The Moveable Fest

“We’d take these aerial shots and [shots of] ourselves flying and ourselves preparing the plane and made a little montage out of it. At night, there was a small projector, so we screened it on the tail of the airplane and whole villages would gather with the moon rising. It was insanely beautiful and it made us feel good because we connected to the people and kids were screaming of joy. But again, [even though we filmed this as well] I took it out of the film because it would've made us look like the good filmmakers and it would've put you as a spectator in a comfort zone, the kind of narrative every NGO and every religious group would do to make their own propaganda. I wanted to keep myself as the narrator, but as kind of a strange figure, so that you're really in the doubt.“ - Austrian-born, French-based filmmaker Hubert Sauper on the difficult decision to include himself in his documentary about South Sudan, “We Come as Friends”

“When Patricia [Clarkson] gave me the script seven years ago when we were doing "Elegy," I was going through a break up with the father of my child. And I didn't know how to drive, and I know for North American people, driving is a tiny thing, but being from Macedonia, you don't have to drive, so for me, it was a way to take the grips of my life again. I really felt connected with this character and I felt very moved by the script. I thought it addressed some things about racism with a light touch, so I thought, "Yeah, sure, let's go." - Isabel Coixet on her latest film “Learning to Drive,” opening today.

“Right now, everything that's exciting that going on has to do with women. That's just where it's at. I think guys are really at a complicated, confusing point because the necessity of men seems to be at an all-time low. Guys are trying to figure out what we have to contribute because mostly we don't need big strong muscles anymore. It's just not very necessary in modern life. [That’s why] I wanted Jake [Johnson]'s story to get smaller, and end up with this guy in a hole and Rosemarie [DeWitt]'s story to get more expansive, ending up with her looking at Saturn in the night sky” - Joe Swanberg on how he came up with the structure for his latest “Digging for Fire,” which tracks a married couple that takes divergent paths during the course of a weekend in Los Angeles.

Noted: Peter Bogdanovich at the Aero Theatre 8/9/15

During a recent retrospective at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, Peter Bogdanovich revealed that the inspiration for his latest film, the comedy “She’s Funny That Way,” about a philandering theater director (Owen Wilson) who unwittingly discovers his leading lady (Imogen Poots) when he hires an escort and urges her to go into another profession, actually came from a real-life experience he had while making the 1979 drama “Saint Jack”:

“We actually cast some real sex workers in the picture and two of them touched me. They were very sweet and both wanted to go home. So I gave both of them quite a bit of money if they would stop doing what they were doing and they did. One of them went back to Malaysia and the other went back to Thailand. So I thought it’d be funny to have a character who fools around, but he pays them a lot of money to stop being escorts and that’s how we started with that.”

When asked if he ever plans to go back to Singapore, Bogdanovich didn’t waste a moment to say “No.” Why?

“It was ideal for us to have a movie that mostly takes place outside because a lot of what we did with this film was work with the limitations that we had. You have less equipment, and when it’s all in one day, you have less clothing to deal with. Still, what we had to work with were the costumes and the life that Brooklyn has, so we looked for the best frame which had the most interesting stuff in it. I love the colors of our film so much - that's one thing that you can do with little resources is make a look that you really think works. It feels like summer and we fit [the story] into a structure that is simple in a way, but a lot can happen within it.“ - Sarah-Violet Bliss on making the most of a limited budget in the ferociously funny Brooklyn satire “Fort Tilden.”

“I know it’s so taboo to talk about female sexuality, and it’s especially taboo to talk about teenage girls wanting to have sex. Society would like to pretend that’s not true, but the truth of the matter is most teenage girls are having sex and all of them are thinking about it. Pretending that’s not true is just sheltering them for sheltering’s sake, which I think is just crazy.

But we’ve had great conversations coming out of this [film]. I think it makes some people uncomfortable, but it’s a really great conversation to have because movies have been made about young boys having sex forever. You can point to movies from “The Graduate” to “American Pie” and boys have been able to feel like they are not alone and they are not freaks for a long, long time, no matter what they do sexually, so I think girls deserve the same.” - Marielle Heller on her remarkable directorial debut, an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s coming-of-age tale “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.”

Noted: Taylor Kitsch at LACMA for CAN/WEST Conversation 7/30/15

Last night at LACMA, Toronto Film Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey sat down with fellow Canadian Taylor Kitsch to talk about his career. Kitsch shared tales from the sets of “John Carter” and “True Detective,” but spoke about how the role that led to all others - Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights” - almost didn’t happen.

I was in Vancouver and I got the script and the script wasn’t that good - Pete [Berg] will tell you that. But they wanted me to play Jason Street, and I didn’t want to play Jason Street. i wanted to play Riggins and we went back and said, “Hey, let us read for Riggins.” And [Berg] was like, “Yeah, let him read for Riggins.” So we went on tape and it was the “Texas Forever” thing. I went and found Texas beer. I went and had a sleeveless [shirt] on and I was this cocky, young twentysomething. Then the next day, they’re like “You’ve got to get to LA for the screen test,” and that was hell on earth, getting into the States. Then I got to the next level and flew down, and we improv-ed, which Pete is just so brilliant at and we were walking down the hallway, and I walk in there and there’s a board of who’s going to play who.