By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Santa Barbara Film Festival Names All Five Best Director Nominees As Directors Of The Year

Posted Thursday, January 28th, 2016 - 4 Comments »
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[PR] The Santa Barbara International Film Festival announced today that Lenny Abrahamson, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Tom McCarthy, Adam McKay and George Miller will receive the 2016 Outstanding Directors of the Year award. They will each be celebrated individually for their films ROOM, THE REVENANT, SPOTLIGHT, THE BIG SHORT and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, respectively.  The individual honors will be followed by a joint conversation between the directors on their craft and the landscape of modern day filmmaking.  The ceremony will take place on Thursday, February 11 at the historic Arlington Theater.

 “These directors have each made their mark on the film canon and have solidified their standing as some of the best directors of our time,” said SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling.  “The fact that these films come on the heels of already illustrious and established careers makes this honor even more special.”

 The Outstanding Directors of the Year award is given to directors not afraid to push the envelope in the cinematic world.  They have an eye for the picture they want to present and then do so, with an expertise that is both gracious and bold. Past recipients include Damien Chazelle (WHIPLASH), Richard Linklater (BOYHOOD), Bennett Miller (FOXCATCHER), Laura Poitras (CITIZENFOUR), Morten Tyldum (THE IMITATION GAME), David O. Russell (AMERICAN HUSTLE), Kathryn Bigelow (THE HURT LOCKER), and Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE).

 

The festival previously honored Jane Fonda (Youth) with its Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film and has announced that it will honor Johnny Depp (Black Mass) with its Maltin Modern Master Award, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams (Spotlight) as an ensemble with its American Riviera Award, and Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl, Ex Machina), O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton) Géza Röhrig (Son of Saul), Elizabeth Banks (Love & Mercy), Joel Edgerton (Black Mass), Paul Dano (Love & Mercy) and Jacob Tremblay (Room) with its Virtuosos Award.

 

For more information, and to purchase tickets, festival passes and packages, please visit www.sbiff.org.

 

About the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts and educational organization dedicated to discovering and showcasing the best in independent and international cinema. SBIFF offers 11 days of 200+ films, tributes and symposiums that transforms beautiful downtown Santa Barbara, CA into a rich destination for film lovers which attract more than 90,000 attendees.

 

SBIFF continues its commitment to education and the community through free programs like its 10-10-10 Student Filmmaking and Screenwriting Competitions, Mike’s Field Trip to the Movies, National Film Studies Program, AppleBox Family Films, 3rd Weekend and educational seminars. In recent years SBIFF has expanded its year round presence with regular screenings and Q&As with programs like Cinema Society, The Showcase and its Wave Film Festivals.

 

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Posted in MCN Curated Headlines, Movie City News, Press Releases | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Santa Barbara Film Festival Names All Five Best Director Nominees As Directors Of The Year”

  1. Larry Gleeson says:
    January 29, 2016 at 10:32 am

    This year’s festival is picking up an enormous amount of momentum with this latest announcement: http://bit.ly/20xZ2JJ The Montecito Award ignited a massive energetic surge: http://bit.ly/1QLd8of Looking forward to seeing you there. This is an event to get to. You’ll be glad you did!

  2. Larry Gleeson says:
    January 29, 2016 at 10:35 am

    Yes. I love Barbara Boros look: http://bit.ly/1nTFUYz This has the feel for an extraordinary edition. Looking forward to seeing you there, JP!

  3. Larry Gleeson says:
    January 29, 2016 at 11:59 am

    Sorry the other links may not work properly. This year’s festival is picking up an enormous amount of momentum with this latest announcement: http://hollywoodglee.com/2016/01/29/outstanding-directors-announced-for-sbiff-2016/ The Montecito Award ignited a massive energetic surge: http://hollywoodglee.com/2016/01/27/montecito-award-honoring-sylvester-stallone-sbiff/ Looking forward to seeing you there. This is an event to get to. You’ll be glad you did!

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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?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

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.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon