RECESSIONARY FILMMAKING IN GREAT BRITAIN

By Scott Macaulay

We’ve envied the Brit’s public funding for feature films, government support for new talent, and innovative tax schemes supporting production. They’ve envied our culture of private equity investment for film. Now we’re both about even… or maybe not.

From a worthwhile read by Killian Fox in today’s Guardian entitled “Digital: Take a Short Cut to the Cinema”:

In [London Film School Director Ben] Gibson’s view, funding opportunities for first-time film-makers are desperately limited, and the lucky few who receive support are being hobbled by the whims of commissioning bodies, who place more weight on “the availability of a certain actor or the popularity of a certain theme” than on the promise of a new director. “Nobody is looking for the new Leigh or Loach or Frears here,” says Gibson. “And whenever a new Lynne Ramsay emerges, it is highly exceptional from the point of view of the film infrastructure. There is no intention for anybody to ever make an art film in the UK.”

Lizzie Francke, who runs the First Feature Film strand of the UK Film Council’s Development Fund, is less pessimistic. “You can see the glass as half-empty, but if I compare the situation for independent films in this country with the US, where the hedge funds that were supporting indie film-making are all gone, the glass is very full. For people who have the ability to tell good stories, there are places to go,” she says, citing regional public funding bodies such as Scottish Screen, EM Media and Northwest Vision. “If you’re a young film-maker in Britain today, you can find your hub.”

The bulk of the article is not, however, about funding politics but about the strategies new British filmmaking talent are using to jumpstart their careers. These range from crashing for a year at a noted production company to entering internet short film contests to creating internet identities for not just one’s films but the characters within them. In other words, doing the same kinds of things young filmmakers here are doing. It concludes:

[Film London director Adrian] Wootton has a similar outlook: “In this

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WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Q&A WEBCAST

By Scott Macaulay

If you aren’t able to make it to the IFC Center tonight for Ondi Timoner’s Sundance Prize-winning We Live in Public, you can catch the Q&A via a live webcast. The webcast is embedded below, and it’s scheduled to be live at 9:15 and 11:20.

if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget(’06085bc4-0ce1-4db8-b6bc-824993580ff6′);Get the Pseudo Button widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!… Read the rest

MARK KERMODE IS SCARED BY PHILIP RIDLEY

By Scott Macaulay

I haven’t seen Philip Ridley’s second feature, The Passion of Darkly Noon…. but I am a fan of his debut film, The Reflecting Skin, which I saw at its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival many years ago. On the basis of that grandiose, gothic picture, I’ve been wanting to see more of him. So, like the BBC’s Mark Kermode, I am looking forward to his new one.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, “BIG FAN”

By Nick Dawson

PATTON OSWALT IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ROBERT SIEGEL’S BIG FAN. COURTESY FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURES.

For someone who says his main creative motivation is boredom, Robert Siegel has done rather well for himself. Born and raised in the Long Island town of Merrick, Siegel graduated from the University of Michigan 1993 with a B.A. in History, after which he followed his then-girlfriend to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was studying for a PhD. In addition to working for the local newspaper and volunteering at Madison’s public radio station, Siegel started writing for a small satirical rag that was given away free in the town’s coffee shops, The Onion. In 1996, he became editor-in-chief and began masterminding a major expansion of the paper, putting it online, making it a national and then international publication, and conceiving a number of Onion books, including the hugely successful Our Dumb Century (1999). One of the paper’s less successful side projects was The Onion Movie, a sketch comedy film which was finally released on DVD in 2008 but was conceived and written long before Siegel left The Onion in 2003. It did, however, introduce Siegel to screenwriting, which he chose as his next career. After writing a number of as-yet-unproduced comedy scripts for studios, Siegel was approached by director Darren Aronofsky, who who’d been impressed by Siegel’s screenplay Big Fan. Aronofsky commissioned Siegel to write the script for The Wrestler (2008), the Oscar-nominated movie which would become his first script to make it to the big screen.

There’s a pleasing circularity about the fact that Siegel was inspired to direct Big Fan because of The Wrestler, and even began shooting his own movie the day after Aronofsky’s wrapped. The movie’s eponymous protagonist is 35-year-old Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a perpetually single parking garage attendant still living at home with his mother and whose dull existence is made meaningful only by his all-consuming passion for the New York Giants. One night, Paul and his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spy Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and when they follow him to a club, Paul … Read the rest

KILLER AND MASSIFY’S LOOP PLANES WRAPS PRODUCTION

By Scott Macaulay

Robin Wilby’s Loop Planes , produced by Christine Vachon, is the first project to emerge from the partnership between Massify and Killer Films, and it has just wrapped production. Brooke Sebold is documenting the process over at Massify, and the first video is now up. It is embedded below, and make sure to visit the page and the site for more on the project and Massify in general.

Massify + Killer Films Episode 1 from Massify on Vimeo.… Read the rest

TED HOPE ON COMMUNITY AND COLLABORATION

By Scott Macaulay

Last year producer Ted Hope gave the keynote address at Film Independent’s Fourth Annual Filmmaker Forum and began a dialogue on the changing face of independent film that he has carried over to regular postings on his Truly Free Film blog. Last week Hope received the Vision Award at Vision Fest 09 from the Filmmaker’s Alliance. Presented by Alan Ball, the award has heretofore only been given to directors. The clips have just gone up on YouTube — check out Hope’s message to the independent community.

