New York Film Festival

New York Film Festival Debuts Poster Designed By Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Vikram Murthi — Thu, 19 May 2016 17:17:07 GMT

As the 69th Cannes Film Festival slowly wraps up for the year, it's time to look ahead at another festival happening a few months away. The 54th annual New York Film Festival takes place between September 30th and October 16th, and though it'll be some time before the lineup is released, today the Film Society of Lincoln Center has debuted the festival's poster. Designed by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the poster functions as an artistic signature for the festival, a symbol of NYFF's unique stamp on the world. NYFF director Kent Jones explains that Apichatpong Weerasethakul was "more than just a 'logical' choice to do our poster — he's one of the world's greatest filmmakers and he works in the visual arts," and that he send them "a beautifully wrought, self-contained little world." Jones further says that the festival has "had many great posters designed by a long list of great artists, but this is one of the very best." Check out the poster above.

READ MORE: 53rd New York Film Festival Announces Main Slate Offerings; 'Brooklyn,' 'Carol' and 'Bridge of Spies' Top List

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has directed numerous acclaimed films, four of which have been selected for the NYFF lineup: "Tropical Malady," "Syndromes and a Century," "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," which also won the Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, and his most recent feature "Cemetery of Splendor." His artwork has been exhibited in such diverse places as the New Museum in New York, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and more. Other poster artists for the NYFF include Saul Bass, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, Manny Farber, and last year's designer Laurie Anderson.

The poster will be available for purchase at all venues at the festival.

READ MORE: Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Why 'Cemetery of Splendour' Will Be His Final Film in Thailand

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FilmRise Acquires Shocking Murder Documentary 'The Witness'

Mike Lown — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:50:34 GMT

READ MORE: The Kings of Queens: 'The Witness' and 'In Jackson Heights' Examine a New York Borough, Then and Now

On March 13, 1964, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was stabbed to death right outside her apartment complex in Queens, New York. It was later reported that there were 38 witnesses to her murder, but none chose to intervene. The new documentary "The Witness" explores the murky details around her death and the subsequent investigation, and it has just been acquired by FilmRise.

The directorial debut of screenwriter James Solomon, "The Witness" details the horrific incident, its aftermath, and Kitty’s brother's arduous journey to bring her murderer to justice.

“This film is not only an unraveling of what really happened that fateful night, but also about a brother’s relentless quest to reclaim his sister Kitty’s life from her death, "said Solomon. “I am thrilled that FilmRise will be bringing to audiences the untold story of Kitty Genovese and her remarkable brother, Bill."

FilmRise plans to release the film sometime in spring 2016.

READ MORE: 53rd New York Film Festival Announces Main Slate Offerings; 'Brooklyn,' 'Carol' and 'Bridge of Spies' Top List

Watch: Sleep is a Hallucinatory Epidemic in Exclusive Poster and Trailer for 'Cemetery of Splendor'

Riyad Mamedyarov — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:36:53 GMT

READ: Watch: New International Trailer For Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Cemetery Of Splendor'

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendor" was lauded on last year's festival circuit, starting with an acclaimed debut in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film, a haunting tale which explores the familial, societal and economical issues of Thailand through the lens of a sleeping sickness that has begun plaguing the people, marks the director's return to producing films in his native tongue.

The spiritualistic film tells the story of an aging woman who finds solace, comfort, revelations, magic and healing in the world of comatose victims. The enigmatic tale is one that incorporates notes of magical realism and tales of redemption and empathy. These thematic issues that Weerasethakul tackles are not ones that he is unfamiliar with, having been known to explore the dilemmas of Thailand's society in his previous films.

The film saw its U.S. debut at the 2015 New York Film Festival and will next screen in the Spotlight section at Sundance later this month. The film will open in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Center on March 4. IFC will also be playing other films by Weerasethakul, including "Tropical Malady," "Syndromes and a Century" and the New York theatrical premiere of "Mekong Hotel."

READ: Cannes Review: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Cemetery Of Splendour'

Parisian Arts Initiative Launching 'American Fringe' Film Series in 2016

Zack Sharf — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 20:05:55 GMT

Richard Peña, Director Emeritus of the New York Film Festival, is taking his talent for programming across the Atlantic to Paris, where he and co-curator Alessia Palanti will launch a new 2016 screening program in coordination with The Arts Arena, a Parisian nonprofit initiative in the visual arts, performing arts, film and issues of culture and society.

Entitled "American Fringe," the series will be presented as part of Paris’s Festival d’Automne in November 2016. According to Peña and Palanti, the program will include titles that hail "from outside the axis of Sundance/South by Southwest indies." The pair will instead select work from "unlikely places" to screen, making an effort to have the films "feature innovative approaches to film style and content."

"Over the past two decades, in conjunction with the emergence of digital media, an extraordinary number of films and filmmakers have emerged all across America," said Peña exclusively to Indiewire. "Many of these works are a far cry from what's usually designated as 'independent cinema,' having been made at fractions of the cost of typical festival films and without additional resources such as stars. Some of these works, at least from the small number that I've seen, have been among the most exciting American films I've seen in years, and the aim of 'American Fringe' is to gather together a selection of these works, fictions and documentaries, that have often been neglected, even in a film-crazy country like France."

More details on "American Fringe" will be released in the coming year. The curators can also be reached at amfringerp@gmail.com for more information.

Watch: Joseph Gordon-Levitt Talks 'The Walk' and His Early Acting Gig with Robert Redford

Glen Yi — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 21:20:12 GMT

"Off Camera" with Sam Jones offers honest and thoughtful commentary from some of today's most iconic actors, directors, artists, musicians and athletes. These in-depth conversations and discussions range from artistic processes to creative choices and insights that are rarely covered in a typical three-minute talk show segment.

READ MORE: Watch: Jake Gyllenhaal Explains His Early Career 'Mistakes' in Exclusive Video

The acclaimed photographer, director and documentarian — whose works include seminal portraits of President Obama, Sandra Bullock, Robert Downey Jr. and Bob Dylan, award-winning music videos for the Foo Fighters and Cold War Kids as well as documentaries such as "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco" — sits down for an interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Dressed down and agenda-free, Sam Jones brings viewers behind the scenes as Gordon-Levitt talks about the emotional premiering of "The Walk" at the New York Film Festival as well as his experience with Robert Redford during filming of the 1992 film "A River Runs Through It."

Recent and upcoming episodes of "Off Camera" with Sam Jones include Jake Gyllenhaal, Cindy Crawford, Ellen Page, Olivia Wilde and more with additional guests being announced soon. In the meantime, check out these clips of the interview with Gordon-Levitt.

Ingrid Bergman's Home Movies Brighten Biodoc 'In Her Own Words'

Anne Thompson — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:38:00 GMT

Some of my favorite classic movies star Sweden's Ingrid Bergman, who acted opposite Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca," Gary Cooper in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious," which featured the longest screen kiss ever. Even when she was young—she hit Hollywood at age 23, in David O' Selznick's "Intermezzo"—there was something worldly about her, a natural sensuality. Movie directors loved her, in Sweden and America, because she gleamed with health and beauty even without makeup and could also play sophisticated and glamorous.

In a year rife with strong archive docs, "In Her Own Words" stands out because Bergman was a pack rat who hung on to everything, from her diaries (well-read by fellow Swede Alicia Vikander) to her home movies. She was an early woman with a movie camera, and her husbands enjoyed shooting her as well. The movie tracks her tragic family life—she was orphaned young and went to live with an aunt who died in her arms a year later—and from the start she was abandoning her husband Petter Lindstrom and baby Pia for Hollywood's siren call.

"She was so much before her time in the way she lived and worked," says Swedish filmmaker Stig Björkman, who collaborated with a woman producer, photographers and editor. "I see her as an early feminist, not politically involved or interested, just in her actions and her way of living. She seemed to be a very strong woman, who could be a model for how a modern woman would live her life, because she lived the way any man lived in the 40s or 50s. Work was the primary interest and after that came family and children, who accepted this."

When she was present, her children report, Bergman was wonderful to be with; but she was often absent, working. In short, Bergman behaved like a man, and when that included having an out of wedlock affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, she was punished for it, even though they eventually married and had three children. After living in Italy and Paris, when Bergman stopped making improvisational art films with Rossellini, Hollywood welcomed her back, awarding her an Oscar for "Anastasia," enthusiastically accepted on her behalf by Cary Grant.

Björkman had a blast delving into the riches of the Ingrid Bergman collection at Wesleyan. And after Isabella Rossellini had suggested at a chance meeting at the Berlin Film Fest, "should we make a film about Mama?," Bergman's four children are front and center in the narrative, perhaps too much so.

Björkman told me that he was trying to avoid the standard-issue cradle-to-grave narrative, and came upon the idea of having an actress (Vikander proved perfect casting) narrate the film by reading Bergman's diaries (in Swedish) and letters (more often in English). Bergman was "at 14 years old alone in the world," said Björkman, "which is why she kept everything over the years, diaries and letters whatever. This gave us the freedom to be more associative in the editing and building the structure, and not have a timeline in the narration."

Some of the most delightful footage is archival material from Sweden and early Hollywood, which fit well with all the amateur film shot by Ingrid herself or somebody close to her. "They were so rich and so valuable," said Björkman. "There were more than a hour of behind-the-scene films for 'Joan of Arc,' and amazing footage filmed by Ingrid and her first husband on a trip to Germany and France; on the street you see brown-dressed uniformed military people walking by; it was just before World War II."

The movie follows Bergman through her late blossoming on-screen in Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata," in which she co-starred with Liv Ullmann as her daughter, a mother-daughter tearjerker that hit close to home.

Björkman's discovery was Bergman's "great courage, in every way," he says. "One of my favorite scenes in the film is when she comes to New York for the New York Film Critics awards; she was very afraid of going back to the States who had rejected her for such a long time. She's standing there at the airport being interviewed, smiling: 'Do you have any regrets?' 'I don't have any regrets, I only regret the things I haven’t done yet!' she says with a smile. That captures her so well."

A Conversation with Hou Hsiao-Hsien - Director of 'The Assassin'

Susan Kouguell — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 18:59:09 GMT

At the New York Film Festival press screening, Hou Hsiao-Hsien spoke with Dennis Lim about his new film "The Assassin" for which he won Best Director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Filmed on location in Japan and on set in Taiwan, "The Assassin" centers on the story of Yinniang, who, abducted at age 10, is now a Tang Dynasty assassin dedicated to the art of killing until memory transforms her course of action.

The Story

Hou Hsiao-Hsien: “There is a lot of information from the Tang Dynasty -- tales, legends and novels. I first came across this story in college. I wanted to bring this realism into the film. The story is based on historical facts and then I fleshed out the characters.

I wanted to do this film in the wuxia genre. I wanted to draw inspiration from Samurai movies from Japan as a long tradition of this martial arts practice that would be more in line of how I see the wuxia genre; it should be based on the realistic depiction of human capacity.”

Working with Actors

Hou Hsiao-Hsien : “I work with actors and actresses I have worked with together before; they know my style and how I work on set. They will know the script and know the mood I want to create. There is no rehearsal. They come to the set prepared. They know what the scene is about. I have to set up the lights and camera, and I set up the dolly and tracks, and then I ask them to go onto the set I created for them. Hopefully they will be inspired by this mise-en-scène, and the location. The actors immerse themselves and embody the characters. Things happen naturally. Sometimes they do take after take, and when they get too comfortable, they get mechanical and unnatural. I want to somehow change the scene for them, to really act. The long takes go with that particular way of directing.”

The Dagger and Action Sequences

Hou Hsiao-Hsien explained how the main character Yinniang has a strategic advantage, using the short dagger; it allows her to swiftly outmaneuver her opponents’ unwieldly swords.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien: “To utilize such a short dagger, timing is so important. That burst of action. That’s how I design action sequences. These actors are not trained in martial arts. There was a lot of training. What I did was divide all the action sequences into small fragments one at a time, and they (the actors) have to complete it in that short fragment. Still, it takes a long time -- to find their weapons, they get injured, they have to rest, and if they shoot the scene over and over, we have to change location. It’s time-consuming and painstaking.”

Jiaxin, the princess-turned-nun and Yinniang’s abductor, criticizes Yinniang for not following through with an assassination:

“Your skill is matchless, but your mind is hostage to human sentiments.”

“Your heart lacks resolve.”

These two lines are at the heart of the conflict found in Yinniang’s journey in this intimate and powerful wuxia drama.

Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College SUNY, and presents international seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of SAVVY CHARACTERS SELL SCREENPLAYS! and THE SAVVY SCREENWRITER, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog

NYFF: Todd Haynes Talks ‘Carol,’ Exploring Desire, Identity, Giving Himself “Creative Assignments” & Much More

Rodrigo Perez — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 13:20:58 GMT

Todd Haynes may be one of the most renowned, under-appreciated filmmakers in the United States today, at least as far as arthouse and mainstream audiences and viewpoints go. As the director of “Safe,” which essentially launched Julianne Moore’s career, “Velvet Goldmine,” which looked at glam rock and sexual identity, the repressed Douglas Sirk-ian sexual desire of the 1950s-set, “Far From Heaven,” and the kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan anti-biopic, “I’m Not There,” and many more, Haynes is a huge figure in cinema despite only having eight features under his belt in nearly four decades. And his films are routinely accepted in the global Olympics of film festivals like Cannes.

