Posted May 23, 2012, by Nick Dawson
We’re all caught up in the spirit of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (read this, if you don’t believe me!), so we’re excited to be able to give away a bunch of rather cool (and also very useful) swag related to the movie, which opens in selected cities this Friday through Focus Features.
The two Filmmaker readers who are quickest on the (email) draw can get their hands on: a T-Shirt, a set of two patches, a cooler, a canteen and a Moonrise Kingdom soundtrack.
All you have to do is email nick@filmmakermagazine.com and tell me which Hollywood movie star appeared in a 2008 commercial directed by Wes Anderson which, like Moonrise Kingdom, features a troop of boy scouts. (A quick tip: check out the Spring issue of Filmmaker for the answer!)
For one last bit of magic, click on the Moonrise Kingdom poster below to watch the movie’s trailer.
… Read the rest
Posted May 23, 2012, by Ani Simon-Kennedy and Cailin Yatsko
We are Ani & Cailin, founders of the barely one-year-old Bicephaly Pictures, and we’ve embarked on a wild journey to make our first feature film: Days of Gray. It’s a modern-day fantastical silent film, scored by the amazing Iceland band Hjaltalín. The story follows an 11-year-old boy who lives in a timeless, barren land. His entire community must wear face masks outside to protect themselves from an epidemic that caused the people in the village next to theirs to develop strange animal mutations. The men on the boy’s side first erected a wall to keep them out and then ultimately ended up killing all of them. One day the boy discovers a girl with gill-like openings on the sides of her face: she’s the only survivor from the other side and has been living in hiding her whole life. The film follows the two of them as they overcome their fear of each other and, in the end, become friends.
We’ll be filming in July, and we just returned from ten days of non-stop meetings, casting sessions and location scouting adventures over lava fields and craters.
The challenge:
- scout 5 main locations
- cast 6 principal actors
- choose a camera and test it
- crew up locally
- re-write the script accordingly
and have more meetings a day than we could count!
We started by planning at our New York City headquarters (read: home office) with the help of Rebekka Bryndís Björnsdóttir, our associate producer and the talented bassoonist of Hjaltalín. Rebekka got in touch with the Reykjavík Performing Arts school, who recommended 27 young children, aged 8 to 13, to invite for the casting session. From 10 am to 6 pm, we saw all 27 children in rapid fire, with only 15 minutes intervals. Some kids had perfect English, some little to none, but Hrafn Jonssón, our Icelandic friend and scriptwriter, was thankfully there to translate.
Casting for a silent film is tricky, since there are no lines of dialogue to try out, yet the actors need to express the entire story through their facial … Read the rest
Posted May 23, 2012, by Nick Dawson
Strangely, the details of the 2012 Sundance ShortsLabs passed us by when they were announced a couple of weeks ago. (Particularly strange as both Scott and I are involved in panels at the NYC event in June!) So, I’m playing catch up now by posting the info on the workshops, including the first to be held in Seattle, which is currently undergoing an indie filmmaking renaissance.
So, from the press release, here’s the skinny on this year’s excellent events:
ShortsLabs offer filmmakers first-hand insight and access into the world of short filmmaking through panels and sessions with industry representatives, as well as Sundance Institute staff and alumni, on story development, production and exhibition of shorts. Featured participants for the series (vary by city) include Antonio Campos, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Durkin, Hal Hartley, Nicole Kassell, Josh Leonard, Brit Marling, Adepero Oduye, Nick Offerman and Lynn Shelton. Following the ShortsLab, attendees can stay connected with the Sundance Institute community through a monthly email with job opportunities, crew needs, and links to recommended shorts.
Notable Institute alumni who started their careers with short films are Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, Debra Granik, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Tamara Jenkins, and Jason Reitman.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “ShortsLabs are an extension of the more intensive filmmaking Labs Sundance Institute has hosted for more than three decades. ShortsLabs give filmmakers the opportunity to improve their storytelling techniques, learn about the world of production, and explore platforms to showcase their work in an environment that celebrates and fosters individual voices.”
Trevor Groth, Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, added, “Fueled by the enthusiastic response from last years ShortsLabs we are thrilled to do them again in New York and Los Angeles. We are especially looking forward to hosting our first one in Seattle, an area with a vibrant cinema history and a wealth of emerging filmmaking talent.”
In advance of ShortsLab: NYC on Saturday, June 16, Rooftop Films will host a screening of short films the previous day (Friday, June 15) at Open
… Read the rest
Posted May 23, 2012, by Byron Camacho
In March, Joachim Trier introduced his second film, Oslo, August 31st, to an enthusiastic audience at the 2012 Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films series. The film focuses on Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering drug addict who aimlessly roams the streets of Oslo trying to reunite with friends and family. Oslo, August 31st is a tremendous work featuring an intense yet understated performance by Danielsen Lie and exquisite cinematography by Jakob Ihre.
