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: 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 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.
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 —
Inherent Risk: Editor and Producer Mathilde Bonnefoy on Making Citizenfour
When documentarian Laura Poitras asked Edward Snowden why he had chosen her, out of all the potential people to disclose his information to, he replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” At the time Snowden was writing to her as “citizen four,” and for months Poitras alone knew about his trove of information on the N.S.A.'s surveillance program.
Eventually, as we learn in Citizenfour, the Oscar-nominated documentary that culminated from her relationship with Snowden,
Sundance 2015: Talking to Cassian Elwes, Co-Producer of Inaugural Horizon Awards
The Sundance Film Festival has made a few recent announcements that speak to a fresh commitment to help spread some of the festival’s opportunities around. The first was a new tool to help lesser-known filmmakers get their work seen by using a new service, Quiver Digital. As reported by Mashable, Quiver Digital is a distribution dashboard that allows users to push their films to Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Google Play and Sony Entertainment Network,
2014 in Review: Portrait Artists, Sound Designers & More – Part I
As a wild year in film draws to a close, we’re looking back at some of the talented filmmakers we’ve had a chance to speak with, and all the ways they schooled on us how films really get made. Sound designers, construction crew managers, creature supervisors, production designers, a portrait artist (for Wes Anderson, naturally) and more (our first group of filmmakers are, admittedly, a bit more well known). Although these folks don’t really care how much attention they get,
Indian Paintbrush’s Peter McPartlin on Producing The Grand Budapest Hotel & More
The actual business of making films, from acquiring insurance to dealing with lawyers to the Byzantine permits, permissions and contact stipulations can be, in the right storyteller’s hands, entirely entertaining. Indian Paintbrush’s COO Peter McPartlin is one of those storytellers.
There have been books about the business of Hollywood (Peter Biskund’s Down and Dirty Pictures comes to mind) that reveal the huge personalities orbiting behind the filmmakers and the stars,
Disney Animation Pushes the Boundaries of Technology With Big Hero 6
Fighting an evil villain and saving the day are probably not very high on an average teenager’s daily to-do list. But for robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, star of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ animated feature Big Hero 6, those tasks just happen to pop up on a typical weekday. With the film opening in domestic theaters this past Friday, audiences are now joining the mini mastermind and his inflatable robot sidekick, Baymax, on an action-packed adventure as they get entangled in a dangerous plot unfolding in the bustling,
Beyond Interstellar: 12 Films to Put On Your Calendar
After months and months of speculation that Christopher Nolan alone seems able to create around his films, the general public will get a chance to weigh in on his most passionate project yet, Interstellar. You’ve already heard about Interstellar. Everyone has. What we thought we’d do is give you a quick cheat sheet on some upcoming films, leading you right to Christmas day.
November 14
It’ll be a very strong week for serious film,
Piecing Together The Imitation Game
The only thing more astonishing than Alan Turing’s efforts during World War II was the way his own government treated him after. Turing was, by all measures, a war hero, and his and his team's efforts were partly responsible for saving, by some estimates, 14 million lives.
One of the fathers of computing, he led a group of linguists, scholars, chess champions and intelligence officers in an effort to crack the “unbreakable” codes of Germany’s Enigma machine.
The Sundance of Horror: L.A.’s Screamfest is Freakish Fun
L.A.’s Screamfest is assured of two things this year: it will once again be the biggest horror film festival in the United States, and it won’t draw the ire of the Professional Clown Club. There appear to be no murderous clowns in this year’s festival lineup.
If you’ve been following entertainment news over the past few days, you might have noticed the kerfuffle between the Professional Clown Club and FX’s American Horror Story,
Spirits & Passion Collide in The Book of Life
Animator, painter, writer and director Jorge R. Gutiérrez has won Annies and Emmys for his animated television series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon. His work caught the eye of another Mexican polymath, writer, director, producer and novelist Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim), who’s producing Gutiérrez ‘s feature debut The Book of Life, which bows this Friday, October 17. The Book of Life is an enchanting story of friendship,
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,
Filming in the Paris Catacombs for As Above, So Below
Imagine all your fears, mistakes and regrets returning to haunt you…while you’re trapped in a claustrophobic 180-mile underground cave system and mass grave. Apparently brothers John and Drew Dowdle found this premise inspiring enough to write Legendary and Universal’s new psychological horror film As Above, So Below. The same twisted minds behind Quarantine and Devil, the brothers are no strangers to inducing audience-wide panic attacks. Legendary CEO and As Above producer Thomas Tull called the Dowdles with the idea of setting a movie in the Paris Catacombs and the two filmmakers were all too happy to oblige him.
International Cast & Crew Cook Up The Hundred-Foot Journey
Sitting in the theater of the Museum of the Moving Image, everyone eagerly awaits the arrival of Bollywood icon Om Puri. Located in Astoria, Queens, the recent renovations at the museum added this 267-seat theater for events such as this, where locals and tourists alike can take in great films and sit for interviews with legends they likely have never heard of. Om Puri is here to be interviewed by Indian actress and author,
Comic-Con 2014: A Snapshot of Films, Panels & Events
Comic-Con and its overflowing abundance is upon us once again. We’ll help guide you through the costumed chaos with a selection of offerings from top movie studios, the “only at Comic-Con” events, and our own wish list of events.
Major Studio Showings:
Thursday, July 24
11:15am Toy Story That Time Forgot (Disney)
If the words “you’ve got a friend in me” set your heart aflutter,
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.
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.
