DAVID POMES, “COOK COUNTY”

By Brandon Harris

The rapid growth of methamphetamine use in rural America has been unabated for years now, but it has just now found its definitive cinematic dramatization in David Pomes’ bittersweet crime thriller Cook County. Contemplating the final weeks in the life of an east Texas drug din as its proprietor spins out of control, Pomes’ film details the dark underbelly of addiction within an entire community that silently affirms the control meth has taken over many of its citizen’s lives. Meditating on the particularly harsh affect the drug has had on a family through three generations, Cook County is at heart a film about family. The meth-pushing brothers at the center of the film, played with startling authenticity by Anson Mount (AMC’s Hell on Wheels) and Xander Berkeley (Sneakers, Gattaca, Safe), are one of the more contentious and complicated set of siblings to grace screens in quite some time.

Cook County was a hit at the 2009 SXSW film festival, where it won the audience award. Since then it has enjoyed a strong run on the American regional circuit, winning prizes in Nashville, Dallas and at Birmingham’s Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. Pomes, a Houston, Texas native who lives and works in New York and had been a lawyer for a decade before turning to film, has already shot a second film, Sunny Side Up, with Kathryn Erbe and Parkey Posey. His debut Cook County opens in New York at the Cinema Village tomorrow.

Filmmaker: Did you have any experience with meth or meth addicts before embarking upon this film? Was your way into the story an interest in how they operate?

Pomes: I didn’t start out writing about that. I started writing about people living on the margins of society I guess, living outside of urban areas, really kind of secluded backwoods of the country. I began to write about and do research on some of these people, the type of people I grew up around in these outside, bordering areas of Houston. My family is from Louisiana, so going there and … Read the rest

SHOOTING “TINY FURNITURE”

By Filmmaker Staff

Originally published in the Summer 2010 issue.

Only a few months after we selected her for last year’s “25 New Faces” list, writer-director Lena Dunham went into production on her second feature Tiny Furniture. Shot by fellow 2009 “25 New Faces” Jody Lee Lipes and produced by Filmmaker contributing editor Alicia Van Couvering and Kyle Martin, the film wound up winning the Grand Prize at 2010’s SXSW Film Festival and was picked up by IFC for distribution this fall. The film was shot on the Canon 7D, and we asked Lipes, focus puller Joe Anderson and Technicolor colorist Sam Daley to comment on the DSLR format and their production and postproduction decision making. –S.M.

“Choosing to shoot on the Canon 7D was a bold move on [director] Lena [Dunham’s] and [d.p.] Jody [Lee Lipes’s] part,” says focus puller Joe Anderson. “At the time of production there were few (if any) rental houses in New York supporting the new hybrid-SLR cameras as movie cameras. Subsequently we had to make due with far fewer accessories than a traditional movie production would use. Existing tools like matte boxes, follow focus wheels and multiple monitors had not yet been updated to work smoothly with these new cameras.” The production rented a few different types of handheld and tripod mounts, most manufactured by Zacuto, from still-camera rental houses in New York City, and Anderson worked with Lipes to retrofit them for the shoot’s needs.

Technicolor agreed to convert test footage to HDCam SR so that everyone would know what they were getting into. Before the test screening, Anderson remembers Daley warning them, “You really shouldn’t shoot with this camera. It records in the h.264 format, which is more of a YouTube format; it’s not meant for production.” “But that was before we started shooting, and before he saw the final tests,” adds Lipes. “I think the color correct is really what sold him — when he saw how much flexibility he had with the color while we were in the final grade.”

Anderson recalls that first screening of test footage at Technicolor: “We … Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: THE ART BEHIND SACRIFICE

By John Yost

Picking up right where we left off; Anna Rebek says nuts to embracing limitations; start sacrificing everything to make all the details important.

One great thing about being micro is that no one but ourselves are breathing down our own necks, asking for results, and pushing the timeline. You often have as much time as you allow to problem-solve any limitations that you give yourself, so why would you cut corners and allow your film to be anything but what you realized at the script stage? Perhaps the best time to know how far you can push it is at the conception. Perhaps it’s time to slow down and craft every detail instead of just rounding out the corners. This past week Scott Macaulay wrote an incredible post about when to give up, and when to push on. Perhaps all microbudget filmmaking is is an incredible understanding of executable limitations, mixed with a keen sense of when to pack it up and try something else…or when to push beyond and sacrifice everything.

