TRAILER WATCH: “EASTBOUND AND DOWN” SEASON THREE

By Dan Schoenbrun

HBO has released the trailer for the third and final season of its Danny McBride-starring comedy, Eastbound and Down. Created by Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way) and David Gordon Green (George Washington, The Sitter), the first two seasons tracked fowl-mouthed, washed-up baseball icon Kenny Powers (McBride) as he moved back to his hometown and courted success in Mexico, respectively. This year, Powers is headed to Miami Beach, where he’s making a last ditch effort to climb back up to the majors. Returning along with McBride are many of the show’s supporting players, including John Hawkes, Will Ferrell, and The Catechism Cataclysm’s always hilarious Steve Little.

The new season premieres February 19th. For now, check out the trailer below:

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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

DAVID GORDON GREEN ON “THE SITTER”

By Scott Macaulay

In our Winter issue Michael Tully sat down with David Gordon Green to discuss the arc of his career, which has gone from small-scale, Malick-inflected indies to big, ’80s-riffing studio comedies. His latest is The Sitter, starring Jonah Hill, and while it may seem like a raunchy take on Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting, Green said he had a different model in mind. Here’s an except from the interview:

Filmmaker: You’ve just finished shooting. Are you watching movies? Do you watch movies that reflect the mood you’re in and the movie you’re making? Or is it the opposite? Do you watch a scrappy indie while you’re making a big movie?

Green: I always watch the opposite of what [I’m making]. [For The Sitter] I actually watched Adventures in Babysitting and some of these John Hughes movies that I am inspired by. In my head this is my version of an ‘80s John Hughes movie. But when I’m tired I felt that was the wrong headspace to be in, so I very severely contrasted what I watched during production or in the preparation for the movie. I always find it helpful to not hit the nail on the head with a genre that I’m looking at, to think of something that’s a little left-of-center. That helps me re-imagine a genre that could otherwise be very comfortable.

Filmmaker: Watching the sizzle reel at the wrap party, The Sitter seems to have kind of an After Hours vibe. It’s like a hyper, tweaked-out New York.

Green: Yeah, it’s a little surreal — a little heightened reality of New York, that’s definitely the goal. After Hours is absolutely the kind of role model for what we want to do. It’s a comedy on a lot of levels but it’s also kind of upsetting.

The red band, NSFW trailer follows. It’s preceded by awkward “edgy” comedy. Be forewarned.

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DAVID GORDON GREEN ON “YOUR HIGHNESS”

By Scott Macaulay

“By making this movie, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have done what all of us have dreamed of doing since we too fantasized about making movies as adolescents. They have used their current success to truly test the boundaries of what they can get away with, and they’ve done it at a time when the Hollywood industry is as timid and fearful and insecure as it has ever been (which is saying something). They have caged their inner scaredy cats and swung for the f**king fence to produce something on a grand scale that has no direct precedent (or at least one that I can recall). Creatively, they’ve managed to tap into their inner smart-asses and be as unselfconscious and freewheeling as possible. On the scale at which they were working, it’s hard to fathom how difficult this actually was to do.” 

That’s set visitor and friend Michael Tully over at Hammer to Nail on David Gordon Green’s Your Highness, which has opened today to some goofy raves and more than a few withering pans, including a couple that have debated whether it’s the worst film ever made. (I remember when someone said that about Gummo, and Harmony Korine replied, “Worse than Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag? C’mon!).

Color me intrigued. I haven’t seen the movie yet and was not a set visitor, but I am a Green fan and we ran a career piece on him in our Winter issue by Tully in which the two discussed Green’s transformation from elegiac arthouse auteur to Hollywood laughmaker. In that piece were bits on the older films, the upcoming The Sitter, Eastbound and Down, and the production company Roughhouse Pictures. And there was this bit on Your Highness. Since it was print-edition only, in honor of the film’s opening I’m reprinting it here.

Q: Let’s talk Your Highness. In every way it’s a bigger film with things you haven’t done before: special effects, animals, horses and stuff. Was it a dramatically different experience directing this film?

A: I’m always most protective

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REVISITING THE TOPIC OF INDIE MOVIES AND YOUTH

By Scott Macaulay

This is perhaps the longest gestating blog post in Filmmaker Blog history.

Back in December, Ted Hope commented on the graying of the arthouse audience in a post entitled “Can Truly Free Film Appeal to Younger Audiences?” He asked:

What is it that new audiences want? What must the indie community do to engage them? It is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience. In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like RUN LOLA RUN or the French New Wave (PARANORMAL ACTIVITY not withstanding…). Are we incapable of making the spirited yet formal work that defines a lot of alternative rock and roll? And if so, why is that?

