February 29, 2004

Three for Three

If you want to win, just impart your filmmaking wisdom on greg.org Congratulations to Oscar winners, Independent Spirit Award winners-- and greg.org interviewees--Sofia Coppola and Errol Morris. And don't forget Dany Wolf and Gus Van Sant with their Palme d'Or from a little 'burg called Cannes....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

The Shoes of Errol Morris

Errol Morris, you just won an Oscar and an Indpendent Spirit Award. Where are you going next? "I'm going to Nordstrom! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes." Buy Sperry Top-Sider 'Stripers' like the ones Morris wore to both award ceremonies-- and our interview-- at Nordstrom....
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Posted by greg allen at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2004

Learning at Errol Morris's Knee

Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award. Morris's films are best known for the intensity of the interviews he conducts. He invented the Interrotron, a teleprompter setup that gets the interviewee to look and speak straight into the camera. I, in the mean time, didn't have...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2004

The Fog of War Re-enactors

[via NYT] They're putting the band back together, Elroy. For the first time since The Fog of War was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris took their show on the road. They spoke at Berkeley Wednesday, the first time McNamara appeared at the school that led the anti-war movement in the Sixties. It's also his and Morris's alma mater. The webcast is available on Berkeley's site. [The discussion starts about 11 minutes...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2004

Phrancis Phord Coppola's Ophspring

From Yahoo News coverage of the Golden Globes[note: annoyingly slippery link]: Director Sophia Coppola holds her award after winning Best Screenplay for a motion picture for her wok on the film 'Lost In Translation' during the 61st annual Golden Globe Awards (news - web sites) in Beverly Hills January 25, 2004. (Chris Haston/NBC via Reuters) Dude, she spells it "Sofia." This is the Baysinger/Bassinger of her generation. [And while she's usually very quiet, the one thing Sofia won't shut...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2004

FLASH: Pretend-journalists love Sofia Coppola

As you can see by my interview with her last year. On the subject of pretend-journalists, Lost in Translation beat out indie underdog Finding Nemo for best comedy/musical at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globes last night. The 80-page or so outline/story/is it really a script? that funders initially thought was too slight to make a whole film from won best screenplay, and Bill Murray won best actor (for finishing it, I guess). Gothamist has minute-by-minute coverage of the...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2004

My Yogurt with Gus

On the occasion of Elephant's release in the UK, Simon Hattenstone goes on a publicity pilgrimage to Oregon to interview Gus Van Sant for the Guardian. Gus sends him for coffee before buzzing him up, and later serves him blueberry yogurt [which Simon apparently doesn't understand is the archetypal food of the Guy Living Alone.] It's a long account with some nice backstory and several references to Van Sant's art background (he went to RISD with David Byrne). Related: My...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2004

Mike Mills, How did you get your f*&%ing awesome job?

[via TMN] Considering the number Google searches I still get for Mike Mills, two years after I posted about his Jack Spade-sponsored documentary, Paperboys, and considering how tight Spike, Sofia, Roman and I have become since then, I should be sitting down with Mills myself. In the mean time, check out Readymade's interview with Mills, whose feature debut, Thumbsucker, is based on the novel by the less-Mormon-than-I-am-but-more-Mormon-than-you-are Walter Kirn. Paperboys is now on DVD, but I like my VHS copy...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2003

Filmmaking Interviews of Note

Vadim Perelman, first-time director of House of Sand and Fog, whose tantrums made many people angry in Hollywood (this is news? at least his were entertaining, as are his accounts: ""So I go to his [Harvey Weinstein's] suite at the Peninsula, and he's sitting there like Jabba the f--king Hutt with his Diet Cokes and his Marlboro Reds."). And the film's getting strong reviews. [Sean Smith for Newsweek, via GreenCine Daily] Ray Pride pulls some information from Milos Stehlik of...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2003

Gus Van Sant's Go-to Guy

Gus Van Sant, Elias McConnell, and Dany Wolf at Cannes 2003, image: festival-cannes.com There he is, scorched in Death Valley and on the Saltflats of Utah; in a mold-closed school with a barebones crew on scooters; and on the Palais steps of Cannes, where he accepted the Palme D'Or this year for Elephant. Gus Van Sant? Sure, he's there, too, but I'm talking about Dany Wolf, the producer. The guy who actually has to figure out how to make...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2003

Factchecking Sofia Coppola

While I was being protective of her, Sofia was opening up to me, revealing that her inspiration for the Suntory whiskey commercials in Lost in Translation was a photo of her father Francis and the emperor of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, who made Suntory commercials for years. I reviewed a whole raft of these commercials, which are hidden on a Kurosawa documentary DVD. Coppola's nowhere near them, I concluded. I made it sound like I watched the entire doc,...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2003

The Suntory Commercials of Akira Kurosawa

Nothing wrong with bigname film folks making commercials. Errol Morris (whose The Fog of War I just saw and will write about soon) directed the Apple Switch ads. Swedish master Ingmar Bergman made some cake by selling cakes of soap. Hell, Spike Lee's got a whole agency, SpikeDDB, to sell out through. And as Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation shows, Japanese commercials are a great way for stars to pay their jumbo mortgages. Coppola mentioned she got the idea...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:01 AM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2003

Interviewing Sofia Coppola about Lost in Translation

Last Sunday, on the occasion of the impending release of her new film, Lost in Translation, I joined a couple of journalists in a group interview with Sofia Coppola. The interview took place in New York City at the end of her press junket. I found the suites capacious, the sofas commodious, the sandwiches copious. "Big Brother" was hanging around, but he rebuked us; Roman stayed mostly near the buffet. Not being a reporter, I failed to get the names...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2003

On interviewing film people

On MovieCityNews: Leonard Klady shares some insights and some great war stories about interviewing directors and actors, a useful (and timely) resource as I prepare for some upcoming junkets. [thanks, GreenCine, and for the mention, too.] Related posts: post-game post on Bingham Ray interviewing Alexander Payne at MoMA; Lily Tomlin and Will Ferrell-as-James Lipton interviewing David O. Russell at MoMA the year before (apparently involved some kind of pipe)...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2003

Behind the scenes with The Road to Europe director, Christoffer Guldbrandsen: a greg.org exclusive

Hearing a story on the wide-ranging political turmoil which followed The Road to Europe, a documentary on the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, I wanted to know more; but the reports I found still left me unsatisfied. Deutsche-Welle, The Economist, even NPR's On the Media, referred to the documentary as "reality TV," a term which belittles both the film's message and impact and which ignores the history and context of "fly-on-the-wall" filmmaking. To get the still-untold story of how...
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Posted by greg allen at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)