READ MORE: Spend Over 1 Hour In Conversation With Todd Haynes

Haynes may be a filmmaker by trade, but he studied semiotics in university, and so it not only makes him an incredibly thoughtful conversationalist, but also a keen observer of human behavior and desire, who can find deep significance in some of the most minute and subconscious gestures. This affinity for nuance comes to the fore in his latest film, “Carol,” a masterful, gorgeous, and intimate love story about two women, Therese, played by Rooney Mara and Carol, played by Cate Blanchett. Haynes often uses female protagonists and looks at identity, often sexual, through the lens of culture. “Carol” is set in 1957 and though it shares some of the Eisenhower ‘50s era sensibilities of his earlier film, “Far From Heaven,” which also looked at sexual identity and repression, it’s ultimately a completely different movie in its aims and concerns.

Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel, “The Price Of Salt,” “Carol” is really just a beautiful and classical love story, but one that plays with the very perceptible notions of desire, longing, power, and scary vulnerabilities as it applies to falling in love. It’s an impeccably crafted movie and a deeply-felt one too; perhaps no movie this year (or this decade for that matter) charts the nervous, exciting, and near imperceptible palpitation of the fluttering heart with such lie-detector specificity and precision like “Carol.”

As the film screened at the New York Film Festival this week, Haynes was joined by NYFF Director of Programming Kent Jones for an absorbing chat about “Carol,” Haynes’ career, his explorations of identity, desire, the radicalness of glam rock, Dylan, and the recent death of cinematic innovator and Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It was a fascinating talk, especially for fans of the insightful Haynes. Here’s many highlights and if you like, you can listen to the entire conversation at the end of page two. “Carol” opens in limited release on November 20 and the auteur will be back for a terrific all-encompassing Todd Haynes retrospective that runs from November 12-29 at the Film Society Of Lincoln Center In New York.

The Influence Of David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” & The Idea of Giving Himself The Assignment Of A Love Story
“I did look at a lot of films for ‘Carol’ and I started as I often do by looking at films from that era, but very quickly I realized that that wasn’t very relevant to this and I wasn’t interested in repeating the Sirk-ian, studio system kind of filter [from “Far From Heaven”] on the style of this film. One of the very first films I thought of when I read the adaptation and the first draft of the script was “Brief Encounter” and I started thinking of great love on film and I thought, ‘ok, wow, this is something that I haven’t really approached it as a discipline as a filmmaker,’ and I always want to give myself some kind of assignment, something I feel like I can learn from each time.”

Point Of View Is Key To The Love Story Of “Carol” Though It Changes From The Novel
“It all started to make sense, because the nove,l ‘The Price Of Salt,’ is entirely rooted in the point of view of Therese, the character Rooney Mara plays in the film, and like most Patricia Highsmith novels, they’re all locked all inside a single mental state and this was no different. And I drew very interesting parallels to that tendency of hers. But it just made me thing of point of view, because as soon as I read the first draft of Phyllis [Nagy’s] script, it opened [the point of view] up and we all of a sudden had access to Carol freely that we didn’t have in the book.”

Vulnerable Woundable Parties
“I just wanted to really very conscious of how we enter Carol’s world initially, what that means, but trying to structure the whole film around point of view. And the best love stories on film are rooted in the point of view of the more woundable, more vulnerable, more amorous party. In this case it’s mostly Therese through the story, but what’s so interesting about the [screenplay], that isn’t reflected in the subjectivity of the novel is that that changes over the course of [the movie]. For people that know ‘Brief Encounter,’ it begins in that refreshment stand in the train station and you’re introduced to secondary characters in the story and in the background you see two people having a conversation. And you’re like that’s Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard and you you’re like, ‘Oh, they look like extras in their own film.’ And then a loudmouth gossip friend [shouts] ‘Laura!’ and interrupts and you realize an important conversation has been interrupted.”

The Perils Of Falling In Love & Stealing Directly From David Lean
“What’s so interesting about [the opening of ‘Brief Encounter’] is immediately you’re questioning who’s story is this? And you get deeper her story, her point of view, her narration that she conveys to her husband and her brief encounter which is ending that day is retold in real time. And so i thought, oh wow, that’s such a beautifully structuring device because you then travel through the entirety of the narrative to explain what that conversation was about, what we missed and you replay it at the end of the film and the importance of it and what that interruption meant.”

“But in ‘Carol’ at the end… I lifted that right out of 'Brief Encounter,' by the time we come back to the hotel scene in ‘Carol,’ they’ve shifted their statuses in the relationship and Therese who was this young, vulnerable subject very much in formation before our eyes, who fell in Carol and was hurt and developed defenses, protections, limits, and has changed the way she looks and has grown up. And all of a sudden Carol has sacrificed a lot in her life, reevaluating the meaning and value of this very special girl that she met and is now coming back.”

“But it was about shifting points of view and aligning yourself with the person who is more in peril in love. Love relationships do shift and we only remember the times when we’re in peril. So it was really about love stories that were rooted in one of the subjects’ sides that I looked at a lot and gleaned from a lot.”

Visual Language, Similarities To “Far From Heaven”
“I think the visual language of the film was increasingly informed by the historical research that we were doing and what New York City looked like at in the early 1950s, how incredibly different a world it was when we think of the Eisenhower 1950s, which we fully explored in 'Far From Heaven.' It’s so funny, I remember doing research of the period, Hartford, Connecticut, 1957, and people saying, ‘there’s a great Italian American population in Hartford, so you might want to consider Italian faces as extras.’ And I was like, ‘Umm, No.’ We want everyone to look like patrician, Hollywood backlot extras like robots. Nothing remotely connected to the real Hartford in 1957. And so many people would say to me, “I remember the ‘50s and it was exactly like that!” and sometimes you’re like, is it movies that change the way we think?”

The 1950s Cultural Terrain Of Which ‘Carol’ Takes Place
“Post War New York City: it looks distressed, dirty, also the process of color photography adds a unique patina to the soil palate, where even the temperature is hard to determine, and there’s a warm and cool interplay which is really interesting. We were still made to feel newly vulnerable, by the arms race with Russian and there lead in that and that incredible frustration with the Truman administration, a real need for a change. Eisenhower had been elected, but there was a much longer time before he took office back then then there is today. So it was really in that interim where this story takes place. So there was a great deal of indeterminacy and insecurity and vulnerability and that felt like a really poignant, gorgeous terrain to watch these roots and sprouts of a love emerge at this time.”

Photographers That Influenced The Look Of The Film
“On top of Saul Leiter’s beautiful work that features windows, reflections, and filtering of images there was also a great deal of beautiful color photography and it’s all by women photojournalists, Esther Bubley, Ruth Orkin who was the partner of Morris Engels, who made “Little Fugitives,” and there was one that they did together called “Lovers and Lollipops,” that’s more set in locations that were relevant to locations in “Carol,” so we kept watching it over and over again. Helen Levitt and then Vivian Maier, who is a more recent discovery but who’s work is amazing and would own the way she indiscriminately capture her own reflection in her work as a documentarian of cities. And that related to the role Therese plays in the story, in ‘Carol’ in our version she’s a aspiring photographer."

The Recent Death Of The Late Chantal Akerman And Her Influence.
“It’s still so… the weight of that loss is still being understood or how it can be. And maybe now that weight of her amazing body of work.” Specifically of Ackerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” Haynes called it “profound and really exhilarating… so inspiring as a filmmaker and as someone thinking about female subjects and how they're depicted and what we come to expect is occupied onscreen when we're dealt the story of women's lives and what is important and what is not important. You just fall into the incantation, the unbelievable spell of observing labor, of observing work in the kitchen, of observing routines," he said, noting that that movie features a lot of what's removed from films now, the sort of everyday events that people ascribe great meaning to in their own lives.

Haynes called her influence, “The sheer power of understatement and negation of action and how much we make those events meaningful and how when they are slammed by them in traditional films, we’re numbed by them.”

Akerman’s Influence of Haynes’ “Safe”
“When it came to ‘Safe’ it was a seminal film that I couldn’t not think about and I was also interested in setting up different kinds of obstacles to the way we normally we identify with central characters in movies and what the viewer does in recourse of that, the circuitous way that you compensate and how you fill in yourself. How hungry we are to participate in narrative and emotional experience and so it’s interesting to pare down what we normally just throw out at spectators in films. And so with 'Carol' it was an evacuation of a subject that was really the starting point for this person and her relationship — like you feel in 'Jeanne Dielman,' albeit in a very different way — to her environment and her domestic life. [It’s] at times almost an oppressive center position in the frame that somehow she does not feel like she owns and if anything she feels dwarfed and minimized in.”

The Strength of The Novel, Changes From The Book & The Power Of Love & Love Like The Criminal Mind
“I loved how in the book Therese is a little bit more artistic aspirations in her ambitions and Phyllis’s draft had already removed that and it made these character less equipped for the love and these experiences they were about to encounter. And it just depend this idea of: what I love about the novel, it describes love so much from that tunnel that you’re in when you’re first falling in love and you think no one’s ever been there before you and you’re so impressed by that specificity of your desire finding its exact object in this person. And your life is a minefield of signs and things to be decoded; every gesture, every phone call, every pause in their breath means something that’s gonna tell you whether you live or die, basically. And that is so fucking gorgeously conveyed by Patricia Highsmith because it is like the criminal mind, it’s exactly like that… like in all her other novels which is like weaving these intricate webs of possibility, how you will get caught or not, how you’ll avoid being found out. So I thought that was brilliant.”

“Safe" And How It Tied To The AIDS Epidemic
“I was also really interested in the disease movie as a genre and the way that it reassigns identity, the illness strips you of the identity you’re supposed to have, it makes you completely have to question every marker of who you are. And then it reassigns you with a new certitude that you are this cancer sufferer or you are this victim of environmental illness. And it was in this time in the [early ‘90s] that we were still in the throes of the AIDS epidemic and whole notions of cause and culpability around HIV were in discussion and I think a desire to make some sense of this virus that was frightening the hell out of the world.”

Haynes said he felt the recurring theme “about the desire to blame yourself when you are outside of situations you can control, so culpability became this means of controlling an uncontrollable situation. It’s like the little kid who asks his parents, ‘mom, dad, why are toy getting a divorce, is it because of me?’ We come to understand things by implicating ourselves at the center of them… and there’s something so heartbreaking and universal about that.”

The Terrains of Identity And How They Applies To "Velvet Goldmine"
"Identity is this imposed state that we're supposed to fulfill… change and mutability, stability, artifice, and construction play no part. We’re supposed to find an authentic and organic self, that is whole. We espouse those terms and elevate those ideas and values. At least of my feature films, the first terrain where I was trying to look at radically different strategies, practices around that was with the glam rock [scene in] ‘Velvet Goldmine’ and how weirdly rebellious and disquieting that moment was, that sort of bisexual androgynous rallying cry in the early 1970s.”

Haynes said artists like David Bowie, The Stooges, Brian Eno, and the Velvet Underground were inspired by this anti-hippie ethos and played with it. "That notion of radical instability in terms of sexual orientation and identity is still uncomfortable today in our very advanced state of progress around issues of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues because it's so much easier and so much more legislatively tidy to talk about sexual orientation as something that we're born into, that's biologically determined and stable, and then you could just say no there's no choice involved, a desire to actually change it up, and what was so interesting about the glam moment was that it was addressing the inherent instability of adolescence around young people and how much they don't know who they are day to day and that fantasy or metaphor of an alien androgynous space creature who was bisexual was so liberating and so radical in so many ways and continues to be today."

Identity As It Applies To Bob Dylan And Haynes' Film "I’m Not There"
“Dylan was a very American version of someone who was refusing [labels],” Haynes explained, noting that he first got into the artist as a teenager, but it wasn’t much later in life until he began to see Dylan as a a “shapeshifter." It wasn’t until later in life that Haynes rediscovered his music and then rediscovered the man. “He always connoted that cocksure-ity, that engine of defiance is true. I didn’t identify the plugging in electric [period] and seeing that on a similar continuum as becoming Christian. But when you look at the whole [of Dylan], it made so much sense. It was a way of throwing back at the societal expectations of a kind of constancy — this person who was not going to do it the same each time.”

Haynes joked about seeing Dylan in concert and how the musician notoriously deconstructs some of his most iconic songs into constructs audiences barely recognize. “Fundamentally he’s a creative entity who has to be making things to survive life. But under the pressure of what he became at that time [of being famous], the demand to keep fulfilling social expectations was too constraining and he had to lash out against that. And there was a hostility, maybe healthy creative hostility in that practice.”

Shooting “Carol” On Super 16MM
Haynes said they came upon the choice of shooting on Super 16 because when they shot “Mildred Pierce” for HBO on 35MM. And having watched his movie shot on film presented in HDTV, the filmmaker said it lost its grain and looked like digital photography. “So it was like we really wanna see the grain and have it be a movie! Everybody who did ‘Mildred’ came from film, including Kate Winslet, she had never done TV before, and we were all proud of that — that we didn’t know anything about TV. But we wanted [‘Carol’] to look like a movie and so we did and the results were really great and it was kind of fun and radical to downgrade to a 16mm camera.”

Douglas Sirk & The Power Of Melodrama
An audience member wanted to know if — much like Douglas Sirk, who Haynes loves — if there were any other similarly overlooked filmmakers who were due for a critical reevaluation (Sirk was dismissed at the time, but found favor with critics decade after his heyday). Haynes was stumped (though Kent Jones did offer Richard Quine’s “Strangers When We Meet” and the works of Delmer Daves, which Haynes had hadn’t seen and got excited about), but it did lead him to go on about melodrama and “the especially the way melodrama has been denigrated as a genre alongside all the others that are more often associated with male subjects. But there’s something fascinating, radical and gorgeously constructed about these films… but they leave you with a sense of dissatisfaction.” Haynes quoted Sirk, who said, “You cannot make films about things, you can only make films with things.”

