Category: making movies

Both in today’s NY Times:

Slate’s Bryan Curtis interviews Kevin Smith in advance of the Jersey Girls release. Jersey Girls makes Kevin Smith sound like the perfect spokesmodel for daddytypes.com, but Smith’s best comments are about Mel Gibson, “fellow Catholic.” [Damn, that’s one big tent.]

Tony Scott’s got a very astute read/review of Dogville, Lars “Von” Trier’s new movie. Scott makes some keen references to both Mayberry and South Park, while skewering the reactionary anti-anti-Americanism of reviews like Variety‘s.

Jessica Winter interviews LVT’s cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, in the Voice. [Stay tuned for my own Dogville post later this week.]

Don’t tell the Whitney Biennial folks. That trademarked slogan comes from a series of video loops designed for your giant flatscreen TV that are “100% narrative free with strong visual aesthetics” called Souvenirs from the earth [Ahem. A series called Souvenir? I hope you kept the number of that trademark lawyer…]
You can buy their DVD for $50 from Dynomighty, on east 10th st, or, like Alain Ducasse did for Mix, you can commission a custom version. They’re also planning “complete never seen night programmes to TV stations, financed by sponsors from the luxury industry.”
Goodlooking execution? Yes. Growth market? Definitely. But new idea? Not at all. The duo’s dsytopian main mission sounds familiar: “Our main mission is to collect pictures of life on earth today, in case humans would need them later…” It’s the glass-half-full, luxury industry-chasing version of “Life out of balance,” the subtitle/translation of Godfrey Reggio’s 100% narrative free classic Koyaanisqatsi.
[Coincidentally, the last time I saw Koyaanisqatsi, it was wall candy on a flatscreen for a party in a bigtime art collector’s Central Park West apartment. It had a bigger audience than anything else, and at $25, it was easily the cheapest work there, by a factor of several thousand.]

And on the custom corporate front, I’m reminded of the wraparound montage for the LED facade of 745 Seventh Avenue, produced in 2001 by branding consultancy The Mint Group for Morgan Stanley. This Times Square video “took brand-building…to the next level,” and communicated Morgan Stanley’s unique ability in the financial services industry to “connect investors, ideas and capital.” Of course, in one weekend after Sept. 11, before ever occupying it, MS sold the building to Lehman Brothers, who stepped right into this unique, branded video skin without batting an eye.
Another wall candy video option: “Want to throw a great party? Put this on!”FunviewTV‘s 20-scene DVD includes a fish tank, a fireplace, falling snow, falling leaves, disco lights, and a microwaving pizza.
And just to loop the Whitney back in: there’s new-to-you Biennial star Eve Sussman’s debut video show in 1997. The artist labored for nearly a month to construct a 3-story scaffold/ramp in an airshaft, and then trained video cameras on the pigeon nests hidden within. Wall sized projections of oblivious pigeons filled the gallery. Congratulations, Eve, on your overnight success.

Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun talks to David Kehr about Abouna, his second feature and only the third film to be made in his native country. There is no commercial cinema in Chad, yet films–and particularly US films–have a powerful influence on the imaginations of young people living in impoverished isolation.
An ardent admirer and student of foreign directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Hou-Hsiao Hsien, Kitano Takeshi, and Clint Eastwood, Haroun is an uncommon internationalist in the nascent African filmmaking industry. He’s undaunted by such bright lights, however: “Our films are a little like candles, no? They illuminate only a small space, small groups of particular people. But those people can be everywhere, all over the planet.”
In an interview with Neil Young at the Edinburgh Festival, Haroun spoke at more length about his process and working with non-professional actors. When asked about autobiographical influences on his film, Haroun readily agreed, “Creation sometimes is just a question of memory.”
Abouna screened last year in New Directors/New Films, and will be on Sundance Channel starting Sunday night as part of the Voices from Africa program. One African film, Apolline Traore’s Koundani, from Burkina Faso is in this year’s New Directors/New Films.

