Author: EdwardAppleby

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IFC: Starting Small

From IFC, “Starting Small: Ten Notable Shorts That Became Features.” Among them, Bottle Rocket:

What’s another $4,000 after paying private school tuition? That was probably the pitch made by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson to their fathers, a year after the two met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas at Austin and decided to pen a script together about a trio of unlikely hoodlums. Similar to the clueless would-be criminals they created — Bob (Robert Musgrave), Anthony (Luke Wilson) and Dignan (Owen Wilson) — Anderson and Wilson scored the initial amount of cash that they asked for from their parents, but only wound up shooting eight minutes of 16mm footage before running out of funds. As a result, the Wilsons’ father contacted family friend and “Paris, Texas” screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson to see if the kids’ work had promise, which led to Carson finding enough money to finance the rest of the 13-minute short, as well as producer Barbara Boyle getting in touch with then-Gracie Films vice president Polly Platt. The short got into Sundance in 1993, and though the unusually rhythmic patter of the characters didn’t make much of an impression on audiences in Park City, it got the attention of Platt’s boss, James L. Brooks, who would ultimately bankroll the feature — which ironically was rejected by Sundance, though there’s no question who got the last laugh.

So What’s Different? Beyond an expansion of the plot, not a whole lot is different except for a jazzier score and that it’s shot in black-and-white.

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Brothers Coen: World Cinema

From /Film:

In 2007 an omnibus film called Chacun son cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) played at festivals. Made to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the collection featured short films about cinema made by an amazing variety of directors: Takeshi Kitano, Gus Van Sant, Zhang Yimou, Jane Campion, Atom Egoyan and many more. Among those ‘many more’ were Joel and Ethan Coen, who enlisted their recent star Josh Brolin in a three-minute movie called World Cinema. Problem was, World Cinema didn’t show up on either of the DVD releases of Chacun son cinema, making it very difficult to see. (I was lucky enough to see it at Toronto that year.) But now it has found its way onto YouTube, and you should watch it after the break, right now, before it goes away again.

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Noah and the Whale meets Wes (well, sorta)

From the Noah and the Whale blog, after the Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer:

Looks as amazing as I imagined it would. I actually walked past Mr. Anderson a couple of weeks ago. We were mixing the sound for the film at the same post production house that he was mixing ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’. As I got out of a lift, he walked in. I said nothing. Minutes later the building next door burnt down. Seriously.

Their new album/film The First Days of Spring drops 6 October 2009. We can’t wait.

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Official site updated

The official site FantasticMrFoxMovie.com now includes the trailer *and* links to the soundtrack page at ABKCO, the label for the Rolling Stones’ early work.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer: images, music, and reaction

We have posted some screenshots from the Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer in the gallery. Thanks to stretch! All images are © 2009 20th Century Fox.

Over in the soundtrack thread of the Yankee Racers forum, Racer theodorevalley breaks down the trailer music:

The first song in the trailer is the Bobby Fuller Four’s “Let Her Dance”. The second one is…I don’t know. The third one is a version of the “Peter Gunn” theme by Henry Mancini. The fourth and final song is Clarence Carter’s awesome “Looking For a Fox”.

Anyone know what the second song is?

Finally, Rope of Silicon has a great post on some of the reactions to the trailer. My favorite is from ardent Wes supporter Glenn Kenny:

The Loud Family’s “Ballad Of How You Can All Shut Up” goes out to Movieline’s S.T. Vanairsdale and Spout’s Christopher Campbell, whose concern-trolling (no links) over the putatively underwhelming trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox isn’t really anything more than very poorly disguised pre-emptive poking at a film that they’re clearly dying to shit all over. The bad faith is palpable; you can practically hear the guys honing their boasts about how they helped “bring” the movie “down” that they can recite at all the corporate holiday parties they hope the recession won’t be canceling. Really makes you love the internet even more than usual.

Get ’em, Glenn! Mr. Fox looks exciting, and different, and interesting. We can’t wait.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer

See it in HD at Yahoo.

Discuss it at the Yankee Racers Forum.

