Aside from being a great director David Lynch has some mean skills in the kitchen.
Around the release of Inland Empire (2006) he made these cooking videos where he prepares some quinoa and organic broccoli.
Shot in black and white, they are set to some moody music as the director mentions the qualities of quinoa (“they say that it is the only grain that is a perfect, complete protein”) and he tells a mean anecdote about his travels in Europe involving paper money and sugar water.
Nicole Kidman also remembers working on what would be Kubrick’s final film:
Here is a BBC News report the night he died:
In 2001, his regular producer Jan Harlan, director Martin Scorsese and wife Christiane Kubrick joined Charlie Rose for an hour long chat around the release of the documentary Stanley Kubrick, A Life in Pictures.
There is also this montage (by YouTube user vezina2001) set to the music of Dead Can Dance and Lisa Gerrard:
A working version of the floating house from Pixar’s Up has been created by the National Geographic Channel.
As part of their series “How Hard Can It Be?” engineers built a basic house structure and lifted it into the air for over an hour using 300 weather balloons.
Angel Heart (1987) remains of the more underrated films of the late 1980s, and around its US release director Alan Parker gave a lengthy interview about it and his career up to that point.
At the time it divided critics and a rough sex scene ruffled feathers at the MPAA, but over time it has become something of a cult favourite with directors such as Christopher Nolan singing its praises (he has admitted it was an influence on Memento).
The interview was part of a series conducted by John A Gallagher and contains some interesting nuggets of information including:
Robert Redford originally owned the rights to the novel
Why he loves switching genres
How Carolco funded it after making lots of money on the Rambo series
Working with Mickey Rourke (who is ‘very much his own man’ – diplomatic words?)
The appeals process with the MPAA over the sex scene
How the greatest crime is just to make ‘another movie’
The importance of shooting on location rather than a studio sound stage
How he got his break writing and filming in the ‘egalitarian’ world of advertising
The pragmatism of choosing Bugsy Malone (1976) as a film project
Brando talks about his awakening and how it will affect other dispossessed minorities, saying the march is:
“one step closer to understanding the human heart”
Heston talks about picketing restaurants in Oklahoma and how he could no longer pay lip service to:
“a cause that is so urgently right in a time that is so urgently now”
When the discussion broadens out to the wider subject of human freedoms around the world, the parallels with recent protests in the Middle East are hard to ignore.
Twitter reaction to the 83rd Oscars didn’t prove as popular as The Grammys or the Superbowl but there were some surprising trends.
The online social network wasĀ gauged last night by the firmsĀ Mass Relevance and TweetReach, and Techcrunch posted a data map of what was being said on the popular micro-blogging service.
Unsurprisingly, the most mentioned accounts were @TheAcademy, @JamesFranco (who was busy posting backstage all night long) but people who won such as @Trent_Reznor and @LeeUnkrich also rated highly.
Surprisingly, amongst the most re-tweeted accounts were @TheOnion and @KeithObermann, which suggests online satirical news sites and former MSNBC presenters wield a lot of clout in the online Oscar world.
It is also interesting to note that the tweets spiked when Inside Job won Best Documentary, which could have been because of the reaction to the auto-tune montage sequence, the presence of Oprah Winfrey, the anticipation of Banksy appearing on stage or Charles Ferguson’s comments about Wall Street getting away with criminal activity.
Techcrunch report that the Oscar ceremony didn’t spark anywhere near the same level of interest as comparable televised events like the Superbowl or The Grammys:
Davis told me that the event paled in comparison to the Super Bowl and The Grammy, where TweetReach saw 17,000 tweets in a single minute. In contrast, the spikes topped out at 12,000 at the Oscars.
Twenty Oscar-related terms (e.g. Oscars, #Oscars, Academy) were tracked as the show went out live and there were 1,269,970 tweets, 1,663,458,778 potential impressions, and 388,717 users tweeting.
Actor and Oscars co-hostĀ James Franco recorded a lot of the backstage action last night on his mobile.
When he came out for the opening with Anne Hathaway, you may have noticed him filming the audience on his phone.
He posted a collection of the photos and videos during the ceremony last night, under the name of Oscars Real Time, and they give an interesting glimpse to what goes on backstage at a big TV event like the Oscars.
