THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: FILMS TOO SMALL TO FAIL

By John Yost

I first met Zak Mulligan through my DP Sean Donnelly a few years back. After a bit of back and forth on the merits of Kickstarter, I helped him with a little production design on his first feature, and we became fast friends and supporters of each others work. Zak and his directing partner Rodrigo Lopresti were recent participants of IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs with their first feature film I’m not me. Zak also won the Best Cinematography award at Sundance last year for his work on the film Obselidia. He’s here to talk a bit about the advantages of staying small.

Picture this: Two guys with a camera, a rental car, and an afternoon to kill. The duo take a drive out of New York City with no particular destination in mind, possessing only the vaguest of ideas and a desire to shoot something… Anything. Suddenly a kernel of a thought takes hold and the first frame is captured. What now? One idea flows into another until they have something. It’s not exactly a short film; it’s more like a doodle. A quick sketch that could perhaps be developed later on. This humble beginning marks the inception of my latest film “i’m not me” (pictured right).

Along with actor extraordinaire and my directing partner Rodrigo Lopresti, we continued creating these doodles for several months. It was great fun, required no pre planing, and most importantly nothing was sacred or precious. Our creativity spawned out of whatever we had in front of us at that moment. These moments then led to new ideas and we began to branch out by enlisting the help of other actors we knew. Before we could even finish editing all the pieces, we realized we had something much bigger. So, we decided to put the camera away, break out the laptop, and start writing a script.

The following weeks after finishing the script, we thought long and hard about how to get this thing in the can. A few strategies came to mind. The first we tried was to ‘get a name … Read the rest

DAMIEN CHAZELLE, “GUY & MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH”

By Brandon Harris

Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a throw back and perhaps a harbinger of things to come, a bebop tinged DIY mumblemusical that, despite its New Wavesque 16mm B&W aesthetic, is very much a movie of this time and moment. It concerns a relatively young, black and talented trumpet player named Guy and his would be, perhaps still his lover, a white grad student named Madeline (the oddly alluring Desiree Garcia). Played by real life Boston jazz scene leading light Jason Palmer, Guy engages in a series of pseudo-romances, bemoans the marginality of the relatively esoteric Jazz he plays and does alot of hanging out. Do he and Madeline break up in the films opening credit sequence or is this when they first meet? Narrative is sparse and conclusions always ambiguous in Mr. Chazelle charming, tightly framed film, one which is always cuing up and off the cuff musical number, even if they were all recorded by the Bratislava Symphany Orchestra. Guy and Madeline spend most of the movie in the company of others—Guy takes up with a pushy girl named Elena, who pronounces herself Guy’s girlfriend at some unarticulated point, while Madeline considers moving to New York, where she has an older, persistent suitor. Never less than bubbling with energy and just short enough to allow its paper-thin conceit not to feel overlong, it is, like its recurrent musical number “I Left My Heart in Cincinnati”, a delightfully whimsical experience.

After bowing at 2009′s Tribeca Film Festival, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench played at AFI Fest and the Viennale before earning a nomination from the editors of this very magazine for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You at last year’s Gotham Awards. On the eve of its release (it drops in New York on Friday), Filmmaker caught up with its 25 year old director.

Filmmaker: You made this film while still a student at Harvard?

Chazelle: For the most part I was still a student. I was putting in the last score … Read the rest

EVAN LOUISON’S SEMINAL INDIES

By Scott Macaulay

This week on the blog I wrote a post asking what independent films made young audiences fans of independent film. Below are responses from writer, actor, director and musician Evan Louison.

Buffalo ’66. I was 15. Particularly for the quiet, for the musical numbers, and for the paleness and stillness of the winter depicted. Particularly for the dinner table scene. I felt like I understood, or better like someone else did. I was in private school, and wrote a paper on it that got me called in after class. I don’t know what happened. They had a thing with strange kids. I think they wanted to know if I was gay or on drugs.

julien donkey-boy. I read about this in the Times when I was in private school and knew I had to see it. It wasn’t available except for in the city and I only stayed there on weekends to see my father, and I ended up missing it. I also don’t know if I could have convinced my father to bring me to see it. I had seen Kids (which I feel like every 15-year-old in private school probably loved — having rewatched it recently I only really like the dialogue), and ended up finding a VHS copy of Gummo in my local library somehow instead, what depraved/brilliant mind ordered that in a community of rich liberal Jews & prude Episcopalians I’ll never know, but I’d love to meet them. I didn’t understand it but liked the music, and the stills, and was all the more obsessed with finding and seeing julien. I remember thinking it made me nauseous. I was 16. Eventually I did see it, and only cause someone I was in a band with had IFC on cable and was flipping channels and I saw an image of someone crawling up a staircase on their hands, and having never heard of that part of the film before or seen one frame of it, I told them to stop, said, “That’s julien.” I was right, and I’ve been grateful ever since. … Read the rest

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

THE IMAGINARY MAN

By Admin

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Bookforum’s new issue spotlights “New Books on Film.” Many of the articles, including Kent Jones on Marshall Fine’s Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film, are unfortunately not online. But you can read a piece by Tom Holert on French “thinker” Edgar Morin and his philosophical meditations on film: The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Star. Morin worked with the great ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch in 1959 to make Chronicle of a Summer, and his credited by some with coining the phrase “cinema verite.” Unfortunately he is perhaps more notorious in America for his politics. He was the center of intellectual maelstrom a few years ago when he was charged with “racial defamation and apology for acts of terrorism.” by two European groups for a pro-Palestinian piece he co-penned in Le Monde in 2002. While his vast erudition carried him though many fields from philosophy, sociology, surrealism, politics and even bio-ethics, his early thinking about film remains provocative and poetic.… Read the rest

IT’S NICE TO BE APPRECIATED

By Scott Macaulay

Dennis Lim has a great half-page profile of writer/director Andrew Bujalski in the Sunday New York Times. Bujalski, who Matt Ross selected as one of our “25 New Faces” three years ago, has built up a big fan and critical base with his two features, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. Lim uncovers some good stuff — I didn’t know, for example, that Chantal Akerman was Bujalski’s filmmaking thesis advisor at Harvard and that she instructed him to run down the hall one day after a possible performer.

Lim ends the piece by discussing what the future could hold for a moderately successful no-budget filmmaker:

“He now finds himself grappling with the same career anxieties as his Mutual Appreciation hero, who goes through the motions of networking and self-promotion with an ambivalence that often shades into dread. Mr. Bujalski has acquired an agent and is looking to the economic models of independent stalwarts like John Cassavetes and John Sayles, who financed personal projects by taking on work for hire. Hoping for a shot at Hollywood screenwriting, he recently connected with some executives in Los Angeles, though he said he treated the meetings more like therapy sessions: ‘I would go in and tell them my problems,’ he said. ‘They always had a couch.’

As the big 3-0 looms for this chronicler of 20-something malaise, his first two features increasingly represent not just an impractical way of working but also a quixotic way of life. ‘As I get older and my friends get older,’ Mr. Bujalski said, ‘it’s harder to say to people, ‘Take a month off from your life and work for me for free.’ “… Read the rest

CASSAVETES ON CRITERION

By Admin

From DW Hudson at Green Cine Daily, the best film blog on the Web, comes an interesting post on May 9 about Criterion’s plans to issue a box set of five films by John Cassavetes, placing the company squarely in the middle of a blood feud between Gena Rowlands and Ray Carney over Carney’s recent discovery of a print of the original version of Shadows.… Read the rest