In early spring of 2013, Christopher Nolan and his crew were scouting for locations in Iceland – looking for glaciers that could stand in for the icy wastes of a distant planet in Nolan’s new film, Interstellar. They were on foot, the terrain proving inaccessible by car through freezing rain.
Many of us have random impulses, but Bill Murray is the man who acts on them, for all of us. Consider, for example, the time a couple of years ago when he caught a cab late at night in Oakland.
The flood of loving tributes to the late Harold Ramis this week has encouraged many of us to look back over his rich movie career. It also brings to mind Doug Kenney, one of Ramis’s co-writers on Animal House (Chris Miller is the other).
I had two contradictory but complementary responses to the news that Philip Seymour Hoffman had died of a drug overdose at the suddenly tender age of 46 — two responses, that is, beyond how terrible and damn, he was great.
Trace the evolution of the screen shape from the silent film days through the widescreen explosion of the 50s, to the aspect ratio of modern digital cameras. Take the full Filmmaker IQ course on the History of Aspect Ratio with sauce and bonus material at: https://filmmakeriq.com/courses/histo
The pop-culture tuning fork known as the Academy Awards will reveal its film nominations on Thursday, and if the recent Golden Globes win by Her on Sunday for best screenplay is any indication, the film’s writer and director, Spike Jonze, may score his first-ever Oscar win.
In June of 1983, “Trading Places” was released in theaters. It remains the greatest Wall Street movie ever made. Thirty years later, most regard it as part of the canon of American comedies, having launched, revived, or defined the careers of many of its cast and crew.
When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, most American critics slammed it. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.
1. A DIRECTOR MUST BE A PEOPLE PERSON • Ninety-five percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that.
Every January the Sundance Film Festival takes over Park City, Utah, but since 1995 the town has also played host to the festival's younger upstart sibling: Slamdance.