November 17, 2009
Anil Rao: Editing Globally
Filmmaking has been something of a roller coaster ride for Anil Rao, but when you have received writs from Warner Bros because you made your own award-winning Batman movie (for £300 from the Prince's Trust), had your graduation film described by Total Film magazine as 'British Cinema being in good hands' and have worked with Luc Besson and hung out with Quentin Tarantino, you can probably take an…
September 18, 2009
Sally Potter: “The beginning of a new way of looking at film”
"Anyone can be a filmmaker. What's really hard is to make a good, interesting film. A computer doesn't help you write a better novel; writing in a notebook longhand is just as good.
"So technology can't do the job for you, but it can make the medium more accessible to more people... Within a short time, I could get 30,000 people coming to my site, from countries where Rage doesn't have distribut…
August 27, 2009
Behind the scenes: Jackboots on Whitehall
Jackboots on Whitehall has been called the "British Team America," countless times for its use of puppets, but there's a lot more to the film than that.
It gives us an alternative World War II scenario, in which the Nazis managed to invade Britain. The debut writer/directors, brothers Ed (25) and Rory McHenry (22), have managed to entice an impressive array of stars into lending their voices to…
August 08, 2009
The Yes Men fix the world. We ask what keeps them going?
As the Yes Men - the thinking-person's Sacha Baron Cohen - see their latest film released in the UK, Netribution sneaks its way into a secretive underground political cell known only as 'Soho House' to find them out and learn more.
The Independent's Johann Hari recently asked the question: "when you are just one person sitting on a warming planet – when you see economies collapsing, wars raging…
Burma VJ has been met with very positive reviews in the UK following its release last week, with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but what do the Burmese depicted in the film make of it?
In his first contribution to Netribution, JJ Kim travelled to the heart of the pro-democracy movement in Thailand to watch the film with Khine Wai Zaw - who was involved the Saffron Uprising of 2007 - and hear his…
As the Age of Stupid opens with a record-breaking simultaneous world premiere to a potential million viewers across 550 screens in over 60 countries over the next few days, a look back at James MacGregor's interview with Franny ahead of the UK release:
It was over three years ago that James MacGregor first reported here that Franny Armstrong, director of the acclaimed McLibel, was looking to sel…
March 09, 2009
Simon Pegg - How to Lose Friends and Alientate People
Fresh back from a whistle top promotional tour where he faced a grilling by hundreds of journalists, Simon Pegg stepped straight into his latest role – playing a celebrity obsessed magazine writer who has a terrible knack of upsetting everyone including the people he’s sent to interview. In How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Pegg plays British hack Sidney Young who lands a highl…
August 26, 2008
Roleplaying, Autism and Normality : Nic Balthazar on Ben X
"For me the film isn’t really about autism, it’s about what we do as a society to everyone who has a problem functioning and to all the people we call the nerds, the geeks and the dorks because they’re not what everyone else is. It’s the fascism of cool. The fascism of being ‘normal’." Nic Balthazar
Exploring the implications of virtual worlds, Nic Balthazar's Ben X has been seen by two thirds o…
"No matter how powerful an enemy is, you can always escape - there’s always a way, somehow. But how the hell do you escape your own head?"
Nuru Mkali
Director of I Refuse to Forget, winner of $5m feature funding prize, and Laura MacDonald, Creative Director for Filmaka.
Back in 2000 TCM's £5,000 short film prize seemed huge - you could almost make an El Mariachi for that much money…
May 21, 2008
Simon Rumley: Living with 'The Living and The Dead'
Simon Rumley is one of those UK filmmakers whose work never seems to get the recognition it deserved. His debut feature – the brilliantly crafted faux documentary Strong Language – showed his talent for sharp writing, creating compelling situations and making a lot out of a tiny budget. His follow up films The Truth Game and Club le Monde – which, with Strong Language, formed the 'youth trilogy'…
Tantric Tourists peers into the world of 'spiritual bling' and the 'mystic bourgeoise'
One of the gala premieres at the East End Film Festival in London, is Alexander Snelling's first feature, Tantric Tourists (Friday 19th, Genesis cinema, 7.30). Shot on location in India for £10,000, the film cost as much to produce as Snelling's 35mm short Denial seven years ago (which we thought was really ch…
April 10, 2008
Menhaj Huda : Keeping it Real with Kidulthood
The distribution deal was done with Revolver but they wanted some minor cuts to the film, which I
was unhappy about... They went ahead with it without ever discussing it with me directly."
Director Menhaj Huda is best known for his hit feature film Kidulthood (2006) which became a cult flick amongst teenagers across the UK and went on to win The Douglas Hickox Award at the British I…
April 07, 2008
Extraordinary Rendition: The opposite of documentary
Extraordinary Rendition, which first caught Netribution's attention ahead of its premiere at last year's Edinburgh festival, is due to be released on DVD on 28th April, and broadcast on the BBC in the same week.