I started out thinking I would write this as a list of should’s, shouldn’t’s, and lessons learned, but then I remembered, I hate getting filmmaking advice. So I decided to tell my story instead.

When our film company Subtext Features set out to make our first feature, La Sierva (The Servant) (pictured), we aimed high story-wise and realistically with production. Mike Maekawa, the director, had written the screenplay and he went for real guts: terrifying bloody gash moments and emotionally wrought script sequences…real BALLS. Bad Ass. He also had the foresight to stay within our microbudget limitations — four of 11 locations were in moderately priced, local hotels; there were alleys and garages, and even each of our cars had a cameo. And it was all on purpose. He was a genius at this. He saw what we had, saw what we could buy, and wrote an incredible story we could pull off. A psycho-thriller border story about drug trafficking and a lead Mexican female with gravitas. I would play that part, the role of Sofia Morena, and … Read the rest

ADAM BHALA LOUGH AND ETHAN HIGBEE, “THE UPSETTER”

By Brandon Harris

Widely revered in reggae and hip-hop circles, Lee “Scratch” Perry is one of 20th century music’s most influential and mysterious artists, a tried-and-true rasta man whose lasting contribution goes beyond spawning some of reggae’s most seminal acts. He was, in fact, the driver for the aesthetic innovations that germinated into the two genres mentioned above, and he reinvented the image of the studio engineer from mere technician to artistic focal point. Now in his mid seventies and expatriated to Switzerland, he’s the subject of the feature-length doc The Upsetter, from the directors Adam Bhala Lough (The Carter, Weapons) and Ethan Higbee (Red Apples Falling). NYU classmates, frequent collaborators (Higbee has scored several of Lough’s previous features) and nearly lifelong reggae fans, Lough and Higbee received unprecedented access to the beguiling Perry, who speaks in gorgeous, puzzle-like sentences that require significant scrutiny to unpack.

The Upsetter screened at over a dozen stops on the fest circuit, including Edinburgh and Karlovy Vary, and just now is finding its way to theaters, nearly two years after its festival run ended. Like several of Lough’s previous films, it evolved significantly after playing at festivals. In the interim some footage has been lost, a few vintage photos of Perry, Bob Marley and other key figures in the early days of reggae have been unearthed and its new, slightly slimmer cut features voice-over narration by Benicio Del Toro . The Upsetter opens in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent this Friday. It screens at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem April 3rd.

Filmmaker: How did your interest in Lee Perry evolve into the desire to make a film about him?

Lough: I’ve been interested in reggae since I was a little kid. My dad used to play Bob Marley since I was very young. I wasn’t really aware who Lee was though.

Higbee: I’ve been obsessed with him since high school really.

Lough: Probably in middle school I saw a solo record of his at Tower Records or something. He was very prominent and … Read the rest

“CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP” DIRECTOR RODMAN FLENDER

Ever since Jane Pauley left the Today Show, the trials and tribulations of network television personalities have been the stuff of dinner table fodder. However, few contract negotiation battles captured as much attention as the recent skirmish over who would host The Tonight Show, Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien. What started out as a simple transition turned into an epic battle for late night’s soul, one that Leno won — even if many consider it to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the most anticipated films at SXSW, Rodman Flender’s Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop follows a bruised O’Brien in the months after his much-publicized separation from NBC. Determined to soldier on in the face of a very public dismissal, O’Brien went on tour, turning to the one place a comedian can find real redemption: onstage.

Filmmaker: Tell me how this project got started. Did you approach Conan or did Conan approach you?

Flender: Conan and I are old friends. We went to college together. I have known him for a long time, but we’ve never worked together before. Then he found himself in a very strange position a year ago when he departed from his employers and started this live show. I thought to myself that this moment needed to be captured, and I pitched this idea to him. A few days later, I was in New York  working on a documentary about my father, and he called me and said, “I think we should do this.”

Filmmaker: One of the key things to making a good doc is having access to your subject. How did you negotiate access with Conan?

