Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs: IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary film festival picks its opening feature. Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter are set for London Film Festival honors. Wes Anderson adds to his next project. And Ryan Reynolds eyes a psychological thriller. AFI Fest Taps Bernardo Bertolucci as Guest Artistic Director The Oscar-winning Italian director and screenwriter has selected four features for his special sidebar program at the festival including 42nd Street (DIR Lloyd Bacon), La Regle du Jeu (DIR Jean Renoir), Sunrise (DIR F.W. Murnau) and Vivre Ca Vie (DIR Jean-Luc Godard). In addition, the festival will present Electric Chair , a behind-the-scenes film about the making of Bertolucci’s new movie, Me and You . Bertolucci has written and directed over 25 films, including The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris . The 2012 AFI Fest takes place November 1 – 8 in Los Angeles. Wrong Time Wrong Place to Open 25th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam The film is described by the world’s biggest documentary festival as “an essay on the insignificance of life and the role played by chance.” The non-fiction feature directed by John Appel revolves around the events of July 22nd, 2011 in Norway, when 77 people were killed in the bomb attacks in Oslo and the shootings on the island of Utoya. IDFA will take place November 14 – 25 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter to Receive London Film Festival Honors Burton and Bonham Carter will receive the British Film Institute’s highest honor, the BFI Fellowship at the 56th BFI London Film Festival, which opens October 20th, which will open with Burton’s Frankenweenie . Around the ‘net… Uma Thurman Joins Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Thurman has joined the cast in the controversial Danish director’s erotic drama in a role that is unclear. Nymphomaniac stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Stacy Martin, Connie Nielsen and Christian Slater. The film will be released in both soft and hard core versions in 2013, THR reports . Ralph Fiennes to Star in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel The film is Wes Anderson’s follow-up to his successful Moonrise Kingdom . The project also stars Bill Murray, Jude Law and Owen Wilson, Deadline reports . Ryan Reynolds Eyes The Voices Reynolds is in early talks with Mandalay Vision and Vertigo Entertainment to star in the psychological thriller that will be directed by Marjane Satrapi from a script by Paranormal Activity ‘s Michael R. Perry. His possible role revolves around a strange bathtub factory worker who longs for the attention of a co-worker. Their relationship takes a sudden murderous twist, but his evil speaking cat and benevolent talking dog lead him to salvation, Deadline reports .
Over the weekend, I heard Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me cite a study by Japanese scientists that determined that workers who watch kittens and other cute baby animals on the Internet are “more focused and productive the rest of the day.” So, in the interest of strengthening the coffers of corporations everywhere, I think you should take the next half hour off and watch these very funny — I mean, cute — Seven Psychopaths parody trailers, PsychoCats , that feature cats instead of the cast, which includes Christopher Walken , Sam Rockwell , Colin Farrell , Woody Harrelson and Tom Waits . The deservedly anticipated film by Martin McDonagh opens on Friday. Click Here to Check out Movieline’s Seven Psychopaths photo gallery featuring Sam Rockwell. The PsychoCats trailers were directed by Adult Swim alumnus Jim Tozzi, who co-created and produced the cartoon network’s late, lamented Xavier: Renegade Angel. Tozzi studied film and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design (which sounds impressive until you remember that this guy is making parody videos starring cats.) He’s directed music videos for Mercury Rev and Moby and created the award winning retro “Twip” campaign for TV Land. As part of the art collective PFFR, Tozzi has also esigned animation characters and puppets for the underground hit MTV show, Wondershowzen . Embedding for the Red Band trailer has been disabled for some reason, perhaps because little kids shouldn’t be watching cats drop the f-bomb, but here’s a link to the clip . As Tom Waits says in movie, “Dandy!” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
