4th Annual New Directors Showcase
On May 25, SHOOT unveiled its fourth annual New Directors Showcase reel. The 25 helmers–including three two-person teams–selected for the Showcase come from diverse backgrounds. However, the bond they share is great style, vision and commitment–whether it be reflected in comedy, visuals or storytelling. Helping fashion the Showcase lineup were entries from SHOOT‘s ongoing “The Best Work You May Never See” gallery, assorted submissions, and feedback from agency creatives and producers. Here’s a look at this year’s field:
Jon Watts
Smuggler
Fatboy Slim’s “Wonderful Night” music video
How did you get into directing?
Making Hi8 movies with my friends in high school. I was planning on going to school for chemical engineering in Colorado but applied to NYU and USC film school as a long shot. I got a full ride scholarship to both schools and ended up going to New York. I still can’t believe it.
Why do you want to direct commercials?
I took a negotiating class a few years back…working in commercials has given me a shot at using those skills in a way I never imagined….and there’s the cash, the red carpet at pre pros, fast food, fast women.
What is your most recent spot project?
Just delivered a music video for Fat Boy Slim and posting one for The
Spinto Band. It’s a completely arduous technique that involves videotaping actors, printing them onto paper, cutting them out then animating them using digital still cameras. It’s a cool effect, but man… it takes forever.
Do you have plans to work in other areas–e.g., shorts, films, features or TV? Have you ever done any of that in the past?
I didn’t even realize that making music videos and commercials could be a real job until very recently. I made a short at NYU that people really seem to like and have written a couple of feature scripts. I went to school to make features, and that’s what I want to do.
What do you think is the best part about being a director?
Having an epiphany about the perfect way to shoot a scene.
What’s the worst part?
Having that epiphany at 4 am the night before the shoot.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More