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Ain’t It Cool interviews Jason Schwartzman

From Ain’t It Cool:

Beaks: It was just announced that THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX is going to have its worldwide premiere at the London Film Festival. Have you seen the movie? And if so, can you give us an idea of what to expect from it? The pictures really have people freaking out. In a good way, I think.

Schwartzman: I’ve seen the film, and I’m proud to be a part of it. I think it looks really beautiful. Wes didn’t change his style of filmmaking and writing to suit the genre or the concept of the film. He brought it to him. It’s just the new Wes Anderson film, but with puppets instead of live actors. It’s stop-motion. It was really fun to be a part of it because Wes tried as hard as he could to not have all of the actors recording their voices separately in studios at various times. He really made an effort to get the actors together in groups, and literally act out the scenes with each other. To have overlapping [dialogue], and just weird exchanges. He’d have a gentleman with a boom mic running after us, following us doing it all. So, for example, the scenes in the movie where we dig? That’s actually all of us on the ground digging – like digging in the real dirt. And if we were eating, we’d go “Rawr!” and have real stuff in our mouths. I play George Clooney’s son, and there’s a scene where we’re talking to each other or having an emotional scene, and those scenes really are the two of us in a room acting and looking at each other – as opposed to being done separately and pieced together later. Of course, there are exceptions. Meryl Streep is in it, and I never got to act with her. But for the most part, most of my scenes were done with the actors I’m working with.

It’s really beautiful. I was thinking about this yesterday, and I think it will appeal to the kid in adults and the adults in children. It crosses at a certain point because the dialogue is really funny, so adults will love it. But they’ll also love it because maybe they loved the book. And, also, animation just does something to the brain where it makes you feel young. And I feel that kids will love it because it is animation, and they are young. But they’ll also just love the dialogue and the physical action. There’s a lot of physical humor in it that I feel Wes wouldn’t have been able to do with live actors due to the constraints of the universe and physics and gravity. (Laughs)

Continue reading “Ain’t It Cool interviews Jason Schwartzman”

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New Fantastic Mr. Fox photo

I haven’t seen this one. Via Rope of Silicon.

fantasticfoxcont

Also some very early Oscar buzz.

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Mr. Fox at film festivals

On Monday, The Playlist incorrectly reported that the opening of Fantastic Mr. Fox at the BFI London Film Festival in October was likely proof that the film had been rejected by the other major festivals (to their credit, they have revised the story printed below):

Good news and bad news. Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” will make its world premiere at the Times BFI London Film Festival which runs October 14 through 29 according to THR. Good for the film, but that means the film won’t premiere early at the Venice Film Festival or the Toronto International Film festival, both of which happen in September.

Variety already said that ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox had applied to the Venice Film Festival (and even then it seemed doubtful if the picture would get accepted) and this probably means it’s been turned down and if TIFF didn’t pick it up, well, this might be tacit understanding of its quality. Or maybe the picture’s just not ready yet? We’re not saying it’s bad, but it appears that Venice and therefore probably TIFF passed on the film, which sorta speaks for itself, especially since Venice pretty much loves Anderson and held the world premiere of “The Darjeeling Limited.”

This also likely means the film won’t screen at the New York Film Festival which typically ends by the time London will have even started so North American audiences won’t have a chance to see the film until it’s in theaters on November 13.

Our source at Fox tells us that the studio passed on both Venice and New York, even though the film was even offered opening night at the New York Film Festival! Fantastic Mr. Fox is a British film, inspired by a British author and made by British hands (not to mention that only world premieres can open the London FF). London calls!

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The Times (U.K.) on Mr. Fox at BFI London Film Festival

dahlgypsy

(Dahl inside of his garden writing hut)

Great story from The Times today:

After a decade brewing in the mind of one of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic directors, the long-awaited adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox — with 30 sets based on the author’s own home and village — will open The Times BFI London Film Festival in the autumn.

The stop-motion animation of Dahl’s children’s book stars George Clooney, who voices the ingenious Mr Fox, and Meryl Streep as Mrs Fox. Michael Gambon supplies the voice of the malevolent farmers, and the pop singer Jarvis Cocker plays a musically inclined farmhand. It will premiere at the 53rd film festival on October 14.

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