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James Franco vs. the Fact Checkers Unit
Director Dan Beers and Executive Producer Thomas Bannister of the Web series "FCU: Fact Checkers Unit" sit down with MM to chat about their Web series, the latest episode of which, starring James Franco as a possibly pregnant supergenius version of himself, premieres... well, right now. Read the interview, then check out the "FCU" episode "James Franco is Preggers," embedded below for your viewing pleasure.
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Celluloid Dreams: Spurning Digital to Shoot a First Feature on Film
From inception, it was essential to me that we shot Joshua Tree, 1951 on film. While many similarly budgeted first features opt for the RED or even a Canon 5D, celluloid was an integral and irreplaceable component of the vision of the film. A combination of strategic planning, careful budgeting and on-set restraint made it possible. The result, I believe, is a level of production value and emotional intimacy within the image that we could not have accomplished any other way.
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Having Big Fun in the Big Town
26 years after it was filmed, Dutch director, journalist and rap aficionado Bram Van Splunteren's Big Fun in the Big Town is finally being released to worldwide audiences. A documentary on the origins of hip hop filmed in New York in 1986, just as the genre was getting noticed—but not, notes Van Splunteren, being taken seriously—on an international scale, Big Town features interviews with pioneers like Russell Simmons, Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash, Doug E Fresh and LL Cool J from before they became household names.
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Telling the Story of Portrait of Wally
The history of Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally seems too improbable to be true. Art theft. Prestigious cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and NPR. A Jewish art collector who spent the last decades of her life trying to get a beloved painting, looted by Nazis, returned to her—and a seemingly unscrupulous fellow collector who refused to give it up. But truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction—and director Andrew Shea lays out the incredible tale of "The face that launched a thousand lawsuits" with his documentary Portrait of Wally, opening in New York City today.
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“It’s Only Forever…”
Director Brian Crano on the pressures and triumphs of A Bag of Hammers
Making a film, you learn a lot of lessons—often contradictory lessons, but lessons nonetheless. These are a few of the thousand lessons I learned in the process of making my first feature, A Bag of Hammers. I’ll skip the really obvious ones, like “Write a great, compelling script” or “cast the best actors you can"...
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The Journey to The Cup
On New Year’s Day of 2003, a neatly handwritten note arrived on the fax machine: “I have a story idea I wanted to run past you. I am sure you are familiar with the subject matter and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions.” The intriguing note came from Eric O’Keefe, a Texas journalist I had met while directing the television western Crossfire Trail. “What do you know about the 2002 Melbourne Cup?,” it read.
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Documenting the Lost and Found Generation in Falling Uphill
As a Hitchcock enthusiast, for years I wanted to direct a dark, suspenseful thriller. So I spent a of couple years developing a film in this “Hitchcockian” vein while producing and managing other films. After working on Peter Bratt’s La Mission, which depicts San Francisco in a very intimate and non-traditional way, I began to observe my surroundings and reflect on my personal life. Although it sucked to set aside my high concept screenplay, I refocused my energies on a more personal project featuring San Francisco. The film that resulted is Falling Uphill, which tells a story about heartbreak, self-discovery and new beginnings.
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Water Takes Center Stage in Last Call at the Oasis
When we started Last Call at the Oasis, our goals were ambitious and the challenge was considerable. We wanted to illuminate the water crisis and its many facets... and there are many, many facets. Generally, when we hear “water crisis” we think “drought”—usually “drought happening somewhere else in the world.” But what’s going on is big, and it is crucial that we understand it. This is water—essential for all life. Could the stakes be any higher?
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Over the Rainbow with Jonathan Kalafer
The PS22 Chorus isn't your normal elementary school extracurricular group. A certified viral sensation after chorus director Gregg Breinberg started posting their performances on YouTube, in 2010 they were invited to perform at the Academy Awards. There to capture their journey from Staten Island to the Kodak Theatre was director Jonathan Kalafer, for whom the making of the film was its own sort of underdog story. In advance of world premiere of Once in a Lullaby: The PS22 Chorus Story at the Tribeca Film Festival, Kalafer took the time to share with MM his experience filming the PS22's Chorus incredible journey—and the personal impact doing so had on him.
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My Golden Rules: Ti West
With The House of the Devil and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, writer-director Ti West showcased an uncanny ability to pay tribute to the classic horror films of the 1970s and ’80s while reinvigorating the genre with a bold indie spirit. His latest effort, The Innkeepers, was an award-winning hit on the film festival circuit and landed on Blu-ray and DVD on April 24th. Here, the horror-icon-in-the-making shares his golden rules of moviemaking.
