More on Short Cuts. Dig this excellent documentary.

On Short Cuts. 

Cinephilia and Beyond gives a great post on David Lean.

Tonight on HBO.

Nice group of Big Lebowski links over at the consistently rewarding movie site, Cinephilia and Beyond. Includes this picture of Steve Buscemi and John Turturro taken by Jeff Bridges (the guy in the middle is Bridges’ longtime stand-in). Ah, my Zelig moment. You’ll see in the background right near Buscemi’s head, a blurry figure wearing a Clippers jersey. That would be me.

Ha!

Sir Charles.

Woody Allen movie posters. 

Katerina Cizek’s Out My Window project is seriously dope. 

See for yourself.

It’s time to toast one of our own. Eric Branco, known round here simply as “Branco,” has his directorial debut showing on Saturday at the Coney Island Film Festival. If you are around, show some love and check it out.

Stay Cold, Stay Hungry is Branco’s first feature film. A native of New York City, he went to the Bronx High School of Science and the School of Visual Arts before beginning his career as a cinematographer. He’s lensed a host of feature films, shorts, and documentaries, and his work has screened at festivals around the world, including Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa, and SXSW.

I had a chance to catch up with him recently and rap about his movie.

Dig it:

Bronx Banter: How did this project start for you?

Eric Branco: The idea for this film actually came to me ten years ago. I was enrolled in the School of Visual Arts at the time, but I wasn’t quite happy there. I came up with the master plan to drop out and make this movie. I wrote it on and off for the next few years, and once I had a script I was happy with, I started looking for financing. This was right around the time of the housing collapse, though, and no one was interested in funding this tiny indie film. I had the choice to shelve the project until I could find money, or just pull myself up by the bootstraps and make the movie on my own. I chose the latter.

BB: How did you cast it and what challenges did you face having to shoot over such a long period of time.

EB: I’ve known both of the leads for a long time. Johnny Marra is an old friend that I met in high school, and we became closer after graduation. We were both in art school, and so we’d constantly be bouncing ideas off each other and talking about our various projects. When I told him about this movie, he reacted so strongly to the concept. He had such an intense knowledge of the character that I’d show him scenes as I was writing and ask his opinion. It became clear over time that I wasn’t going to find anyone who knew the character as well as John, and I asked him to play the part of Harley. Stephen Hill was a bit of a different story. I was familiar with his work through an acting studio I used to work for, and just submitted the script to him and asked if he’d be interested doing it. The summer after I left college, I shot audition tapes for a well known acting coach. Very often actors will be on a project in New York and need to read for parts in LA. When that happens, they put themselves on camera and overnight it to the casting director. Steve was a star pupil of this acting coach, and she often had him read the other parts in these videos. He stuck with me, and years later I thought of him for Manny.

BB: It reminds me of the movies Orson Welles shot in Europe over months and years. 

EB: Shooting over a long period of time actually a blessing. Since we were self funded, we didn’t have anyone to answer to but ourselves. There was no one barking at us about not being on schedule, and so we really took our time with this film, and made sure we had it right. A few times, if we felt a scene wasn’t working, we’d just come back to it another day. We had complete creative freedom, which is probably the only time we’ll have that luxury for the rest of our careers! We shot for about four months over the course of two years, and we really got to know these characters. As a result, the characters changed over time just like real people would. What made sense at the beginning of the shoot, very often didn’t ring true after shooting for over a year, and we did a fair amount of rewriting throughout the process. Steve’s character, Manny, took on a much larger role in the film, and we wrote new scenes so we could really get to know him. There’s one scene in particular, where Manny has a conversation with a pillow, which I think is one of the strongest moments in the film. That was Steve’s idea. I wrote it up, and we shot it later that week.

BB: The time you were afforded sounds like an advantage. Did you ever have to balance that with a feeling of impatience to get it complete?

EB: I was never impatient waiting for these pieces to fall into place, though. I lived a good amount of life since I set out to shoot this movie. Between wrapping this movie and premiering it, I’ve gotten married, had a baby, and watched my career as a cinematographer grow exponentially. There hasn’t been much down time, and so thankfully I was never sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting to finish this movie.

BB: How did you maintain continuity working here and there over so much time?

EB: I really have Steve and John to thank for helping me maintain continuity. They both fell back into their parts so easily that I didn’t need to worry about losing the big picture. In terms of shooting, I had an internal style guide for what the movie should look like and I stuck to that pretty rigidly. Whenever I shoot a film I tend to box myself in by creating rules for myself, and that sensibility carried through to shooting my own film. It was very helpful in maintaining a visual continuity through the entire process.

BB: The look is so sharp but that’s not a surprise because you are a cameraman and photographer. But what was it like for you to direct actors?

