Day: September 22, 2021

Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is a documentary about how the comedy world tried to bring laughter back after the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Airing on VICE TV, it includes interviews with David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, Matthew Broderick, Aasif Mandvi, Rob Riggle, Nathan Lane, Gilbert Gottfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Chris Kattan, Lewis Black, Doug Stanhope, Jimmy Carr, Russell Peters and many more. In this piece, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Nick Fituri Scown explains how he and award-winning comedy journalist Julie Seabaugh took inspiration from Werner Herzog to make the film.

The only thing I love more than Werner Herzog the filmmaker is Werner Herzog the motivational speaker. Back when I was an undergrad in college, he visited our directing class and gave one of the most inspiring lectures I’ve ever heard. The one idea that really struck a chord with me was about the power of telling someone that you’re making a movie. Not, “I’ve got this idea I’m thinking about” but, “I’m making this project. It’s happening one way or the other. You want in?” 

So when my co-director, Julie Seabaugh, and I first started discussing Too Soon, and she asked how we, two first-time documentary filmmakers, could even start a project like this, I told her about wise ole Werner’s theory, and how I thought we should test it. We wouldn’t tell folks that we were thinking of doing a documentary about comedy after 9/11: We would announce to the world that we were making it.

Story continues after the trailer for Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, by Nick Fituri Scown and  Julie Seabaugh:

Of course it’s very hard to make a documentary without any camera equipment… or audio gear… or an editing system… or footage. But we were not going to let such trivial things stand in our way. So we did the one thing we could at that moment — research. We scoured the internet for any archival interviews or clips that we could use to make a sample reel of what we wanted to examine in the film, the idea of Tragedy + Time = Comedy.

Thanks to Julie’s background and connections from being a comedy journalist, we were able to get a pitch meeting with a cable channel specializing in comedy. The people there liked the idea and reel, but they weren’t ready to hop on board.

That left us with a choice. We could take our reel around town, polish our pitch and wait to see if anyone else would help us — or we could just continue making the documentary. The entire movie. Just the two of us.

Also Read: Werner Herzog on Parenting and How to Rent a Dad in Japan (Podcast)

Which to be honest, was pretty terrifying, but hell, Werner Herzog said he stole a camera to make one of his first films, so…

We borrowed equipment, and didn’t steal anything… though I may have perhaps lied a little to get press credentials to the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, where we went to begin filming our documentary. Julie showed the reel to some of the folks she knew in the comedy world, and that was enough to get Todd Barry and some other comics to commit to interviews. We not only got some great footage on tape, but could now see how this was going to be more than just a good idea — it would be a good movie.

Inspired by what we’d got on our first shoot, we started shooting interviews with comics in L.A. on our lunch and dinner breaks from work. I would secretly cut our footage when the AVIDs at my job weren’t otherwise in use. After trading in our miles and hotel points to go film in New York, we had enough material to update and improve our reel. That got us more pitch meetings (not buyers, unfortunately) — but more importantly, it got us more interviews, as other comics could see who else was in the film and what the tone of it was. This wasn’t going to be just a series of tasteless jokes, but a respectful examination of that harrowing time, told from the POV of entertainers who weren’t sure what their place in the world was going to be after such a tragedy.

Over the course of the next year-and-a-half we compiled enough interviews to flesh out some of the major story points, particularly The Onion’s 9/11 issue and the rise of the Arab comics who formed The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. Now people could see the narrative arc of our film play out with their own eyes; the world before 9/11, the terror of witnessing the attacks, and the feeling that the world had changed. No one knew what comedy’s place would be, but eventually entertainers realized that they needed to talk about the trauma we had all experienced. By doing so they helped us all mend.

Through making the film we’d discovered that the true equation we were examining wasn’t Tragedy + Time = Comedy, but T+T+C = Healing. 

Werner’s theory was proving true. The more we made the film, the more momentum we gained. The more interviews we filmed, the more other entertainers were interested in sitting down with us. The more we edited the film, the more people could see what the film would be, which led to Julie winning a grant from Women Making A Scene that we used to finally get our own editing system, which let us start editing a rough cut of the film.

