photo by Karina Longworth

Last year at a New York Film Festival press conference following the premiere of Inland Empire, David Lynch announced that he would never again go back to shooting on film. Yesterday, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival press screening of his HD-shot feature, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, veteran filmmaker Sidney Lumet made an almost identical declaration, predicting that celluloid will be all but obsolete in five years. “I don’t think there’s one director who has ever liked film,” Lumet said. “It’s a pain in the ass, it’s cumbersome, and it’s rigid in its rules.”

Check out the audio clip below for Lumet’s elaboration on the rise of HD, why he thinks “naturalistic photography” is an oxy moron, and anecdotes on the how the drawbacks of celluloid stifled both Dog Day Afternoon and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (the female voice heard at the beginning and end of the clip is NYFF selection committee member/EW film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, who moderated yesterday’s conversation). We’ll have more coverage of Lumet’s excellent Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead later today.

 

 Sydney Lumet On Film vs. HD @ NYFF 2007: Play Now | Download

For the New York coterie of film critics, bloggers, and anyone else who can make a reasonable case for a press or industry pass, the first day of New York Film Festival press screenings every September is something akin to the first day of school. (That is, for people who really, really liked school.) But it’s also kind of like embarking on a four-week vacation right in the middle of the city. Screenings are held at Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side, a part of town that I personally rarely have occasion to visit, and once you’ve made your way through a maze of construction and up a hidden escalator to the Walter Reed Theater, it’s difficult to hold on to everyday concerns and not get completely wrapped up in the excitement of what is about to unfold.

NYFF press screenings are perhaps most appreciated for their leisurely schedule. Each day starts out with a fair amount of breakfasty schmoozing over the bagels, juice and coffee provided every morning by the press screening sponsor. There are generally just two screenings a day, five days a week, for four weeks. Most screenings are followed by a lengthy press conference; this year, the only American filmmaker whose work is in the fest who is conspicuously absent from the press conference schedule is Gus Van Sant. It’s the rare film festival that’s actually possible to cover in the nooks and crannies of a normal day job––although, having tried that last year, I have to say that I far prefer camping out at Lincoln Center for full days to sneaking in screenings here and there during lulls in the odd work day.

Because I’m still working on some Toronto odds and ends, I was only able put in a half day at yesterday’s NYFF 2007 opener, but I’ll be able to catch the afternoon film, Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It, when it re-screens later in the fest (if you can’t wait, Keith Uhlich has already reviewed it here). In the morning, I did catch Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. More on that after the jump.

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• Dreamworks and Paramount have decided to open Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd wide on Christmas weekend. The original plan was to open on a couple of screens December 21 and then go wide three weeks later, but the studios, apparently convinced that Johnny Depp’s demon barber could have the appeal of a singing, cannibalistic Captain Jack, think Burton’s Sondheim adaptation has holiday weekend written all over it.
• “Owen Wilson’s emergency hospitalization and recovery are throwing a major monkeywrench into production of two movies and causing marketing headaches for two more,” writes Variety’s Tatiana Siegel. It seems like a fair thing to  speculate, but the only studio rep who would go on the record dismisses the line of inquiry as “totally inappropriate at this time.”
• Another day, another set of amazing sidebars announced by the New York Film Festival. This time, it’s a series of “dialogues” with directors Julian Schnabel, Todd Haynes, Wes Anderson and Sidney Lumet.
• Women in Film, in partnership with GM, have launched an online magazine for/by/regarding females in the film industry. It’s called Traction, and you can find it at wiftraction.com

