Web Exclusives
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
The Kid with a Bike, the latest from the Belgian Dardenne Brothers, is opening this Friday, March 16, courtesy of Sundance Selects. The touching story already picked up the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year in addition to being nominated for a Golden Globe and Spirit Award. After his heartbreadking role in the Dardennes’ The Child, actor Jérémie Renier reprises his role as a deadbeat dad, Guy, who abandons his twelve-year-old son, Cyril, to be looked after by the local hairdresser, Samantha. She struggles to fill in the missing holes Cyril’s absent parents left behind while trying to keep him away from negative influences on the street.
Once again the brothers have mastered the art of portraying the trials of the working class with compassion over pity, and with objectivity over sentimentality. It’s a powerful story that presents characters whose motives change so many times it becomes impossible to judge them, which is just what the brothers set out to do.
“Children generally don’t ask themselves whether their parents love them,” said Jean-Pierre at the recent Kustendorf Film and Music Festival, where they presented their film to the festival, organized by another two-time Palme D’Or winner Emir Kusturica. “With Cyril that is not the case. Samantha’s love can save him, and he ultimately understands that she loves him and that she will provide him with a childhood. She is ready to take the risk.”
We sat down with the brothers at Kustendorf to discuss music, tenderness, and the best of young Belgian cinema. Like any Dardenne films, A Kid reminds us what it means to be human, and how to work to fill in the gaping holes in our own lives.
Filmmaker: When we last spoke in 2010 in Morocco, you refused to reveal any details about The Kid With a Bike. Do you always keep your projects under wraps until the last moment?
Jean-Pierre: Yes, it’s better no? Because if you speak about your project, maybe it will not be necessary to make it.
Filmmaker: This is your first movie with music. Why now? … Read the rest
Friday, March 9th, 2012
“Tipping.” “Pulling.” “Gathring.” Yes, a new tech start-up has entered the independent film space, and with it a nomenclature that speaks to its ambition to “democratize” the business of theatrical distribution. Launched by a filmmaker, Scott Glosserman (Behind the Mask), Gathr offers “TOD,” or theatrical-on-demand, an audience-driven process by which fans request (or “pull”) films to local venues by aggregating their interest and pledging their funds in advance via credit card. When enough fans support a screening on a particular day, the film “tips,” and credit cards are charged. Fans get to see films that might never come to their towns, and theaters get a guaranteed audience for a low-traffic night.
Positioning itself both as a resource for DIY filmmakers and a sub-distributor for established players in the theatrical space, Gathr launched this week with titles ranging from indies (Behind the Mask, Truth in Numbers) to repertory (Alien, Blazing Saddles) to second-run arthouse (Fox Searchlight titles Another Earth, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Shame). (Tugg is another player in this space.) I spoke to Glosserman about Gathr’s business model, its predecessors, and all that tipping, pulling and gathring.
Filmmaker: So how do you describe Gathr?
Glosserman: We have coined a new term: TOD, or theatrical-on-demand. We allow people to pull movies to places those movies wouldn’t have a prayer of screening. We’re creating theatrical distribution from the bottom up and democratizing [this part of the business.] I like to say it’s kind of like Kickstarter met Netflix and had a love child. We are consolidating and creating critical masses online, who preauthorize their credit cards for the cost of the ticket, promote the film and gather around the endeavor to screen the movie. When we achieve our internal thresholds and tip, that’s when we charge credit cards. We don’t have to be a traditional distributor who needs a home run to cover our losses. We can outlay our costs and then react when people tip the movie.
This becomes a wonderful opportunity for exhibitors, especially arthouse theaters, who are … Read the rest
Friday, March 9th, 2012
I have fallen in love with Nina Menkes. Her films have taken me there, in their descent to the depths of her psyche, and by way of hers, to my own. I continue falling in love with her as she shares her experience of making her art. She speaks of her films as dreams that she interprets and uses to understand her self. Her journey is both creative and spiritual. She is committed to the inner life and intuitive filmmaking. She is committed to the alienated feminine. Nina Menkes’ films have been recognized internationally as works of art on the highest level… brilliant, provocative, intense and utterly original. Over the past 25 years she has made six influential films. But they have not always reached their audience. Denis Lim, in his recent New York Times article, writes, “A distinct and idiosyncratic figure in American cinema, Ms. Menkes, has also remained somewhat overlooked, an outsider both on the indie film scene and in avant-garde circles. Her work is sometimes called experimental, but unlike most experimental filmmakers she makes narrative features.”