Suchandrika Chakrabarti met up with director Jim Threapleton and producer Andy Noble, childhood friends turned filmmaking collaborators, to get an update on the improvised film's editing…
"There was a great bit in Eastenders when Ricky said, "we were goin' at it 'ammer 'n tongs!" so we pinched that and put it at the beginning of our showreel! "
I remember Tom Fogg coming back from the interview with Hammer and Tongs, a music video trio (then unknown to us) in 2000. He was both bitter and excited for they seemed just like us, except they'd focussed only on making films…
April 03, 2008
Support for Filmmakers in the West Midlands
The West Midlands may seem a million miles from Hollywood, but filmmaking talent is strong in the region and as more and more young filmmakers embark on what they hope will become a career, the need for support and advice is as vital as ever. But is there enough in the region? And is it meeting and fulfilling the needs of a growing community of filmmaking talent?
Dan Lawson, Production and De…
April 01, 2008
Chris Rogers: From panto dames to internet auditions
Chris Rogers found his latest role through a website. He signed up to Bethemoviestar.com , which he was sure was "a hoax, an absolute hoax." Luckily for him, it wasn't. A 30-second clip of his acting was all that was needed to bag him a role in a series of mobysodes called GSOH. It's also led to his first feature film role, in Rapture.
Suchandrika Chakrabarti met up with Chris in the BFI cafe…
March 31, 2008
Park Chan Wook : Cyborg Therapist
Korean director of classics Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengence, returns in fantastic and upbeat style with I'm A Cyborg, and That's OK. The film was - for me and friends I saw it with - the highlight of the 2007 Edinburgh Film Festival, a One Flew over The Cuckoos Nest in Teletubbie Land. There are far too few films looking at the effects and treatment of mental illness with anything other tha…
27-year-old director, writer and magazine editor Vicki Psarias has been making films since she was 11 years old. With her TV-experienced dad, George Psarias , on hand as cameraman, she directed a film about litter on the streets of Leeds, where she grew up. As she says, "I was actually directing, which is quite freaky, because I was 10, 11, and I was saying to my dad, get a shot of that over ther…
March 02, 2008
LARS VON TRIER - Revitalised
Interview by Geoffrey McNab. Illustration by Eric Dubois
You issued a “Statement Of Revitality” earlier this year in which you said you planned to reschedule your professional activities in order to rediscover your original enthusiasm for film. Having made The Boss Of It All, are you now revitalised?
Von Trier: I just turned 50, you know. At that age you think of the things you…
January 21, 2008
Warped Imaginations: Darklight's female horror directors
Digital film studio Warp X want to address a specific problem: why don't many women direct horror? Suchandrika Chakrabarti finds out how DarkLight aims to encourage female directors to reinvent the horror genre for the 21st century.
Four women
After months of development, Darklight has chosen four directors, out of an original ten, to have their ideas for a horror movie expanded to 25-page t…
November 13, 2007
Jim Gilliam: building a people-powered movie distributor and financier with Robert Greenwald
If you can't raise finance for your feature, and cinema chains don't want to touch your film, what can you do? Until recently that could have meant the end of the project, but the web offers some interesting ways of changing this.
"This was not like putting a blog post up and all of a sudden everybody comes and knocks our door down. We'd carefully cultivated an audience and put a lot of effort…
November 01, 2007
Shooting a feature in Iraq against all odds, Al Daradji on Ahlaam
Leeds filmmaker faced kidnap, torture and attacks to shoot debut feature in Iraq - now on cinema release in the UK
There are tales of filmmakers acting
like war heroes, battling against the odds to complete their film true
to their vision. There's Francis Ford Copolla in Hearts of Darkness: A
Filmmakers Apocalypse clinging onto a helicopter as it took off to
go fight in Cambodia…
October 30, 2007
London Film Festival: Paul Greengrass receives Variety award
Last night saw director Paul Greengrass receive The Variety UK Achievement in Film Award at an event held in conjunction with the London Film Festival. He was then interviewed by Variety magazine's Europe and Middle East correspondent, Ali Jaafar. The discussion ranged from Greengrass's interest in Northern Ireland to the process of making The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Suchandrika Chakrabarti…
October 20, 2007
London Film Festival: Naomi Watts Screentalk
Last night saw Naomi Watts interviewed for a Screentalk at the London Film Festival.