He continued, “Basically what [Sirk] is saying, I think, that all I can do is show you the conditions that we all live under and I’m not going to show you these characters figuring them out of them or overcoming them, that’s what you need to go home with. [These films] don’t stroke you, they don’t solve problems for you and that’s makes them less purely satisfying.”

“Carol” & The Qualities Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara Possess
Hayne called “Carol” a “tribute to the seminal, lesbian women in my life” and joked that when he learned Cate Blanchett was already attached to the film, “that was kind of a drag, but as a director you make due,” he quipped. The director had high praise for the underrated emotional intelligence of Rooney Mara, who he said was wise beyond her years. “In such a short amount of time she’s distinguished yourself as such a totally, thoughtful, serious and gifted actor. When you see a young actor like that who somehow understands the scale of the medium so well that she knows how to underplay, how to reduce down and minimize the gesture and have even more impact through understatement, that’s rare. And that speaks to real intelligence and innate understanding that exceeds her years."

”Carol” opens in limited release on November 20. Listen to the full Q&A below.

NYFF: Closer 'Miles Ahead' Marks Star Don Cheadle's Directorial Debut

John Anderson — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 00:10:41 GMT

Fact: Everyone loves Don Cheadle. That said, his directorial debut—“Miles Ahead”—probably did itself a disservice premiering at the New York Film Festival on Saturday. The NYFF has certainly been known to elevate movies that might otherwise have been overlooked and give them the attention they deserve. The downside? The festival’s Lincoln Center locations and reputation for highly distilled cinema deliver such a high degree of scrutiny and level of expectation that the flaws in a film are cruelly magnified.

There are things to like in “Miles Ahead,” but things to laugh at, too (there are moments, during the car-chase scenes – yes, car-chase scenes in a jazz bio-pic —that suggest Cheadle was out to make an homage to “The In-Laws”). Cheadle himself is a bit outré as Miles Davis, the trumpeter, composer, band leader, taste-maker and one of the more influential figures in American music, just FYI. The movie itself, which doesn’t pretend to be anything like a cradle-to grave biography (Davis died in 1991), straddles two time periods: 1979, the year Davis would end a five-year moratorium in performing and recording; and the late ‘50s, when he was at what many would consider the height of his artistic and commercial powers, having made such landmark albums as “Birth of the Cool,” “Kind of Blue,” “Sketches of Spain,” and the recording of the title, “Miles Ahead.”

The story is not entirely cooked up by its four screenwriters (including Cheadle): Davis' drug-addled hermit years in his Upper West Side home were detailed in his own autobiography. Truth, however, does not always equal plausibility. In the movie’s 1979 section, a writer named Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), pretending to be on assignment from Rolling Stone, inveigles his way into Davis’ life—after being punched in the face at the trumpeter’s door—by telling Davis he can score high-quality cocaine. In what becomes an increasingly farcical, haywire narrative, our heroes try to steal back the heisted master recording of Davis’ secret comeback session from a sinister music figure played by Michael Stuhlbarg, and an up-and-coming trumpeter (Keith Stanfield) who sounds like Miles reincarnate (except, of course, that the vibrato-less master is still alive).

In the alternating late ‘50s section of the program, Davis' chief concern is Francis Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), the dancer he would love, marry, abuse and who graced the covers of several Davis album covers (“Someday My Prince Would Come,” “ESP”). Taylor was involved in the making of the film, which may help explain its eager embrace of a schematic and romanticized plotline and adoring portrait of her—when not flash-forwarding to the Dave & Miles show, and their shootouts, and car chases, and suggestion of “48 HRS.”

Jazz? It’s not really Cheadle’s concern, though two of Davis’ great collaborators, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, get some screen time at the end of the film, and a lot of jazz greats are alluded to throughout – Teo (Macero), Gil (Evans), Paul (Chambers) and Bill (Evans) among them. What Davis fans may object to in Cheadle’s rendition of his life isn’t so much the burlesquing of Davis crazy years but the failure to capture what made him great, or to provide any solid insight into his character — which after “Miles Ahead” remains, as always, frustratingly elusive.

NYFF Review: ‘Miles Ahead’ Starring Don Cheadle, Ewan McGregor & Emayatzy Corinealdi

Rodrigo Perez — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 23:29:11 GMT

The volatile, creatively restless, and stormy life of jazz giant Miles Davis is rendered in vibrant, kaleidoscopic, and seemingly unconventional fashion in actor Don Cheadle’s directorial debut, “Miles Ahead.” Attempting to eschew customary cradle-to-grave biopic narrative, Cheadle’s drama, which he co-wrote with Steven Baigelman, takes a collage-y approach to linear form, mixing and matching music from disparate, chronologically anachronistic periods, and hopscotches around in time mercurially. It’s a film that almost dares you to describe it as a straight-up biopic. But for all its confidence in this method, plus surface and stylistic attempts to create a story that feels like it’s filtered through a fractured glass of memory, “Miles Ahead” is actually akin to a traditional jazz played, or disguised even, in a would-be wilder key.

Built around a standard framing device of a (invented) Rolling Stone writer, Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), trying to score an interview with the reclusive Davis (triple threat Don Cheadle) during a mid-1970s lost weekend era — which spiraled into five years of deafening silence from the legendary musician — this conceit anchors the film’s more erratic impulses from turning into free jazz. But the familiarity of the mechanism, a safe place to circle back to, doesn’t do the movie that wants to be seen as unusual many favors.

READ MORE: Don Cheadle Hits All The Studio As Miles Davis In First Clip For 'Miles Ahead'

As the unscrupulous Brill tries to convince the tempestuous and cloistered music figure, who is perennially trying to dodge various sycophants, to grant him an interview, two stories unfurl: the redemptive road to Davis’ recovery from drugs and toward a musical comeback; and a more anarchic flash of images of the artist’s life, mostly centering on his ex-wfe Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). And if there’s a narrative journey to story A, it’s the contents and recovery of a reel of audio that Davis has recorded — his first in many years — that everyone is dying to get their hands on, not the least being the musician’s impatient label Columbia Records. “What the fuck you looking at?” Davis says to his trumpet at one point, its neglected state clearly speaking to him. A side story evolves here with a up-and-coming trumpeter (Keith Stanfield), tacitly understood to be Davis’ possible heir apparent, and his shady and calculating manager (Michael Stuhlbarg). Story B is essentially every flashback, which mostly track the rise and fall of his marriage.

But ultimately, “Miles Ahead,” for all its aggressive smash cut transitions from the past into the present and back again, is a fairly standard story of a man in the present, struggling to face his greatness and his demons while meditating on what got him to this lonely, isolated place. Of course, much of that is just the reflective lament about his lost love and, occasionally, glints of the monstrous and selfish personality documented in countless books. Cheadle’s Davis is gruff and suffers no fools, but the real musician makes movie-Steve Jobs look like a saint. The Davis of the film has bite, but he rarely decimates in the way he was known to be capable of in real life.

READ MORE: NYFF Preview: 12 Films To Watch Out Of A Must-See Schedule

The filmmaker’s greatest decision is to focus on Davis the man rather than Davis the creator of seminal pieces of art, because the music can speak for itself. And not much is going to be gleaned from its creation, other than Davis’ uncompromising vision and knack for finding the grace notes, but the movie wisely communicates that quickly and then moves on. But just as much as there are tastefully crafted leading-the-band scenes, the movie can still frustrate with the obvious. “Miles Ahead” is the type of film that introduces Ewan McGregor’s character with a subtle, but noticeable scratch under his left eye — which foreshadows much about the opportunistic and dubious personality we’ll soon get to know — but then decides to spell out exactly how he got the shiner even though a half-discerning mind can put two and two together fairly easily. It lacks faith in is viewer that way and always circles back to spell out what it hinted at earlier.

Cheadle’s fragmented narrative walks the thin line between impressionism and chaos, and the film certainly has moments of success and failure in this regard. Occasionally, the dynamic energy of the editing conveys sensory experience and flashes of brilliance: the final crescendo merges and blurs time to such terrific effect, you wish the film managed to find a way to employ this technique more often.

Whereas Todd Haynes expertly examined identity and the desire to escape it in the superior and truly unconventional Bob Dylan film, “I’m Not There,” Cheadle’s film rarely presents such keen observations. “Miles Ahead” doesn’t deliver much insight into Davis’ erratic and enigmatic impulses other than suggesting they were fueled by drugs and the haunting longing for his first wife — and doesn’t every music biopic usually offer this? And it covers the 101 beats you’d find in any magazine profile: the drug abuse, a tendency for guns and violence, loves, infidelities, paranoia, and other megalomaniac tendencies. His approach is to present situations and scenarios we’ve heard about (though his infamous domestic violence and misogynistic tendencies are severely muted in the film, presumably at the behest of the estate), but rarely reveals meaningful whys.

Still, “Miles Ahead” does have its moments, including some disarming elements of humor. Cheadle is strong as the music legend — though one may giggle a little at first at the throaty delivery and wig — and he and McGregor have a good rapport even if the latter seems like he’s sleepwalking at times. As usual, Keith Stanfield steals every scene he’s in and I’ll submit that he should age up as soon as possible in order to play Davis himself one day. And Stuhlbarg, as the conniving music manager, is deliciously oily. For all its flaws, “Miles Ahead” is rarely dull and often entertaining, but it’s certainly a movie that believes it’s more radical than it actually is.

"Miles Ahead" never really breaks out of the box, the boundaries of which Davis was always redrawing and stepping outside of himself, but it's not for lack of trying. And so, “Miles Ahead” is well-intentioned and ambitious, but ultimately uneven, as it cannot redefine the structures its so desperately wants to break down. However, it’s still a promising directorial debut from Cheadle, which could have easily turned into a self-congratulatory vanity project. In the end, it's clear Cheadle’s movie’s reach exceeds its grasp and capabilities, but as recent biopics go, its musicality, flair, and verve certainly count for something. [C+/B-]

NYFF Review: Don Cheadle's 'Miles Ahead' Isn't Really a Miles Davis Biopic

Eric Kohn — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 18:29:35 GMT

READ MORE: The 2015 Indiewire NYFF Bible: Every Review, Interview and News Item From the Festival

"If you're going to tell a story, come with an attitude," declares Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) in the opening minutes of "Miles Ahead," during an interview leading up to a comeback performance. The musician proceeds to do just that, giving Cheadle — who also handles co-writing and directing duties — full license to craft a subjective riff on Davis' troubled relationship to his own mythology. Erratic, unpredictable and constantly intriguing, "Miles Ahead" plays more like one of Davis' compositions than a traditional biopic, stumbling around with flashes of insight and a brilliant central performance.

Co-written by Steve Baigelman, who worked on the script for last year's James Brown biopic "Get on Up," Cheadle's trades the standard biographical details of that earlier film for an intermittently enjoyable and wacky farce examining the conditions under which Davis returned to music late in his career.

Set in the late seventies, during the five-year window where Davis stopped performing, "Miles Ahead" borrows in part from the unlikely mold of a heist movie: After insistent music reporter Dave Braden (a jacked-up Ewan McGregor) surfaces at the drug-addled Davis' home looking for an exclusive, Davis drags him along on a trepidatious odyssey to rescue some of his private recordings from the Columbia Records office. In the process, he's nearly seduced by a scheming producer (Michael Stuhlbarg), who's wielding a new protege named Junior (Keith Stanfield in his first significant role since "Short Term 12") readymade for teaming up with Davis.

Cheadle intermittently cuts away from these unseemly events with a handful of flashbacks to Davis' earlier career, most notably his courtship and ultimately doomed marriage to dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Though Davis married twice more, "Miles Ahead" positions Taylor as the muse whose impact weighed heavily on the musician even though he ruined their romance with a series of infidelities. Her face peering off the cover of Davis' "Someday My Prince Will Come," Taylor takes on a symbolic value throughout "Miles Ahead" as the idyllic fusion of life and art that Davis never managed to fully grasp. Nevertheless, the sequences involving his time with Taylor lead to some of the more conventional moments (and, unfortunately, the only real presence of a female character), which otherwise sticks to a series of unexpected circumstances.

Hiding behind a pair of shades and an unkempt afro for most of the movie, Cheadle buries himself in the character. His version of Davis is a creature of paranoia and understated frustration, whose antics find him scoring coke in a Columbia University dorm room and pointing a pistol at anyone who threatens his sense of control. While the role constantly rubs up against the dangers of caricature, that itself enhances the strange meta-narrative qualities percolating through many scenes. It's a distraction from the substance of Davis' music, but also invites scrutiny of the same creative process. Davis, after all, built his unique sound on the backs of earlier jazz inspirations and the improvisatory processes of dissonant elements. "Miles Ahead" follows suit with mixed results, but its ambition is formidable.

Fortunately, no matter the exuberant twists, "Miles Ahead" never shortchanges the music. Littered with passing references to various albums — sick of the public's obsession over "Kind of Blue," this Davis seems to prefer the classical-world music blend of "Sketches of Spain" — "Miles Ahead" relies heavily on Davis' compositions. To that end, Cheadle's choppy storytelling never overshadows the talent that inspired it.

