"To call it uncompromising..."

August 7, 2008

I know I've written before of my cinematic matriculation in the pages of Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion; I practically learned to read with the dog-eared copy on my grandfather's bookshelf. So it is that one of my more sentimental goals as a filmmaker is to one day read a review, by him, of one of my movies, and so too is it that I felt quite the vicarious thrill this evening when I happened upon his review of Frownland. It literally sent chills down my spine, much in the same way that, in my youth, my heart would stop upon unexpectedly seeing a girl I fancied turn a corner. Does this mean I have a crush on Ronnie's film? It just might. I've certainly been in less functional relationships....

Anyway, the cause célèbre is that Frownland opens its run at the Facets Cinematheque in Chicago today. If you're in town, and you haven't seen this film yet - you know the drill, friends, you do indeed.

Posted by David Lowery at 10:52 PM | Comments (1)

We Are Hardly Men

August 6, 2008

It wasn't as smooth this time around. Sample dialogue from yesterday:

TOBY: Are we back on the highway?

DAVID: ...yeah.

TOBY: How did that happen?

Our increasingly delirious jaunt to Los Angeles climaxed around 2AM this morning with a blow-out in the desert. We had to ease our way down an on-ramp to get off the freeway, and then put our manhood to the test by trying - and failing, miserably - to take the wheel off. Thank goodness for non-judgmental roadside assistance folks.

We spent the night in desiccate motel that time forgot and, looking back on it now, we never seemed to entirely wake up. We're still not awake. We arrived at our destination, and I promptly bought a plane ticket to New York.

Posted by David Lowery at 9:43 PM | Comments (0)

Editing a River

August 3, 2008

At some point in the next twelve hours, Toby and I are hitting the road to Los Angeles for the second time this summer, this time taking the Northern route through the desert foothills before curving down into that tectonically precarious basin. We'll be there for the next month or so, developing some new projects, supposedly jogging every morning at seven and also devoting the other 127% of our time to editing a feature-length documentary about this band...

All the hip kids are into them these days, I hear. I'm getting into them myself, as I finish up a last-minute edit of a teaser trailer for the film before we leave (although I still find myself turning away from the computer to listen to that Bonnie Prince Billy album some more - the third, seventh and twelfth songs on that album are almost all I want to listen to right now, over and over and over again).

I think we're going to be shooting a test for a music video while we drive out there, too. We're also going to endeavor to start our own band over the next few weeks, eat only raw food and perhaps learn a new language or two as well. Nothing like maximizing time.

Is it raining outside?

Posted by David Lowery at 6:18 PM | Comments (1)

Precedents

August 1, 2008

I'm showing St. Nick again this evening, to a few select folks. I'm at the point now where I'm watching it repeatedly, all the way through, on a pretty regular basis. I'm still too excited about showing it to people to not sit there and watch it with them (although I suppose I'm earning the right to never sit through it again after its eventual public premiere).

As I mentioned way back when, the spark for this movie was a web series that I was making with my brother and sister that I never finished. It was a different animal, with separate intent and purpose, but I re-watched the first episode the other day (the only one I ever actually cut), for the first time in ages, and was surprised by how closely it adheres to the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie. For example, the first shot of each:

There a handful of little things like that scattered throughout the film. Basically, I rip myself off a lot. There's an alley that was behind my old apartment that I used in a music video I made last year (which will officially be seeing the light of day soon), and again in a static shot of the neighborhood in the film.

And this photo I took in Marfa last October was the inspiration for the shot of the kids entering the house.

There are a lot of others I've discovered, too. A few conscious, but most of them not.

* * *

I cut anther four minutes out of the movie today, taking it down to 83. But I think I might put a few of them back in. I don't want to be a running time bully.

Okay, I'm gonna stop talking about this movie now.

Posted by David Lowery at 9:36 PM | Comments (0)

Writing With Jandek, pt. 2

"I crashed and burned and phoenixed out of there. And now what do I have? Some semblance of my body, an overview of my mind. I stand looking. I can't see all that was."

