In Production

Bay Area narrative filmmakers are thriving in doc capital in '09

When I received the proposal last January to write a weekly “In Production” column for SF360.org, I had no concerns about finding sufficient material—that is, local works in various stages of progress. As you well know, the Bay Area is the only place in the country outside of the industry town of Los Angeles and the megalopolis of New York that could sustain a weekly column on independent filmmaking. The challenge I expected was (un)covering a halfway respectable number of narrative features to balance the famously overwhelming output of documentary makers. But as the year unfolded, the trickle of fiction films built to, well, not a flood but a very healthy stream—in the middle of a depressing recession. While I’m not quite ready to anoint the Bay Area as Indiewood North (or West), I have found that something’s certainly going on.

topics: activism, actors, bay area, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, features, filmmakers, frameline, independent film, mill valley film festival, narrative feature filmmaking, san fra, san francisco international film festival

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Platform

"Sorry, Thanks" lavishes love on the Mission

From the steep slope of 22nd Street down to La Taqueria, from the Attic to Boogaloos, Dia Sokol and Lauren Veloski’s droll and charming Sorry, Thanks showcases the Mission to glowing advantage. Veloski (producer and co-writer) was born and raised in the Bay Area and knows the territory, while Sokol (director and co-writer) mapped the terrain of seriocomic relationship movies as producer of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Mutual Appreciation. Sorry, Thanks follows the dating stutter-steps of a young woman (Kenya Miles) unattached for the first time in eons, and the amusing antics of a passive underachiever (Wiley Wiggins) barely present in his long-term relationship. Talky without being pretentious—or precious—the film glides gradually from gently absurd comedy into a poignant look at commitment and responsibility. We caught up with the filmmakers via email ahead of the Bay Area screenings of Sorry, Thanks October 11 and 12 in the Mill Valley Film Festival, and October 24 in the first annual SFFS Cinema by the Bay festival in San Francisco.

[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in advance of the film’s MVFF screening.]

topics: bay area, cinephiles, directors, distributors, film festivals, independent film, mill valley film festival

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Report

Live from Mill Valley: Woody Harrelson and Uma Thurman

Woody Harrelson is a treasure whom the Mill Valley Film Festival, according to founder/executive director Mark Fishkin, had been pursuing some years. They certainly lucked out with the eventual timing, however, since the festival’s tribute Thursday occurred amidst an unprecedented high-profile period for the busy but seldom spotlight-seeking actor.

He’s currently sitting atop box-office charts as the biggest marquee name in splatstick comedy Zombieland, in which he’s hilarious. He earned raves at Toronto last month playing a damaged, delusional loner who thinks he’s a superhero in Defendor, which Sony Classics picked up for distribution. He’s got a sizable part in the imminent 2012, Roland Emmerich’s latest world-destroying spectacular. And he’s certainly got some awards heat going for his powerful turn as a U.S. Army lifer delivering “casualty notification” to soldiers’ families in The Messenger, the excellent drama that is scenarist (Married Life, I’m Not There, Jesus’ Son) Oren Moverman’s directorial debut.

topics: actors, audiences, awards, bay area, directors, hollywood, independent film, mill valley film festival

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Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival opens its 32nd

The Mill Valley Film Festival’s 2009 program features, as ever, a bounty of local work, U.S. independent features and docs, international festival favorites and children’s flicks, as well as live events and more. But what it also offers is a surprisingly potent mainstream industry presence: The headlining tribute programs offer opportunities to get a close look at A-list types more frequently seen at the multiplex than at the art house. And you know what? We approve.

