TRIBECA PROFILE | "My Winnipeg" Director Guy Maddin

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" is screening at the 7th Tribeca Film Festival, currently underway. IFC First Take will release the film in theaters beginning in June in the U.S.] "I was going in the direction that all indie directors go," said filmmaker Guy Maddin, reflecting on his career. "It was fun to do a U-turn and go in the opposite direction. Ironically, if I go to Hollywood, I'd be happier going this way. I'll get there on my own strengths, if I get there at all." Maddin, talking to a moderator Dennis Lim in front of a crowd that gathered at the Apple Store SoHo Sunday night (co-hosted with indieWIRE), is referring to the primitive nature of his recent films, most particularly "My Winnipeg," which is making its U.S. debut at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.
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iW PROFILE | "My Blueberry Nights" Director Wong Kar Wai

"I don't think of this as a road movie," filmmaker Wong Kar Wai told New Yorkers last night, during a conversation about his new movie, "My Blueberry Nights," which was partially filmed in Lower Manhattan. "The original idea was to have the film just be about Norah and her relationship with the owners of this restaurant," Wong Kar Wai revealed. "But it was too expensive to shoot just in New York and the characters began to expand across the country."
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Pondering Polanski in New Doc (Not Coming to a Theater Near You)

Reportedly set for an HBO cable TV premiere in June, Marina Zenovich's "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" quietly opened in two movie theaters over the weekend. To qualify for Oscar consideration -- as originally reported by Defamer.com -- the documentary is currently on screen for afternoon showings at theaters in Pasadena, CA and in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood. indieWIRE first covered the film shortly after its Sundance Film Festival debut.
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AWARDS WATCH | Indie Spirit: Cassavetes Nominees "August Evening," Owl and the Sparrow," "Quiet City," "Shotgun Stories," "The Pool"

The five nominees for the John Cassavetes Award at this year's Film Independent Spirit Awards are a diverse lot representing five very different films: Chris Eska's "August Evening," Stephane Gauger's "Owl and the Sparrow," Aaron Katz's "Quiet City," Jeff Nichols' "Shotgun Stories" and Chris Smith's "The Pool." indieWIRE spoke with each of the nominees about their acclaimed films, their backgrounds, and their future plans. The prize honors the best of the low-budget films produced each year, singling out five films each made for under $500,000.
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iW PROFILE | "Caramel" Director Nadine Labaki

"Caramel," the funny, sharp-eyed import about a beauty shop that opens in theaters today, set tongues a-flapping in Cannes last year as well as in 40 countries so far--by far the largest release a Lebanese film has ever received. It also is the first movie made in Beirut that doesn't reference the war. Director/writer/co-star Nadine Labaki, who was 17 when the war ended in 1990, says that omission was "a very conscious choice." During a recent whirlwind visit to NYC, she explained why to indieWIRE.
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iW PROFILE | "Teeth" Star Jess Weixler

All seemed back to normal when Jess Weixler returned to her New York City apartment after a whirlwind week in Park City this time last year. The film she starred in played well at Sundance '07. Her performance got some laughs and she found it comical how some men were a little scared to meet her after screenings. Now she was packing again for a flight to San Diego to film another movie. An actor's work is never finished. But when she touched down in San Diego something strange happened. A flight attendant came to her seat and in an excited tone told her that she had to return to Park City immediately. Weixler gave the attendant a very puzzled look, a look she often gave in the film that was getting all the attention 750 miles away: puzzlement mixed with curiosity. Then she heard it: "You just won an award at Sundance." Playing the lead in a film about "vagina dentata" didn't seem that bad anymore.
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iW PROFILE | "There Will Be Blood" Director Paul Thomas Anderson

Sitting down with indieWIRE earlier this month in New York City for a one-on-one conversation about "There Will Be Blood," the exceptional new film that dominated iW's 2007 film critics' poll, American auteur Paul Thomas Anderson caught a first glimpse of Upton Sinclair's re-issued 1920s novel, "Oil!" resting on a small table nearby. Examining the book's cover, he groused briefly about the need to place an image of Daniel Day-Lewis on the front of the book, explaining that he had intially hoped the promotional item could be re-released with that same simple cover that first caught his eye in a London bookstore years ago. Picking up the book back in Britain started him on the long journey to making his epic new film.
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Remembering St. Clair Bourne: 1943 - 2007

