Here’s a podcast with Amy Ryan, Oscar nominated for Gone Baby Gone and Jack Goes Boating, which she was promoting in this particular case. The film is the directorial debut of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who you can see in the photo to your left, accompanied by his dreadlocks. There were seven of us in the […]

Last year, when I wrote about Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up, I suggested that it was some sort of miracle that a movie directed with such condescension and pandering was still engaging and entertaining. When one of the most dominant elements of production is off-putting, it’s unlikely that a viewer will be […]

One of the smartest things that Charlie Kaufman did with his script for Being John Malkovich was to push back the reveal of the central concept for almost an entire act. An interfering producer might have insisted that the movie start on page 30. But, luckily, Kaufman was also a credited executive producer on the […]

When an actor with aspirations to become a director is on the set of a movie he regrets signing up for, does he use it as an excuse to learn what not to do? If it’s a film he does believe in, does he take mental notes on what he should be doing? Or is […]

Andy Kaufman was* hilarious. But only in retrospect. If you went to a comedy club and had to sit through one of his on-stage readings of The Great Gatsby, it’s a very reasonable response to heckle him and eventually leave. Such meta-commentary on the notion of entertainment and the expectation of a comedian performing for […]

Recently I interviewed Noah Buschel, the director of The Missing Person,  on the various ways the independent film world works and how it has changed over the past ten years. Noah would know better than most about this subject, because he made three films in three different eras of independent films, always having to change […]