That’s because the 32-year-old festival’s 2009 tributees are the kinds of starry talents that give Hollywood a good name: famous mid-career actors with depth and range, a writer-director who’s actually succeeded by appealing to the audience’s grownup intelligence, not its inner (or actual) 14-year-old Tweeting fanboy. These are the good guys. We can’t even hate them because they’re beautiful.

topics: activism, actors, african american cinema, authors, bay area, critics, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, features, film festivals, independent film, international film, mill valley film festival, music, world cinema

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Experience

Mill Valley Film Festival's Maher moment

When you’re, say, 14, movies that “everyone” is dying to see come pretty often—they’re most likely the latest megabuck action-fantasy or comedy toy opening Friday at every multiplex in the land. As one gets older, such occasions grow fewer. Taste changes, people have more important things to do (is there a parent alive who hasn’t sighed “Oh, I can’t remember the last time we got out for a movie”?), and so much of the Hollywood fare available to most seems such—kidstuff.

But this week there is, in fact, a movie everyone I know is dying to see. It goes “wide” on Friday, but opens the Mill Valley Film Festival Thursday night. There’s no doubt every cranny of the Smith Rafael Film Center could be filled by locals who can’t wait even those extra few hours before its first regular commercial matinees. That movie would be Religulous, the desperately awaited (by some) and already vehemently decried (by others) film by director Larry Charles (Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and star/provocateur Bill Maher .

topics: actors, directors, documentary film, features, mill valley film festival

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Mill Valley Film Festival 30

Like its late-‘70s-birthed classmate Sundance, the Mill Valley Film Festival has a long-standing emphasis on American independent cinema. The difference being that at this point anything premiering at Sundance is instantly “discovered” by international media, sussed by agents, studio scouts and distributors. As its profile has risen, “indie cred” has perhaps inevitably lowered — several titles each year are just uninspired, starry if relatively low-budgeted quasi-mainstream flicks.

Not so at Mill Valley, which retains its genuinely alterna-vibe and local (rather than professional outta-towner) audience after 30 years…even if that loyal audience is very white, suburban and wealthy. Here, the bulk of the program remains truly alternative, with many a worthy movie not already poached by other, more media-pumped festivals.

Not that there weren’t plenty of celebrity visitations at MVFF’s 30th. First-time director Ben Affleck and thesp Amy Adams turned up — traffic-delayed but still welcome — to promote “Gone Baby Gone.” Ang Lee, a Mill Valley regular since his own 1991 debut “Pushing Hands,” discussed his career in a tribute program the night after “Lust, Caution” opened the festival. Questions about that latest effort prompted him to muse, “You could say all my films are about food and sex.” (We’re not sure where “Hulk” fits into that equation, though.)

Jennifer Jason Leigh got her own tribute in a program that included “Margot at the Wedding,” the new film by her writer-director husband Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”) in which she co-stars with Nicole Kidman and Jack Black. A little nonplussed by interviewer Ben Fong-Torres’ line of questioning, she responded to his asking why several of her characters have been prostitutes by cracking, “I guess there aren’t that many jobs for women.” (She also noted that on her very first professional job, a part in 1970s TV series “Baretta,” star “Robert Blake threw a chair on the set. He has a temper.”)

A phalanx of the studio’s top animators attended the premiere of documentary “The Pixar Story.” An all-star lineup of musicians performed a Bob Dylan tribute concert after Todd Haynes’ Dylan fantasia “I’m Not There,” among them John Doe, Wilco’s Nels Cline, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Bob Weir and Chris Isaak. And last night’s closing feature was supposed to have brought in “The Kite Runner” director Marc Forster, scenarist David Benioff and the bestselling novel’s author Khaled Hosseini to the Sequoia Theatres. (I myself wasn’t able to make it to witness.)

These were the big-noise events. But eavesdropping on audience buzz at any given screening was likely to point instead toward the spotlight on new Romanian cinema, a digitally-shot drama from Burkina Faso, or a documentary about some impossibly off-grid culture. Marin audiences seem to have a particular fondness for the latter such exotica, and this year everybody’s favorite armchair-adventure discovery seemed to be “Riding Solo to the Top of the World,” a literal one-man enterprise in which filmmaker Guarav Jani, his camera and his motorcycle journeyed to the Changthang Plateau — an Indian mountain region bordering China where the average altitude is 15,000 feet and the few human residents are nomadic shepherds.