Over the course of four years, Julie and I had now built enough momentum on our own that people were ready to hop on board. The first to join the Too Soon train was Dan Baglio of Pulse Films. He had worked with Sean Hayes and Todd Millner’s production company, Hazy Mills, in making The History of Comedy for CNN. Since Julie and I already had a rough cut of the film, it was very easy for us to cut a new reel and build a pitch deck.

Since we had spent so much time making the film, Julie and I were confident we could talk anyone through the story and answer any questions they had. Which we did for a lot of great distributors, but there was one in particular that stuck out to us. When we met with VICE, the people there were the first ones who didn’t want to waste time with us pitching them the story of the film. They just wanted to know how they could help us make it. These were our kind of people.

Now, after five years, we’re happy to say that we are no longer making Too Soon, because it’s been made. It’s done. It’s being released by ViceTV for all the world to see.

So, if there’s a movie you’ve been dreaming about for a long time, something you believe the world needs to see, that will help entertain, educate, or enlighten people. Then listen to Werner: Stop thinking about it and start making it.

Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 is now airing on VICE TV. It will also screen at the Dances With Films Festival on Saturday, Sept. 11, at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theater.

Main image: Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 moviemakers Nick Fituri Scown and Julie Seabaugh, courtesy of Too Soon Productions.

The post How Werner Herzog Inspired Us to Make Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

In Dashcam, a new horror film that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, a MAGA-hatted social media provocateur named Annie Hardy breaks quarantine in Los Angeles to travel to the UK, where she mistakenly believes life will be more relaxed.

Soon after she arrives, she encounters something much worse than COVID-19. It all plays out on the dashboard camera she uses to communicate with fans who tune in to watch her perform freestyle songs as she drives.

Dashcam is the latest of many low-budget films produced during COVID-19 lockdowns, and feels like a step forward. It plays more like a frantic Blair Witch than a socially distanced slow burn. Its British director, Rob Savage, and his co-writers, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, previously collaborated on another pandemic horror film, last year’s streaming success Host.

Some COVID movies wear their logistical limitations as a badge of honor, as if COVID protocols were a variation on Dogme 95. Others simply pretend COVID didn’t exist, and artfully shoot around the limitations without drawing attention to the added effort involved.

Dashcam wisely uses the lockdowns as a backdrop and then pivots in a completely different and giddily gross direction. It has gruesomely great set pieces, especially in a lake, a funhouse, and an un-fun house. The hand-or-dash-held camera moves constantly, making us really work to understand what’s going on — except in scenes where it falls eerily, effectively still.

The film mercifully avoids any sanctimony about pandemic protocols, and instead steps back to  just note the weirdness of this moment, especially in a scene where a restaurateur who is wearing his mask wrong (his nose is exposed, so what’s the point, really) becomes more and more furious at Annie for being unmasked.

Also Read: Spree Director Eugene Kotlyarenko Wrote All 7,000 Internet Comments That Appear in the Film

Annie Hardy is played by the real Annie Hardy, an L.A. musician who really did start livestreaming a dash cam show a few years ago in which she freestyles songs based on short suggestions from her viewers. The Annie Hardy in the film seems to be an outsized, more outrageous version of Annie Hardy in real life. It’s never clear if she’s an actual Trump supporter or just someone who likes the outrage she gets from wearing her Make America Great Again hat in public. But the character in the film shares the former president’s dismissiveness toward masks, and some of his followers’ belief that COVID is a hoax.

Annie-in-the-film is MAGAnificently unlikeable — rude, gross, hypocritical, selfish. One recent review of the film called her “the worst person on Earth.” (The real Annie is much more sympathetic — she has suffered unfathomable loss in recent years, including the loss of her infant son and her boyfriend, Robert Paulson, a rapper known as Cadalack Ron.)

You could read the film as a British criticism of a certain kind of American. But no matter how we feel about Annie, Dashcam wittily exploits the fact that we as audiences end up rooting for whomever occupies the frame the most, even if they have a tendency to do things like spitting in their hands and then slapping sleeping friends awake.

The poor awakened friend is played by Amar Chadha-Patel, whose character’s nickname, Stretch, may or may not be inspired by grotesque behavior he was known for when he and Annie were bandmates back in L.A. When Annie arrives in the UK, she clashes immediately with Stretch’s masked, sanitized girlfriend, played by Jemma Moore, and messes up Stretch’s job as a food delivery driver with her rejection of basic politeness or respect.