Acclaimed filmmaker St. Clair Bourne passed away yesterday (Saturday) at the age of 64. The documentarian, who died from complications following surgery, had been working on a film about civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, according to an obituary by Richard Prince (fourth item), in addition to a film about the Black Panthers. Bourne's many films included "Making 'Do the Right Thing'," "Paul Robeson: Here I Stand!," Let the Church Say Amen," "In Motion: Amiri Baraka," "The Black and the Green," "Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper," "New Orleans Brass," and "John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk," among numerous others. A biography on his own website indicates that St. Clair Bourne was born in Harlem on February 16, 1943. After a time in the Peace Corps, Bourne studied filmmaking at Columbia University, but was subsequently expelled for demonstrating on campus. Shortly thereafter, he produced public television's first Black public affairs program, "Black Journal," later forming the film collective, Chamba. He served as a guest lecturer at the UCLA film department in the mid-70s, created documentaries for L.A.'s KCET and was on the selection committee of the Los Angeles film festival, FILMEX.
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iW PROFILE | "Margot At The Wedding" Writer/Director Noah Baumbach

It was an image of a mother and her son riding on a train sparked Noah Baumbach's upcoming "Margot at the Wedding" (opening this Friday, November 16th from Paramount Vantage). As Baumbach told indieWIRE during a conversation back in September at the Toronto International Film Festival, that visual evolved into a script he wrote shortly after "Squid" debuted at Sundance in 2005. Interestingly, "Margot" was originally titled "Nicole in the Country," but when Nicole Kidman joined the cast (which includes Baumbach's real-life wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh), Baumbach feared people might think it was reality-based, so it reverted back to "Untitled Noah Bambach Project" throughout its production. "It was a real lesson not to leave a movie untitled for that long," Baumbach admitted. "Just seeing 'Untitled Noah Bambach' written on everything... And of course everyone has ideas for the titles and you keep getting submissions. It was terrible."
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iW PROFILE | "Southland Tales" Director Richard Kelly

A boxer/action star suffering from amnesia who is pushing a screenplay about the end of the world. An entrepreneurial porn star with her own talk show, energy drink, and a pop song called "Teen Horniness is Not Crime." A police officer with doppelganger issues who is caught up in a conspiracy with a neo-Marxist group. A disfigured Gulf War veteran/drug addict who serves as the "Southland Tales" narrator and in a drug addled state imagines himself in a musical number performing a song by The Killers. All of these elements (and more, way more) make up Richard Kelly's new film "Southland Tales," which is finally hitting the big screen on November 14th after a not so warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.
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iW PROFILE | "Juno" Writer Diablo Cody

Back in the days when she was working as a stripper and phone sex operator, Diablo Cody never dreamed she'd one day be the toast of the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, with a project in the works with Steven Spielberg, a second movie deal, and Oscar buzz spinning around her. Cody got her big break when her quirky, honest writing style on her blog caught the notice of manager Mason Novick, who then helped her secure a literary agent for the blog entries she was compiling into a book. Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, about her experiences as a stripper and phone sex operator, shortly followed.
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iW PROFILE | "Control" Star Sam Riley

Twenty-seven year-old British actor Sam Riley seems to fit his role in Anton Corbijn's "Control" to a T. In the film, he plays the lead as the ill-fated lead singer of early '80s Manchester band Joy Division, deftly portraying singer Ian Curtis who fronted a band that has continued to increase in notoriety among generations of fans, many of whom were born after the singer committed suicide the night before the band was to fly across the Atlantic for their first American tour.
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iW PROFILE | Producer Anish Savjani of Film Science

"How do you turn creativity into a business?" wonders "Hannah Takes the Stairs" producer Anish Savjani, chatting with indieWIRE at the Cornelia Street Cafe in downtown Manhattan as the film screens around the corner at the IFC Center on opening night. Emerging films and filmmaking are in the spotlight during IFC Center's "New Talkies: Generation DIY" series, casting a spotlight on emerging filmmakers like "Hannah" director Joe Swanberg and "Quiet City" director Aaron Katz, but behind the scenes a new generation of film producers are also starting to make a mark, including Austin-based Savjani.
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The Start of a Journey: An Appreciation of Ingmar Bergman

