FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “ARBITRAGE” DIRECTOR NICHOLAS JARECKI

Currently best know for his documentary The Outsider, Nicholas Jarecki is poised for reevaluation with Arbitrage, his narrative directorial debut. Jarecki spent a long time ruminating over what kind of story he wanted to tell, ultimately deciding on a thriller set within a world he knew quite a bit about. The film has already garnered attention thanks to its A-List ensemble, but Jarecki hopes his script will force audiences to continue thinking even after the credits finish rolling.  Arbitrage, which is set amidst today’s tumultuous economic terrain and considers the ethics of a hedge-fund mogul, screens today in Park City.

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Filmmaker: Your film is a suspense thriller, but also about a man’s morality. How do you categorize the movie? Is it a cinematic ride, a character study, or a snapshot of the American financial landscape?

Jarecki: Arbitrage is a dramatic thriller about a desperate man who must do whatever it takes to stay alive. It’s also an erotically charged, luxurious ride through high and low and the gray areas of contemporary New York morality. Six characters interweave as they all confront the same basic question: will you give up the power you love to hang on to your last shred of humanity?

Filmmaker: You worked with a large range of actors (Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth, Brit Marling, Laetitia Casta, and Monica Raymund). Can you speak about working with such a large, talented ensemble cast of actors?

Jarecki: I felt lucky every day I went to work with the gifted group that came together for this movie. They taught me an enormous amount; together we went on a real journey of discovery through a one-month rehearsal process. We explored the characters, toured the stock exchange, got drunk, and rewrote the script by acting out scenes in my apartment like crazy people– we came together as a family. When we hit the set, we were confident enough in our ideas and comfortable enough trusting each other to be able to take risks in the moment. There’s nothing more a director can hope for.

Filmmaker: What motivated … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “FOR ELLEN” DIRECTOR SO YONG KIM

After winning over half a dozen festival prizes for her first two feature films, So Yong Kim has spent the last few years producing for her husband, Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl), and developing and writing her newest movie, For Ellen. Similar to her previous films, For Ellen’s narrative derives from Kim’s own experiences growing up. Brought together through the character of a young man traveling to see his daughter for the first time, Kim’s personal style of filmmaking not only forces the audience to question their own decisions, but has also allowed the filmmaker a cathartic way to view her own life. For Ellen premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category.

Filmmaker: When did you begin writing For Ellen? Was it a long process?

Kim: After my second film Treeless Mountain was finished, I had a vague idea of a story about a male character I wanted to develop, but I didn’t know exactly what that story would be.  I wanted to step away from autobiographical storytelling, but still make a personal film.  I collected notes for about a year and spent another year organizing my notes into a script.

Filmmaker: Since the film was inspired by your own experience meeting your father for the first time, what was writing and making this movie like for you emotionally?

Kim: Although the main character is a young white rocker, and his appearance is completely unlike my own, I feel this film is my most personal. I started to write the story based on a personal memory and wrote it during a particularly difficult time in my life when I was going through a crisis.  I felt insecure about being a mom, a partner, and a filmmaker and was filled with anxiety.  While writing and making this film, I was able to fully investigate how this character, a struggling young artist, copes with challenges.  Making this film gave me an emotional outlet and a platform to dig into my own insecurities. I am grateful for that.

Filmmaker: You … Read the rest

WRITER/DIRECTOR CRAIG ZOBEL ON “COMPLIANCE”

Following the adventures of two mismatched salesman hawking vanity recording deals for a small Southern recording label, Craig Zobel’s 2007 Sundance picture Great World of Sound is a beautifully crafted debut feature, emotionally rich and with a sagacious perspective on America’s escalating obsession with fame. And in the months following its release, the banter between the two men, and the hapless vocalists aiming for an America’s Got Talent-style brass ring by way of a cheaply-produced studio single, must have made the film seem like a comedy to those who missed its lacerating moral critique. That’s because, as Zobel notes below, the scripts he received after that lauded debut were all comedies — and ones he ultimately didn’t even get to direct.

Now, five years later, Zobel — a founder of the website Homestar Runner and co-producer of George Washington, by David Gordon Green, who is an executive producer of this latest picture — returns to the festival with Compliance, an edgy true-live drama.“To delve too much into the events might dampen some of the film’s enjoyment,” he told Filmmaker, “but in brief, it involves some people who are essentially talked into holding a person against her will, naked, in the stockroom of a fast food restaurant for hours.”

Before the festival I spoke to Zobel about how Compliance and not a studio comedy came into being as his next film.

FILMMAKER: So, you made Great World of Sound in 2006. What happened after that, and why so many years until Compliance?