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James McTeigue Captures The Raven
Unlike the many American teens who first encountered the work of Edgar Allan Poe in English class, James McTeigue, director of the upcoming thriller The Raven, discovered the Gothic writer in the lyrics of 1970s punk rock, specifically the song "Descent Into the Maelstrom"—named after a Poe story—by the band Radio Birdman. The first assistant director on all three Matrix films before making his directorial debut with V for Vendetta, McTeigue was never a Poe fanatic. But when producer Aaron Ryder (Donnie Darko, Memento) suggested that they work together on a fictionalized account of the legendary writer’s life, he couldn’t say no.
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Richard Linklater’s Cinematic Conviction
Legendary indie takes on the justice system with Bernie
The first thing you need to know about Richard Linklater is that he’s a Texas moviemaker. From his breakout hit Slacker, which told the poly-vocal story of several eccentric Austin residents, to his latest film Bernie, which is based on the true story of a murder that took place in Carthage, Texas in the mid-1990s, the bulk of Linklater’s films have taken place in his home state. MM caught up with the director on his home turf, at the SXSW Film Festival, to talk about truth, justice and the moviemaking way.
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John Stockwell’s Golden Rules
Actor-turned-director John Stockwell (Crazy/Beautiful, Blue Crush, Into the Blue), whose most recent film as a director, Dark Tide, comes out on DVD and Blu-ray today, shares his Golden Rules for directing.
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Revisiting Stony Island
Director Andrew Davis recalls the making of his 1978 R&B drama Stony Island, out for the first time on DVD April 24th
The development of Stony Island began long before there was a script, from spending time with and shooting images of my brother Richie and his friends. I had been doing this for over a year when I met Tamar Hoffs, who had a brother with a similar story to mine. They were both musicians, white kids who loved the blues, Muddy Waters and all the great artists from South Side. I shared my research and images with Tammy, and we began working together on a screenplay. We called it Stony Island, after an area of Chicago that was a vortex of black/white South Side culture and had real significance to both of us.
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Enjoying Chicken with Plums
Co-directors of the Oscar-nominated Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud have tackled another one of graphic novelist Satrapi's works for their second collaboration, the dreamy, fairy tale-esque Chicken with Plums, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival last year and is having its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. In advance of the film's first Tribeca screening this Sunday, the duo took the time to chat with MovieMaker about their second collaboration and the source of their visual inspiration for this truly stunning film.
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Weathering the First Winter
In Benjamin Dickinson's feature directorial debut First Winter, a group of Brooklyn hipsters at a yoga retreat in upstate New York are forced to learn survival skills the hard way after an immense blackout hits, stranding them a drafty farmhouse with dwindling supplies and miles separating them from any passable roads—or, indeed, the rest of humanity. With their stock of food shrinking and temperatures dropping, buried tensions come to the fore, straining the friends' ability to work together even though—in a world with no electricity, no way to communicate with the outside world and virtually no chance of making it back to the city alive–all they really have is each other.
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Meet the Rat King
Petri Kotwica's gaming-themed thriller brings a modern edge to noirish suspense
To get a sense of Finnish director Petri Kotwica's Rat King, try imagining a standard thriller. Then infuse it with a heavy dose of Hitchcockian suspense, add a dash of high school drama and flavor the whole thing with a cyberpunk aesthetic. In advance of the film's international debut at this month's Tribeca Film Festival, Kotwica shared with MM his inspiration, influences and favorite silver screen villains.
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Inside Inside Hana's Suitcase
One of the great horrors of human history, the Holocaust is the title of millions of interlocking stories that span tragedy to comedy, despair to hope. The delivery of a battered suitcase from the Auschwitz Museum to director Fumiko Ishioka of Tokyo's Holocaust Education Resource Center marked the beginning of one of those stories. Ishioka, along with a group of young Japanese students, made it her mission to unearth the fate of the little girl whose name was painted across the suitcase front: Hana Brady. Ishioka's search for Hana's identity, and the story she discovered, is the subject of Larry Weinstein's documentary Inside Hana's Suitcase, opening in New York tomorrow, April 18th.
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Ian Fitzgibbon Tackles the Death of a Superhero
In Irish director Ian Fitzgibbon's Death of a Superhero, teenager Donald's creativity, active imagination and innate talent combine to make him a highly talented comic book artist. His future would be bright were it not for one thing: Donald, 15, is dying of leukemia. With a cast that includes Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Donald, a non-mocap Andy Serkis as his unconventional psychologist and Michael McElhatton and Sharon Horganas his struggling-to-cope parents, Fitzgibbon has managed to direct a film about a teen with cancer that manages to be inspiring but not melodramatic, sad and poignant but not unrelentingly grim.