The Hamptons International Film Festival handed out awards Sunday for its 20th edition of the event with Umat Dag’s Kuma and Cate Shortland’s Lore tying for the Golden Starfish narrative prize, while Tora Martens’ Colombianos took the Documentary prize. Toronto audience winner Silver Linings Playbook , meanwhile, also took the equivalent prize in the Hamptons, while No Place on Earth won the audience nod in the documentary category. The 20th Hamptons International Film Festival winners: Baume & Mercier Audience Award Narrative Silver Linings Playbook by David O. Russell Baume & Mercier Audience Award Documentary No Place On Earth by Janet Tobias Baume & Mercier Audience Award Best Short Growing Farmers by Michael Halsband Golden Starfish Award Narrative Feature Winner (TIE) Kuma , Directed by Umat Dag Lore , Directed by Cate Shortland Golden Starfish Award Documentary Feature Winner Colombianos , Directed by Tora Mårtens Special Jury Prize for Inspiration Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet , Directed by Jesse Vile Special Jury Prize for Performance Carlos Vallarino , La Demora GSA Short The Curse , Directed by Fyzal Boulifa The Kodak Award for Best Cinematography Lore , Cinematography by Adam Arkapaw The Victor Rabinowitz and Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice Call Me Kuchu by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall The Jeremy Nussbaum Prize for Provocative Fiction Lore by Cate Shortand Zelda Penzel Giving Voice to the Voiceless Award One Nation Under Dog by Amanda Micheli, Jenny Carchman, Ellen Goosemberg-Kent GSA for Curatorial Excellence Ian Birnie
The scene outside East Hampton’s usually civilized Guild Hall was almost as frenzied as a mosh pit on Saturday night when an overflow crowd turned up to watch Alec Baldwin interview fellow leading man Richard Gere . The spirited conversation, which focused mostly on Gere’s pre- Pretty Woman career, was a precursor to the Arbitrage actor receiving the Hamptons International Film Festival’s 2012 Golden Starfish Award for Lifetime Achievement in Acting. Over the course of the discussion, Gere talked about some of his more unusual moments working with such storied directors at Terrence Malick, Richard Brooks, Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader. For instance, he recalled his frustration working with Malick on Days of Heaven because of the lack of guidance that the filmmaker gave to his actors. Malick “is a really interesting guy,” Gere said, “but one of his quirks is that he doesn’t always know what he wants.” Indeed, during one frustrating scene, Gere said he found himself asking that very question of the director who then pointed to “linen curtains blowing” in the breeze of an open window. “I meant like that,” Gere said Malick told him, and in that case, the actor told Baldwin, “I knew exactly what he meant.” The silver-haired Gere also talked about Brooks’ secrecy regarding scripts. He recalled that when he asked the director if he could see the screenplay to Looking for Mr. Goodbar , Brooks invited him to his Los Angeles home, where the filmmaker’s wife, actress Jean Simmons greeted Gere and led the actor to a “romantically lit room.” There, Brooks gave him a half hour to read the script, which Gere implied, was not enough time, until he discovered that Brooks had “blacked out everything that was not my part.” The discussion took an amusing turn when Baldwin brought up the subject of American Gigolo and asked Gere if he was uncomfortable about his emergence as a sex symbol. The actor replied that it was an “interesting dilemma” and eventually invited his WME agent Andrew Finkelstein, who was sitting in the audience, to join the conversation. (Finkelstein was an assistant to the late ICM agent Ed Limato, who worked with Gere at the time of that 1980 movie.) Finkelstein replied that Limato “didn’t like” that the media was focusing on Gere’s “hunkishness,” adding: “You were a better actor than a hunk.” The line drew a big laugh from the audience, and Gere, wearing a wry smile on his face said: “I’m a better actor than a hunk. Thank you, Andrew.” Finkelstein recovered nicely by yelling out: “Richard is now looking for an agent.” Shortly before Gere was presented with his Golden Starfish award, Baldwin asked the actor if any of his leading ladies had ever fallen for him. “Someone told me that one of them had, and I said, ‘I wish they had told me!'” Gere replied. “But I’m not going to answer that question.” