Filmmaker. Spring 06.

"You know, all of these films are just one film, they're just different chapters, so basically it's all stuff that occurs to me. That's all it is." Robert Altman, to Filmmaker's Matthew Ross. A second favorite: "I revel in the opportunity of confusion. I allow that to develop, to happen, to grow. We all come together and use it. We're aware of what we are doing and we each do our part. If someone's not aware of what we're doing, they have to learn." You've got to love the man.

Also in the Spring issue of Filmmaker: It's Matthew Ross again, talking to another legend, Robert Towne. Here's the author of Chinatown on Los Angeles: "I suppose that it's a place that continues to have a habit of erasing itself from decade to decade, and yet it's still classically that dream factory where, since 1848, people have come here to strike it rich with gold, with oil, with real estate, with becoming a movie star, creating a religious cult, leaving old identities and old problems behind and hoping that you can reinvent yourself."

David Slade's first feature is Hard Candy, and Scott Macaulay finds him to be "an intense, hyper-articulate Brit" who happens to have found inspiration in the period when Altman and Towne were first beginning to truly flourish: "I'd been offered a lot of scripts, but this was the first thing that took me back to the roots of why I wanted to become a filmmaker, which was seeing Nicolas Roeg's Performance. Performance hit me like a brick... [Hard Candy] is a script Roeg would have done, a harrowing relationship story with many, many subtexts, with questions that can't be answered unless you answer them yourself and don't tell anybody. I think that in this climate, right now, a film that can make the audience ask themselves a question is important."

Peter Bowen meets not one but two fresh faces, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who wrote and directed Quinceañera, winner of both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. This being Filmmaker, there's an emphasis in all these conversations on how of actually getting these films made (note, too, the sidebars throughout) - but especially here because, as Bowen explains, the odds weren't exactly in these makers' favor.

Bowen, by the way, also turns in report from last month's Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival and from the Berlinale.

Anthony Kaufman talks with David Ziegler not only about his documentary Sir! No Sir! but also about the wealth of material at the film's site: "I was aware that the main charge leveled against the film would be, 'Oh, this is just a handful of cowards and malcontents,' and we really wanted to make clear that this was a massive counterculture that permeated the military."

Also, a report on a most "unusual scenario": the producers of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin haven't just pulled out of a deal with Tartan Films USA and TLA Releasing, they're suing the distributors and working with Strand Releasing to get out an "authorized" version of the DVD.

Mary Glucksman is here again with five first peeks at indies in production from Alfredo De Villa, Ernst Gossner, Alan Cumming, Adam Bhala Lough and Sal Stabile.

Sharon Swart reports on an odd cooperation that seems to be taking hold: Hollywood talent agencies and indie producers. Not for everyone, obviously, but for some projects, it works.

DW Leitner has a hefty introduction to low-cost HD and info on where to find out even more.

New Orleans has "a close-knit local film community largely dispersed by the storm but gradually resettling." Paul VanDeCarr meets some of them.

Mike Plante has a great, great Sundance story.

And André Salas remembers Walerian Borowczyk: "Misunderstood and wickedly subversive, he inhabited a unique place among the likes of Buñuel and Fassbinder, often dividing critics on the merits of his work."

Posted by dwhudson at April 25, 2006 2:56 PM