The Ambitious, Beguiling The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see your life through someone else’s eyes? In his ambitious feature debut, writer/director Ned Benson gives his characters this unique chance in the emotionally charged tale of love, loss and rediscovery that is The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. The film follows the relationship of estranged couple Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) from first blush to final breath as they try to regain the connection they once had...

Whiplash Composer Justin Hurwitz Settles the Score

Director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz met at Harvard playing in the same band. By sophomore year they were roommates, and soon enough the two were taking time off from school to create what they thought was just a student film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. “The idea for the film was to do a sixteen millimeter black and white vérité style movie, but juxtaposed with this big, lush 90-piece orchestral romantic score,”...

Creating The Boxtrolls by Hand

The Boxtrolls is a stop-animation fable directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable about the foul monsters who live beneath the cobblestone streets of Cheesebridge. The deal with this Victorian-era hamlet is that it’s obsessed by money and class, a posh place where the air is redolent with the stench of fine cheese. Chesebridgeians love their cheese, so this is exactly what the villainous Boxtrolls prey on—at night, they crawl out from their dank, fetid sewer homes and steal the residents of Cheesebridge’s precious cheese!...

The 52nd New York Film Festival

Major film premieres from three of cinema’s most iconoclastic directors, a documentary about one of the most controversial figures in recent American history and some of the best of world cinema highlight the 52nd New York Film Festival, which runs from September 26 to October 12.

As the last major festival of the year, you might think NYFF’s main slate would be filled with films that have already played in any one of the fests that came before,...

Jonathan Tropper on Adapting his Novel This Is Where I Leave You

Novelist, screenwriter and television show creator Jonathan Tropper had the odd experience adapting his novel “This is Where I Leave You” for the screen before it was even published. “By the time I was on book tour, I was already writing the screenplay, and I got confused with what parts were only in the book and what were in the script,” he says. Tropper’s writing began attracting film producers since his debut novel "Plan B" was published in 2000.” His novels are populated with smart,...

Building the Sensational Sets of The Maze Runner

One way to jumpstart your film career is to create your own mini-masterpiece, have it blow up on YouTube, and force Hollywood to come knocking. This was the case for animator/director Wes Ball, whose 2012 short film Ruin grabbed the attention of 20th Century Fox. Ball was called to a meeting where the longtime animator was asked to take the reigns on an adaptation of a popular 2009 sci-fi YA novel. While there, he successfully pitched them to turn Ruin into a feature...

Working Through Birdman’s Brilliant Contradictions

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, out October 17th, marks his first formal foray into the comedy world, but this film only strengthens his reputation for touching, intricately woven narratives. A little too intricate, perhaps, as Iñárritu’s focus on contradiction, validation, and all things meta blend into a swirling mass of crises for both viewers and characters alike. But worry not – Iñárritu has a plan, and Birdman proves to be a film that brings an audience closer to the story than they might expect...

The Drop Director Michaël R. Roskam on Filming the Brooklyn Way

How did a Belgian director, most well known for his fantastic, Oscar-nominated foreign language film Bullhead, about a young cattle farmer’s deal with a notorious beef trader, end up filming one of the best New York crime thrillers in recent years with a predominately international cast and crew? Michaël R. Roskam's The Drop is based on crime novelist Dennis Lehane's short story "Animal Rescue," adapted by Lehane himself for his first feature film script. The Drop'...

As TIFF Draws to a Close, Films & Performances Drawing Heat

As the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) moves into its final weekend, and with Cannes, Venice and Telluride all in our rear view mirror, there's some considerable heat around specific projects and performances. And while the New York Film Festival will see a few more major premieres (David Fincher's Gone Girl and Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice), here are a few of the most talked about performances and films leading into fall and the release of most of the Oscar hopefuls...

Drawing Katniss, Magneto & More: Costume Illustrator Phillip Boutte Jr.

Phillip Boutte Jr. has been involved in film since he was three years old, when he began acting. He acted until he was around 16-years old, when he was growing tired of the roles he was being offered. “I didn’t like the way they were portraying young black men on TV,” he said, “every audition I was going on was for ‘Wiseass Kid number five,’ so I had an identity crisis about what I wanted to do,...

Native 3D: The Future of Spatial Movie Production

What do the 3D epics Guardians of the Galaxy, Godzilla, and Gravity have in common save for being huge hits and starting with the letter 'G'? None of them were shot in 3D.

