Filmmaker. Spring 05.

Kicking off the online offerings from the new issue of Filmmaker, Peter Bowen asks Gregg Araki first what he's been up to in the six years since Splendor and second all about the making of Mysterious Skin: "I wanted it to be a gorgeous aesthetic experience, to feel like a Wong Kar-wai or a Terrence Malick movie in its visual splendor." Cam Archer talks with the film's stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet.

Introducing his interview, Matthew Ross reminds us of the commitment with which Todd Solondz has stuck to his aesthetic guns.

Scott Macaulay:

Expertly capturing the almost surreal quality of Enron's corporate culture and the near insane behavior of its leaders, director Alex Gibney's new film is a compelling human drama, a tale of hubris writ large. And if that were the end of it, I'd recommend Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room simply for its entertainment and historical value. But when the Bush administration is out there touting Social Security privatization, when deregulation and reliance on the free market are promoted as economic panaceas and when some of the biggest players in Enron's rigged games were held only minimally accountable, it's clear that the lessons conveyed by this engrossing and necessary picture are ones we still need to learn.

What follows is a discussion with Gibney and Bethany McLean, co-author of the book the film's based on. One of the reasons Enron is so powerful is that it has a single compelling story to tell and it sticks to it. Fahrenheit 9/11, on the other hand, successful as it was in riling the emotions in a way the Democrats could not, seems in hindsight like a scattershot blast against an administration so broadly offensive on so many different fronts. Now, in the wake of last November's election, many indie filmmakers are reconsidering their strategies, on both a personal and professional level, as Reed Martin, who's talked to several of them, discovers. In a sidebar, Fisher Stevens looks back on his own efforts to swing Ohio into blue territory and considers ways to apply the lessons of losing to winning in 2008.

Alan Jacobson's talk with filmmaker Rusty Nails about securing music rights has been noted earlier, but there it is.

Mary Glucksman returns with her terrific regular feature, a look at independent films currently in production. Five new ones this time.

Anyone hoping to break into games should check out Graham Leggat's piece.

Quick reports:

• Macaulay: "Japanese director Jun Ichikawa avoided all of the great-author-to-film pitfalls with his Tony Takitani, an adaptation of a story by the masterful Haruki Murakami."

• Sandy Dubowski: "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha, awarded the Golden Bear at the 2005 Berlinale, sings, dances, loves, fights, flirts and teases its way through this black-majority African dreamscape and sends it to operatic heights."

• Planning on shooting in a strange land? Aon can help, notes Ross.

• Hazim Bitar assesses the state of filmmaking in Jordan.

Posted by dwhudson at May 1, 2005 7:11 AM