By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

NYFF Goes GONE GIRL For Opening Night

 

 

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCED TODAY THE WORLD PREMIERE OF DAVID FINCHER’S GONE GIRL AS THE OPENING NIGHT SELECTION FOR THE  52ND NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

 

 

New York, NY (July 17, 2014) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that David Fincher’s Gone Girl will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection for the upcoming 52nd New York Film Festival (September 26 – October 12), which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall and return to Tavern on the Green for the after party. Based upon the global best seller by Gillian Flynn, and starring Academy Award® winner Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry, Gone Girl marks Fincher’s return to the festival since The Social Network, the 2010 Opening Night Gala selection. The 20th Century Fox and New Regency release is due in theaters on October 3, 2014.

 

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair, Kent Jones said: “Gone Girl is so many things at once: sharp as a razor about many aspects of American life that have been untouched by movies, very tough and just as funny, brilliantly acted, and 100% entertaining—a wild ride from start to finish. In short, a great American movie based on a literary phenomenon, directed by one of the best filmmakers alive. I’m so proud to have the world premiere of this film as our opening night.”

 

David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage, and a comedy that starts pitch black and only gets blacker, Gone Girl is a great work of popular art by a great artist.

 

The 52nd NYFF also marks the return to Tavern on the Green, a longtime destination for the evening’s after party, which came to an end when it closed in 2009. In May, owners Jim Caiola and David Salama reopened this New York landmark, decorated to evoke the original Victorian Gothic structure.

 

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Senior Programming Advisor; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

 

NYFF previously announced the retrospective, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: The Essential Iconoclast, to take place during this year’s festival, as well as initial selections in the Revivals section of the festival to include Burroughs: The Movie, The Color of Pomegranates, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Once Upon a Time in America.

 

Tickets for the 52nd New York Film Festival will go on sale to the general public at noon on Sunday, September 7. Becoming a Film Society member before July 31 provides access to a pre-sale period for single tickets to festival screenings and events ahead of the general public on-sale date.

 

Subscription Packages and VIP Passes to NYFF52 give the buyer the earliest access to tickets and are on sale through July 31. Depending on the level purchased, packages and passes provide access to Main Slate and Special Event screenings including those on the Opening, Centerpiece and Closing nights of the festival. VIP passes also provide access to many exciting events including the invitation-only Opening Night party, “ An Evening With…” Dinner, Filmmaker Brunch, and VIP Lounge. For information about purchasing Subscription Packages and VIP Passes, go to filmlinc.com/NYFF. To find out how to become a Film Society member, visit filmlinc.com/membership.

 

 

New York Film Festival Opening Night Films

 

1963    The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, Mexico)

1964    Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, USSR)

1965    Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

1966    Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman, Czechoslovakia)

1967    The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria)

1968    Capricious Summer (Jiri Menzel, Czechoslovakia)

1969    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, US)

1970    The Wild Child (François Truffaut, France)

1971    The Debut (Gleb Panfilov, Soviet Union)

1972    Chloe in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer, France)

1973    Day for Night (François Truffaut, France)

1974    Don’t Cry with Your Mouth Full (Pascal Thomas, France)

1975    Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, Italy)

1976    Small Change (François Truffaut, France)

1977    One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnès Varda, France)

1978    A Wedding (Robert Altman, US)

1979    Luna (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/US)

1980    Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, US)

1981    Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, UK)

1982    Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)

1983    The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, US)

1984    Country (Richard Pearce, US)

1985    Ran (Akira Kurosawa, Japan)

1986    Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, US)

1987    Dark Eyes (Nikita Mikhalkov, Soviet Union)

1988    Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)

1989    Too Beautiful for You (Bertrand Blier, France)

1990    Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen, US)

1991    The Double Life of Veronique (Krysztof Kieslowski, Poland/France)

1992    Olivier Olivier (Agnieszka Holland, France)

1993    Short Cuts (Robert Altman, US)

1994    Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, US)

1995    Shanghai Triad (Zhang Yimou, China)

1996    Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, UK)

1997    The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, US)

1998    Celebrity (Woody Allen, US)

1999    All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)

2000    Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, Denmark)

2001    Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette, France)

2002    About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, US)

2003    Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, US)

2004    Look At Me (Agnès Jaoui, France)

2005    Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, US)

2006    The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK)

2007    The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, US)

2008    The Class (Laurent Cantet, France)

2009    Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, France)

2010    The Social Network (David Fincher, US)

2011    Carnage (Roman Polanski, France/Poland)

2012    Life of Pi (Ang Lee, US)

2013    Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass, US)

 

 

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Latinbeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, The Film Society recognizes an artist’s unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award. The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

 

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, HBO®, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, Row NYC Hotel, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

 

Support for the New York Film Festival is also generously provided by KIND Bars, Portage World Wide Inc., WABC-7, and WNET New York Public Media.

 

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

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And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
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