A Decade Old Lullaby

February 5, 2010

Ten years ago today I began to shoot Lullaby, my first attempt at feature filmmaking. I was recently nineteen and had hair reaching far past my shoulders.

I'd spun in my head a dozen more Proustian onsets to this entry, but then thought better of sentimentalizing something I've long since retired. One critic, noting last year that St. Nick was being billed as my first feature film, surmised that I'd apparently distanced myself from it. This is true, in a sense; in private, I'm very proud of it, but there's no need for it to exist in the public eye. I've got other work that I'm happy to be represented by; this one can fade away. The same can be said for much of my output between then and now, which I've pared down to the one or two offerings I feel actively contribute to my body of work, excising the many whose value was in teaching me what not to do.

I do my best to regret nothing in life, but were I to allow myself some celebratory leeway in this regard, I'd wish that version of me who was nervously directing coverage in a kitchen for the very first time ten years ago this morning had learned a little more quickly how to throw that coverage away and get to the heart of the matter. With any luck, he'd outpace this current, clean-palated me, who often - but not tonight! - thinks that that he has indeed learned just that.

I came out of that film with a many memories, mostly faded, and a few dear friends with whom I'm still making movies. Yesterday, I met up with James M. Johnston to sign off the last few contracts for St. Nick's distribution. You can find him in the picture below, taken on the last day of our first collaboration. Also in there is Adam Donaghey, who has three new films he produced playing at SXSW this year. I look forward to making many more films with them both.

Everyone else in the photo has more or less vanished.

Posted by David Lowery at 1:46 AM

Catch the Trainwreck at SXSW

February 3, 2010

The 2010 SXSW lineup just went live, and chief among the titles I'm happy to report about is the world premiere of Frank V. Ross' Audrey The Trainwreck.

As has been writ often on these pages, this film is a particularly beloved one of mine, my involvement with it notwithstanding. I can't wait to see it with an audience, and on the big screen. You can see the trailer, soon to be updated with festival laureates, right here.

There are tons of other great films in the lineup - I'm excited about friends' new offerings like Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Aaron Katz' long-awaited Cold Weather. Clay's film Earthling is in competition, Lovers Of Hate will have its first Sundance encore here, as will Cyrus and Enter The Void. Oh, and Trash Humpers is playing!

There are a few new things of mine that will be playing as well, to be announced at a later date. But ultimately, March in Austin is all about Audrey The Trainwreck for me. It's the real deal.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:20 PM

Have One On Me

January 28, 2010

Coming February 23rd...

Posted by David Lowery at 11:18 PM

Enter The Void (2010)

January 27, 2010

I have yet to see Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Lovely Bones - my opinion of the novel, compounded by the torpor of special effects so pronounced in the trailer, has not sent my scurrying to the theater - but I couldn't help but think of it while watching Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, and apply it's touchy-feely tagline -'The story of a life...and everything after' - to Noe's vision of just that. Enter The Void, to be fair, is touchy-feely too, in its own inappropriate fashion, and it's perhaps even more dependent on CGI trickery than I presume Jackson's opus is, but it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of realizing the inconceivable. He gives us visions we can relate to - such as a sexual climax filmed from inside a woman's vagina. It's somewhat funny, but also so operatically audacious that it achieves its desired effect in spite of any laughter.

Noe isn't interested in heaven, and death seems to be a means to an end more than a raison d'etre; his intentions, he explained after the screening at Sundance, was to make the audience feel like they were on drugs. He pretty much succeeds. Early in the film, Oscar, the young protagonist, takes a hit of DMT and lapses into an extended reverie of computer generated abstractions - long tendrils of unfurling bioluminescence, swirling flagellum trailing into floral orifices, forever shifting and branching. It's comparable to the final flight in 2001, and also perhaps to a screensaver, but what's remarkable about it is how it captures in visual terms precisely how one's brain functions when under the influence of hallucinogens. In other words, it's not a visual representation of a hallucination (which is only a few degrees less dangerous than representing the afterlife), but a road map, if you will, to how a hallucination works. It's a guide which the rest of the narrative will follow, in a more figurative sense, and during the last 45 minutes, when ennui and distended repetition begin to grate on one's shellshocked eyes and you just want it all to stop - well, you can't take Noe to task for inaccuracy.

You also can't quite take him to task for shallowness, which, to a large extent, Enter The Void is. There's nothing dangerous about the film's provocations. It's unsetting, but not intellectually or ideologically so. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Noe's nihilism, much like David Fincher's, is mostly surface; it's aesthetic window dressing for bravura filmmaking, and indeed, the technical work on display here is of the highest order, graceful and intense and frequently dazzling. There's an enormous amount of digital work on display, but it's nearly impossible to tell where the special effects sequences begin and end. Hence, the film functions as a cohesive whole, a singular experience, and we're able to take a vested interest in the sad lives Noe puts on display. Irreversible worked in a similar fashion - a threadbare story made grandiloquent through craft and conceit. That film, of course, also had two almost unbearably disturbing scenes, which Noe seems to have no interest in topping. Indeed, for all unpleasantness he pushes our noses into here (a violent car accident and its aftermath, an unnervingly realistic abortion), he ultimately reveals himself to be a great big softie.

Posted by David Lowery at 9:39 PM

Afterwards

It's a remarkably pleasant thing, attending a festival in support of someone else's film. On the one hand, I feel close enough to Bryan's film that I can take enormous satisfaction and no small degree of pride in hearing people say they've heard good things about, hearing them say good things about it. But I'm also able to detach entirely from the usual nerve-wracking jitters and subsequent decompression and just dip in and out of the ride. I've been watching movies and enjoying myself and when people congratulate me on the film, I take their kind words and run with them to the next screening, feeling just a little bit warmer than I did beforehand.

The first screening was wonderful. It looked really good on the big screen, and sometimes even beautiful. I made a lot of mistakes behind the camera, but there were lots of things I tried to do that did work, and never so well as when projected at large (I was pleased to see that the Hollywood Reporter thought likewise). I skipped the second screening to see a different movie, and now I regret it.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:15 AM

Failure!

January 24, 2010

I'll have more to write about Sundance as a whole later on, but right now, we're ninety minutes out from the world premiere of Lovers Of Hate. I'd say that it's so surreal that it's not even surreal, except that it's not. Is it wrong to say that it feels strangely appropriate? Maybe I can get away with saying that, since I'm not the director.

An anecdote: during the Austin leg of the shoot, I cut together the title sequence of the movie for the cast and crew's viewing pleasure. As temp score, I used the theme from Raising Arizona. Aside from the fact that it was instantly recognizable as such, it worked perfectly - so perfectly that there were doubts we'd find anything as good.

But then when I flew down to Austin last summer to work with Bryan on trimming his first cut, he suggested we drop in Power (Failure), a song by Kevin Bewersdorf. I dragged it into the timeline, replacing the Coen Bros. cue - and there it's remained ever since. It was perfect. So perfect that the opening sequence has hardly changed since that day, and Kevin ended up composing the entire score. If we hadn't used that song, I don't think the movie would be what it is, and we probably wouldn't be here today - it was the piece of the puzzle we didn't know we needed until it was in there.

So here, for your listening pleasure, is that song: Power (Failure) by Kevin Bewersdorf. With any luck, this will become the anthem of Sundance 2010.

Power (Failure) : mP3 : 5.1mb

And now I'm off to the screening!

Posted by David Lowery at 4:40 PM