Elevating

Didn’t get a chance to see yet: Insecure, Halt & Catch Fire, Rectify, High Maintenance, Horace and Pete, Westworld, The Americans

Ingmar Bergman

Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson’s stirring and thought-provoking stop motion film Anomalisa was one of the highlights of 2016. A beautifully crafted concept and although glum and melancholic at its core, lifted by an unmistakable wry sense of humour and an earnest exploration of human nature.

Nerdwriter “breaks down just how prevalent such adequate movies have become and how we audiences are beginning to happily settle for such cliche-laden filmmaking.“ (via Playlist)

Films didn’t get to see yet: I, Daniel Blake, Tony Erdmann, Elle, Loving, 20th Century Women, Manchester By The Sea, Jackie, La La Land

“Part of it was not shackling ourselves to genre. The science fiction genre has all types of good tropes that work that are tried and true, and that didn’t make sense for this story. In our process as filmmakers, we have to try and be really honest in how we tell a story, which, in this case, is to highlight the capacity and the beauty of human emotion.”

“The director of Fish Tank and Red Road shares the secrets to low-budget authenticity.... Andrea Arnold's characters are—like Arnold herself—restless spirits. Trapped in lives that are too small for them, they push boundaries to break open their worlds. From the volatile Mia in Fish Tank, Arnold's most celebrated film to date, to Wasp's Zoe, a single mother of four who wants to live her own life, Arnold has compassion for women with a devil-may-care attitude and the desire to live an untethered life.” 

Original casting call flyer for Larry Clark’s Kids.

Pablo Larrain’s The Club: a surreal, funny, tragic and bizarre story about faith, morality and loneliness. But also oddly about love.

Jill Soloway Masterclass on The Female Gaze at TIFF 2016.

A poignant essay written by Cassavetes in 1959, that’s still relevant today...

How Bafta-winning director Rachel Tunnard went from short films starring her own thumbs to making the year’s most relatable twentysomething comedy.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s alluring, sumptuous and thought-provoking film Mustang is a remarkably self-assured debut. Encapsulating the confusing and wreckless feelings of growing up at a poignant time in their lives, we watch these sisters face their future in this a powerful and devastating coming of age story.

As pointed out in this video essay, “The Social Network – Designing Dialogue,” Aaron Sorkin does with the character of Zuckerberg what every good script should do: give us character through action and then let the dialogue expand on those actions. The essay is essentially a crash course in Screenwriting 101, giving examples of great screenplays that handle exposition and dialogue well, some that are too expository, and even some that tell you what you should not do when it comes to explaining character backstory to the audience.

“My #1 piece of advice would be to just sit down and write something. Anything. Even if it sucks.”

Charlie Kaufman

In this second On Story installation featuring Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonathan Demme, the duo look back on the vision, style, influences, and creative passion for Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense, Rachel Getting Married and Something Wild.