Movie City Indie Archive for November, 2005
Cillian Murphy in heels: Learn when you're drunk
Jessica Winter talks to yer man Cillian Murphy about the demands of Breakfast on Pluto in the VOICE: “The voice was the thing for me, and her physicality. I didn’t want to be butch; I wanted to be as beautiful and feminine as possible. We’ve seen the whole tough-transvestite thing before, and I wanted her to have a softness, a vulnerability. I wanted her to be a real girl.”
Of co-writer-director Neil Jordan, Murphy says, “We never had enough money, never enough time, never enough light, and yet Neil would always somehow get that perfect composition or that perfect tracking shot.” Winter confesses to Murphy that she can’t walk in high heels. “Oh, you just need that confidence to go for it and fall down as much as you need to. I hung out with these transvestites in London, and their advice was, ‘Learn when you’re drunk,’ so I did.”
From Adaptation to Bee and back again: Gyllenhaal on modern scripts
“I feel an enormous debt to Charlie Kaufman, who has really returned screenwriting to an art form,” Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal tells the Writers Guild West’s Dylan Callaghan. He’s “allowed us to deconstruct it and use the visuals—it doesn’t have to be completely linear. Bee Season was very challenging because it’s a lot about the internal voice of the characters and I had to find a way to externalize that and to visualize it. [But] because the ending was what it was, [that helped]. So few things have a good ending. Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Spiderman 2)… says that’s the hardest part. He says if you have an ear and you’re observant, you can write a story, but to find a good story with a beginning, middle, and an end, that’s a hat trick. This one had an ending that was so extraordinary that the struggle to balance the rest of it was made a lot easier by knowing where you were going.”
Let's roll: 9/11 hits UK
Bloody Sunday and Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass has cleared his Working Title-Universal 9/11 real-time tale, Flight 93, for takeoff. (And the handheld wizard is looking an awful lot like Harry Potter all growed older and wooly-headed.)
Reports Daily Mail’s Baz Bamigboye, “It’s about the fourth plane involved in the 9/11 attacks in America four years ago, the one on which passengers famously fought back against their terrorist hijackers, under the rallying cry: “Let’s roll!” Greengrass is shooting at UK’s Pinewood studios, “thousands of miles from the US, for reasons of sensitivity and financial practicality… On two of the stages at Pinewood, replicas of the cockpit and passenger sections of the United Airlines Boeing 757 have been built.” The film is based “on the conversations the passengers had with their families, air-traffic controllers and, in one famous instance, a telephone company superviser. The film will follow the real-life time frame of the actual incident as it happened on the plane, intercutting with air-traffic control.”
Big picture this: Goldstein sez movies done, calls it quits
Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by fierce warriors. “Well, what are we going to do,” Lone asks Tonto. Tonto reflects, raises an eyebrow: “What we, white man?” In LA Times, Patrick Goldstein big-pictures his desire to shift to another beat, in an apocalypse-POW! piece that his editors subhed, the era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close. “New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant messaging and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the streets fast enough to stop suckers from lining up to see a new stinker. Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they’ve become wildly out of touch with reality.” That, Goldstein suggests, is the only reason anyone at Sony could have gotten behind Bewitched. “Or why any of the studio’s highly paid executives didn’t wonder why it should shoehorn an obscure family movie into the one-week window between the Disney-powered Chicken Little and the latest Harry Potter juggernaut, especially when the movie, Zathura, has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the warning “side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction.” …
“The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is [getting] your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble… Too often studio people have the same ideas about the same things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing one Hot New Thing after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate Hudson to Colin Farrell, who’ve yet to connect with rank ‘n file filmgoers.” [More KA-blooey at the link; and no, it’s only his tone that seems to be calling it quits.]
Throwing the VHS out with the bathwater: what to do with all that tape?