Though I knew Nina’s name, I’m embarrassed to admit her films did not reach me until I was contacted to interview her for her upcoming retrospective, “Cinema as Sorcery.” And when I did watch them, I couldn’t believe I had missed this essential voice. These films inhabit a space that combine a harsh, cold, brutal, political reality of living as a woman in a sexist world, with intimations of inner transformation, with connections to the inner life and the fruitfulness which might be found there. Watching the films, I realized I had missed years of opportunity to be inspired to trust my own voice and my own vision as a filmmaker, to trust my own instinct that treasures exist in the inner alienated feminine. And they exist in the outer alienated feminine as well. Our industry has continued to support keeping the feminine an outcast, though there is much outcry against this at the moment, and more. Luckily this retrospective gives filmmakers, young and old an opportunity to discover or rediscover … Read the rest
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
The titular tattooed protagonist of Dominic Allan’s Calvet is Jean Marc Calvet (pictured), who went from being a hustling, drug-addicted street kid in the south of France to an NYC art world darling. But the path he took to get there is equal parts winding, fascinating and downright insane. After being discovered in a shooting competition by a guy who ran a security firm, Calvet joined the “world of bodyguards,” taking care of the likes of Mel Gibson, Forest Whitaker and Tim Robbins at Cannes. But he was soon enticed to leave his young family and “disappear” to America with a rich client – who, unfortunately, turned out to be a Miami mobster who never paid him. That’s when Calvet literally fled to South America – where the British documentary filmmaker Dominic Allan ultimately found him. Which itself is a story stranger than fiction. Luckily, I got the chance to speak with the director about this and more shortly before the U.K. theatrical release of his (nonfiction) suspense thriller. Calvet plays the Miami International Film Festival March 7th and 9th in conjunction with an exhibition of Jean Marc Calvet’s work.
Filmmaker: I was chatting with Marina of Monkdogz Urban Art Gallery at Jean Marc’s exhibit during DOC NYC, and she let me in on the odd story of how you decided to pursue this project. Can you recount this?
Dominic Allan: In 2004 I was living and traveling in Latin America, driving with some French friends from Costa Rica to Nicaragua. We were heading to Granada, a small colonial town on the banks of the Lake of Nicaragua. In the car they were talking about this guy who was running a cafe-restaurant there at the time and who had been a mercenary, robbed a bank or something… and he’d started painting like a madman. I was dozing on the backseat and remember thinking it sounded like a tall story. Then we arrived and walked into this place – and I stopped dead in my tracks, faced with this big painting on the wall. It was bright, very colorful, at the … Read the rest
Monday, March 5th, 2012
Director Marjane Satrapi’s freshman effort Persepolis had all the success a first film could dream of having. The animated coming-of-age tale set in Iran, directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, earned the 2007 Jury Prize at Cannes, as well two César awards and an Oscar nomination. It’s a tough act to follow, but the graphic novelists turned filmmakers are back with a worthy live action film Chicken with Plums, forthcoming this summer from Sony Pictures Classics.
Add it to today’s rich catalogue of films helping change audience perceptions about Iran. Alongside this year’s Academy Award winner The Separation, other directors are revealing an Iran that is not about nuclear weapons or veils, but about day-to-day love and loss. Chicken with Plums, which received a standing ovation at Venice last year, tells the tale of a musician who choses to die after losing his perfect violin, a metaphor for his real lost love, a woman named Iran. The gorgeously stylized film, starring Mathieu Amalric and Golshifteh Farahani, pulls deep from Satrapi’s imagination, featuring a stunning visual palette alongside a remarkable script full of passion and wit.
While a relative newbie in filmmaking, Satrapi brings a wealth of knowledge to her craft well beyond her industry years. We spoke with Satrapi at the Kustendorf Film & Music Festival, the brainchild of Serbian director Emir Kusturica, where she showed Chicken with Plums to a crowd that instantly fell in love with her outspoken, charming self. Satrapi speaks freely on the importance of where art is distributed, how to inject humor in even the darkest situations, and the recent controversy over her star actress posing nude in a French paper and video. Here, in the form of ten filmmaking lessons, she shares with us some of her vast knowledge from the field and from life in general.
