Written by Ian Haydn Smith  |  Tuesday, 01 May 2012

DARK HORSE is the latest feature by acclaimed American director Todd Solondz. As with his previous films, it highlights his skill at navigating a unique course through the representation of the American family. In doing so, he cements his position as one of contemporary cinema’s finest satirists.

International success came early for Solondz with his sophomore feature Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, picking up the C.I.C.A.E. award, followed by further success at the Independent Spirit Awards, where its star Heather Matarazzo won the Best Debut Performance award. A brilliant and blackly comic account of an awkward youth’s uneasy relationship with her family (the model of Rockwellian bliss, tempered by Dawn Weiner’s brooding teen angst), it highlighted the director’s skill with actors and also exhibited his dark, unsettling sense of humour.

Read more »

Written by Sol Tryon  |  Thursday, 12 April 2012

Director Sol Tryon gives an in-depth account of the making of THE LIVING WAKE starring Mike O’Connell and Jesse Eisenberg.

Beginings:

"From the first moment the script hit my hand until my end of days, my life has changed because of THE LIVING WAKE. Through forged friendships and a raw creative force, this little movie has truly taken on a spirit unto itself.

Mike O’Connell birthed the concept, Peter Kline harnessed and translated it to the page and I visualized a world where K. Roth Binew is king. I envisioned the storybook-like feel, taking place in a beautifully isolated environment. A world that could feel like its own universe yet at the same time strangely familiar. For me, that place was my home state of Maine. The vibrant fall foliage matched with the rustic architecture of the area fit my vision perfectly. I wanted the film to be funny and sad, but also strikingly beautiful. Shaping the dramatic and emotional elements of the story to enhance the comedic wit of the script was of utmost importance to me. K. Roth Binew is such an overwhelming personality that I felt that the audience needed to feel sympathy for him even if they disliked him.

Read more »

Written by Davy Rothbart  |  Monday, 24 January 2011

My cell phone crows with an odd, frazzled ring when someone shows up as PRIVATE CALLER, and the only two people who ever pop up on my phone like that are Nicole, a woman in Texas I had an intense phone-sex relationship with for a couple of years, and Steve Buscemi, the actor, who I'm working with on a writing project. I made the mistake of explaining this to Buscemi once, and now, whenever he calls, he breathes heavily into my ear and lays on a scratchy whisper: "Hey big boy, what are you wearing?"

So earlier this week, when my phone flashed PRIVATE CALLER, I figured it was either Nicole or Buscemi, but it was actually my 93-year-old grandmother, known as Mimi, calling from her brand-new assisted-care living facility in Philly to congratulate me—she'd heard from my cousins that a movie called Easier With Practice, based on a real-life experience of mine, was opening in theaters this weekend. "What's the storyline, dear?" she asked sweetly.

Read more »

Written by Kyle Patrick Alvarez  |  Tuesday, 30 November 2010

When I first read "What Are You Wearing?", the GQ article I based my first feature Easier with Practice off of, I knew what struck me about it right away. I wanted to do a serious, uncomfortable and strange phone sex scene and do it without compromise. What I ended up with is certainly the most complex scene in the film, and one that affected nearly every step of making the film. However, it is the scene I am the most proud of in the movie and the one that I think reflects my original intentions of making the film the strongest.

Writing - Writing this scene was certainly one of the most challenging aspects for me. I'm an incredibly shy and relatively private person, so sitting down and writing some nasty sex talk certainly didn't come easily to me. I remember I was writing in a small 'office' which was really a retired copy closet in a friend’s office. It had no windows and no one was ever in there with me. I remember knowing I had hit the right notes in the scene when I looked over my shoulder, embarrassed to make sure no one was reading it, even though I knew no one was there. That was the exact vibe I wanted to bring to screen... I shouldn't be watching this, but I am.

Read more »

Written by Wim Wenders  |  Monday, 24 August 2009

If our century still had any shrines... if there were any relics of the cinema, then for me it would have to be the corpus of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. He made fifty-four films in all, silents in the twenties, black-and-white films in the thirties and forties, and finally colour films until his death in 1963 – on 12 December, his sixtieth birthday.

Ozu's films always tell the same simple stories, of the same people, in the same city of Tokyo. They are told with extreme economy, reduced to their barest essentials. They show how life has changed in Japan over forty years. Ozu's films detail the slow decline of the Japanese family and the collapse of national identity. They don't do it by pointing aghast at the new, American, occidental influences, but by lamenting the losses with a gentle melancholy as they occur.

Read more »