ZOBEL: After that movie, I had another project with all the pieces in place. I had a bigger budget, but then with the Writer’s Guild strike looming, all the actors went off to projects that would make them a lot more money in the short term. And when that project deconstructed, I had nothing else ready to go. I started writing a new thing, but by the time the [strike] was over there was another Sundance, and there were more new young filmmakers out there. I ended up finding a lot of energy and … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS WITH “THE COMEDY” DIRECTOR RICK ALVERSON

Director Rick Alverson is nothing if not prolific. After putting out six albums over eight years with his band Spokane, Alverson turned his attention to film, directing The Builder in 2010 and New Jerusalem last year. Continuing this productive streak is The Comedy, a dark exploration into the insular, self-destructive lifestyle of the affluent white male. Set against the backdrop of Brooklyn’s ultra-hip Williamsburg, The Comedy stands in contrast to Alverson’s previous two films, films that focused mainly on the stories of working class immigrants. Starring comedian Tim Heidecker (in his first dramatic role) and a supporting cast that includes Heidecker’s frequent collaborator Eric Wareheim, as well as musicians James Murphy and Will Sheff, The Comedy is a bold new work from an artist who has already built up quite an impressive portfolio.

Filmmaker: How did you decide to cast Tim Heidecker, a comedian known for his absurdist humor, in this more dramatic role?

Alverson: Tim has a real capacity for vacillating between the deceptively safe and the disturbing in his performances, and a talent for blending the two in a very unconventional and uncomfortable way. As does Eric Wareheim and Gregg Turkington, who also feature in the film. I’m very interested in the disconnect between people and their ideas, their ways of being in the world that are in conflict with their desires for being in the world, and those spaces between people that are unbridgeable. I was looking for a personality that was at home in that space, in that discomfort.

Filmmaker: And what was it like working with James Murphy and Will Sheff, musicians who I imagine didn’t have an extensive amount of acting experience.

Alverson: For my first film, The Builder, I solely used non-actors: friends, musicians, people cast for their personalities, for their professions or preoccupations. I felt comfortable directing them. I found it comforting that I could ask things of them and they would not consider “motive” or meaning, they would simply utilize their own relationship to the thing without dilemma. I could assess their social responses and their behavioral impulses … Read the rest

RELEASED

18 years after traveling to Arkansas to make a documentary about the gruesome murders of three young boys by alleged Satan-worshiping teenagers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky bring their crusading story of the West Memphis Three to a miraculous conclusion with Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. By Jason Guerrasio

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “SIMON KILLER” DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS

Indie sweetheart Antonio Campos debuts his newest feature film, Simon Killer, today at Sundance. After he and his partners made waves in Park City last year with Martha Marcy May Marlene (which won Sean Durkin the Best Director award, and introduced Lizzy Olsen to the world), critics and audiences have placed Borderline’s newest on their must-see list. But that hasn’t changed things for Campos.  He comes to Park City as a director this year, prepared to experience the festival from a new perspective.

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Filmmaker: You and your partners at Borderline Films are no strangers to Sundance and the festival marketplace. With three successful features to your name, does entering the Sundance arena this year feel any easier?

Campos: It never feels any easier. It always feels like with every new film you’ve hit the reset button, and though all the experiences feel familiar and deep down you know how things all work on the day to day, it feels like you’re experiencing them for the first time, again.

Filmmaker: You lived in Paris for sometime and conceivably have a relationship with the city, how many of your own experiences in Paris influence the film?

Campos: Not many actually. There is one fight in the street where a man bumps into Simon and goes to apology with a handshake, and when Simon reciprocates, he holds on to it and taunts him in front of his two female companions. This happened during my first week in Paris after I had moved there for the Cannes Residence. I could not help but be insecure about “my small hands” as the man called them for the next few weeks.

Filmmaker: Much of the film also takes place around notable Parisian landmarks. What was it like to shoot these scenes? Did the actors have an organic process of interacting with their environment and thereby developing their characters?

Campos: Shooting in the museums was a great pleasure because we were shooting when they were closed. An empty museum is one of the coolest places to be. It’s one of the most peaceful places to … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD” DIRECTOR BEHN ZEITLIN

Pushing the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, Behn Zeitlin stands by his decision to make movies involving children, animals, and somewhat fantastical locations and environments. Lauded for his short, Glory at Sea, Zeitlin attends Sundance this year with his first feature-length film, Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Like Zeitlin’s short, his feature debut takes place in Louisiana and aims to capture identifiable human emotions through the journey of a young girl. Beasts proves to be a seemingly mysterious narrative, unidentifiable from its abstract synopsis, but its premiere today in U.S. Dramatic Competition will soon shed more understanding on this highly anticipated film.

