KIRSTEN SHERIDAN AND THE FACTORY: ASSEMBLING IRELAND’S ACTORS

Talk to Kirsten Sheridan, director of August Rush and her latest Dollhouse (pictured and premiering in the Panorama section of the 2012 Berlinale) about The Factory, the collective she co-founded with fellow filmmakers John Carney (Once) and Lance Daly (Kisses), and it soon becomes apparent that Ireland’s recent financial woes have done little to dampen Dublin’s DIY spirit. If anything the collapse has, ironically, helped artists, Sheridan theorizes, by making their outsized dreams affordable. Indeed, in a thriving economy just meeting the rent on a space big enough to house everything from production studios, to a fully equipped camera department and editing facilities, to a digital cinema and a recording studio, would leave no time for these Factory friends to actually collectively create.

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing in this one-stop, mom-and-pop shop since 2009. And now that Carney’s The Rafters is also due to be released, the trio are focusing attention on expanding the family, specifically through their latest initiative in association with Screen Training Ireland. The Factory’s Actors Studio is a rigorous training ground for future screen thespians, invite-only but free to attend. From initial cattle calls the collective winnows down a select group, who are then chosen to attend a preparatory course, followed by workshops two to four times per week. “Our goal is to get a wide group of actors,” Sheridan emphasizes, which will then allow Irish filmmakers both within The Factory and outside its auspices, to cast directly from the collective.

But considering the country’s great theatrical tradition wouldn’t it be simpler just to pilfer players from the stage? I wondered. Guys like John Crowley and Martin McDonagh seem to have no problem finding native talent. Sheridan corrected my assumptions, though, noting that it’s important to give Irish actors “confidence with doing very little,” and that many theater thespians just don’t feel comfortable in front of a camera. In fact, even today filmmaking is viewed as a somewhat foreign trade in Ireland. “We’re not really a visual culture,” Sheridan explained, adding that her tradition is based in literature … Read the rest

CANNES DIRECTOR THIERRY FREMAUX ON THE FUTURE OF FILM FESTIVALS

To have the presence of Cannes Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux at your festival is like getting a seal of approval from the godfather of cinema himself. Arguably one of the most important players in the film industry today, Frémaux arrived by helicopter with French actress Isabelle Huppert to Emir Kusturica’s Fifth Annual Küstendorf Film and Music Festival, held this January in Serbia. “Sure Cannes is glamorous with its red carpet,” said Frémaux. “This is not the red carpet, it’s the white carpet, it’s the snow. And I think that is Emir’s style.” Küstendorf is a festival free of corporate sponsorship that aims to give back the gifts that cinema has bestowed upon Kusturica to a new generation of filmmakers, as 20 student films are screened alongside established director debuts.

When Frémaux is not running the Cannes Film Festival, he is directing the Institut Lumière in his hometown of Lyon. The museum and library honors the birthplace of cinema in Monplaisir and is dedicated to preserving the works of the Lumière brothers. He also serves as Director of the Festival Lumière in Lyon to showcase new film restorations and revivals each October.

We spoke with Frémaux at the Visconti Café at Küstendorf on the increasing importance of world film festivals in today’s market. Traditionally the goal of any new director at a film festival is to seek out distribution. As independent distribution unfortunately continues to shrink — unless you’re a filmmaker lucky enough to be working in France — film festivals may just be evolving into a very worthy substitute.

What is the relationship between Cannes and global festivals?

There are the major festivals: Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice, but the family also has a lot of small cousins and I want to pay attention to them. If Cannes can help we will, because showing the interest of Cannes helps the festivals we support.

I think that film festivals are like music festivals. A filmmaker can go for two years having 50,000-100,000 people watching his film, which is enormous. They screen the film in front of 200 people here, 500 people there. It’s like … Read the rest

“BITTER SEEDS”: AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR MICHA X. PELED

Monsanto, the agriculture biotech company maligned in such docs as Food, Inc. and King Corn, found renewed opposition this month with the launch of an online petition gone viral called “Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto.” The petition protests the president’s 2009 appointment of the company’s former VP, Michael Taylor, to the position of senior advisor to the FDA. That this years-late call to action has inspired more than 380,000 signatures attests to the toxicity of this particular marriage between government and a multinational corporation.

