Exec Producer & Writer on FX’s Tyrant Talks About Groundbreaking Show
FX's new show Tyrant is unlike anything currently on television. Showcasing Arab characters and cultures, set in the Middle East, the 10-episode first season is a bold step towards showing American audiences people and situations rarely depicted. While Netflix's Orange is the New Black is deservedly lauded for filling the frame with three dimensional female characters who are black, brown, gay and transgendered, Tyrant will put faces on our screen who have too often been portrayed as villains or marginal characters at best.
Taiwan, Paris & the Presidio: A Global Village Creates Lucy
Filmmaker Luc Besson has a thing for dangerous women. In 1990 Besson gave us Nikita, a felon-turned-assassin in La Feme Nikita. Four years later he came back with The Professional, in which a young girl named Mathilda (Natalie Portman) is trained by professional assassin Léon (Jean Reno) after her family is killed in a police raid. And three short years after that, Besson created his most powerful woman to date, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich),
Writer/Director David Cronenberg on Technology, Transformation & Money
David Cronenberg has a new short film , The Nest, that was recently commissioned by the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. The film is a single shot, 9-minute take in which a woman (Evelyne Brochu) is undergoing a surgery consultation with an unseen doctor (voiced by Cronenberg). The short doesn’t have any of Cronenberg’s trademark visual potency—nothing molts, explodes, or mutates—but what it does deliver, in spades, is his fascination with technology,
Filmmaking on the Edge at the 2014 Provincetown Film Festival
The Credits is back at the Provincetown Film Festival, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't just a little bit thrilled. Last year, our first in Provincetown, was the type of introduction that will marry you to a place, and a festival, for life. We had the great fortune to spend some time with legendary filmmaker, writer, visual artist, wit and unofficial (but sort of official) Provincetown mayor John Waters.
From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.
Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th.
Watch How to Train Your Dragon 2‘s Dean DeBlois Take Kids’ Questions
We learned a lot from talking to writer/director Dean DeBlois. One is, he must be one of the most calm, even tempered and laid back individuals helming a major film franchise in the business. Two, a lot of work, and risk, went into making How to Train Your Dragon 2, a sequel that is being heralded as one of the best in animated history. And three, the man is committed to creating an animated trilogy that’ll live on and inspire kids and adults alike for years to come.
How to Train Your Dragon 2‘s Writer/Director Dean DeBlois
When Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders film How to Train Your Dragon was released in 2010, it was a critical darling but had something of a sleepy opening. Adapted from Cressida Cowell’s book, How to Train Your Dragon contained everything that you expect from a stellar animated film—a great script, no small amount of wit, dramatic depth and fantastic effects. At its core it had a relationship that was hard to beat,
Get Excited: Star Wars: Episode VII, the Coen Brothers as Writers for Hire & More
What do J.J. Abrams, the Coen Brothers, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Ames and UNICEF have in common? Nothing, save for the fact that they're all apart of this round-up of things to be excited about. Let's have a look:
The Coen Brothers as the Best Possible Writers for Hire
Here’s the [true] story; one afternoon in May, in 1943, an Army Air Forces B-24 bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Former Olympic track star Louis Zamperini,
Celebrating the Unsung Maternal Heroes of the Silver Screen for Mother’s Day
Mothers’ Day is this Sunday, and it’s come to our attention that, strange as it may seem, celebrities have mothers too. Some of them even have celebrity mothers. Though really, if you consider all the time, industry knowledge and innate talent that it takes to succeed in Hollywood, it makes sense that we see so many famous kids with famous parents (see Liza Minelli and Judy Garland) or sprawling thespian dynasties (see the Barrymores or Redgraves).