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Look, I’m sure this Jai Courtney dude from Spartacus playing John McClane’s beefy son/action heir is great and all, but there’s just one reason to watch any Die Hard movie, and his name is Bruce MF’ing Willis . So check out the first trailer for A Good Day To Die Hard even though it takes a full 30 seconds of overly edited shots of warehouses and ambiguously visible bad men with guns to get to Bruno’s familiar smirk and the explosion-y goodness that follows. A Good Day To Die Hard catches up with Willis’s McClane as he and his estranged son (Courtney) fight terrorists in Russia, or something. John Moore of Behind Enemy Lines and Max Payne fame directs from a script by Skip Woods, of Swordfish and Hitman fame, so we’ll see how this one goes. The film hits theaters February 4, 2013. [via Yahoo ]
Onetime Bond girl Carey Lowell and Bond villain Robert Davi — respectively, Pam Bouvier and Franz Sanchez from Licence to Kill — were among the celebrities who came out to celebrate the 50th anniversary of James Bond at the EPIX and Vanity Fair -hosted premiere of Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 on Wednesday night in New York. Mr. Big was also there — not Yaphet Kotto from Live and Let Die , but rather Chris Noth from another die-hard franchise, Sex and the City . “In the history of cinema, there is no experience like a Bond film,” Davi declared at the Museum of Modern Art, where the documentary screened. The film’s director Stevan Riley explained that his motivation for making Everything or Nothing was his interest in answering the question: “How did Bond last these 50 years? No other film series has managed to do that. Not continuously, for sure.” (TV viewers can learn the answers Riley uncovered when the documentary premieres on EPIX on Friday, which has been dubbed Global James Bond Day in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the theatrical premiere of the first Bond film, Dr. No , in 1962.) Movieline had its own secret agenda for being there of course, and through the evening, which continued at the very Upper East Side Metropolitan Club, I asked guests a series of Bond-related questions. Here are their answers. What wisdom or life lessons have you picked up from the James Bond movies? Chris Noth , actor (pictured left): ” Always be careful when you go to sleep that there’s not a tarantula under your pillow.” Carey Lowell , actress, former Bond girl: “Always put your shoulders back and carry a gun on your thigh.” Chace Crawford , actor: “I learned how to carry the Walther PPK with a silencer on it. You always have to have a silencer, apparently. [Laughs] No, I learned how to make a martini. I can make a Vesper Martini and a dirty martini very well.” Robert Buckley , actor: “You always look infinitely better in a suit. People will think you’re much more interesting and charming when you have an accent. And, if you’re going to walk out of the ocean in slow motion, do it in short shorts.” Fern Mallis, fashion and design consultant: “Absolutely everyone is replaceable. Even James Bond.” Kate Upton , model and actress: [Laughs] “What life lessons?” Gloria Reuben , actress and singer: “How to ski down a hill while looking fantastic.” Theophilus London , rapper: “Just be super smooth, be quiet and you’ll get all the babes.” Cameron Winklevoss , entrepreneur: “If you have an accent, a fast car and a great suit, you can do just about anything.” Carlos Campos , fashion designer: “Never give up!” Nary Manivong , fashion designer: “There’s always a mission.” Chace Crawford Who’s your favorite Bond girl? Chris Noth: “Ursula Andress, because she’s