IFP/SAG INDIE PRODUCING PANEL OFFERS TIMELY INSIGHTS

By Admin

This weekend, as the Tribeca Film Festival rolled on just blocks away, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel for New York Film Academy producing students on the various challenges confronting film producers in a mid-recession, New Media environment. Hosted by SAG Indie and the IFP, the panelists included Cinetic Rights Management’s Matt Dentler, former CAA agent and current Hunting Lane Films partner Kevin Iwashina, and The House of the Devil producer Peter Phok. We were eventually joined by cross-platform impresario and Filmmaker Contributor Lance Weiler, who despite being held up in traffic for most of the proceedings, offered his inimitable perspectives on audience aggregation, alternative reality gaming and the impending demise of traditional forms of film authorship.

What most struck me about the event was how a veteran indie deal maker like Iwashina and a young, hungry producer like Phok described their strategies for luring private equity investment into an increasingly daunting specialty film marketplace. While Iwashina cautioned the young producers attending the panel that “we’ll never be able to turn back the clock” to the time when “dumb money” was widely available, Phok confessed that he’s essentially given up the notion of pitching prospective investors on the potential profitability of the relatively low budget horror films he’s been making with directors like Ti West and Glenn McQuaid. After Phok claimed that most of these pitches involve endearing the investor to the personalities of the above the line talent than the potential for profits, Dentler chimed in, reflecting that “now more than ever, you have to look yourself in the mirror and ask, does this story really have to be a film? Can it be some other format? A web series? A video game?”… Read the rest

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN ABOUT IN FILMMAKER?

By Scott Macaulay

In the current issue of Filmmaker we feature the last of Bomb It director Jon Reiss’s fantastic three-part series on DIY distribution. In part one he outlined an alternative vision of DIY theatrical distribution; in part two he discusses DIY DVD distribution; and in part three in the current issue he discusses DIY web marketing. This third part will most likely be Jon’s last in the series — he’s writing a book about all of this that should be out later in the year — and I’m curious what practical articles you, our readers, would like to read about next. We’ll have more on DIY and hybrid distribution in the next issue with a piece that looks at some filmmakers who have been expert at reaching non-typical film audiences, and Esther Robinson will continue her series of articles on filmmakers and personal finance. But as we are putting together the grid for the next issue, I thought I’d solicit ideas, which you can place in the comments thread below. Production issues? Equipment? Budgets? Crews? More on distribution? Screenwriting? Web-based production models? Legal issues? Please respond if you have thoughts.… Read the rest

THE UNKINDEST CUT

By Scott Macaulay

I’ve been meaning to blog about this interview with director Ti West by Karina Longworth over at Spout for a couple of days now. (I missed it when I first posted but caught up with it through Karina’s Twitter feed when she tweeted that after the interview director West was forbidden from doing press.) You should check out the piece, but, in a nutshell, West alleges that the version of his new The House of the Devil, screening this week at Tribeca, is “not my version,” and that the financiers, Dark Sky Films, excised a four-minute scene in order to tighten up the film’s pacing and make it more commercial.

From the piece:

In the case of Devil, West says, the money guys knew what they were getting into when they hired him, and didn’t seem to have a problem with what they got until recently. “All of my movies, the first half of them are just like regular movies, and then they turn into horror movies. That’s the only interesting element to me, that contrast. So they’re not surprised. It’s just that everyone is terrified, because it’s 2009, so no one’s going to buy anything.” West says the producers test screened his cut without his knowledge, and then showed him response cards. The audience’s answers to the leading questions along the lines of “Were you bored by anything in the house?” were presented as evidence that the audience asked for the specific cuts that Dark Sky eventually mandated. That he had made a film that was even subject to last minute revision based on testing came as a surprise to the director.

“It was in the rough cut, it was in the fine cut, it was in the final cut it was in the sound edit — it’s never changed, and it was always boring the whole time. It’s this whole last minute fear.”

After reading this, I had one question, and it’s one the subject of which I’ve long planned to make a Filmmaker article: who had final cut? The paragraphs above and one of West’s … Read the rest

INTRUSIVE ELEGANCE

By Scott Macaulay

At Filmmakermagazine.com, we just put up our first skyscraper ad, so we are inching out of the Dark Ages when it comes to internet advertising. Intrusive advertising is the rage now, but not the intrusive advertising of old in which window after window would take over your screen. Today’s advertisers are savvier and more creative. Take this Honda ad for its new hybrid vehicle which morphs its Vimeo page into a beautiful light show in the desert. I’m embedding the making of here, but to get the full effect go to the link above.