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

By Scott Macaulay

Over at the new IFP Independent Film Week 2009 blog, Danielle DiGiacomo sits down with Independent Film Week ’08 veteran Bryan Wizemann, who has a number of promising projects that might just be about to go… and then he’s got a short film that questions the wisdom of it all. At Wholphin check out Film Makes Us Happy, a short in which Wizemann interviews on-camera his wife and asks her whether he should give up film. It’s a painful watch, although one with a lot of relevance to many filmmakers trying to balance work and family needs. From the interview on the Wholphin site:

How do you think the film will affect other struggling filmmakers?

Many have come up to me after various festival screenings, and the conversation starts like this: “I’m a (insert creative occupation here), and my girlfriend and I went through (insert difficult situation caused by said career choice here).” What struck me most is that it’s not so much a film about filmmaking or all that brings, but a film about the sacrifices involved in any relationship, so w hen people talk to me about the film they end up talking about their own relationships. I wouldn’t have known this to be true if it wasn’t for those who sought me out after a screening.

As far as how it’ll affect other filmmakers, here’s an excerpt from someone who commented about FMUH on IMDb:

“…This video was embarrassing to watch, he exploited private moments with his wife, which really put him and his wife in a really negative and non sympathetic light. This is the kind of stuff you know you will see at film festivals, but still when you see it you walk out upset that you paid money to sit through such crap. I blame the programmers for allowing such low quality stuff in their programs as well. Makes me want nothing to do with this art form.”

So…, it may actually turn people off of filmmaking in general, which would be unfortunate. My hope is to just illustrate how working in

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WHEN PIRACY BECOMES PERSONAL

By Scott Macaulay

When I initially talked with producer Jake Abraham about contributing a piece to our Web Exclusives section about his DIY distribution of Kirt Gunn’s Lovely by Surprise, I told him I wanted it to be a two-parter. I wanted him to check back after the release had time to prove itself and let us know how it all worked out. Well, as Abraham notes in the intro to his just-posted new piece, “Tweet This!”, that time has come sooner rather than later. In brief, Abraham was compelled to write when he discovered that the film he’s been tirelessly promoting has been uploaded in decent quality to a filesharing site.

What’s so surprising, you ask? Studios deal with this routinely. The music industry has had to totally change its business model on account of the pirates. Did Abraham honestly think that his film wouldn’t at some point be uploaded?

While I consider myself “piracy agnostic,” and while we have certainly explored both sides of the issue here at Filmmaker (see, for example, this 2004 article by Jeff Levy-Hinte entitled “The Digital Divide”), I do empathize with Abraham. In the piece he talks about how he has been both thrilled to discover that his producing work has been pirated as well as depressed. I’ve had the same experiences. Once I travelled to Sarajevo as a guest of the Sarajevo Film Festival. A Bosnian teenager came up to me and asked if I had produced Gummo because it was one of his favorite films. How did he see it, I asked, knowing the film’s distribution in Eastern Europe was very limited. Oh, he bought a bootleg copy. Cool, I thought. Gummo had a big distributor, this was years after the film’s theatrical release, and I was just happy people were seeing the movie.

A decade or so later I produced another movie I liked a lot that struggled to break $1 million at the box office despite really good reviews. I remember meeting the girlfriend of a family member who told me that all her friends had seen the movie … Read the rest

THE MANY INTERVIEW FACES OF QUENTIN TARANTINO

By Scott Macaulay

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t expect Inglourious Basterds to be as big a hit as it is when we selected it for Filmmaker‘s cover. I love the movie, but I thought it’s more idiosyncratic qualities would take it out of mainstream orbit. I’m really happy to be wrong. And while credit gets passed around to the Weinsteins, the publicists, etc., Tarantino should take some himself. He defied the pundits who opined that he had to cut a half hour or so out of the film after Cannes (the current cut is actually one minute longer), refusing to alter his vision, but then, and this is important, he went out there and defended his vision to every possible outlet. He’s been everywhere, goofing it up on Conan last night but then giving an uncommonly thoughtful and introspective interview to Charlie Rose last week. Check out the end of this interview with Rose for a great anecdote about attending the Sundance Labs with Reservoir Dogs and how Tarantino learned not to look for subtext in his scripts but to just simply trust that it is there. (And, of course, check out my interview with Tarantino on the newsstands or by picking up a digital subscription.)

Over the next few days I’ll try to post a few out-takes from my interview with Tarantino. Here’s one in which he elaborated on his penchant for writing scenes that then become a character’s backstory.

If I wrote a scene about Aldo [Ray, Brad Pitt's character], about how he got his rope burn — al right, so I could write that scene, I could do the whole thing. I could write a sequence. I could write a 20-page scene. I didn’t, but I could — and I definitely did stuff like that all the time for Kill Bill. [laughs] I could write that. And whether or not I use it in the movie, that happened as far as I’m concerned. That’s his history, that makes me know him more. Now, it’s not just an idea, what happened to him, I

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THIS WEEKEND: STILL WALKING AND BIG FAN

By Jason Guerrasio

Posted this morning over on the main page are interviews with Hirokazu Kore-eda on his touching family drama Still Walking and Robert Siegel talks about his dark comedy Big Fan. Both films open in limited release this weekend.

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