If you’ll remember, Monsanto is the company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange, both of which were banned at some point for their harmful effects on people and the environment. As the world’s largest producer of genetically modified (GM) crops, the company has achieved its position through a means of strong-arm tactics, ambitious mergers, and, as the petition points out, collusions with the U.S. government.

If these points don’t spark your indignation, then Bitter Seeds will. The documentary, directed by Micha X. Peled, traces Monsanto’s sizable footprint on an agrarian community in central India. The film has been traveling the festival circuit since last year, winning the “Green Screen Competition” Award at the 2011 IDFA (in a jury presided over by Joe Berlinger). After garnering acclaim at last month’s Palm Springs International Film Festival (PIFF), it is featured in the “Meet the Docs” series at the Berlin Film Festival.

Bitter Seeds sets down in remote village in the state of Maharashtra, where locally grown, renewable seeds have been phased out by genetically-modified, non-renewable seeds. In a region where the majority of farmers are rain-dependent and unable to pay for the fertilizers that GM seeds require, the influx of the new product into the marketplace has caused extreme indebtedness, leading as many as 25,000 farmers to take their lives since 1997. Bitter Seeds asks the question of whether a cotton farmer, Ram Krishna, will “be next.”

If that sounds sensational, it’s because it partly is. Contrary to the film’s conspicuous marketing, however, the documentary is among … Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH D.P. MARTINA RADWAN

I started working with DP Martina Radwan about a year ago on the feature documentary, Mentor (addressing bullying and teen suicide in Mentor, Ohio) I further had the pleasure of working with her on a recent music video for the band Shearwater. It is a gift, as a director, to find a DP who you can quickly fall into a shorthand with, creating your own visual language, and trusting in the collaborative process. Radwan and I found this with each other.

Her narrative work includes Flannel Pajamas, by Jeff Lipsky; Singapore Dreaming, one of the first Singaporean feature productions and the winner of several international awards; Rain, the first indigenous film of the Bahamas, produced and directed by Maria Govan; The Killing Floor, a thriller produced by Doug Liman & Avi Arad and the horror film Train, a Millennium Films production, both directed by Gideon Raff.

Her most recently-released documentaries include William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe by Emily & Sarah Kunstler, and Beautiful Darling, by James Rasin. I sat down with her recently to discuss her beginnings as a cinematographer, women as directors and cinematographers, and Saving Face, the Oscar-nominated short doc she shot this past year.

FILMMAKER: How did you first get interested in cinematography?

RADWAN: I was always interested in images because to me the visual language leaves more room for interpretation then the spoken word. You can allow the audience to add their own emotions and impressions to the story. Images are a universal language, as we know from silent movies. Growing up in Germany, I watched many American movies, and if the visual language was strong enough, I could understand the film, without understanding the spoken language. I was a school drop out which prevented me form going to college, so I worked my way up from PA to Assistant Camera, and I started shooting after I moved to the US.

FILMMAKER: What was your first production assistant job?

RADWAN: It was an American German co-production starring Martin Sheen and Sean Penn — I think Sean Penn’s father was directing … Read the rest

ABEL FERRARA: TEN LESSONS ON FILMMAKING

The original King of Indie Abel Ferrara made a stop at Emir Kusturica’s Küstendorf Film and Music Festival this January to screen his latest film 4:44 Last Day on Earth. The Loisaida-set film paints a picture of addiction at the end of the world, starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh. Ferrara has always felt a connection to Kusturica, and felt very welcome at Küstendorf, the Serbian director’s wooden village high in the mountains of Mokra Gora. “We just kinda have a connection, other than I look like him,” Ferrera told me, minutes before entering a workshop to discuss the film with students who had descended upon the festival from all around the world to learn from the week’s line-up of cinema greats. Also at the fest were Kim Ki-Duk (Korea), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Marjane Satrapi (France), the Dardenne Brothers (Belgium), Andreas Dresen (Germany) and Frederikke Aspock (Denmark).

These days, Ferrara is generous in sharing his wealth of knowledge on the industry. Just keep him away from the bear sanctuary, a new habitat Kusturica is building for abused circus bears at the Mokra Gora nature park, among his many projects in the region. “If you’ve got that kind of energy it’s great. But I wouldn’t be dancing with no bear, I’ll tell you that much,” said Ferrara, referring to a photo he had seen earlier that day of Kusturica getting intimate with a brown bear. “There’s a picture of him with fucking sugar in his mouth kissing it, I don’t know. I’ve had nightmares about bears my whole life. If that bear was around I’d be on a helicopter out of here.”