Still, the movie tosses around a lot of possible access points to Davis' legacy, some more successful than others. As the fictional protege Junior, Stanfield represents Davis' own memories of his youthful determination ("Junior" was one of his nicknames), though the metaphorical connotations of the character never quite cohere. Awkward exchanges with super-fans who approach a dyspeptic Davis with praise register as one-note. The crime element of the plot never really pays off.

Through it all, however, Cheadle maintains a convincing screen presence that holds the multiple strands together. The actor makes an uneasy transition to the director's chair, but his performative abilities enhance the movie's intentions. Cheadle clearly takes his cues from an opening Davis quote that "when you're creating your own shit, even the sky ain't the limit." Like Davis, the movie keeps reaching for new ideas, occasionally hitting on some great ones. Chief among them, a dizzying bit in which Davis attends a prize fight that ultimately turns into a musical performance epitomizes Cheadle's inventive technique.

With so many fragmentary ingredients, "Miles Ahead" falls short of settling on a satisfactory ending. The concluding performance, which finds Davis returning to the stage for the final act of his career, begs for a transition into archival materials. Instead, Cheadle keeps it up through the credits, portraying Davis on the trumpet while wearing a jacket emblazoned with the hashtag "#socialmusic," a reference to the musician's own term for his art.

That contemporary reference point, like many of the random details swirling about "Miles Ahead," distracts from the legacy of a musician whose work remains timeless. At the same time, it underscores a passionate argument for the extent to which Davis' rich mash-up of sounds has grown more culturally relevant than ever.

Grade: B

"Miles Davis" closes the New York Film Festival this weekend. Sony Pictures Classics will release it theatrically next year.

READ MORE: Don Cheadle Tries to Hit the Right Notes in Clip From 'Miles Ahead'

PODCAST: In Praise of Steven Spielberg, Michael Moore and Chantal Akerman

Indiewire — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 21:14:18 GMT

This week's episode of Screen Talk is presented by Vimeo. Head here to check out movies you can rent on Vimeo selected by Indiewire's Eric Kohn, including last year's Oscar-nominated animated films (above), which you can watch at a 20% discount using the promo code "eric20." (The Oscar-nominated live action films are available with the same discount code here.)

A lot has changed in the movie world over the past week. Last week, when Eric Kohn and Anne Thompson recorded Indiewire's weekly Screen Talk podcast at the New York Film Festival, they had not yet seen Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies," Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs" was on the verge of another big festival screening, Michael Moore's new documentary "Where to Invade Next" still hadn't found distribution, and the tragic death of filmmaker Chantal Akerman hadn't happened yet. In this week's episode, the co-hosts tackle all those topics, and also provide updates on the Oscar race for the foreign language and documentary categories.

Listen to the full episode above.

READ MORE: Why Do We Care About Film Festivals?

Screen Talk is available on iTunes. You can subscribe here or via RSS. Share your feedback with Thompson and Kohn on Twitter or sound off in the comments. Browse previous installments here, review the show on iTunes and be sure to let us know if you'd like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.

If you want to sell your film or series on Vimeo On Demand, all you need is a Vimeo Pro account. Go to vimeo.com/startselling and use promo code "eric20" for 20% off Vimeo PRO and start selling.

Effie Brown on Matt Damon's Diversity Comments: "This is No Longer OK"

Freja Dam — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 17:00:00 GMT

With staggeringly low statistics for women and racial minorities behind and in front of the camera in Hollywood, it's easy to lose hope that the tables will ever turn. Yet there seems to be a change of attitude in the public discourse. An increasing number of stars, like Emma Watson, Salma Hayek, Kristen Stewart and, most recently, Michael Moore, have spoken out about sexism in Hollywood.

The subject is getting a great deal of media attention as well. To contribute to that debate, the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a panel called "New Hollywood?" at the New York Film Festival on Sunday night. The panelists debating if the tides are indeed changing were producer Effie Brown *currently on HBO's documentary series "Project Greenlight"), producer and Columbia University professor Ira Deutchman, journalist Mark Harris, AK Worldwide executive Susan Lewis, Gamechanger Films producer Mynette Louie, actress Rose McGowan and producer Lydia Dean Pilcher.

Moderator Eugene Hernandez, Deputy Director of the FSLC, kicked off the debate by asking Brown to discuss the controversial "Project Greenlight" scene in which she expressed her discomfort about a group of white men directing a movie about a black prostitute. (She preferred a directing team with a Vietnamese man and a white woman.) Matt Damon, her fellow consultant on the show, cut her off to manexplain/whitesplain (Mattsplain?) that "when you’re talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not the casting of the show.” To which a shocked Brown simply responded, "Wow, OK."

"That was the nice cut," said Brown about the clip that went viral and caused Damon to publicly apologize. "I couldn't go head on against the biggest movie star in the world -- I want to work again. This is a thing we all have to think about. I'm a ballsy chick, but he has a number one movie and an Oscar. I'm trying to pay my mortgage," she continued. "What was brilliant is that on social media, there was an immediate call and response. People tweeted and were on Facebook. This is clearly no longer OK."

"I think social media is giving women of color a voice, and we're really loud," said Louie. and Lydia Dean Pilcher added: "I think it's great that it happened, because what he said exhibits a wider understanding of diversity in Hollywood, and it's the kind of thing that gets said all the time behind the scene."

Lewis provided an example: A studio head didn't like a black woman director because she was being "too polite" and asked for her to be "a little messier." "If she'd come in and cursed, it would have been the opposite: the angry woman," said Lewis.

McGowan, who was fired from her agency for tweeting about sexist wardrobe demands, contributed to the horror stories, recounting how she just walked out of a meeting at Paramount because she was told about a practice where a caster would make actresses come in wearing bikinis to make sure the male decision-makers would be in the room. "I'm sick of it," she said. "There's a deep problem with disrespect."

In a lot of cases, however, the issue is ignorance rather than conscious discrimination, said Brown.

"I don't want to be bashing the dude," she said, referring to Damon, whom she later called "very intelligent and very thoughtful." "Because I do feel that his view, in his mind it made sense, and I do think it's the view of quite a few people, because it made it on [the show]. And I don't feel that he's a malicious person, and I don't feel they're malicious.... They just don't think about it."

"I feel like I have to be a teacher to some people," added Lewis. "I have to explain why your pitch may be really offensive because it's about a magical Negro. ... But maybe I can make an impact. Maybe they can be like, 'Oh, you're making a good point.'"

"Most aren't these terrible men; it just hasn't occurred to them," added McGowan. "When it occurs to them, sometimes great things happen."

And changes are underway in Hollywood, argued Ira Deutchman. He believes that the studios' failure to reach mass audiences --which in Hollywood's mind equals young men -- may motivate them to rethink their repertoires from a purely economic perspective.

"For every big superhero movie that makes hundreds of millions of dollars, there are two or three that are failing at the moment," he said. "When Donna Langley from Universal says, 'We're not going to deal with $200 million superhero movies that I don't know has franchise potential or not. Let me just take some smaller bets on other audiences and see what happens,' then you end up with the biggest summer of any studio.... It does give me hope that maybe it's not one of those things that gets cycled back around again, where everybody's going to forget that the audience exist."

"The audiences in movies and especially in TV have been sending a lot of messages saying that they are very receptive to diverse filmmaking and programming," said Mark Harris. "My frustration is in seeing how invested certain agents in the business are in not hearing that. They see every diverse thing as an exception if it exceeds."

While change is still coming slowly in film, women directors have experienced "a modest improvement" in television, according to the DGA's latest diversity report.

The panelists all agree that TV is the future, especially for women and minorities.

"I think film is becoming like theater, where it's a very rarified art form that is for white people mostly," said Louie.

"TV is challenging film no matter what," said Brown. "I'm the queen of the little movie, and I'm over it. It's so rare to make money on a little movie, and it's so hard to make money on a little movie. So I think the Internet and also doing TV, is the way to go. And the fact that we can be there and hold down the fort -- I love it."

"Not only are we there, we are kicking ass," added Lewis. "This is the space that we [black women] can own, and people want us."

"On TV, we're getting to the point where there's actually freedom to fail," said Harris. "Saying 'Give us a chance and we'll prove it and give you a success' is one of the great economic arguments, but it's also a devil's bargain. Because it invites people when something flops to say, 'See, we tried, but it just didn't work.' ... Freedom to fail is really crucial, because no one says, 'No more movies with Adam Sandler.'"

No one says "No more movies with Matt Damon," either.

"'The Martian' is the number one movie. So even though everyone was in a flutter about Matt Damon, that wasn't enough to stop the ticket sales," said Brown, who still finds the experience with the "Project Greenlight" media storm positive.

"What really surprised me is that you guys got it. I really did think that I was alone with that whole diversity comment. Like maybe Black Twitter will get it. I even said that when I talked to HBO. 'Black Twitter is real.' What made me feel great is that it grew. It became a bit of a moment, and everybody -- black, white, Asian, everybody --- came up and said, 'This didn't make any sense,'" Brown said. "But I still haven't heard from Matt Damon."

Hou Hsiao-hsien on Bringing His Trademark Realism to Wuxia Masterpiece ‘The Assassin’

Tarek Shoukri — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 16:40:37 GMT

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s latest film, "The Assassin," is the 68-year-old Taiwanese filmmaker’s first foray into the wuxia genre, a Chinese fiction favorite dealing with martial arts, chivalry and sorcery.

The drama tells the story of a princess-turned-assassin (played by Shu Qi) who was trained to murder corrupt politicians by a nun in exile. After struggling to complete one of her assignments, she is sent to kill her cousin, a military leader, as a punishment intended to toughen her up. The film's simple premise is rendered in gorgeous fashion, as Hou's ornamental visual style, exquisite framing and methodical filmmaking imbue one of the oldest genres in Chinese literature and cinema with an unparalleled degree of artistry and grace.

Following the screening, Hou discussed the making of the film and how he maintained his patented sense of realism within the wuxia genre. From the onset, Hou spoke to the high degree of preparation required to make a wuxia film from the Tang Dynasty. Getting a film set in such a remote location and time period to still summon a sense of realism was only possible by carefully re-examining all the stories from the Tang period, including "Nie Yinniang," the story from which "The Assassin" is based.

"In order for me to somehow bring that realistic portrayal and realism into this particular film, of course I needed to go back into all this archival material and do my research and my homework," he said. "I relied on these historical details as a starting point to extend my imagination for the rest of the characteristics of the characters."

Speaking to whether or not his preferred sense of realism was at odds with the wuxia genre, he explained, "I wanted a film based on my own interpretation of the wuxia genre. This idea of defying gravity and people flying around in the air is just not something that I even contemplated doing." Instead, Hou looked to Japanese samurai movies for inspiration Those types of martial arts practices, according to Hou, were "more in line of what I think the wuxia genre should be based on my own realistic depiction of human capacity."

Even though he might have omitted some of the elaborate stunt work and fantastical elements typical of many works of wuxia from "The Assassin," the film's action sequences are mesmerizing nonetheless, punctuated most prominently by swift bursts of sword-fighting. Hou explained that because his actors and actresses were not trained martial artists, the preparation for the scenes was painstaking and time consuming, requiring large amounts of training, practice and choreography. Yet, this limitation also helped Hou determine how to best shoot the sequences with respect to time and space.

Hou recounted, "What I did is that I somehow divided all the action sequences into small fragments and I only shot one at a time in small dosages. They have to somehow complete all the choreography and all the movements and actions in that particular short fragment."

On "The Assassin," Hou re-teamed with many actors, who by this point were familiar with Hou's unique approach on set. "They know exactly what this particular scene is about and all I have to do is set up the lights in the way that I want and set up the camera with my cinematographer Mark Lee...and ask them to then go into this particular set that I’ve created for them." he said. "Hopefully, they will be inspired by this particular location, this particular mise-en-scène. They then can immerse themselves into the characters and embody the movements and the mood that I want to create."

A similar principle explains Hou's repeated use of tracking shots, which allow him to capture natural, unrehearsed and sometimes unscripted reactions from his actors. Throughout "The Assassin," the camera wanders through the sublime set-pieces like an invisible guest, peeking through silk curtains and seeing through smoke to convey the meditative atmosphere of the film.

"The Assassin" will be screen for the public tonight and Saturday at Lincoln Center before opening in select theaters next week.

Reviews of Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Junun,' Now Streaming

Sam Adams — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 14:58:17 GMT

Film festivals can be frustrating experiences for those who don't live near them, but Mubi is helping soothe FOMO by streaming movies from this year's New York Film Festival online. You'll still have to wait for "Carol" and "Bridge of Spies," but several titles from the festival's cutting-edge Projections lineup have been streaming for the last week, and today, Mubi added a big one: "Junun," the latest movie from Paul Thomas Anderson.

"Junun" marks several departures for Anderson: It's his first documentary, his first pronounced experimentation with shooting on digital, and his first non-narrative work. Even Anderson's music videos have more story than the hour-long "Junun," which documents the recording of an album by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood with Israeli composer and singer Shye Ben Tazur and a collection of Indian musicians dubbed the Rajasthan Express. But rather than privileging Greenwood's POV and making a movie about a Western musician discovering the wonders of the East, Anderson treats him as an incidental figure: An early shot spins in a lazy circle as the musicians sit cross-legged on the floor playing a hypnotic riff en masse, with Greenwood unremarked among them. None of the other musicians are identified until the closing credits, either, a democratic gesture somewhat undercut by the fact that Greenwood and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich will still be recognizable to the film's likely audience. Anderson obviates his own POV as well; he's not even credited as the director, only as one of five cameraman, although you can occasionally hear him posing questions offscreen.