Casey Dolan of LA Times writes about the fate of all those bulky VHS tapes. “Consumer discards… are just the tip of the tape-waste iceberg. Film studios, postproduction facilities, video- duplication companies and other industry enterprises are dumping tapes more quickly than Disney can shed Miramax movies… The tapes, which are not biodegradable, arrive 5,000 to 10,000 a day at Tropical Media in Burbank, Calif. Tropical and similar companies hire independent recycling companies to break down the cassettes in Mexico by stripping the plastic and screws off the tapes… Given that it takes one-sixth of a gallon of petroleum to produce a single half-inch VHS tape, the more tapes can be reused, the less they strain the world’s energy sources…” One spokesman “points out that such processes fall short of… “recycling,” of turning the products into something new. “It’s actually reconditioning. The tape shell is made from engineering resin that can’t be reused.” Yet Sony announced in August that it has found a way to do just that. The solid polystyrene cases are chemically modified to create a water-soluble liquid polymer that can then be used to pull pollutants from industrial wastewater. A single cassette shell can treat 65 barrels of wastewater, according to the company’s Web site.”
George Lucas on theatrical: You could chop that off in a second
The Reporter’s Paula Parisi has a Hotel Bel-Air breakfast with George Lucas, whose coffee is definitely strong. “There are definitely some dynamics that are changing the economics of the business. What do you think of Mark Cuban’s idea of releasing films simultaneously at home and in theaters?” I think it’ll happen— it’ll have to happen… because of piracy. It’s the only way you can stop piracy; there is no other way. You have to get a very, very aggressive enforcement program so that people do have consequences to stealing, but you also have to be able to offer it to them … for the same price they can get it on the street. It won’t be DVDs—DVDs aren’t going to be around too much longer. If you can get it at home for $2, then why would you go on the street and get a bad version? 
Lucas believes PPV will replace DVD. It’s the way kids do it today. It’s how you do it on your iPod: They just download it. You pay 99 cents for music, and movies will be like two bucks. That will definitely change the economics of the business because (studios) are losing money now… If you look at the (theatrical) divisions, I don’t think they make any money. I don’t think they’ve made money for five or six years… For studios, the fact is that the theatrical film market is less than 10% of their business—it’s very, very small. I mean, you could chop that off in a second, and it wouldn’t even bother them—they’re just doing it as a promotional thing.
Greek chic: the next breakout national cinema?
Fiachra Gibbons of the Guardian thinks Greece might have the next breakout national cinema, writing on the eve of the International Thessaloniki Film Festival: “Only a few years ago Greek cinema was the preserve of arid intellectual epics choked with philosophical allusion and cloying nostalgiac melodramas on the manifold historical misfortunes of the Greeks.
“The only relief was provided by the odd… very broad comedy (we are talking films like the fantastically-named Cow’s Orgasm here). [But] not only have mainstream directors found a formula that has Greeks returning in their millions to cinemas to see big, well-made films like Brides and A Touch of Spice, but a new wave of young filmmakers has emerged to rewrite the rules and create a very particular extreme humanist style of their own. For the first time in what feels like aeons, Greece is staring itself squarely in the face. To everyone’s surprise – most of all the Greeks – the results make compelling cinema…. Yet this is not iconoclasm (another Greek invention) for the sake of it. There is something else going on that is very Greek in its way of melding conflicting, often contradictory emotions, and which avoids the chill cynicism of so much extreme cinema in Europe and the US.” [She surveys specific titles at the link.]
Saw seen: Forbes laps at Lions Gate
As a third Saw is foreseen, Forbes’ Peter Kafka enters Jon Feltheimer’s den: “No one likes a loser. But in Hollywood, even some of the winners don’t get much love. Just ask the folks at Lions Gate Entertainment, the small movie company with one of the year’s big hits—Saw II [which has] pulled in $80 million since it opened Halloween weekend…. Add that to the $100 million box-office take, and a slew of DVD sales from the original released last year, and Lions Gate has a franchise its bigger competitors would kill—or maim, slash, torture—for. [Yet] Hollywood’s chattering classes instead argue—sotto voce—that the success of the Saw movies just makes Lions Gate more likely to try to sell itself… None of this is news to Lions Gate [CEO] … Feltheimer, who is used to hearing that his company is for sale. But it’s not, he insists. “People who tend to put themselves up for sale tend to do the opposite of what we’re doing,” he argues…. If Lions Gate were dressing itself up for a sale, it would logically be ratcheting down its movie-making business and focusing on its catalog of 6,200 films and 1,800 television episodes… Making new movies, even the small-budget ones that Lions Gate specializes in, is inherently risky.” [More of the Lions Gate line at the link.]