But then she stumbles into a job delivering a masked, obviously sick woman named Angela (Angela Enahoro) to a distant locale, and bodily fluids begin appearing in very unwelcome ways, and soon she Annie and Stretch are hunted by… something.

Internet commenters leave a speedy Greek chorus of comments as they watch, sometimes saying what we as viewers are thinking, and sometimes going to very dark places. The device was used to even better effect in last year’s terrific Spree, directed Eugene Kotlyarenko, which also involved social media, a car and lots of carnage. The running commentary is one of many places where Dashcam drops homages and inside jokes, including one commenter saying “you’ve got red on you,” a reference to Edgar Wright’s 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead.

Provocations abound. Annie rolls her eyes at Black Lives Matter signs, and Angela is Black, as many of the commenters point out. It’s unclear whether there’s some symbolism here, but let’s just say that Annie doesn’t learn any valuable lessons.

Dashcam is now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival.

 

The post In Dashcam, a Trump Troll Is Tormented by Anarchy in the U.K. appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

In today’s Movie News Rundown: R.I.P Eastbound & Down co-creator Ben Best; Werner Herzog’s advice on just doing it; a Hawkeye trailer for Christmas; Queen’s Gambit wins at the Creative Arts Emmys; The Card Counter is great.

Clint Eastwood on Aging: “I don’t look like I did at 20, so what?” the 91-year-old tells The Los Angeles Times in a profile pegged to his new film, Cry Macho. “That just means there are more interesting guys you can play.”

Recommendation: Saw Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter in a theater this weekend, and the writer of Taxi Driver and writer-director of American Gigolo is as good as ever. Try to go in knowing nothing. Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe star. That’s all I’m saying. Okay, also, there are cards in it.

More Recommendations, from TIFF: So far I’ve seen Dashcam, Attica, and The Jockey though virtual Toronto International Film Festival Screenings. Dashcam, a horror film that unfolds through pandemic England via a dashboard camera, made me think about how some filmmakers treat COVID protocols like a new kind of Dogme 95. Dashcam isn’t one of them.

Creative Arts Emmys: Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, written and directed by Scott Frank and starring Anya Taylor-Joy, led at the Creative Arts Emmys, scoring nine awards for casting, cinematography, costumes, editing, makeup, production design, score, sound editing and sound mixing. The Mandalorian had seven Emmys, and RuPaul’s Drag Race won five. Here’s the full list of winners from all three of the awards ceremonies.

Advice From Werner Herzog: Nick Fituri Scown, co-director of the new documentary Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, shares some advice he took from Werner Herzog: Stop telling people you’re thinking of making a movie, and start telling them you’re making a movie.

The Marvel Christmas Spectacular: The new Disney+ show Hawkeye, starring Jeremy Renner as the least powerful Avenger and Hailee Steinfeld as young archer Kate Bishop, will be a Christmas story. (The tagline on the poster is, “This holiday season, the best gifts come with a bow.”) The show also features a Broadway musical about former Captain America Steve Rogers. Here’s the Hawkeye trailer.

Do You Like Comics? If so, the collections Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon and Hawkeye Vol. 2: Little Hits, by Matt Fraction and David Aja, are some of the best I’ve read, in terms of art, story, and flair. They collect issues 1-11 of the Hawkeye comic book series that looks to be a big influence on the Disney+ show. The issues were known for groundbreaking, understated storytelling — especially the issue told entirely from the POV of a dog.

R.I.P. Ben Best: The Eastbound & Down co-creator died yesterday at 46. “It’s with heavy hearts we say goodbye to our good buddy Ben Best,” Rough House Pictures posted on  Instagram. “We lost him the day before he would have turned 47. A hell of a friend and a creative force. He inspired us and made us laugh. Charming and hilarious. Gone way too soon. We love and miss you.” Rough House is run by Best’s friends and frequent collaborators Danny McBride, David Gordon Green and Jody Hill. Best co-wrote and co-starred in The Foot Fist Way with McBride and Hill, who directed. They later teamed up on Eastbound & Down, in which Best played hard-partying bartender Clegg. He also co-wrote Your Highness with McBride and acted in films including Land of the Lost, Superbad and Observe and Report. “RIP Ben Best. I remember seeing him as Chuck The Truck in Foot Fist Way and thinking ‘I have to work with this man,’” wrote former co-star Seth Rogen. “I’m honored I got work with him, and even more so and that I got to hang out with him and just be in his company. Watch Foot Fist Way today and bask in his genius.” No cause of death was given.