EB: Actually, directing is and has always been my first love. Working with actors is my comfort zone. I didn’t originally intend to become a cinematographer. When I was younger and would make movies with my friends, there wasn’t anyone to hold the camera. I kind of picked up the baton and ran with it. When I got to film school, I already had a ton of experience shooting and so I was often asked to photograph other students’ films, and really fell in love with the camera. It snowballed from there, and now it’s how I make my living.

BB: Did you rehearse?

EB: We rehearsed extensively. We had very structured rehearsals before we started shooting, where we really tore through the script and got very specific. I filmed those rehearsals and often referred to them while we were shooting to try and maintain a constant emotional tone through the film. Once we began shooting, we stopped rehearsing, but would have long conversations about the scenes that were coming up in the schedule. After we’d wrap, we’d often talk for another two hours about the next day’s scenes and really get to the emotional core of what the scene was about.

BB: Did you cut the movie yourself? With all that footage and with you being so close emotionally to the project from day one how did you have the distance required to make tough decisions?

EB: I had a great editor, Adam Bertocci, who cut the movie as we shot. After wrapping each day, I’d drop the footage off to him and he’d usually have something to watch the next day. On our breaks between shooting, we’d take the time to do as polished a cut as possible, and really try and objectively examine what wasn’t moving the story forward. From there we’d either cut the scene, or I’d rewrite it and shoot it again. Adam was ruthless in his cuts, which also prevented me from getting too sentimental about the material.

BB: How much of the film was formed in the editing room?

EB: There’s probably another movie’s worth of footage that’s sitting on the cutting room floor! We shot and shot, cut scenes, rewrote scenes, and shot some more. The biggest difference between the first draft of the script and the final product is the film’s point of view. The script was very much written from Harley’s perspective, and it wasn’t until we started shooting that we realized we needed to see just as much of Manny for the movie to have the emotional resonance it needed. We ended up cutting some scenes of Harley that were too expositional, and rewriting them to be a little more ambiguous. At the same time, we wrote new scenes for Manny so we could show a little more of his private life and make the audience aware of things that the other characters were not.

BB: When Adam showed you a cut version of a scene did that help you know what you might have needed to go back and reshoot?

EB: Our reshoots were all about structure. We didn’t reshoot because things just didn’t come out well, but rather because things needed to connect to other scenes which may not have been in the original script. We ended up cutting a recurring character, and then had to reshoot a bunch of scenes that she was in. Her arc and influence on Harley ended up being revealed in other ways, and so she became redundant as far as the entire story went. We reworked several scenes that she had been in and shot new versions.

BB: What movies did you look at in preparation for making this?

EB: I have a laundry list of movies we watched! Probably the biggest influence on the film was Panic in Needle Park. There’s something so powerful to me about the relationship between Al Pacino and Kitty Winn in that film that I felt really mirrored the relationship between Harley and Manny in SCSH. Adam Holender’s photography was also a huge influence. There’s nothing wasted in that movie. The photography is incredibly lean and almost utilitarian, but beautiful and nuanced at the same time. I watched it religiously while shooting. Other films that were in the rotation were 25th Hour, Serpico, The Warriors, Mean Streets, Permanent Vacation, Naked, Kids, and Lost in Translation.

BB: Did you ever find yourself getting stuck, waiting and working other jobs, to get back to this? 

EB: I can say without a doubt that making this movie was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It took everything I had in me to finish it. We would shoot and run my bank account down, I was often stuck just waiting until I had enough money to tackle the movie again. There was a good amount if post audio work needed, and a lot of dialogue had to be rerecorded. Several times, I worked deals with people where I’d shoot for them in exchange for a sound booth they had access to. Situations like that really took the big chunk of time to complete, and I hit dead ends at every step of the way that really sucked away all the enthusiasm I had for the project. By the end, it was a matter of finishing the movie to prove that I could. What began as optimism turned into a freight-train determination to see this thing through.

BB: Did the story you set out to tell differ from the story that exists in the finished movie?

EB: I set out wanting to make a film about the safety net afforded to people with money. That’s a story I felt strongly about telling, and so that was never in danger of being lost or diluted. What ended up changing, though, was the amount of layers within that story. What began as a relatively straightforward narrative blossomed into something more thanks to the amazing performances by the actors. This is the kind of movie that really gets people talking and debating the issues presented in the film, and as a storyteller nothing could be more rewarding.

BB: So, labor of love. Now that it is finished how do you feel?

EB: I feel good, man. I’m glad that I have something that I’m proud of and that the people involved are proud of too. I’ve already moved on to the next project, which is a down-and-out story about an ex-boxer trying to right his past sins. SCSH is hopefully just the first entry in what will be a lengthy catalogue of films. I just want this film to reach as many eyes as possible. For me it’s about exposure more than it is about making a profit. Not only for myself, but for the actors. Nothing would be more rewarding than to look back in a few years and be able to say “X happened because they saw you in SCSH“. That’s what I’m gunning for.