The discussion took in Mulholland Drive, Funny Games and Eastern Promises, as well as Naomi's background and her experiences of producing. Suchandrika Chakrabarti reports
Naomi also gave us a fine impression of David Lynch directing her while she was in a full bunny suit, unable to see or breathe.&n…
September 29, 2007
ASGER LETH: risking everything to make GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL
“We were being chased to the airport by a bunch of chimeres, and people were being shot on the streets. Just at the airport, in front of the terminal, a guy got shot right when we arrived.”
I don't know if Denmark’s Asger Leth has ever actually said he would die for his art. Actions speak louder than words, though, and while making the controversial documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil, Leth ofte…
Extraordinary Rendition, which gets its British Gala showing at the Edinburgh film festival tonight (21st August) tells the story of one innocent man who is caught up in the Orwellian nightmare of being 'rendered'. He is abducted and detained, then subjected to constant questioning. After that comes the torture. No reasons are given, nor the right to answer any charges. The film was shot for £20…
June 11, 2007
Susan Buice and Arin Crumley - web film pioneers become YouTube's first feature filmmakers
There are few poster-stars of the web-led film evolution quite like Susan Buice and Arin Crumley. The NY duo - who James MacGregor sourced for a Shooting People interview, and then for an interview for the new funding book (republished here) - have just seen their credit-card funded Four Eyed Monsters became the first feature film to be made available on YouTube (films are normally capped at 10 m…
March 25, 2007
David Thompson reunites DiCaprio, Winslett and Mendes
The news that Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio are to reunite
for the first time since Titanic, in a feature directed by hubby Sam
Mandes, is a great coup for BBC Films who developed the project. I
interviewed David Thompson, head of the department, in 2005 for
the last funding guide and he said some interesting things about how he
likes to work with producers, commissioning structures…
February 12, 2007
Sabrina Ferro of Media Directions: I just think that we have to get out there and do it ourselves.
The trials of endless unpaid work placements spurred Sabrina Ferro, managing director of Media Directions magazine, onto following her dream of running her own business. Now working on the third issue of the magazine for those aspiring to work in the film and TV industry, Sabrina hopes that the publicity that the magazine can offer to young hopefuls may help them find their big break.
She sta…
January 24, 2007
RACHEL WEISZ: Dying for her art
“I’ve probably been over preoccupied with death. I think about it unhealthily too much. Actually, I think I see it as an ashes-to-ashes grand recycling scheme that when we die our body goes into the soil and a tree grows and the fruit grows and a bird eats from the tree, and you go round and round and round.”
This film is preoccupied with death. "I've probably been over preoccupied with dea…
December 05, 2006
Documentary award winner Clare Richards: We're all just human beings
Clare Richards won the prestigious Grierson documentary award for her directorial debut, Disabled and Looking for Love, on Friday 14 November. Even now the shock hasn’t worn off for her, as she said: “I’m feeling a bit calmer about it now. But it was wonderful to have been nominated.”
On the film’s subject, she said: “It’s about looking for a partner through the eyes of people who have disabilit…
November 13, 2006
Inside a Grierson-Nominated Documentary: DISABLED AND LOOKING FOR LOVE
'The idea that a disabled person should want to have a sex life is still considered fairly taboo, I have found. Non-disabled people don't like to think about it, or at least they aren't confronted by it as an issue, because it's easier for non-disabled people to go to bars, get drunk and cop off even if they find it hard to form lasting relationships. It's just not as easy for someone who has a d…
November 03, 2006
Leilani Holmes : Nokia 15 Second Movies: Working With Dinosaurs
Death of the Dinosaurs is a 15 second short made for the 2006 Raindance Nokia shorts competition. Writer, Director and Crew came together through filmmaking collaborative group OTTfilms. The initial idea was to use toy dinosaurs, which would remain quite static, and then add movement in the camera shots to make the whole come to life. It was decided however to go for stop motion as opposed to cam…
November 01, 2006
EWAN MCGREGOR: How it all began - Exclusive video interview
In a 30 minute non-PR interview, Ewan McGregor talks with Netribution's Nicol Wistreich about his early days, the beginning of interest in drama at school, and travelling around Africa with Aids campaigners. He talks about his first ever play, practicing the lines to the sherif of Nottingham to himself, and overcoming the negative perceptions of people around him to get where he is now. The inter…
We were moaning about bank bureaucracy in the flat the other night when I started to fantasise about an Open Source bank. As Open Source software - which supposedly backbones some 80% of all websites - goes from strength to strength, more people are looking at how to apply the methodology - whereby people are united to create the best product, as opposed to growing rich - to the real world. …
October 24, 2006
BAFTA Award Winner NIGHT PEOPLE Out in UK Cinemas
The BAFTA Scotland audience award winning debut feature Night People is out on limited release in UK cinemas from early November.