gorgeous ! She came out of the water like a mermaid.” Chace Crawford: “There are so many good ones! Octopussy . It was the first one I saw. And [the girl in] Goldfinger . Damn . I did like Eva Green, too.” Robert Buckley: “Halle Berry. I suddenly stopped caring about the nuclear weapon and just cared about what she was doing in that movie. I lost focus. I was like, James who ? That is a Bond girl.” Jeffrey Wright , actor: “Ursula Andress is tough to beat. Grace Jones is sort of an unorthodox Bond girl. She wasn’t exactly a Bond girl, more of a villainess. Eva Green I thought was stunning and breathed a new type of life into it and a new type of intelligence into it. But, I’m not going to restrict myself in that regard. I’ll enjoy them all.” Carey Lowell Who’s your favorite Bond villain? Robert Davi , actor and former Bond villain: “I’m considered one of the top five Bond villains. I think there are 22 films. That’s pretty damn good.” Stevan Riley , director of Everything or Nothing: The Untold Story of 007 : “Everyone loves Goldfinger and [Ernst Stavro] Blofeld’s character Donald Pleasance. You know, I really like Mads Mikkelsen’s portrayal of Le Chiffre in Casino Royale .” Carey Lowell: ” The villains kind of come and go. I just remember James Bond. And Daniel Craig is a very good Bond. Sexy and skilled, shall we say.” Shaken, Stirred… or Heineken? Robert Davi: “Jack Daniels. Two fingers of Jack, ice cubes, the rest water.” Jeffrey Wright: “Preferably not a shaken or stirred Heineken . You can’t beat a nice Bond Vesper Martini. Hilary Saltzman , daughter of Bond film producer Harry Saltzman: “Shaken, stirred.” Nell Alk is an arts and entertainment writer and reporter based in New York City. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Magazine, Z!NK Magazine and on InterviewMagazine.com, PaperMag.com and RollingStone.com, among others. Learn more about her here. Follow Nell Alk on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Also in Wednesday evening’s round-up of news briefs, Toronto winner Silver Linings Playbook makes its U.S. move. Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller set for a fete. And Focus Features unveils its winners for an African film program. Friar’s Club to Fete Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller Christopher Lloyd, Robert Vaughn, and Jerry Stiller will be honored with the “Best Ensemble Cast of Yesterday and Today” award for their new film, Excuse Me for Living October 9th. The comedy written and directed by Wayne Knight, centers on a “charming, suicidal druggie must obey his rehab-clinic’s demand to lead a seniors men’s group or face incarceration and lose the love of his psychiatrist’s daughter.” Silver Linings Playbook to Open Film Independent Forum The film by David O Russell, which won the People’s Choice Award at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, will open Film Independent’s Forum, taking place October 19 – 21. The event helps indie filmmakers bring their projects to the screen. Focus Features Names Winners of its Africa First Program For a fifth consecutive year, five filmmakers have been selected for Focus Features’ Africa First Program. The worldwide film company’s initiative earmarked exclusively for emerging filmmakers of African nationality and residence, will award the filmmakers $10,000 apiece. The winning filmmakers for 2012 are Mr. Vincent Moloi (from South Africa); Mr. Jeremiah Mosese (from Lesotho); Ms. Ekwa Msangi-Omari (from Tanzania); Ms. Samantha Nell (from South Africa); and Mr. William Nicholson (from South Africa). Around the ‘net… Gael Garcia Bernal Joins Matthew McConaughey in the Dallas Buyer’s Club The drama from Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee ( The Young Victoria ) initially had Hilary Swank attached, but has since dropped out. In the film Garcia Bernal will play an effeminate member of the club, a fellow AIDS patient who meets Woodroof in the hospital, THR reports . Julianne Nicholson Joins August: Osage County Nicholson will play Ivy Weston, one of the sisters to Julia Robert’s Barbara in the adaptation of the Oklahoma family clan drama. She will be the middle daughter to Violet, played by Meryl Streep, Deadline reports .