I firmly believe that I can credit Ingmar Bergman with my understanding and appreciation of cinema as an art form. Looking back on my life, there have been distinct stages to my growing awareness of film as something more than entertainment, more than narrative, more than itself--in childhood, "Fantasia" clued me in to the essentials: sound plus image; in preadolescence, "2001: A Space Odyssey" forced me to acknowledge that storytelling needn't be cinema's ultimate goal, and that the unknown is far more pleasurable than what's understood; and in adolescence, when I began to crave even stronger stuff, there was Ingmar Bergman, whose provocatively titled, in-every-way foreign films lined the shelves of my local public library. Growing up suburban, I had no choice but to first witness all classic films in full-framed videotape, with resolutely unrestored transfer and sound, yet this hardly demystified the experience of discovering these new forms of cinema (that were sometimes as "new" as forty years old). Askew images stared back from the boxes, and in the case of "The Seventh Seal"'s death figure, literally beckoned me.
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iW PROFILE | Introducing Scott Prendergast

Remembering a phone call from Lisa Kudrow that jumpstarted his first feature, "Kabluey," director Scott Prendergast noted that he was flustered and began stammering when the popular actress contaced him about the project. "She called me and I started hyperventilating," Prendergast said Monday during a post-screening Q & A at the Los Angeles Film Festival after his film's world premiere. "And then I realized I was standing in my driveway in boxers with nothing else on." Laughing near Prendergast at the Q & A, Kudrow added, "And the reason why I was calling was to make sure he was not crazy!"
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iW TRIBUTE | Film Community, Friends Salute Jim Lyons in NYC

When the late actor, writer and editor James Lyons was a young kid growing up on New York's Long Island, a new cinema opened in the neighborhood, walking distance from his family home. As his mother Gladys Lyons recalled on Tuesday night at a memorial service for her son, Jim was passionate about books, but one day he learned about a contest that would award a year-long movie pass to the first person in line on the opening day of the new neighborhood cinema. Jim won the prize and stretched the gift into a two-year ticket, clearly developing a passion for the movies.
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iW Profile | "Eagle vs. Shark" Star, Loren Horsley

Director Taika Waititi's comedy "Eagle vs. Shark" probably received one of the biggest Sundance compliments to be had... On an uber jam-packed party night, swarms of movie-goers and would-be movie-goers instead crowded the sidewalk in front of the Egyptian Theater on Main Street hoping to see the first feature from the otherwise relatively unknown filmmaker. For those who managed to get in, the laughs were plenty and it seemed everyone hung around for the Q&A following the feature, which Miramax will release in the U.S. on Friday, June 15. A heaping amount of praise was reserved for the film's co-star, New Zealand actress Loren Horsley, who plays an awkwardly shy cashier at a fast-food restaurant who has a crush on an electronic store clerk who works across the way.
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Remembering Jim Lyons: 1960 - 2007

James Lyons, known for his frequent work with Todd Haynes, died last week in New York. The editor and actor starred in and edited Haynes' "Poison," winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Lyons edited Haynes' other projects: "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story," "Dottie Gets Spanked," "Safe," "Velvet Goldmine" (for which he also co-wrote the story) and "Far From Heaven." He also edited Esther Robinson's Berlinale Teddy Award winning documentary "A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory," which will have its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival next week. Born in October of 1960, James Lyons was a member of Act Up and was treated for H.I.V. for many years. He died of cancer on Thursday in a New York City hospital.
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The Subway Will Carry Us: Master Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami Teaches in Manhattan

"What is cinema?" It's not often that such a question gets posed without irony or pretension. But when you're speaking with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, widely regarded as one of the most important living filmmakers today, such inquiries feel like a natural outgrowth of the conversation. "It's an image that's not limited to what you see," he responded the other night at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where a near comprehensive retrospective of his films is currently underway. "It has many different layers, and sometimes those layers dissolve the images that you see, and you just think about the layers. This is cinema." Got that?
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An Altmanesque Celebration For A Maverick American Director: Robert Altman, 1925 - 2006

Friends, family members, filmmakers and fans saluted the late Robert Altman during a memorial service in Midtown Manhattan yesterday (Tuesday) on what would have been the maverick director's 82nd birthday (and three months after he died). In scenes reminiscient of Altman's film about life in Hollywood, "The Player," a host of famous people mingled together before and after the two-hour event at Broadway's Majestic Theater on 44th St. in New York City. The celebration, which included hilarious and moving anecdotes, remembrances, live music and film clips, featured on stage tributes by Paul Thomas Anderson, Bob Balaban, Harry Belafonte, Bud Cort, E.L. Doctorow, Buck Henry, Kevin Kline, Julianne Moore, Tim Robbins, Alan Rudolph, Lily Tomlin and Garry Trudeau.
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