I am talking to you. Or at least 98% of you folks who are trying to raise money to make a film.
You know how in poker it always pays to look for other players’ “tell”? A “tell” is the subconscious gesture most people make when they are not sure of themselves. The “tell” helps to show when people are bluffing — or in everyday terms, when they are lying. The most common ”tell” is
By Isabelle Giordano of Unifrance
World is moving, faster and faster. People all over the world continue to see movies in theaters, but we can no more ignore the power of Internet. We live in a time where people spend a huge amount of their time online, on blogs, social media and watching films on different platforms.
This is the reason why our duty is to have French films online. For those who don’t live in big cities such as New York, Paris or Tokyo, for those who don’t have access to European culture, MyFrenchFilmFestival is a great opportunity to discover France new talents.
There’s a big appetite for French cinema and all these films can simply not be distributed due to economic reasons. Our goal is to offer visibility during a whole month to this new generation of filmmakers to a broad audience in a different way than a traditional release in theaters.
The 2013 edition was a success, with more than 750,000 viewings in 189 countries and a 25% increase in paid viewings. Countries like China and Canada did exceptionally well.
By Morgan J. Freeman
This story won’t shock anybody who knows me — but I’m hoping it might help some who don’t.
When my debut feature, Hurricane Streets, won an unprecedented three awards at Sundance in 1997 (Audience Award, Best Director, Best Cinematography), I thought I’d arrived at the age of 27. I was sure of it. All my hard work had paid off and I was, as they said, “set.” With the struggle behind me, it was time to celebrate, to bask in the glow of my crowning achievements and settle in as one of our industry’s top directors.
But early success went straight to my head. Bigtime. Something shifted when I won those awards — my ego was fed a huge dose of You Rule Pie — and I was consumed by it. I became completely self-absorbed with my achievements and couldn’t celebrate them enough. Fueled by a false sense of my place, I lost sight of my way — and had zero ability to capitalize off the moment in a sane, strategic way. I skipped key industry meetings, canceling last minute if at all; refused a meeting with an A-list actor because a producer wanted to be present; boycotted a critical on-set budget meeting with a financier so I could watch X-Files (he now runs a studio); was more interested in dating the lead actress than directing her; and showed up on set with last night’s party all over me.
When my agent, manager or lawyer advised me to clean up my act, I fired them (usually over vitriolic late night emails). Without really grasping what was happening, this small window of opportunity — one I perceived as permanent, as “mine” — slammed shut. And by the time I came to six years later, it was as if it had never really been opened at all.
I was 33, scratching my head, wondering what the fuck had just happened?
By Antonin Peretjatko
The first surprise that I had when I heard people talking about my movie was that everybody was seeing references to other movies.
Why does my movie provoque so much references to the audience ?
It’s interesting to see that the references vary on the country where the movie is screened : Monthy Python, Woody Allen, Godard, Dino Risi… etc.
I think it is because of the way I made this film.
Colors are very saturated, there are also very few camera movements, it is not a fashion way to make a movie so it may remind of the 70’s or 60’s.
Plenty of movies come to the spectator’s mind. As there is a certain freedom in filming and very few self-censorship with people smoking, drinking and driving without safety belt, it may remind them of a certain period of cinema.
The freedom of filmmaking is also a way to escape from the routine where certain filmmakers or crews are making movies.
By Justen Harn
The Cinemapocalypse
For many there remains something magical about sitting in a cinema surrounded by strangers invested in a story, recalling tales told around a campfire, everyone drawn to the light like one of Brakhage’s moths. These tropes, in and of themselves, are indicative of film’s romantic, metaphysical appeal, but perhaps more importantly for our purposes, they bely the importance of the context within which moving images are consumed.
Given the sanctity of this nearcenturyold filmgoing ritual, why is it that movie theaters are struggling now more than ever to attract an audience? Even in the absence of current technological trends,at present the typical homeviewing experience cannot come close to that of watching a film projected on a 50 foot screen in a movie theater. To paraphrase Ted Hope, the trouble is that large box theaters, and many small art house theaters, while able to offer an unparallelled experience, are entirely dependent upon mass market cinema releases, products developed based on predictability and maximizing returns.
By Colin Brown
Hollywood has always fallen hard for films about scam artists and their clever schemes. Even before American Hustle and The Wolf Of Wall Street, there was Catch Me If You Can, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Grifters, The Sting, Paper Moon and seductive confidence artists stretching all the way back to The Lady Eve in 1941. The cons vary but the tricks remain much the same: victims are fooled into trusting in a stranger’s good faith through greed, vanity, opportunism, desire, compassion, desperation and any other basic urge you can name. It is easy to see the greenlight appeal of such stories. Not so much because of Hollywood’s own history with charismatic charlatans, or even because their conniving tales can provide such giddy entertainment, but because filmmaking itself so often involves elaborate self-deception and blind trust. The human lust for storytelling, and the constant craving for money required to feed that, is such that some of the strangest bedfellows are thrown together in the name of cinema.
For a taste of just how surreal some of those couplings can be look at the duo behind Envision Entertainment, the financing outfit that burst on the Hollywood scene a couple of years ago. The two men writing the checks at that company, Remington Chase and Stefan Martirosian, are as colorful as many invented movie characters, at least judging by this article in L.A. Weekly that has become the astonished talk of the town. And yet here they are right in the thick of Oscar contention as the backers of the pedigree war drama Lone Survivor starring Mark Wahlberg. Chase, according to that article, admits to being an FBI informant; for his part, Martirosian acknowledges altering the spelling of both his first and last name in film credits so as to avoid a contested 1993 cocaine trafficking conviction showing up in online searches – the kind of details that make their involvement in such upcoming projects as The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League so much more tantalizing.
