maybe we should have one place to park links to interesting conversations and articles with/about film-makers?
here’s a great interview on the onion’s av club with alex cox.
AVC: Is it hard to rectify what punk stands for and also make movies that cost a lot of money?
AC: Yeah! I think so. I think that’s right, because the money… we spend an awful lot of money on a movie. Twenty percent goes back to the studio for overhead. Who knows how much is going to get eaten up by the principal actors? Even making Repo Man for $1.5 million seemed like a waste of money to me. We had two guys in a car, and yet we have to have a tow truck, a car trailer, another huge vehicle behind it, police cars in front, motorcycle outriders. The only thing we were missing was a Roman Centurion riding along at the front with a big banner. “Here comes the movie!” And I think it’s grandiose. A lot of the time, this last one we did, nobody even knew we were there. We’d be shooting in places, and people would just walk right past us. You film much quicker and have more fun that way.
Does this or this count as “etc.”? “I have two stents in my heart!”
Man.
The Cox interview was damn good. Has anyone seen Walker? And — Jeff, did you ever see his Revengers’ Tragedy?
The new issue of The Believer mar/apr 08 which is a film issue has some interesting stuff in it. I’m guessing I read a lot less film theory than most of you folks, so you may not find it to be very good.
But there is a Werner Herzog Errol Morris talk, a Todd Haynes piece, a DVD applying Freud crap to all sorts of Hitchcock movies, and a piece detailing why an indie movie costs $18 million. Full contents and some of the articles at the link.
There’s an essay on the New Wave and auteurism in the new New Yorker. Haven’t read it yet because I’ve been fascinated by this.
Mark Harris, who wrote this excellent book on the best picture nominees of 1967, has a pretty good essay on the newest volume of gangster dvds, and the genre more generally, at Slate.
Don’t know where else to put this, so I’ll stick it here — a Joe Dante-hosted series of features at the New Beverly? If I lived within 300 miles of L.A., I’d be attending at least one of these, and dragging Mauer along. Mark, go–and report back!
Oh, and when are you coming to visit us poor slobs in the Twin Cities? You have to come, since Arnab visited you.
Errol Morris has been writing, intermittently, a really fascinating blog at the New York Times, and he’s been in the last two posts (one and two) examining the use of “re-enactments” in documentary….
… and Ron Rosenbaum has an essay that cites Morris’ blog and Morris’ new film on Abu Ghraib while examining the use of slow-motion.
Maybe we don’t need to post interviews from the AV club anymore (maybe we all already know to look there), but here’s an interview with Lloyd Kaufman, the impresario/auteur behind Troma films, that is really quite funny and smart. I think Troma films have always been a bit too obvious for me–as a self-professed fan of sleaze, I find the Troma approach more often “sleazy” than sleazy. Or maybe it’s just that the jokes are often even for me a little too-13-year-old. Still, I find it exciting that Kaufman’s studio has been and remains a kind of strange Miramaxian doppelganger for indie cinema…
tony clifton. oh my god.