Writer/Director Emmanuelle Bercot on Standing Tall
French actress and director Emmanuelle Bercot took the Cannes Film Festival by storm in 2015. She starred in Maiwenn’s Mon roi (My King) which garnered Bercot the festival’s Best Actress prize. Meanwhile, La Tete haute (Standing Tall), which Bercot cowrote and directed, kicked off the prestigious festival, making Bercot the first female director to open Cannes since 1987.
Bercot says that as an actress and a viewer,
SXSW 2016: The Duplass Brothers, A Journey that Began in Austin
The Duplass Brothers (Mark and Jay) were back at SXSW on Saturday to discuss their successful careers and provide some words of wisdom to filmmakers who are just starting off. Austin is where is all started for the New Orleans natives; they filmed their first feature film, The Puffy Chair, in Austin.
Their talk had the generous feel of a commencement address—here were two successful alums, grateful and humble, ready to share their hard-earned wisdom.
SXSW 2016: Ilana Glazer & Abbi Jacobson Talk Hillary Clinton, Broad City & More
YAS QUEEN! Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of Comedy Central’s Broad City brought their special brand of irreverence and humor to SXSW on Saturday. Featured on a panel hosted by Maria Clare’s editor-in-chief, Anne Fulenwider, the friends chatted about their hilarious comedy and so much more.
Starting as a web series, Broad City made its television premiere in January 2014. The third season, which began on February 17, 2016,
SXSW Alumni: Lena Dunham’s Start in Austin
Girls creator Lena Dunham can credibly say that her career officially began at the SXSW Film Festival. It started with the rejection of her short film Creative Nonfiction. Instead of giving up on it, Dunham kept working on it and re-submitted the film. The determination paid off— Creative Nonfiction was accepted. When she came to Austin with the film, she not only had what she called "the best week of her life"
The Hilarious Writer/Director Michael Showalter Discusses Hello, My Name Is Doris
Hello, My Name is Doris, the latest comedy from Wet Hot American Summer co-creator Michael Showalter, stars Sally Field as a woman falling in love for the first time. We talk to the writer/director about creating a new type of comic protagonist, landing Sally Field and having to be the bad guy on set.
Hello, My Name is Doris started as a short film.
SXSW Alumni: Trey Parker & Matt Stone’s Start in Austin
As we settle into Austin and prepare for SXSW 2016, we're also looking back at some of the great careers that were launched here. We begin with longtime creative partners Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who brought their animated short, The Spirit of X-Mas and its' cadre of soon-to-be-infamous characters—Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny—to South by Southwest in 1997. Yet their road to SXSW began years earlier, in 1992, when Parker and Stone, then students at the University of Colorado,
Watch the new International Trailer for Ghostbusters
We were thrilled when the first official trailer for Paul Feig's Ghostbusters dropped on March 3. Frankly, if you're not excited about watching Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones battle the supernatural in New York, well, maybe you need to have your head examined (or you're a humorless ghost). The new Ghostbusters movie,
SXSW 2016: A Brief List of Some of the Narrative Features We’re Excited About
This week we're headed to the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, where we'll once again run around like lunatics, trying to figure out how to parse 139 features (52 of them from first-time filmmakers), 89 World Premieres, 13 North American Premieres and 8 U.S. Premieres. This is to say nothing of the TV lineup, which has grown in recent years, and includes some hottest properties this year from Cinemax, HBO, AMC and more.
Here's just a brief glance at some of what we're excited to see in the narrative feature category.
Writer/Director Dominique Schilling on her Film A Reason
Writer/director Dominieque Schilling's film A Reason centers on a generational clash, moving in often surprising, funny, and all-too-believably painful ways. So in other words, it feels like watching an actual family. We meet Serena (Magda Apanowicz), a young, introverted lesbian and her controlling older brother Nathan (Nathan Hilgrim), who gather, along with the rest of their family, at the house of their elegant, opionionated elderly Aunt Irene (Marion Ross) to hear the reading of her will.
