Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

Review: Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the 60’s

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Like most of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, his new one, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” is driven by cultural nostalgia. Yet, this time around, Tarantino’s nostalgia is his film’s guiding principle, its entire ideology—in particular, a nostalgia (catnip to critics) for the classic age of Hollywood movies and for the people who were responsible for it, both onscreen and behind the scenes. The movie draws a very clear line regarding the end of that classic age: it’s set in 1969, at a time when the studios were in financial crisis owing to their trouble keeping up with changing times, and its plot involves the event that’s widely cited as the end of an era, the Manson Family killings of Sharon Tate and four others at the house that she shared with her husband, Roman Polanski. The heroism of his Hollywood characters is an idea that Tarantino works out gradually until it bursts forth, in a final-act twist, with a shocking clarity. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” has been called Tarantino’s most personal film…Read more.

Also read 5 Important Tools Every Screenwriter Should Have

Oscar-winning Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron Interview

Oscar-winning Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón Interview

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Alfonso Cuarón Orozco, born 28 November 1961, is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer, and editor. Alfonso Cuaron is best known for his dramas A Little Princess (1995) and Y Tu Mamá También (2001), the fantasy film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and the science fiction thrillers Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013). Cuarón is the first Latino and Mexican director to win the Academy Award for Best Director…more.

What has changed about filming in Mexico since the last time you did?

So much has changed since the last time I filmed in Mexico. Now, there is a big and vibrant film industry. When I did Y Tu Mamá También in 1990, going into 2000, the industry was just starting to recover and starting to have a decent amount of film production, which was complemented by a decent amount of commercials.

Now, there is an immense amount of films shot in Mexico every year—maybe 150 films every year—and that’s not including commercials and even more television series, both from Mexican filmmakers and from others around the world.

I shot Y Tu Mamá También in 1999/2000 and ROMA in 2016/2017, and those two time periods are incredibly different and contrast Mexico City from when I was growing up and trying to begin my career as a filmmaker. At that time, the industry had almost disappeared.

I’m Mexican and my biggest dream is to be a filmmaker. What advice would you give to me?

I’m not very good at giving advice, but something that I feel strongly about is that—and this may sound like a cliché —it’s so important to remain true to yourself. And if you’re a Mexican whose dream is to become a filmmaker, keep your roots very well cemented in your culture….more.

Related: Alfonso Cuaron on Children of Men

Writer Gets Her First Movie Made by Steven Spielberg

Writer Gets Her First Movie Made by Steven Spielberg

By Filmmaking, Women In Film, Writing No Comments

Just 18 months ago, then 31-year-old Liz Hannah thought her career wasn’t going anywhere…then, despite ‘one in a million’ odds, she got her first movie made by Steven Spielberg. After a decade of hustling, first in development at Charlize Theron’s female-centric production company and then as an aspiring screenwriter, Hannah was beginning to think, “Maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to do.”

Her boyfriend, TV writer Brian ­Millikin, suggested she spend the summer writing about the woman who had fixated her for years: Washington Post Publisher ­Katharine Graham, who braved the Nixon administration’s legal threats and her own insecurities to print the Pentagon Papers.

Graham had taken over the family business unexpectedly after her husband’s suicide eight years earlier, and she defied advisers who said that printing the secret study about the Vietnam War could lead to the company’s demise. “That’s the moment where she came of age,” Hannah says. “You want to find the most interesting and relatable window into a person’s life.”

Graham’s autobiography, “Personal History,” won her a Pulitzer. Hollywood, however, left her heroism on the cutting room floor. Read the article at The Lily.

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5 Important Tools Every Screenwriter Should Have

5 Important Tools Every Screenwriter Should Have

By Filmmaking, Writing No Comments

Before you sit down to write your next script, be sure to get these five essential screenwriter tools ready to help you with the task.

