Kieran and Michele Mulroney are no stranger to massive blockbusters -- they contributed production rewrites to Mr. and Mrs. Smith and wrote the draft that rocketed George Miller's DC superheroes collection Justice League to just short of a shooting date -- so it may come as some surprise to find that the key to their big-studio success was their Sundance Labs background. Five years ago, their script Paper Man won them entree into both the Labs and Hollywood's top rewrite lists, and this past month, the Mulroneys finally saw their finished Paper Man premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. We talked to them about how exactly the Park City experience can lead to putting words in Superman's mouth.
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As the director of the seminal high school film Heathers, Michael Lehmann knows a thing or two about navigating a world filled with peer pressure and backstabbing -- just the attributes that make him the perfect creative adviser to talk Hollywood at the Sundance Labs. That isolated, idyllic workshop experience in the wilds of Utah might seem like an entirely alien world to the Hollywood veteran, but he tells Movieline that it's one that provides some of his biggest artistic highs (as well as, on occasion, some emotional lows for the vulnerable, fledgling filmmakers gathered there).
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As Maeby on Arrested Development, Alia Shawkat had what's typically a luxury for an actor: the relative security of a stable television gig ("relative," since Fox infamously jerked the acclaimed comedy around on its schedule and made renewal a constant battle). Since the series ended, she's booked parts in Drew Barrymore's Whip It! and the Dakota Fanning/Kristen Stewart-toplined The Runaways, but as she tells Movieline, the industry's bottom line focus on box office was starting to wear her out. What changed things? The Sundance Labs process, where she got to workshop Elgin James's Goodnight Moon (in which she'll eventually be starring alongside Juno Temple).
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If you've got any notion of a "typical" Sundance filmmaker, Elgin James ain't it. Raised on a farm by Quakers, he eventually found himself drawn into gang violence, and after a fight that left him brain-damaged and homeless he founded the street gang FSU, which robbed drug dealers to finance straight-edge propaganda. Eventually, the film-crazy James ended up in Hollywood, and he's just finished a series of programs at the Sundance Labs where he workshopped the feature he's about to shoot, Goodnight Moon (starring Alia Shawkat and Juno Temple). Movieline talked to the filmmaker about becoming a Sundance fellow and what it taught him about flashy camera moves and, in his words, "being able to fucking do it."
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Reservoir Dogs. Boys Don't Cry. Requiem for a Dream. Those are just a few of the striking films that had their start in the Sundance Labs Feature Film Program, which nurtures a handful of fledgling filmmakers every year in a workshop environment shepherded by some of the best minds in the business. Still, for as much attention as is lavished on the January film festival, the summertime Labs operate in relative seclusion.
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Anthony Mackie didn't need much convincing to take the role of Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, the by-the-book foil to Jeremy Renner's world-weary U.S. Army bomb defuser in the excellent new Iraq thriller The Hurt Locker. The only potential sticking point was Iraq itself -- the thematic albatross that has crippled more films and filmmakers than perhaps any other subject of the last decade. The veteran actor talked to Movieline recently about what makes a war film work, why so many anti-war films fail and the next great story he's got his eye on.
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Now that the Academy has announced that it will be expanding the Best Picture race to ten nominees, everyone in town has an opinion about whether the move was a brilliant reinvention or a go-for-broke bailout. Movieline went straight to the top -- Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis -- to get the lowdown on the Oscars' bombshell announcement.
Sid, how did you manage to keep this huge announcement secret?
[Laughing] It was my biggest accomplishment on this! You know, I talked to the board and we all agreed that it was a major announcement and we had to keep quiet. But still, I'm not sure how it happened. It might happen again in my life, but I'm not counting on it.
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It's long been taken for granted that Kathryn Bigelow is Hollywood's best female action director -- and that's a reputation she firmed up before tomorrow's release of The Hurt Locker, her best film so far. The Iraq War bomb squad thriller is a shot of adrenaline for not just the audience, but Bigelow's career, which includes classics like Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days. The whip-smart director recently sat down with Movieline to talk all things Hurt Locker, though the conversation soon veered to Point Break parodies, wooing the King of Jordan, and a certain vampire franchise she'd been heavily touted for.
