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After a year-long tour of the festival circuit, earning rave reviews at the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Director's Fortnight, filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan's third feature, Keane, opened in New York City. Keane crawls into the mind of a man, suffering in the wake of his daughter's abduction and follows him as he tries to redeem himself. Writer/director Kerrigan talks to Elise MacAdam about shooting hand-held in the Port Authority Terminal, writing about his worst fears, social filmmaking, and the forthcoming DVD releases of his first features Clean, Shaven and Claire Dolan.
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Albert Maysles has been shooting "The Gates" since 1979, when artists Christo and Jean-Claude first proposed the project - a massive installation of 7,500 fabric-draped steel gates (requiring 600 workers to install) for New York's Central Park, then in a very distressed condition. On February 7, "The Gates" will finally open to the public view-- until February 28. In this interview with Elise MacAdam, Maysles and his collaborator, Antonio Ferrera, tick off the several rejections by various mayors previous to Michael Bloomberg, the technical requirements of both film and artwork, and several reasons why Maysles is not Michael Moore.
Please Note: From February 9 through February 23, The Department of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art is presenting a nine-film cycle chronicling the work of collaborative artists Christo and Jean-Claude, including "Wrapped Reichstag," "Umbrellas" and "Islands," the 1986 film by David and Albert Maysles on February 20.
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Is Elie Wiesel correct in thinking that all depictions of the Holocaust are obscene? How can filmmakers and artists answer this charge? Should "The Pawnbroker" never have been made? "Schindler's List?" What about documentaries, and films by survivors themselves? Elise MacAdam takes up this and other sticky questions with Aviva Weintraub, Director of Media and Public Programs for the Jewish Museum and Daniel Anker, director of the film, "Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust," his entry in the current Jewish Film Festival presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film society of Lincoln Center.
In her new film, "In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger", currently playing at New York's Film Forum, writer/director/producer Jessica Yu avoids psychoanalyzing the fascinating but peculiar Henry Darger and encourages audiences to be equally nonjudgmental. Here she speaks of the artist's preoccupations with war, Catholicism, and the weather with Elise MacAdam and Brooke Anderson, curator for the American Folk Art Museum a center for Darger scholarship. Together they supply a number of remarkable insights into Darger's work and his very complicated sense of humor.
Author Gary Indiana joins host Elise MacAdam for this historic conference call with one of the Hollywood's great insiders, biographer (Natalie Wood), novelist (Inside Daisy Clover,) and screenwriter ("Spartacus") Gavin Lambert, on his new book about the beautiful and damned life of the aristocratic, womanizing screenwriter ("Shane," "Giant") Ivan Moffat.
Gavin Lambert, friend of everybody who was anybody in film and literary society, is not just the ultimate Hollywood insider but the author of some of Tinsel Town's best stories (Inside Daisy Clover, The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life, The Goodbye People,) and biographies (Nazimova, Natalie Wood, George Cukor, Norma Shearer). He is also an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and probably the only person in the world who could possibly do justice to the complicated life of screenwriter Ivan Moffat, a legend in his own time for many more reasons than one. In this interview/performance program, novelist Gary Indiana (Do Everything in the Dark, Three-Month Fever, Resentment) joins host Elise MacAdam in the Clocktower for a telephone confab with Lambert, who illumines Moffat's life while listening to Indiana do an impromptu reading from both The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris and Hollywood, and The Slide Area. Perfection in radio.
Director/screenwriter Jane Weinstock and producer Gloria Norris come easy - "Easy" the movie, that is, the new romantic comedy for people who really want a dream date and are afraid they'll get one. Elise MacAdam does the interview.
Jane Weinstock started out writing a thriller at the Sundance lab but later wound up writing "Easy", a romantic comedy that (blessedly) doesn't quite fit the mold. Shot in just 21 days, it is a Los Angeles story of people with jobs that have nothing to do with the movie business and whose landscape is populated by contemporary artworks (by Barbara Kruger, Malerie Marder, Laurie Simmons and Catherine Opie, to name a few). Here sex is a triangle and single girls can be anything but easy.
What would it be like to start a beauty academy in Afghanistan just after the fall of the Taliban? Find out here, as host Elise MacAdam brings filmmaker Liz Mermin and festival director Kathy Brew to her table for a close look at this year's lineup of the Museum of Natural History's anthropological annual.
Filmmaker Liz Mermin learned of the Beauty without Borders project in a newspaper article. With her first documentary feature, "On Hostile Ground", behind her - it focused on the murder of an abortion doctor - she went to Muslim-ruled Afghanistan with an all-female crew to shoot "The Beauty Institute of Kabul." Is beauty really such a light subject for a nation in serious disarray? Or is doing hair and makeup an important step to power?
Does the conservative right need a film festival in Dallas when it already has FOX news? Will the digital revolution make current modes of film distribution extinct? Has Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 actually made a difference? Peter Broderick, former president of Next Wave Films, talks with Elise Mac Adam about his new project, Films to See Before You Vote. The site encourages people to educate themselves about the upcoming election through movies and provides easy ways to rent and buy DVDs as well as information about when movies are playing, and where.
Bill Morrison meets with host Elise MacAdam to speak of the extraordinary display of images that is Decasia, his film made from deteriorating nitrate stock, and such other projects as The Film of Her.
Are they terrorists or are they law-abiding Americans with Arabic names? That is one question that Alison McLean and her codirector, Tobias Perse, peruse in their new film, Persons of Interest, where they interview several of the people who were rounded up, imprisoned and occasionally deported by the U.S. government in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. This is the first documentary to be produced by the Sundance-sponsored Documentary Campaign
which produces and distributes films promoting human rights issues.
The energetic Neistat brothers (Casey and Van) visit Elise MacAdam with Creative Time's Ann Pasternak, talking an illicit bicycle ride though New York's Holland Tunnel, turning the tables (or rather iPOD wheels) on Apple, and experimenting with bombs and goldfish. Check out their web site for a free DVD!
Elise MacAdam learns the ins and outs of film composing from Evan Lurie. A founding member of the Lounge Lizards, he has created the musical scores for such movies as Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge, Cindy Sherman's Office Killer, and Stanley Tucci's Joe Gould's Secret, among others, and is currently providing the Nickolodeon Jr. hit show, "Oswald", with its distinctive musical themes as well.
Host Elise MacAdam meets with Karen Cooper, co-director of Film Forum, New York City's longest-lived repertory cinema, to discuss current and upcoming films and how to see them.
Host Elise MacAdam speaks with video artist and filmmaker, Charles Atlas about this summer's DVD release of The Legend of Leigh Bowery, his eye-opening documentary of the London-based artist recently played by Boy George on Broadway, in Rosie O'Donnell's Taboo. This is the real thing. So is Charlie Atlas. His other films include a number of collaborations with dancers and choreographers. Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance was made for the PBS American Masters series. He has also worked with Michael Clark, Carole Armitage, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Karen Finley and DANCENOISE.
Screenwriter Elise MacAdam talks to the movers and makers of film and video art. Her guest today: screenwriter (The Ice Storm) and producer (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) James Schamus.
