“In The Director’s Chair” Archive
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Stewart Raffill has made many films in different genres. He’s made action films (High Risk), sci-fi what-ifs (The Philadelphia Experiment), erotic thrillers (Survival Island) , monster movies (Croc) and more than his share of family films (including The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and the infamous Mac and Me). But now, with Standing Ovation, opening this week, the 70-year-old writer-director has tackled his first musical.
“One of the thrilling things I noticed was during the editing and filming with the actors that, after a while, the music plugs into another part of your mind,” says Raffill from his Los Angeles home. “I really enjoyed making it, it was lovely. The whole movie was new discoveries because the cast never acted before. At least 99.9 percent of them didn’t!”
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Debra Granik comes a long way from the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, where her new film Winter’s Bone is set. The writer-director currently resides in Manhattan, but has also lived in Boston, Washington, D.C. and Maryland. The life of the mountain people depicted in her film is something new to her. But you could never tell that, based on the film’s authenticity and almost documentary-like feel.
Winter’s Bone, shot in the Ozarks, was a real challenge for Granik, who wasn’t sure she had it in her to capture the people and places and sights and sounds of the location.
“It took a lot of trips down there to get the confidence to make this,” the director admits from the comfy lobby of a Philadelphia hotel. “A flag went up at first. Initially, we thought we were not the people to make this. Things could go wrong when you are an outsider who wants to make a film about a place you don’t know.”
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
To many, writer-director Philippe Mora’s name is often linked such exploitation films as the horror opuses The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf and The Howling III: The Marsupials. The link became even more prominent with Not Quite Hollywood!, the rousing 2009 documentary about the Australian “B” and “C” movie industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Clips were showcased of the two films, while Mora spoke about their production, as well as his work on Mad Dog Morgan with Dennis Hopper.
As it turns out, however, the Paris-born, Australia-raised Mora is more than an exploitation director. Much more. He has a background in painting, and has worked regularly as a newspaper columnist, cartoonist, investigative journalist, magazine publisher and documentary filmmaker. In many ways, Mora is something of a Renaissance man, delving into all sorts of ways to express himself when his artistic juices start flowing.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
It wasn’t too long ago that writer-director Vincenzo Natali was getting bad vibes about his newest film. Splice, the latest effort from the filmmaker, was a project he worked on for ten years, beginning with a script he had written shortly after his well-regarded first effort Cube came out in 1997.
Splice, a wild tale of genetic mutation, was completed a year ago, just as the independent film industry became rankled by the bad economy. Two studios had been interested in distributing the film; both went out of business. Natali was beginning to think that Splice’s fate would mirror that of Cypher and Nowhere, his two previous films, by avoiding theaters and go straight to DVD.
Fortunately, a funny thing happened on the way to the film forum. A screening at the Sundance Film Festival was enthusiastically received. Word got out to uber-producer and horror specialist Dark Castle topper Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, The Matrix) that Splice was worth a look. He took one, and his company picked it up, their first acquisition ever. Now, Warner Brothers is distributing it as a major summer release for the studio.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
George A. Romero is back on the zombie track with George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. The New York City -born, Pittsburgh-raised and now Toronto-based director has brought us gore and lots more in his shockers about the living dead for decades. Of course, it was Romero who practically invented the entire subgenre of horror movies with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the classic low-budget saga of a group of people holed up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse battling flesh-eating creatures. But there was more to the black-and-white effort other than scares for the sake of scares. Whether the midnight movie and drive-in audiences flocking to the film realized the subtext is debatable, but Romero, 70, has gone on record to talk about how anger about the Vietnam War and his views on the country’s racial prejudices played integral parts in the story. And, he has said, there have been political and social ingredients to all of his other skin-devouring scareathons as well.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Peter Hanson never thought he’d see his documentary Tales from the Script on the big screen. The entertaining survey of the world of screenwriters and screenwriting was created as a companion piece to his book of the same name, and, he figured, would get some nice play on DVD and, perhaps, on television or cable.
But when First Run Features picked it up, the indie enterprise was so high on their acquisition, they took it to film festivals, and opened it theatrically in New York and Los Angeles where it was well-received by such publications as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Village Voice.
It was a surprise payoff for a project that took a few years to complete and a 20-year career as a journalist.
“I was thrilled to see it with audiences of 500-600 people,” says Paulson, 40, by phone from his Beverly Hills home. “Even though it is a documentary, I had wanted to take people on a journey with laughs and provocative thoughts and interesting personal recollections, and it was neat to see people respond to it.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Jeremy Paul Kagan knew that working on The Chosen, his 1981 film of Chaim Potok’s best-selling novel, would be something special.