It doesn't read quite the same without the music.

Posted by David Lowery at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

The Onset of a Minor Proliferation....

July 31, 2008

One of these days St. Nick will have its own website. I'm working on a design that capitalizes on my own bad handwriting; it's not done yet, but what of it there is so far can be seen here.

In the meantime, we're making baby steps towards publicizing this thing. To that end, the film now has a Facebook page which you can befriend, and a mailing list which you can join. Thinking about marketing is, for me, akin to pushing small children down flights of stairs: it's an unpleasant but necessary evil. Luckily I have heartless friends like James to help me do it!

Posted by David Lowery at 12:43 AM | Comments (4)

Palimpsests

July 30, 2008

At the test screening last week, I tried something I'd been mulling over since way before we even shot the movie: opening with an old-fashioned musical overture. No images, just music for a few minutes, to put audiences in the mood. I don't think anyone's done this since Lars von Trier opened Dancer In The Dark with a black screen and selections of the score (that black screen would be replaced with impressionist splashes of color upon the theatrical release).

This idea came about as a result of wanting to include Bill Callahan's song Palimpsest in a movie that had no place for traditional song in its soundtrack. But this song - I listened to it a lot in the months before we shot. Its words, its arrangement, its very texture seemed to reflect what I wanted this movie to be about. It feels how I want it to feel, it sounds the way I want it to look. I also love the psychological implications of the title (which is on its own terms a wonderful word, scarcely altered from its Greek derivative). Literally defined, a palimpsest is a document that has been written over but which belies traces of its former contents. A would-be tabula rasa.

Here is the song. Close your eyes and listen to it:

Smog : Palimpsest : mp3

And now, in a way, you've basically seen the film. Which is part of the reason I decided that I wouldn't push this experiment past the test screening process. The first five minutes of the movie are essentially an overture all by themselves. A vorspiel to the opening movement. A beginning before the beginning.

* * *

Currently on repeat is Bonnie Prince Billy's new record, Lie Down In The Light. The third track, a duet entitled So Everyone, is making me swoon.

Posted by David Lowery at 4:36 PM | Comments (3)

Carnivalesque Films Launches Today!

July 28, 2008

My favorite David Redmon story: he has a PhD in Sociology, and last fall taught a class at TCU on that topic as it relates to documentary film. He invited me to be a guest speaker one day, and the day I attended he was discussing Herzog. Towards the end of the class, he popped Even Dwarves Start Small in the DVD player; his students were summarily horrified, and he stopped the film after about 20 minutes. But later he wrote me to tell me that he felt so guilty about only showing them part of the work that he forced them to sit through the whole thing at the following class and discuss it afterwards. I'm sure they all hated him for it, but it's almost guaranteed that they'll never forget it.

I've had the great pleasure over the past year to get to know David and his partner in crime Ashley Sabin. We met at the Sidewalk Film Festival last fall and realized we were practically neighbors - which in the long term didn't mean much, because they were always off shooting a new project or wrapping up loose ends on an old one. New Orleans one week, Mexico the next. I've never met any filmmakers who travel and work as much as these two. And now they've found yet another way to keep busy, as they've added a distribution arm to their production company Carnivalesque Films. It officially launches today with the release of David's acclaimed documentary Mardi Gras: Made In China, which premiered at Sundance two years ago. His and Ashley's subsequent films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, will follow in short order, along with Tara Wray's Manhattan Kansas and (breaking out of the documentary mold) Ry Russo-Young's Orphans. You can read the entire press release here - and there's a fascinating, gloves-off interview with David over at Green Cine, entitled "Girls and Boys Gone Wild in the Context of the Global Economy."

David and Ashley both seem possessed by the same myopic drive to tell the stories that matter to them, and I'm excited to see this tendency extended to films that they themselves didn't make. Along with Benten Films, Carnivalesque is a boutique worth keeping both eyes on.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)

Animals making mistakes

I re-read that review of All The Real Girls the other day, and I think it's just about the saddest thing I've ever written.

Posted by David Lowery at 9:54 AM | Comments (1)