“In the Director’s Chair” Archive
Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
The first thing that strikes you upon meeting Edward Zwick is that he is whip-smart.
The other thing you get just by chatting with him for a few minutes is that he has a strong work ethic.
Consider his most recent films. He’s fought the Nazis in Eastern Europe with Defiance (2008), journeyed to Africa to depict the struggles over much-wanted gems in Blood Diamond (2006) and he’s cast his cameras on Japan in the 1870s to depict a Civil War veteran fighting against and for the country’s top warriors in The Last Samurai (2003). Then there are the small screen productions he’s been involved with, from the highly praised TV series Once and Again and My So-Called Life to the internet show Quarterlife.
So, it would seem like a natural that the seemingly indefatigable Mr. Zwick would chill every once in a while. And you would think an example of taking it easy would be helming a romantic dramedy called Love & Other Drugs on location for a few months in Pittsburgh. But even this project was no walk in the park.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Danny Boyle! You’ve just won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Picture for Slumdog Millionaire! Now, what are you going to do?
Um…make a movie about a guy stuck in a cave.
You got to, er, hand it to Danny Boyle. The British filmmaker is unpredictable, to say the least.
His follow-up to 2007’s busy, multi-lingual worldwide sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire is 127 Hours, an intense and, at times, excruciating true story about adventure enthusiast Aron Ralston, whose sanity is threatened and life appears to be over when his arm is locked into the side of a Utah canyon for days.
The story of Ralston’s survival has been pretty well documented, as has Boyle’s decision to make the movie. So, it’s should come as no surprise how far Ralston, as played by James Franco, goes to survive. If readers do not know, let’s just say 127 Hours shows you how handy a pocket knife can be.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Conviction, the latest film directed by filmmaker/actor Tony Goldwyn, almost didn’t happen.
The story was certainly compelling enough to become a movie. It focused on Betty Anne Waters, a single parent and high school dropout with two kids who went to school for 12 years to obtain a GED, college and law degrees, all in order to prove the innocence of her brother Kenny, a diner employee convicted of killing a female customer.
Goldwyn had set the film up at Universal Studios, with Naomi Watts playing the determined working- class Waters. But a shift in studio executives put the project in limbo. Watts eventually exited, leaving Goldwyn with a film he desperately wanted to make, only with no star and no studio. Like Waters, who eventually did get her brother out of prison after 18 years with help from the organization the Innocence Project and newly discovered DNA evidence, Goldwyn had an uphill battle with a film with such serious subject matter for an adult audience in mind.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Paul and Sandra Schuette Fierlinger are animation pioneers who have produced hundreds of animated shorts, commercials and public service spots for over 40 years.
Based in the Philadelphia area, the Fierlingers work out of their home, specializing in 2-D work done using a computer-based “tablet” and a super-sensitive stylus—a device akin to that used at supermarkets to sign a signature on the credit card machine when checking out.
Their latest project is My Dog Tulip, adapted from the 1958 autobiographical book by British author and literary lion J. R. Ackerley. Like the much-acclaimed book, which was among the favorites of Truman Capote, the film details Ackerley’s relationship with an Alsatian bitch (aka German Shepherd) he adopts, and how it becomes the best friend he ever had. Despite it gorgeous animation style (using over 58,000 drawings) and seemingly family friendly subject matter, My Dog Tulip is not a kid’s film. In great detail, Ackerley, through the film, recounts his precise observations about Tulip’s anatomical parts, as well as her bathroom and mating habits. There’s a unique sadness and unsettling undertone to the entire enterprise which puts My Dog Tulip into a category onto itself.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
After directing three acclaimed documentaries on boxing (the Oscar-nominated Against the Ropes), film producer Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) and teenagers (American Teen), director Nanette Burstein was finally ready to make the leap to helming a feature film.
Burstein, 40, an NYU film school grad, looked over a bunch of scripts before she settled on Going the Distance, a romantic comedy about a long distance relationship between an aspiring West Coast-based newspaper reporter and a New York City music promoter.
