Movie City Indie Archive for August, 2013

Pegg & Frost Get Lucky (1’17”)

Teasing AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS (0’51”)

10 Questions For Elmore Leonard (2010) (6’34”)

Interview: A Few Choice Details From Lee Daniels on THE BUTLER

LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER

Lee Daniels is almost as entertaining an interview subject as he is as a filmmaker. We first talked about Precious, and a few weeks ago about The Butler. We spoke at the Waldorf-Astoria Chicago on July 30, 2013. Earlier in the day, Forest Whitaker told me that Daniels’ attention had extended to a special detail on one of the film’s three posters: the butler’s upraised, Black Power-like salute still wears a white glove. We talk about details like that, Presidential cameos, father-son issues, his love for John Waters, the importance of dirty jokes in the movie, the racial slur that the butler hears throughout the film, the first alternate title that came to Daniels’ mind and more. (Plot details are discussed.)

The previous interviewer had told Daniels about having admired his bold, eccentric work all the way back to 2006’s Shadowboxer.

DANIELS: You put your heart, your soul, your guts, your everything into your films and sometimes it’s embraced, and sometimes it’s not embraced, and so… I remember that my directorial debut was not embraced. And for him to say that… Helen told me, Mirren told me, she said, Lee, people will appreciate this in many years, I promise. And I said, ooooo-kay, well… I’ll living in the now! (A big laugh.) I’m living now! Anyway.

PRIDE: The film very quickly announced itself as a Lee Daniels film. There’s no public profile of the film right now, what the film is [at the end of July]. Nobody’s talked about it, because almost no one has seen it. Some people are predicting it’s going to be docile. It’s going to be very uplifting. [Daniels cackles, then breaks out in huge laughter.] What is it, five or six shots in before you see the shot of the two lynched men hanging from a branch, the American flag behind them, no breeze, draped down dead weight, just like them? I was, okay, we’re in for the ride.

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AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS Making-of By The Ross Brothers (13’29”)

These guys continue to be so, so good. [Via Film.com.]

LOCKS (2009), from Ryan Coogler (6’11”)

A sweetly unexpected mix.

Jer Answers THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED Question (1’34”)

I get a little teary hearing him say “Bad… Bad… Bad.” But! The punchline.

Woody Allen Is A Pimp… For John Turturro (2’21”)

WALTER MITTY In A Box

2013-08-12 15.47.38Five images from Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, in a 2MB thumb drive. ˙

mitty longboard
The always-poignant image of a 50-year-old man with a skateboard.

 

The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitty_5

The always-poignant image of a 50-year-old man with prepared food on a plastic plate under plastic wrap.

“My wish is that we made a movie that people have a hard time categorizing,” Ben Stiller writers in “Some Thoughts.” “I hope it is funny and serious, epic and intimate, realistic while also being sort of a fantasy, too. Mainly I hope it connexts with the idea that we all have something inside of us waiting to get out, and all it takes it the courage to stop dreaming and start living.” Pleasant omens: the adaptation is by Steve Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness, The Promotion); photographed by Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano, Lone Star, “Boardwalk Empire”).

 

Werner Herzog’s FROM ONE SECOND TO THE NEXT Doc for Sprint, Verizon, AT&T (34’56”)

Heart-tugging, tear-jerking genuinely Herzog film: that last line is quietly spoken and ever so loudly Herzog. “I knew I could do it because it has to do with catastrophic events invading a family, In one second, entire lives are either wiped out or changed forever. That kind of emotional resonance is something that I knew I could cover. What AT&T proposed immediately clicked and connected inside of me. There’s a completely new culture out there. I’m not a participant of texting and driving—or texting at all—but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.” (Via Sprint.)

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Ben Wheatley makes his first video: “Formaldehyde” for The Editors (4’13”)

“A lot of directors come up through making pop promos: I didn’t,” Wheatley says. “My route in was through advertising, internet and television. The pop promo is something I’ve always been interested in. Music plays a big part in my film work and I’ve always admired the work of Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, David Wilson and Dougal Wilson to name but a few. I was very flattered to be asked.” [From. Via @keyframedaily.]

Movie City Indie

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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