It’s been said by thousands since, but I believe it was Alfred Hitchcock who first once said, “To make a great film you need three things — the script, the script and the script.” And in today’s wild age of film and video content run amuck across an ever-growing range of film festivals and digital platforms, it rings absolutely true today.

At the heart of every good film is a good script, and at the heart of a good script is a great story. To truly master the art of scripting, a screenwriter needs to harness every tool at his or her disposal to create scripts that can resonate with audiences and pop off the page to bring your story to life.

So, if you’re looking to be the next Paddy Chayefsky, Aaron Sorkin or Diablo Cody — or are looking to put your story down in proper script form for the first time — here are five things you need to succeed. Read the article at Premium Beat.

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5 Tips from the Pros for Adapting Books into Film Scripts

5 Tips from the Pros for Adapting Books into Film Scripts

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Interested in adapting books into screenplays? Follow these professional tips for adapting books into film scripts to create practical adaptations for the big screen.

Writing a script can be hard work. It takes a lot to put pen to paper (or even just open Final Draft) and build a story from scratch, develop a narrative, define characters and conflicts, and tie it all together with a nice thematic and cinematic bow.

It would make sense for screenwriters and filmmakers to gravitate towards stories that are already tried and true and popular with audiences — as is the case with books. From canonical classics to modern bestsellers, books make great fodder for screenplay adaptations.

That is, until, you dive into one yourself. Adapting books is harder than it looks, and it can be one of the most difficult and frustrating tasks for filmmakers and writers alike. Read the article at Premium Beat.

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Our Film and Video History is Threatened by the Rise of Streaming Video

Our Film and Video History Threatened by the Rise of Streaming Video

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Is our film and video history threatened by the rise of streaming video? There isn’t much not to like about streaming video. Subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime, and you can choose from thousands of film and TV titles with the press of a button. No VHS tapes to get chewed up by a tape player, no DVDs to clutter the living room or collect dust and scratches. Whole seasons of TV series ready for binge viewing for fans with the addictive habits of chain smokers. This is entertainment technology at its best.

Or is it? Film historians and film buffs would beg to differ. For them, the rapidity with which streaming has supplanted discs and tape as a viewing mode is a bug, not a feature. As the mass audience gravitates toward the big streaming services, those services have more incentive to focus their streaming inventory on recent and self-produced titles. Read the article at the Los Angeles Times.

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In the 1900s, continuity of action across successive shots was achieved and the first close-up shot was introduced (that some claim D. W. Griffith invented). Most films of this period were what came to be called “chase films”. The first feature length multi-reel film was a 1906 Australian production. The first successful permanent theatre showing only films was “The Nickelodeon” in Pittsburgh in 1905. By 1910, actors began to receive screen credit for their roles and the way to the creation of film stars was opened. Regular newsreels were exhibited from 1910 and soon became a popular way for finding out the news. From about 1910, American films had the largest share of the market in Australia and in all European countries except France.

The first eleven years of motion pictures show the cinema moving from a novelty to an established large-scale entertainment industry. The films represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, completely made by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in something like industrial conditions.

The year 1900 marks the emergence of the first motion pictures that can be considered as “films” – at this point, film-makers begin to introduce basic editing techniques and film narrative. Read more at Wikipedia.

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‘The Shape of Water’ Cinematographer on How to Shoot Great Genre Films

How to Shoot Great Genre Films – Cinematographer Dan Laustsen

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Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen is a veteran of how to shoot great genre films. With Mimic (1997) and Silent Hill (2006), he took on horror; with Crimson Peak (2015), he channeled Gothic romance; and earlier this year John Wick: Chapter 2 saw him excel at action filmmaking. Now The Shape of Water, his third, and latest, collaboration with director Guillermo del Toro, once again has him forging ahead into new genre territory — this time an adult fairytale version of the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Given how dexterous Laustsen is at bringing visual life to an extreme range of genre films, we spoke to him about The Shape of Water and his approach to tackling each of his disparate projects.