Playing a hand in her decision were the words of her one-time subject, super-producer Evans. “Robert Evans is all about show business himself,” says Burstein, during a stop in Philadelphia, about the former Paramount studio head behind such films as The Godfather and Marathon Man. “He’s told me all kinds of great things that are true pearls of wisdom about how the business works. I called him after American Teen screened the Sundance Film Festival and told him I wanted to make a feature. He said, ‘You have to make a love story, kid.’ He’s a big fan of love stories--after all, he did produce Love Story!”
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Thanks to a mishap on Amtrak, Fatih Akin arrived over two hours late at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station from New York City. Now, in a hotel room, the 37-year-old writer-director is scrambling to move furniture around, so interviewers can find their place in a cramped hotel room to ask him questions.
“And I am supposed to be the director,” he jokes.
But Akin, a man of Turkish heritage born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, is used to scrambling. That’s the nature of independent filmmaking throughout the world.
And that’s even if you have received international praise and won awards at prestigious film festivals, as the amiable Akin has. Head-On, his heady 2004 mix of tragedy, comedy and social commentary told of the unlikely marriage of two psychiatric patients: a suicidal 40-year-old widower and a twentysomething drug-and-alcohol-addicted woman who wants to get out of her strict Turkish household. It also announced a major filmmaker arrived on the scene. The director’s 2007 effort, The Edge of Heaven, tackled three different, intense stories, shifting time and countries, and delving into the lives of such characters as a Turkish freedom fighter, an elderly man and a young prostitute. Along with taking many European awards, it won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the festival’s coveted Golden Palm Award.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Neil Marshall wanted the world to know that even though his first two features were horror films—the well-received werewolf opus Dog Soldiers and the spooky girls-in-the-cave film The Descent—he was not a “horror movie director.”
“I’m a genre director,” states Marshall, 43, from a Philadelphia hotel. “I like all sort of genres. And, yes, I was scared of being pigeonholed as a horror director after those movies.”
As his next project, Marshall tackled Doomsday, a futuristic Mad Max/Escape from New York/Resident Evil mashup which met with mixed results with critics and at the box-office. But Marshall is hoping to rectify this with Centurion, his latest effort, an historical adventure epic centering on the battle that occurred in 117 A.D. between the Picts, the savage natives of Scotland, and the Ninth Legion of invading Roman soldiers, led by General Titus Virilus (Dominic West), centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) and Amazonian mute female tracker Etain (Olga Kurylenko), who doubles as a lethal Pict assassin.
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Edgar Wright envisioned the film version of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World the minute he finished reading the first installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series.
“I was given it the week it was published, so I read it with everyone else in 2004,” says Wright, best known as the co-writer-director of such spoofs as Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. “Making the film has been quite organic, because I’ve been in contact with the author while he was writing the other books.”
Wright, a youngish-looking 36, sought and received input from O’Malley during the six years he spent bringing Scott Pilgrim to the screen.
“He was very involved—he read every single draft and he did little polishes on scenes,” says Wright, in Philadelphia to talk about the project. “A couple of lines from the movie are in his (most recent) book, and his lines—like four or five—are in the film. He was very polite to email me and ask: ‘Can I use one of your lines in my book?’”
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Irv Slifkin | In the Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
The last time we saw Todd Solondz, he was promoting his film Palindromes. One of the story threads of the film involved a character who bombed abortion clinics. Word on the street was that members of right to life groups were going to protest Palindromes in theaters because the film depicted them as terrorists. Solondz actually welcomed the protests and the controversy. “Anything to help the movie,” he said.
Five years later, Solondz is back to his old tricks, playing the role of filmmaker and provocateur. While it’s unlikely anybody will be holding a picket sign or shouting into a bullhorn as people enter the theater for Solondz’s Life During Wartime, the film is apt to spark discussion and impassioned debate.
One of the reasons may be because Life During Wartime is, in fact, a sequel to 1998’s Happiness, Solondz’s envelope-pushing survey of the surly side of suburbia as seen by the lives of three sisters, played by Cynthia Stevenson, Lara Flynn Boyle and Jane Adams. The film, which featured extra-marital affairs, masturbation, obscene phone callers, suicide, and pedophilia, went to theaters unrated after it was dropped by its distributor, October Films, at the time.
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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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Tags: Jake Gyllenhaal, romantic comedy movies