Category: making movies

Production Diary
I grabbed an image from each of 35 massacre cuts in The Godfather‘s baptism/massacre sequence to use as reference for shooting. Given the conditions, however, and the fact that I was also a co-host, with a speech to give, and I had major ass to kiss, this served as only the roughest guide.
I needed at least one shot of me, though, and so when my co-host Hilary and I went up to the podium, I gave my running camera to the nearest pair of hands I could find–Bill Murray.
Murray played along, and in fact, started filming Hilary’s dress, chest, earrings, and hair, which cracked everybody up. Anyway, by the end of the night, I think I got enough footage that formally references Coppola’s original, but is, of course, completely different.
Gossip
When another speech (the intro went too long for the taste of at least one big cheese producer) said how MoMA was interested in great films, “not just films from India or Senegal or someplace,” several stunned people turned to look for a reaction from the rather great Indian filmmaker Mira Nair–who was sitting right behind me. She didn’t flinch.
Quentin–who was sitting next to me–was a rockstar, and we talked endlessly about making and remaking movies. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was, he said, his favorite movie of 1998, and he had non-stop praise for Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb, and Chris Strompolos, the three teenagers who spent seven years making their shot-for-shot adapation of Raiders of The Lost Ark.
My wife couldn’t come at the last minute, so I turned her seat back in, not knowing who I’d get as my seatmate. Just before the lights went down, a very genial and genteel-looking older lady was escorted in. Somebody’s mother, I figured; did they plan to leave her at the hotel if they couldn’t score her a ticket? Turns out her name was Lillian Ross. She’s a writer or something. Didn’t get the details. Very nice. She borrowed my cell phone to call her son, who I met later at dinner. Also very nice. But not related to any of the filmmakers there, as far as I could figure.
Anywho…the gossip, the first blind item on greg.org, blind because not stupid; I’d still take their meeting:
A very recent Oscar winner told me, at the party, about meeting a fellow nominee, i.e., one of the losers–who actually had two films nominated–so technically, a double loser. Upon being introduced–by the Mayor of New York City, no less–the loser replied, “I can’t believe you won; your film was so boring!”
I’ll leave the comments open for a while this one.

From the painstakingly organized files of Mr Stanley E. Kubrick:
Stanley Kubrick filled his St Albans estate with over 400 fileboxes (specially manufactured to his own design) of notes, photographs, correspondence, drafts, props, and much, much more. The first authorized exhibition drawn from the estate opens today at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt. In fact, Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan are speaking in the cafe at 2030h, less than 5 hrs from now.
[Seeing as how you missed that, though, you can pre-order the exhibition catalog in English from the museum. It’s a more in-depth collection of essays by filmmakers and historians, different from The Stanley Kubrick Archives due any day now from Taschen.]
Journalist Jon Ronson writes in the Guardian about what he found in his repeated vists to the archive, including an exhaustive day-by-day timeline of the goings-on in Napoleon’s court; Kubrick’s favorite font; a sniper’s severed head, and a reference to “A Bill Murray Line!” [Also, a link to Kubrick’s script for Napoleon, deemed authentic by Ronson.]
From a 1975 telex correspondence with a Warner Bros. publicity man re Barry Lyndon:

[Publicity man:] “Received additional material. Is there any material with humour or zaniness that you could send?”
Kubrick replies, clearly through gritted teeth: “The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany.”

[via TMN. And my post title came from a 1977 French animated short I found on IMDb.]

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.]