Namesake) and Big Beach’s Peter Saraf (Little Miss Sunshine). The three will be sitting down to discuss Roiff’s first producing effort with Waitress, written and directed by the late Adrienne Shelly, along with talking about some of the challenges producers face — developing material, finding money, building a strong team to get the project from script to screen.

The panel (with reception to follow) takes place at the Helen Mills Theater (137 West 26th St (btw 6th and 7th)) from 3:00-4:30. Tickets are $25 with all proceeds being donated to the Adrienne Shelly Foundation.

For tickets call 212-465-8200 x218 or rsvp@ipf.org… Read the rest

SAN FRANCISCO FEST @ 50
By Justin Lowe

In 1957, when the Berlin International Film Festival was in its sixth year and the Festival de Cannes had recently turned 12, there was still no established annual film festival in the U.S. “Back in the ’50s, San Francisco needed to keep its place in the arts world with an international film festival. There wasn’t one in North or South America,” San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) founder Irving M. “Bud” Levin recalled in 1995.

Following Levin’s lead, the San Francisco Film Society has presented the SFIFF since 1957 and becomes the first North American festival to celebrate its 50th anniversary when the event unreels April 26-May 10 at various Bay Area venues. Now a sprawling 15-day celebration of global cinema, the inaugural fest was a relatively modest affair, screening an international title every night over two weeks to stylishly attired audiences at Union Street’s Metro Theater.

The first SFIFF included Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Grido, Akira Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation Throne of Blood, Satyajit Ray’s first Apu-trilogy installment Pather Panchali and Luchino Visconti’s Senso, as well as Uncle Vanya – the only American film in the lineup.

“The history of achievements of the festival is a very, very long one,” says Graham Leggat, who joined the San Francisco Film Society as executive director in October 2005. “To begin with, the fact that in 1957, when America was scared of aliens of all descriptions, both invaders from outer space and the Red menace, we were showing 15 films from 12 different countries. You can’t imagine nowadays exactly how revolutionary that was.”

Fifty years later, the 2007 SFIFF offers titles from 54 countries, bookended by two award-winning European films. Emanuele Crialese’s New York-set Sicilian-immigrant saga Golden Door (Nuovomondo) opens the run and two weeks later the festival closes with director Olivier Dahan scheduled to attend the West Coast premiere of La Vie en Rose, the Edith Piaf biopic that recently kicked off the Berlin festival.

The SFIFF has a variety of special awards and events on tap for the 50th, in addition to annual filmmaker and actor … Read the rest

CHOOSE… BUT CHOOSE WISELY

By Jason Guerrasio

With the Tribeca Film Festival a few days away, Anthony Kaufman has a great piece over at indieWIRE about the rivalry between Tribeca, SXSW and LAFF. As the three fests are scheduled so close to one another, most of the times they are fighting for the same films (and leaving regional fests like Sarasota, Florida Film Festival and Independent Film Festival Boston with little to choose from). This causes headaches for filmmakers who due to premiere-crazed programming aren’t choosing a festival that’s best for their film but what fest will give them the most exposure.

Here’s an excerpt:

“’Call me a wimp, but I wasn’t willing to take my chances and show it in Sarasota,’ says Jon Frankel, who withdrew from the Florida fest to premiere his Harlem football documentary Hellfighters at Tribeca because programmers ‘asked me not to show it at Sarasota,’ he says. ‘This is my first experience with festivals. I just didn’t want to piss them off.’”… Read the rest

MORE CRISIS

By Scott Macaulay

In 2005 Filmmaker selected Rachel Boynton as one of our “25 New Faces of Independent Film” based on the advance knowledge we had on her completely excellent doc Our Brand is Crisis, which was successfully released in theaters last year.

Today came more great news for Boynton and her doc. Pamela McClintock and Adam Dawtrey report in Variety that Warner Brothers has picked up feature remake rights to the doc for George Clooney and his Smoke House production company. According the trade paper, the film will be “reimagined as a dark comedy,” which is not much of a stretch if you’ve seen Boyton’s tragi-comic skewering of U.S. political advisors muddling about in Bolivian politics.

(Boynton is photographed here by Matt Mahurin.)… Read the rest

2007 NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS By Erica Abeel

The tone of the 36th edition of New Directors/New Films (March 21-April 1) might be encapsulated in the words of a character from The Great World of Sound, a first feature by Craig Zobel: “Fuck ‘fair.’ Life ain’t fair.” In fact, if the miserabilist flavor of the festival is any indication, the world (hedge fund managers excepted) is not a happy place.