When I first saw the trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I was fascinated, then confused. It looked like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but it had… Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? It’s some weird studio stunt, I figured. But I was wrong.
Turns out Sky Captain is the culmination of one man’s nearly impossible-to-believe vision. Kerry Conran worked for four years, alone, to produce the six minutes of seamlessly melded CG and live action footage that ultimately led to his making a $70 million independent film:

Conran walked into [producer Jon] Avnet’s office in a plain black T-shirt, looking a little apprehensive. He had agreed to watch the original six-minute short with me and Avnet, and it was clear he wasn’t looking forward to it.
It opens with a black-and-white version of the film’s signature shot, a zeppelin docking at the Empire State. I had seen this sequence in one form or another perhaps a dozen times in the last three days. I can’t begin to guess how many times Conran has seen it: airship and skyscraper, two antique promises of progress meeting to announce our final liberation from earthly concerns. The short was rudimentary compared with what I’d seen, to be sure. And Conran grimaced throughout. But I was stunned when I considered the painstaking labor with no promise of reward, or even end, in sight. And I thought of all the computers in just this building, each one thousands of times as powerful as a Mac IIci, in the hands of eager, young, lettuce-munching dreamers, and I wondered what worlds they were constructing in their spare time between snowflakes. On the screen, Sky Captain flies to the rescue. I happen to know from Kevin that it’s Kerry himself behind the goggles. Naturally, he’s masked.
The short ended. Conran blinked a little and smiled. ”Wow,” he said. ”That was embarrassing.”

[via Gawker] It’ll cost you, but this may be the closest you’ll get to a hummer from Chloe Sevigny. Director/actor/antagonist Vincent Gallo is selling his meticulously assembled and tuned film production package on ebay.
According to the sale, Gallo designed and assembled and fine-tuned the package after Buffalo 66 and has shot 60,000 feet of film with it for Brown Bunny. According to Gallo,

The package would have to include everything needed to make the film: 2 cameras, a high quality and comprehensive lens collection, mobile yet sufficient lighting, sound equipment that could integrate with the cameras so as to avoid slating, a mic assortment that would never need backup, and a ton of extras that would meet the needs of his flexible and spontaneous production style, and last but not least, an extremely secure transportation case system.

The package also includes, remarkably, an “Angenieux zoom [lens] which was purchased from the Stanley Kubrick estate. It is the famous super long throw lens that Kubrick had made for Barry Lyndon. No other like it exists.”[12/04 update: actually, according to Ed diGiulio, who made the lens, they developed a prototype for Kubrick, but also built and sold several others as the Cine-Pro T9 24-480mm zoom lens.]
If the film’s credits are accurate, you can use this package to make a movie all by yourself. There are a couple of sound people listed, but otherwise it’s all Gallo, Gallo Gallo Gallo. No sign that he’s going to free his indentured tech servants as part of the deal.
Unlike critical response to Brown Bunny, Gallo’s ebay feedback is universally positive. He trades a lot of high-end audio equipment and pays very quickly. In 2001, Gallo dealt with an ebayer named Ian McKellen. We don’t know if that transaction involved a hummer, but Vincent did thank Ian for going “the extra mile.

Two films by Etienne Sauret, including the eerie WTC: The First 24 Hours, [which screened on the program with my first film at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight] are showing at Film Forum today through March 16. Etienne will introduce the films tonight at 6:15 and 8:00.
Mark Holcomb reviews them in the Voice and gets cranky about the FDNY. Stephen Holden reviews them more straightforwardly in the Times.

Tom Ford has signed with CAA agent (and longtime friend) Brian Lourd to find films to direct. The NYPost’s Suzanne Kapner pitches him a really edgy story:

Robert Evans called. He wants his schtick back…
“For his last Gucci menswear show, there were scantily clad dancers with big hair and heavy eye makeup gyrating around stripper poles and worldly gentlemen with tumblers of whiskey.
Keep an eye out for such images in a future film – perhaps a cross between Ocean’s Eleven and Showgirls?”
Suzanne, Brian’s not taking calls right now. Can I get your number, and I’ll pass it along?

Doin’ it for the children of the revolution: Malick’s directing
another movie before these kids graduate from college.
Production is set for four months, starting in July–this July, 2004– for Terrence Malick’s next film, Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as the world’s most logo-friendly marxist. Malick’s writing and directing. Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh (I thought he was taking a year off?) will produce the $40 million picture, which comes–if you calculate by Malick-Time– almost 14 years ahead of schedule (i.e., six, not twenty years after his last movie, The Thin Red Line).
[a Guardian/ Variety story.]

[via Fimoculous] Michel Gondry’s new video for Steriogram is all stop-action knitting. There’s a little too much Peter Gabriel going on, but the shots where the band’s watching a knitted movie are brilliant.
It reminded me of a piece at the Whitney’s “Into the Light” exhibit of American video art, Anthony McCall’s 1973 Line Describing A Cone, where a projected image of a circle created a cone of light in the smoke-filled gallery.
I just watched all Gondry’s videos, and I must say, they made me a little tired. The White Stripes Lego video is probably my favorite. The transposition of filmspace onto flat lego boards is pretty ingenious. There’s some of that, with knitting in perspective, etc., in the Steriogram video, too.
[update: it didn’t occur to me to add a link to buy the Steriogram CD until an hour later.]