While "Junun" is a experimental for Anderson, it's not a notably ground-breaking work, but it still sucks you in, and captures something of the wordless collaboration between musicians who don't need to speak each other's language to communicate. Mubi's $4.99 monthly fee is less than you'd pay to stream an hour-long movie through many other services, and it also gets you access to its ever changing lineup — the site adds, and loses, a movie every day of the month — which right now includes Tsai Ming-Liang's "Stray Dogs," Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist," Roy Andersson's "You, the Living," Curtis Harrington's "Night Tide" and John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence."

Reviews of "Junun"

Nick Schager, Variety

With no contextual onscreen information provided, and interview and conversational dialogue kept to a bare minimum, "Junun" functions as an experiential documentary, one in which all meaning and emotion is derived from being wholly submerged in the music on display. Favoring long, unbroken takes that allow the rhythmic, full-bodied songs to breathe as they ebb and flow from beginning to end, Anderson’s aesthetics unobtrusively capture the magic of Greenwood and company’s global partnership. It’s a reverent tribute, and one that articulates its underlying themes in subtle, piercing snapshots.

Eric Kohn, Indiewire

As the sonically rich album comes alive, "Junun" eschews context and lets the audiovisual design speak for itself. Concise yet wandering in its structure, it doesn't rise to the level of narrative complexity found in Anderson's many other projects, but compensates with a series of lush sights and sounds. While not interested in fleshing out their personalities, Anderson gives the musicians a precise identity as humble servants in the spiritual act of collaboration. On occasion, they just lounge around, killing time whenever the electricity flares out. There's never any sense of urgency or professional motivation. Aided by three other credited camera operators, the filmmaker follows the ambling quality of these sessions by shifting from static shots to roaming drone cameras that capture the majestic fort alongside the adjacent cityscape.

Leslie Felperin, Guardian

It’s an austere but stylishly packaged work, serious and respectful, which studies the performers as they play with mostly long unbroken takes that run through to the end of each song. There’s a tiny bit of travelogue stuff, background colour showing the city below the fort where locals mill about and craftsman fix out-of-tune instruments while birds wheel in the sky overhead. But, following the Fred Wiseman school of documentary-making, which eschews naming and explaining, the emphasis is squarely on the music itself, not the people who play it. Comparisons might be made with Wim Wenders' tribute to the music of Cuba, "Buena Vista Social Club," but that was a much more accessible, populist work and it's doubtful this will do for the Indian folk artists featured here what that older film did for its charismatic, elderly stars.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

There's a beautiful, multi-tiered exchange among artists happening in "Junun." Jonny Greenwood's unconventional dramatic scores have enriched the last three features by Paul Thomas Anderson, and the director now reciprocates by bringing along his camera to document the unique recording adventure this past spring of an album of devotional music — alternately plaintive and ecstatic, trancelike and propulsive, invariably stirring — on which the Radiohead guitarist collaborates with Israeli composer and singer Shye Ben Tzur, producer Nigel Godrich and a populous band of Indian musicians and vocalists dubbed the Rajasthan Express.

Anderson shares shooting duties with Godrich and three other operators, and there's something distinctly joyous and celebratory about the way the camera flies in and out of the ornate architectural structure to connect the music to the people, places and spaces surrounding the fort. Glimpses of musicians catching a few winks during breaks or power outages add to the flavorful observation. Andy Jurgensen's editing echoes the changeable rhythms of Ben Tzur's spectacular, surging music in a transporting film that places us right there in the room, living and breathing a singular artistic experience. Trying to remain still in your seat is futile.

Vadim Rizov, Filmmaker

"Junun" splices Anderson's previously characteristic high formality and Big Event shots with Inherent Vice‘s handheld looseness and some other modes, both familiar and new. Between helicam ascents, Anderson executes some faux-Steadicam coups, roaming at virtuosic and kinetic will through the old fort (shades of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," moves he's removed from his visual vocabulary for some time), or slowly panning over to rest on whatever musician he finds most compelling at the moment, confirming them as the most interesting person in the room at that moment. There's a well-balanced tableau shot of the musicians mid-song from another room, disrupted and reframed by three different archways in the middle ground. After a few minutes of this impressive composition, the camera is suddenly hoisted up for a closer-up view, briefly lapsing into grab-your-phone-and-stare-at-the-ceiling chaos; this is the work of someone who’s going to do whatever they want, even if it’s momentarily disruptive and borderline amateur hour.

Nick Newman, The Film Stage

This is generally a modest work, perhaps only requiring a theatrical outlet when it comes to the excellent soundtrack, and Anderson mostly uses its loose framework as a playground for new-to-him forms — the documentary, first and foremost, but also (and more interestingly) the possibilities afforded by digital filmmaking. The images of a far-away land are genuinely curious (never just pretty-looking and postcard-like), the performers making the music at its center are terrific, the work they’ve produced is booming and unique, and, above all, everyone seems to be having a good time. If your expectations call for a new benchmark in his career, you might want to come back down to earth before diving in.

Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

"Junun" is Paul Thomas Anderson at his most laid back. Not bothering with instructive context, the picture finds him absorbing the energy of the musicians through their instruments and personas. A scrappy film that never feels precious about itself or its subject matter, there’s room in it for Anderson to ask a question off camera, catch a musician dozing off in the middle of a jam, or track the whimsy of a pesky pigeon that continues to make sound problems for the album’s producer Nigel Goodrich. "No toilets, no showers, but full 24 hour power," one of the musicians jokes, the irony being the haphazardness of India means lots of power outages. And so the doc improvises, wandering outside, and in a way, makes it all up as it goes along.

NYFF Review: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Doc ‘Junun’ Featuring Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express

Rodrigo Perez — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 13:47:35 GMT

If Christoper Nolan recently borrowed a chapter of the Mayles playbook with his all-too-brief Quay Brothers documentary, quietly observing events unfolding without cinematic editorializing, perhaps one could argue Paul Thomas Anderson pulled out a looseleaf page from cinéma vérité giant Les Blank for his debut doc, “Junun.” While neither as rollicking or rambunctious as Blank’s films, there’s a spiritual connection to “Junun,” a free-form, vibrant documentary about an album recorded by a supergroup of musicians in Northern India that doesn’t feel the need for formal narrative. Maybe it’s as simple as the innate sense that, just like Blank does in his work, Anderson is sitting on the fringes, soaking up the infectious energy and loving every second of what he’s now become part of.

Documenting an album recorded by Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood, and the 15-plus motley crew of Indian folk musicians known as the The Rajasthan Express, ‘Junun’ opens with a magnetic shot that suggests a formal rigorousness that’s quickly spirited away. Set on a tripod, the camera slowly pans around the room, absorbing the deeply locked-in performance that begins to create a fugue state pull from which there is no escape. But then the camera briefly shakes mid-rotation, no one calls cut, the song ends, and the title credits smash up across the footage: JUNUN it reads in bold, white letters announcing its big, brazen intentions.

Anderson’s impressionistic doc reaches for and achieves, in the words of Woody Allen, “total heaviosity," capturing sonorous drones, viscerally rhythmic syncopations and utterly dynamic music. Playful and raw, “Junun” is unpolished to the extent that Anderson uncharacteristically reaches for whatever is at his disposal—digital cameras, GoPros, and even surveillance-like drones zipping around in the sky.

“Junun” is Paul Thomas Anderson at his most laid back. Not bothering with instructive context, the picture finds him absorbing the energy of the musicians through their instruments and personas. A scrappy film that never feels precious about itself or its subject matter, there’s room in it for Anderson to ask a question off camera, catch a musician dozing off in the middle of a jam, or track the whimsy of a pesky pigeon that continues to make sound problems for the album’s producer Nigel Goodrich. “No toilets, no showers, but full 24 hour power,” one of the musicians jokes, the irony being the haphazardness of India means lots of power outages. And so the doc improvises, wandering outside, and in a way, makes it all up as it goes along.

This all being said, the film is not at all unfocused. Shot in Northern India during a three-week trip at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, “Junun,” named after a track on the album that means the “madness of love,” it's certainly a loose and raw musical document. But its intimate, fly-on-the-wall curiosity captures and expresses so much about the musicians and their culture in just a few carefully placed gestures, whether it’s following a musician into town to tune his harmonium or observing a man feeding raw meat to ravenous seagulls. India doesn’t stop for electricity, and neither does PTA and his curious look at the cultural periphery.

“Junun” does that ineffable thing where it communicates its love for the musical fireworks it is witnessing firsthand without any overt salutes. There’s already an unpretentious, unfussy air to the film, but its exuberance for the material is evinced through the various “mistakes” it doesn’t bother to clean up, which gives the film an even greater immediacy. The camera sometimes pulls random focus, PTA will jump behind the wall in the middle of a shot, and one scene in particular, the too-close mics roar into the red of the distortion field. But all these unvarnished elements just feel of the moment, as if you are right there also beholding something akin to a spiritual musical experience.

Musically, “Junun” is hot fire, and luckily for Anderson some of the electric moments of the doc are the filmmaker flipping on the camera and hitting record when the 20-something troupe of musicians click into a trance-inducing syncopated groove that’s somewhere between the JB’s-driven funk of James Brown, the memseric beat of Fela Kuti, and the more traditional, but not less exciting, soulfulness of Qawwali music. The eclectic musicians who back Tzur, The Rajasthan Express, might as well be Jadophor’s answer to Fela Kuti’s bombastic Africa '70 — a 15-something member Arkestra who laid down swirling, hypnotic rhythms that are intensely infectious.

Radiohead fans or pop culture tourists may walk away disappointed. Those looking for a documentary about Jonny Greenwood or the hipster music doc of the year, have come to the wrong place (the Radiohead musician barely utters a word). But those willing to let these two creative giants in their respective fields broaden their horizons will really get their hair blown back.

For celluloid purists who love Anderson’s devotion to 35 and 65mm, perhaps there will be fewer visual joys here. “Junjun” has no director of photography to speak of, little camera quality uniformity, and there are five people credited as being cameramen, including Anderson himself, producer Nigel Godrich, and Greenwood’s wife Sharona Katan, but it speaks to the of-the-moment approach: if you see something, pick up one of the cameras and shoot it.

At 55 minutes in length, “Junun” is a perfectly digestible chunk of time to spend with this culture and these musicians — many of whom PTA gives their own little idiosyncratic moment to shine — but Shye Bur Tar’s music is so good, you could easily spend hours engrossed in the transfixing play. Just as “Junun” starts to crescendo, it bows out, leaving you satisfied but yearning for more (which is where the accompanying album that comes out in November on Nonesuch factors in).

Paul Thomas Anderson has always been intertwined with music, from his jukebox blasts in his feature films, to making music videos for Fiona Apple and Joanna Newsom. However, with “Junun,” the director's relationship with music takes greater hold. If “There Will Be Blood” was Anderson’s Kid A, an artistic leap towards left-of-center that informed everything that followed, “Junun” is that quickly recorded, off-the-cuff EP that bands release between fully-fleshed out albums. And as unconcerned as it is with fidelity, it’s still an enthralling, intimate and exciting little riff you’ll be playing on repeat. [A-]

Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson Composes An Exhilarating Tune in 'Junun' Trailer

Zack Sharf — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 13:40:14 GMT

READ MORE: NYFF Review: Paul Thomas Anderson is Trying Something Different With 'Junun'

Paul Thomas Anderson's mysterious documentary project "Junun" had its world premiere yesterday at the 53rd New York Film Festival, and if reviews out of the screening are to be believed, it seems like the director has effortlessly switched to non-fiction filmmaking.

The 54-minute documentary is a collaboration with Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist from Radiohead who has scored Anderson's last three films, and Israeli musician, composer and poet Shye Ben Tzur. The three traveled to Rajasthan in northwestern India and were welcomed by the Maharaja of Jodhpur at the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort, where they assembled a makeshift studio and worked with a group of Indian musicians. "Junun," which translates to "the madness of love," depicts the resulting artistic collaboration over their three-week stay.

In his B+ NYFF review, Indiewire Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn said, "Despite the meandering trajectory, 'Junun' develops a psychedelic, otherworldly atmosphere that serves as the sole linking device to Anderson's other films."

Watch the exciting new trailer above. "Junun" is now available to stream on MUBI.com.

READ MORE: Paul Thomas Anderson Music Doc 'Junun' to Stream Exclusively on MUBI

NYFF Review: Paul Thomas Anderson is Trying Something Different With 'Junun'

Eric Kohn — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 22:28:52 GMT

READ MORE: The 2015 Indiewire NYFF Bible

The first shot of Paul Thomas Anderson's 54-minute musical documentary "Junun" swirls around at the center of mostly Indian musicians playing trumpets, singing and clapping in a dizzying assemblage of sights and sounds. In the midst of it all, there's also a skinny white guy with long, tousled hair strumming away at the guitar. That would be Radiohead musician and frequent Anderson collaborator Johnny Greenwood, whose presence in "Junun" alongside Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur speaks to a striking fusion of creative forces at the center of this immersive portrait.

As the sonically rich album comes alive, "Junun" eschews context and lets the audiovisual design speak for itself. Concise yet wandering in its structure, it doesn't rise to the level of narrative complexity found in Anderson's many other projects, but compensates with a series of lush sights and sounds.