Video Intro:
Getting in a lift before the show:
Walking Backstage (a Spinal Tap ‘Hello Cleveland‘ vibe to this one):
More walking backstage:
Famous last words right before the show begins (‘it might be bad’):
Entering the stage and filming the audience:
Showing Anne Hathaway something funny on his phone backstage:
Backstage with Anne Hathaway and Oprah Winfrey:
Backstage in drag whilst David Seidler wins for The King’s Speech:
Walking out on stage with the phone in his pocket whilst he introduces Scarlett Johansson and Matthew McConaughey:
Backstage with the head writer of the show Jordan:
Laughing backstage with Anne Hathaway:
‘What am I doing?’:
Posing with Billy Crystal and Anne Hathaway:
Backstage whilst Randy Newman plays the song from Toy Story:
‘Are you filming again?’:
Anne Hathaway tells the audience that the nominees have power bars under their seats:
Oscar writer Bruce Villanch backstage:
Florence:
The Best Actor bit with Sandra Bullock:
Anne Hathaway gives him a hand massage (not what it sounds like):
Unseen for years, it was only recently made public by the National Security Archive and is from a DVD supplied by the U.S. National Archives’ motion picture unit.
A grim but fascinating document of the Cold War, it feels like the kind of film Stanley Kubrick would have wanted to see in his research for Dr Strangelove (1964).
It says a lot about the era when the death of 60,000,000 citizens is described as a ‘success’.
Although it is a lot rougher than the slick promotional EPKs used today, it features a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes footage.
George Roy Hill is wonderfully open and frank about various aspects of the production, including:
Newman’s acting process
Casting Katherine Ross
Problems with a bull
Conrad Hall’s cinematography
The multi-camera setup for the train explosion
Old-school visual effects used in the river jump sequence
How they shot the final sequence
His final line of commentary is priceless:
“I have now spent exactly a year and three months on this film and at this point I don’t know how it is going to be received. I think it’s a good film, I think the guys are great in it, and I think the relationships work. It was a helluva lot of hard work doing it …and if the audiences don’t dig it I think I’ll go out of my fu*king mind”
The documentary is interesting as it was made before the film became a huge box-office success and the highest grossing film of 1969.
“The eureka moment was when I saw a behind-the-scenes making-of about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was kind of a shabby EPK that had been cobbled together, but it was narrated by the director, George Roy Hill. And it was the first time I’d ever conceived that films didn’t happen in real time. I was about seven years old, and I thought, “What a cool job.” You get to go on location, have trained horses and blow up trains and hang out with Katharine Ross. That seemed like a pretty good gig”
The scope is pretty breathtaking and includes interviews with icons such as Charlie Chaplin, Rita Hayworth, John Huston, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn.
Of particular note are those we don’t often hear on the TV or radio, such as Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford and Boris Karloff.
Here is an index of the current available interviews, which you can listen to by clicking on the relevant links below.
1950s
Charlie Chaplin (1952): A ’round table’ interview with a reluctant genius. [20 mins]
One of the most impressive elements of The Social Network was the visual effects that allowed one actor to play twins.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were the twin brothers who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) stole their idea for Facebook.
However, director David Fincher had a problem when he couldn’t find a pair of twins that matched the real world Harvard rowers.
So, a solution was hatched where a combination of visual effects and another fill-in actor (Josh Pence) was used to create the illusion.
A visual effects team from Lola (a company that specialises in human face and body manipulation) essentially painted a digital version of Hammer’s face on to Pence’s.
A British film maker based in Cairo for the past 12 years, he filmed some of the protests with a GoPro and the Canon 550D.
He says:
As a foreign guest living in Egypt I generally try to steer clear of Egyptian politics. However, what has been happening in Tahrir is totally unprecedented. Itās amazing to see people making signs from anything lying around them in an attempt to get their voices heard
If any news organisations are reading this you can contact him via his website here.
For those unfamiliar with the film (and if you haven’t seen it, you really should), it features a filmmaker named Thierry Guetta who documents Banksy and then later becomes an artist himself, using the moniker of Mr. Brainwash.
This new cat-themed site purports to be that of a performance artist and ‘professional nose dancer’ Charlie Schmidt, the originator of the Keyboard Cat meme from a couple of years ago.
But it looks to me like this is the work of Banksy and his cohorts as they mount what is the most unusual campaign in Oscar history.
By the way, notice the use of Clementine’s Loop at the beginning, a piece of music by Jon Brion which pops up in the first three films by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Fox Searchlight have released a video showing how many of the visual effects in Black Swan were achieved.
Darren Aronofsky’s dark ballerina drama might not seem like a conventional visual effects movie, but when you see this video you’ll realise why they were central to the film.
* WARNING: There are major spoilers in this video, so don’t watch if you haven’t seen the film *
Mike Randolph recently shot this film showing the tradition of human towers in Catalonia.
In Tarragona in Spain people gather every two years to build human castles (or ‘castells’), a Catalan tradition which originated in the local area around the end of the 18th century.
The sight of humans supporting each other, along with the vibrant colors inside the stadium, make for compelling viewing.
At the end of the original 1985 film, Marty McMcfly (Michael J Fox) and his girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells) are met by Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) who comes back from the future to warn them about their children.
When director Robert Zemeckis filmed Part II, Wells was not available, which meant the role was recast with Elisabeth Shue and the whole scene reshot.
