Very short two-day trip to Rome for the red carpet and the premiere.

While there were eight of the twelve directors in attendance, suffice it to say that the team that made TAR happen was a lot larger. The DPs, production designers, costumers, G&E team, line producers, sound, location managers and our amazing ADs and their teams, were all incredible. And the magicians who worked on the film in post, pulling 12 different shorts together – the editors, sound designers, composers. So much talent and dedication. My intense gratitude to each of them.

In terms of nerves, all of mine were reserved for the screening itself.

The Hollywood Reporter review can be read here.

^{Photo Credit/Source: Ernesto Ruscio, Venturelli/Getty Images Europe}

A big part of life as a writer/director is handling rejection. Rejections from festivals, prizes, grants, producers, actors… I mean, anyone who can reject you will do so. Perhaps several times. And even someone who appears successful externally is getting crushed with some form of rejection.

Some rejections you can brush off and move on. Others linger. The depth of the wound and the recovery time is directly proportional to the sum of how much you deluded yourself and how much you wanted it.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. So when Peter Bradshaw linked to this article by Rose Tremain, I read it immediately. If you are a filmmaker, you should read the whole article.

The most significant hurdle of all is finding the resources to defeat the almost inevitable 48-hour blues that follow the non-win, and the energy to return to the work in hand, unaffected by what’s just happened to a different book. Every writer I know feels more or less contented or discontented with day-to-day life according to how his or her writing is going. Many, many things will affect this, but I know that the non-win of a prize can seem to infect the ongoing work with a badness-virus and lay the author low. What’s on the page or screen – in which there had been stubborn belief, perhaps even garlanded a bit with excitement – can suddenly appear less than first-rate. Sentences crease and bend. Dialogue sounds wan. Even the ideas which inform the book can buckle at the knees.

The art of surviving this is simply the art of keeping on. Time and hard work will heal the poor ravaged thing. In the work lies the future. In the future may lie other shortlists and other wins or non-wins. And so the whole darn desperate process begins again …

By the time I reached the end, I was tearing up with empathy ((My rejections, to be clear, are on a much smaller, less relevant scale.)). But, taking her advice, I shall get back to work instead.

Congratulations to the OK Breathe Auralee team for the film being a finalist at the NBC/Universal Short Cuts Film Festival.

And a huge congratulations to Kendra Mylnechuk for winning the Best Actress prize. Her award comes with a year long holding deal with NBC. Here’s hoping for good things for a very talented actress.

In the fall of 2011, I was involved with a very unique, collaborative feature film. Twelve directors, twelve different poems from a collection, twelve short films, all coming together to make a feature, TAR.

The writer/directors from NYU Grad Film, guided by James Franco, adapted the poems from a wonderful collection called Tar, by C. K. Williams. I chose to combine two poems, “The Color of Time” and “Waking Jed“, to make my short film.

In “The Color of Time“, as C.K. Williams observes his son Jed, in the special moments just before waking, he remembers a phase of his childhood dominated by the sounds of the dark, a strange woman across the courtyard and his stern father.

In November 2011, we were in Detroit, shooting. As I said when I posted a few pictures of the city, it was an intense, stressful, magical and unforgettable experience. I had the pleasure of directing James (as C. K. Williams) and Jessica Chastain (CK’s mother). For the role of young CK, I was lucky to find and work with the wonderful and talented Zachary Unger.

And this November, TAR, starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jessica Chastain, Henry Hopper, Zach Braff and Bruce Campbell will premiere in competition in the Cinema XXI programme at the Rome Film Festival.

TAR SYNOPSIS
TAR is based on Pulitzer prize-winning poet C.K. Williams’ collection of the same name. Written and directed by 12 filmmakers, the film blends together adaptations of numerous poems, creating a poetic road trip through C.K. William’s life. Waltzing through time over several decades, C.K. Williams goes through a certain sense of rejuvenation as well as feelings of loss, as he experiences a series of significant past and present encounters. His constant wonder at and desire to grasp his memories makes him struggle to be fully present with his wife, but he then realizes through his journey, that he is inexplicably bound to both.

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
“Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.”

Our project began as a collaborative experiment rooted in the idea that the language and ambitions of poetry provide a fertile source from which to create a unique cinematic experience.

Our source was Tar, C.K. Williams’s 1983 poetry collection that is a narrative of a remembered life – personal stories of brief as well as long-lasting encounters with people, places and situations. It is an extraordinary poetic achievement.

TAR, the film, consists of contributions from 12 individual directors developed in a Graduate Film class at Tisch lead by James Franco, and comes from a shared belief that a truly collaborative experiment could yield something more powerful than we each could have achieved by ourselves.

Central to the collaborative nature of the film were the actor’s improvisations, allowing little accidents to happen, letting the actors’ inventions shape the moments, and in this way helping us explore and celebrate the wonders of one man’s recollections, seen through a glass cinematically.

It is our hope, that TAR will meet an audience open to watching and experiencing this kind of improvisational and experiential cinematic jam- session.

For more details on The Color of Time, view the film page.

In film, the proportion of gruel to the proportion of fun is so unbelievably outsized… it’s crazy!

Yes. But if it’s in you, in your bones, has infected you, you have no choice. No choice at all.

And yes, I love Ira Glass.

via Filmmaker Magazine

REPRISE was mentioned in The Huffington Post

Three films remain fresh in my memory: Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s Embrace about the 2008 terrorist massacre in Mumbai; Strangers with young director Kabir Chopra and young actor Zoran Saher; and Reprise, a “relationship” film featuring two women and a college-bound daughter.

And he spoke to Angela, who plays the role of Sarah:

Angela Perri, an actor in the short Reprise which dealt with an abusive relationship, told me at the after-party:

I was intrigued at first by the character, an abusive alcoholic in a same sex marriage, and then further by Shripriya Mahesh’s (the writer/director) treatment of the relationship between the two women. Even though on the surface it might seem the details would create an unfamiliar situation for me, the story — one of connection, relationship and behavior — rung a deep familiar chord.

Reprise is a finalist for the Iris Prize.

The Iris Prize – Cardiff’s International Gay and Lesbian Short Film Prize is the only LGBT short film prize in the world which allows the winner to make a new film.

The film will screen on Friday, October 12th at 4PM.

REPRISE, my second-year film, was an Official Selection at two Academy Qualifying festivals – the Palm Springs International Shortfest and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

It also won the Best Student Short at the deadCenter Film Festival and was an Official Selection at the oldest LGBT festival in the world, the 36th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, which is known as Frameline.

It was also at a clutch of other festivals and I am honored by the reception. I’ve been remiss in not updating the blog, and promise to be better in future.

My first film at NYU, IN THAT MOMENT, has been selected to be showcased on the NYU Grad Film website. You can watch the entire movie on the site.

If you are thinking of applying to Grad Film, the Showcase site lists some examples of all the films we make while we are at school. The MOS, Observational Documentary, and Adaptation from the First Year, the one key Second Year film, and then the Thesis film.

The really cool thing about the Grad Film program is that it keeps evolving – till recently, the third year was mainly devoted to writing, planning for life after grad school and doing your own projects, but due to curriculum opportunities in my year, we made a lot of films in the third year too. Everyone made at least one film and some people made as many as three. I’m sure some of these films will start showing up in the Showcase in the future.