Flender: I told him from the get go that I did not want this to be a Conan O’Brien product. If he wanted a straight-up multi-cam concert film that wasn’t what I was interested in doing… Knowing that he knew what I wanted to do, he gave me full access. He never really asked me to turn off the camera. I think he knew that I had no axe to grind, that I was not Michael Moore … Read the rest

CHICKENS, VINYL AND LOST & FOUND IN AUSTIN: JEANIE FINLAY AT SXSW

By Jeanie Finlay

My name is Jeanie Finlay and I’m an artist and filmmaker from the U.K. I’m in Austin for my very first SXSW and the world premiere of the feature documentary Sound it Out which I produced and directed.

I am full of expectations — do audiences really queue that long to get into cinemas, will anyone be able to understand the strong, sometimes very strong, North East accents in my film, can we make a splash in this enormous festival. I’m really not quite sure what to expect — Glastonbury for geeks, musos and filmophiles…?

The Austin Convention Center is like a small city — the overlap with the interactive conference means that when the panels kick out it’s almost impossible to walk from one side of a lobby to another and the internet surges and wanes depending on the social … Read the rest

“BETTER THIS WORLD” DIRECTORS KELLY DUANE DE LA VEGA & KATIE GALLOWAY

When two young activists from Midland Texas were arrested with Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican convention, their story became a media sensation, but documentarians Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more to this story than the good-kids-turned-domestic-terrorists version the media was reporting. So, they did what any skilled documentarians do: they took a leap of faith, jumped a plane and started talking to people involved with the case. The result is Better This World, a documentary that explores what happens when idealistic, angry young activists stop being polite and start getting mixed up with the FBI. I spoke with Galloway and Duane de la Vega as they were putting the finishing touches on their film, just in time for its premiere at SXSW.

Filmmaker: How did you decide to pursue this particular story?

Galloway: I was just sitting on a plane, and I came upon this story about an FBI informant who was going to be the star witness in a case against two young men from Midland Texas who were caught building Molotov cocktails at the Republican convention in 2008 and charged with domestic terrorism… The defense in the case of David McKay was entrapment, and the question was whether they would have been doing this if there had not been this government agent. Kelly and I had been talking about working on something together, and when we got together with our stack of ideas, she said that  this one was the one. We got on a plane two days later and started filming on the eve of David McKay’s domestic trial.

Duane de la Vega: After reading the blurb, we decided to take a small financial gamble and go out there and interview all the characters and decide whether they were strong enough. Almost immediately after meeting them, we knew that the characters were strong, and the story got more and more complex. We felt confident after that first trip that there was a rich story we could tell.

Filmmaker: A lot of your other films were filmed in real … Read the rest

SXFANTASTIC’S TIM LEAGUE ON 2011′S MIDNIGHT EDITION

Despite their protestations to the contrary, festival programmers are often a competitive bunch, jostling for not only premieres but status. That’s why SXFantastic, now in its third year, is such a welcome event. A collaboration between SXSW and Fantastic Fest, which unspools its own main event in September, SXFantastic brings Fantastic’s genre smarts and midnight-movie acumen to the South By sprawl. The result is a focused section that has been producing its own fan favorites, critical hits and even industry acquisitions. Last year’s successes included Gareth Edwards’ Monsters and the unlikely pick-up A Serbian Film (which just landed the SITGES festival in court over child pornography charges).

Comments Fantastic Fest co-founder Tim League, “Monsters — and what happened to Edwards after the festival — were our biggest surprises last year. It got picked up immediately, he’s got an agent, and now he’s helming the super-big-budget Godzilla reboot. And before SXSW he was pretty much an unknown SFX guy. I’m really happy for what happened to him.”

Of the origins of SXFantastic, League says, “I’ve always been a huge fan of SXSW. The opening day at the Alamo Draft House was for SXSW back in 1997, so we have had a relationship for a long time. When the Fantastic brand started to rise and we became known for our midnight program, [SXSW’s] Janet [Pierson] and I had a casual conversation about an alliance, and so far I’ve loved it. Off season, it allows me to keep looking under rocks and stay in touch with filmmakers, and I enjoy the process of programming just five movies instead of 70.”