With his film coming out on VOD tomorrow courtesy of Tribeca Films, Fitzgibbon took the time to chat with MovieMaker about what initially drew him to the script and how he crafted his own approach to the material.
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The Messy Business of Growing Up
Jannicke Systad Jacobsen crafts a different sort of coming of age story with Turn Me On, Dammit!
Small incidents, to paraphrase director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, can make large explosions. They can also make telling movies. In her first narrative film, Jacobsen explores a blip in the life of an adolescent girl and how a minuscule event can morph into something that leads to personal and social revelations. Based on the novel by Olaug Hilssen with a screenplay written by Jacobsen, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a sensitive and unapologetically blunt look at the convergence of sexuality and growing up. The film brings to light those many things we’ve been taught to ignore, yet have all thought about and experienced by default of having survived teenagehood.
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Jon Shenk Gets Up Close and Personal with The Island President
For Mohamed Nasheed, climate change isn't just an academic issue—it's one of survival. The former President of the Maldives, one of the lowest-lying countries in the world, Nasheed made it his personal mission to have a positive impact on the climate issue during his tenure as his island nation's first democratically elected president. Luckily for everyone who loves a good underdog story, director Jon Shenk made it his mission to capture Nasheed's inspiring crusade on film; the result, the award-winning documentary The Island President, comes to U.S. theaters tomorrow.
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Benjamin Wagner Keeps It Deep and Simple with Mister Rogers & Me
Talk to anyone over the age of, say, 20, and chances are good that they grew up learning about the values of kindness and self-respect from Fred Rogers, whose show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" brought Mr. McFeeley, King Friday XIII, Lady Aberlin and the rest of the gang to PBS from 1968 to 2001. Of the many whose lives were impacted by Mister Rogers, very few were lucky enough to actually have a chat with the man. One of those who got that chance is Benjamin Wagner, then a young journalist and producer at MTV News, who met Rogers at the cultural icon's summer home in Nantucket, Massachusetts, which happened to be next door to the cottage Wagner's mother was renting.
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The Key to Natural Selection
Everybody always wants everything to be perfect.The perfect budget, the perfect cast, the perfect shooting schedule, the perfect location. It took me six long years to get Natural Selection made, and most of that time was spent obsessing over getting things perfect rather than making do with what I had. I could have waited forever if at some point I didn’t say to myself—‘Hey, asshole, nothing’s ever going to be perfect, and if you wait too long to make this thing, every feeling that inspired you to write it in the first place will be nothing but a memory.’ So I sat down with my producers one day and broke the news to them. Two million dollars is a bloated budget, I said. Let’s make this thing for what we’ve got: $150,000. We decided on the spot to make our movie, come hell or high water, in three months. And that’s when everything started falling apart.
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Crawling Out of Development Hell with Laura Lau and Chris Kentis
Silent House's directing duo on their real-time, single-take horror thriller
“Opportunity knocks…” was the intriguing subject line sitting in our Gmail nestled between the latest Groupon offer and reminder from Geico to pay the car insurance. With so many years since we’d made a film, not a whole lot of opportunities were knocking. Swimming with the sharks in Open Water was a leisurely dip compared to surviving the perils in Hollywood. We had had our hearts broken over passion projects and other labors of love, all of which were stalled at their own frustrated spot on the road to celluloid. But we didn’t give up.
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Sneak Peek: Frankenweenie
In 1984, twenty-something newcomer Tim Burton made his mark on the industry with a modern take on a horror classic in the form of Frankenweenie, a live action short in which a young boy named Victor uses the power of science to bring his beloved dog, Sparky, back to life. Now, almost 30 years later, the Oscar-nominated director is returning to his roots to create the Frankenweenie he always envisioned, in the form of a stop-motion animated feature.
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Finding Your Jodie Foster
Boy "wrirector" Taika Waititi on auditions, acting and happening upon the perfect child actor
We found our main actor three days before principal shooting started. I don’t recommend that process, but sometimes you have to go with your gut and believe everything will be okay.
Someone once said of casting: “This is quite painful and I’d rather be at the pub.” It was me. I’m not a fan. I’d rather write a role for a specific actor and then convince them do it with treats or weapons. Some of this probably stems from being an actor, having to audition and knowing the feelings that go with it: Putting yourself out there, walking into the room hoping to not suck, convincing yourself you don’t care, secretly knowing you’re amazing.
