filmmaking
With the DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Invitation, I was able to snag a quick interview with the film’s director, Karyn Kusama. Taking place in a Beverly Hills mansion in L.A over the course of an evening.
Last week, I had the pleasure to talk with Emily Best, who founded the company called Seed&Spark, a crowdfunded film studio. Seed&Spark helps independent filmmakers crowdfund their films, produce them and distribute them. In their own words:
Editor’s note: Incidentally, we were working on this article a few weeks before Cimino’s death. Sadly, Michael Cimino passed away on July 2 2016, and with this article, we are paying homage to one of the director’s films that had such a significant impact on the entire Hollywood system.
Back in 1993, Steven Soderbergh just came off the disappointment that was his ambitious yet unloved second feature, Kafka. He turned his attention to a property best described as a sure-thing, a money grab, if you will; writer A. E.
Steven Spielberg. The name alone is synonymous with cinema. But take a step back.
German expressionism was an art movement that began life around 1910 emerging in architecture, theatre and art. Expressionism art typically presented the world from a subjected view and thus attempted to show a distorted view of this world to evoke a mood or idea. The emotional meaning of the object is what mattered to the artist and not the physical reality.
PJ Woodside and her partner, Steve Hudgins at Big Biting Pig Productions in Madisonville, KY are creating quite a stir in the independent horror scene. They’ve put out a film a year for the last decade. Their most recent film, Frances Stein, was recently released on Amazon Prime and has been getting a steady stream of five star reviews.
This is the second and last part of “What Is Mise-en-scène”. Find part one (dealing with mise-en-scène of setting, costume and objects) here! Cinematography If there is an important element in mise-en-scène then cinematography is it.
We all know James Franco as one of Hollywood’s top A-list actors and working artists who has his hand in various aspects of the arts, but a handful of film students and emerging talent in Hollywood know him as an instructor, mentor or college professor. In March 2014, he decided teaching at USC, UCLA and CalArts wasn’t enough, so he opened his own school, Studio 4. In October 2014, James taught his first class at his new school:
Mise-en-scène is one of the great terms used in film criticism. It is also the most basic and is usually the first thing you’ll learn on any film theory course. Unfortunately mise-en-scène is also, strangely, one of the hardest terms to understand.
This is the second and final part of our What Is Film Analysis article. Find the first part, on Narrative and Character, here. Production The giveaway of any bad production is the settings and costumes.
William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter; when it comes to playwrights who have had their work go from stage to silver screen, the list sees no end. Whilst everyone cannot resist a new portrayal of a timeless piece of literature incorporated with modern twists and/or special effects, audiences are constantly being introduced to plays through the expression of cinema. While this is a positive notion, it does however highlight the contrary:
Elliot Grove’s life should be made into a film, virtual reality’s going to be the next big thing and Sacha Baron Cohen hasn’t always been funny. Those are just three of the things I discovered when I went along to interview Grove, founder of the Raindance Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards. Discovering Raindance I grabbed the chance to ask Grove for an interview at a recent Raindance Open House event, held to introduce filmmakers to Raindance and what it can do for them.
As 2015 comes to a close, the promises of 2016 in film leave excitement fizzling like the fireworks of New Year amongst Quentin Tarantino fans. We have been treated to an influx of releases ripe from the mind of the divisive director over the past few years, with Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained providing much controversy and dividing many opinions, but it is The Hateful Eight that is now beginning to incite anticipation about its January release. But, as this excitement grows towards the end of Tarantino’s twenty-fourth year in the filmmaking business, the success he enjoys now has progressed in an initially unexpected way.
Hanna Polak is a documentarian whose films have been screened the world over. It only took her two directorial efforts for her to be recognized by the Academy, as her memorable film Children of Leningradsky was nominated for Best Documentary Short in 2005. After spending some time as a director for hire, Polak is returning to the international documentary scene with an absolutely remarkable film over 14 years in the making, Something Better To Come (you can read my review here).
