On Friday evening, I moderated a panel at the Denver Film Festival called DIY FIlmmaking in an Indie Apocalypse. I pitched the panel to the festival in the hopes that by talking to actual filmmakers who have recently made moderately successful films (mostly) independent of the system that the “sky is falling” fatalism insists is broken, we could start to expand this dialogue beyond doomcasting and push towards options and solutions. I’m not sure we repaired the ever-expanding crack in the firmament in one night, but certainly the six filmmakers who took the stage offered a new perspective on the supposed crisis.
You can listen to a recording of the full panel here, but if you don’t have 73 minutes to spare, after the jump I’ve isolated what I think were five major themes of the evening. Here’s more info on the filmmakers and their films:
I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.
Natural Causes is a personal movie about that couple who everyone knows shouldn’t be together. Everyone except the couple, that is. Michael Lerman, Alex Cannon and Paul Cannon did what, I think, young filmmakers should do more of–have your idea, get some actors and shoot it before you have time to think about it. That way you learn something fast.
We talk about the creative fertility in breaking up and the invention of the “Awesome Cam.”
SXSW 2008: Lerman, Cannon, Cannon interview [6:48m]: Play Now | Download
In the interest of full disclosure: I play a very small role in the subject of today’s SXSW preview, Natural Causes. As such, I’m going to have to pass the SXSW reviewing duties along to another member of the Spout team––and in fact, as of this writing, I haven’t even seen the film, even though parts of it were made in my apartment––but we passed along our standard 4 Questions to co-directors Alex Cannon, Paul Cannon and Michael Lerman nonetheless. Check out the Emerging Visions selection’s trailer above, and answers from the boys below.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
25 words or less? Natural Causes is like the greatest hits of a relationship.
That said, we wrote it in 1 month and shot it in 11 days, some of them 23 hours long. This was our attempt to make an extraordinarily personal film about the nature of a young relationship. The three of us have gone through similar experiences and we know so many people who have as well. Natural Causes is our way of taking a look back at that and examining what it’s like to be with someone at this age and all the shit that goes along with it. We’re not blind to the fact that there are movies that resonate with us in an emotionally similar way, like David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girlsor Atom Egoyan’s Calendar.
The best part of the whole experience might be the collaboration. Who better to make a movie with than two of your best friends? Combine that with a really great crew and you have the most fun the three of us have had, pretty much ever. Michael Tully is a jack-of-all-trades, Asif Siddiky is a genius and the whole cast is incomparable. We worked with some of the most dedicated and inexhaustible people around and the fact that nobody ended up screaming or in prison is a miracle, although we managed to get some stitches along the way. Literally.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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On Friday evening, I moderated a panel at the Denver Film Festival called 
I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
