Has it Really Been 20 Years Since Toy Story?
Given the length of the lines (at least 100 people were turned away at the door) for South by Southwest’s, “Infinity & Beyond: Pixar & 20 Years Since Toy Story” panel, many of us have a friend and clearly miss our old Buzz Lightyear and Woody the cowboy toys. But this ‘behind the scenes’ look into the Pixar films that made so many of us animation junkies was the next best thing.
SXSW 2015: Constance Zimmer on her roles in Results, House of Cards & More
You know Constance Zimmer. If her name doesn't ring a bell, her face will. You've seen her before, typically as the no-nonsense, hard working, truth-telling badass who is this close to losing her cool on some less than forthright character. Perhaps you remember her as Dana Gordon from Entourage, the young, tough studio head who could ink multimillion dollar deals and go potshot for potshot with Jeremy Piven's logorrhific Ari Gold. (Fans of Zimmer as Gordon will be pleased to know she's reprising the role in the upcoming
The Second Annual White House Film Festival LIVE Today at 1
The second annual White House Student Film Festival takes place today at 1:00 pm EST. You can tune in and watch the festival live here. As we did last year for the festival's inaugural run, we reached out to Adam Garber, the deputy director of digital content for the White House, to learn a bit more about this year's program, which is focused on the theme of giving back. During the festival,
SXSW 2015: A Q&A With the Director & Star of She’s The Best Thing In It
Films by women, about women, and in many ways, targeted to women were a huge part of this year’s South by Southwest festival. Women were tremendously prominent in the line-up, serving as two of the four SXSW film keynote speakers: Ava DuVernay, the noted director of Selma, and Christine Vachon, who has produced some of the most celebrated American indie features, including the Academy Award wining Boys Don’t Cry.
SXSW 2015: Sony’s Steve Mosko Talks TV
Sony Pictures Television’s president Steve Mosko recalled the reaction of some of his fellow executives when they were preparing to green light an oddball script some years ago. The story was about a high school chemistry teacher with terminal cancer turning to the production and distribution of crystal meth in order to support his family after he died. Not only was this premise completely baffling to some of Mosko’s colleagues (wait, the protagonist is going to die?
SXSW 2015: Andrew Bujalksi on Writing and Directing Results
Writer/director Andrew Bujalski came into this year’s SXSW having already made four well respected, funny/weird films. His 2002 debut, Funny Ha Ha, is considered the first mumblecore film, and revolves around the lives of recent college grads who try, in their own singular ways, to put off adulthood for as long as possible. The film landed on New York Times critic A.O. Scott's top ten list for the year, and put Bujalski at the very forefront of a new wave of indie films.
SXSW 2015: Selma Director Ava DuVernay’s Moving Keynote Address
In her South by Southwest keynote address, director Ava DuVernay discussed taking on one of the greatest challenges for any filmmaker; the depiction of a historical event. For DuVernay, of course, it was the challenge of making Selma, the story of Martin Luther King Jr. leading the historic, dangerous march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery in support of African American voting rights in 1965. She accepted the project knowing she was the seventh choice for director (at various points Stephen Frears,
SXSW 2015: Alison Bechdel, Joshua Openheimer & Maria Hinojosa talk Storytelling
Maria Hinojosa, the executive producer and anchor of Latino USA on NPR, led a discussion between two leading lights in their respective fields; graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel and documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer. Bechdel’s last two works, the groundbreaking “Fun Home,” about her childhood and, more specifically, her closeted father, and “Are You My Mother?” which explores her relationship with her mother through the prism of psychoanalytic theory. Oppenheimer’s last two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and his latest,
SXSW 2015: Honeytrap Writer/Director Rebecca Johnson
In America we call them projects, and they’ve been the locus of many crucial, incredible films, quiet a few from Spike Lee, including Do the Right Thing and Clockers. They’re called favelas in Brazil, the setting for the Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s explosive City of God, while in Britain they’re called estates. These are places where large groups of lower income families and individuals, often minorities, are grouped together in sprwling,
SXSW 2015 Preview: Women to Watch
The programming at SXSW has become more robust each and every year. Part of the appeal of the festival's selections is the wide representation of female filmmakers, who have produced an especially rich mix of films for this year's slate.There are far too many filmmakers to chose from, so here's just a very quick peek at some of these talented women and the projects they've brought down to Austin.
Hannah Fidell 6 Years
Hannah Fidell is back after winning the Chicken and Egg award here in 2013 for her film A Teacher.