Honda Insight – The Making of “Let it Shine” from Honda on Vimeo.… Read the rest

BRONSTEIN AND SAFDIE, STATESIDE AND ABROAD

By Scott Macaulay

Earlier I posted about the screenings of Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland and Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed this weekend in Los Angeles. As Brandon Harris noted in a blog post below, Josh Safdie and his brother Benny are premiering their new title, Go Get Some Rosemary, at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes this year. That film stars Frownland‘s director, Bronstein. So, seeing their two films back to back this weekend is something of a stateside prep for their appearance along the Croissette.

Filmmaker contributor Mike Plante has just interviewed Bronstein over at his CineMad blog. Below, he talks about working with Safdie and the slow process of making his next movie:

Plante: Let’s make it clear that you haven’t just been sitting around doing nothing since you finished the film.

Bronstein: My process for my own work is painfully slow. I mean, it’s not something I’m embarrassed about. I work slowly, and I’m comfortable with that. The first sort of step, after the thematic scope of a project is mapped out, the first step for me is to create a central character who will become the anchor of the work. For instance, with FROWNLAND it took four months of heavy collaboration with Dore until Keith was alive and breathing, so I could sort of wind him up, and spin him around and toss him into any situation and he could respond in character. This new one is taking a little longer. I’ve been working for about seven months with this my lead. And now finally the character is there, he’s alive.

Plante: Right. In your new script?

Bronstein: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. But I did take a break to work on Josh and Bennie’s movie [The Safdie Brothers’ new GO GET SOME ROSEMARY, which Ronnie acts in and helped edit]. And I can see why people attach themselves to greater, higher infrastructures in their life. Why they get jobs that tell them where to be everyday, and why. It’s a true pleasure to be involved in something so creatively engaging and fulfilling and yet not have to steer

… Read the rest

COPPOLA, SAFDIE BROTHERS, SHELTON AMONG THOSE TAPPED FOR 41ST DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

By Admin

After choosing to pull his film out of a non-competition slot in the official selection of this year’s Cannes Film Festival because of the film’s “personal and independent nature”, Francis Ford Coppola will be on the Croisette after all with his new South American drama Tetro, which has been picked to be the opening night film at the 41st Director’s Fortnight in Cannes. As is the Fortnight’s custom, a mix of notable young filmmakers from around the world are sprinkled in with veterans of the international festival circuit such as Pedro Costa (Ne change rien) and Hong Sang-Soo (Like You Know it All).

Lynn Shelton’s Sundance hit Humpday will be on display at this year’s event before it makes its way on American screens this summer. For the second consecutive year, the Fortnight has also tapped Josh and Bennie Safdie, who were in the Fortnight last year with the feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed and the short The Acquaintances of Lonely John respectively. They will world premiere their new film Go Get Some Rosemary, which counts Ronnie Bronstein and Abel Ferrara among its cast members. Rounding out a strong American contingent are Cherien Dabis‘s Sundance Competition title Amreeka, and short filmmakers Charlie White (American Minor) and Andrew Betzer (John Wayne Hated Horses), whose short gem Small Apartment we caught during Slamdance 08′.

See Alicia Van Couvering’s interview with Charlie White here.… Read the rest

PAOLO SORRENTINO, “IL DIVO”

By Nick Dawson

TONI SERVILLO IN WRITER-DIRECTOR PAOLO SORRENTINO’S IL DIVO. COURTESY MUSIC BOX FILMS.

If Paolo Sorrentino represents the future of Italian cinema, then the country’s filmic output certainly should be exciting in years to come. The highly accomplished writer-director was born in Naples in 1970, and first became involved in filmmaking in the mid-90s when he was an assistant director on a couple of films, The Gas Inspector and Drogheria (both 1995). Finding himself poorly suited to production work, Sorrentino transitioned into screenwriting, jointly penning Polveri di Napoli with the film’s director Antonio Capuano in 1998. The same year, he wrote and directed the short L’amore non ha confini, and in 2001 he made his feature debut as writer-director with One Man Up, a comedy drama about the parallel lives of two Neapolitan men with the same name. The film starred the revered Italian actor Toni Servillo, who also played the lead in Sorrentino’s second movie, The Consequences of Love (2004), a poignant crime drama about a lonely Mafia accountant which was a critical hit and gave Sorrentino an international profile. In 2006, he followed up with The Family Friend, about a loan shark who becomes obsessed with a client’s daughter, and also made his acting debut with a cameo role in Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman.