So what about SXFantastic’s 2011 line-up? League calls Brandon and Jason Trost’s The FP (pictured above) “lovably unique,” saying, “I love its visual anarchy. The FP is set in some sort of strange alternate reality world where civic decisions are solved by a dance video game, Beat Beat Revolution. It’s played earnestly, but everyone speaks in a mid-’80s hip-hop-inspired dialect. And the film is a family affair. Brandon was the d.p. on Crank 2, which I love. His sister who was … Read the rest

JANET PIERSON ON THE FILMS — AND CROWDS — OF SXSW

Six weeks before the festival, every hotel room in downtown Austin was booked solid. Badges were already selling out a month prior, and, in the last few weeks, LAX-AUS flights have become almost impossible to come by. Last year the festival was, by all accounts, over-crowded — press and industry felt needlessly constrained by the impossibility of special access to screenings, and complaints of line cutting were all over Twitter. Pierson and her staff took all of these criticisms hard. In the wake of the grumblings, there are new and bigger theatres (the renovated State Theatre, next to the Paramount; the Vimeo theatre inside the convention center), new policies in place to cut down on cutting (sequential numbers will be distributed one hour before each screening) and methods to cheer up the industry (same-day Express tickets will be released each morning to badge holders.) But as the anecdotal evidence mounts, some anticipate the most crowded, least buyer-friendly atmosphere ever.
Has the new pressure from industry affected Pierson?

“We do feel that there’s more attention. We’ll see how it plays out, it’s tough — you want great things to happen for the films, because press coverage benefits everybody; agents and distributors and buyers should discover the films and give them futures and income. But we’re not a market, so we need to balance that.”

SXSW’s pride in not being a market — the desire to guarantee “democratic” screening environments for the films; to cater to the audience, not the industry — is complex. With premieres of films by Takashi Mike and Jodie Foster (The Beaver, which Pierson is proud to be showing, as it would have been swamped in tabloid frenzy anywhere else), the program needs to retain a balance between the audience favorites, press schedule relevance and emerging filmmaker discoveries.

“For me, being a destination festival is important, being a place that people bother to take a flight and book the hotel, that’s a goal; you want to experience this event in real time.” But the lack of press and industry perks is part of a larger mission … Read the rest

SXSW CLOSING WITH THORNTON’S “THE KING OF LUCK” & ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL TITLES

By Jason Guerrasio

The South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival revealed today that its closing night film this year will be the world premiere of Bill Bob Thornton‘s documentary on Willie Nelson, The King of Luck. They also announced additional titles to the fest, including a work-in-progress screening of Bridesmaids, starring Kristen Wiig and produced by Judd Apatow, and a short from Harmony Korine. More info on the closing night film and additional titles can be found below.

SXSW will take place March 11-19 in Austin, Texas. Read full list of features here; Midnight, SXFantastic and shorts here.

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

The King of Luck
Director: Billy Bob Thornton
This is a documentary about Willie Nelson: the man, the songwriter, the friend, the father, legendary performer and champion of the family farmer. (World Premiere)

SPECIAL EVENTS

Bridesmaids (Work In Progress)
Director: Paul Feig, Writers: Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
Kristen Wiig leads the cast as Annie, a maid of honor whose life unravels as she leads her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), and a group of colorful bridesmaids (Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper) on a wild ride down the road to matrimony.

Films from R.E.M.’s Collapse Into Now followed by a Q+A with Michael Stipe
A selection of films from R.E.M.’s latest album, ”Collapse Into Now,” with films by notable artists and filmmakers and personally curated by Michael Stipe.

Night Fishing
Directors: PARKing CHANce (PARK Chan-wook, PARK Chan-kyong) (Narrative Short)
Story about the transitions between life and death brought by PARKing CHANce, the first collaboration between PARK Chan-wook and PARK Chan-kyong. (North American Premiere)

The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway
Director: Marty Callner, Created and Conceived by: Paul Reubens, Written by: Paul Reubens and Bill Steinkellner, Additional Material by: John Paragon, Also written by: Josh Meyers, John Koch and Paul Rust
Based on the original show that launched Pee-wee Herman into a pop culture icon, Paul Reubens’ beloved character brings his Playhouse to life once again in the HBO special “The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway.”

Sound & Scene: Made … Read the rest