For the first time in 15 years, director Bryan Buckley of production house Hungry Man is on the Super Bowl ad sidelines.
“I’m sitting on the bench going through withdrawal. I’m like a crack addict wanting that USA Today poll,” quipped Buckley, a perennial contributor to the Big Game spot lineup and a three-time DGA Commercials Award nominee, winning the honor back in 2000.
However, Buckley’s tongue-in-cheek withdrawal symptoms are self-inflicted as he opted to forego Super Sunday in order to focus on his entry into feature-length filmmaking with The Bronze, which made its world premiere on opening night (1/22) of the Sundance Film Festival, which runs through Feb. 1.
Buckley described The Bronze as a hybrid comedy/drama that is in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. The film centers on Hope Ann Greggory who in 2004 became an American hero after winning the Bronze Olympic Medal for the women’s gymnastic team. Fast forward to today and she’s still living in her small hometown, washed-up and embittered. Stuck in the past, she must reassess her life when a promising young gymnast threatens her local celebrity status.
This is the second time Buckley has had work screened at Sundance, the first being in 2003 when his short film Krug—part of the Sony “Dreams” series out of Y&R New York—debuted at the festival. The “Dreams” initiative back then was designed to promote high-def shooting. Select directors were invited to show what was possible with free creative rein and free use of Sony’s digital high-definition 24P CineAlta camera.
“To be able to now return to Sundance years later with a full-length opening night feature is just amazing,” said Buckley who was immediately drawn to The Bronze upon reading the script. “I don’t run in the opposite direction when a movie comes in with sports,” said Buckley, alluding to his affinity for athletes and his big directorial career break on classic ESPN SportsCenter ad fare. “Two pages into the script, it took a turn that astonished me and I didn’t stop reading. Melissa and Winston Rauch wrote such a strong female character. I love character-based work and there was a challenge built in to make her likeable. It’s a dramedy that had me laughing out loud. Ultimately it’s a story about redemption.”
On the surface, shared Buckley, the concept of a husband-and-wife writing team “seemed like a dangerous situation to get into. But two seconds with Winston and Melissa eased my concerns. I realized they are wonderful and special. We moved forward on what was a great collaborative process.” That process included Melissa Rauch in the lead role of Greggory, and Buckley bringing in many of his collaborators in the commercialmaking world such as DP Scott Henriksen, editor Jay Nelson, costume designer Michelle Martini, and Beacon Street composers Andrew Felteinstein and John Nau, among others.
While 12 years separate Buckley’s two turns at Sundance, he is no stranger to the festival circuit. His short film Asad made its world premiere and won Best Narrative Short distinction at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, and went on to garner similar honors at assorted fests, including in Los Angeles, Austin, Florida, Rhode Island, New Orleans, Florida, and Traverse City, Mich. The latter is director Michael Moore’s annual festival.
Asad centers on the title character, a 12-year-old lad in a war-torn fishing village in Somalia who must decide between falling into the pirate life or rising above it to choose the path of an honest fisherman. Buckley wrote the script in an attempt to do justice to the humanity of the Somalia people.
In 2013, Asad earned an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film.
Robert Pulcini, Shari Springer Berman
“Going back to Sundance is like going home for us,” affirmed Shari Springer Berman who along with husband Robert Pulcini wrote and directed Ten Thousand Saints, which debuted last week in the Premieres section, home to some of the most highly anticipated narrative films of the coming year.
Based on the novel of the same title, Ten Thousand Saints follows three lost kids and their equally lost parents as they come of age in New York’s East Village in the era of the CBGB (country, bluegrass, blues) music club, yuppies and the tinderbox of gentrification that exploded into the Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988. The movie’s cast includes Ethan Hawke, Asa Butterfield, Emily Mortimer, Julianne Nicholson, Hailee Steinfeld and Emile Hirsch.
“This is our third time at Sundance with a feature, yet it still feels like our first in many ways,” observed Pulcini. “We did American Splendor with HBO, so we had this huge support team with us, and that was quite a magical experience that we shared with many who worked very hard on that film. This time around we’re a small little group. It’s hard to ever top the experience of winning the Grand Jury Prize [for American Splendor in 2003], but Sundance is always an unpredictable adventure. It’s never the same festival, and that’s why it remains vibrant and exciting, and yes, overwhelming too.