Other far-flung audience hits included “The Iron Ladies of Liberia,” about that previously violence-plagued nation’s new wave of enlightened female leaders; Kurdistan road-trip parable “Crossing the Dust;” and “Kiviuq,” a telling of traditional far-north Canadian Inuit fables in dance, music and Inuktitut language.

Closer to home, two excellent documentaries in the kids-do-the-darndest-things mode of “Spellbound” stirred considerable enthusiasm. Tricia Regan’s “Autism: The Musical” follows a group of diversely “functional” Southern California autistic kids — and their sometimes equally high-maintenance parents — as Miracle Project founder Elaine Hall pulls off the near-impossible feat of focusing their attentions toward creating a stage show. But even that stunt is dwarfed by those performed by the competitive jump-rope and double dutch (the two categories have elaborate, separate rules) tweens-to-teens in Stephanie Johnes’ “Doubletime.” You’re probably thinking: Jump rope tricks, right…big whoop. But the mix of acrobatics, hip-hop dance, speed, and whatnot these kids pull off is more exciting to watch than 95% of what you get at the Olympics.

Other nonfiction finds included “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer,” an engrossing portrait of the still-salty, hard-living bebop “canary,” and “Knee Deep,” a stranger-than-fiction tale of attempted matricide in the depressed farmlands of not-so-quaint inland Maine. A big favorite for many was Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick’s “Passion and Power: The Technology of the Orgasm,” which looks at the “secret history” of the vibrator from Victorian times (when doctors used it to relieve women’s “hysteria”) to today. Alas, there were no thematically relevant gift bags for patrons after the screening.

topics: film festivals, independent film, mill valley film festival

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Nine questions for Rob Nilsson

Veteran Bay Area filmmaker Rob Nilsson was a staple in San Francisco’s collectivist, countercultural film scene of the 1970s, a leading figure in the American independent feature landscape of the 1980s, and then…. Well, those who saw his earlier work (“Northern Lights,” “Heat and Sunlight,” “Signal 7”) at arthouses and festivals might have thought he dropped off the map in the 1990s.

Unless they religiously attend the Mill Valley Film Festival, that is, where patrons have known that Nilsson has been extraordinarily prolific since abandoning celluloid for the lighter, cheaper, more flexible digital realm. He’s made several features (noted below) both here and abroad — from Kansas City to Jordan — most of which have had low-profile release to home formats.

But his epic project, now finally complete, is the “9 @ Night” series of nine interlocking full-length films made in collectivist style with the Tenderloin yProject. These semi-improvised movies, stylistically diverse and often striking, fit together as a vast tapestry of life in and around S.F. — largely down-and-out life, reflecting in many cases the real-life experience of Nilsson’s collaborators.

Rich, humane, unpredictable, the “9” movies have been premiering individually at Mill Valley since 2000 — and this year the last-finished segments “Used” and “Go Together” will take their bow. Nilsson promises the entire series, 12 years in the making, will play regular local theatrical dates soon. As if that’s not enough, he’s got an unrelated third [ital] feature, “Presque Isle,” also premiering at MVFF.

Somehow amidst all this he found a spare moment to check in with SF360.org…

1. SF360: You’ve got to be the most-programmed filmmaker in the history of MVFF. Admittedly, you’ve had a lot of features to premiere — but why there in particular?

Rob Nilsson: I started with (Festival Director) Mark Fishkin and I intend to end with him. The North American premiere of (his 1978 first feature) ‘Northern Lights’ was at Mill Valley and I never looked back. They have supported me like no other American institution, and I support them like no other American filmmaker.

2, SF360: You went from being the classic U.S. indie filmmaker, who made a feature on film every few years, to this explosion of activity working with a collective on digital video. What’s most liberating about the new technology?

Nilsson: More intimacy. Less fooling around with needless technicalities. Great equipment which never fails. You look like an amateur so you can get people to relax. It’s closer to poetry.