Main image: Ben Best as Chuck “The Truck” Wallace in The Foot Fist Way.

 

The post R.I.P. Ben Best; Herzog’s Advice; Hawkeye Trailer; All the Queen’s Emmys appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

In making his feature film debut We Need to Do Something, director Sean King O’Grady struggled with when to follow his original vision, and when to compromise. The film, starring Sierra McCormick (The Vast of Night), Vinessa Shaw (Hocus Pocus) and Pat Healy (The Inkeepers), follows a family who become trapped after a storm. Soon the family’s teenage daughter, Melissa, realizes that she and her girlfriend may have had something to do with the horrors that threaten them all. In this piece, O’Grady  — who has also produced films including last year’s Sundance darling The Assistant — shares what he learned about blocking, setups — and making adjustments.

This is a story about embracing reality — sticking to your vision, obsessing over details, but not letting what you thought would be your movie get in the way of the conditions the universe presents you with.

In the midst of pandemic-mania 2020, a bunch of crazy people decided to join me in Michigan to make an extremely contained movie, while living in a self-imposed “bubble” consisting of our set, and our hotel. For over a month, no one would see the light of day. Miraculously, we all survived without murdering each other, and that movie has now been released by IFC, and is called We Need to Do Something.

But let’s back up a little… During pre-production, the incredible cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier and I spent a week shot-listing every scene in the movie. We were psychotically organized. Because most of our movie takes place in one location, a bathroom, we matched our spreadsheet shotlist to an overhead diagram of the location — for every single shot. We knew the motivation for each shot, the blocking we wanted the actors to perform, and how we could fit each shot and desired move into the tight schedule. We had one particular scene with 26 setups. For two pages of dialogue. In one room.

More on that later.

We had our cast come in a week before production was to begin, so that we could rehearse on our set together. However, I kept torturing our poor art department to get the set the way I wanted it, and due to this, the set wasn’t finished on time. As a result, we had to retreat to the basement of our office, tape out the dimensions of the bathroom on the floor, and rehearse that way.

I walked the actors through the blocking based on our shotlist — and immediately realized everything sucked.

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And not just a little. It sucked horribly. The blocking that made sense in my head was insane when you saw real people doing it. It was like a bad play. So after a half a day of trying to walk through each scene the way I envisioned it (because I saw Steven Spielberg do this on an Indiana Jones bonus feature — true story), I had a sidebar with Jean-Philippe and asked his opinion. He agreed with me, and I asked the actors just to forget everything I told them and act out the scene based on their feelings in the moment.

This. Changed. Everything.

The scenes came to life. I quit stomping around the non-set telling my extremely talented cast how to move, and started learning from them what actual humans would do in these situations. I started watching from the sidelines, seeing from the camera’s point of view, and having a fucking blast. I started to see my movie in a brand new way, and it was way better than what I’d envisioned.

So we re-shotlisted. The entire movie.

Okay: That’s not totally true. There were a few highly technical scenes where we needed some blocking that matched our original shotlist (more on this later… again) and the cast made it look incredible, despite being a little unnatural.

Now we had our movie. We planned it all out. Only one handheld scene in the bathroom, aside from the flashbacks, which were all handheld. It was written in stone and blood.

Before we knew it, the set was finished, and we started shooting. And everything changed. Again. Blocking without walls is not the same as blocking with walls. But this time, we knew this was a moment for excitement, a chance to make things even better again. We embraced the change. And the movie got better.

We were extremely fortunate to have our editor, and writer, on set. And they edited everything we shot as we shot it — chronologically. Each night, we got to see the assembly of that day’s footage, and could then tweak the shot list and script based on how we all felt about the edit.

Days were going well and everything was coming together. But our 26-setup effects-heavy scene was starting to become a source of stress. It was a week away, but we were very concerned it could become a 24-hour shoot day. I’m not joking.