Sorrentino teams up with Toni Servillo for the third time in his latest picture, Il Divo, in which Servillo plays Giulio Andreotti, a titan of Italian politics who was the country’s prime minister seven times during his long career in government. Andreotti is a figure loved and hated in equal measure who allegedly had close links with the Vatican, the Cosa Nostra and the fascist masonic lodge P2, has been given numerous nicknames (including Moloch, Beelzebub, The Black Pope and, yes, Il Divo), and yet remains enigmatic and essentially unknown. Rather than producing a dry biopic of this sphinx-like statesman, Sorrentino has made Il Divo as extravagant as Andreotti is restrained, fashioning a “rock opera” (as he calls it) about Italian politics’ great superstar. This intoxicatingly cinematic movie employs … Read the rest

HIGHLIGHTS AT TRIBECA APPLE STORE PARTY

Though the Tribeca Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday with the screening of Woody Allen‘s Whatever Works, the fest really kicked into gear on Thursday as screenings started as well as the parties. Apple Store‘s annual party was tonight with the highlights being an appearance by a cute dog named Archie (pictured right) who roamed around the first and second floor with ease, acting more civilized than most of the humans in the store.

Case in point, this group who decided to start a conga line around the second floor.

… Read the rest

TRIBECA QUICK TAKE: GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH

By Scott Macaulay

Walk in a few minutes late and you’ll miss the set-up and most of the actual plot of Damien Chazelle’s lovely debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Guy’s a young, handsome, somewhat taciturn jazz musician who seems to move from one short-lived romantic encounter to another while saving his real passion for his trumpet. Madeline is a pretty, shy, somewhat directionless young woman who meets Guy, is affected by him and his music, and then is abruptly cut loose as Guy’s eye wanders. And yes, that’s all in the first few minutes and told mostly without dialogue. The rest of the movie is the long trailing note of Guy and Madeline’s short-lived relationship, a collection of offbeat and sometimes just ordinary moments given emotional inflection by not only our knowledge of their romantic misfire but also the old-fashioned Hollywood movie-movie-style orchestral swing score by Justin Hurwitz.

Chazelle and I sat down and talked last week, and we batted around several references for his juxtaposition of large-scale romantic musical and minimalist relationship drama. We talked about films like Jacques Rivette’s Haut Bas Fragile and Chantal Akerman’s The Golden ’80s, films that also experiment formally with tropes of the musical genre. But I’d like to throw in one other reference: Once. Although it’s considerably quieter and more elliptical in its storytelling, like that film, this movie is deeply informed by its lead actor’s love for his music and his ability to convey that love through his on-screen playing. Guy is played by Jason Palmer, a Boston-based trumpeter whose debut album, Songbook, was recently released by Ayva Musica. When he takes the stage — in this film, a threadbare apartment jazz club with white walls and black curtains that still seems like the coolest place in town — his performance tells you everything the film’s dialogue doesn’t. (Given the logorrhea of so many contemporary American indie film characters, the quietness of this film’s principals is tremendously appealing.)

Begun while he attended Harvard Film School, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench was shot, by Chazelle, on … Read the rest

NATALIE PORTMAN CHAT @ APPLE STORE

By Jason Guerrasio

As part of the Apple Store’s Meet The Filmmakers series during the Tribeca Film Festival, I’ll be sitting down with Natalie Portman and business partner Christine Alyward tomorrow @ 3:30 to talk about their website, MakingOf. They’ve been hush-hush about it, so all I can really say is what’s been posted by Apple, “a site that promises to transform the way people view, enjoy, and participate in entertainment.”

Having seen the site I can tell you it’s certainly something aspiring filmmakers should take note of. So if you’re in SoHo (103 Prince St.) tomorrow come by and check it out.… Read the rest