A few weeks ago, I had the chance to hear Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu speak at the Chicago International Film Festival, after a screening of his film, Babel. Someone in the audience asked him if he still considered himself an independent filmmaker, now that he had a higher budget (Babel had a $20 million budget compared to the $2 million Amores Perros). Inarritu laughed and said "I am and will always be an independent filmmaker." He then shared a story about how his friend and fellow filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, was complaining about not having enough money while making the Harry Potter film. said "And no matter what your budget is, you will never have enough money."

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to highlight some of the filmmakers with upcoming films who got their start making low-budget and no-budget films and as a result of their success had loads of cash at their disposal. And I can't help but wonder, is it enough?


Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan's new film, The Prestige, opens this week in theaters, starring Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, and Christian Bale, who Nolan worked with on Batman Begins and the upcoming The Dark Knight. Nolan burst on to the film scene with Memento but that was not actually his first film. Back in 1998, Nolan made his directorial debut with Following, a black and white film about a writer who likes to follow strangers around London. The budget for the film? $6,000. Compared to the $140 million it cost to make Batman!



Marc Forster
You may not know the name Marc Forster, but I'll bet you've heard of his films. Forster's latest, Stranger than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson, opens in theaters this week. Forster found box office bliss with Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball and also earned nominations for his actors (and an Oscar win for Halle Berry). But his first feature, Everything Put Together, was a small indie film about a young woman struggling with the death of her child from SIDS. This low-budget film starring Radha Mitchell and Megan Mullaly, cost merely $500K to produce--compared to $40 million for ...Fiction.


Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky's new sci-fi love story, The Fountain, is making its rounds on the festival circuit and will open in theaters in late November. Spanning over one thousand years, and three parallel stories, The Fountain is a story of love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of our existence in this world, and cost roughly $38 million to produce. Compare that to the $60,000 it took to make PI, Aronofsky's directorial debut.

It's interesting to look back and remember these filmmakers got their start. If you get a chance, I'd recommend renting the films on video. I was lucky enough to interview all three of these gentleman who at the time were unknown artists. So to all the filmmakers who are funding their films on credit cards, don't give up. It could happen to you too!

Long live indie film,

Michelle

I have been thinking a lot about music in the past few weeks. How it makes me feel, gives me impetus to act, how it has always been a constant. I have spent a lot of time listening to it, old stuff and new, oddly watching a number of films about it and for some reason, this quote kept coming back to me it. It is from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - a play admittedly I do not know very very well but this quote and the remainder of it was something that has always stuck with me.
The entire quote reads:
If music be the food of love, play on
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

It is said by Orsino - the very definition of a hopeless romantic who is more in love with love than he actually loves. He craves it, needs it but has a hard time actually having it as a real thing in his life. This is perhaps a digression but the main point is that he loves love so much and is so full of desire for it that he will die - literally and figuratively for it. Is that passion or insanity? I have never really been able to tell but I know that feeling - that sense of heady bliss that a piece of music or a scene in a film or the performance of an actor gives me. I have felt it Not sure if I would be willing to die for it, but I would certainly go to as great as lengths as I had to to always be able to have it.

I had an experience last week that was a confirmation of all of this blathering about Shakespeare, passion and insanity.

A friend of mine unbeknownst to me signed me up to something called mobile clubbing. It is a sort of flash mobbing that was, I am told, very popular here in London a few years ago. The idea is to get a "mob" of strangers together in a location and have them do something collectively. Back in the day, this was in the form of warehouse parties where you would get a secret code and location, show up and dance until all hours of the night with random other people.

This "mobile club" occurred at the Liverpool Street Tube station at 7pm last Thursday. I received an email to arrive at the location a few minutes before the witching hour with my ipod. I arrived about 6:45 with said ipod not really sure what to expect. I saw lots of people around but it is a pretty busy station so was not sure if it was all a big hoax. BUT, at 6:55 everything changed. People were all taking out their ipods and scrolling for music. I did the same. We all were looking at each other with a sense of anticipation and to be honest, pure excitement. At 7:00pm, people with ipods (and some without) started to dance. Not just swaying tapping to the music dancing but full on - 50 Cent's In Da Club (the song I chose) dancing. It was fucking awesome. It lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes with commuters joining in or staring but it was awesome. Then, people just started to back to the business of their evenings.