1. Learn how to sell your story.
“You know, I learned something from Emir Kusturica. Two years ago he told me that everybody’s talking about the movies, about storytelling. But it’s not that, you know. It’s how you sell the story. You can have … Read the rest
Friday, March 2nd, 2012
As a child growing up in Scituate, Massachusetts, Nick Flynn (pictured here at left and below with director Paul Weitz) was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Viet Nam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18 Flynn started working for the smuggler — unloading fishing boats and as an electrician’s apprentice – and he’d get high every day to make the work bearable. Eventually the boyfriend got busted and Flynn had to show up in court to speak to his character.
Just a couple of years earlier, Flynn’s own estranged father wound up in prison. The elder Flynn began to write his son, sending him hundreds of letters. But it would be almost a decade before they’d unexpectedly meet face to face at a homeless shelter, where Flynn was a social worker and his father, Jonathan, was seeking a room. This meeting and their subsequent relationship led Flynn to write his memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which was how his father often described the experience of being homeless in Boston.
The book (published by Norton in 2004) won the PEN/Martha Albrand award, has been translated into over ten languages, and is now a feature film, Being Flynn, written and directed by Paul Weitz (About A Boy). (“Bullshit” in the title apparently doesn’t fly with American moviegoers.) Robert De Niro plays Jonathan, Julianne Moore is Flynn’s mother, and Paul Dano is the author as a young man. Flynn’s real-life wife, Lili Taylor, also appears in the film.
I spoke with Flynn this past Winter, as the film was finishing its post-production. Being Flynn opens today from Focus Features.
FILMMAKER: You wrote a book about the experience of making Being Flynn.
FLYNN:… Read the rest
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.”
That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg.
Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, shot by Kerwin Devonish, and Colin Trevorrow’s puckish Safety Not Guaranteed, shot by Benjamin Kasulke, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Trevorrow said his 2.40 aspect ratio was the result of vintage Panavision lenses used to achieve what the director called “a 1970′s Hal Ashby look.”
For me, however, the camera that cast the longest shadow at this year’s Sundance was the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, whether or not it was actually used. Let me explain.
Nearly all large single-sensor motion picture cameras today, including those responsible for Sundance 2012 premieres, use Super 35-sized sensors, including Alexas, RED Ones, Sony F35s, F3s, FS-100s, and Canon 7Ds. The major exception is the Canon 5D, which uses a significantly larger sensor.
Super 35 matches the original 18 x 24 mm “full” camera aperture used to expose 4-perf 35mm film in the silent era. As it happens, the APS-C sensor found in some DSLRs is also a match—why Canon’s 7D makes the list.
This original 35mm motion picture format devised by Eastman and Edison 120 years ago is the classic one around which most motion picture camera and lens technology developed, as well as technique and cinematic language.
35mm motion picture film also gave rise to two still formats: a 4-perf frame (same as motion pictures) and a larger 8-perf frame that traveled sideways. The Simplex still camera of 1914, for example, snapped both formats.
8-perf eventually prevailed for stills because … Read the rest
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Ask a filmmaker how to go about making your first film, and 99% of them will impart the easier-said-than-done advice, “Just go and make it.” The technology is there, filming and editing equipment have never been more affordable, and the internet has broken down the barriers between filmmakers and distributors. Few of those filmmakers, however, can give that advice as genuinely as Marshall Curry, who did just that with remarkable results.
While working at a New York multimedia design firm, Curry decided to pursue a latent desire to make documentary films. With no prior experience in filmmaking, he bought a Sony PD150 and started filming Newark’s 2002 mayoral race between Corey Booker and then-four-time incumbent Sharpe James. That film became Street Fight, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. Fast forward to today, where Curry has received his second Oscar nomination for his latest film, If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and you could do a lot worse for a self-taught filmmaker with just three films under his belt.