Shot last February in the 400-year-old Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan, India, Anderson's first non-fiction effort bears little resemblance to his other movies, starting with the immediate perception that it's not really a movie in any traditional sense. Instead, "Junun" unfolds as an assemblage of moments mostly set within the confines of the fort. The musicians assemble a series of tracks using countless instruments, vocalists and languages ranging from Hebrew, Hindi and Urdu, with the occasional English-language aside in between performances.

The linguistic and ethnic tenor of the collaboration leads to a complex cinematic tapestry in which Western and Eastern traditions seep together from scene to scene. A mixture of ancient and modern sounds, the album is a porous concept, and Anderson follows suit with his alternately vibrant and listless techniques.

While not interested in fleshing out their personalities, Anderson gives the musicians a precise identity as humble servants in the spiritual act of collaboration. On occasion, they just lounge around, killing time whenever the electricity flares out. There's never any sense of urgency or professional motivation. Aided by three other credited camera operators, the filmmaker follows the ambling quality of these sessions by shifting from static shots to roaming drone cameras that capture the majestic fort alongside the adjacent cityscape.

Much of "Junun" evades the pressures of a traditional behind-the-scene music documentary in which collaborative details come equipped with talking heads. It might be more accurate to describe Anderson's approach as post-narrative, in that it offers up a uniquely 21st century collage of digital wizardry and homegrown talent that focuses less on structure than unique, fragmentary encounters with cultures fusing together.

In the process of combining acoustic and mechanical effects, the musicians never say much about the particulars of the sound they're aiming to achieve. But with flutes, drum machines and tubas all somehow finding their ways into the harmonies, "Junun" hints at meaning that transcends specific reference points. (The precedent for this sort of collaboration, if there is one, would probably be Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass' 1990 album "Passages," though "Junun" delivers a much livelier sound.) In a fleeting aside, we overhear one of the Americans in the mix describing a group of female vocalists "speaking words they don't understand." That becomes a running motif in "Junun," where overlapping elements allow for a new type of language to take shape.

Despite the meandering trajectory, "Junun" develops a psychedelic, otherworldly atmosphere that serves as the sole linking device to Anderson's other films. A meditative universe of self-contained artistry, "Junun" offers no clear-eyed statement on its subject, but develops an enveloping internal logic about the thrill of artistic innovation. During a live show in the closing scenes, a producer describes their album as a "very unusual coming together." Seen in the context of the movie, it's not only a reference to the performers in front of the camera but the ever-surprising director behind it.

Grade: B+

"Junun" premieres this week at the New York Film Festival this week and is available exclusively to stream on MUBI.com starting June 8.

READ MORE: Jia Zhangke Reveals How Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica Saved His Career

Yorgos Lanthimos on the Absurd Logic of Satirizing Modern Romance in 'The Lobster'

Emily Buder — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:46:13 GMT

Nothing is too absurd for Yorgos Lanthimos. With his lauded 2010 feature "Dogtooth," the Greek director proved to be one of the most daring social satirists working today, leaving no taboos unturned in an attempt to mock the dysfunctional modern family. Now, Lanthimos is back with his newest effort, "The Lobster." Like "Dogtooth," it's a black comedy that inhabits the surreality of an extreme premise. But "The Lobster" is decidedly larger in scope. Nearly two hours long, it depicts a dizzying totalitarian world full of bizarre rules and even weirder characters (played by the likes of Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux and John C. Reilly).

The target this time around? Romance.

"It all starts from a little thing," said Lanthimos following a New York Film Festival screening of the film. "This time I wanted to do something about relationships, and how people are under so much pressure to be successful in that domain." Lanthimos said that modern romance is a minefield of expectations and rules, many of which are arbitrary. "You find certain ways of justifying why you make certain choices in relationships," he said. "You tell yourself why you can approach someone, be with someone, leave someone. Pushing that to extremes in this movie enhances our understanding of relationships."

The world of "The Lobster" is extreme indeed. In the dystopian future, being single is illegal. When a person becomes single or cannot find a partner, he or she is required to check into an institutional "hotel."

"We started with the idea of the hotel," said Lanthimos. "When you become single, you have to go to a hotel and find someone. Then we started coming up with all the rules, restrictions and pressure — that you have to find someone in certain amount of time, and what happens if you don't."

What happens is that the bachelor or bachelorette gets turned into an animal of their choice. "We just followed logic after we set up the premise," said Lanthimos to a crowd that chuckled at the relative absurdity of the claim.

Read More: 'The Lobster' Director Yorgos Lanthimos Explains Why Name Actors Need to See His Films Before Working With Him

For the first half of the film, we follow Colin Farrell's plight to force an instance of compatibility with another hotel resident. The second part sees Farrell transition to renegade; he flees into the forest, where he encounters a commune of anti-establishmentarians who champion the merits of singledom.

"We came up with the world outside the hotel because we felt the world wasn't complete without it," said Lanthimos. "We knew there would be people out there who had different ideas, wanted to live differently, and were rebelling against the system." The rogue community, however, has its own set of oppressive rules. "We're interested in the irony of someone who tries to escape a certain kind of system ending up having to become a part of another," said Lanthimos.

In this sense, "The Lobster" is as much about dissidence as it is about satirizing relationships. "People follow completely absurd rules," said Lanthimos. "You get used to it because you're educated in a certain way. Many years can go by and people don't question. That's how it's done. That's the way it is. But if you distance yourself from it, you can realize how absurd some of the things that we consider normal are."

"We're not really interested in just representing reality on film," Lanthimos continued. "We always try to structure a world that can lead us to explore themes under extreme conditions and reveal the absurdity of our everyday lives and how ridiculous and how horrible and how wonderful it might be."

When asked which kind of animal Lanthimos would have chosen to turn into, he said, "I'd like to be some kind of bird. You know, to fly around."

"Because you're a free spirit?" asked the audience member.

"No," said Lanthimos. "I just like flying!"

Don Cheadle Tries to Hit the Right Notes in New Clip From NYFF Closer 'Miles Ahead'

Kate Erbland — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:20:57 GMT

READ MORE: Don Cheadle's Directorial Debut 'Miles Ahead' to Close 53rd New York Film Festival

It's rare that a film slated for a major film festival debut doesn't show off at least a bit of marketing before its premiere, but such is the case with the Don Cheadle's directorial debut, "Miles Ahead." The film, which will serves as the New York Film Festival's Closing Night Film this weekend, hasn't released a full trailer yet, and most clips have been decidedly short, but Yahoo! Movies has now revealed our longest look at the film yet, in the form of a dizzyingly (and appropriately) musical new clip.

The Oscar-nominated actor ("Hotel Rwanda") also stars in the biopic as Miles Davis, one of the 20th century's greatest and most fascinating artists. Cheadle's film will focus on the legendary jazz musician's crazed years in the late 1970s, during which he struggled with a variety of ailments while also contending with memories of past triumphs and falls. His years with Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), the love of his life, are also explored.

The world premiere of "Miles Ahead" will close out the New York Film Festival on Saturday, October 10. The film does not yet have a release date.

READ MORE: Watch The First Footage Of Don Cheadle As Miles Davis In The Trailer For The 2015 New York Film Festival

Daily Reads: What Happens When Amazon Dies, The New York Film Festival Grapples With the Death of an Icon, and More

Vikram Murthi — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 15:51:24 GMT

Criticwire's Daily Reads brings today's essential news stories and critical pieces to you.

1. When Amazon Dies: What Happens to Digital Collections When Tech Giants Fall? It's a strange and curious question. No one ever believes that giants like Amazon or iTunes will suddenly collapse, but as much as we want to put that thought out of our heads, things like that happen all the time. But in an age of not owning an artistic medium, i.e. CD or DVD, and instead licensing copyright content, this can be troubling. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance writes about what happens to us when companies like Amazon fall.

So what happens if the company that sold you that song goes out of business? Very quickly, things go from being complicated to becoming a "super complex" problem, Hunter told me. Apple's document outlining terms and conditions for purchases from the iTunes and App stores is nearly 80 pages long. "Good luck working out if you still have a right to use the music if Apple goes out of business," Hunter said. "I'd have a hard time working it out, and I've been a copyright lawyer specializing in high-tech issues for 25 years." For streaming purchases, the unfortunate fate of one's collection is pretty straightforward: "Let's imagine Amazon goes out of business," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "In the case of streaming videos, yeah, you just lose it. It's just not stored locally." In other words, unless you've taken the time to download each title you purchase to stream — Amazon recommends you do this "promptly after your purchase" in its Instant Video Terms of Use, by the way — your access to that film depends on a variety of factors, all of which are outside of your control. Amazon, which didn't respond to multiple interview requests for this story, doesn't even have to go out of business for you to lose the film you bought. In order to keep a film in your collection watchable, there's a constellation of pieces that must be in place: The software that streams the video has to work, the devices you want to use to run that software have to remain compatible with it, and the film itself has to be accessible on that software. None of these things is guaranteed. The films you buy could already, at any time, automatically disappear from your Instant collection. (Again, that's right there in the Amazon service terms.) All this signals a larger cultural shift in the way people think about ownership of media in the 21st century, or how they ought to be thinking of it. Increasingly, the purchase of digital works is treated like the purchase of software, which has gone from something you buy on a disc to something downloadable with an Internet connection. "You might think you're buying Microsoft Office, but according to your user agreement you're merely leasing it," Vaidhyanathan said. "You can think of music and video as just another form of software. There is a convergence happening."

2. The New York Film Festival Grapples With the Death of an Icon. Everyone in the film community is still reeling from the death of legendary director Chantal Akerman whose revolutionary work moved the medium forward and inspired countless directors to start making their own films. Her last film "No Home Movie" is screening at the New York Film Festival currently running right now. Grantland's Mark Harris examines how the festival grapples with the death of an icon and his experience watching "No Home Movie" at a press screening two weeks earlier.

I saw "No Home Movie" at its New York Film Festival press screening on September 24, and although I would like to be able to tell you that I fully appreciated it in real time, the truth is that my first thought while watching it was Oh NO. Akerman's movie begins with a shot of a bare-branched tree being buffeted by a loud and persistent wind. She holds the shot for a long time — what started to feel to me, as it went on, like an uncompromisingly, defiantly, belligerently long time. Long enough so that I thought, OK, this is the first shot, and I wonder what it will mean in the context of the movie, and then thought, OK, maybe this represents something or someone resisting an implacable force, or being slowly eroded by that implacable force, and maybe I ought to be grappling with the question of whether the shot is about the tree or about the wind. And then I thought, maybe my own irritation is what I'm supposed to be engaging with, and then I thought, fuck it, I don’t care, the contextless point being made here isn't worth the time being spent on it, just get on with it, and then I thought, it doesn't really matter what I think because this shot isn't going to go away until it goes away. And then I thought, there are worse things than a movie that forces you into and through and past your impatience, and I am a professional and one shot isn't going to break me, and maybe I'll just spend some time thinking about the truly excellent Peter Sarsgaard movie "Experimenter" that I saw just before this, and what a shame that I'm only realizing how hungry for lunch I am now, when it's too late. And then the shot changed, and I suddenly felt like I had entered a mild trance and was somehow ready for whatever came next. I am by no means a Chantal Akerman expert, but many years ago I saw her most famous and acclaimed work, the 1975 film "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," made when she was just 25, and it is the rare kind of triumph for which a filmmaker earns a lifetime pass; you don't have to like all or even most of her other work, but after seeing "Jeanne Dielman," you will never forget that what you are looking at is the searching work of a great artist. For me as for so many others, "Jeanne Dielman" changed how I watched and related to movies. It is a drama, and a comedy, and a suspense film, and a polemic, and a horror story — about a woman, her home, her work, the ways in which she prostitutes herself, and what it costs. In the 1970s it was seen as a feminist masterpiece; now it is seen as a masterpiece that does not require an explanatory adjective. "Jeanne Dielman" is three hours and 21 minutes long, and not plotless, although the plot announces itself very gradually and very slyly. The film is composed largely of extended takes of mundane, repetitive activity (famously, Jeanne makes a meatloaf), and if you can sit through it and say that you were never once bored, then congratulations, but I think you missed something, which is the opportunity to learn that boredom has its uses and its meanings. When we're bored — when something that feels utterly pointless feels like it is going to go on, without respite, forever — we can feel threatened, desperate, self-alienated, almost endangered. We feel like we might go mad. To experience that is to begin to understand the movie.

3. The Ten Commandments of Talking About Oscar Season. Oscar season is unfortunately right around the corner. I say "unfortunately" not because the Oscars are an inherently bad event (they aren't, although they sometimes try very hard to be), but because the Oscar discussion absolutely sucks up any and all critical discourse for months and months and months. It takes an art form and make it into a competition. Luckily, over at Random Nerds, Charles Bramesco states the Ten Commandments of talking about Oscar season to remind us how to behave when the golden statues come out.

VI. Thou Shalt Accept That We Knoweth Nothing. Until that big moment when the presenter takes the envelope and then fumbles to open it and then makes a brutally unfunny joke about the difficulty with the envelope-opening, nobody knows who's winning. Regardless of how many questionably real sources anyone might like to claim he or she might have, which usually amount to bupkus, nobody has any authoritative idea about who's gonna take home the gold. There are analysts with a good brain for pattern recognition, people who study this sort of thing and see crucial details regular joes don't, but in the end, they're just better guessers. It's all just guessing, and while some guesses certainly have a higher likelihood than others, nobody really ever knows what the hell is going on.