If you’re going to make a 3D movie, you can either shoot it that way, sometimes referred to as native 3D and the preferred method for filmmakers like James Cameron, or, you can convert your film into 3D during post-production like the above films did...

Full Immersion: Hollywood Eyes New Storytelling Methods

The dreams of a serious virtual reality, the kind of full-tilt total immersion that have been a part of the collective imagination for as long as we've had computers, had seemingly come and gone. Despite the fever dream virtual realities imagined in films like Tron, The Lawnmower Man, and perhaps most evocatively in Kathryn Bigelow's barely remembered but quite robust on a fresh viewing, Strange Days, we've been left wanting when it comes to virtual reality…until now. The VR scene has had a recent rebirth in the eyes of the consumer,...

Ruffalo & Tatum Wrestle With Difficult Roles in Foxcatcher

If you are unaware of the tragic true events that lie at the heart of the upcoming film Foxcatcher and want to remain blissfully unaware (good luck) going into the film, read no further. The film follows the story of the Schultz brothers, Dave (Mark Ruffalo) and Mark (Channing Tatum), two Olympic gold medal-winning wrestlers, and their relationship with the wealthy heir John du Pont (Steve Carell) who built a state-of-the-art wrestling facility on his mother's vast estate called Foxcatcher...

Hope Floats: The True Story Behind Dolphin Tale 2

There was almost no reason to expect that there could have been a sequel to Dolphin Tale, considering it was based on a true story and a sequel would invariably have to be fiction. Not that Hollywood is averse to sequels (or prequels, or trilogies, or origin stories, or re-imaginings), but the original Dolphin Tale was a special case.

Dolphin Tale was released in September, 2011, and told the story of Winter,...

The Bold Adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the Screen

There is a moment in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild” where she has it out with her mother while hiking in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon—only by this point, her mother is dead, and the reckoning is with Strayed's own grief and anger on what would have been her mother's fiftieth birthday. Strayed catalogued some of the worsts things her mother had done, with dying at forty-five being the worst of the worst. These included occasionally smoking pot in front of her and her siblings,...

DP Emmanuel Lubezki Soars Again With Birdman

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki could credibly claim to have put together some of the greatest shots in modern filmmaking. By the early aughts he’d already worked with a slew of great American directors, including Mike Nichols (The Birdcage, 1996), Martin Brest (Meet Joe Black, 1998) Tim Burton (Sleep Hollow, 1999), and Michael Mann (Ali, 2001), to say nothing of the generation defining 1994 film Reality Bites, directed by Ben Stiller...

Extreme Personalities: Four Fall Films About People on the Edge

Sociopaths, addicts, battle fatigued soldiers trying to hold onto their humanity—yup, summer blockbuster season is just about over. The fall is packed with films everyone's excited about, from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to David Fincher's Gone Girl. Here are four films we're looking forward to that involve people dealing with extremes, internally and externally.

Whiplash – October 10

“There are a lot of movies about the joy of music,” director Damien Chazelle said in his director’s statement,...

BK 101: How International Cast & Crew of The Drop Studied Brooklyn

A Belgian, a Brit and a Swede walk into a Brooklyn bar. This is either the beginning of that rare joke involving Belgians and Swedes, or, it's exactly what was happening when the cast and crew behind The Drop were working their butts off to become credible Brooklynites while prepping for the crime thriller. Directed by the Belgian Michaël Roskam, and starring Tom Hardy (British) and Noomi Rapace (Swedish), much of the cast and a good number of the crew are from outside the U.S.,...

Saying Goodbye to James Gandolfini in The Drop

James Gandolfini’s final film performance can be seen this September 12 in The Drop, directed by Michaël Roskam. The script, the first by master crime writer Dennis Lehane, is based on his short story “Animal Rescue.” Gandolfini plays Cousin Marv, a once formidable Brooklyn heavy who now runs his namesake bar, a place that does a little more than provide drinks to thirsty locals. Cousin Marv’s place is a also a ‘drop bar,’ one of a selection of watering holes where members of organized crime stash away money that can’t be put in any bank...

Filming The November Man in Beautiful Belgrade

The entire process of filmmaking, from script to post, is about problem solving. The inviolable law of the medium is often Murphy’s Law, and filmmakers find themselves having to reverse course, rewrite, restructure, rethink their film due to some fresh problem. Yet, as David Mamet memorably wrote in one of his must read books on filmmaking (he has a few) “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” often it’s the problems that occur and their unexpected consequences that can make a scene, or even a film,...