Talking With Diego Luna About Directing Cesar Chavez
Directing his second feature, and his first in English, Mexican actor Diego Luna turned to one of the most admired figures in recent history: Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez. In the 1960s Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers, organized an historic grape boycott, and led a 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California that drew global attention to the plight of migrant farm workers.
Michael Pena stars in the biopic that focusses on Chavez’s early years,
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.
Fight Coordinator J.J. Perry Calls the Punches in Divergent
For most young adults, one of their most pressing questions is “What do I want to be when I grow up?” In the futuristic society in Divergent, the answer to that question is predetermined. At sixteen, they are sorted into one of five factions where they spend the rest of their lives. Shailene Woodley (The Descendants, Secret Life of an American Teenager) and Theo James (Underworld: Awakening) star in this adaptation of the bestselling young-adult novel by Veronica Roth.
The Grand Budapest Hotel Production Designer Adam Stockhausen Goes Handmade
Seven years ago, a young art director was given an appropriately quirky assignment on the set of The Darjeeling Limited: design the dishes for the dining cabin of Wes Anderson’s India-traversing train. It took “an awful lot of versions” to win over the discerning director, but Adam Stockhausen must have made a good impression—since then, he has served as production designer on Anderson’s last two films, Moonrise Kingdom and The
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.
Re-Drawing History With the Storyboard Artists of Mr. Peabody & Sherman
They rose to prominence more than half a century ago, a genius talking beagle who invented a time machine (plus won a Nobel prize and two Olympic medals) and the dorky little boy he adopted. As the whimsical world travelers who showed up in the middle of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Mr. Peabody and Sherman brought a generation of cartoon audiences to the farthest reaches of history thanks to their WABAC machine.
SXSW 2014: Home‘s Ronen Landa, the Horror Film Composer Scared of Horror
Composer Ronen Landa first came to SXSW in 2005. He was here with a documentary called The Dreams of Sparrows, a remarkable film shot in Iraq at the outset of the war. First time director Haydar Daffar collaborated with a team of Iraqi directors to capture life in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Landa had worked with the film’s producer, Aaron Raskin, who brought him in to compose.
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.
Building a Plane From Scratch With the Production Designer of Non-Stop
Have you ever walked through a missile silo? What about into the Oval Office or onto an alien planet? We didn’t think so. But chances are each of the millions of moviegoers who have flocked to see Non-Stop know what the inside of an airplane looks like. And since he was charged with creating an interior that looked totally realistic and doubled as a functional movie set, that posed a pretty big challenge for production designer Alec Hammond.
Flying the Unfriendly Skies with Non-Stop Stunt Coordinator Mark Vanselow
Using an airport bathroom can have the degree of difficulty of a gymnastics floor routine. But when your job is United States air marshal and there’s a mystery man on your plane threatening to kill one passenger every 20 minutes, taking care of business means means squeezing into the stall to swap punches with a bad guy like two angry sardines in a can. And though star Liam Neeson, playing air marshal Bill Marks, no doubt took some licks during filming,
Honorary Academy Award Winner D.A. Pennebaker on the Award’s Beguiling Charm
When the late, great Peter O’Toole learned he was to receive an honorary Academy Award in 2002, his initial reaction caught Hollywood by surprise. The Irish-born wag, then 70, dashed off a letter to the Academy asking them to hold off on the honor until he was 80. “I’m still in the game and might win the bugger outright,” wrote O’Toole, who was counting on a future shot at winning a competitive Oscar after being shutout seven times.
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.
Joshua Oppenheimer on Chatty Killers in his Oscar Nom’d Doc The Act of Killing
When filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer set out to document the aftermath of what he calls “one of the biggest killings in human history,” he started with the survivors.
But it is the killers who speak in his Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, a film that reinterprets the documentary.
“Documentary implies that we’re documenting a pre-existing reality, and I think we never are in nonfiction; we’re always creating reality with the people we film,”
How Matthu Placek Created the Single Take, 3D A Portrait of Marina Abramović
The synthesis of technology and art is at the very heart of cinema. Filmmakers are natural innovators. Whether they're working on a big budget film or a small independent, there has simply never been a film made in which the crew didn't have to surmount obstacles through ingenuity—be it with state of the art technology or a nuts and bolts solution.
The ingenuity, technical daring and beautiful beating heart Matthu Placek's 130919 •
Director Ritesh Batra on his Mumbai Set Love Story The Lunchbox
Writer/director Ritesh Batra is enjoying critical and viewer acclaim for his first feature-length film, The Lunchbox. The film, set in Mumbai, is a quiet love story that takes place mostly through hand-written letters. So it’s a surprise to find the Indian-born director and his film at the center of a fiery controversy over the current role and power of the Film Federation of India.
But the decision late last year by India’s official film body to select a lesser-known film with limited distribution,
How The Lego Movie Got Its Stop-Motion Look
When the trailer for The Lego Movie came out, the Internet was abuzz. The Lego characters had that signature stop-motion feel to them, moving in a slightly stilted manner. Was the movie filmed in stop-motion or CG animation? “There were a couple arguments that we all found quite humorous when we first put out the trailers. People on the Internet were saying they knew for a fact we were doing stop-motion,”
The Monuments Men Production Designer Jim Bissell Re-Creates a Ruined Europe
In The Monuments Men, art experts weave through battlefields and behind enemy lines in order to find art looted by the Nazis. Before he was a dictator, Adolf Hitler was an art student, and he planned to take the best art from the countries he conquered and assemble it in a museum that would rival the Louvre in Paris. It was the act of a lunatic, and The Monuments Men had to capture that scope.
Director Jehane Noujaim on her Oscar Nominated Doc The Square
An Oscar nomination can vault a young filmmaker into the big leagues. But for Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square, it means that her film might have the chance to be seen by many of the people who made it. The Square, a powerful, on-the-ground look at Egypt’s revolutionary uprising, was shot by Noujaim and a largely Egyptian crew on the volatile streets in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square for more than two years.
Sonic Manipulation: Deborah Stratman on her Foley Artist Doc Hacked Circuit
Hearing is believing—this is one of the points Debroah Stratman makes with her fantastic short film about foley artists, Hacked Circuit. While we often associate our eyes as the prime mover in our emotions when we watch a film, it’s our ears, Stratman argues, that moves us to really feel.
Stratman has made some very intriguing documentaries in her career. Hacked Circuit is her 28th film, her third at Sundance Film Festival.
Ilan Gabai, FX Technical Director of Rio 2, Talks Digital Wonders
Typically, the job of digital effects animator does not require previous experience working with live explosives. But it certainly looks good on a résumé.
Ilan Gabai, an effects technical director (FX TD) with Blue Sky Studios, can claim that experience. The 33-year-old grew up in Israel and served three years in his country’s defense forces where he handled grenades, mortars, and RPGs. “I got to blow up a lot of things during my training,”