Genre films are built on identifiable, fundamental characters that make them what they are — think of how it’s usually pretty easy to distinguish an action movie from a horror movie based on basic visual or story tropes. But filmmakers who go into a genre project letting those tropes guide their thinking too much can risk limiting their approach. That’s why when Laustsen begins a project, he keeps his mind free of preconceptions. Read the article at Pond 5.

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How To Be A Television Futurist In Four Simple Steps

How To Be A Television Futurist In Four Simple Steps

By Culture, Entertainment, Television No Comments

Ever since cable morphed into streaming, and we started watching more video on phones than couches, even mere acquaintances have started demanding answers from you about the future…you need to be a television futurist. Last December, you mumbled something like “Stranger Things is soooooo good,” before squirming out of the conversation. Alas, this year that strategy is doomed to fail. This year you will need to equip yourself with some trenchant commentary to fend off your soused interlocutor.

Never fear. We are here to help you through this plight. This handy cheat sheet contains a variety of clever responses to that perennial inquiry: What is the future of television?

1. “Apps are the Future of TV.” A classic. And with quality examples to bolster your argument, it is the sensible retort. “Two very recent products,” your response might begin, “portend a future in which individual shows are delivered as discrete apps, thereby eroding the distribution monopoly of cable networks.” Read the article at Wired.

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Artificial Intelligence in Storytelling – Machines as Co-creators

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Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. New artificial intelligence research details how AI can predict how plots, images, and music affect your emotions while watching a movie.

But the most notable aspect of the film involves its creation: an artificial intelligence (AI) bot wrote Sunspring’s screenplay.

“Wow,” you think. “Maybe machines will replace human storytellers, just like self-driving cars could take over the roads.” A closer look at Sunspring might raise some doubts, however. One character in the film inexplicably coughs up an eyeball, and a critic noted that the dialogue often sounds like “a random series of unrelated sentences.” Until the technology advances, we still need rumpled screenwriters bent over keyboards. So let’s envision a less extreme scenario: could machines work alongside humans to improve the storytelling process?

Imagine how this collaboration might unfold in the rich medium of video. As always, human storytellers would create a screenplay with clever plot twists and realistic dialogue. AI would enhance their work by providing insights that increase a story’s emotional pull—for instance, identifying a musical score or visual image that helps engender feelings of hope. Read the article at McKinsey.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence displayed by machines, in contrast with the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of “intelligent agents”: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. Read more at Wikipedia.

About Sunspring: In the wake of Google’s AI Go victory, filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays. They created “Jetson” and fueled him with hundreds of sci-fi TV and movie scripts. Shortly thereafter, Jetson announced it wished to be addressed as Benjamin. Building a team including Thomas Middleditch, star of HBO’s Silicon Valley, they gave themselves 48 hours to shoot and edit whatever Benjamin (Jetson) decided to write.

Starring: Thomas Middleditch
Director: Oscar Sharp
Executive Producer: Walter Kortschak
Producer: Allison Friedman, Andrew Kortschak, and Andrew Swett
Editor: Taylor Gianotas
Writer: Benjamin (formerly known as Jetson), an LSTM RNN Artificial Intelligence
Writer of Writer: Ross Goodwin

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What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction

What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction

What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction

By Creativity, Writing No Comments

What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction…? Two researchers named Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke have spent the past few years developing software that analyzes literary databases. Their program can identify dozens of structural and stylistic details in huge chunks of text, and if you give them a collection of great stories—stories that maybe you wished you had written—they are able to identify all the details that those great stories have in common.

That’s where I come in: I write stories for a living. (My last one was about werewolf billionaires. It was fiction.) And I’ve watched technology infiltrate countless trades and crafts, oftentimes improving how people do their jobs, all while passing storytellers by.