It’s been rumored for years, but it looks like Warner Bros. is finally going to convert the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz to 3-D. Thank James Cameron and the Titanic 3-D rerelease that brought in cruise ship-loads of money. Temper that knee-jerk reaction for just a moment and consider: Could Wizard of Oz 3-D actually be a great thing for cinema? The Judy Garland musical about a Kansas farmgirl whisked away to a magical land was a game-changer in its own day, heralding the leap from black and white to color in one breathtaking cultural moment of Technicolor bliss. WB made the announcement today at a press event celebrating their 90th Anniversary; expect Dorothy to skip along the Yellow Brick Road and into your cerebral cortex in 2013. And while Wizard ‘s legacy has lived on in subsequent decades, trickling down tributaries of pop cultural influence as far reaching as the Muppets, to Japanese Lolita cosplay to a live-action prequel by the guy who made Evil Dead , there’s something wonderfully pure about the idea of an entirely new generation of youngsters getting an intro to Dorothy Gale’s fantastical Oz adventure on the big screen. Mimicking that transformative cinematic revelation from B&W to color could also be a big moment for the 3-D industry; imagine the black and white doldrums of Dorothy’s ho-hum homestead not only exploding in color, but in glorious three dimensional color once she awakens in Oz. It could blow kids’ minds, plus it opens the door to the next natural step: The Wizard of Oz 4-D . Opium highs and the odor or Munchkin sweat — the pinnacle of added-value cinema. [via Collider ]
Did you just see that glass of water tremble à la Jurassic Park ? Could that distant rumbling be Harvey Weinstein barreling T-Rex style down the endless red carpet leading to the Kodak Theater in February? Indeed, with the announcement this week that Seth McFarlane will be hosting the 85th Academy Awards , Oscar season is now officially under way. Screeners and For Your Consideration ads shall soon be raining down upon us. So this seems as good an occasion as any to assess the buzz around Oscar hopefuls in the major categories. Prognosticating about the Oscars so early in the race, when many of the most anticipated prestige movies of the year ( Lincoln, Django Unchained, Les Miserables ) remain to be seen, may be premature, like discussing the prospect of a Gingrich/Perry 2012 ticket a year ago. But what self-respecting pundit waits to be fully informed? After all, the jockeying has already begun . BEST PICTURE ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Like last year, there could be as few as five and as many as ten nominees in this category. The locks so far are Lincoln (a biopic of Abraham Lincoln directed by Steven Spielberg could be made with animated stick figures and it would still be a shoo-in—actually, I’d like to see that…); Les Misérables (a lavish, crowd-pleasing period musical that couldn’t be more upfront about its Oscar ambitions); and Argo (Ben Affleck’s film about a CIA hostage rescue mission in Tehran under the guise of a Hollywood production — Zero Dark Thirty meets Tropic Thunder ? — got a terrific jump out of the Telluride and Toronto gates). Silver Linings Playbook , a romantic comedy with just enough of a serious edge to please Oscar voters, also had a solid Toronto run. Ang Lee’s lyrical Life of Pi delighted New York Film Festival audiences last week and there’s every reason to believe the Academy will be just as enchanted, especially since there’s a feeling Lee was screwed over when Crash was voted best picture over Brokeback Mountain in 2005. I’d be surprised if The Master didn’t get nominated for best picture, but Kristopher Tapley and Anne Thompson over at Indiewire point out that, while the acting and cinematography are spectacular, the film itself left many critics cold. Michael Haneke’s rueful rumination on love and death, Amour , which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a bit of a long shot since it’s in French. But if Weinstein, who is distributing the film in the U.S., can get a French silent film a best picture Oscar, as he did last year with The Artist , there’s no saying what he can do with a French talkie. Rounding out the frontrunners is the oneiric bayou fantasy Beasts of the Southern Wild, which could provide this Oscar season’s feel-good, indie underdog narrative. (NB: This category will be shaken up in December, when many major contenders will be released, including Django Unchained ; The Hobbit ; Promised Land ; Zero Dark Thirty ; and The Impossible .) BEST DIRECTOR Ben Affleck Back in 1998, we all made jokes about how Ben Affleck was the luckiest man alive for tying his fate to Matt Damon’s and winning a screenwriting Oscar. But Affleck, who’s proven to be one of the best mainstream directors of his generation, may well get the last laugh — in addition to a nomination for helming Argo . Spielberg’s seat at this table has been booked for years. The Master auteur Paul Thomas Anderson is a near lock, too. Les Miserables director Tom Hooper, who won this award two years ago for The King’s Speech , will almost certainly get recognition for his use of live-action singing, which, to believe the featurette Universal put out last week, has never been attempted before in a musical of this scope. The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow could get a shot at a repeat victory with Zero Dark Thirty . The same goes for Ang Lee, who took home the best-director consolation prize in 2005, and breaks new ground this year with his innovative use of 3D in Life of Pi . If David O. Russell’s reputation as an on-set tyrant hasn’t blacklisted him so far — and judging from his 2010 nomination for The Fighter, it hasn’t — there’s a good chance he’ll get a nod for Silver Linings Playbook . Rounding out the category are heavy hitters Robert Zemeckis ( Flight ), Peter Jackson ( The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ); and Quentin Tarantino ( Django Unchained ).