Many of the 26 films in the fest (a joint venture of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), featured the proverbial little guy ground down by poverty, war, incarceration, or just old age. This parade of misfortune threatened to become a downer. But a couple of standouts — Day Night Day Night [pictured above] by Julia Loktev and Red Road by Andrea Arnold — transformed their grim content, through accumulated detail and the musique concrete of everyday sounds, into riveting cinematic realism. Both films are marked by icy control and withholding of crucial information. Both induce paranoia: either we’re under surveillance or menaced by a bomb. Both work an intimate canvas, while opening a panorama on big issues.

Day Night Day Night — Loktev’s astonishing first feature which became a fest talking point — follows a polite 19-year-old girl of unstated origins and motives as she’s prepped by her handlers to become a suicide bomber, and then deposited in Times Square. The first half, shot in a leached light, watches the girl ritualistically wash, depilate, brush teeth. She barely speaks; it’s that awful light that voices her state of mind. Moments of gallows humor surface as the girl “models” a series of teen uniforms and knapsacks; and makes a bomber’s final video, the handlers blotting a shiny nose and fitting her out with a cartridge belt, as if for a graduation photo.

But it’s in the second half in Times Square, shot in raucous color, that Loktev gets all cylinders firing, staging a battle between mundane life — munching a sticky candied apple, the proximity of overweight tourists slung with cameras — and the heavenly rewards envisaged … Read the rest

A MESSAGE FROM BLACKSBURG

By Scott Macaulay

There’s been so much in the mainstream media in the last week about the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech — much of it rather soul deadening in its own right — that I hate to direct you to one more story. But if you’ve been following the MSM coverage you’ve probably come across a quote from or reference to Paul Harrill, an independent filmmaker who teaches film at the school. Harrill was the one who discovered a similarity between the images in Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy and the homemade videos of the killer. On his blog, which I’ve linked to several times before, Harrill provides context for his commentary, discusses the coverage of the tragedy, and also tells you what you can do to help.

First, on the Old Boy comparison, which I’m going to quote at length:

Last night, I was disgusted that the various media outlets were giving airtime, ink, and webspace to the videotape and writings of the person behind the massacre here at Virginia Tech.

Amidst the images I saw on the New York Times website, one that stuck out as odd — an image of the young man brandishing a hammer. To me, the image called to mind a still from a movie — at first, I thought, something from a Gasper Noe film. Then, later, I remembered it was the revenge movie, Old Boy.

For others, the image might have suggested something else, but I am a filmmaker and I suppose I am inclined to make comparisons between images of cinematic texts, if one can use such coolly academic terminology for a killer’s self-taped imagery. Both images feature people looking into a camera’s eye brandishing a hammer and, importantly for me, both images are “revenge texts.” The fact that both images are of Asian males was largely inconsequential to me; if either person had been of a difference race, nationality, etc. I would have, I feel, made the same connection. As I said, at first I thought the image came from a French film.

Certainly, I thought, some readers and viewers would be

… Read the rest

SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES DIRECTORS/SCREENWRITERS LABS

By Jason Guerrasio

The Sundance Institute has announced the 13 projects for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, held May 28-June 28. The Labs have evolved to include filmmakers from around the world, with fellows this year from Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Haiti.

The participants and projects selected for the Labs are:

DIRECTORS LAB

THE CAVANAUGHS / John Morgan (co-writer/director) and Meg LeFauve (co-writer), U.S.A.
When the mother of a deeply evangelical family suddenly rejects motherhood, falls in love with a woman, and disavows her faith, the remaining members of the family are thrown into chaos, forcing each of them to construct new meaning for the ideas of family, love, and identity.

CIRCUMSTANCE / Maryam Keshavarz (writer/director), U.S.A./Iran
In the charged climate of today’s Iran, two girls grapple with their intense, complex relationship during a volatile adolescence.

COLD SOULS / Sophie Barthes (writer/director), U.S.A.
In the midst of an existential crisis, a famous American actor stumbles upon “Soul Storage”, a private lab offering New Yorkers a relief from the burden of their souls.

FARMING / Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (writer/director), United Kingdom/Nigeria
Abandoned by his parents, a young African boy desperately searches for love and belonging within a brutal skinhead subculture where violence becomes his only companion.