During the post-screening Q&A, Trier explained that with his latest film, he wished to portray Oslo as a character – a city in constant change filled with memories both beautiful and tragic. This is immediately evident in the film’s opening which features archival footage of the city cut together with actual accounts of people who live there. According to Trier, he used interviews he conducted with Oslo natives in which he asked them to begin with the phrase “I remember.” The result is both haunting and unexpectedly touching. Throughout the film, Trier introduces us to different aspects of the Norwegian capital, from the lush greenery of its parks to the ethereal beauty of early morning bike rides through the city – all gorgeously shot by Ihre. Much like Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Trier’s film serves as a love letter to the city punctuated by moments of both joy and sadness.
When asked about the casting, Trier stated that he chose Danielsen Lie (who he previously worked with on his film debut, Reprise) before he even began writing the script with co-writer Eskil Vogt. The knowledge that Danielsen Lie was involved at such an early stage in the process helps explain the incredible depth of his performance. A doctor and multi-talented artist in real life, Danielsen Lie brings a great deal of sensitivity to playing a man whose resourcefulness is laid to waste in the face of addiction. Trier explained that Danielsen Lie was so open to the role that he almost didn’t make it through the shoot if not for the unrelenting support of his girlfriend. Danielsen Lie’s level of dedication is certainly hard … Read the rest
Posted May 23, 2012, by Damon Smith
For his micro-budget debut feature Redlegs, which resides comfortably alongside work by Aaron Katz (Quiet City) or Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl) both tonally and dramatically, Filmmaker magazine contributing editor Brandon Harris (with whom I share this column) returned to his hometown of Cincinnati with three actors and a tiny crew hoping to dramatize the moment when childhood camaraderie dissolves in the face of adult realities and overdue reckonings. Very loosely modeled after John Cassavetes’ Husbands, the film trails three young men — brooding ex-actor Marco (Nathan Ramos), sensitive Willie (Evan Louison), and aggressively obnoxious parking-lot owner Aaron (Andrew Katz) — over the course of a long, aimless weekend as they bitch, argue, get high, and wander through town. Having been reunited after the murder of Ricky, a close friend whose absence overshadows their low-key collegial misadventures, the argumentative trio cope by revisiting some of their old stomping grounds and try, with varying degrees of failure, to revive some of their former rapport. Shot by indie actress-turned-cinematographer Miranda Rhyne, Redlegs makes the most of its urban Midwest setting, especially with a gallery of nighttime sequences that brings one character’s anguish and secret guilt into clearer focus.
Harris spoke with Filmmaker about his native city, the joys and perils of being both a critic and filmmaker, and why there’s more to micro-budget cinema than meets the eye. Redlegs opens Friday at reRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn.
Filmmaker: To paraphrase a question asked by one of the characters in Redlegs, what do you love about Cincinnati?
Harris: The place has a peculiar pull on people. It’s a hilly city rich with a lot of very interesting history. And it’s a city of neighborhoods, where people are from the west side of town or the east side, and consider themselves to be from those neighborhoods more so than they think of themselves as “from Cincinnati.” It’s also the picture of contemporary suburban sprawl. In 1970, there were 1.3 million people in the Greater Cincinnati area, which is about where they are now, but they … Read the rest
Posted May 23, 2012, by Nicholas Rombes
Second #5499, 91:39
This look—this sharp, suspicious, and accusatory look—is passed between Detective Williams and Jeffrey just moments after Jeffrey describes Frank as “a sick and dangerous man.” In the temporal flow of the film, the moment of this gaze passes very quickly, as the narrative draws our attention to what Jeffrey (who has brought along his black and white surveillance photographs) tells Detective Williams about Frank and his dark goings-on. And yet, when the film is frozen and this frame from second #5499 is de-linked from linear chronology, the Detective’s look takes on a new shade of meaning, one that suggests that perhaps Jeffrey, as well as Frank, is a “sick and dangerous man.” There is something in that look, those eyes, that suggests that Detective Williams sees the dark folds in Jeffrey’s soul that are hidden to others, and that in this look at this moment he signals to Jeffrey that he knows.
In his classic 1970 text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser (who strangled to death his wife and so knows, ahem, a thing or two about “apparatuses”) wrote this:
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange
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Posted May 22, 2012, by Scott Macaulay
Is there anything worse than some other guy going on about the weather?
When Angelenos extoll their perpetually sunny climes, it always feels a bit like a reproach to those who live anywhere else. Pacific Northwesterners discuss their persistent rain quietly, as if wearing some old war medal. But journalists in Cannes? What do readers feel when reading reports of how cold and soggy it is in the south of France? Sympathy? Schadenfreude? Or perhaps just disinterest?
Despite my suspicion that it is the latter, I still have to go there because, yes, the rain has been the most notable story so far at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. While the sun is shining as I type this — and after many industry folk have left — since Friday it’s been more or less rain, rain, rain. I’ve been coming to Cannes for almost 15 years and I never remember it like this. My shoes have been soaked, remaining still wet in the morning; I’ve changed screenings based on whether I’ve been carrying my umbrella or not; and, mostly, I’ve looked expectantly out my window each morning — or through the windows of the Palais as I head out of a screening — for rays of sun. Somehow, the experience of spending two hours in a dark theater is able to convince you that the world outside will have changed by the time you exit. But no, you look up and the clouds remain.
