Golden Age of Documentaries: A Q&A With Filmmaker Jamie Meltzer
Documentarian Jamie Meltzer knows how to pick his subject matter. Take his award-winning film Informant, which took home the Grand Jury Award at the DocNYC Festival as well as Best Documentary at the Austin Film Festival. Informant examines the life of Brandon Darby, a radical leftist activist turned FBI informant. Darby became a hero when he traveled to a Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and braved toxic floodwaters to rescue a friend of his stranded in the Ninth Ward.
From Soldier to Filmmaker: Q&A With The Iceman Director Ariel Vromen
How does an 'extreme' special unit Israeli Air Force soldier, law student and world-traveling DJ become a successful director working with some of the country’s biggest stars? Here’s the circuitous route Ariel Vromen took on his path from performing military maneuvers in Israel and reading dense law texts in England to getting behind the camera. Vromen faced an endless string of challenges to get his latest project, The Iceman,
Drawing Inspiration: Sketching With the Storyboard Artists of Oblivion
Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) heads down to planet Earth — or what’s left of it anyway — to find a downed surveillance drone that has landed in the charred remnants of the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room. It’s only when Harper hits the ground of this cavernous space that he realizes he’s entered a trap. Someone — or something — wants to capture this drone repairman alive.
Whether he’s rappelling into a forgotten old library,
CinemaCon Showcase: Twentieth Century Fox’s Upcoming Film Releases
So we’ve gotten a peek at Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures upcoming slate of films during our time at CinemaCon.
Here’s a trailer roundup for you from Twentieth Century Fox, which includes a good cross section of animation, comedies, and big-time action blockbusters.
Epic (May 24)
This 3D animated adventure directed by Chris Wedge and based on William Joyce’s children’s book “The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs”
The Sky’s the Limit: Cinematography’s Technological Revolution
Just as smart phones and tablets are changing the way we experience daily life, other technologies are dramatically shifting the cinematic landscape. Directors today can harness these tools in order to express their artistic vision on the screen as never before. We spoke with two of the most significant players in this field in order to find out what’s possible now, and what we can expect to see in the future.
3D moves beyond ‘next big thing’
Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines
Ryan Gosling may have recently suggested that he is taking a break from acting, but fans can still find solace in this weekend’s release of The Place Beyond the Pines, a triptych that reunites him with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance.
The cops and robbers caper—costarring Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta—traces the ramifications caused when Gosling’s character, a drifter-cum-motorcycle stunt driver,
511 Days of Total Darkness: The Incredible True Story Behind the Documentary No Place on Earth
In 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NYPD officer and caving enthusiast Chris Nicola set out to Western Ukraine to explore Verteba and the Priest’s Grotto Cave, one of the longest cave systems in the world. Inside the caves—dark, damp, and stifling, wholly inhospitable to human life—he found the unthinkable: buttons, shoes, a house key, artifacts of human habitation decidedly recent. Upon returning from the caves, his attempts at discovering the origins of these items led him to only the offhand comment from a local villager that,
Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Jenks Makes Compassion Cool on MTV’s World of Jenks
Andrew Jenks wasn’t the first free spirit to drop out of college. He also wasn’t the first to do it despite having two successful parents, one of whom currently serves as the Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations. But he was certainly the first to go from the halls of NYU straight into an assisted living facility, where the documentary he shot, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, was quickly acquired by HBO,
Can We Predict The Oscars? Social Media Reveals Who The Public’s Rooting For
They are known as quants (short for ‘quantitative analyst), and their undisputed supreme leader, at least in the public’s perception, is Nate Silver. You’ve heard of Silver, the man who went from relative obscurity before the 2008 presidential election to a household name thanks to his pinpoint accuracy predicting the last two presidential elections.
Quants are not just employed to help us figure out who the next Commander in Chief is going to be,
Celebrate The Other Oscar Nominees – You Know, The Ones Ryan Seacrest Likely Won’t Interview
Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director–these might be the most anticipated categories of the Oscars, but this year, let's celebrate the other half. After all, the year's best films wouldn't stand a chance without the genius nominees in less-publicized realms like Production Design, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyle, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects.
Here at The Credits, we love all parts of film, which is why we created this infographic to celebrate the many industry icons who are making big waves (but perhaps not big red carpet debuts) at this year's 85th Academy Awards.
Talking With Malik Bendjelloul, Director of Oscar Nominated Documentary Searching for Sugar Man
A surprise hit at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Best International Documentary, first time filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man opened last summer to strong critical reviews and robust commercial success. The story of singer-songwriter Rodriguez, from his late 1960s emergence from the streets of Detroit; his startling and strange success in South Africa during the waning days of Apartheid in the 70s and 80s;
An Evening with Dror Moreh, Oscar Nominated Director of the Documentary The Gatekeepers
Dror Moreh’s stunning, sobering documentary The Gatekeepers is told from a remarkable point of view, or views, rather. Moreh managed to get six former directors of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, to speak to him for hours–on the record. The Shin Bet is, as the Los Angeles Times described the organization, "a combination of the CIA and the FBI.” The agency was created after the Six Day War of 1967,
How Would Lubitsch Do It? A Valentine’s Day Ode to the Classic Rom-Com
It’s Valentine’s Day, which means there’s a good chance you and your special someone might want to catch the latest lighthearted romantic comedy—but right now, there’s not much out that qualifies as such. Sure there is Silver Linings Playbook and Warm Bodies, two recent (and well executed) genre twists on the rom-com, but “light hearted” they are not. The former, up for 8 Academy Awards, is wonderful but dark,
We Are Living in a Star Wars Universe
The film world was riveted with the news that J.J. Abrams, perhaps the most logical successor to George Lucas for the Star Wars franchise, would direct Star Wars: Episode VII. As it’s been widely (and breathlessly) reported, Abrams has already successfully rebooted a space franchise with the release his 2009 Star Trek, which was a critical and commercial success.
Abrams admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he was more of Star Wars fan growing up.
Persistence, Pluck and Luck: Filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton Gets it Done
Four adopted girls scattered throughout America share one commonality: they were all adopted from China because the country’s "One Child Policy" put their parents in an impossible situation. Twelve men and women become the first-ever senior citizen hip-hop dance team in the country, performing at center court for the (then) New Jersey Nets. South Africa, among other nations, begins a co-production with the American children’s program Sesame Street to bring the beloved show to them,
How do you Make a Zombie a Sex Symbol? We Speak With Warm Bodies Writer/Director Jonathan Levine to Find out
It’s no easy to task to make a zombie palatable (let alone credible) as a love interest in a film. Yet, that’s exactly what writer/director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) has done with Warm Bodies, which he adapted from the Isaac Marion novel of the same name. The film centers around the budding paranormal romance between a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult) and a kick-ass young woman named Julie (Teresa Palmer),
Mommy Issues: Making Monsters with Mama Visual Effects Supervisor Aaron Weintraub
A father kills his wife and brings his two young daughters to a secluded cabin where his would-be murder/suicide attempt is foiled by one very maternal ghost. Years later, the girls are discovered, their feral upbringing posing the second biggest obstacle to a normal life behind a spirit that, to put it mildly, has become a bit possessive.
Mama may not be the feel-good hit of the new movie year, but it may be its most pleasant surprise,
A Meditation on Film Festivals: Unraveling Cinema’s Time-Tested Tradition
Sundance is, sadly, drawing to a close. For the last two weeks, the world of film has gone appropriately haywire with around-the-clock coverage of one of the most well recognized film festivals on earth.
One needn’t look farther than a film-trade addled Twitter feed to find first hand dispatches from ultra-exclusive parties, critics weighing in on their favorite new films, and gossip mills aflutter with what ‘it’ stars are wearing whilst gallivanting around Park City,
A Q&A With one of Iceland’s Premiere Filmmakers, Baltasar Kormákur, Director of The Deep
For anyone living in Iceland in the early 1980s, the 1984 shipwreck of the fishing boat Breki that claimed the lives of five men is the stuff of legend—thanks mostly to it’s lone survivor, a man named Gulli, who spent four hours in forty-degree water until he washed ashore near a jagged cliff of volcanic rock, which he proceeded to scale, and then he hiked for two more hours in 27-degree weather until he found safety.
A Q&A With Girl Rising Director Richard E. Robbins About the Nine Incredible Young Women in his Groundbreaking Documentary
Academy Award nominated director Richard E. Robbins will be screening a portion of his latest project, the crucial documentary Girl Rising, at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, January 21st. The film focuses on the story of nine girls from nine different countries born into unforgiving circumstances, with each girl’s story framed and written by a renowned author from her native country.
The film includes the story of Ruksana,