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In the upcoming comedy Paper Heart, not only do stars Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera play themselves, but director Nicholas Jasenovec casts an actor to play his own stand-in, who directs Yi on a voyage of romantic self-discovery. It's a very meta juggling act, but one that's a perfect fit for Yi, the alternative comedienne who stole scenes in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up.
As the film plays at LAFF this week, I sat down with Jasenovec (pictured here, at bottom-left, with his cast) to get the lowdown on his chemistry with Yi, the behind-the-scenes incidents that changed the film, and the double-edged sword that came from the film's hyped reception this year at Sundance. And no, I didn't send an actor to play myself in the interview.
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When I met up with Kerry Washington in a hotel room at the Beverly Hilton, she was poured into a slinky dress, wearing perilously high heels, and busy cleaning up some dirty dishes as though the Hilton didn't have plenty of cleaning ladies who'd be around soon to do just that. In her onscreen roles, Washington shows just as much surprising commitment, and as Marybeth in Buddy Giovinazzo's Life is Hot in Cracktown, she goes the furthest she's had to yet: playing a drug-addicted, male-to-female transsexual. It's a role as unlikely as Washington's dish-cleaning glamour girl, and as she told Movieline, it's one she had to fight for.
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After a break from the genre that earned him an Oscar in 2006, An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim has brought his new documentary It Might Get Loud to the Los Angeles Film Festival. (Loud opens Aug. 14 in New York and L.A.) The film sketches portraits of three generations of rock heroes -- Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White -- while composing a bigger picture of the art, sound and influence of the electric guitar in each of their lives. Calling Movieline from the set of his current production, Guggenheim took a break to discuss the rock film he didn't want to make, Jack White's two-hour songwriting clinic, and how a classic concert movie provided his breakthrough for An Inconvenient Truth.
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Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are having a moment, and they know it.
As the screenwriters behind the year's two biggest films, Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (cowritten with Ehren Kruger), the writing partners have solidified their position as Hollywood's top screenwriting duo. It's a long way from Hercules and Xena, where the two began, and they'd be the first to admit their journey wasn't the one they planned on. Now, as all they touch turns to gold (and even the projects they've recently produced -- including Eagle Eye, The Proposal, and Fringe -- have become unqualified hits) they sat down with Movieline to discuss their unlikely path, Megan Fox's big mouth, and just whose idea it was to give one of the Transformers a gold tooth.
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It has got to be a great Monday for Anne Fletcher. Her third feature, The Proposal, shattered projections this weekend, taking in over $34 million at the box office. That's the biggest opening of its star Sandra Bullock's career -- by a long shot -- and ranks among the biggest ever for a female director.
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An unlikely mashup of two of today's biggest headlines (the Iranian election protests and Chastity Bono's sex reassignment), the timely new documentary Be Like Others addresses a loophole that's begun booming thanks to Iran's inhospitable treatment of gay men: the sex change industry. Faced with a society that outlaws homosexuality and promises often-fatal punishment, gay Iranians like Anoosh (pictured above right, with boyfriend Ali) are turning to Tehran doctor Bahram Mir-Jalali and his transsexual counselor Vida in order to become women, a process sanctioned and practically encouraged by Iranian law. We talked to director Tanaz Eshaghian about her eye-opening film, set to premiere on HBO2 June 24.
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Josh Harris saw all of this coming. The ubiquity of the Internet, the reality-TV craze, social networking, the surging access to (and increasingly desperate chase for) fame -- all of it. In 1999, Harris was at the bleeding edge of the vanguard chronicled in We Live in Public, filmmaker Ondi Timoner's Sundance-winning documentary charting Harris's time spent as an early Web mogul run aground on the shoals of self-obsession. On one hand, Timoner was lucky: That self-obsession yielded thousands of hours' worth of videotapes for her project. But it came at a cost.
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