My wet shoes are nothing, though, compared to the problems of women in their couture heading to the evening galas. Or the BFI, which had to move the site of its annual party indoors from the Marriott Rooftop. Or, as The Hollywood Reporter reported, filmmakers Gonzalo Tobal and Christian Mungiu, who saw screenings cancelled after the roof of the temporary industry screening site, the Soixantieme Theater, partially collapsed under the weight of all that water.
The rain has had an effect on business too. As Deadline reported, buyers have stayed in their hotel rooms to close deals while the palliative effect of glamorous … Read the rest
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Category Festival Coverage, News | Tags: Beasts of the Southern Wild,Calvin Klein,Cannes 2012,Diane Kruger,IFP,Jessica Chastain,Joana Vicente,Lara Stone,Ludovine Sagnier,naomi watts,Quvenzhane Wallis,Shailene Woodley
Posted May 22, 2012, by Nick Dawson
As a teenager in the U.K., I grew up reading the reviews of film critic Mark Kermode, whose smart and opinionated engagement with contemporary cinema rapidly won him a following and led to him becoming a familiar presence on TV and radio arts programs. Kermode is now one of the most passionate and prominent voices in (populist) film criticism — his slot on Simon Mayo’s BBC Five Live radio show has been a very successful podcast on iTunes for some years — and he has used his position as a figure of influence to champion films and directors that his listeners/viewers/readers might not otherwise be aware of. Recently, Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption was a movie he gave special attention; those long familiar with Kermode will know all about his obsession with The Exorcist, a film he used to (and still may) claim was unquestionably the greatest film of all time.
Via Twitch, I found out today that Kermode has started an online film club, housed on his Kermode Uncut blog. He will choose a movie, his blog readers will track down and watch it, and then there will be a discussion of the film on Kermode’s blog. It’s the kind of idea that can be hit-or-miss, but in this instance I hope that it will have some longevity as I think Kermode’s polarizing views and his often very good (if unusual) taste in movies will stimulate some interesting debate. Case in point: his inaugural selection is Jim McBride’s Breathless, historically one of the most maligned remakes of all time but a film that has recently been revisited by a new generation of filmgoers who are less precious about (if no less adoring of) Godard’s original and who have been singing its praises to me. Now seems like the ideal time for me to finally check it out…
Kermode’s introduction to Breathless is below:
… Read the rest
Posted May 22, 2012, by Scott Macaulay
When the JOBS Act was passed into law last month, I immediately wondered about the effect it would have on the crowdfunding of independent feature films. Many independent films are successfully raising into the six figures by banking on the generosity of their supporters and giving them only creative, non-monetary rewards. But the JOBS Act, as detailed by Matthew Savare and Richard Jaycobs at Filmmaker, allows filmmakers to seek actual equity investors via crowdfunding platforms. These platforms, like Kickstarter, will have to register with the SEC and provide investors with various disclosures.
Some filmmakers are excited by these new regulations, believing that equity investment will attract more coin for their films. Others worry that this new equity option will bias contributors towards more commercial projects. (And still others, like me, wonder how producers will send out hundreds of annual K1s for each film.)
Kickstarter co-founder and CEO Perry Chen is definitely in the latter camp, as evidenced by an interview with Om Malik published today at GigaOm. It’s a long interview covering many different topics, and worth reading in full. But here’s the part where Chen makes it sound like Kickstarter won’t be doing that pesky SEC registration.
Om: With the JOBS Act, there is a lot of talk about Kickstarter being used for crowd funding of startups, etc. What do you make of all that talk?
Perry: Some people have made assumptions about what we would do. We’re not interested in that model.
We’re going to keep funding creative projects in the way we currently do it. We’re not gearing up for the equity wave if it comes. The real disruption is doing it without equity. The real disruption is when you break down the funding of a project into all these little bits.
When people are giving $5, $20, $50 — people don’t need to receive a return on their investment. People are giving relatively affordable amounts of money and they decide how much they give.
So many ideas, in general, in the world are not about and are not going to make money. Those things need
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Posted May 22, 2012, by Nick Dawson
Bill Murray has been in every Wes Anderson movie bar one (“Bottle Rocket, still not seen that one”), so who better to give you a tour of the set of Anderson’s latest opus, Moonrise Kingdom, than Murray himself. The film — which received rave reviews when it opened Cannes last week, and we love so much that we put Anderson on the cover of our Spring issue — opens stateside on Friday. Keep your eyes peeled for a Moonrise Kingdom giveaway in this space later in the week.
Oh, and just to warn you, Murray was under the influence of Sailor Jerry spiced rum when he filmed this…
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