This is a first feature for Shooting People members Adrian Mead directing and Clare Kerr, producing. It was created under the pressured hothouse film development programme devised by Scottish Screen known as New Found Films, it shows just what can be achieved on a fea…
October 17, 2006
GYPO - director Jan Dunn and producer Elaine Wickham
Made for £50,000, the UK's first certified Dogme film hits cinemas this Friday
"Some films just make you really proud of UK filmmaking" Iofilm.com
If you've ever staggered away from industry networking evenings with a pocket stuffed with cards wondering if any of the inspiring conversations will lead anywhere, read on. A couple of months after meeting at Screen South's New Talent Initativ…
September 17, 2006
SGT. JOHN MCLOUGHLIN - World Trade Center hero
When I came out on the stretcher I didn't know the towers were down. I thought it was car bombs that went off. When I got trapped I was in my own little world. So not only didn't I know the towers had come down, I had no idea of the magnitude of the event at that time. I only found that out months later. It obviously upset me because it was very personal to me. This wasn't just an event where nea…
"The desire for belief is a serious concern. It's an important theme here. Faith, the function of faith, and the meaning of belief, believing in belief, is a concern of ours. The mechanics of it, how does it work? An important American writer, Flannery O'Connor, has been an important influence on my creative life. I wrote a Cum Laude thesis on her at Harvard and I've read every word she wrote, tw…
August 10, 2006
RENDITION: 'INNOCENCE AND GUILT ARE ENTIRELY SUBJECTIVE STATES'
Rendition
tells the story of one innocent man who is caught up in the Orwellian
nightmare of being 'rendered'. He is abducted and detained, then
subjected to constant questioning. After that comes the torture. No
reasons are given, nor the right to answer any charges. The film was
shot for £20,000 and stars Andy 'Gollum / Kong' Serkis.
Suchandrika Chakrabarti speaks with write…
August 08, 2006
Inside A Grierson Award Nominated Documentary
Waiting For Sunrise - Interview With Filmmaker Aneel Ahmad
Aneel Ahmad's film won the UNICEF award at Sheffield just one year ago. Now it has been shortlisted for one of the film world's most distinguished awards - the Grierson Award for documentary. This interview with Aneel Ahmad was made for Shootingpeople.org in July 2005. Having chosen to work in an extremely competitive industry where few…
August 06, 2006
Innocent Voices
The experiences of Oscar Torres, the writer of Innocent Voices, offer a salutary lesson about how even an obscene situation can appear normal to people denied a glimpse of a different reality. Torres based the film on his childhood during the civil war in El Salvador. Then, it was normal to have to cower underneath a bed as bullets burst through his house during fire fights between FMLN guer…
August 05, 2006
KEANU REEVES gets animated about A Scanner Darkly
"I've heard Richard Linklater say that in the States certain civil liberties are being taken away under the guise of safety - ‘We have your best interests and your protection [at heart]' - and it's becoming more and more not innocent until proven guilty, but you're guilty until proven innocent. I think A Scanner Darkly is kind of quietly dealing with some of those themes. Or something to get out…
August 02, 2006
KEVIN WILLMOTT - Revealing American history in CSA: The Confederate States of America
"One of the main reasons why I wanted to make the film is because the Civil War's still going on in America. There's still many people that want to hold onto the Confederacy as this great concept that had nothing to do with slavery. But if you honestly look at history, and you read books outside of battlefield books, you quickly find out that it was all about slavery. So that's the chief reason w…
July 21, 2006
DARK NIGHT: INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR
Daniel Grant, a fourth-year archaeology student at University College London, has just seen the premiere of his first feature film, Dark Night, which he wrote and directed. It is the horrific tale of a house party gone terribly wrong, as the guests find themselves stalked by a mystifying evil presence. Here, he gives his view on the whole experience…
Q: There was actual screami…
The words are those of self-taught film-maker, Paris-based Pan Nalin, who won inter-national acclaim when his first feature film Samsara released worldwide in 2001. Since then Nalin, born and bred in Gujarat, has carved a niche for himself in the international film circuit. In a brief interview he talks to Meenakshi Kumar on the release of Samsara in India and how Indian cinema can make it big in…
June 26, 2006
BEN COCCIO - Confronting Columbine in Zero Day
"Zero Day could never have been made in Hollywood. Elephant [Gus Van Sant‘s Columbine-inspired film], I don't think, could even have been made in Hollywood. The larger studios would never touch it. Not before. Not after. Maybe in a long time from now. I remember watching Columbine on television and thinking to myself, ‘God, someday somebody's going to make some awful Columbine epic and it's goin…
"Bettie's got a cult following in America. She is a pop icon. A lot of people dress like her, they do a burlesque show, and a lot of people will put on the wig and do acts like Bettie Page. And fashion and everything, the looks were inspired by things that she wore then. When Madonna had the cone bras in the early 90s, she was doing that in the 50s. As for her sexuality, I'm sure she was aware of…
