One of the smallest countries in Europe has the highest number of soldiers per capita. This situation is dissected in “Swiss Citizen Soldiers,” one of the six high-end documentaries that will arrive on the circuit in the coming months, and were pitched at the Swiss Films Previews at Visions du Réel, in Nyon, Switzerland. SWISS […]
Bill Hader is enjoying a pretty good run right now. The fourth and final season of “Barry,” which he directed all eight episodes of, is earning strong reviews and delighting audiences with unexpected cameos. He also makes a scene-stealing appearance as a nervous delivery driver who stumbles on some very bad news in Ari Aster’s acclaimed “Beau Is Afraid.”
Of course, lending his voice to a small part in a big movie is nothing new for Hader. Alongside Ben Schwartz, he was credited as a vocal consultant on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” for helping voice the spherical droid BB-8. In a new interview with The Independent, Hader reminisced about the experience of working in a galaxy far, far away.
“My kids love ‘Star Wars’ and I was so into it when I was young” he said, adding that he spent a lot of time playing with his toy Millennium Falcon as a child. “I was flying it around my house… I caught the edge of a wall and it bounced back and hit me in the face. It knocked a tooth out!”
Hader said he believes his minor role in the beloved franchise had more to do with J.J. Abrams doing him a solid than his actual skills. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t thrilled about the opportunity.
“I mean, that’s the weird thing. It was just J.J. Abrams being a nice guy. It was like something you would do for someone who won a contest,” he said. “But it’s pretty cool seeing your name in blue at the end.”
Hader hasn’t made many genre films outside of the “Star Wars” franchise, but that could soon be changing in a big way. He recently revealed that he is developing three feature films, and could end up directing and starring in a horror movie as his next project.
“The horror one, I would star in. The other two, as of now, I would not be in,” he said. “But I’ve done this before, where I’ve talked about things, and then once it gets out there, you’re almost really jinxing it. So, we’ll see. Always, the thing you’re concentrating on is the thing that kind of goes well, and then this thing over here that you’re half thinking about, that’s the thing that [takes off]. I mean, that’s what happened with ‘Barry.’”
Somebody give Chloë Sevigny what she wants: glamour! “God, how many more frumpy mommies can I play?” says the actress (and real-life mother), whose recent run includes shedding her fashionista ways in such projects as Bones and All, The Girl From Plainville, We Are Who We Are and The Act. “Give me some glamour, for […]
A perfect way to plan a trip to Thailand — the country where Mike White plans to film season three of The White Lotus — is to combine beachy adventures (such as Jason Statham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley once had at the Amanpuri resort on Phuket) with a journey to the mountainous north and a stint […]
Coachella parent company AEG is threatening legal action against a filmmaker who created a concert movie using found footage of Frank Ocean’s controversial April 16 set at the festival. Brian Kinnes, who did not attend Coachella, stitched together about 150 videos uploaded by concertgoers to YouTube, TikTok and Twitter to make an unofficial, multi-cut film […]
Vietnam — where Netflix’s new romantic comedy A Tourist’s Guide to Love, starring Rachel Leigh Cook, Scott Ly and Ben Feldman, was filmed — is reigniting interest in traveling to the country, long a beloved destination of foodies and nature lovers. Feldman — who recently shared his Vietnam travel diary with THR — visited Hoi An […]
I went to Vietnam in spring 2022 to film A Tourist’s Guide to Love while the country was still closed to Westerners [because of the pandemic], so it was really special. It felt like we were kind of sneaking in. I love Rachael Leigh Cook, and this is a passion project for her. She was […]
Illumination and Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is checking off another notable milestone. The Nintendo video game adaptation will cross $1 billion at the worldwide box office sometime today or Sunday. It becomes only the 10th animated film to achieve the feat. In North America, Super Mario‘s projected weekend gross is $37.5 million for […]
A few years ago, “true crime” became a marketable trope, and the documentary market has been in slow-motion decline ever since. The millions that streamers invested in non-fiction overinflated expectations for the form, stretched it thin, and the bubble burst earlier this year. In January, few documentaries generated much buyer interest out of Sundance. In this column, I proposed that filmmakers might be best-served by killing the word “documentary” to avoid getting rejected outright.
Sam Green has taken a more pragmatic approach. His delightful, immersive essay film “32 Sounds,” which opens in New York’s Film Forum this week more than a year after its debut as a live performance at Sundance’s virtual 2022 edition, has a malleable form and modest scale that lets it thrive without the unreasonable expectations of success. The project’s long-term viability provides a valuable case study for how unconventional, smaller-scale non-fiction filmmaking can remain sustainable. Staying small and strange is a way to stay safe.