Set in 1940s Brooklyn, Potok’s book told of the friendship between a Hasidic Orthodox Jewish teen (played by Robby Benson) and his pal (Barry Miller), a conservative Jew with more secular views about religion. The book also showcased the differences between their two fathers: a tough, old school rabbi (Rod Steiger) and a college professor (Maximilian Schell) active in Zionist causes, which the rabbi disapproves of.
Kagan related closely to the story because his father was a rabbi—albeit of a reform congregation—in Mount Vernon, New York, where the filmmaker grew up.
Although released nearly 30 years ago in theaters and now being reissued on DVD, Kagan thinks he is not the only one who holds The Chosen near and dear to him.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Deception, intrigue, murder, bribery, stolen money, blackmail, arson, illicit trysts. Sounds like classic film noir turf, the stuff that Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice and even Body Heat are made of.
So you would think that Nash Edgerton, the director of The Square, the knockout modern noir that boasts all of these elements, would be well-schooled in the dark and dangerous films of the past.
Surprisingly, Edgerton has never seen any of the aforementioned films, which makes his acclaimed directorial debut even more remarkable.
“I’m definitely a fan of Fargo and Blood Simple and Bound, but I hadn’t seen them in a long time before I made this film,” says the 37-year-old Aussie during a stop at the Philadelphia Film Festival. “I was saying to my brother (Joel, the co-star and co-scripter of The Square) the other day that I’ve never seen Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice. He’s seen them, and wrote this, and I hadn’t, but I got to give my fresh perspective on those kinds of stories.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Sounds like a caper film from the distant past. An international production, perhaps, starring the likes of Michael Caine, Lino Ventura and Claudia Cardinale, in which a group of cons with distinctively different backgrounds team together to rip off some priceless art from a highly secure gallery. Or, maybe a tautly wound French film in black-and-white directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and boasting Alain Delon as the dashing lead thief.
Well, The Art of the Steal is a caper film, but what makes it unusual is that it is true. It’s actually a documentary that’s every bit as tension-filled and entertaining as the aforementioned fictional films. But this caper stars a bunch of politicians, a state governor, an eccentric millionaire, opportunists who look to forward their careers and powerful philanthropists. At stake? No less than billions of dollars worth of artwork by the likes of Matisse, Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Since he hit the mainstream with good reviews for 1997’s Kurt Russell road thriller Breakdown, Jonathan Mostow has gotten the rep of being that rare director who can fluidly mix action and intelligence. His follow-up to Breakdown was 2000’s U-571, a WWII adventure starring Matthew McConaughey, Harvey Keitel and Bill Paxton. In 2003, he was handed the reins to The Temrinator franchise, delivering Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which offered dazzling special effects and a complex storyline, not to mention a cast that included Nick Stahl, Claire Danes and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a last pre-political career role. In addition, Mostow has producer credits on David Fincher 's The Game, which showcased Michael Douglas, and Peter Berg’s Hancock, the Will Smith starrer.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Scott Cooper has reason to celebrate. On the weekend of the Critic’s Choice and the Golden Globe Awards, the 39-year-old writer-director of Crazy Heart boasts an air of self-confidence. And who could blame him?
His $7 million film has just opened across the country, and is up for several year-end awards. Not just for lead actor Jeff Bridges, who has been gaining lots of steam for his marvelous performance as “Bad” Blake, washed-up country-western singer. Cooper himself has been singled out, too, nominated for Indie Spirit Awards and a Writer’s Guild of America Award for turning Thomas Cobb’s 1987 novel about the resurrection of an alcoholic troubadour into a moving, music-filled drama that has critics singing its praises and the industry buzzing: “Will The Dude finally get an Oscar?”
All this from a guy who has never written a screenplay before, or directed so much as a high school play. To say nothing of a movie that was abandoned by its now-defunct studio (Paramount Vantage), and then acquired by Fox Searchlight. That’s the same studio that had a little luck last year releasing a film called Slumdog Millionaire, after Warner Brothers left it orphaned.
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Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Hollywood is stuck between Iraq and a hard place.
Even though three different big-name directors flirted with making The Messenger, a script authored by
Oren Moverman and Alessandro Cammon, differences over the screenplay and scheduling pushed them away from the project.
Then there was that Iraq problem. Hollywood has attempted to deal with war in the Middle East. Films like In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone and the recent The Hurt Locker received critical kudos but little response at the box-office. Other well-meaning efforts like Home of the Brave and Stop/Loss came and went so fast they seemed like direct-to-DVD offerings.
Yet there was still intense interest in The Messenger, a powerful saga of two solders assigned to deliver the awful news to families that their loved ones—boyfriends, spouses, fathers—have been killed in combat in Iraq.
The three big-name directors’ loss, however, turned out to be Oren Moverman’s gain. The screenwriter whose credits include the 1999 druggie odyssey Jesus’ Son, the period adultery drama Married Life and the weirdo Bob Dylan bio I’m Not There eventually got the assignment to make his directing debut with the film.
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