Where’s the technology that can make me better at my job? Where’s the computational system that will optimize my prose? Hammond and Brooke agreed to collaborate with me on a simple experiment: Can an algorithm help me write a better story? I began by giving them a collection of my 50 favorite sci-fi stories—a mix of golden-age classics and… Read the article ‘What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction’ at Wired.

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Science fiction (often shortened to SF or sci-fi) is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a “literature of ideas”. It usually avoids the supernatural, unlike the related genre of fantasy. Historically, science-fiction stories were intended to have a grounding in actual science, but this connection is now only expected of hard science fiction. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Actors Tom Hanks, James Franco and More on "Predators Everywhere" and Secrets of "Legends"

Actors Tom Hanks, James Franco and More on “Predators Everywhere…”

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Six of the season’s top stars — including actors Tom Hanks, James Franco, John Boyega, Gary Oldman, Sam Rockwell and Willem Dafoe — sound off on everything from dealing with nerves (“I’ve worked with people who vomit every night”) to fending off aggressive suitors (“There are predators absolutely everywhere”).

Actors are used to pretending they’re other people. But what if they were able to switch lives, or at least jobs? “[I’d do] some brand of daily journalism, like a column,” says Tom Hanks, 61, who plays legendary newspaper editor Ben Bradlee in The Post. “Goings-on about town, that kind of thing. I’d like that.”

James Franco (The Disaster Artist), 39, also likes writing, which he has done in numerous forms. John Boyega (Detroit), 25, opts for architecture; Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), 62, for being a cook or a farmer; Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), 59, for continuing his offscreen passion: “My hobby is 19th century wet-plate photography. I could do that until the end of time.” But Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), 49, says he has no other options, except “pumping gas. I got no plan B. I don’t have any skills, man.” Read the article and watch videos of each actor’s comments at The Hollywood Reporter.

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Fix It in Production

Pre-production Planning – Fix It in Production

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A 1st A.D. tells you what mistakes to avoid when shooting an independent film in “Fix It in Production”.

I’ve been writing, shooting and producing short films, about twenty of them, since 1999. I’ve also DP’d several shorts and a zombie feature. I enjoy assisting other filmmakers in North Carolina, where I live, and I’ve worked as AD over the last five years on both short- and long-form projects. The projects I’ve AD’ed have had budgets ranging from the tiny to the small, all well under $100,000.

This article describes what I’ve learned as AD about how to run a shoot. Everyone I’ve worked with did their best and turned out some great stuff. The problems discussed in this article are not a reflection on the quality of films produced. Screwed-up productions and exhausting shoots sometimes produce great stuff. The same folks with less hassle and a bit more time will probably also produce great stuff — maybe even greater and be willing to work with you again. Read the 2016 article ‘Fix It In Production’ again at Filmmaker Magazine.

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The role of an assistant director on a film includes tracking daily progress against the filming production schedule, arranging logistics, preparing daily call sheets, checking cast and crew, and maintaining order on the set. They also have to take care of the health and safety of the crew. The role of an assistant to the director is often confused with assistant director but the responsibilities are entirely different. The assistant to the director manages all of the Director’s in development, pre-production, while on set, through post-production and is often involved in both personal management as well as creative aspects of the production process.

The first assistant director (first or 1AD) has overall AD responsibilities and supervises the second AD. The “first” is directly responsible to the director and “runs” the floor or set. The first AD and the unit production manager are two of the highest “below the line” technical roles in filmmaking (as opposed to creative or “above the line” roles) and so, in this strict sense, the role of first AD is non-creative. Their responsibility is to keep the production on schedule throughout the day, communicate to the entire crew, and to maintain the safety and security of the staff and shot itself. An assistant director must be very good at estimating how long a scene will take. Read more at Wikipedia.

