Could This Fall be the Best Film Season in Years?
There are major themes being explored in film in the coming months, in what looks to be a diverse and deeply challenging (in a good way) season of releases. Just going by the excitement of audiences at TIFF, there is reason to hope that we’re looking at one of the most quality-packed stretches in recent ...
Talking With Legendary Director William Friedkin
William Friedkin, legendary director of The French Connection (1971), which won him the Best Director Oscar, and The Exorcist (1973), one of the greatest horror films of all time, recently published his memoirs, The Friedkin Connection, a candid look at his early life and his long movie career. We caught up with him as he ...
Creativity in Hollywood: Film Visionaries On Creative Process And Inspiration
Unlike most films and television shows, inspiration is not available on-demand. In the highly creative realm of movie-making, a good idea can catapult careers, spark motion picture franchises, and make cinematic history. Inventing the next film can mean laying the groundwork for brilliant movies and television, from Inception, Taxi Driver, The Master, or Edward Scissorhands. ...
The World’s End: What’s Behind our Apocalypse Obsession?
Edgar Wright’s The World’s End (premiering August 23) is not the first, second, third or fourth film to come out this year about an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic world. A cursory glance of 2013's film slate would suggest we are currently suffering from a collective panic attack about our prospects on the planet. This is the End, World ...
George Mastras on Writing & Directing One of Breaking Bad’s Best Episodes
George Mastras has been a criminal investigator for the public defender’s office in Washington D.C., a counselor at a juvenile correctional facility during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, a litigator in New York, and a defense attorney in Los Angeles. Then he quit, bought a one-way ticket to China and backpacked around the world ...
An Evening With Filmmaking Icon Norman Jewison
Lauded filmmaker Norman Jewison may be as entertaining a storyteller in person as he is through film. Rocking New Balance sneakers, sunglasses and youthful exuberance at a July 22 event at the MPAA in Washington, D.C., the 87-year-old filmmaker regaled a delighted audience with tales from his more than four decades of historic success in ...
Workaholic Woody Allen: Five Decades & Counting of Unparalleled Production
In 1966, China became the first nation to synthesize Insulin, Walt Disney died, the first Star Trek episode “The Man Trap” aired, England won the World Cup (they haven’t won one since), and a young director by the name of Woody Allen released his first feature film, What’s Up Tiger Lily? In the 47-years that ...
Talking With DP Jonathan Ingalls About Killer Whale Documentary Blackfish
For the past 10 years, producer, director, and cinematographer Jonathan Ingalls has been making compelling documentary television (MTV’s I Used to be Fat, A&E’s The First 48 and films such as City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story.) This week, perhaps his most controversial project, Blackfish, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, hits theaters in New York and ...
Married Directors Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman Talk Girl Most Likely
A background in documentary filmmaking came in handy for long-time co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini when they needed to film a man in a mollusk-inspired exoskeleton on the busy streets of New York City. “People are really scared off of [filming on a city street] without a lot of crew,” Berman told The ...
An Evening With Fruitvale Station Writer/Director Ryan Coogler
Few directors fresh out of film school can boast their first feature-length movie is a likely Oscar contender, but Ryan Coogler could be one of the few with Fruitvale Station. The movie, which Coogler wrote and directed, won the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature and Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic Film at the 2013 ...
Eastern Influence: Pacific Rim Latest Film to Draw Inspiration From Japan
The early reviews suggest that Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (which opens this Friday) is nice blend of what you want out of your summer blockbuster—spectacle, suspense and solid storytelling. Pacific Rim is also a nice blend of the Japanese tradition of Kaiju films (the most famous example being Godzilla) and mecha stories (about robots or machines), popularized ...
Walt Disney Studios Reimagines The Lone Ranger & Breathes Life Into Westerns
“So who was that masked man, anyway?” A question invariably asked at the end of every episode of The Lone Ranger television series. Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski hope to provide a definitive answer to that question with the brand-new film The Lone Ranger, their reinvention of both the ...
Director Douglas Tirola Serves up the Doc Hey Bartender
In the rollicking documentary Hey Bartender — which opened in select theaters and on iTunes and On Demand on June 7 — director-producer Douglas Tirola chronicles the resurgence of the craft cocktail — and the eclectic, opinionated characters who drink and pour them. We chatted with Tirola, who has made docs about everything from poker (All ...
How’d They Do That? Building 1920s New York in The Great Gatsby
Digital FX firm Animal Logic helped craft the extravagant, hyper-vibrant world of New York in the roaring 20's for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. But how? They lovingly refer to themselves as “animals,” but the staffers at Animal Logic, based at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia, are really masters in special effects and animation. The ...
Rounding up the Cast and Director of Eco-Thriller The East
In The East, Zal Batmanglij and his filmmaking partner, Brit Marling, deliver an edge-of-your-seat eco-terrorism thriller in which an undercover overachiever (Marling) infiltrates a militant anarchist eco-vigilante group (including Alexander Skarsgard and Ellen Page) that arranges “jams” against corporate evildoers. Without giving too much away, you may find yourself asking, "What's really in this prescription ...
Poetry From Conflict: Writer-Director Musa Syeed on his Valley of Saints
Conflict zones have a long history of providing an amply angst-ridden backdrop for cinematic romance, but in his narrative feature debut, Valley of Saints, Musa Syeed takes a surprisingly lyrical look a largely untold conflict in India’s Kashmir region, an area that Indians and Pakistanis have fought three wars over during the past century. And ...
Looking Back at Iconic Tentpole Movies and Imagining Their 2013 Versions
As summer movie season officially kicked off this past Memorial Day weekend, the slate of “tentpole” movies — the ones that are expected to hold up (like a tentpole, get it?) and turn a profit, bringing in big bucks both domestically and overseas — is bigger than ever: There’s Hangover 3, After Earth, Man of ...
500 Strong: The Joint Effort in Making 20th Century Fox’s Epic
How do you oversee the work of more than 500 people over the course of several years on a giant 3D animated film without losing your mind? Producer Jerry Davis of Blue Sky Studios, who helped shepherd the production of Twentieth Century Fox's Epic along with his producing partner Lori Forte, gives us the scoop. Epic, which features characters ...
Steven Soderbergh Through the Looking Glass: Behind the Candelabra
One of most fascinating developments out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival has been the inclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic swan song, the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, in this year’s main competition as per the insistence of festival director Thierry Fremaux. Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his live-in lover ...
Homegrown: How Star Trek Left the Galaxy Without Ever Leaving California
As Star Trek: Into Darkness basks in the space-age glory of an $84.1 million opening week, the blockbuster can take pride in an even more impressive accomplishment: from ever-growing Paramount Studios in Hollywood to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of Oakland, every frame of the J.J. Abrams blockbuster was shot in the state of California. ...