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Bringing Suspicion to the Big Screen
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2007, I didn’t know I wanted to be a director. I thought I just wanted to produce. Like everyone else who moves to L.A. to pursue their dream, I figured that said dream would involve getting a job as a production assistant and going from there. I was fortunate enough to land just that job; later, I became a producer’s assistant for my mentor John J. Kelly (Warrior). It was during this time that I discovered I wanted to direct, write and produce. I wrote the contemporary mafia drama/thriller Suspicion and approached financiers with an interest in independent film. Once financing was secure, I approached available colleagues, and we set out to make my first feature film.
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My Golden Rules: McG
He has directed music videos for Sugar Ray, Cypress Hill, Sublime and Wyclef Jean. Executive produced more than a dozen popular television series, including "The O.C." and "Chuck." And he's been the chosen director to re-boot "Charlie's Angels" and resurrect the Terminator franchise for the big screen. Now he's making Reese Witherspoon choose between Chris Pine and Tom Hardy in This Means War. As the new action-rom-com makes its way into theaters, writer-director-producer McG shares his golden rules of moviemaking.
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Winning Big in the Amazon
When you hear the word “Amazon,” one of two things probably come to mind: Online retailer Amazon.com or (maybe) that river in South America. Well, here’s a third option: Amazon Studios, the online moviemaking arm of Amazon.com, which awards cash prizes to scripts, trailers and test movies submitted by members as a way to help up-and-coming moviemakers get discovered and complete their films.
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From the Classroom to the Kodak Theatre
Max Zähle picks up an Oscar nomination for his student film Raju
The Oscar-nominated short film Raju is something of an enigma. A German student film shot, not in a crew member's backyard, but in India, the film's small budget meant that, for director/co-writer Max Zähle, paying the cast wasn't an option—but he snagged two A-list German actors, Wotan Wilke Möhring and Julia Richter, to star all the same. And, of course, it's a student film that's been nominated for an Oscar... and that's not something that happens all too often.
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Activism and Terrorism Collide in If a Tree Falls
With the Oscar-nominated documentary If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, co-directors Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman turned their camera on an issue that is at once historical and current: The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a '90s environmental activist group made up of once-peaceful protestors who took to committing acts of arson after the non-violent demonstrations they had been participating in were ignored by the government and often met with brutality by the police. Though the film resonates with the protest movements that have sprung up since its release, Curry didn't make the film with any particular agenda—environment, political or otherwise—in mind. Instead, he was intrigued by the story of Daniel McGowan, a former ELF member facing life in prison for his acts of what the government considers terrorism.
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Bringing Together Comedy, Politics and Economic Meltdown in Gnarr
In case you haven't heard, the economy hasn't been doing that well for the past few years. No country has felt the economic crisis so keenly as Iceland, where the collapse of a once-soaring economy left citizens feeling betrayed by their politicians. Against this backdrop rose an unlikely political hero: Jón Gnarr, the comedian who ran for mayor of Reykjavík as a joke… and won. His campaign—in which he promised to build a Disneyland in the city and refused to talk to his opponents if they hadn't watched "The Wire"—was filmed, from start to finish, by Gaukur Úlfarsson for his feature documentary Gnarr.
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Into the Sunset: Cinema’s Greatest Swan Songs
There’s a circular pattern to the careers of many directors: Their early films tend toward rough experiments. Then they mature and develop their own distinct artistic voice. Finally, secure in their success, they drive off into the sunset of their career, all too often trading in the fame they had at their peak for something more like the obscurity they started with. The decline of a director’s work at the end of their career is an all-too-common trend, but it's one that Hungarian director Bèla Tarr, with his final film The Turin Horse, has managed to avoid. With The Turin Horse coming out on Friday, we're taking a look at three other directors who refused to leave their legacy poorly wrapped.
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Don’t Go in There! Cinema’s Scariest Haunted House Movies
Creaky floorboards. Rattling window shutters. Creepy noises in the attic. What could be scarier than a lonely old house on a dark and stormy night? The haunted house subgenre has been around for a long time and has proven to be endlessly fascinating to moviemakers and audiences alike. With the two newest entries in this enduring subgenre—The Woman in Black and The Innkeepers—hitting theaters today, MM is taking a look back at some of the scariest haunted house movies of all time.
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The Challenges (and Rewards) of Big Miracle
Director Ken Kwapis: "It was brutal, but I loved every minute of it."
Let's not beat around the bush: Directing a movie with ten major characters sounds pretty tough. Directing a movie with ten major characters, a bunch of non-professional actors and three massive animatronic whales that can only be reached for repairs by diving into some pretty chilly water? Even tougher. Shooting in Alaska, where one of the only weather conditions that stays consistent from day to day is the freezing cold? Was Big Miracle director Ken Kwapis nuts?!
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