Indie auteur Joe Swanberg has established himself as the reigning poster child of mumblecore, for better or worse , but as the most surprising filmmaker contributing to the Sundance hit horror anthology V/H/S (in theaters Friday) he begins branching out of his comfort zone with a newfound energy; his entry, The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger , was filmed using Skype — and a script! — and is also one of the more memorable and inventive shorts in the midnight crowd-pleasing omnibus. Between his V/H/S segments (he also acts in Ti West ‘s road trip gone horribly wrong) and the forthcoming Drinking Buddies , which blends his improvisational style and mainstream stars Anna Kendrick and Olivia Wilde, Swanberg says he sees 2012 as a turning point in his creative evolution. “I feel like I’m ready to be a filmmaker,” he declared to Movieline. Read on for more with Swanberg on how he and West accomplished a lot with very little for V/H/S , why acting in Adam Wingard’s Your Next reinvigorated him as a director, and how his Drinking Buddies stars took to the Swanberg method. You’re involved in two of the segments that most scared me, so well done. How did you first get recruited for V/H/S as a director and as an actor in Ti West’s short? I might venture to say that you out of the entire slate of filmmakers are not so much, or at all, thought of as a horror filmmaker. I would agree! One of the cool things about V/H/S is I think it’s one of the first times it’s actually visible how interconnected the independent film world is, and how easily it crosses genres. I think there was a perception for a long time of mumblecore being this very inclusive little group of [Andrew] Bujalski or Aaron Katz and the Duplasses and I or something, and that the horror world did its own thing and the documentary world did its own thing. But all of us have been friends for a really long time and we just make different kinds of movies. I think Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard went to bat for me as a director for V/H/S , and it helped that [producer] Roxanne Benjamin had seen some of my other films. But I acted in Ti [West]’s first, so that was my first involvement in the project. He shot his in May and I didn’t shoot mine until August, so it was a while where I feel like Adam and Simon were lobbying for me to get the chance to do one of these. Simon wrote your segment, which makes your V/H/S segment the first time you’ve directed something you haven’t written yourself. Not only is it the first time that I’ve directed something I haven’t written, it’s also the first time that I’ve directed something that was scripted. My own films are all improvised. So it was really fun for me to play with somebody else’s material. And Simon wrote it knowing that I was going to direct it and I think he expected that I would just throw the script away once we started, but I actually really loved his script and thought it was a good first chance to go ahead and do that. Your segment uses a Skype chat as its set up for tension; we watch as Emily (Helen Rodgers, pictured with Swanberg above) experiences something strange as she chats online with her boyfriend. How did you fake it, or did you? For V/H/S we actually just used Skype, we didn’t fake it. I did a bunch of research into the best way to fake it and I realized the best way was not to fake it. We were going to build this crazy, elaborate rig with multiple cameras that were connected to each other, and the more I looked at it and researched screen capture stuff I realized we could do high definition screen capturing and actually record live Skype conversations. So it’s a film made without a camera – laptops were our cameras. But you used lighting rigs and such? Adam Wingard DPed my segment and I wouldn’t describe it as a typical lighting set-up but it was modified for our purposes. Adam was usually moving with Helen – the other funny thing is because it’s a real Skype conversation, Helen was the camera operator, essentially. She not only had to act, she was in charge of what was seen and what wasn’t seen. So we had to do pretty elaborate choreography about where and when to turn the computer, when to set it on the bed, all these sorts of things, and Adam was usually following her off-camera with lights. The computer gives off a decent glow so we had some light motivated by the computer but we also had back-up lights, and the cool effect of that is, because it’s a real Skype conversation, one of the reasons we decided it had to be real Skype was that every time it gets bright on Helen’s screen you actually see that reflected on Daniel’s screen. If it wasn’t a real Skype conversation it’d be really difficult to get