Then something happened. We shot our one planned handheld sequence. And we loved it. I knew immediately our 26-setup scene should be a much simpler handheld sequence. The energy would simply be better. But I didn’t want to feel like I was compromising. Yes, I’m a petulant child (like most of you reading this probably are) who refused to make his life easier, simply because I didn’t want to feel like I was compromising. I was willing to compromise the quality of the scene, and the sanity of the entire team, to not “compromise” my original vision. Mind you, I had successfully avoided this trap twice while making this film! Had I learned nothing? From myself?

We rode out this stress for another 10 days. Then finally, the day before we shot the sequence, our core team came together, and we all felt the same way. The handheld wasn’t a compromise. It was an improvement. We made the call. We did it. And to this day I love it.

The moral of this story is: Don’t worry about compromising your vision. You’re not going to do that. You came this far to get a movie made. Compromise isn’t in your DNA. However, leaving your mind open to the idea that evolving your vision to the reality that the universe presents to you can be extremely liberating, and will make your film better.

Now go make something.

We Need to Do Something, directed by Sean King O’Grady, is now in theaters and available on digital and VOD, from IFC Midnight.

Main image: Sean King O’Grady on the set of We Need to Do Something.

The post The Director of We Need to Do Something Needs to Say Something About Compromise appeared first on MovieMaker Magazine.

The Card Counter writer-director Paul Schrader has been making classic films since the 1970s — but he still embraces digital cinematography.

“Certainly, there’s a lot to be said for film,” Schrader tells MovieMaker. “But the advantage of digital is obviously that it’s just so much faster — everything is faster.”

He continues: “There’s almost no relighting, and you never leave the set. You used to have all that trailer time. But now, if I had to set up a scene and enter my trailer, by the time I reached the door of my trailer, the PA would be tapping me on the shoulder: ‘Mr. Schrader, they are ready.’ So it allows you to move much, much quicker.”

Schrader rattles off more advantages: “You don’t have any reload time. You don’t cut gels as you can relight from your iPad. And that’s only half the story. The other half is that you can relight the whole thing in post.”

Schrader says shooting digitally gave him much more creative control on The Card Counter, which stars Oscar Isaac as a poker player consumed with guilt. Final cut is especially important to Schrader after he lost it on his 2014 film Dying of the Light.

“You’re dealing with the economics of a 20-day shoot. We didn’t shoot anything that’s not in the film. You can’t afford to take longer than you need to do something. That’s the price you pay for freedom — I have final cut, and no one tells me what to do. But I better make those 20 days, and I better keep the audience interested,” he says.

The Card Counter is Schrader’s third collaboration with cinematographer Alexander Dynan after Dog Eat Dog (2016) and First Reformed (2017), and all were lensed digitally.

Nighttime exteriors are a major perk of digital cinematography. In Schrader’s commentary track for the Blu-Ray release of his 1979 film Hardcore, he comes off a little hard on himself as he bemoans the lack of camera movement and points out sequences that seem over-lit. At one point he jokes that he needs sunglasses, and compares a location to a supermarket.

“I remember going in there as the grouchy old man, attacking my film for an hour and a half,” Schrader says of the commentary, which was recorded in 2016.

“Back in those days, everything was over-lit, and it really wasn’t until digital — the first one was Miami Vice — where they could really film with available light at night,” he continues. “Otherwise at night you’re always pouring all this light in. And you can always tell on some of these films, particularly exteriors, where the character is too bright. We were always afraid that you couldn’t see the characters.”

Also read: The Voyeurs Writer-Director Michael Mohan Hopes to Revive the Erotic Thriller With His Steamy Moral Dilemma

Schrader says one exception from that era was cinematographer Gordon Willis and Francis Ford Coppola’s collaboration on The Godfather trilogy. For those films, he says, “it didn’t matter. So what, you can’t see him very well?”

“But a normal film, you would get a call the next day after dailies from the studio yelling at you that everything is too dark.”

Asked about recent low-budget American indies that are shot on 16mm and allow viewers to miss details during dark sequences, he replies bluntly: “Well, it’s a bad choice.”

“That’s what digital was made for. I remember Michael Mann said to me, ‘You can even see the clouds at night.’ And there’s no way with normal film you could see the clouds at night.”

The Card Counter, written and directed by Paul Schrader, is now in theaters.

Main image (above): Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish in The Card Counter, from writer-director Paul Schrader.

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