HAITI CHERIE / Patricia Benoit (writer/director), U.S.A./Haiti
Three refugees from Haiti wrestle with the effects of exile when they start a new life in the United States, only to find they can’t leave the ghosts of the past behind.

HERE / Braden King (co-writer/director) and Dani Valent (co-writer), U.S.A./Australia
Measurement and orientation break down for a solitary American mapmaker charting the Armenian countryside when he travels with an adventurous landscape photographer visiting her homeland.

SPOONS / Eric Lahey (writer/director), U.S.A.
After years of struggling with addiction, a father reunites with his son, and the two men realize that no matter how far you move from the present, you never live that far away from the past.

WATER & POWER / Richard Montoya (writer/director), U.S.A.
Twin brothers nicknamed “Water” and “Power” from the Eastside streets of Los Angeles rise through the city’s political and police ranks … Read the rest

EDGAR WRIGHT, “HOT FUZZ”

By Nick Dawson

SIMON PEGG AND NICK FROST IN EDGAR WRIGHT’S HOT FUZZ. COURTESY FOCUS FEATURES.

Brit Edgar Wright’s film career began when, straight out of college, he wrote and directed his ultra-low budget debut feature, A Fistful of Fingers (1994), an affectionate comedic homage to spaghetti westerns. The film played a few festivals, and was enough of a success to get Wright work directing sitcoms and sketch shows, where he worked with many of the best British comic performers around. His friendship with actors Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson resulted in the trio creating Spaced, a television series about the oddball residents of a house in London which achieved cult status. The show, which playfully and regularly referenced Hollywood films, ran from 1999 to 2001 and led to Wright and Pegg working together on their idea for a romantic zombie comedy, or “rom-zom-com.” Shaun of the Dead (2004), co-written by star Pegg and Wright, was a huge box office success in its native U.K., a surprise sleeper hit stateside, and was vocally supported by everybody from Quentin Tarantino to George A. Romero (who recruited Wright and Pegg to be zombies in his 2005 movie, Land of the Dead).

Hot Fuzz, Wright’s follow-up to Shaun, had a staggeringly successful U.K. opening weekend in February, taking an almost unprecedented $11.7 million. The film, which reunites Wright with Pegg and his Shaun of the Dead sidekick Nick Frost, riffs on the Hollywood buddy-buddy cop movies of the 80s and 90s with its plot about an overachieving London cop, Nicholas Angel (Pegg), who is relocated to a sleepy countryside village, a place where crime is seemingly non-existent. Unsuprisingly, Angel and his new partner, beer-guzzling Bad Boys fan Danny (Frost), soon discover that beneath the village’s placid exterior lies a truth more sinister than either could have imagined. Hot Fuzz is extremely funny and unashamedly enjoyable and, like Shaun of the Dead, is so fresh, charming and inventive that it manages to be referential (and reverential) without ever being derivative. Wright’s direction is top-notch, while the script he co-wrote with Pegg … Read the rest

ROUGH CUT WISDOM FROM THE BOOK OF CALEB

By Scott Macaulay

Below I posted about the upcoming IFP Rough Cut Lab I’m teaching with Gretchen McGowan and a group of fantastic advisors in June. The deadline is April 27 (find more info here) so we’re in the final rounds of accepting and looking at material. But if you have a project and have been on the fence about submitting it, here’s an email I received from Matt Manahan, who went through the lab last year with his feature The Book of Caleb (pictured). It might help you decide if the process is one that can help you and your film.

The lab experience was very helpful and unique in a variety of ways. After going through this whole process of making a narrative feature for the past six years I’ve learned two big things.

1. Trying to get people to give you money to “make a movie,” at any stage of a project sucks so hard.

2. The sheer value of post-production. Which is not just editing. It’s sound design, ADR, color correction, music composition, and music clearance. The way I look at it now, if you don’t respect them, it’s all these different ways you can fuck up your story. Which is terrible because it’s the final draft of your story. It’s the last draft before report card time.

This is all AFTER you’ve survived the rewrites, casting , shooting and problems with money and time. You’d be surprised how quickly that thrill of wrapping production fades.

It becomes more of like, “how can you cover up all the mistakes you made in every other part of the process and still tell a clear coherent story?” and by this point you’re pretty exhausted and fucking broke. “What can you do to make everything else work?”

These are the areas the lab focuses on though. You go in with a group of your peers from all over the country.

Independent film too is a weird thing, because often times you feel like you are toiling away in a cave on a mountain somewhere, like completely isolated and everything you do

… Read the rest