Don’t know how I missed this. The Guardian/Observer‘s Damon Wise goes on a revealing to Filmbyen, or Film Town, a Danish hive of suburban movie production, founded by Lars Von Trier and his producing partner, Peter “The Eel” Jensen. (That nickname’ll be TMI in a minute, by the way.) Dogme95 co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg has also set up shop in “town.”
At the agressively but unsurprisingly unconventional Filmbyen, VT and The Eel insist on various musical and flag-raising rituals and on keeping alive whatever of their communist ideals they can. We’re talking actual, card-carrying communists here, not Fox News slash-and-burn invective-style communists.
And on public nudity. Wise has a hard time maintaining eye contact: “Like ourselves and the rest of the pool’s other patrons Vinterberg is wearing a swimming costume, but Jensen and Von Trier just whip off their clothes and dive in. Jensen’s genitalia are on full display and we escape with just a glimpse of Von Trier’s pallid bottom.” What follows is a discussion Von Trier’s long, hard, sweaty…process of writing, working with actors, and making his latest film, Dogville.
[Dogville opened this weekend in London (and which comes to the US in early April). See Philip French’s dazed Observer review, or the official Dogville UK site.]
While I have nothing to add about communist genitalia, I have seen Dogville and will write about it soon.

After British director James Miller was killed–shot in the neck by an Israeli army sniper in Gaza in May 2003–while filming an HBO documentary, his wife Sophy, field producer Dan Edge and other crew members felt compelled to complete the movie. Her story is in the Telegraph, and Edge writes in the Guardian about making the film–and watching Miller get shot in front of him.

The finished documentary, Death in Gaza, is a fly-on-the-wall account of a young Palestinian boy and his interactions with paramilitaries barely older than himself. The film also includes extended footage of Miller and his translator being shot as they approached an Israeli APC, while shouting “British journalist!” and waving a white flag. Sketches made during an independent investigation bear an eerie resemblance to camera setup diagrams used on the set.
To date, no one has been held accountable for Miller’s death.
The film screened last week as part of the the Berlinale’s Panorama Dokumente.
Related: An account of Miller’s death and an open letter to the Israeli Defense Forces from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
justice4jamesmiller.com, a site set up by his family and friends, which contains the results of an investigation by Chiron Resources, a company which specializes in media support in hostile environments.
Related but lighter: background on the Panorama Dokumente, from Filmmaker Magazine’s blog
David Hudson’s and Cory Vielma’s exhaustive-but-insightful daily coverage from the Berlin Festival, at GreenCine. It’s the next best thing to being there.

[via Gothamist] The Style Section article a few weeks ago where Neil Strauss plays wingman to some David Blaine wannabe named Mystery (Seriously. You think the Times didn’t factcheck something so goofy?) has been optioned by Columbia Pictures (along with a book based on the piece). The price? “In the low six figures.” Strauss will advise, but not adapt.

For the ever-popular Law & Order, the producers mine today’s headlines for new story ideas. HBO’s K Street is just the opposite. Not in the “what, it blew and nobody watched it?” way you’re thinking, in the “life imitates art” way.
In one K Street plotline, the actress and former Cheneyac Mary Matalin worried about being investigated by the Feds for leaking a CIA operative’s identity. At the time, the subject was innocuous or implausible enough to pass the “no substance” filter that actual DC operatives ran their cameo appearances through. But last month, the Washington Post reports, Matalin and several other White House appointees were hauled before a grand jury to testify about who in the administration leaked a CIA operative’s identity. She even wore the same “passes for fashion in Washington” jacket for both gigs. (Hey Mary, I know the IRS now works for you now, but I hope you got a receipt for that thing. Not that HBO wants it back…)
How to tell the truth from the fiction, then? Easy. On K Street, Matalin’s lament rambled on (and on and on) over several episodes. In The Real World, her only line was, “I can’t comment.”

Mary-Ellis Bunim, the co-creator of The Real World, which revolutionized television while destroying civilization, died of breast cancer at age 57.
Bunim also produced The Real Cancun, which, while better than Justin and Kelly, was not as entertaining as the reviews of it. Take some solace, at least, knowing she probably had fun making it.
Very related: Support the fight against breast cancer