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Filmmaker: What was the process of moving from a short film to a feature-length film like for you?

Zeitlin: It’s kind of like getting hit in the head in a boxing match.  You’re looking for your brain and it just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. A short you can keep all in your head all at once. A feature, or a least this one, has this chaotic mystery to it, where you plan as much as you can before you start, but we set up so many unpredictable elements in our shoot that you can only really think moment to moment, things are happening faster than you can control them. So each day you just run out there and try not get killed, it’s a thrill.

Filmmaker: How do you think audiences will react to this somewhat mystical world you have created?

Zeitlin: I think they’re going to recognize it. Because the film, to me, is a piece of realism. The characters, and the emotions, and the aesthetic are all rooted in real people, places, and events. And the elements that are ‘mystical’ are really exaggerations of actual things, the way you can look at something and feel more for it that is actually there, those hyperaware moments are expressed on screen, but the ground is the same ground everyone walks on.

Filmmaker: You mentioned in another interview that you have found yourself using all the things you were taught not to when making a film – … Read the rest

“MONSIEUR LAZHAR” WRITER/DIRECTOR PHILIPPE FALARDEAU

With its intensely concentrated industry buzz and high profile bidding wars, Sundance is one of the few places where filmmakers’ careers can be transformed overnight. But writer/director Philippe Falardeau says he’s not looking for a Cinderella moment when his French-language feature Monsieur Lazhar screens out of competition in Park City this week as part of the fest’s Spotlight program. The film — about a mild but mysterious Algerian immigrant to Montreal, Canada, (Mohamed Falleg) hired to replace a school teacher who has committed suicide — has already picked U.S. distribution through Music Box Films, a slot as Canada’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and a handful of festival honors, including the Audience Award at the Locarno Film Festival and Best Canadian Feature honors at the Toronto International Film Festival. Besides, Falardeau says he’s already had his big, transformative moment, and it came long before the success of his first three features, Congorama (2006) and It’s Not Me, I Swear! (2008).

Filmmaker: Sundance is one of the few places where a filmmaker’s career can truly be Cinderella-d, so to speak. Are you so jaded that you don’t think about that sort of thing?

Falardeau: I do care. I do get excited. I would be lying if I said I didn’t. But, first of all, I’m realistic. I studied political science and international relations, and it was a series of accidents that made me direct a documentary and then I migrated to fiction. And sometimes I have to pinch myself, because I wake up in the morning and say, “Wow, I do this incredible job and make a living out of it.” And I’m one of the few people in Quebec who can make a decent living out of making films. I write my own stuff and I make a film every three years. I write my own stuff and I make the films, so it’s one every three years. So in a way the Cinderella story already happened to me. If a second one happens, I’m going to be super happy, but it already did happen to … Read the rest

TERRENCE NANCE, “AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY”

Watching Terence Nance’s Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is like being talked through the contents of a shoebox, each item another memento of The One That Got Away. Live action, animation, claymation reenactments, direct-to-camera address by him, on-camera interviews of her by him, blurry, amateur footage shot by her of him, all guided by a formally written voice over, delivered with somber, staccato clarity by an anonymous older man. Descriptions and depictions of other girls slide in and out of the narrative, intercut with shots of The One, whose name is Namik. One animation of a long-distance affair depicts a hand-drawn Terence rising from a grave, holding flowers, the girl walking away, while voice-over intones that “She was repelled by your inability to speak clearly about your feelings no matter their implications… However you hypothesize that the cause of your separation may be because you are too sure of the connection’s viability. A commitment with a woman with whom you are so intensely compatible that it would leave you with nothing else to search for, rendering your distance from her a product of your addiction to the unpredictability of a feast and famine romantic existence. On a more pragmatic level, Joy may just not be that into you.”

The film< is presented as multiple chapters, although sometimes out of sequence  (“Oversimplification of her Beauty” being merely Volume 3.) It began as a short film called How Would You Feel, a short film we see him making, see her watching, see composite images of two-dozen versions of both of them watching in a movie theatre set. He showed her the short film to win her over, hoping she would see that it was about her, become a secret shared between them… but, in the words of his press materials, “I FAILED.” She broke up with the boyfriend she had been seeing throughout their platonic-but-maybe-not relationship; he professed his love, but failed again. As the reality of all this sunk in, Davies took several years to flesh out the short into a feature premiering in the New Frontiers section of Sundance this weekend. Re-reading letters he wrote, re-telling dreams he had, re-enacting conversations the way he remembers them and asking for her to weigh in on what … Read the rest