June 15, 2006
BRIAN NELSON - Confecting Hard Candy
A common thing that I come to again and again is I’m very drawn to stories where people face what they are capable of. I think that society is a big construct that we’ve erected to keep from too close knowledge of ourselves, because we’re all capable of much more than we want to admit to ourselves, and that’s both for good and for bad. I’m very drawn to stories where people find themselves in a s…
June 13, 2006
DAVID SLADE - Brit director shares Hard Candy
"We made Hard Candy for under a million dollars, we shot it in 18 days, and the reason we did that was because if we hadn't, we would have been forced to change the script and make it a little more lightweight. That was never something we wanted to do. Or would do. In fact this is a rare instance where the filmmakers set out to make a film and pretty much made the film they wanted to make. I sai…
June 07, 2006
Thich Nhat Hanh: the Buddha biopic and the road to peace
It was announced at Cannes this year that Vietnamese zen monk Thich Naht Hanh's biography of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, would form the basis of Dr BK Modi's long gestating $120m Buddha biopic. The film was originally floated 12 years ago at a time when Mira Nair was set to direct, and has now - with the support of the Dalai Lama - resurfaced driven by billionaire Indian media tycoon…
June 06, 2006
KEN LOACH/PAUL LAVERTY - Ruffling feathers with Palme d'Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley
(KL) "We could have made a whole film of brutal acts and gone on for twenty-four hours. I mean just imagine it: they slit a man's throat, they tie him to a cart, they drag him for a mile and kill him. They beat a man's skull in. A woman comes to the door with a child in her arms, they shoot the mother. I mean how much brutality do you have to show for someone to actually take it and say, ‘Yes, we…
June 04, 2006
PAUL GREENGRASS - Decoding terror in United 93
"We see these things happen on the television, and of course we’re shocked and momentarily we stop, pay our respects, but then we want to carry on with our lives, untouched, because it’s the World Cup coming, because I’m going to the pub, because I’ve got my holiday booked, and all that. And what we expect of these families is having had their anointed moment as victims, they disappear. But if yo…
June 03, 2006
Under Arc Light, From Poverty's Darkness
Three decades ago, at the age of 12, Priyanandanan walked 12 kilometres to earn two and a half rupees per day at a ceramic factory, to support his family. Today, he is a top-rung Malayalam film director, with a string of national and international awards under his belt. In his struggle to make a mark for himself, Priyanandanan, unknowingly, created a grassroots movement, which supports low-budget…
Elephant's Dream, an 11 minute animation which premiered on the Internet earlier this month, describes itself as an 'open movie'. It was animated on the open source (ie user-built, free and modifiable) 3D package Blender, has been distributed, with the soundtrack, under a Creative Commons (ie free to copy and distribute) license - and almost all the tools used in its creation were open source. Fu…
To win one major Cannes award is fortunate. To win
two, is just plain careless. The suprise double win for Ken Loach's The
Wind that Blows the Barley and Andrea Arnold's Red Road at Cannes on
Sunday night, is a stunning endorsement of Paul Trijbits' reign at the New Cinema Fund as the UK Film Council advertise for his replacement.
"for a first time film maker
to win…
May 18, 2006
Dan Hartley - from Harry Potter to Joseff Hughes
Who gets the first cut on a Harry Potter film these days? Thanks to desktop editing many scenes are now roughly edited on set - and in some cases effects and music added - so that the director can tell if a sequence is working before progressing.
Meet Dan Hartley, the UK's first 'Floor Editor', who got into the film industry by walking onto set, knocking on a 2nd AD's trailer and ask…
May 18, 2006
John Howard: The Key to Self Publishing
After 30 standard rejection letters from agents and publishers to his 'Da Vinci code for kids' book The Key to Chintak, author John Howard copied out the instruction manual for his washing machine and sent it off again. When exactly the same 'we have read you're manuscript but sadly already have too many similar titles' rejection letters came back he realised no-one had read it the first time, an…
I guess my films are dark, yeah. But I get scared of dark. Because dark connotates (sic), in Los Angeles, as something that won’t sell, that they don’t want to give to an audience, that’s bad. It’s much like they’ve taken the word art in ‘art movie’. I mean how has this now become bad? We don’t want to make movies that are like McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken, do we? I don’t think so. I thin…
Hawk is an upcoming short film that was written, directed and produced entirely by twenty-somethings. Shot on location in Snowdonia, Wales, for a budget of £50,000, the 35-minute film follows the life of young Rowan, who retreats into a fantasy realm of Celtic folklore touching on ancient gods and paganism.