Fortunately for Ferrara, the brown bears of Mokra Gora were hibernating during his visit. So I sat down with him to discuss some of the top lessons he’s learned over the years from his vast and diverse lifework. So stop fucking around and take note.

1. New game, new rules.

“Being independent now is like being the loneliest man in the world.

I think independent was a reference to a film structure that was outside of Hollywood. I … Read the rest

“THE INVADER” DIRECTOR NICOLAS PROVOST

A sort of Taxi Driver set within the world of European immigrant culture, Nicolas Provost’s The Invader is one of the most intriguing and seductive films currently on the festival circuit. It premiered in Venice before screening in Toronto (where the below interview was conducted) and now Rotterdam, and it marks the feature debut of Provost (pictured above), a Belgian video and installation artist whose work has always taken as its subject the way cinema orders images into narrative.

The story opens with the camera fixed on the vagina of a beautiful blonde woman, sunbathing nude on a Southern European beach. It pulls back, taking in the scene of vacation frolickers until we spy Amadou (Issaka Sawadogo), an immigrant from Africa literally washing up on shore. After a hallucinatory sequence that sends Amadou from the beach to the city (Brussells), the film proper begins. Amadou is now part of an illegal labor force contracted out for day labor jobs by an imperious mid-level crime boss. An altercation with the boss sends Amadou on the street, without a job, money or papers. Spying a beautiful blonde executive, played by the stunning Stefania Rocca, he uses his considerable charm, verbal dexterity and sexual persuasiveness to insinuate himself into her life. Soon, though, his own anxieties, his resentments and feelings of being out of place, send him on a path to self-destruction.

Provocative in its socio, sexual and racial politics, The Invader makes us watch as an initially honorable African man gradually implodes when the shiny images of Western culture are dangled before him. The film plays with our sympathies, and our stereotypes, and it does so with a sleekly absorbing visual style. In the below interview, I talk with Provost about his art background, his move to feature filmmaking, and the archetypes he evokes in this picture.

Filmmaker: Let me start with the obvious question: where did the idea of making this film come from?

Provost: Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is … Read the rest

AN INNOVATIVE LAUNCH FOR “JOFFREY: MAVERICKS OF AMERICAN DANCE”

For the past four months, my company Hybrid Cinema has been working on the release of Bob Hercules’s new film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, about the history of the Joffrey ballet. I will be writing a number of posts outlining the unique path that I and my partner on this release, Sheri Candler, have taken to release this documentary about the history of the groundbreaking dance company, The Joffrey Ballet.

In my book Think Outside the Box Office and in subsequent blog posts, I have written about the advantages and challenges of launching a film after its world premiere festival screening. Many filmmakers have complained that they can never recapture the exposure they gain with their first festival. As a result there have been a number of attempts to launch a film in some fashion out of a premiere festival. Orly Ravid writes in Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul about BassAckwards, which launched via YouTube Rentals during Sundance 2009. IFC has been running its Festival Direct program to provide a promotional lift to its VOD releases for several years. For instance IFC will premiere films at SXSW and follows it up with screenings in a few cities while it premieres day-and-date on VOD with the festival. Tribeca has started using their festival as a launch for a number of films that they distribute on VOD.

The chief advantage of using a world premiere to launch a film’s release is to condense all of the publicity into one window, thereby conserving precious resources and taking full advantage of press garnered via the premiere. The approach also utilizes the promotional muscle that many festivals can muster to promote the release. The principal challenge is being prepared – having all of the necessary tools and distribution and marketing channels lined up to take advantage of the promotion. In general this has been beyond the abilities of most independent filmmakers, who are just scrambling to get their films finished in time for their first festival. Another challenge is the short window of time that films have to get everything … Read the rest

MICHAEL BARRY ON HIS CAREER IN FILM SOUND

Michael Barry has been a re-recording mixer for more than two decades, working on over 100 films. Some of the directors he has collaborated with include Tony Gilroy (Duplicity, Michael Clayton), Stephen Daldry (The Reader), David Koepp (Ghost Town, Secret Window), Robert Altman (Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion) and the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski, Fargo). In our interview he discusses his beginnings in sound, the job of the mixer, and the future of sound in film.

Filmmaker: When did you become interested in sound and film?