For the uninitiated, Green’s work straddles the line between cinema, music, and performance art. Ever since 2010’s “Utopia in Four Movements,” Green has developed a body of work around the concept of the “live documentary,” as he delivers amiable voiceovers in front of a screen, usually accompanied by musicians. For 2013’s “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” he partnered with Yo La Tango; with “32 Sounds,” he reunites with composer JD Sampson, building on a conceit they previously explored with the shorter work “7 Sounds” in 2021 (that one was designed to be experienced through headphones on an iPhone, preferably while sitting outside).
His latest work takes the form of a freewheeling, metaphysical exploration of audio experiences, ranging from manufactured sounds of a tree falling in the forest (ha!) to a bird chirping for its extinct companion, but Green weaves together his collage with an astute fixation on the modern history of listening to the world.
“As a filmmaker, how do you make work in a world that’s awash in images? I’ve had to reckon with that,” Green told me this week over Zoom. “On a personal, we’re all scrambled and distracted and alienated. The film is an examination of that idea — being alienated, overwhelmed with media, the human condition.”
When I first watched “32 Sounds” on my computer during virtual Sundance, it was a riveting interactive experience. The binaural sound mix mandated the use of headphones and made the case for a home theater experience in which none of the nuances of the work were lost. Yet now, after some 50 live performances around the country, Green has done something new with his homegrown form by partnering with theatrical distributor Abramorama and preparing a recorded version of “32 Sounds” for its Film Forum release (a VOD opening is around the corner). Film Forum audiences receive headphones upon attendance, which turns this site-specific documentary into an eventized release even without the live component.
It’s gratifying to witness a work that can mutate over time and succeed in multiple forms of distribution, rather than struggling to find the best home and slipping through the cracks. Filmmakers often scoff at considering distribution strategies during development, but Green does that as an extension of his creative process.
Sam Green’s “32 Sounds”
Sundance
“If you’re a filmmaker now, you have to be nimble and able to work with different iterations of cinema,” he said. “If you’re not sharp, versatile, and trying new things, you’re dead. Or you’re teaching.” He laughed. “I was never getting funded by Netflix or anything like that, so I’m just carrying on as usual. My projects continue to be hard to pitch. My next project is a documentary about trees. I’m not going to go to a pitch forum and sell that. I’ve been thankful not to be dependent on that part of the documentary world so far.”
On the other hand, he’s an indirect beneficiary of the initial documentary boom. Green made “32 Sounds” for around $800,000 with a mixture of grants and equity, much of which came from Impact Partners, the same company behind behemoths like Netflix’s “Harry & Meghan” miniseries. However, he also relied on a network of resources well beyond the film industry, including a live media residency with MASS MoCA that allowed him to workshop the live version.
“The film world is capitalism,” Green said. “The performing arts world is still some kind of socialist model. Those shows don’t always need to break even in ticket sales. It helps me to be in that kind of economy.”
That flexibility allowed him to improvise as new opportunities for the work come up. After Green performed “32 Sounds” live at BAM last year, he was approached by outgoing Film Forum director Karen Cooper about a recorded version and contacted Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) on a new 7:1 mix.
“A big part of the film’s magic is the spatial element, so figuring out how to translate that into a 7:1 mix was hard, but in some ways it ended up better,” Green said.
By mandating an experience exclusive to headphones, “32 Sounds” has a much longer lifeline than his previous efforts. “It’s the only way to make a documentary about sound that could show in all sorts of theaters, many of which are crummy,” Green said. “This ensures everyone has the same sonic experience. It’s the epitome of the artist controlling the audience experience.”
My favorite sequence in “32 Sounds” is its dance break, when Green and Sampson essentially turn up the volume and encourage the crowd to get up and party. When I watched the movie in Sundance’s 3D virtual theater, a number of viewers guided their virtual avatars around the room and made them jump to simulate the appropriate vibe. Still, I suspected at the time that IRL crowds would boogie down a lot harder. “With live shows, I’ve noticed that people are really getting into it,” Green said. “I think everyone’s a little tired of just Netflix. I’m heartened by that.”
Green’s work might seem too niche and eccentric for any specific business takeaways, but I’d argue the opposite: It’s instructive because it’s niche and eccentric, proof that working on the margins and challenging the medium’s boundaries can lead to more innovative ways of getting art into the world. In that regard, “32 Sounds” deserves to be heard in more ways than one.
As usual, I welcome feedback to this week’s column: [email protected]
Browse earlier installments of the column here.
Costume designer Donna Zakowska was totally unprepared for the time jumps in the fifth and final season of Amazon Prime’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Stand-up comic Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) finally achieves stardom in 1961, yet we’re interrupted with glimpses of the future in wrapping up her story. This made Zakowska apprehensive and anxious when the scripts first came in from showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino and executive producer-writer Dan Palladino.