Hawk is also the first British short film to have its trailer screened in cinemas acro…
May 08, 2006
Movie Industry Lines Up For A Starbucks Coffee Buzz
Two years ago, Denson was one of hundreds of unknown development executives pitching movie projects. Now she is Starbucks' new liaison to Hollywood, and the same execs who once spurned Denson are courting her in the hope that the coffee chain can be the kind of marketing juggernaut for movies and DVDs that it has been for music.
"The tables have really turned and it feels great," Denson said…
"If you think about the French New Wave, what was the main topic? Young directors wanting to know, how is a real woman? How is she? What is my fantasy? I was very lucky to be at that time because I became part of the fantasy. But now the daily life is far beyond our own personal relationships, and there is what I call the ‘third sex’: men love women, men love men, women love women, and why not? Y…
May 05, 2006
DOMINIC SAVAGE - Romance and racism in Love + Hate
“I think a lot of racism is not a deeply held belief. If there’s a lot of other people who feel that way, it’s easy to feel that way too. So the Adam character in the film, in a way his racism is not deep-seated, because he wouldn’t be able to change so readily or quickly; it’s because of all the people around him and it’s because of those communities. Everyone falls in because it’s all part of t…
JH: I think, probably, the most interesting area of V for Vendetta is taking a fresh look at what terrorism is and what it stands for. We have been kind of led to believe, in the present situation, that terrorism is utterly disgusting and certainly I’m not arguing for a minute that it’s the right way forward, but then I wouldn’t say that any kind of warfare is the right way forward, personally. I…
April 13, 2006
ILLUSTRATOR DAVID LLOYD - Creating anarchy in the UK
"When we originally wrote V for Vendetta it was 1980-81, and Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. She had only just started and the full weight of her influence only came about later with the miner’s strike in ’84, stuff like that, and it was around that time that we started to emphasise the political message and it became much more important to add those things as time went by. For me, the m…
April 12, 2006
HUGO WEAVING - The man behind the mask
"What a lot of people want to talk about is this whole idea of is V a terrorist or is he a freedom fighter? From his point of view he is trying to wake people up and force them to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than be beholden to the government. What is terrorism? Terrorism is a word that’s bandied around a lot at the moment and the more we use it, the less it means; and the mor…
April 12, 2006
JULIEN TEMPLE - Putting Glastonbury on screen
We are in danger of becoming extinct. We worry about the rhino and the blue copper butterfly or whatever, but we are on our way to becoming a different thing, a half-computerised species. I think there is something about just the eccentricity of the Englishness of the Glastonbury Festival that does say, ‘Remember you’re a human being and you’re not programmed. However much you’re bombarded with t…
April 10, 2006
MAY MILES THOMAS - digital pioneer
When One Life Stand premiered in 2000 it gave a
glimpse of the possibilities that digital offered. As the UK's first DV
feature film, made for not much more than a Tartan Short budget, self
financing allowed helmer May Miles Thomas a remarkable degree of
control. As writer, camera, editor and director, Thomas showed that
digital heralded not only che…
I knew very little about Wal-Mart, I was incredibly ignorant, so it was a huge learning experience for me. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know much but it’s also what made making this film so amazing for me, because I’m coming in, in a sense, with the audience’s eyes. So the amount of influence they have over so many people, in so many different ways, made a huge impact on me and all my colleagu…
April 02, 2006
TIMOTHY SPALL - Noose work in Pierrepoint
We can all sit in judgement on huge things - the death penalty, terrorism, war - but until you have to make that decision or you're involved in it, you can't speak. When I was ill, one of the things that struck me was, ‘Oh my God, this happens to somebody else.' You know, this usually happens to the bloke round the corner and they're all going, ‘Oh what a shame.' No, you're the fucking bloke roun…
March 31, 2006
NATALIE PORTMAN - Burning questions
I think being Israeli definitely influenced my desire to do V for Vendetta because being from Israel, terrorism and violence is a part of daily life. It might be a new thing for Americans in the past few years, but as an Israeli you live with it your whole life. It’s people you know, it affects people you love, so they’re issues that I have been thinking about and questioning constantly from a ve…
March 30, 2006
SUSAN SARANDON - Sex, song and cigarettes
Life has so much more of an imagination to do things than I do. I think one of the reasons that my life - once I got past the really difficult, difficult part of it, like all my identity crises and everything in my twenties - kind of fell into place, was that I stopped trying to put my expectations onto what things were going to happen and was more open to everything. 'I’m here because all my pla…
March 30, 2006
JOHN TURTURRO - Unleashing Kate Winslet
The first person I asked to play Tula was Kate [Winslet], and the reason was I saw her in Holy Smoke and I thought she was very uninhibited, and I wanted someone who could really play a wild character like that but also turn it on its head. When we met she was really, really skinny, because she had done Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I was really disappointed. I was like, ‘Oh man, she…
March 30, 2006
From Russia With a Love of Story: Michael Dounaev, Producer
Whether you're Russian, American, French or Japanese, chances are Michael Dounaev has a story that will tug at your heartstrings. As the newly appointed CEO of Sistema Mass Media and co-founder of one of its subsidiaries, Thema Productions, Russian-born Dounaev has an eye for stories with international appeal. He has produced and co-produced hits like A Good Woman, starring Helen Hunt and Scarlet…
March 27, 2006
MICHAEL BURNS: In the Crosshairs of Preventive War.
