Category: media

“Despite the cultural and geographic distance, I have always felt very close to Alice Munro’s themes: the family and family relationships in a rural, provincial, or urban setting. And also the desire, the need to escape from all that; always one thing and the opposite, without that meaning the slightest contradiction.”

It’s not like now is a great time for women directors and DPs, but the 1970s were way worse. “These were guys who very solidly did not believe a woman could do this. I wasn’t getting political, but just by doing the job that only they thought they could do, it was a very political statement.”

“It became an unofficial war memorial; a meeting-place for people who had one thing in common – loss. People didn’t really talk about it when they came back. They didn’t want the degradation to infect their families.”

It’s not exactly a new idea – think digital Tupac – but the tech keeps on getting better and better. And weirder: “There’s a whole new phenomenon where famous actors are getting themselves scanned in order to provide for their family and their family’s trust in perpetuity, so that they can be recreated in films in the future.”

Actress Naomie Harris only had three days, thanks to visa issues (she’s British) to shoot her role as the main character’s crack-addicted mother, and she was nervous about it until she talked with director Barry Jenkins: “Here, for the first time, is someone who has a vested interest in ensuring that she doesn’t become stereotyped, and that she is given her full humanity.”

What Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown says about a camera that requires a combination of athleticism and artistry from the person deploying it: “It’s like the neck of a swan or something like that, if you wanted to pursue that analogy. … It has reach, and that reach is part of the ballet of dancing around with it.”

The fact is, in the war between author and screenwriter, the screenwriter virtually always wins. “Living authors are a problem. It’s much better to have an author safely departed because they do cause trouble. What you have to remember is that you owe everything to the movie, and nothing to the original.”

Facebook’s aim is to seed content for the new video tab in its mobile app, to make it more of a destination for users to spend time watching video content. The effort is similar to its program under which it has paid celebrities and media companies, including BuzzFeed, CNN and the New York Times, to produce video for Facebook Live.

“Both [films] were being campaigned for Original Screenplay and determined to be originals by the Writers Guild in their WGA Awards … Instead, the Academy’s writers branch ruled them eligible only in the Adapted Screenplay Oscar race.”

“Per Rule 15 II E of the Academy’s rules and eligibility guidelines, a score ‘shall not be eligible if it has been diluted by the use of pre-existing music, or it has been diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs or any music not composed specifically for the film by the submitting composer.'”