Before Fantastic Beasts, new Trailer Reveals J.K. Rowling set to Release Four New Stories
Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly revealed this trailer for J.K. Rowling's History of Magic in North America, which teases the four brand new stories Rowling will be releasing on Pottermore today. As EW revealed, these new stories will help set the stage for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which will take viewers into the world of North American wizarding (specifically, in New York City) and is based on Rowling's first official script,
Watch the First Official Ghostbusters Trailer
The first official trailer for Ghostbusters is here, and it takes only 40 seconds for Kristen Wiig's Erin Gilbert to be covered in ectoplasm. A brief set up introduces who our Ghostbusters are; Erin Gilbert (Wiig) is the brainiac ("Erin, no one's better at quantum physics than you!); Kate McKinnon is Jilian Holtzman, the brilliant engineer, Melissa McCarthy is Abby Yates, the team leader, and Leslie Jones is Patty Tolan, the one who knows New York City inside and out.
Oscars 2016: Spotlight Surprises With Best Picture Win
A genuinely surprising Oscars wrapped with Tom McCarthy's Spotlight winning Best Picture over equally likely contenders The Revenant and The Big Short. Mad Max: Fury Road cleaned up the technical awards, which wasn't surprising, but Mark Rylance beating out Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor sure was. Despite five nominations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't pick up a single award (but droids C-3PO,
Chatting With Day out of Days Writer/Director Zoe Cassavetes
In Day Out Of Days, starring Alexia Landeau and Melanie Griffith, writer/director Zoe Cassavetes follows the struggles of a forty-year-old actress trying to stay relevant in Hollywood. We talk to Cassavetes about making her second feature film, crowd-funding and what she learned from her trailblazer parents, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
I was reading that you chose to go down the crowd-funding route to finance the film so you could cast your friend and co-writer,
Know Your Oscar Nominees: Live Action, Animated & Documentary Short Films
We've covered a slew of the either often overlooked or misunderstood nominated categories for this year's Oscars. Earlier today we published our technical guide to visual effects, and in the past week or so we've looked at editing, costume design, and sound mixing and editing. Now we're going to shift our focus a bit and look at the short film category; live action, animated and documentary.
Berlinale 2016: A Recap
With Meryl Streep presiding over the festival’s international jury, the 66th Berlinale handed out awards yesterday and drew to a close. The Golden Bear went to Fuocoammare, or Fire at Sea, a tragic and topical Italian-French co-production from the director Gianfranco Rosi. Taking place on the Sicilian island Lampedusa, the documentary thoughtfully and powerfully examines the ongoing refugee crisis, through the lens of a 12-year-old Italian boy,
Judd Apatow Brings the Love to Netflix
The warts and all view of relationships we know and love from Judd Apatow’s comedies is set to become bingeable with today’s premiere of his Netflix series Love. Love follows dorky nice guy Gus (Paul Rust) and freewheeling tough girl Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) as they embark on a relationship. The half hour comedy series was created, written and executive produced by Apatow, Rust and Lesley Arfin. It was originally conceived as a film by husband and wife team Rust and Arfin (who was a writer on the Apatow-produced Girls) and Apatow helped them develop it into a TV rom-com about a slow-burning romance.
The Wild Hail, Caesar! Press Conference at the 66th Berlinale Film Festival
An unwitting, kidnapped communist. A gay (or so implied) tap dancing undercover agent. Very angry rival twin gossip columnists. These are George Clooney, Channing Tatum, and Tilda Swinton in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest, Hail Caesar!, which doesn’t have quite the gravitas of, say, No Country For Old Men, or even A Serious Man, but more than makes up for that in chuckles,
New Teaser Hints at Opening Shot of Star Wars: Episode VIII
Principal photography officially began on Star Wars: Episode VIII at Pinewood Studios in London on February 15, 2016. The teaser announcing this news had one very interesting reveal—either this could be one of the opening shots of Episode VIII, or, writer/director Rian Johnson was on set for the very final shot of The Force Awakens. Considering The Force Awakens was very much J.J.
Talking to Writer-Director Tobias Lindholm About his Oscar-Nominated A War
The third big-screen collaboration between Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm and actor Pilou Asbaek, A War follows a company commander through the horrors of Afghanistan and back to Denmark, where he's put on trial for alleged war crimes. The movie, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, has a semi-improvisational style and features mostly nonprofessional performers. Lindholm's two previous movies, R and A Hijacking,
Warner Bros. Names Ryan Coogler First Creative Talent Ambassador
Ryan Coogler's young career continues to move in interesting directions. The writer-director burst onto the scene in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, a Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner at Sundance. This past year, he co-wrote and directed Creed, again teaming up with Fruitvale star Michael B. Jordan as the titular son of Apollo Creed, who goes on to become a protegé of Rocky Balboa.