"I made this film because I feel a sense of responsibility as an American. Here we are, living in a place of enormous wealth, opportunity, beauty and privilege, where alongside those things, and to preserve those things, our government engages in extremely dangerous behavior. Here, if you choose, you can ignore US foreign policy. Meanwhile, around the world, American foreign, economic and m…
March 21, 2006
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IMRE KERTESZ - Fateless
There are some people who suffer from this "[Auschwitz] disease" for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events. I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process o…
Rather than just come out and call V a terrorist, I think you have to look behind the veil and see what creates people like that. Then if you take that line, is it right to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist? Is it right to call Che Guevara a terrorist? There’s been a lot of historical figures that, at the time, depending on what regime they’re fighting against, are called a lot of different things…
March 03, 2006
OSCAR WINNER RACHEL WEISZ - Weisz words
The idea, I think, that most appealed to me about The Constant Gardener was that I think in our parents' generation they felt more idealistic and I think they felt more that one person can make a difference. I think students today are not that politically active. Not like they used to be. And what I loved about this film is that it portrays people who really do believe, absolutely, that one perso…
March 02, 2006
OSCAR NOMINATED DIRECTOR BENNETT MILLER -- Capote
“This is the moment where Truman Capote got everything he ever wanted in life. And the moment he had it, and he celebrated himself with his black and white ball at the Plaza, that’s the epitome; the rest is a spiralling into hell. He did what he was attempting to do from the time he was a child, which is he wanted that praise and recognition; but I think once he had it, it’s almost like he resent…
March 01, 2006
OSCAR WINNER NICK PARK - Wallace, Gromit and Me
Since I made Grand Day Out, I’ve thought how similar Wallace is to my father, because my father used to make things a lot. He wasn’t an inventor but he was always in the shed making things. In Grand Day Out, Wallace builds a rocket and it’s got wallpaper inside and furniture, and it just reminded me after making the film of my dad. There was seven of us in the family and…
February 14, 2006
ANDY SERKIS - Big on Character
In terms of acting there’s no difference in playing a conventional role and playing a CG character in terms of the acting choices and creative approach in building a character, a psychological profile for the role and so on. In those terms, there are absolutely no differences. But in technicality there’s a language you have to learn. It’s akin to being on a bare theatrical stage – you have to ima…
February 13, 2006
Building Comic Characters - ANDY SERKIS & The Boys Get Jolly
We did a lot of casting, a lot of casting. Everybody will tell you casting is so important. The agents in town were all very supportive, particularly since there is not much out there for young actors. There are TV soaps and other drama series or a bit of fringe theatre – even that is very competitive – so if you approach with a film and their actors like the script, often they will be very helpf…
...he did a lot of his hunting at night, when there was no light to see by, except for the moon. But then he preferred not to go out on moonlit nights because just as he could see his adversary, so his adversary could see him! The real battle of wits was between him and the animal he was tracking and the amount of… well there were times he would start tracking a maneater during the day and by nig…
February 11, 2006
Gentle Man Jim Corbett, Maneater Hunter & Filmmaker
This is the man whose exploits inspired Forest, the film Oscar-nominated director Ashvin Kumar (Little Terrorist) is making in India. Jim Corbett loved India and loved its wildlife. He was an expert tracker and hunter who became a pioneer filmmaker. To remote villagers, terrified by the presence of a maneater in their district, he was a hero. Now, with India's first national park n…
March 20, 2006
ROY DISNEY - Imagineer
Roy Disney, nephew of Walt, and former
Chairman of Disney's feature animation, worked for the 'Mouse House'
for over thirty years before Michael Eisner pushed him from the board.
