Given the opportunity to make a documentary about former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, filmmaker James Toback knew exactly what he didn’t want to do.
“The whole notion of the film is that it’s not an apology, not investigative journalism, not a journey into the various opinions of people who do or don’t know him,” Toback says. “It’s to allow a fascinating, complicated, tragic figure to reveal himself in his own language. Using other voices in the film would be a complete waste of time. I had 90 minutes or whatever I could get of original footage of one of the most famous people of the 20th century. Why clutter it up with what other people had to say? It would be an absurd waste of cinematic space.” (More…)
They were both denizens of Hollywood in the countercultural 1960s: rebellious, free-wheeling, hugging the fringe.
Yet David Carradine and Bruce Dern never really knew each other until they were cast as shipmates, as it were, in the independent film “The Golden Boys,” opening in limited release today.
“I don’t know how we missed each other,” Carradine says.
Says Dern, “The first time I met David was at an event in Hollywood a couple of years ago where they were honoring some famous families: the Derns, the Carradines, the Keaches.”
Continues Carradine, “On this thing, we turned into blood brothers. I wish I’d known him all these years. We have a lot of the same connections.” (More…)
His lips pursed, his grin tight, Michael O’Keefe seems to gather the forces of darkness around him whenever he’s on the screen in “American Violet.”
As District Attorney Calvin Beckett, he’s a racist, a bully – a manipulator of the system who represents an Old South that seems distinctly out of step with the 21st century. O’Keefe couldn’t be happier.
“It’s all too rare you get to make a movie that specifically addresses a cultural phenomenon and bring it to the attention of a wide audience,” O’Keefe says, sitting in the lobby of the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, N.Y. O’Keefe, on-hand to do a post-screening discussion about the film, grew up not too far from the theater, in nearby Larchmont, though he divides his time between a home in the upper Hudson Valley and Los Angeles. (More…)
Directing Michael Caine in “Is Anybody There?” was no problem, says John Crowley. Keeping himself in check was the challenge.
“Michael turns up keen to do the best acting he can,” Crowley says, sitting in a meeting room of a Manhattan hotel during a recent press day. “He’s happy to be directed. But you have to get over your fan-ness, I guess you’d say. You have to get over the fact that it’s the Michael Caine. Being a fan is of no use to a director. You have to put it to one side and do what you’re there to do.” (More…)
The lobby of the Bowery Hotel – one of those everything-old-is-new-again Manhattan boutique hotels for the hipoisie – looks like the setting for an Edgar Allan Poe story: shadowy, antiquey. If there was a way to decorate it with cobwebs without also making it feel abandoned, you get the feeling they’d do it.
Clad in black, Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner – the heart and soul of Canada’s long-running heavy-metal band Anvil – look right at home, as they settle into low-slung chairs in a corner of the lobby. The release of the documentary, “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” is mere days away (it opens today, April 10, in limited release) – and, as the film’s director, Sacha Gervasi observes, “They’re having a moment.” (More…)
Matt Aselton, a 38-year-old Worcester, Mass., native, spent years working in advertising and shooting TV commercials. In his heart, he always harbored the idea of writing and directing his own films. To that end, he wrote the script for “Gigantic” in 2006, then spent two years trying to find financing and actors – only to have the entire shoot completed in 25 days – 24 in New York, one in Los Angeles. But that was all the money he had: “After this hilarious amount of preparation, then the thing itself blinks by,” he says.
The film, which stars Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman and Ed Asner, is about a young mattress salesman with one goal in life: to adopt a baby from China. He pursues it single-mindedly, though life hurls distractions at him in the form of Deschanel (as a scattered rich young woman) and her overbearing father (Goodman).
“Gigantic” was released last Friday – the day after it won the top prize at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. Aselton took a few minutes to discuss the film by phone. (More…)
It’s taken Greg Mottola a dozen years to get back to where he once belonged. In the process, he figured out where he actually wanted to be.
“I had to let go of my fantasy of the kind of career I was going to have,” Mottola says, sipping water in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park. “I thought there was only one kind of filmmaking career I could really respect – and that was not really me. So I had to spend a lot of time getting my head out of my ass.” (More…)
Two heads are better than one, say Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the co-writers and co-directors of “Sugar,” which opens tomorrow.
But one head inevitably dominates.
“We fight a lot in preproduction, but that’s part of the process,” Fleck says, sitting in a conference room in the offices of Sony Classics, discussing the two-director approach. “The person who wins the argument is usually right.”
“We try to keep it about the material,” puts in Boden, his long-time partner, adding with a laugh, “The hardest part is keeping it from being personal.”
Still, once they get to the set, they’re in synch: “We plan so much so closely that when we’re on the set, we’re on the same page,” Boden says. “Crew members can ask questions and either one of us can answer.” (More…)