Stay Cold, Stay Hungry premieres Saturday night in Coney Island. Don’t sleep.

Stay Cold, Stay Hungry — Teaser from Eric Branco on Vimeo.

Lebowski in 60 seconds.

Woody’s New York. 

Martin Amis on ET circa 1982:

Steven Spielberg’s films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is 34, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time… What’s he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?

‘Super-intensity’ is Spielberg’s word for what he comes up with on the screen. His films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular titillation. In Jaws the emotion was terror; in Close Encounters it was wonder; in Raiders of the Lost Ark it was exhilaration; in Poltergeist it was anxiety; and now in ET – which looks set to outdo them all – it is love.

Towards the end of ET, barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair – complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration – in the space of 120 minutes.

Hackman, Elmore, Huston, Dustin, Rip, Willis, Lange and more…Movie nerds: dig in. 

[Picture Credit: Robert Wilson]

From Cinephilia and Beyond.

And this in today’s Times:

Ethan We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect. We’ve been able to keep making movies because of that and also because, strangely, we’ve had studio patrons, starting from Barry Diller. Sometimes they’re establishment people who know they’re not going to make huge amounts of money, but they like your movies. They’re moviegoers, too.

Joel And mostly they’re making blockbusters, but when you get in a room with them, they go, “Go off and make your movie, and I’ll do it as long as I can’t get hurt too bad.” You know? They’re completely open to that still. They don’t want to get burned.

Ethan They don’t want to look stupid.

Joel Nobody wants to look stupid or lose lots of money. On the other hand, they’re not afraid of doing other stuff if they can trust you to keep it reasonable. So, yeah, they kind of let us wander off without any adult supervision and do what we want.

This Saturday, my gal Shannon’s movie is being shown here in New York. Worth checking out if you’re around.

Cinephilia and Beyond has this good post on Scorsese editing Life Lessons. The editing room–room 306 of the Brill Building–stuff was shot when I was a senior in high school and working in the building. Ah, memories.

New York Stories – Life Lessons (1989) from Aitor Garcia on Vimeo.

ss

Jackpot.

This site looks amazing. Dig the post by David Bordwell  (found via Kottke).

Held over until next Tuesday is the Film Forum’s run of Intolerance.

Here’s Glenn Kenny:

If you have not seen D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance since film school, or film appreciation class, or years ago on public television, etc., or worse yet (or maybe better yet, as it happens) have never seen it at all, get yourself down to Manhattan’s Film Forum starting tomorrow and catch it, in a stunning new restoration released by The Cohen Film Collection. It is nearly one hundred years old and I will put money down that it will be the most spectacularly vital film running theatrically in the five buroughs as of its first screening.

Why? Well, it’s not just the structure: in making this ostensible “answer picture” to the (completely justified) protests pertaining to his 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Griffith conceived four tales of this movie’s title theme, each set in a different age and place, and interwove them cinematically, with one of the key effects being, as Kevin Brownlow has so memorably described, a sweeping up of the viewer into four separate and equally engrossing climaxes in the film’s final third. This was/is admitedly a daring storytelling gambit, and not a whole lot of conventional narrative filmmakers have tried to meet this challenge since (although in a mildly ironic coincidence, noted Griffith disapprover Quentin Tarantino has performed structural tricks that Intolerance certainly set a kind of precedent for, in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown). That’s the thing I absorbed pretty well on my first screening of Intolerance long ago, so it didn’t knock me out this time around. Nor, for that matter, did the content, although it is quite fascinationg. The discursive “modern day” story finds Griffith wrestling with his inner Victorian to concoct a condemnation of priggish reformers. The conception of the fall of Babylon has an interesting proto-feminist component in the person of a character named “Mountain Girl.” And so on. All good stuff. Pauline Kael has noted that the film contains the seeds of every kind of silent and then sound studio film that came immediately after it. And more than that: the movie has surprising scenes of nudity, quasi-nudity, and extreme violence and gore. There’s a beheading or two; the effects for these are not particularly convincing, but hey, they were in there pitching. In this respect, and given the movie’s still staggering scale of spectacle and set-construction (it’s almost impossible to believe that Griffith conceived, produced, shot, edited, and released such an elaborate movie in a mere year after his prior one), what Kael says still goes.

Woody, in the current issue of Esquire:

What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.

I never see a frame of anything I’ve done after I’ve done it. I don’t even remember what’s in the films. And if I’m on the treadmill and I’m surfing the channels and suddenly Manhattan or some other picture comes on, I go right past it. If I saw Manhattan again, I would only see the worst. I would say: “Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. I could have done this. I should have done that.” So I spare myself.

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you’ve left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It’s the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that’s crippling you when you’re trying to write.

Oh, man, real good stuff on Robert Towne over at Cinephilia and Beyond. And even more at Screenplay How To.