Movie City Indie

Teasing THE MASTER

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Trailering Bond 23: Hello Roger Deakins!

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56 Seconds Of THE SOUNDS OF ARONOFSKY

[Kottke.]

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Aaron Sorkin’s Syracuse Commencement Speech (16’27″)

“Thank you very much. Madam Chancellor, members of the Board of Trustees, members of the faculty and administration, parents and friends, honored guests and graduates, thank you for inviting me to speak today at this magnificent Commencement ceremony.

There’s a story about a man and a woman who have been married for forty years. One evening at dinner the woman turns to her husband and says, “You know, forty years ago on our wedding day you told me that you loved me and you haven’t said those words since.” They sit in silence for a long moment before the husband says “If I change my mind, I’ll let you know.”

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Trailering Michel Gondry’s THE WE AND THE I (1’55″)

Saves on sets.

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Peter Berg Blows Up His BATTLESHIP In Israeli TV Interview MNSFW (1’34″)

“What the fuck is going to happen in Israel? What’s the nickname for Benjamin, what do you guys call him? You got Bibi, and who’s his Secretary of Defense, the Defense Minister? You have two men that are now dictating the policy towards Iran. It’s a real mess, because you’ve gotta decide whether it’s better to allow Iran to be armed, and whether a nuclear Iran is less of a threat than an attacked Iran. If you attack Iran now, they’re gonna fight you back, right? There’s gonna be blood. Israelis will die, right? No question. Would you rather take that now, or let them get a nuclear bomb. It’s the most serious issue facing our planet today.  More so than the movie Battleship, which I’m very excited to have directed, I love Rihanna, she’s a great actress, did a wonderful job in the film, my Dad was a Navy historian… Have you been in the Israeli army? What? How’d you get out of that, are you a draft dodger? You gotta join the army, motherfucker! How’d you get out of that?” [Via reader JR74.]

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Don DeLillo talks COSMOPOLIS (spoilers)

 

From the press kit: ”It all happened very quickly, actually. [The script] was incredibly close to the book. Of course, Cronenberg cut out a few scenes that couldn’t work out, but it is totally faithful to the spirit of the novel. Of course, I had no intention to make comments when I read it, it had become a Cronenberg film. It is my novel, but it is his film, there is no question about it. Then, last March, I saw the film in New York once it was completed. I was really impressed. It is as uncompromising as it can possibly be. I liked it from the very beginning, from the opening credits: what an amazing idea to start with Jackson Pollock, and to finish with Rothko, for that matter. And the final scene, with [---] and [---], is just mind-blowing! Throughout the years, there have been many proposals to adapt several of my books, but they have never come through. I thought that adapting ‘Cosmopolis’ would be particularly tricky, since most action is confined within a car, which doesn’t translate well to the screen. But not only did Cronenberg respect that, he also shot in the limo some scenes that originally happened elsewhere, like the sequence with Juliette Binoche, for instance.”

On his novels, often fixated on movies, being hard to adapt: “I thought that ‘Libra’ or ‘White Noise’ could easily be turned into films, but apparently it is very complicated. I don’t know why. Anyway, don’t expect me to take care of it myself and write a screenplay… Many people think that in the 1960s I quit my job in an advertising company to write my first novel. Not at all: I just quit so I could go to the movies every afternoon. Only afterwards did I seriously take up writing… As I live close to New York, I keep discovering many new films that have become impossible to watch in a theater anywhere else in the United States. At some point in my life I lived in Greece, for three years, and I was film-starved, many good films weren’t shown there, I really missed it. Otherwise, I have kept a close look on what has been happening in the cinema industry, and I think that lately The Turin Horse by Béla Tarr, The Tree Of Life by Terrence Malick or Melancholia by Lars von Trier have been real milestones.”

On the visual obsessions of his writing: “I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.”

On mixing New York and Toronto locations: “The important thing is that it happens inside a limousine. It is like a world itself, with several intrusions of various kinds, visitors, or an angry mob. This is what really matters. Besides, shooting elsewhere gives the film a more general dimension, of course it is New York, but it is more the idea of ‘the great contemporary city’ we are dealing with, which is perfectly fine.”