After the absolute high of that experience, I started to think about the fact that film gives me and countless other people all together in a dark theater the same sort of experience as mobile clubbing. We are not all listening to our own music but watching the same thing on the screen. Yet, we all bring and take away our own experience. Our reactions can all be the same - we all laugh, we all feel sick but the way character walks or talks or flips their hair may bring to mind a different thing all together that is not related to what the film is about. It is about life - our lives, the lives of the writer, the director, the characters in the story. It is passion, insanity, reality, fantasy, and despair all in 120 minutes.

Film is the food of life.

For more info on mobile clubbing, check out this website - http://www.mobile-clubbing.com/

Keeping it indie,

Julie

This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced the short-list of Documentary Short Subject films that will be eligible for nominations for this year’s Academy Awards.

Here’s a list of the films:

The Blood of Yingzhou District (pictured on homepage)- The Blood of Yingzhou District is a stunningly shot, sensitive portrait of a hidden AIDS epidemic in China, a country not commonly associated with the disease. . Hong Kong-born filmmaker Ruby Yang and award-winning producer Thomas Lennon followed orphans in the rural villages of Yingzhou District for one year.

Dear Talula(pictured here) - Filmmaker Lori Benson is a quintessential downtown New Yorker who was diagnosed with breast cancer just 14 months after the birth of her daughter Talula. With much grace and humor, Benson brings us along as her friends and husband document an emotionally charged year.

The Diary of Immaculée – Peter LeDonne’s The Diary of Immaculée reveals the horrific, yet inspiring story of a remarkable woman’s experiences in the midst the Rwanda genocide, one of history’s most tragic events.

Phoenix Dance - Karina Epperlein's Phoenix Dance follows Homer Avila as he dances a pas de deux despite the loss of his leg.

Recycled Life – Directed by Leslie Iwerks, this documentary is an account of people living and working around a toxic landfill in Guatemala City.

Rehearsing a Dream - Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon's documentary short follows talented 17-year-old artists during a week of mentoring with artists such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vanessa Williams and Michael Tilson Thomas.

A Revolving Door - Marilyn Braverman's film captures a family as they help a son deal with mental illness and addiction.

Two Hands - Directed by Nathaniel Kahn, Two Hands, is a portrait of pianist Leon Fleisher, who after losing the ability to play with his right hand in the '60s played with only his left until experimental surgery enabled him to return to playing with both hands.

The official nominations for the 79th Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, January 23, 2007. In the meantime, check back to see if these films are playing at a festival near you.

Long live indie film,
Michelle

If you have never seen a film starring Isabelle Huppert - stop reading this (actually keep reading for a minute or two more) and get yourself to your nearest indie video store or Netflix list because you need to have the experience of watching this amazing actress work - though I am not sure you can actually classify what she does as work as much as it is some sort of combination of the slightest of movements or gestures with her eyes or her hand or the way she moves into or out of a room imbued with a simultaneous mixture of power and fragility that amazes. I, admittedly, was a bit late on the Isabelle Huppert fanwagon and the first film I saw of hers was La Separation (a film co-starring the equally fabulous Daniel Auteuil about the disintegration of a marriage). In the film, Huppert plays Anne, a woman who one day informs her husband that she has fallen in love with another man and she is leaving him. The film is a raw and painful study on how two people who were once in love enough to pledge their lives to each other can turn around in a moment to inflict the worse kind of pain on each other. Sublime.

The fantastic thing about Huppert is her clear indie maverick streak not only in her performances from playing a hooker (La Vie Promesse) to a dominatrix music professor (The Piano Teacher) to Madame Bovary to an ugly duckling aunt (Eight Women) to her an eccentric writer (I Heart Huckabees) and her recent turn as a woman having an affair with a man she hates (Gabrielle) but her desire to work with the most original directors out there - Chabrol, Maurice Pialat, Ozon, Diane Kurys, Hal Hartley. David O Russell, Michael Haneke and Paul Cox. Huppert is not one to appear in the big Hollywood blockbuster though she does have the distinction of being a part of Hollywood legend playing the part of Ella the whore courted by Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

It is hard to pick which of Huppert's films is my favorite but I think that it would have to The Piano Teacher as it is in this film that she is her most sublime. She is at once authoritative, even brutal but she manages to make you feel sympathetic towards her as she sexually (and emotionally) terrorizes her young student.

The BFI has very smartly decided to honor this French arthouse cinema icon screening 20 of her films including an in-person tribute screening her latest film, Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle. If you are in London, get thee to the NFT in November. if you are not lucky enough to be able to see this extraordinary body of work on the big screen, most of these films are available on DVD.

Keeping it indie!

Julie