On the strength of American Splendor, Pulcini and Berman went on to earn a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2004.
Both Pulcini and Berman were drawn to the book Ten Thousand Saints. Berman related, “I read the book and became obsessed. It was so cinematic that I could actually envision the movie as I was reading. The writing was beautiful and the characters were all so complex and flawed. I am also a child of New York in the 1980s and so it is an era that I really wanted to revisit. I even wandered into the actual Tompkins Square Park riots in the summer of 1988. Thematically, I was extremely moved by how it illustrates the cosmic nature of family.”
Pulcini recalled, “Shari read the book and fell in love with it and urged me to do the same. The writing was not only beautiful, but constantly surprising. The characters really spoke to us, as did the world. For some time we had discussed setting a movie during that time period in New York. For me personally, it was quite an exciting era. The film is set the year I moved here.”
As for the biggest creative challenge that Ten Thousand Saints posed to them as filmmakers, Pulcini said, “The budget. Isn’t that always the case? It’s a period film on an indie budget, so we had to really think about how to control everything appearing in the frame without the resources to really do so. And we needed to accomplish this in a way that didn’t make the film feel small and overly contained. New York has changed so, so much. You don’t realize it until you go back and look at footage of the East Village in the ‘80s. Even if you find an amazingly preserved location, everywhere you point the camera, there’s these bright blue clusters of Citi bikes!”
Berman concurred, “I grew up in New York and making this film really made me realize just how glossy and basically unrecognizable the East Village has become. It was nearly impossible to make the ‘new’ New York look gritty and dilapidated on any budget, but on an indie budget it was a massive undertaking.
Luckily our production designer, Stephen Beatrice, and his team were inventive, a little bit insane and a lot brilliant! Also, we shot this movie during the coldest winter in New York history. There were like four polar vortexes and endless snowstorms. The snow looks great on film but it was a huge challenge just to walk to set without falling. I still shiver thinking about it.”
Ten Thousand Saints also marked the first time Pulcini and Berman collaborated with cinematographer Ben Kutchins. Pulcini noted, “On this film, since it’s very much an actor’s movie, we wanted to work with a cameraman who had a keen sense of intimacy. We liked his work on a movie called Holy Rollers—he had an interesting sense of where his camera should be in every scene. And he accomplished a style on a tough budget, which was also impressive. From the get-go, we wanted to shoot this film on Super 16, and Ben was quite excited by and supportive of that idea.”
Berman added, “We were excited by Ben’s work and his style, but we also felt he really understood the story. We didn’t just want a cinematographer to make pretty pictures. We wanted a partner in storytelling and Ben had a deep understanding of the characters and the narrative.”
Storytelling may also extend to shorter-form fare for Pulcini and Berman who are now on the directorial roster of indie feature production company Process’ recently formed commercialmaking/original branded content shop.
Morgan Neville
The last time Morgan Neville had a documentary at Sundance, it was nominated for a festival Grand Jury Prize and went on to win the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. That film was the backup singers anthem 20 Feet From Stardom, with Neville serving as writer/director/producer. Now just two years later, Neville returns to Sundance with Best of Enemies, which he directed with Robert Gordon. Best of Enemies is a behind-the-scenes account of the volatile 1968 televised debates between the conservative William F. Buckley and the liberal Gore Vidal. Their rancorous disagreements spanned politics, God and sex.
Neville—whose first Sundance film was Troubadours in 2011—described Best of Enemies as “an odd labor-of-love project. My co-director and old friend Robert Gordon called me five years ago and said he had bootlegged tapes of debates between Buckley and Vidal. I watched them and they were absolutely fascinating. It was a window into a world that doesn’t exist anymore—hyper articulate people on national television debating issues of the day. I love politics although I had never really made a film about politics.
I’m more a cultural filmmaker. This documentary at the end of the day is about the culture of politics and its relationship with media.”
At the same time, Buckley and Vidal brought out the worst in each other, observed Neville. “Each was the other’s Achilles heel and at times it reduced them to ad hominem attacks. They were both very civil otherwise in debates with others—but there was nothing civil about their exchanges with each other.
Debates on news broadcasts started with these guys. Their debates led other networks to change how they were doing commentary and debate. Now we live in a world where people talk past each other and don’t agree on facts. We see the seeds of all that in this story. Broadcasters took from it—without the intellectualism. I cannot believe how relevant the Buckley-Vidal debates are to today.”
