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February 20, 2011

Ephemera 11

A smattering of things:

• The San Francisco Bay Guardian did their Sundance wrap-up last week, and at the fourth spot on their list of the best films was Pioneer. That was quite a thrill.

• Speaking of that film, the SXSW Screening times are out. We're in Shorts Block 1 (alongside another excellent Sundance short, The Strange Ones), and our schedule can be found here. Our first show is the morning of the 12th, and I'm hoping we'll have the whole cast on hand for the Q&A afterwards.

• The night before that is opening night, and Bad Fever (pictured above) is one of the films that will be featured that evening. Between now and then, completely unrelated to that film, I'm going to lose at least ten pounds.

• I'm finishing the third draft of the feature I'm aiming to shoot this coming fall. It's changed a lot, and for the better, but I'm having to deal with that familiar extrication the little things I love. Little gestures, exchanges, passages that are already fully realized in my head right down to the lens and the angle and the speed of a zoom. Most of these, I've come to learn, I love unto themselves. I love the cadence they add to the story, and that is a love which is separate from their effect on the story itself. They're the moments about which I might say I'd like the entire movie to be about, and as pivotal as such instances might be, their narrative integrity has proven fairly plastic - e.g., it doesn't matter so much who whispers in such and such's ear, what matters is the act of whispering itself. It's not as important who bleeds to death in the automobile as it is that someone does indeed expire while the landscape drifts by out the window. So this rewrite has been an exercise of reappropriating and redistributing those moments, so that the script has the same feel I've been after, even as its incident shifts quite a few degrees back towards center.

• Something about being really inspired by the news that Paul Thomas Anderson is gearing up to helm that Pynchon adaptation, even though Pynchon himself has never quite been my cup of tea.

Posted by David Lowery at February 20, 2011 2:04 PM