The post inspired a long comments thread, much of which focuses on the issue of marketing, and whether today’s independent films are marketed to youth correctly, or whether today’s indies are giving young audiences the experiences they want. Amongst these comments is one by producer Cotty Chubb, who tackles the issue of young content. An excerpt:

If there’s no reason to go to the theater to have an emotional (comedic, dramatic, it doesn’t matter) experience that answers questions you have — about being a child of divorce, about how to figure out how to live or love, or about what happens you become intimate and it’s all too much — whatever it is that you’re living — if you lose the habit of seeing movies because the people that make them don’t give two shits about you except for your ability to spend money — you stop going, except for the thrill rides or the exceptional rude boys.

That’s why I thought Judd Apatow was going to matter when I saw Knocked Up. That’s why I think 500 Days of Summer is important. It was honest and funny and smart and generous and Joe Gordon Levitt is uniquely transparent in his emotion. And it grossed 32+MM$.

I think Ted and Cotty combine to make a great point here having to … Read the rest

CRAIG ZOBEL, “GREAT WORLD OF SOUND”

By Nick Dawson

KENE HOLLIDAY AND PAT HEALY IN CRAIG ZOBEL’S GREAT WORLD OF SOUND. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Previously best known as David Gordon Green’s right-hand man, Craig Zobel has effortlessly emerged from his friend’s shadow and established himself as an important presence in American filmmaking in his own right. Though born in New York, Zobel grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and stayed in the South for his college education, studying film at the North Carolina School of the Arts alongside Green and a number of other future collaborators. After graduation, Zobel worked on Green’s first three films — George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003) and Undertow (2003) — as either co-producer, production manager or second unit director, and as well as a handful of other films, such as Adam Bhala Lough’s Bomb the System (2002), in a similar capacity.

Though Zobel’s previous work in film was mostly conducted in the ostensibly non-creative area of production, his debut feature as writer-director shows an innate cinematic sense as well as a keen ability to engage his audience’s emotions. Great World of Sound focuses on a pair of hapless salesmen, straight-laced Martin (Pat Healy) and his streetsmart partner Clarence (Kene Holliday), who unwittingly find themselves working as “talent scouts” for Great World of Sound, a company that scams wannabe musicians out of their savings. A well-written and thought-provoking film, Great World of Sound is even more impressive given the technical demands of the shoot: Zobel shot all the audition material in a hidden camera set-up with real auditioners, placing extreme demands on both his crew and two leads in order to get the realism and immediacy he wanted.

Filmmaker spoke to Zobel about working with Terrence Malick, his love of I Heart Huckabees, and his desire to make the seventh Bourne movie.

CRAIG ZOBEL, DIRECTOR OF GREAT WORLD OF SOUND. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Filmmaker: What influence did your childhood in the South have on you as a filmmaker?

Zobel: It was definitely very formative in ways, like I knew I wanted my film to take place in the … Read the rest

GREEN HEADS BACK TO THE ’70S

By Scott Macaulay

Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.”

Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and films weren’t afraid to be funny and sad or pretty and ugly at the same time. You can’t go wrong with flicks like these.”
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THE GULAGER INFLUENCE

By Scott Macaulay

Like many of you, I’ve been watching this season’s Project Greenlight with degrees of amusement, empathy and recognition. But it wasn’t until just now that I flashed on the tidbit of trivia that ties PGL director John Gulager and his dad Clu to today’s indie film scene.

Father Clu, a veteran character actor who plays the bartender in his “contest-winner” son’s PGL horror movie Feast, has only one directing credit to his name, but it’s an evocative short that inspired the career of one of today’s most interesting filmmakers. In fact, Gulager’s 1969 A Day with the Boys, which d.p. Tim Orr discovered one day lying around the North Carolina School of the Arts and went on to show his friend, director David Gordon Green, influenced Green so much that he included it on the Criterion DVD release of his first feature, George Washington.

Here’s Orr in IndieWIRE: “[A Day with the Boys] was actually a good influence on George Washington. I found this short film made by Clu Gulager, who was a character actor (The Last Picture Show) in the ’70s and ’80s and he directed this short film that Laszlo Kovacs shot. It’s a very wild and great picture called A Day with the Boys about these kids who take this businessman guy in the woods and they kill him. We watched it three times in a row. It filtered in, in a way, among other things.”

The kicker? One of the boys is played by none other than a nine-year-old John Gulager.
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