John Krasinski is best known for his role as Jim on NBC’s The Office, but he originally got into acting because he’d attended a table reading of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and he decided he wanted to stick with it when he realized how smart acting could be. He began pursuing the film rights to Brief Interviews, and at a suggestion from co-star Rainn Wilson he decided to direct it himself.
Cut to Sundance 2009, where his adaptation of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was in competition. Spout attended a small press conference with Krasinski at Sundance where he spoke about adapting Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories, his first time directing, and why he’s not ready to leave The Office.
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Rob Siegel, former editor in chief at The Onion, hit both the highest highs and the lowest lows since transitioning to Hollywood screenwriting. First he saw his The Onion Movie get shelved for year and barely appear on DVD; then last year’s The Wrestler appealed to audiences and critics alike as an unexpected comeback vehicle for Mickey Rourke. This year, he’s directed his first feature called Big Fan, with Patton Oswalt, and rather than the comedy you’d probably expect from Siegel and Oswalt, it’s a dark look at sports fandom and people who aren’t content to settle for “normal” lives. Read on for the full interview where Siegel talks about The Wrestler, directing his first feature, and why writing is much harder than directing.
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Michael Jai White is best known to the world of movie-going geeks as the title hero in 1997’s Spawn, and as the gangster overlord Gambol in The Dark Knight. However, after this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it’s going to be hard for him to dodge calls of “Black Dynamite!” in public. This homage to classic 1970s blaxploitation films surpasses movies like I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, and is definitely worth seeing.
White and director Scott Sanders sat down to discuss the Obama presidency, how James Brown inspired the movie, the future of action films, and what the future plans are for a Spawn sequel.
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Tom DiCillo has been a Sundance mainstay for years, having had over five films in the festival since 1992. Some of the standouts include 1995’s Living in Oblivion (a must-see for any aspiring filmmaker) to 2007’s Delirious, both of which star Steve Buscemi. This year he’s back with a documentary about The Doors, When You’re Strange. It’s a feature-length movie comprised entirely of never-before-seen archival film footage, consisting of rehearsals, concerts, vintage television appearances, and it also includes most of Highway, a student film Morrison made and stars in. While the documentary doesn’t offer us anything new about the band, it’s a unique look at one of the most famous American bands to emerge from the 1960s.
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