And on Cronenberg taking swathes of dialogue directly from the novel? “It is the strangest thing! These are my words, but they take on another life. I wrote this conversation about art that Eric and the character played by Juliette Binoche have, but somehow it felt like I was discovering it, or even understanding it for the first time.”

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Trailering Resnais

If such a thing were possible, this looks potentially even nuttier than Wild Grass. And the “David Boring”-style title treatment!

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Postering OSLO, 31 AUGUST

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Bronson Allen’s FAREWELL CUMBERLAND CINEMA (4’50″)

 

[Via Norm Wilner.]

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Closing Marquee, Cumberland 4, Toronto

[Via.]

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Adam Yauch Performing “Three MCs and One DJ”

One of multiple angles from the Criterion DVD collection. Directed by Nathaniel Hörnblowér. [Via Criterion.]

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Movie City Indie

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“I’m in Locarno, my movie is premiering for 1,000 people, which is nuts. A huge-ass screening, second day of the festival, 7:30pm in the sidebar competition. It’s comparable to Un Certain Regard or Director’s Fortnight. Every movie I saw in that section was fun, brilliant movies from around the world. The main competition was like Aza Jacobs and Mia Hansen-Løve, people who have been around. And I was like, “This is crazy. What am I doing inside the bloodstream of this establishment? I’m 27. I don’t belong here.” Every person I talked to there couldn’t believe what the movie cost, and then couldn’t believe when I told them what other American movies cost. We were the cheapest movie there by 65%. The next cheapest movie cost I think three times as much as we did. And they were just like, “You can’t make movies for what you’re telling us your movie cost.” And I told them, “Well, I can, I’m here, I’m in the same section as you are, so you are wrong. People think I’m lying when I tell them my budget. And also everyone likes it. I’m having a great time and people are being very responsive. Maurice Pialat’s widow was like, “I heard your movie’s good, I want a copy of it.” I’m like, “Well this is f**kin’ crazy.” Pedro Costa saw it there and really liked it and I’m like, What am I doing? I had gone in two months from screening at BAM for a lot of friends to Pedro Costa? This is the exact sentence: “Pedro Costa saw your movie. He’s a huge Jerry Lewis fan. He wants to talk to you about your movie and also Jerry Lewis.” And I thought, “I’m out of my element. I cannot have that conversation because that’s ridiculous.” Because his retrospective was happening at Anthology when I worked at Kim’s, and his Criterion box set came out when I was working at Kim’s. He can’t want to talk to me. That’s not possible. That’s not allowed. There is no world where that makes any sense!”  Or like when you wrote me to say that David Gordon Green wrote you to say, “I’m watching The Color Wheel and then I’m going to see Tree of Life.” There is no world where this is allowed! Again, somebody whose DVDs I was putting on the shelf, as, like, a hero. And it’s just like, “Oh, I’ll watch this movie.” There’s just a very fuzzy area in the middle there and it happened very quickly and I don’t understand why.  I still have a voice-mail from Sean [Price Williams, cinematographer]. I wish he was here to talk about it, but the voice-mail is a long pause and he’s just like, “I don’t want to tell you this, because it’s gonna make you so insufferable. I hate having to tell you this, but Leos Carax watched your movie and he really loves it, and he wants to meet you when he comes to New York.” I can’t live in a world where Leos Carax knows who I am, watches my movie, likes it, and thinks, “I wanna meet that guy.”
~ It’s Alex Ross Perry’s World

“I don’t know. It’s been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be to make the films I really dream of making. I was in Italy a few years ago scouting for this very beautiful film I wanted to make with Richard Linklater. We worked really hard on the script for a couple of years and couldn’t get the money together. It was an expensive idea. It’s heartbreaking when that happens over and over again and then the movies that do get made are ones that have lots of women being beaten up or zombies being killed. It’s all fine, it’s all okay, but it’s hard. I remember when River Phoenix died, he was ahead of me on this curve. He kind of realized how hard it was to make serious movies. People like Sidney Lumet figured out how to walk that line, but it’s hard. And it requires patience. It’s a life’s work and I wonder if I’m up to the task.”
~ Weary, Wary Ethan Hawke

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