In the final week of his life Orson Welles gave two interviews in which he reflected on his career and old age.
On October 3rd 1985, he described being able to make Citizen Kane (1941) as “a total piece of luck”, how he “always hated Hollywood”, why he couldn’t compromise and that he wanted to be remembered as “a good guy, rather than a difficult genius”:
When the director of Old Boy (2004) and Thirst (2009) announced the project last week, it sounded like some kind of gimmick, but a new trailer and behind the scenes featurette seem to suggest something more substantial.
The Korean title is ‘Paranmanjang’ and it is a 30-minute fantasy with the following synopsis:
“A fantastical tale that begins with a middle-aged man fishing one afternoon and then, hours later at night, catches the body of a woman.The panicked man tries to undo the intertwined fishing line, but he gets more and more entangled.
He faints, then wakes up to find himself in the white clothes that the woman was wearing. The movieās point of view then shifts to the woman and it becomes a tale of life and death from a traditional Korean point of view.”
This is the trailer:
Funded by the South Korean mobile carrier KT, it cost $130,000, features mostly black-and-white video and was shot on up to eight iPhone 4 devices.
This behind the scenes film shows the full range of filmmaking equipment that was used to augment the cameras on each phone.
Despite the cost of the project, Park is a champion of smartphones as a relatively inexpensive tool to make films, telling the LA Times:
āFind a location. You donāt even need sophisticated lighting. Just go out and make movies. These days, if you can afford to feed yourself, you can afford to make a film.ā
Quentin Tarantino is an admirer of Park and as well as chairing the Cannes jury which awarded Old BoyĀ theĀ Grand Jury Prize in 2004,Ā he also regards Joint Security Area (2000) to be one of best films made since 1992.
I remember seeing the Coen Brothers film at a press preview back in 1998 and it went down a storm with the audience.
It was soon apparent that it wasn’t going to be a box office smash, but over time its reputation has grown to such an extent that it is now one of the major cult films of the 1990s.
This clip from “Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides” shows Bridges visiting a shop in New York’s Greenwich Village called The Little Lebowski, which is dedicated to items inspired by the film.
My favourite line is when Bridges says: “Cool shop man!”
It never got a release in the US, so remains something of an obscurity, but years later Connelly went on to star in Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000).
There only appears to be a Japanese trailer on YouTube:
And now have a look at the trailer for Black Swan:
You can check them out side-by-side at YouTube Doubler here.
Some of the posters from Etoile are also interesting to compare with the designs for Black Swan.
Was the earlier film any inspiration for Aronofsky?
After strong festival buzz in the Autumn, it scored mostly favourable reviews and already looks like a multiple noiminee at the Oscars this year, with Portman already looking like the strong favourite for Best Actress.
David Puttnam was on a roll as a producer in the early 1980s and an interview from the time provides an interesting snapshot of his career at that time.
He discusses a number of different issues including:Ā working with Bill Forsyth after turning down his previous film Gregory’s Girl; a legal dispute involving locals in Scotland; the role of a producer;Ā his reputation for giving young directors a break; how he got into the film industry; the importance of music, the three key elements to a film and the ‘vivid’ differences between a gross and net deal.
(It begins with an interesting anecdote about gun control)
This video compares the original HBO footage of the fight and the way it was depicted in the film.
What’s interesting is how the film still took dramatic licence even though director David O’Russell used an actual HBO film crew to recreate the fight.
Personally, I don’t think this reflects badly on the film as it demonstrates the limits of recreating something ‘perfectly’, especially given that live TV and cinema are two very different contexts.
After rave reactions on the festival circuit The Kingās Speech finally opens in the UK today and the story of how it came to the screen is a fascinating one.
The film traces the relationship between Prince Albert (Colin Firth) and an unconventional speech therapist named Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who helped him overcome a crippling stammer as he eventually assumed the throne – as George VI – Ā and helped rally his people during World War II.
Directed by Tom Hooper, it is a superbly crafted period piece but also a genuine crowd pleaser with surprising levels of humour and emotion.
Already a frontrunner for the Oscars, Colin Firth follows up his performance in A Single Man with another reminder of how good he can be in the right role, whilst Rush is equally good as the man who helps him.
This is the kind of film that might appear on the surface to be another British costume drama beloved of middle class, Telegraph reading audiences but it is actually much more than that.
By exploring the pain and anguish behind the Kingās stutter, it is not only a surprisingly emotional film but also a sneakily subversive one.
Not only does it allows us to see how Logueās irreverent treatment stripped the ultimate aristocrat of his social hang ups, but how two people from different backgrounds eventually became friends.
But the story behind the film is equally fascinating, involving a veteran screenwriter with a stutter and the late Queen Mother.