VII. Thou Shalt Recognize Thy Codewords. Read enough Oscar coverage (or, alternatively, do literally anything else with the precious hours you have left on Earth) and certain words start to repeatedly pop up. Actresses described as giving a "fearless" or "brave" performance have usually uglied themselves up or gotten nude for a role. "Vulnerable" generally means someone's boobs were out. If a man's performance is described as "brave," he's probably a straight guy who had to kiss a man, or maybe even played a woman. (If the outrage over Eddie Redmayne's turn as a trans woman Lili Elbe in "The Danish Girl" fades away, it is sure to be replaced with a relentless blizzard of adoration.) If a Best Picture nominee attracts the "important" label, it made audiences feel bad about something they did not sufficiently care about walking into the movie theater. If one of the nominees in the Foreign Film category is called "challenging," that means whoever's speaking did not get it and feels only slightly resentful.

4. What You Think About "Project Greenlight" Says Everything About You. The documentary series "Project Greenlight" is chugging along on HBO racking up praise and dismissals left and right. However, your reaction to the series and whom you align yourself with often speaks to your own biases and personal affections more than you think. EW's Darren Franich explores this concept of one's thoughts about "Project Greenlight" speaking to their personality.

On some of my favorite reality TV shows, the narrative is less interesting than the metanarrative. What the show is telling you is never as interesting as why the show is telling you that, and what it isn't telling you. This is something that we as a culture all accept, even though most of us aren't pointy-headed enough to use a word like "metanarrative." "The Bachelor" can work as a fairytale — who will fall in love? — but it works better as an interrogative thriller (who, I ask you, who is actually here for the right reasons? (This is the core realization of "UnREAL," which uncovers the devastating nigh-existential psychodrama lurking under "The Bachelor's" neo-Victorian melodrama.) And the best thing about "Project Greenlight" is how — halfway through this eight-episode season — it has become a Rorschachian window into viewers' own thoughts and biases. You can pick your own metanarrative, your own embedded story. The show is savvy about providing just enough context to prove or disprove any theory. Director Jason Mann demands to shoot on film, even though it's more expensive. "Shooting on Film," and the raw authenticity that concept suggests, has lately crossed over from cinephile obsession to the mainstream: This December, JJ Abrams' 35mm "Star Wars VII" will open just one week before Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight" teaches people under 50 what "70 mm" means. Film, we are told over and over again, isn't financially feasible; it would eat up a tenth of the movie's budget. This news gets delivered (frequently and with increasing blunt force) by self-designated bad cop Effie. Effie could be the symbol for the harsh realities of business versus Jason-as-symbol for big dreams of artistry. This dichotomy gets hazy upon closer inspection, at least partially because Effie is a charming professional and Jason is a self-righteous ass. Jason throws tantrums and end-runs around Effie, enlisting Affleck-Damon and Peter Farrelly into his pro-film cause.

5. "American Horror Story: Hotel" Is Tedious, Insufferable, and Occasionally Exhilarating. The new season of Ryan Murphy's crazy anthology horror series "American Horror Story" premiered last night to confounding critical reception as to why it exists, what it's about, and what's really going on. Luckily, there are the precious few that are here to explain what it's all about. Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz reviews the new season and explains why he wrote the words "I give up" in his notes.

If nothing else, "American Horror Story: Hotel" represents a brazen doubling-down. The premiere plays as if the anthology's creators listed every element that detractors have bitched about under the heading "Stuff We'll Do More Of." "The Shining," "Village of the Damned," "Don't Look Now," "Barton Fink" (partly a horror film, especially the last act), "Se7en," "Suspiria," "Saw": You name it, it's in here, plus dollops of Edgar Allan Poe and Clive Barker. But don't bother keeping a running list of everything "AHS: Hotel" is referencing, or all of the commercial-TV taboos it's busting, because your hand will cramp in minutes. It's an explosion in a pastiche factory so immense that people will be finding bits of homage in adjacent counties for years. About 40 minutes into the premiere, I wrote on my notepad: "I give up." Unlikely as it sounds, that's a compliment, in its way. It doesn't translate as I will never watch this show again, but, rather, I surrender to this show's vision and will keep watching it with an open mind, without expecting it to be something it clearly has very little interest in being. Series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk are doing things here that are mostly not to my liking — not because I'm averse to them on principle, but because only a handful of modern filmmakers, including David Cronenberg and David Lynch, can pull off this kind of thing consistently well, and Lynch/Cronenberg they ain't — but they're doing them with such commitment that the result deserves to be respected, for its audacity and its indifference to what you think of it. I found the first episode (the only one sent out to critics; gosh, I wonder why) confusing, tedious, annoyingly precious, and often ostentatiously brutal, with even clunkier-than-usual dialogue (more so than previous seasons; consider yourself warned), but also darkly beautiful, deeply weird, and (sometimes) exhilarating. To watch even a few minutes of this thing, you must resign yourself to the fact that consistency of tone or quality — never values that have greatly interested the show's creators — mean almost nothing this time. But it would be foolish to assume this is due to inattention rather than design. The premiere is filled with clues as to how we should watch it, from the glimpse of the German Expressionist dream-film touchstone "Nosferatu" playing on a wall at an outdoor screening to the entirely unironic presence of the Eagles' purgatorial lament "Hotel California" on the soundtrack to the paperback of James Joyce's "Ulysses" being casually read by the hotel's concierge, a cross-dresser who for some godforsaken reason is named Liz Taylor (Murphy-Falchuk veteran Denis O’Hare).

6. I Want It That Way: "Magic Mike XXL" Scene Analysis. Gregory Jacobs' crowd-pleasing stripper-palooza sequel "Magic Mike XXL" came out on Blu-ray and DVD last week. The film features numerous scenes that turn the male gaze on itself with the interest in female pleasure constantly in its heart. Over at her blog, Willow Maclay looks at four scenes from "Magic Mike XXL" and how they tie into the concept of satisfaction.

"Magic Mike XXL" is a film overflowing with life and positive energy. At it's core it is a road trip of friends getting together for one last hurrah, and those pockets of love that spread throughout a group of friends in doing a job. That work is specifically the business of male stripping or as the characters in this movie refer to themselves "male entertainment." Unlike the previous the film there isn't much cynicism to be found here and the camera shifts from the performers to the audience. When I saw "Magic Mike" with my girlfriends back in 2012 it was a bit of a letdown to everyone in my core group of friends except me, and it was because they were given a movie that didn't satisfy their needs as viewers. They came to watch a stripper movie, but what was delivered was a story about economy. "Magic Mike XXL" still features some of those same ideas, but they are appropriately slight and only mentioned offhand. The satisfaction of the viewer — specifically the heterosexual women in attendance — is paramount and a few scenes in the movie act as a fulcrum for the type of audience reaction "Magic Mike XXL" is trying to elicit.

Tweet of the Day:

Your taste in film is a quest. You have a palate and you must refine it to match your essence. Never settle and never follow blindly.

— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) October 7, 2015

Chantal Akerman Remembered at Emotional NYFF Premiere of Final Film 'No Home Movie'

Tarek Shoukri — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 14:12:48 GMT

The film world was shocked by devastating news on Tuesday when it was reported that the widely acclaimed and pioneering Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman had died at the age of 65. Last night, the U.S. premiere of Akerman’s latest, and ultimately, final film, "No Home Movie," continued as scheduled at the 53rd New York Film Festival, but news of the filmmaker’s death cast a long shadow over the night’s event.

"No Home Movie" is an intimate documentary that paints a portrait of Akerman’s mother, a Holocaust survivor living in Belgium, over the last years of her life. A visibly shaken Kent Jones, the Director of Programming of the New York Film Festival, introduced the screening alongside Film Comment critic Amy Taubin. Both of them spoke to Akerman’s monumental career as a challenging and deeply personal filmmaker.

Jones, who penned a touching tribute to Akerman yesterday, began by noting that until recently the director had planned on attending the New York Film Festival. Jones went on to dispel rumors that Akerman’s death and recent bout of depression could be traced to the film’s mixed reception at the Locarno Film Festival, where it made its world premiere in August. "Contrary to stories about Locarno, actually I think that was really a good experience for her. And as difficult as this film was for her to make, she’s also immensely proud of it, happy with it, so she wanted to come here to represent it." Jones continued by praising the work, adding, "This film is about as elemental as filmmaking gets and as tough as her very best work."

Taubin then spoke about her first encounter with Akerman in 1970 when the Belgian filmmaker became enamored by the avant-garde scene of New American Cinema. Taubin described how Akerman looked to both the home movie films of avant-garde filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas, as well as the structuralist, minimalist works of filmmakers like Michael Snow, before making a mixture that was all her own. Noting how her films stood out, Taubin said, "They’re mixed with what mattered emotionally to her, and that was her passionate connection to women -- to a mother first, last and always -- but [also] to friends and lovers and her actresses."

Taubin continued, "Her films are not about women out of a feminist, political agenda, nothing could be further from them than this sense we have in the culture now that there should be more films by women and about women. These films are the only films that she could have made and they came absolutely out of her experience, what was personal in her experience and also political in her experience."

Speaking about "No Home Movie," Taubin said, "She's been working on many works about her mother and her mother’s impending death. In the past five or six years, they took the form of writing a long, long text about her mother’s last years, an installation that went with it, a live performance of that text, which ends with a sentence, 'Life or not.' To make films raw and urgent and magnificently formed without a trace of sentimentality kept her on the side of life."

Over the course of her films, Akerman had frequently chronicled depression and her haunted past that predates her existence as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In "No Home Movie," Akerman tries to communicate with and capture the memory of her mother before she is gone. She does this by documenting her everyday existence, using a digital grain that evokes the home movies of our youth. The film takes place largely in a domestic setting at times eerily familiar to that of her magnum opus, "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." Once again, Akerman incorporates static shots that demand our patience and make us acutely aware of the passage of time.

After the film concluded, "No Home Movie" was given a heartfelt round of applause by an audience that included some of Akerman’s friends and colleagues. But as the crowd headed towards a reception at the adjacent Furman Gallery, it became clear that the film proved unsettling and somewhat polarizing amongst the audience members. Some strangers seemed desperate to connect over the film, while others said it had moved them to tears. The divided reaction among the crowd to the painfully raw and oftentimes difficult film only confirms that Akerman never lost her power to overwhelm us with beauty and emotion or lost her power to shake us from our comfort.

In remembrance of Akerman, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will hold two free screenings of the director’s films on Friday at the Howard Gilman Theater. The documentary "Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman" will be screened at 3:15pm, followed by "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" at 5:00pm.

Kate Winslet Explains Why She Avoided Blockbusters After the Massive Success of 'Titanic'

Kate Erbland — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 16:22:27 GMT

READ MORE: Kate Winslet's 8 Best Performances

"I think of myself as a character actress," Kate Winslet mused last night during the New York Film Festival's intimate "An Evening With Kate Winslet" event, which featured Winslet engaged in a wide-ranging half-hour chat with NYFF's director of programming Kent Jones. Winslet and Jones covered a startling breadth of topics in the time allotted, including how Winslet got into her very demanding role in the NYFF premiere "Steve Jobs," the lucky side of her career and why she avoided the blockbuster route after her early success with "Titanic."

Throughout the evening, Winslet emphasized just how much she loves acting — for her, it's still akin to "playing dress-up" — and was open to getting reflective on how the choices she made as an emerging talent still guide her today. Below, read some highlights from Winslet's (and NYFF's) big night.

How Winslet purposely disappeared into her "Steve Jobs" role

"I said to Danny Boyle when I had my first meeting with him, I said, 'No fuss, I have to disappear into this part. I just mustn't look like anything like myself at all. It would be very, very cool if we could have people wondering who that is.' It's a trick, it's a great trick. That's what acting is supposed to be like and feel like. If you can pull it off, and you can actually convince an audience that you really are somebody else, then that's a great, great feeling."

How she found the truth of her character

"In reality, there were several very strong women in Steve's working life. She's a composite character. I was so delighted that he chose her, because I had a such a good time with her, spending time with her and talking with her and sharing her stories...We were always very careful, Joanna and I, when we spoke to talk about the character very much in the third person...She was absolutely one of his key people, but she said there's no way that she, in reality, could have been his 'work wife,' because there's no one more absent-minded and disorganized than she is."

"She was very generous with her stories. She always would say to me, 'It's your character, Joanna the character.' I think also for her, there was something quite emotional about it, too, because she had such affection for Steve, such huge amounts of respect for him, admired him so greatly and misses him."

The lucky break of "Heavenly Creatures"

"That was the biggest stroke of luck of all for me, because not only was I asked to play an extraordinary part in a true story in a film script written by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, [but] then Peter directed it and people actually liked the film. It became that movie that people still talk about. That was a stroke of luck...I had those lucky breaks straight away. It was very fortuitous circumstances. And I learned so much."

"The funny thing about us English actors is that, over here in America, you guys all think that we've been classically trained and that we speak perfectly because we've all been trained for three years to do that with marbles in our mouths or something, and honestly, I grew up in a tiny, tiny terraced house in a family of impoverished actors, real sort of wandering players...It was really very much a fun, lovely childhood on a shoestring...I just thought, 'Well, that seems like a hell of a great gig to me, I'm up for the impoverished actor life, let's go.' When I did have an audition for a film, which happened to be 'Heavenly Creatures,' it was the first ever film audition I'd had, I really just couldn't believe it. I mean, we didn't get a VCR until I was 15. I couldn't believe it."