SXSW 2015 Preview: Hot Docs
We’re back in Austin for the SXSW film festival, and holy hell there’s a lot of stuff to see and do. The festival officially kicks off this Friday with the documentary Brand: A Second Coming, director Ondi Timoner’s profile of the comedian/author/activist Russell Brand’s evolution from hard charging bon vivant to political disruptor and revolutionary who has his own YouTube channel devoted to delivering subscribers the ‘Trews’ (true news).
Brand’s brand of verbosity and high energy is a fitting way to launch a festival with 100 world premieres,
Bert Marcus on his Knockout Documentary Champs
As star-studded as the front row of any primetime heavyweight fight, the boxing doc Champs calls on A-listers from Mark Wahlberg and Ron Howard to Denzel Washington and Mary J. Blige to weigh in on one of the most brutal sports in history. Beautifully shot reenactments and first-hand stories are interspersed with real footage of some of the most famous brawls of all-time, making for a riveting ride. But this isn't just any sports documentary —
The Return of Cinderella
Disney’s original animated Cinderella, an inescapable fact of most Western childhoods, won the Golden Bear in the musical film category at the very first Berlinale in 1951. A live-action contemporary version, nearly singing-free and also produced under Disney’s auspices, premiered at the most recent Berlinale, some 64-years after the original. Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James (best known as Rose in Downton Abbey) in the titular role,
VFX Supervisor Chris Harvey On Bringing Chappie to Life
For Chappie, the visual effects weren’t there to complement the story. They made the story.
“There are huge visual effects movies out there that have lots of explosions. That isn’t this movie,” said Chris Harvey, visual effects supervisor. “[Director] Neill [Blomkamp] shot it all on location without any kind of stage work, so we didn’t do environment [creation] work on this movie. There are no big explosions or destruction scenes. The visual effects work was focused on the creation of those robots.”
Patricia Clarkson on October Gale, Finding the Right Roles & More
If she’s not the hardest working woman in show business, she’s certainly one of the most visible. Patricia Clarkson, with her trademark sultry voice and a smile that could crack stone, has a new film out tomorrow and recently starred in the hit Broadway play “The Elephant Man” opposite Bradley Cooper. One of the most respected and versatile of contemporary actresses, Clarkson over the years has made important films with first-time directors (Lisa Cholodenko, Tom McCarthy, Peter Hedges) as well as iconic veterans (Martin Scorsese,
Director Michele Josue’s Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine
The documentary Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine puts a human face on the young man who paid the ultimate price for homophobia. Michele Josue’s accomplished debut film — poignant, revealing, powerful in its anger, grief and humanity — reminds us 15 years later what his friends, family and the world lost when Shepard was beaten to death in a notorious hate crime.
“There was a long list of motivations for me to make this film,”
Inside The Americans Costume Shop
"I knew going in that when people heard 1980s they’d automatically think neon, big hair, shoulder pads, and I also knew that was actually not true," costume designer Jenny Gering told us when we interviewed her about her work on The Americans. "1981 looks much more like the late 70s than what people associate with the 1980s. I knew it would be fun for me to reeducate the viewer to the way that time period actually looked.
The American’s Costume Designer Jenny Gering
If you haven’t seen FX’s hit series The Americans yet, you are missing out on the one of the most relentlessly entertaining, thoughtfully produced dramas on television. What’s more, for those of you who have any memory of the 1980s, The Americans is also one of the most gorgeously shot and costumed shows on TV, at once nailing it’s era and milieu and simultaneously subverting what you think the 80s looked like.
A Q&A With Maps to the Stars Screenwriter Bruce Wagner
Screenwriter Bruce Wagner knows Hollywood. At an early age, he witnessed the lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous firsthand. Growing up in Beverly Hills, he attended school with celebrities and later on, when he was working as a limousine driver, he drove countless members of the A-list around the city.
It’s no surprise then that Wagner enjoys writing about the Hollywood culture in novels like Force Majuer and Dead Stars and in screenplays like the one he wrote for Maps to the Stars.
Celebrating Black History Month
Black History Month comes to a close this Saturday, and just a week later the 50th anniversary of the first march from Selma to Montgomery, an event that shocked the nation and came to be known as "Bloody Sunday," will be commemorated in Selma on March 7 (a moment so brilliantly conveyed in Ava DuVernay's Selma, one of the films on our list). From World War II to the Civil Rights movement, we've looked at eight moments,