At 73 David Seidler is considerably older than many of his screenwriting peers, with previous films including Tucker: The Man and his Dream (1988), directed by his high school classmate Francis Ford Coppola, and The King and I (1999).
What makes the film uniquely personal for the writer is the fact that as a child he grew up with a stutter and found inspiration in how King George VI overcame similar difficulties.
Although born in England, Seidler was raised in America in Long Island and underwent speech therapy over a number of years before managing to cope with the condition at the age of 16.
āYou carry it within you for a long time. Iām still a stutterer, but Iāve learned all the tricks so that you donāt hear itā
It was over thirty years ago that he first started work on a script for what would eventually become The Kingās Speech and in his research the enigmatic figure of Lionel Logue kept cropping up.
Even years after the King had died, Logue was still a figure of whom little was known as the issue was still a painful one for the royal family and, in particular,Ā the Queen Mother.
After some detective work Seidler eventually tracked down Dr Valentine Logue, a son of Lionel who was now a retired Harley Street brain surgeon.
In 1981 they met in London and Logue Jnr showed the screenwriter the notebooks his father had kept while treating the monarch.
However, Logue wouldnāt do the film unless the writer secured written permission from the Queen Mother. After writing to Clarence House, he received the following request:
‘Please, Mr Seidler, not during my lifetime, the memory of those events is still too painful.’
It wasnāt until 2002 that the Queen Mother passed away at the age of 101 and in 2005 Seidler struggled with a bout of throat cancer.
As part of his recovery he resumed work on his script for The Kingās Speech and after an early draft decided to turn it into a stage play in order to focus on the characters.
It was eventually picked up by Bedlam Productions, who optioned it and then joined forces with See-Saw Films who felt that a film project could work.
Geoffrey Rush became attached early on and a staged reading of the play in Islington, North London was seen by the parents of a British director named Tom Hooper, who was then filming the HBO mini-series John Adams.
After being sent the script, and persuaded by his Australian mother that it was really good, he eventually got around to reading it and was keen to direct it as a film, which like John Adams, explores them interior lives of famous historical figures.
When Colin Firth came on board, the production ā after nearly 30 years ā was finally going to happen.
Weeks before filming began, Hooper and the production team got their hands on Logueās original diaries which informed the sequences between Rush and Firth.
After filming in the UK last year it got its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in early September where it got a rave reaction from the audience and was immediately talked of as an Oscar contender.
A week later at the Toronto Film Festival it got similar reactions, winning the Audience Award, and for Seidler it was an emotional moment:
āI was overwhelmed because for the first time ever, the penny dropped and I felt I had a voice and had been heard. For a stutterer, itās a profound momentā.
The Kingās Speech opens in the UK today and is currently out in the US
Box Office Quant have posted a map which seeks to display whether certain films were better or worse than the original films.
Using Rotten Tomatoes, the originalsā scores on the X-axis are put against the sequelsā scores on the Y-axis.
Sequels around the centre line have a similar rating to the original; those above have surpassed the original; and those below, are ones that were deemed worse.
Each film is represented by a bubble and the size of each reflects the box office gross.
There are also a couple of rules: only the second film in any series is included and reboots and remakes are not counted.
It’s an interestingĀ appearanceĀ as it was only the third episode of ‘Late Night’ and the banter is a little more irreverent than you might expect from the talk show host these days.
* Spoiler Warning: If you don’t know about the real life story that inspired 127 Hours then watch the film before reading this *
The gruesome details of the Aron Ralston story are actually what make 127 Hours inspirational.
Although a film featuring self-amputation might not be everyone’s idea of a breezy night out at the cinema, there is something bizarrely uplifting about the climax to the story.
When Danny Boyle’s latest film first started screening at festivals, there were reports of people fainting (or was it ingenious marketing?) and it posed something of a dilemma for those that had seen it.
Although based on a global news story, should viewers mention what Ralston (played by James Franco) had to do in order to get out of the Utah canyon he was trapped in back in 2003?
I’m guessing that by now, anyone planning to see the film probably knows what happened, but the tough, transcendent climax is actually one of the key reasons to see the film.
Furthermore, in an age when audiences lap up the most sadistic kinds of horror, is the sequence really that tough to sit through?
With that in mind, have a look at these two videos which feature the real life Ralston describing the events as depicted on screen.
First, there is this New York Times video profile, Pushing the Limit: Being Aron Ralston, which features the man himself describing the events of 2003 (along with the photos he took in the canyon) and his life since.
Then there is this extraordinary 2005 interview with Tom Brokaw from Dateline NBC, where Ralston returns to the Bluejohn Canyon in Utah and describes in detail the ‘greatest moment of his life’.
By the way, if all this is making you squeamish 127 Hours is the only film this year to feature a giant inflatable Scooby Doo.