those lighting rigs set up right, but it’s fun to watch and it adds to the realism because when Helen turns on a light on, Daniel’s room brightens as well. It felt almost like directing dance. And we ended up editing after the fact but most of the takes are long, unbroken, four or five minute takes involving starting in the bedroom and going out to the living room, or weaving around the kitchen, so we had to light and choreograph these long 360 set-ups. That’s pretty fantastic a feat to pull off. In Ti’s segment you acted and also operated the camera, home video-style. It’s cool to see performers having to innovate and actually work with the technology, whether in laptop or camcorder form. One of the cool things about this project was the chance to do that. I’ve used Skype before in Young American Bodies , the webseries I do – we recorded a few scenes in that which were like Skype conversations – but outside of that it becomes really gimmicky if you were to do a whole feature film based around Skype or iChat. That becomes the thing. And one of the great opportunities of VHS is I feel like all the directors were liberated to play around with ideas that might not hold up for a feature running time but that work as shorts. The Skype thing was really fun when I realized that people only have to watch it for 20 minutes, and not for an hour and a half. Well, now Paranormal Activity 4 is running with the Skype thing. I’m not saying they copied you, but yours did come first… [Laughs] I know those guys, and I doubt that they’ve seen V/H/S . It’s unlikely that it influenced them. I don’t know when they shot that movie… In Ti’s segment, what did you actually shoot on and how difficult was it to be mindful of your performance and operating the camera at the same time? I forget the model of the camera we used but it was a little handheld portable – Ti did a bunch of research on cameras. We needed one with a light, because some of the real scary things about Ti’s are when the light switches on in the hotel room from the camera. As an actor it was a fun challenge to have to be mindful of that stuff, and it’s helpful in a way because one of the difficult things about acting especially when the goal is naturalism or realism is to not overthink it. You have to just be in a situation and react. So having the camera and having something to do with my hands that was occupying my brain I think made it easier for me performance wise to react to Sophia [Takal] and be in those scenes. It’s a much different experience than having a crew and a camera pointed at my face feeling like, ‘Okay, here’s the big moment – now act natural,’ with 30 people watching and we only get to do it two times so get it right. Both you and Ti seemed to pull off these segments using so few resources. These must be two of the most affordable short films ever made. Yeah, especially going to Sundance with V/H/S was really crazy – Ti’s and my segments were not the most effects-heavy of the bunch. The Radio Silence one at the end has a lot of really amazing visual effects, and David Bruckner’s, they built that monster creature and Glenn McQuaid’s has that video killer. Ours have pretty much practical effects. But all of them were really affordable. Even the super effects-heavy ones were made on moderate budgets, so it was great to go to Sundance and have the movie feel big despite the fact that it’s a low budget movie. In your career so far you’ve made so many films in such a short time – you’re one of the busiest filmmakers around, especially since you’re not only directing movies, you’re also acting in other people’s films. How do you feel like 2012 Joe Swanberg is most changed from 2005 Joe Swanberg? Starting with going to Sundance with V/H/S , I’m having the time of my life in 2012. It’s been the best, most fun year of my life as a filmmaker and it’s because I feel like I’m doing so much outside of what I’m typically known for. All the movies that I made in 2010 and 2011 when I was hyper-productive, that was sort of my last big push almost as a student; I was making a lot of work in an effort to keep getting better as a filmmaker and keep pushing myself to try things I hadn’t done before. Now I feel like with V/H/S and Drinking Buddies , which I just finished and stars Olivia Wilde and Anna Kendrick and Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston – it’s a much bigger production than I’ve done before – I feel like I’m ready to… be a filmmaker. I’m embracing being a director and what that means. Obviously I’ll be practicing and learning my whole life, but I feel like the kind of workmanlike attitude I’ve had the last couple of years is paying off now in the sense that I’m getting to put that practice into