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A Conversation With Jaron Lanier, VR Juggernaut

A Conversation With Jaron Lanier, VR Juggernaut

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Jaron Lanier may not have sired the term virtual reality—that honor generally goes to French playwright Antonin Artaud in 1938—but he’s one hell of a father figure. As the founder of legendary VR company VPL Research, Jaron Lanier both popularized the term and helped create most of the enduring icons of early VR, from The Lawnmower Man’s snazzy headset and gear to the ill-fated Nintendo Power Glove. Now, 25 years after stepping away from the VR field, Lanier has re­­entered the alternate universe he so famously evangelized.

His new book, Dawn of the New Everything, is part ­coming-of-age chronicle (he lived with his father in a DIY geodesic dome), part swinging Silicon Valley memoir (rich anecdotes from his time at VPL), and it’s stuffed with enough fantastical soothsaying to fill a Holodeck… Read the interview at Wired.

“The visceral realness of human presence within an avatar is the most dramatic sensation I’ve felt in VR.”

-Jaron Lanier

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Virtual reality (VR) is a computer technology that uses virtual reality headsets or multi-projected environments, sometimes in combination with physical environments or props, to generate realistic images, sounds and other sensations that simulate a user’s physical presence in a virtual or imaginary environment. A person using virtual reality equipment is able to “look around” the artificial world, and with high quality VR move around in it and interact with virtual features or items. The effect is commonly created by VR headsets consisting of a head-mounted display with a small screen in front of the eyes, but can also be created through specially designed rooms with multiple large screens. Read more at Wikipedia.

Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. A pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. From 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 forward he works at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Seven directors weaponize storytelling to stand against hatred and violence

Directors Weaponize Storytelling to Stand Against Hatred & Violence

By Culture, Entertainment, Women In Film No Comments

Seven directors weaponize storytelling to stand against hatred and violence in this Los Angeles Time Roundtable discussion about the power of storytelling.

The Envelope gathered seven filmmakers for its annual Directors Roundtable — with the strongest representation of women to date. The wide-ranging conversation, led by The Times’ Mark Olsen, included Darren Aronofsky (“mother!”), Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”), Kathryn Bigelow (“Detroit”), Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”), Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”), Angelina Jolie (“First They Killed My Father”) and Jordan Peele (“Get Out”).

The group found commonalities in their works, the outsider stories, the power of the parable, the emotional truths. And then there was that director who called Aronofsky’s “mother!” weird, how’d that go over? Here’s an excerpt from their conversation edited for length and clarity. The Envelope Roundtable article includes short videos featuring each directors comments…read and watch the filmmakers discuss how directors weaponize storytelling at The Los Angeles Times.

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The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper which has been published in Los Angeles, California since 1881. It has the fourth-largest circulation among United States newspapers. In 2016, the Times won the breaking news Pulitzer prize for its coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Through 2014, the Times had won 41 Pulitzers, including four in editorial cartooning, and one each in spot news reporting for the 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Taylor Sheridan Has Two Tips for Becoming an Oscar-Nominated Screenwriter

Taylor Sheridan Has Two Tips for Becoming an Oscar-Nominated Screenwriter

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Taylor Sheridan has two tips for becoming an Oscar-Nominated screenwriter…

The story of Taylor Sheridan’s career is the kind of uplifting tale you won’t find in any of his own gritty movies. After working as an actor for more than 20 years — most prominently on FX’s Sons of Anarchy — the 47-year-old Texas native suspected he could write more interesting scripts than the ones he’d routinely been given to read. He was right. Sheridan’s first three produced screenplays resulted in 2015’s acclaimed drug-war drama Sicario; 2016’s neo-Western heist movie Hell or High Water (for which he received an Academy Award nomination); and the forthcoming Wind River, which examines the aftermath of a murder on a Wyoming Native American reservation and which he also directed. Here, he talks about his unlikely success and making up the rules as you go. Read the article at Vulture.

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Taylor Sheridan is an American actor, screenwriter and director. He is known for portraying David Hale in the FX television series Sons of Anarchy, and for writing several films, including the screenplay for Denis Villeneuve’s directorial film Sicario (2015), in which Sheridan was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.