“I wondered how it was going to work, the idea of these flash forwards,” the two-time Emmy winner told IndieWire. “That was really rather drastic to suddenly project who was Midge and [manager] Susie [Alex Borstein] 30 or 40 years from when we knew them. It’s hard to know how to really portray that, and, luckily, we had a very good prosthetics team. I just tried to think what happened and what does that mean in terms of the clothes and the characters and adhering to different periods?”
Four of the first five episodes open with flash-forwards to the ’80s as a way to resolve many of the personal conflicts in Midge’s life, particularly a bitter falling out with Susie sometime in the future.
In Episode 1 (“Go Forward”), we learn that Esther (Alexandra Socha), Midge’s genius daughter at MIT, is in therapy to overcome her mother issues. In Episode 2 (“It’s a Man, Man, Man, Man World”), Midge recounts her successful career and unsuccessful love life on “60 Minutes.” In Episode 3 (“Typos and Torsos”), Midge bristles at the sight of Ethan (Ben Rosenfeld) living on an Israeli Kibbutz with a fiance she didn’t know about on her way to a benefit show in Tel Aviv. And, in Episode 5 (“The Pirate Queen”), Midge visits ex-husband Joel (Michael Zegen) in prison and complains about their poorly dressed daughter-in-law.
Not surprisingly, Midge’s wardrobe continues to convey a sense of style and theatricality that’s spot-on for each decade (including Brigitte Bardot-influenced French coats). But her favorite color remains red. In fact, Esther can’t help wearing a red MIT sweater over her rebellious Ramones T-shirt. In the other flash-forwards, Midge vividly captures the moment: She sports an upscale red sequin outfit for her “60 Minutes” interview, a peach Bedouin-inspired outfit and turban (looking like “Lawrence of Arabia”) in Israel, and a dark blue dress for her visit with Joel in prison.
However, the standout is the eye-catching red outfit that Midge wears on her first day as a comedy writer on “The Gordon Ford Show.” With its flowing plaid skirt, cute tie, and sailor cap, it’s indicative of her ambition to break the glass ceiling on the talk show hosted by Reid Scott.
“Red in general is a very powerful color for Midge, and I refer to that as the red sailor outfit,” Zakowska said. “That’s why the whole image of the sailor cap is built in. I really had this feeling of her starting a new journey. It started with the shape of the hat and what would work here. There was something very right about the costume. But it had to have a great whimsical, adventuresome aspect to it.”
Befitting its importance, the red sailor outfit has quite a buildup: First, Midge fondly pulls it out during the “60 Minutes” segment and explains its significance; then, in flashback, we learn that the inspiration for Midge to wear it came from Susie. And, finally, in a bravura subway train chase, Midge runs into an old hookup from Season 4 (Milo Ventimiglia’s Sylvio) and darts from car to car in a hectic attempt to escape the past. She’s awash in the spectacle of colorful passengers, but nobody else dares wear red.
“In a way, the subway cars were like little theater pieces, and really a bit like a dance, what she does,” added Zakowska. “And the way she moves from car to car, there’s also a circus quality to it. And that was the other thing about the sailor hat. Sometimes I thought of it as a circus train.”
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”
Philippe Antonello/Prime Video
As for the dazzling array of outfits in the sequence, it was all part of the spectacle. But it started with the description in the script of a woman wearing a Chanel suit, which became powder blue in the episode. “So the idea is that both of them recognize — oh wow, that’s quite an expensive thing you have on,” she said. “That was a stop moment for them, ’cause it’s rare that you see people in Chanel suits on the subway.”
For Episode 4 (“Susan”), Zakowska was pressed into Broadway musical mode for the elaborate “Waste Management” skit at the industrial show, where Midge awkwardly performs the role of narrator, dressed in floppy green coveralls and cap with orange trim, to repay a debt to Susie’s mob connection.
“I went back to original sanitation research, but made it quite oversized for her so it was very clown-like and musical,” said Zakowska.”And it was important to have each character and color be very specific because the town is very happy, very colorful, very pleasant, especially when contrasted with the garbage girls. How do you build a garbage dress? So I found all sorts of plastic and weird papers, and I practically built that myself because it’s hard to describe to someone. And my assistants found different versions of bubble wrap and tin foil, which was much more reflective and much more interesting to see under lights.”
The musical sequence turned out to be ironic, because, after completing “Maisel,” Zakowska designed costumes for her first Broadway musical: An adaptation of “New York, New York,” based on the Martin Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli.
“Who knew at the time that I was actually prepping to do a bigger version of it in the Broadway musical? So it worked out well,” she added.
The first five episodes of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Season 5 are now streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes every Friday.