Responsible for everything from Toy Story to The Lion King, Roy is an
unashamed lover of comedy and escapist family entertainment. In his
only interview for online media, Roy talked with Netribution in 2…
February 02, 2006
ANDREW ADAMSON - Imagining Narnia
"From your childhood, you just kind of go, ‘I love the book. I love the book.’ And then you read it again as an adult, and you go, ‘It’s a lot smaller than I remember it.’ It’s like visiting a house that you lived in as a child. I think largely it was because it was very empowering. You know, you think about it and these kids are disempowered in World War 2, they have no control over the situatio…
January 29, 2006
DON CHEADLE - Playing Paul Rusesabaginia
"What they choose to greenlight or not to greenlight is based on the tastes of the studio. And the tastes of the studio are largely about what they think is going to make money. It’s commerce. The sort of cyclical self-fulfilling prophecy that they always point to is that black movies don’t make money. You know what I mean? Every movie has to have a huge foreign component, it’s much bigger than t…
January 29, 2006
TERRY GEORGE - Framing Rwanda
“In this case, the strangest thing is the bulk of this film, Paul says it’s 90%, I don’t know how you put a thing on it, is true. But events that we show, particularly in the hotel, are exactly how they went. That was the attraction to me. The events, as they say, were stranger than fiction. Roger going next door and finding that the neighbours are dead, the Hutu workers taking over the luxury su…
January 27, 2006
JOE DANTE - They're coming to get you, Dubya!
When Gremlins director Joe Dante was given carte blanche to make an hour-long film for the made-for-cable series Masters of Horror, he and Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm chose to make a political statement about the Iraq war. Based on Dale Bailey's short story Death and Suffrage, Homecoming sees soldiers killed in an unnamed "evil" war rise from their coffins in a bid to vote out the president who…
January 26, 2006
EUGENE HUTZ - Dancing to his own tune
Is there anything Eugene Hutz cannot do? The Ukrainian emigre survived Chernobyl and, inspired by his love of music, founded the riotously wonderful, New York-based gypsy punk band, Gogol Bordello. Although he had never acted before, Hutz recently made his movie debut in Everything is Illuminated, and effortlessly stole the show from Elijah Wood. Below, the mast…
February 09, 2006
NICOLE KIDMAN - Birth and life
[Acting] is very dangerous. It’s like putting a boxer in the ring and you say, ‘I want you to box, I want you to box really hard, and I want you to kill someone, almost. But then when you step out of the ring, don’t use your hands,' you know? With an actor you’re saying you have to keep everything raw and available and there, and now we’re going to put you back into the world, but now you have to…
January 23, 2006
KEVIN COSTNER - Going West
"You’re a writer, right? You love to write. What if somebody was going to take that away from you? When you realise someone’s going to take away something you love, a way of life, however you feed your family, you’re confused by it and you try to make a sense of it. But, generally speaking, the kind of person that would take your life away from you is a sociopath. So you can’t even get inside the…
January 23, 2006
TIM BURTON - Smiling in the face of death
The culture I grew up in, death was always looked upon as dark and forbidden and not discussed. And, you know, living close to Mexico where you were very aware of like the Day of the Dead ceremony where they use humour and the skeletons are all dancing and playing, I just felt like that was so much more appropriate. It’s much more a celebration of life and a much more positive way of dealing with…
January 23, 2006
LEXI ALEXANDER - Up Green Street with the pack
"I think every time, to me, not to talk bad about filmmakers who do these male films, but usually when a man does a fight film or a violent film, there’s no vulnerability in the character, it’s very macho-macho. I think that’s part of the guy thinking, ‘That’s how I want to portray myself. That’s how I want to portray the guys’ whereas I say, ‘No, no, let’s open the curtains. This is what’s reall…
January 23, 2006
HELENA BONHAM CARTER - Poetry in stop motion
I like dressing up. Because, like, Mrs Bucket [in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory], I was the one who asked for teeth. They’re not my real teeth, although Tim keeps thinking they are. I know, but I think there’s something sweetly romantic about it. Just think: after being an ape, after all that, he saw through to the real me!
Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Corpse Bride…
January 22, 2006
AMMA ASANTI - after grange hill
Netribution readers of a certain age will recall this writer/director playing a schoolgirl role in Grange Hill. She's moved on from there and gone behind the camera, becoming the first black woman to write and produce her own TV drama. Now she's turned to directing and her formidible talent sees her debut cinema offering scooping a shelf-full of awards, including a Carl Forman Award at the BAFTAs…
January 20, 2006
Nik Powell: 4 Nov 1950 - 7 Nov 2019
After Nik Powell co-founded Virgin with school-friend Richard Branson, he ran Palace Pictures with Stephen Woolley, and later Scala Productions, where they both produced and found some era-defining films and filmmakers (Neil Jordon, Sam Raimi, the Coen Brothers, Lars von Trier, Shane Meadows), before leading the European Film Academy, and finally running the National Film & TV School. Powell…