Breakfast with Curtis premiered last summer at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and was by far the standout narrative film of the festival. After playing a series of festivals around the country last fall, the film is returning to Los Angeles for some well-deserved recognition. The film was recently announced as the winner of the Film Independent Spirit Awards Jameson FIND...
In December of 2011, I interviewed Joe Letteri for LivinginCinema and AwardsDaily. The four-time Oscar-winning visual effects artist took me deep into the process of crafting the characters and worlds of the Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, Avatar, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The main thing I took away from talking with Letteri was the extent to which he and...
I’m forever grateful to Megan Ellison. She helped finance some of my favorite films this year, including Zero Dark Thirty, The Master and Killing Them Softly. Until this morning I had not heard Ellison’s reaction to the Academy’s failure to nominate Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director — “That’s so fucked up,” she tweeted yesterday....
Documentarian Alex Gibney is no stranger to taking on difficult subjects and courting controversy. In 2008, Gibney won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Taxi to the Dark Side, a film that exposed the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. Despite winning an Academy Award, numerous festival awards, and receiving...
Sound designer Ben Burtt began his career in 1975, and his innovations were quickly recognized by the Academy who gave him Special Achievement Awards for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Burtt went on to win competitive Oscars for his work on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In addition to his long-standing collaborations with Steven...
In 1993, Steven Spielberg directed Schindler’s List, marking the first collaboration between Spielberg and Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski. Kaminski has worked on every Spielberg film since, and they both won Oscars for their work on Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Kaminski’s shared filmography with Spielberg has also resulted in Oscar nominations...