bigger productions that are being seen by more people. Do you feel like this evolution is marked in your process, or your creative choices? It’s in both, actually. A big turning point for me came when I was acting in You’re Next , Adam and Simon’s movie. Getting to be on the set of not a big budget movie, but one much bigger than the ones I make, and seeing Adam, who I’ve worked with really closely on $10,000 movies directing a much bigger movie with a full-sized crew and 20 actors and all these elaborate action sequences, I realized I’m interested in challenging and pushing myself. I don’t just want to shoot conversations in apartments. It would behoove me as a filmmaker, I realized, to know how to do that other stuff. Even if I never make an action movie it would be useful as a director to know how to shoot an action sequence. So I came away from that acting experience feeling energized as a director, to try new things. And V/H/S was the first thing I did. After that I went with an attitude of, like, cool – here’s an opportunity for me to do something I’ve never done before and to really mess it up. Not take the easy route. Figure out how to do this camera work and figure out how to do special effects and really make something that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone. And did that extend to Drinking Buddies ? The same was true with Drinking Buddies , which was still improvised but improvised on a much bigger level, with a full crew that I had to learn to work with. I basically took the process that I normally use with three actors and two crew and do it with 20 actors and a 40-person crew. I’m looking for those challenges now. I’m looking to broaden my spectrum a bit. Drinking Buddies is your biggest movie to date, and it features mainstream actors – how did they adjust to your process? You’ve practically established your own indie subgenre working in a specific style and with regular collaborators. When you were casting did you find that many mainstream actors fell into step with your sensibilities? I went into the casting with the same attitude that I’ve used to cast all of my movies with my friends, which is, who are these people? Are they easy to talk to? Do they have interesting lives and things they’re interested in outside of acting that we can use in the movie? Are they fun to be around? It really was almost the identical process, and the result was I ended up with more people who I love and who gave amazing performances and who are totally ready to show up and figure it out every day. It’s possible they were intimidated by the situation but they never let on. They were really excited to collaborate with me and create these characters. I’m deep into editing right now, and the performances are amazing. Everybody’s going to look at these actors in a new way because of this movie – they’re all really alive in an exciting way. So it’s given me confidence to keep doing this and to feel like I can work with bigger name actors, and that the process isn’t antithetical to the kind of work I’ve been doing in the past or that they’ve been doing. What did you learn about Anna and Jake and Olivia that you then integrated into their characters? All of them, the way that I like to work is that everybody is kind of playing a version of themselves. I write characters and create a very simple set-up, and with the actors I flesh it out. There’s not one specific thing I could point to other than to say when you watch this movie you’ll be watching a really interesting hybrid of my ideas that I came into the movie with and their personalities that they brought to it. There’s a lot of acting happening, and there’s a lot of real stories being told. As is always the goal, I feel like I came out of the film feeling these people were my friends and not just actors I hired for a movie. We all learned a lot about each other during the shoot because that’s how the process works. The more everybody shares, the better the movie is and also the easier it is to create these relationships that don’t actually exist in real life. Side note: I noticed that when you announced your cast for Drinking Buddies you earned a mention on Perez Hilton. Was that the moment when you realized you’d made it in Hollywood? I actually wasn’t aware of that! One of the things about making movies that people started to watch and write about is that they also write mean things a lot of the time. [Laughs] I’ve been pretty disconnected for the past couple of years from any of the press stuff surrounding the movies, so I typically hear about it via friends. I certainly never go looking for it anymore. But now I know! V/H/S is in select theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