He wrote the screenplay for Hell or High Water (2016), which starred Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster, and Sheridan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He wrote and directed Wind River (2017), starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. Sheridan is the brother of journalist John Gibler. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Director Robert Rodriguez Is Going Low-Budget Again

Director Robert Rodriguez Is Going Low-Budget Again

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Director Robert Rodriguez is going low-budget again with his next film. Rodriguez launched his career with the ultra low-budget film El Mariachi, made for only $7000. Since then, Rodriguez’s budgets have substantially risen, but now the Sin City filmmaker is returning to his low-budget roots with his next film. The film will be made as part of the unscripted series Rebel Without a Crew. Details about Robert Rodriguez’s new film are below.

Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez is one of the few directors with a place in the Guinness Book of World Records: his debut film El Mariachi holds the record as the lowest-budgeted film ever to gross $1M at the box office. Since making his breakthrough debut El Mariachi in 1992 for a measly $7000, Rodriguez has gone on to make much higher-budgeted films, including The Faculty, From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado, and Sin City, but the filmmaker has never forgotten his low-budget roots, and has always strived to make his films fast and on the cheap. And now he’s taking it a step further, or perhaps more accurately, he’s taking a step backwards. Read the article at SlashFilm.

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Robert Anthony Rodriguez is an American filmmaker and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in Mexico and his home state, Texas. Rodriguez directed the 1992 action film El Mariachi, which was a commercial success after grossing $2 million against a budget of $7,000. The film spawned two sequels known collectively as the Mexico Trilogy: Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. He directed From Dusk till Dawn in 1996 and developed its television adaptation series (2014–2016). Rodriguez co-directed the 2005 neo-noir crime thriller anthology Sin City (adapted from the graphic novel of the same name) and the 2014 sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Rodriguez also directed the Spy Kids films, The Faculty, as well as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Planet Terror, and Machete. He is a friend and frequent collaborator of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who founded the production company A Band Apart, which Rodriguez was a member of. In December 2013, Rodriguez launched his own cable television channel, El Rey. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke on ‘Happy End’ & Making Audiences Uncomfortable

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In this interview, Michael Haneke on ‘Happy End’ & the Art of Making Audiences Uncomfortable, explore the Austrian auteur’s foreign-languge Oscar entry starring Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant, a darkly comic drama about a dysfunctional French family. Happy End, the latest film from Austrian director Michael Haneke is, in many ways, exactly what we’ve come to expect from the 75-year-old auteur who has made a career out of upsetting and infuriating his audience.

Austria’s entry for the 2018 foreign-language Oscar is in some ways the ultimate Haneke movie. The story of the misanthropic Laurent family, once-wealthy industrialists living in Calais whose construction business has fallen on hard times, touches on themes — inter-generational revenge, the distorting impact of technology on relationships, Europe’s treatment of immigrants and the dispossessed — that haunted the director’s earlier work, from 1992’s Benny’s Video to 2005’s Cache and his 2013 Oscar winner Amour. Read the article at The Hollywood Reporter.

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Michael Haneke is an Austrian film director and screenwriter best known for films such as Funny Games (1997), Caché (2005), The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012). His work often examines social issues, and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. Besides working as a filmmaker, Haneke also teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna.

At the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, his film The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or, and at the 67th Golden Globe Awards the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film would go on to win the Palme d’Or, making it his second win of the prestigious award in three years; this made him the seventh director (at the time) to have won it twice and the only Austrian director to have accomplished this. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Best Screenwriting Books For Screenwriters

The Best Screenwriting Books For Screenwriters

By Filmmaking No Comments

What are the best screenwriting books on the market, why are they the best, and what specific knowledge and experience can screenwriters take away from them? Knowledge is power and the first — and ongoing — step that screenwriters should take when they embark on their writing journey is to read and study the art, craft, and business of screenwriting.