• As part of a campaign to promote their film’s upcoming DVD release, the producers of the Michael Moore attack doc Manufacturing Dissent have struck a deal to stream 40 minutes of the movie on AOL’s TrueStories documentary site. According to Variety, AOL’s Stephanie Sharis said they’ll monetize the event “by splicing adds into the video;” they’re hoping to get some free publicity from “plenty of blogs.”
• SuperBad held onto the top slot at the box office for the second weekend in a row, making it just the third film this summer to show such staying power. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Company’s losing streak continued with a sixth-place open for The Nanny Diaries.
• The New York Film Festival has announced three sidebars:  “Views from the Avant-Garde”, an annual program featuring films by Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs; “Tropical Analysis: The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade,” through which NYFF will screen 13 films by the Brazilian director; and “Chinese Modern: A Tribute to Cathay Studio,” featuring Hong Kong cinema of the 1950s.
• The Pasadena Playhouse will host the world premiere of a stage musical based on Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 film, Mask. Despite the fact that the score will be written by the songwriting team who brought us “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” it seems unlikely that Cher will reprise her role. The Playhouse will also host the premiere of Orson’s Shadow, a play based on a real-life encounter between Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.
• Owen Wilson was hospitalized over the weekend after an apparent suicide attempt. Variety cribs the story from National Enquirer, who have a few additional details.

You’ve probably already seen this on five or six blogs this morning, but when even the swamis of sarcasm over at Reverse Shot greet a trailer with (what seems like) unfettered enthusiasm, you know it’s kind of a big deal. In this first “official” bit of I’m Not There promotion, we get glimpses of each of the six actors playing Bob Dylan in Haynes’ episodic bio-epic (I think I’m most interested in seeing how Christian Bale handles it), as well as more evidence as to why Harvey Weinstein might have been moved to say, “If Cate Blanchett doesn’t get nominated, I’ll shoot myself.” The film is definitely playing the New York Film Festival; rumor has it There might pop up in Telluride as well.

indieWIRE has the full lineup for the 2007 New York Film Festival, which is about six weeks away. Pretty much everything I expected to see on this lineup made it, including the highly anticipated latest works by Noah Baumbach, Julian Schnabel, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. But there are also some surprises — who could have foreseen a doc about Don Rickles made by the guy who directed “Thriller”?

You can click here to read the whole thing, but here are what stand out to me as highlights:

Blade Runner: The Definitive Cut 

Ridley Scott promises this is the last time he or anyone else is going to tinker with his now-considered-classic 1982 slice of dystopia. NYFF will screen this new version in advance of its upcoming release on DVD, in honor of the film’s 25th year anniversary.

The Axe in the Attic

An ultra-selective festival with no separate program for documentaries, NYFF is usually fairly light on non-fiction films. Of the handful of docs on this year’s slate, I’m most interested in this collaboration from Lucia Small and Ed Pincus delves into “the hardships and sorrows of the Gulf Coast Diaspora two years after Hurricane Katrina.”

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat’s adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s An Old Mistress is the Romance director’s most expensive film to date, and by some reports, her most conventional. It’s also one of two films on the NYFF lineup to star divisive sexpot Asia Argento, after Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down a Dream

“Rarely, if ever, has the history and development of a major rock band been explored with the care and the depth with which Peter Bogdanovich approaches Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” promises the press release. I’m just interested to see what Bogdanovich has been doing since his last comeback, 2001’s The Cat’s Meow.

I rarely get excited about new trailers; I NEVER get excited about two trailers in the same week. But today, thanks to Variety’s Anne Thompson, I’ve had a glimpse at a second film on my list of Fall 07 Must-Sees, and I can tell you that it isn’t going anywhere.

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Margot at the Wedding (embedded via MovieFone above), written and directed by Noah Baumbach, stars Baumbach’s wife Jennifer Jason Leigh as a lady preparing to marry the schlub who got her pregnant. That description might call to mind a certain recent comic smash, but this looks like very different territory. Within the context of Baumbach’s filmography, Margot looks more like the dark family dramedy The Squid and the Whale than something like clever-but-fluffy Mr. Jealousy. Nicole Kidman–brunette, and just de-glammed enough to resemble a real person–plays Leigh’s judgmental sister. Jack Black is once again cast as in the “unlikely love interest” role, after his turn in Nancy Meyers’ embarrassing The Holiday, although I’m sure he’ll benefit from Baumbach’s ability to write characters that might actually, like, live in the world.

Interest in Margot seems to be fairly high. Shortly after the trailer appeared on Thompson’s blog, a flurry of other blogs picked it up. I even virtually eavesdropped on a Twitter conversation about the soundtrack. Hopefully we’ll get to see the thing at one of the late-Summer festivals, either Telluride or Toronto.

UPDATE: Margot will screen at the New York Film Festival.