Barry: My mother studied piano at Juilliard. I grew up with her playing the Steinway in our house. She wanted me to practice but, well, you know. I did try later in life, and it just never took. I must have acquired some sort of listening expertise from my mother playing. She would comment that I could hear in-between the sound, which didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but later did. As a teenager, my friends were in a band, and I wanted to hang out with them and do all the things they were doing. Unfortunately I didn’t play an instrument so I ended up being the roadie and the sound guy. I just got into the nuances of how to balance different instruments and sounds. I never attended college and had to figure out a way to go to work. So I guess I got interested through osmosis.

Filmmaker: What kind of band were you a roadie for?

Barry: My good friends had a rock and roll band, and then later with Spyro Gyra.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like you have especially good hearing? Or is it all training?

Barry: I think a lot of it is training. I’m sure everyone can learn to listen in different ways, to educate themselves. You can tell the differences in the way it makes you feel, and I think good sound makes people feel a certain way.

Filmmaker: How did that get you into other kinds of … Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK WISEMAN

The New Year can be as much a time to reflect as it can be to project into the future. Some see the act of looking back as an integral part of moving forward. But on a brisk afternoon in Cambridge the day before New Year’s Eve, Frederick Wiseman resists this notion. The legendary documentary filmmaker has been making roughly one film a year since 1967, only taking breaks when funding difficulties, or in this case critical recognition, require him to do so.

Tomorrow night Wiseman is receiving the Legacy Award at the annual Cinema Eye Honors for his debut film Titicut Follies, which observed the appalling conditions at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Though completed in 1967, the film was withheld from the general public until 1991 due to its alleged violation of the inmates’ privacy. More compromising for the prosecuting government of Massachusetts, however, was the abuse it revealed by Bridgewater’s administrators.

The stress of that litigation now shows in Wiseman’s face—or maybe it’s just the jet lag. We meet the day after he returned from skiing in Switzerland, concluding a year of touring festivals with his latest film, Crazy Horse, about the Parisian cabaret club. The documentary couldn’t be farther away in subject matter and tone from his first one. Yet it falls neatly in line with his last two, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet and Boxing Gym, both dance films if you choose to characterize boxing as such. (Wiseman would) In Crazy Horse, Wiseman explores the professionalism and hard work underlying Paris’s legendary nude dance revue. Along the way, he explores the distinctions between art and commerce, as well as beauty and vulgarity.

January offers a rare opportunity to view Wiseman’s first film and his latest on the big screen. A Stranger Than Fiction screening of Titicut Follies will be held at the IFC Center on January 17th, followed by the opening of Crazy Horse at Film Forum on January 18th. The gap between those two films is substantial, but then, so is the gap between … Read the rest

EMIR KUSTURICA ON CITY BUILDING AND A NEW RENAISSANCE

Fresh off an Ecuadorian tour with his No Smoking Orchestra, the twice-awarded Palme d’Or director Emir Kusturica flew to Morocco for the closest thing he can get to downtime. As President of the Jury of the 11th annual Marrakech International Film Festival, Kusturica got to enjoy one of his favorite pastimes, absorbing a dozen or so independent films from around the world in a week. His second time at the festival, the auteur was honored with the Golden Star award in 2009 for his outstanding career.

While he spent most of the festival behind the scenes, apart from presenting a new Golden Star to another like-minded conspirator, Terry Gilliam, Kusturica granted us a rare interview at La Mamounia in a dark intimate conference room. He detailed what he’s up to when he’s not busy being a professional Jury President, and it’s a doozy. To call Kusturica a renaissance man is an understatement. It’s more like a “fuck your renaissance man. I’ll create my own renaissance” man. For starters, this coming January marks the 5th year of his annual Küstendorf Film and Music Festival in Mokra Gora, this year honoring directors Kim Ki-duk and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. As usual the fest will focus on young talent, with 20 student films from all over the world in competition.

He recently starred in and shot a 15-minute story about a Serbian Orthodox Monk, to be a part of Guillermo Arriaga’s larger film on religion, Words With Gods, which will come out next year. Then there’s the book he’s writing, “The Book of Stories,” a collection of stories that will be sure to grab you by the throat. And he just finished penning his next script, a film about the recent history of war in the Balkans. Stay tuned.

His hotly awaited Pancho Villa film is on, this time with a slightly truncated script. Benicio Del Toro, no stranger to playing Mexican revolutionaries, takes over the role from Arizona Dream star Johnny Depp, who dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. The new film focuses on the love story between a woman who … Read the rest