3. SF360: How did you get started with the Tenderloin yGroup?

Nilsson: My brother was homeless. I drove through the Tenderloin everyday on the way to my editing room for ‘Heat and Sunlight’ (1987). I wondered, who were the brown baggers, the screamers, the shopping bag ladies, the prophets, the pimps, the prostitutes? I thought I might find my brother, but I found a 14 year artistic mission instead. And in the midst of it, my brother did appear.

4. SF360: How was the whole ’9 @ Night’ series developed, in terms of the characters, community and stories it would encompass? How heavily was improvisation involved?

Nilsson: The stories came as a result of meeting people on the streets and in the workshop, which was the first thing to get started. First it was the Tenderloin Action Group, and then the Tenderloin yGroup, a workshop for homeless, street people, inner city residents, professional actors and all comers. I met people through the workshop and its program. I saw how stories might be built around them.

Sometimes things came from their lives. Sometimes they collaborated on the stories. Sometimes things came from the slipstream. Sometimes I just saw things and ran with them. But the intent was to do things to activate the energies of people, to help them find emotion, intuition, honest response. I thought drama should start there. All the movies had a spine, a script scenario, a 10 to 15 page road map. All dialogue was improvised and shaped in editing.

5. SF360: Over what time period were the ’9 @ Night’ films developed, shot and edited? I’ve gotten the impression that in some cases a great deal of time passed between shooting and final edit. True?

Nilsson: It took us about 14 years to complete our entire plan. ‘Chalk’ (his 1996 drama about pool hall hustlers) was first, it was a stand-alone project, sort of a proof-of-concept film. Then it took about 12 years to finish the ’9 @ Night’ series. During that time I also made ‘Winter Oranges,’ (in Japan), ‘Samt’ (Jordan), ‘Security’ (Berkeley), ‘Opening’ (Kansas City), ‘Frank Dead Souls’ (South Africa), ‘A Town Has Turned to Dust (utah)’ — or did i do that before the workshop started? — and just last year ‘Presque Isle’ with the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. I did that with students as apprentices in all positions, and in some cases as department heads.

6. SF360: Unless they’ve actually attended MVFF over the last several years, as far as I know people have had little to no opportunity to see the ’9 @ Night’ films. Now that the whole series is finished, are there plans for wider exposure?

Nilsson: Yes. Harvard is first. The Harvard Film Archive is going to show all nine features November 17-19. After that I’m going to organize a Bay Area opening, hopefully with an art theatre in each of the counties — a one-week orgy of 9 @ night. After that, we’ll take a breath and see what’s next.

7. SF360: Ideally, should the ’9 @ Night’ films be seen in sequence? At MVFF you’re now premiering the ‘2nd’ and ‘9th’ films — so if you intended a formal order, it clearly wasn’t going to be available to anyone until the very end of a long creative process.

Nilsson: Correct. But when films got finished they suggested other films. Some projected films got dropped and others took their place. But now we have nine which do go in a certain order, and Harvard is going to show them that way, three a night for three successive nights.

8. SF360: You seem constantly alert to new methods, new collaborators, new technologies. Do you ever look back on any of your earlier work and wonder where your head was at, professionally or emotionally?

Nilsson: In other words, what could I have been thinking? No. I’ve always been prolific. My poetry book has just come out. My book of film criticism will come out next year. My paintings will also be marketed more this coming year as I bring out the films. I’ve followed my skein because it was always there. The slipstream has offered me constant inspiration. That’s my path.

9. SF360: What were some major formative filmmaking influences on you? Where do you see inspirational hope among filmmakers now?

Nilsson: Cassavetes was my big inspiration, and I got to meet him and talk to him; almost made a film with him. Bergman was my other inspiration, but I never got to meet him. Tarkovsky. Satyajit Ray. More recently, Gaspar Noe, Tsai Ming Liang, Hou Hsiao Hsien.

American cinema has gone off track. Most of it was off track to begin with. I like Inniaritu, Cuaron, Del Toro. I liked Paul Haggis’ ‘Crash.’ Cassavetes and the verite artists pointed a way, a truly American way. I followed it. No one else did.

topics: bay area, filmmakers, mill valley film festival, q&a

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