The quiet craziness and total brilliance of Michel Gondry

"Michel is extraordinary. He is quite quiet. He keeps a lot in his head, and he finds it quite hard, I think, to -- not communicate that, because he does communicate it, but his ideas are so wacky that I think that it's very hard for people to believe that it's going to work. I never had that problem, I would just go, 'Great, that sounds fantastic! So I come in this door, and then I go out that trap door, that hidden one there, I change costumes and wigs and I come back this door again, I'm up for that, let's go!'...He's so genius like that."

"He would do shot lists -- his shot list would be on a napkin. I kept one, actually. There's one, this napkin, and I made him sign it, because it was so extraordinary. It was sort of a picture of me, with half a face that had crumpled off, and then sort of another object in the corner that looked a little like a fetus in a box. And I said, 'What's this?' and he said, 'It's the scene, it's the scene, that we do today,' and I said, 'No, it's really not the scene!' 'No no no no no no no, it's the scene!' 'Okay, it's the scene! Okay, Michel, whatever you say!'"

Why she refused to go the blockbuster route after "Titanic"

"It did throw me. Call me naive, but I had no idea, I really didn't, I had no idea that was going to happen with that film and to my life. It's a funny old thing, because I look back, and I just remember thinking, 'I don't really know how to do this being famous thing and I'm not sure I really like it and I'm not sure I'm ready for it either.' In a funny way, I also didn't feel particularly that I had earned it. It was a funny thing. I was still learning. I was only 21, and I still had so much to learn, I was learning everything on the job."

"I just knew that if I allowed myself to really catapult myself into the world, if I really went with it, that I think it would have made me unhappy possibly. Which sounds like such a strange thing to say, because it makes me also sound slightly ungrateful or something. I just knew that I had to keep acting, and I knew that it was most important of all that I continued to work hard and work on myself as an actress and to love it and to nurture those things."

"I was in a position where I could choose at that point, and chose to do some smaller films, because I wanted to stay grounded and I wanted to learn and I wanted to stretch myself and to play characters. I also didn't want to burn out. I didn't want this huge moment to happen and for me to kind of fizzle out as the moment fizzled out. I wanted to stay strong and true and keep chipping away at it. I think it was the right thing."

"Steve Jobs" opens in limited release on October 9, with further expansion to follow.

READ MORE: Watch: How Kate Winslet Warms Up 'Steve Jobs' (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO)

The Oscar Documentary Race After the Fall Festivals

John Anderson — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 19:13:40 GMT

If the past is any prologue at all, the menu of first-rate documentaries at Toronto and the ongoing New York Film Festival – along with some bewilderingly cynical programming choices – has brought home what may seem like an obvious point: The quality of the individual movies is less relevant to their chances during the upcoming awards season than subject — and soundtrack.

Oh sure, the critics groups may recognize some of the more difficult titles over the months to come. But what’s become painfully clear during the balloting each year is that more and more critics see fewer and fewer nonfiction films. And what they do see are the ones with the widest distribution (which doesn’t correlate to substance. Quite the contrary). This is not necessarily their fault. There are only so many hours in a day. And too many editors to mollify.

It’s quite the different situation with the Oscars. This past February, Academy voters had the sense not to embarrass themselves by overlooking “Citizenfour,” which was a singular film as well as a political event. The year before, however, at least two films of artistic, moral and political greatness — “The Square” and “The Act of Killing” — lost out to “20 Feet from Stardom,” the most easily digestible doc in the mix, and one that boasted the all-important triumphalist tone of voice (and some great voices). The previous Oscar Night? “Searching for Sugar Man,” something of a cooked-up story, won the prize over “The Gatekeepers,” “How to Survive a Plague,” “5 Broken Cameras” and “The Invisible War” -- none of which were easy, and all of which were better.

READ MORE: How Joshua Oppenheimer Reinvented Documentary for "The Look of Silence"

The year before that was even more dissatisfying: “If a Tree Falls,” “Pina,” “Paradise Lost: Purgatory” and “Hell and Back Again” all lost out to the insipid football story “Undefeated,” thanks to the Weinstein Company’s infernal machinery and the fact that the film was the racially reassuring tale of a benevolent white coach rescuing underprivileged black high schoolers. Think “The Help,” but nonfiction.

The lesson is twofold: Don’t confront Oscar doc voters with a tough subject; make them feel good about themselves; if possible, provide some good songs.

Which makes this year an absolute cluster fuck. A24's “Amy” could be the film to beat, and not just because Asif Kapadia’s Amy Winehouse bio is musical -- it also happens to be brilliant. Nipping at its heels, however, are “Miss Sharon Jones!” Barbara Koppel’s portrait of the snake-bitten soul singer; “Mavis,” Jessica Edwards’ Mavis Staples movie; “What Happened, Miss Simone?” the Liz Garbus-Nina Simone doc; Brett Morgen’s “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”; Amy Berg’s “Janis: Little Girl Blue,” and even Denny Tedesco’s “The Wrecking Crew,” about L.A.’s legendary studio musicians. The chances are slim to none that “Amazing Grace,” the 43-year-old Sydney Pollack concert film currently being sat on by Aretha Franklin’s lawyers, could squeak in. But there’s nothing that Oscar producers would have liked better than a big old Aretha love fest at next year’s ceremonies.

Nevertheless: It’s not entirely implausible that the five nominees for Best Documentary feature will be bios of great musicians, replete with heartwarming stories of diversity, nobility and triumph, with a solid back beat.

It’s not entirely implausible either, that some of the better docs to have surfaced during Toronto and New York will go begging for any recognition at all. There are a few that could sneak into the mix by virtue of simply being extraordinary – Josh Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence” for instance, or “Going Clear,” Alex Gibney’s Scientology doc (which, of course, has a built-in handicap in Hollywood). Davis Guggenheim's box office hit “He Named Me Malala” (Fox Searchlight) would provide for a great Oscar moment, which is not irrelevant to anyone’s calculations.

And there are movies that could cultivate fans by being about Hollywood – “Everything Is Copy," Jacob Bernstein’s movie about his mother, Nora Ephron, or Stevan Riley’s “Listen to Me Marlon.” And of course, there are movies whose virtues disqualify them as Oscar candidates: “The Hunting Ground,” for instance, Kirby Dick’s examination of rape on campus and the morally bankrupt response -- or lack thereof -- of most major colleges and universities in this country; or Frederick Wiseman’s “In Jackson Heights,” the venerable verite master’s more than three-hour immersion in the Queens melting pot. It’s hard to imagine Academy voters sitting through it, much less voting for it. But stranger things have happened, and will, especially in the documentary race.

NYFF: Danny Boyle on 'Thinking Different' For 'Steve Jobs' and Moving Ahead With 'Trainspotting 2'

Zack Sharf — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 14:33:17 GMT

READ MORE: NYFF: Michael Fassbender Resurrects the Real 'Steve Jobs' and Mocks Ashton Kutcher

After dazzling audiences over the weekend at the New York Film Festival with the impressively executed "Steve Jobs," Oscar winner Danny Boyle took to the Lincoln Center Amphitheater Monday night for an in-depth chat on the making of the film, its dynamic lead actor and, most enticingly, plans for the upcoming "Trainspotting" sequel.

With a whiplash of a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and a superb cast of Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston and Michael Stuhlbarg, "Steve Jobs" is an unconventional look at the life of the eponymous Apple co-founder. The drama takes place exclusively behind the scenes at three major product launches -- Macintosh in 1984, NeXT in 1988 and the iMac in 1998 -- and features Jobs encountering the same five people all while facing obstacles in launching his newest piece of technology.

Check out the highlights from Boyle's NYFF Live Talk below.

Boyle was blown away by Sorkin's script, but questioned the purpose of a director in it.

"I knew about the stuff about Fincher dropping out. I didn't know what was going on. [Producer] Christian Colson and I work together on a number of films and we generate our own material really...I've never done a Hollywood project. I've never done something that was generated elsewhere. Scott Rudin rang and up and said, 'Do you want to read it?' and I was delighted to. It was an astonishing experience reading it, just because it was so original and imaginative about how to approach biopics. I'm not a biopic fan, and we'd done one before about Aaron Rolston -- the guy who got trapped in that canyon -- but again, like this one, it wasn't skimming along, it was an intense experience of one event -- and in Jobs' case, three events -- as a way of looking at somebody."

"This guy's motto was 'think different,' so you'd expect somebody like Sorkin, with all that confidence he's got and ability, to tackle it in a different way, and he did of course. It was exhilarating reading it. But what role is there for a director in it? It's 181 pages of dialogue, whereas most movies are 120 pages of which half is dialogue and the rest description. There's no description in this. There's no manual of how to do it, there's just 'interior day, continues.' You realize, quite quickly, it's an invitation, or even a provocation to do anything with it."

Boyle loves the challenge of being restricted.

"I don't know if it's a British S&M thing, but restriction is really liberating. We had a hit with 'Slumdog Millionaire,' it was a massive hit, and after that you can sort of spend a lot of money if you want and do anything you want within certain limits, but we never did. There is something about [thinking in a different way]. If you limit your budget -- which we tend to do, we always try to work below $25 million -- it's a self-imposed restriction because it influences the kind of material you do."

"This is cyclical -- it's the same six characters you meet three times in the same 40 minutes before these launches. Whereas, you know, cinema, you want it to be progressive, linear and forward moving. Cause movies do that, they move forward constantly...it's not a reflective medium in the way that a novel is. It's always about forward motion." For this reason, Boyle worked hard to make each act as different as possible through camera choice and music. The story was cyclical, but the changes stylistically in each act "make it feel progressive and moving forward."

The studio wanted Jobs to be more likable, but Boyle had Fassbender to help the character remain truthful.

"You can't really make this film and have [Jobs] in a likable kind of way, it would be ludicrous to do that. Although, that doesn't stop the executives from calling up and saying, 'Is there any chance he can be more likable?' But we hired the wrong actor, because Michael is uncompromising in what he does. Those are his choices, that's his whole working method...he wasn't going to give him this likability factor, it's a relentless pursuit of honesty and truth as is presented to him by Sorkin's script. The studio was always trying to make things more likable."

"Michael is a very intimidating actor. His screen persona is intense. He's also -- which you got a little glimpse of in the Tarantino movie 'Inglourious Basterds' -- got a touch of a Cary Grant in there, he's very funny, very witty. It's not a laugh out loud film this one, but he's setting up gags with Kate Winslet. They're setting things up for each other."

Boyle opens the film with Arthur C. Clarke to show just how revolutionary Jobs was.

Boyle opens the picture with archival footage of science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke standing in a room filled with one massive computer, a striking juxtaposition to the intimate machines Jobs would end up creating several decades later. "That's why we start with Arthur C. Clarke and a wall of computers, because they were intimidating, cold, impersonal and frightening things," said Boyle of the decision. "[Jobs is] this guy with this vision of something that you will fall in love with, that you'll literally have a relationship with that's like romantic. It's true, isn't it? I bet 98% of you take it to bed with you."

"The iMac was the turning point, it put internet in everyone's home," he continued about the product in act three. "Even more important, it made computers cool. And improperly cool, like desirable, sexy cool, which you've never been able to describe a computer as sexy before then. That's what he wanted, so the process by which we take these things to bed with us had begun."

"Trainspotting 2" is moving full steam ahead, though James Cameron may stand in its way.

"We're doing a sequel to 'Trainspotting,'" Boyle confirmed of his next project. "We've got a very good script by the original writer John Hodge, who wrote the original screenplay, the first one. It's like 20 years later, and it's the same actors. You know, it's 20 years later in a friendship. That's what we're going to do next year."

"Irvine Welsh is involved as one of the partners on the film. We've set up a partnership amongst us all and he's one of the partners. The idea of them coming back together again, in the book it's 10 years and in ours its 20, and it's very different. It will be called an adaptation, but it won't be called 'Porno.' We're going to try and call it 'T2.' If we can get James Cameron to permit us we will call it 'T2,' so we're going to have to do something crafty."

Boyle and composer Daniel Pemberton took a cue from Ennio Morricone and scored the movie beforehand.

"When you make a film, especially with a guarenteed release, you do test screenings. So the habit has grown, which is in the last 20 years, of temp music. So you shoot the film and you put temp music on it from another movie or songs, and you test it, and if you're testing well than your composer is in a terrible place because you go, 'Daniel, this has tested really well when it's sounding like this,' so can he do something original or just an imitation of that? We tried to avoid all that. Daniel worked on stuff like Ennio Morricone, which is that he wrote a lot of it before we started. We talked about the three acts and what we wanted. Elliot would cut the film to the music, so that when we were ready we'd show it to Daniel."

"The Social Network" was Boyle's biggest inspiration.

When asked if he had watched the lambasted Ashton Kutcher biopic "jOBS," Boyle admitted that he did once he took on the project, but only so that he could avoid repeating certain elements and keep his film feeling fresh. "The big thing for me was 'The Social Network.' A lot of people said don't reference that, look at 'The West Wing,' but the fact that Fincher had done one of these I found enormously helpful. It was a film I loved when it came out and I studied it quite carefully. I saw what amazing work he did to actually deliver it and enhance it. It's amazing movie because it is a sitting down movie -- a major motion picture and people rarely stand, that's amazing actually if you think about it. It's very clever. I found that helpful. Ours was a standing up movie because Jobs was in to the walk and talk, which is featured in the other film. That was the bigger influence. I felt that we are in lineage with 'The Social Network' with this film and I'm proud to be like that. If it's half as good, we'll come out well."

READ MORE: Telluride Review: Danny Boyle's 'Steve Jobs' is Like Its Subject — Flawed But Fascinating