“Look at this city!” Lone Scherfig is staring out at the San Francisco skyline from a conference room at the Ritz Carlton, perched high atop Nob Hill. Despite being a celebrated international director with a penchant for filming in the world’s loveliest locations, the 52-year old Danish director is in San Francisco for the first time (the closest she’d come previously was an appearance at the Mill Valley Film Festival). “You have so much good architecture here,” she exclaimed, eyes scanning the cityscape before us.
Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in THE HELP
Emma Stone has a lot on her mind this summer. After a star-making and critically acclaimed turn in Easy A transformed the now 22-year-old into one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actresses, Stone filmed three consecutive high-profile projects: Friends With Benefits (for her Easy A director Will Gluck), Crazy, Stupid, Love., and The Help. And now, as these things sometime happen, all three films have been released within just one month of each other, with Stone doing press for the latter two. Add in her Comic-Con duties promoting her role as Gwen Stacy opposite Andrew Garfield in next summer’s highly anticipated The Amazing Spider-Man, and you’ve got one hell of a busy summer.
But right now Emma Stone only has one thing on her mind: cookies. Specifically, the giant chocolate chip cookies available at the Four Seasons.
When Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij were students at Georgetown, they co-directed a film and entered it in the campus film festival. The film won a prize, and they were invited onstage for a Q&A. From the stage, they noticed a “little waify blonde girl” jump up in the front row and start what became a full-audience standing ovation. “Who was that?” Batmanglij said to Cahill later. “There was something about her. Did you see her?” The young woman in question was Brit Marling, a fellow Georgetown student who was studying economics. She soon approached the student filmmakers and expressed her desire to collaborate with them. The trio began working on a series of shorts, and eventually moved to Los Angeles to live together while banging out scripts and hoping for the opportunity to show others their work.
Fast forward to January 2011: Cahill and Batmanglij have each directed a film, both co-written with and starring Marling, and both have been accepted to the Sundance Film Festival. Cahill’s film, Another Earth, premiered to a standing ovation, and went on to win the 2011 Alfred P. Sloan Prize for feature films focusing on science or technology. Another Earth and Batmanglij’s film, The Sound of My Voice, would both be picked up by Fox Searchlight. And now Cahill and Marling are touring the country speaking at their own Q&A’s to promote Another Earth, which opens on July 29. Spinning Platters recently jumped into this whirlwind of standing ovations and film festival prizes to speak individually with Marling and Cahill about the marvelous insanity of the last seven months.
The 54th annual San Francisco International Film Festival kicks off this Thursday, April 21, bringing with it two weeks of jam-packed film programming until its conclusion on May 5. Special guests and honorees this year include Oliver Stone, Matthew Barney, Zoe Saldana, Clifton Collins Jr., and Christine Vachon. The festival will also feature a live performance of the film scores of Claire Denis by Tindersticks.
For full information, check out the official festival website. But first, look after the jump for our top 15 movies to see this year at the SFIFF.
Joe Wright and Saiorse Ronan at the WonderCon panel for "Hanna" in San Francisco last weekend. Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.
“Does anyone have a terrible allergy to cigarette smoke?” Joe Wright, the director of Hanna, is hoping the answer is no. It’s a Friday afternoon, and he’s looking a bit rough. Perhaps it’s a combination of jetlag and the looming specter of WonderCon 2011, which will be kicking off in a few hours. While Wright is no stranger to publicity tours, this is the first time he’s working the geek festival circuit. His previous three feature-length directorial efforts — Pride and Prejudice (the 2005 version starring Keira Knightley in an Oscar-nominated lead performance), Atonement (the breakthrough film of Hanna star Saiorse Ronan, whose performance garnered her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the age of 13), and The Soloist, a contemporary drama starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx — did not take him down this particular promotional path.
Rainn Wilson and James Gunn at WonderCon in San Francisco last weekend. Photo by Kendall Whitehouse.
Rainn Wilson and writer/director James Gunn were in San Francisco this past weekend to promote their bold and demented new film, Super (read our Spinning Platters review here), at WonderCon. It was my first time entering the WC fray, and I found myself wishing I’d brought a bag of bread crumbs while navigating the labyrinthine expanse of Moscone South. But eventually I found the designated press room, where I waited patiently with a table of my fellow online press while Wilson and Gunn worked their way down a seemingly endless line of video interviews. One queasy highlight of this was watching Gunn being forced to awkwardly refer to “Jenna Fischer, my ex-wife” each time he was asked how Wilson came to be involved with the project.
But eventually the video interviews concluded, at which point they were escorted directly to our waiting table. “Here are the nerds!” Wilson cried out in relief upon approaching us. As they got seated (and Wilson bellowed “Hello machines!” into our assorted collection of recording devices), we kicked off a lively conversation on topics like how to make a homicidal maniac sympathetic, pioneering the concept of superhero female-to-male rape, and Wilson’s efforts to keep his character as far from Dwight as possible.
As an actor, Tom McCarthy is that guy you know you’ve seen somewhere. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but he was definitely a cop/lawyer/scientist/reporter in something. And in his 20 years as a screen actor, McCarthy has indeed worked with an impressive roster of directors, including George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck), Peter Jackson (The Lovely Bones), and Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers). He also had key arcs on acclaimed TV series Boston Public and, perhaps most notably, the final season of The Wire. But it is McCarthy’s work as a writer and director which has earned him the greatest praise.
After breaking out with the 2003 Sundance favorite The Station Agent, in which Michelle Williams took one of her first major steps toward becoming the indie queen she is today, McCarthy directed the celebrated drama The Visitor, which scored an Oscar nomination for lead actor Richard Jenkins. And now, after receiving his own Oscar nomination for co-writing Up, McCarthy is back with the highly anticipated Win Win, the crowd-pleasing tale of a down-on-his-luck high school wrestling coach (Paul Giamatti) who unwittingly discovers a talented young wrestler (newcomer Alex Shaffer) while engaged in some shady business dealings. McCarthy recently sat down with Spinning Platters to discuss the plight of wrestling in New Jersey, how he nearly turned down The Wire, and the creative liberation of costarring in 2012.
Edward Norton does not seem like much of a movie star in person. When he first walked into a small Ritz Carlton conference room to discuss his new movie, Stone, with a handful of sweaty, panting, near-hysterical online journalists (okay, that was mostly me), he didn’t exactly blow the roof off with “star power” magnetism. He was soft-voiced, studious, and modestly dressed.
As he sat down and began answering our questions, he gave lengthy and eloquent answers while leaning far forward onto the table, glinting through those famously heavy-lidded eyes as he fussed with his rings. You’d be more likely to mistake him for an author than an actor. But perhaps that’s appropriate, given the thoughtful and well-considered roles he’s taken since his Oscar-nominated debut performance in Primal Fear skyrocketed him to international fame fourteen years ago.