Between Curry’s first and his latest film falls Racing Dreams, which has its television premiere on PBS on February 23rd at 9PM. Just because it lacks an Oscar nomination doesn’t mean it’s a film to be slighted. Like its oft-cited comparison Hoop Dreams, Racing Dreams locates a multi-character, coming of age story within a sport where the players literally grow up before your eyes. The film was crafted from around 500 hours of footage, and, different from Hoop Dreams, unfolds over a brisk hour and a half.
Racing Dreams explores the so-called “Little League” of NASCAR racing, the World Karting Association, where pre-teens from around the country race go karts at speeds of up to 70 mph. Curry zeroes in on three young drivers — Annabeth (11 years old), Josh (12), and Brandon (13) — and watches them compete for the league’s National Championship. Bearing in mind an urban viewer’s possible ignorance to the sport, he sidesteps the generic, competition film approach and treats racing more as an entry … Read the rest
Monday, February 20th, 2012
We are filmmakers. We are artisans.
Or so we forget.
With filmmaking so often abstracted from the actual work of making a film, so enmeshed in conversations about new models and plans and strategies, we sometimes lose touch with what should be the main reason we make movies in the first place: to take pride in works of art made beautifully and with love.
It is precisely the love of artisanal creation that is celebrated in Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story, a verite doc chronicling the making of a 50-foot gaff rigged schooner, “Charlotte,” by a team of craftsmen working in a Martha’s Vineyard Boatyard. Focusing particularly on boat builder Nat Benjamin, Kusama-Hinte observes the painstaking and quiet work involved in building such an elegant craft over the several years required. In doing so, he eschews many of today’s accepted documentary strategies — pinning narrative on conflict, or allowing a character-based story to assume center stage. Instead, Kusama-Hinte focuses on the work, and he pushes us, the audience, to concentrate on its pleasures as well as its vexations, on the focus required to sustain it and the quiet satisfaction achieved by its final completion. With a lovely, Satie-like score by Paul Brill, Charlotte has a gentle, meditative power.
Charlotte is the second feature by Kusama-Hinte, whose Soul Power documentary was half glorious concert film and half exhilarating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the famed concert accompanying the “Rumble in the Jumble” boxing match. The two films are quite different, but they share a respect for their subject matters and a resolve to find the cinematic styles most suited to them. Kusama-Hinte is also a well known producer, whose credits include The Kids are All Right, Thirteen and Mysterious Skin, as well as — full disclosure — the Board Chair of IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker.
I spoke to Kusama-Hinte about making Charlotte, the work required to place it before audiences, and the DIY techniques he’s using to promote and distribute it.
Filmmaker: So, tell me about how you began this documentary, Charlotte.
Kusama-Hinte: I … Read the rest
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Mike Kelley, who passed away this month, contributed to Filmmaker once, in 1997, when he interviewed Harmony Korine about Korine’s debut feature, Gummo. From our archives, here is that interview.
With a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative, a visual style incorporating everything from elegantly framed 35mm to the skuzziest of home camcorder footage, and a startling mixture of teen tragedy, vaudeville humor, and sensationalist imagery, Harmony Korine’s first feature Gummo is perhaps the only recent film whose artistic strategies draw as much from visual art as the film world. (A gallery installation of work from Gummo opens at L.A.’s Patrick Painter gallery in late September). We were thus very happy when Mike Kelley – one of today’s most essential and subversive artists – agreed to interview Korine on the eve of a major gallery installation in Copenhagen. Like Korine, Kelley blithely shreds conservative notions of high and low art as he mounts major gallery shows, designs album covers for bands like Sonic Youth, and plays in Destroy All Monsters with Thurston Moore. In fact, one of the band’s songs, “Mom and Dad’s Pussy,” opens Korine’s film.
Korine: So how did you like your song? It starts the movie with that Super-8 image we kept repeating of the girl in the front of the trailer – I just knew that song would fit that image.
Kelley: I guess I couldn’t tell the gender of the kids.
Korine: I think they were little girls. We were just driving around – that’s how I got a lot of that footage, the Super-8 and video stuff. Just walking around neighborhoods, walking up to people.
Kelley: How much footage do you have of that kind of material?
Korine: I could probably make another two movies with the excess footage. In a strange way, I want to get to a point where the next two movies are even more random and more incidental without them being overly arty. I just want things to become a succession of scenes, images and sounds. I was thinking about [the gallery show] – the problem you run … Read the rest