It’s not about finding tricks, shortcuts, and secret formulas. No book that we list below is the be-all, end-all way to write a screenplay. There is no one way. Reading screenwriting books is about searching for wisdom, experience, knowledge, tips, and instruction that can help you hone your own style. You take what stands out to you the most and add it to your “toolbox” that you’ll use as you go on to write your own.

The collected content of one book may showcase a full approach that best fits with your process. Another book may only have a single nugget of advice, but one that solves a common problem you’ve been struggling with. Read the article at Huffington Post.

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Screenwriting, also called scriptwriting, is the art and craft of writing scripts for mass media such as feature films, television productions or video games. It is frequently a freelance profession.

Screenwriters are responsible for researching the story, developing the narrative, writing the screenplay and delivering it, in the required format, to development executives. Screenwriters therefore have great influence over the creative direction and emotional impact of the screenplay and, arguably, of the finished film. Screenwriters either pitch original ideas to producers, in the hope that they will be optioned or sold; or are commissioned by a producer to create a screenplay from a concept, true story, existing screen work or literary work, such as a novel, poem, play, comic book or short story. Read more at Wikipedia.

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Falls and Rises of the Top 30 Film Franchises

Falls and Rises of the Top 30 Film Franchises

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Hollywood has an unhealthy obsession with film franchises these days; every studio is in desperate need of an IP title that can provide repetitive cash flow i.e. sequels. Don’t get us wrong, there are some absolutely great film franchises out there. To quote How I Met Your Mother, “If you’re not [Star Wars] trilling it at least once every three years, the Dark Side wins.” But it’s not easy to get a film series up and running, just ask Warner Bros. amid the fallout from Justice League. To build a successful movie series, you need a steady combination of fan love, critical praise and box office profits. Then and only then can you start pumping out sequels, reboots and spinoffs.

A new interactive data explorer looks at the rises and falls in quality of some of the most enduring franchises from the last 50 years… Read the article at the Observer.

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A film series or movie series (also referred to as a film franchise or movie franchise) is a collection of related films in succession that share the same fictional universe, or are marketed as a series.

Sometimes the work is conceived from the beginning as a multiple-film work, for example the Three Colours series, but in most cases the success of the original film inspires further films to be made. Individual sequels are relatively common, but are not always successful enough to spawn further installments.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing film series in unadjusted US Dollar figures surpassing the Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series. However, “Star Wars” has the highest when adjusted for inflation. Read more at Wikipedia.

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New Audio Features in DaVinci Resolve 14 Edit Page

New Audio Features in DaVinci Resolve 14

By Filmmaking No Comments

The new DaVinci Resolve 14 Fairlight Audio Page includes some great new features. But if you still need to control audio on the edit page, here’s how.

The Fairlight Audio page is undoubtedly one of the most exciting new features in the latest version of DaVinci Resolve 14. However, the audio controls on the edit page itself have also seen changes with a handful of new features. Let’s get up to speed so you can jump into the new version without confusion.

In DaVinci Resolve 14, this button is now above the viewer, next to the metadata button. For what reason? I’m not too sure. If you ever need to open the mixer panel, it’s more than likely going to be from working on the timeline and not the viewer, so now there’s extra mouse movement to open the panel. Further, there are still audio buttons above the timeline, so it’s not as if the designers of the UI were looking to conserve space. Read the article at Premium Beat.

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Originally designed for Hollywood’s elite colorists, DaVinci Resolve 14 has been used on more feature films and TV shows than anything else because it lets you create images that are simply impossible with other tools. DaVinci is also the world’s fastest growing and most advanced editing software.

Now, with DaVinci Resolve 14, you get incredible new Fairlight audio tools specifically designed for film and television post production. It’s like getting 3 high end applications in one! All it takes is a single click to switch between editing, color correcting, audio mastering and delivery! Best of all, if you’re collaborating on a team, you can all work on the same project at the same time! DaVinci Resolve 14 is a revolution in post production. Read more at Black Magic Design.

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