On April 15, I drove to Chase City to meet cinematographer Roger Deakins. I have admired his work ever since seeing Barton Fink and especially Shawshank Redemption. Despite the name, Chase City is a town (not a city) of about 2,000 people in the south of Virginia, near the North Carolina border. No, there is […]
Sunday marked the death of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Burkina Faso’s most renowned filmmaker. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s okay. Most people haven’t heard of Burkina Faso. I wouldn’t know Ouédraogo’s work either if not for a free film series I attended faithfully when I lived in Richmond. Even though my degree is in film […]
So this happened: R.I.P. for the spec script, long a source of some of Hollywood’s most beloved films I suppose you won’t get published (even in the LA Times) without some clickbaity premise or all-embracing headline. I tend to look askance at any “analysis” that claims one talented writer invented, then killed the spec script, only […]
It’s a rare film that sends me straight to the keyboard to sing its praises and search for its flaws, but that’s what La Promesse has done. I finished watching it for the first time not more than thirty minutes ago, and the movie impressed me more and more with each passing second. It’s no […]
The internet is not the truth, but sometimes it exhibits a common grace. A sampling of websites and forums, for example, will teach a writer the proper form of address for a female superior officer. (If you don’t know, it’s ma’am.) If instead you relied on television writers, you would think sir was proper. I […]
I have worked as a journalist and a documentarian, and I can attest the worst thing either can do is to approach a story with an agendum*. I can also attest that this is exactly what the majority of journalists and documentarians do. Agenda have worked well for Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore, but journalists […]
“Comparison is the thief of joy” – attributed to Theodore Roosevelt I’m writing a book. It started as a screenplay, but on draft three, I realized it bore a fundamental flaw that wrecked the entire story. So I started writing in prose form the thoughts and observations of the various characters in order to get […]
For the first five films, click here. The Son and The Child (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) The Belgian Daredenne brothers, who made Kid with a Bike, also crafted these two movies with similar titles. The Son (Le Fils) is about a man (Olivier Gourmet in a masterful performance) who ends up tutoring the youth who murdered his young child years ago. Who […]
I have written that many elements of The Judgment of Parrish derive from my own experience as a dad. I love my two sons, and I populated the character of Parrish with some of their quirks, sensitivities, and challenges. I also found it easy to “method-write” the father character of Paul, with all his impatience, self-importance, and, eventually, […]
I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do… I am so discouraged about my work… Mediocrity is a hard word to apply to oneself; yet I see myself so equal with it that it is impossible not to throw it at myself . . . I have nothing […]