Egyptian Risky Business? Breaking with self-censorship
Self-censorship by filmmakers in Egypt may not occur to younger ones, writes Farah El Alfy of Beirut’s Daily Star. “It is a well-known fact that within Egypt, premarital sex is a taboo subject. It’s not that it doesn’t happen but simply that there is a “silent agreement” between each individual and society not to talk about it. The independent film industry, however… is going all out to break it… The Fifth Pound by Ahmed Khaled is just one example of a film challenging the norm when it comes to sexual frustration on celluloid, depicting a lower-class couple who tip a bus driver to take them on a drive around the city while they consummate their relationship in the bus…. Unsurprisingly, Khaled’s artistic 14-minute portrayal of a young man and his veiled girlfriend who make love… through Cairo, has created an uproar, being banned in nearly all cinemas and cultural centers. The camera focuses on facial expressions – the satisfied man, the erotic woman and the bus driver’s subtle glances. In that it is more suggestive than explicit, which is even more dangerous in what remains a conservative country when it comes to the details of sex.” [More blow-by-blow at the link.]
Truly spending: on the first trio of Truly Indie pics
Chantal Outon of Austin Business reports on one of the first lambs of the TrulyIndie initiative: “After Mari Marchbanks’ debut feature-length movie, Fall to Grace, premiered at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival… the Austin independent filmmaker knew her life was about to change. … “It’s tough out there in the film festival circuit, marketing the film. I thought, ‘This is a whole new game,'” Marchbanks says…. Marchbanks’ film is one of the first three independent films chosen for Truly Indie, an initiative formed by… 2929 Entertainment LP, whose companies include… Landmark Theatres and Magnolia Pictures Distribution. [Mark] Cuban is co-owner of 2929… Kelly Sanders in the Austin office of Magnolia Pictures/Landmark Theatres is the point person for Truly Indie. She’ll work with Landmark’s Los Angeles office and Magnolia’s New York office on the new initiative.” Which, of course, requires more out-of-pocket. “Filmmakers retain all the box-office receipts and film rights, and they pay an upfront fee that covers all distribution costs, including publicity, advertising and marketing. A one-week placement of a movie in 5 markets can cost a filmmaker about $40,000, while a weeklong theatrical run in 20 markets can cost up to $150,000, says Bill Banowsky, CEO of Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theatres…. “We work with the filmmaker to create a release strategy most likely to reach the film’s largest audience in the most efficient way.” …The other two films chosen for the Truly Indie initiative are Donal Logue’s “Tennis Anyone” and Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana’s “Cavite,” which was shot in the Philippines on a $10,000 budget.” [More at the link.]
To market we go: AFM, Lassie and Harmonyic convergence
In the Independent, Geoffrey MacNab reports on shaking paws with Lassie at the American Film Market, among other surrealism. And: “On the first day of the market, I have a brief telephone conversation with Harmony Korine… Korine explains the plot of his next film, Mister Lonely, in matter-of-fact fashion, as if it is the most conventional costume drama. This will be a tale about a young Michael Jackson lookalike (played by Diego Luna) who ends up in a Scottish commune with Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple for company. Other residents include Marilyn Monroe (to be played by Morton), the Pope, the Queen of England (Sixties icon Anita Pallenberg), Madonna and James Dean. There is also a subplot about nuns and lepers in Latin America. “It’s an allegory,” Korine explains, but offers few hints as to its hidden meanings. [This] may sound preposterous, but unlike many projects being talked up in the Loews, it should actually be made. Korine’s fashion-designer friend Agne�s B is helping finance the �5m [pound] feature, which is due to shoot shortly in France, Scotland and French Guyana.”
