On the occasion of my film Double Play making its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel, I wrote for Filmmaker magazine about the last nine years of my life as a director-writer and one-time actor. It includes Richard Linklater's advice to me about film critics, memories from being road buddies with James Benning, and candid details from the uneasy production of my feature Porto and working with prickly Tim Roth on Bergman Island. You can read it here.
If you're not…
The Miéville and Godard UNICEF-sponsored short in the same omnibus with Jerry Lewis's Boy and the only other one I've seen in the collection. Made around the same time as Godard's Nike ad, but not as defiantly cashgrab-y as that 15-second project. Usually the filmmaker was pretty thrifty with these commissions; here, he splurges on a rocket launcher prop, squibs, and fake blood. Godard did not like the end result, perhaps because of the straightforward rhetorical value of children and war.
"Film, baby, powerful tool for love and laughter, fantastic weapon to create violence or ward it off, is in your hands. The only possible chance you've got in our round thing is not to bitch about injustice or break windows, but to make a concerted effort to have a loud voice. The loudest voice known to man is on thousand-foot reels... Try emulsion instead of rocks for relations and ecology... Then you'll survive. Maybe we'll all survive. Maybe."
Among the…
Östlund just pulled a Haneke in Cannes, which makes sense. Haneke is the dominant influence at the festival these days, or at least he was the last time I was there, in 2017, when several filmmakers in the competition seemed to be tipping their hats to him: Ramsay, Akin, Zvyagintsev, Lanthimos, Östlund, and Mundruczó. Richard Brody called some of these filmmakers the Hanekets, and the Cahiers du cinéma wrote, in an editorial: "The official program is truly a program, in…
In the early afternoon on September 11th, 2001, Pauly Shore, standing outside the Toronto International Film Festival press office, handed me a flyer invitation to a rough cut screening of something entitled You'll Never Wiez in This Town Again (later retitled Pauly Shore is Dead). The festival had suspended its activities and everyone was scrambling to figure out what they should do. Shore, in the middle of this chaos, saw it fit to announce (I quote verbatim): "We're screening our…