Mr. Sunshine: David Lynch, Auteur of the Uncanny, Talks Inspiration
One of the first words out of David Lynch’s mouth nearly brought the house down at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on a drizzly night last week. The icon behind films as disparate and evocative as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, as well as the groundbreaking television series Twin Peaks, was patiently listening as Paul Holdengräber, the erudite director of public programs at the New York Public Library,
Angus MacLachlan on the Art of Writing for and Directing Actors
Paul Schneider won Best Actor at the Tribeca Film Festival last week for his role as Otto Wall in Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That. The character was a tricky one—Schneider was playing someone affable and intelligent, but also unfocused and obliviously selfish. He spends most of the film in a state of confusion about why his life seems to be falling apart. His wife has left him, his daughter doesn’t feel safe in his new house,
Tribeca 2014: David Simon, Beau Willimon, Nate Silver & Anne Thompson Talk Stories
We all know that our shopping habits are fodder for various entities looking to target their advertising and increase their profits, but the same kind of Big Data is being used by media and entertainment entities, from HBO and Netflix to the New York Times and Fox News, to figure out who we are, what we read and watch, and what, perhaps, we want next. "Does betting on the ‘wisdom of crowds’ bode well or ill for future innovation in film,
Tribeca 2014: Writer/Director Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That
Writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That includes one of the more frank and pathos-free sex scenes in recent memory. Otto Wall (Paul Schneider) and Mildred (Ashley Hinshaw), who recently met on the online dating service OkCupid, sit opposite one another on chairs, naked. They are describing, with exacting detail, what they’d like to do to each other. Otto’s wife has recently left him, and he’s experimenting for the first time in his life with online dating.
A Silicon God: Transcendence Screenwriter Jack Paglen’s Machine Dream
What is every budding screenwriter’s dream? How about having your screenplay land on the coveted Black List in 2012 (a selection of the best un-produced scripts in Hollywood) and, a scant two years later, premiere on the big screen with Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall and Paul Bettany as your stars, and serve as the directorial debut for one of the most gifted cinematographer’s of his generation, Wally Pfister. This is the reality for Jack Paglen,
Noah: Artistically Ambitious, Economically Advantageous
At first blush, it appeared that Noah represented writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s first real foray into pure big budget spectacle. The indie auteur that burst onto the scene with his twitchy, unsettling debut Pi, only to follow that up with one of the most breathtakingly devastating cinematic depictions of addiction in many years with Requiem for a Dream, was now going big budget CGI in the retelling of the Biblical story of Noah's ark on a grand scale.
Getting Schooled by Anna Deavere Smith on her HBO Documentary
Playwright, actress, and professor Anna Deavere Smith does not like to be precious about the work she has done with her students over the years. She’s bracingly honest and laid back about the time and effort she’s devoted to helping young people who dream of carving out a career like the one she has had. “It’s not so noble as sharing the craft,” she said when asked why she continues to teach well into a successful career as varied as it is impressive.
SXSW 2014: Sarah-Violet Bliss & Charles Rogers on Grand Jury Prize-Winning Fort Tilden
How do you write and shoot feature in a few months, cut it, have it accepted by a major film festival and then have it win that festival's major award? Writer/directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers would be the perfect speakers on a panel here at SXSW on this very subject, considering as recently as last May, their Grand Jury Prize Winning feature Fort Tilden wasn’t even a thought in their mind.
In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part II
Yesterday we took a look at four filmmakers whose work has earned them an Oscar nomination (in Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's case, his sixth), sharing with you some of their thoughts on their craft. In one of the most anticipated Oscars in recent memory, it's refreshing to step back and reflect on exactly how these talented individuals created such memorable moments in such a fantastic year for film.
Georgian Filmmaker Nana Ekvtimishvili on her Powerful Debut In Bloom
The debut feature from Georgian filmmaker Nana Ekvtimishvili, In Bloom, is a powerful coming-of-age story that takes place in in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shot in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, it’s about two 14 year-olds, Eka (Lika Babluani) and her best friend Natia (Mariam Bokeria) whose ordinary lives—school, friends, domestic strife—are set against the sudden changes to the social order of the country as well as a backdrop of war in the Abkhazia region.
Novelist Joyce Maynard on Jason Reitman’s Adaptation of her Labor Day
Joyce Maynard is a rarity in the movie world: a writer who’s thrilled with the film adaptation of her novel. Maynard’s “Labor Day” was adapted for the screen and directed by Jason Reitman. It’s about a reclusive single mother (Kate Winslet), her 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) and the escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who hides out in their rundown New England house and creates, at least for a long weekend, an unorthodox family that fill a need in all three people.