Backbroke mountain of debt: when filmmakers don't get out
The Sunday New York Times catches up with the Four-Eyed Monsters duo whose sweet, restless movie I’ve persisted in pimping, using them as a lede for an article about the bills left after televising your revolution: “Arin Crumley, 24, and his girlfriend, Susan Buice, 27, sat in their cramped apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn,” scrivens Charles Lyons, “in front of the computers on which they edite
Inducting James Agee into the bruised, vulnerable, too-good-for-this-world poster club
Philip Lopate writes another one of the sort of jingly-jangly fact-filled ledes inspired by the short life of screenwriter, novelist and film critic James Agee in the Nation, on the occasion of Agee’s induction into the Library of America: “In 1958, three years after James Agee suffered a terminal heart attack in a taxicab at 45, his friend and fellow film critic Manny Farber wrote an essay called “Nearer My Agee to Thee.” The title captured Farber’s characteristically mischievous attempt to wrest the real writer from his pious followers. “Even when he modified and showboated until the reader got the Jim-jams, Agee’s style was exciting in its pea-soup density.”
“In retrospect, Farber’s effort to forestall sanctimony by objective assessment seems doomed, because Agee was such a prime candidate for literary sainthood: Handsome, tortured good looks, a cross between Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan; body-punishing habits (alcohol, cigarettes, work jags, insomnia); a rebellious streak; many loves; obsession with integrity; and an early death. He belonged to that bruised, vulnerable, too-good-for-this-world poster club of actors, writers and rock stars whose authenticity was vouchsafed by premature passing.” [More lopin’ Lopate at the link.]
Scorsese: Is it our nature to be good or bad?
“The Departed is the first modern-day film I’ve done in 20 years. I don’t even know how people dress any more,” ‘Marty’ Scorsese tells the Independent’s Kaleem Aftab. “I dress sort of like my father, tie and shoes. Today, people wear sneakers, they wear these clothes with hoods and stuff that I don’t know.” Age has become an issue for Scorsese… The most telling moment I witnessed in Marrakesh wasn’t something Scorsese said; it was his embarrassment at having to take a breath using his inhaler. As quickly as he popped it out, he tried to hide the inhaler behind the blue blazer he was wearing. It came off as an attempt to disguise his own weakness. Age plays heavily on his mind, and it’s clearly been discussed in the Scorsese household. “I agree that 63 is not so old, and that is what my wife says. But it is like they say here, ‘God willing, one should not tempt fate.’ One is breathing one minute and then the next, who knows what’s going to happen? To make it to 63, the interest now is to go even deeper into yourself, to know yourself more, and know what you are capable of. There is still this good and bad in me, but I want to know: what are we capable of as human beings? Down to the essential question: is our nature to be good or bad?”
Artless in the heartland: Landmark's Indy kills
Reports Indianapolis Star’s Susan Guyett, Landmark’s designated markets change some plans: “Key Cinemas on Indianapolis’ Southside will change its name and format Dec. 2, but it’s not because owner Ron Keedy wants to: This makeover is a matter of survival. Keedy was told that after… Landmark Theatres opens Dec. 9, the sort of independent, foreign language and art films that played on his screens… would be unavailable. They would all head to Landmark at The Fashion Mall at Keystone.” Under the new name, Key Cinemas Beech Grove, the theater “will be operated as a discount movie house with admission prices ranging from 50 cents to $2 for second-run family-friendly movies. Keedy is expanding snack bar offerings to include whole pizzas, deli sandwiches and ice cream. He will keep serving Key Cinemas’ celebrated homemade caramel corn…. Simon Property Group is expected to close the city’s other art film house, Castleton Arts, about the same time Landmark opens at a nearby Simon property.”