There are 77 minute of archival material in the 87-minute Best of Enemies. “You can see and feel the mood of those times through the footage,” said Neville who has a personal tie to the story in that his first job out of college was working as a fact checker for Vidal. Neville noted that Vidal was even interviewed for the documentary. “That was the first interview we shot but we ended up not using it for a number of reasons. Still, it was a fascinating experience to talk to him about it. And as we went on to other interviews—with Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott, Frank Rich—the story kept getting better and better, and more and more relevant. It was connecting a lot of the dots for the first time.”
Neville is gratified that Best of Enemies was selected for Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Competition. He served on the U.S. Documentary jury last year. “Sundance is the best showcase there is for documentary film,” assessed Neville. “In competition at this festival is the best platform imaginable for you to get your film out there—especially a film like ours, a labor of love for over five years. We never knew we could finish it. Now to have it debut at Sundance, we know that people are going to discover it.”
Meanwhile Neville is discovering branded content with Saville Productions representing him in the ad arena. He recently directed vis Saville a series of a commercials for an undisclosed client, and earlier helmed a 20-minute documentary for audio headphone and speakers company Bose.
“I intend to do more [ad] projects,” said Neville. “There’s a lot to like. There’s a trend in commercial work to use documentary devices and even a documentary itself as an aesthetic storytelling tool. If somebody comes to me to work on something commercial-based, it means they want my skillset—to get real stories out of real people, to make a story feel authentic.”
Daniel Junge
Another Academy Award recipient is debuting a documentary at Sundance this year. Daniel Junge—who along with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directed Saving Face, the 2012 Short Subject Documentary Oscar winner—just screened his first film at Sundance: Being Evel, a feature-length portrait of the iconic daredevil Robert “Evel” Knievel, delving into both his personal life and public persona.
“Evel was a childhood hero of mine as he was for many in my generation,” said Junge. “But as I grew up and learned more, I had some ambivalence about him. I knew his story was complicated. We’re not the first to make an Evel Knievel film but I like to think that ours is the first that looks deeply at him as a cultural icon while also exploring the life he led. The Sundance selection validates this as a serious film.”
Junge observed that bringing Being Evel to fruition was helped considerably by his having won an Oscar. “It gave me the credibility and then the opportunity to do a dream project of mine.”
With a track record of social justice documentaries—such as They Killed Sister Dorothy, and later Saving Face which examines acid attacks on women in Pakistan, and movingly captures the courage of the victims—Junge has recently extended his creative reach into what he describes as “more populist films” with Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary (co-directed with Kief Davidson) and now Being Evel.
The LEGO Brickumentary premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, was produced by HeLo, which is also Junge’s commercialmaking/branded content home, and is being released by RADiUS-TWC this spring. Being Evel was produced by HeLo in partnership with Dickhouse Entertainment (the company headed by Johnny Knoxville of Jackass movie fame). A deal is already in place with A&E for broadcast/cable distribution of Being Evel, with theatrical release prospects being explored at Sundance.
Junge observed that the biggest creative challenge posed by Being Evel is what to do when people we hold up as heroes don’t turn out to be perfect human beings. We dealt with that as filmmakers. As a society and as devotees, what do we do when we learn that they’re fallible? That created a push and pull on our team. Knoxville is a huge Evel fan. He knows his life inside and out. He knows the dark chapters.
How we walked that line of showing honestly who this guy was with all his foibles while not denigrating his legacy—that was the line we had to walk, That’s the crux of our film. Earlier films were mostly pure adoration and we didn’t want to go down that path.”
Sixty interviews were conducted for Being Evel—all shot green screen by four cameras. “Every single interview shot is a five and six-layer composite,” related Junge. “It’s a technical achievement. You’ll see how dense and layered the documentary is—it’s a barrage on the senses which is akin to Evel’s life.”
While Being Evel is a dream film come true for Junge, so too is his first screening at Sundance. “I’ve had work at practically every other major festival, gotten an Oscar, [News and Documentary] Emmys but I never had a film at Sundance until now,” noted Junge. “I attended in 1992, my first year in college and served as a volunteer in the early ‘90s. I’ve been at the festival 10 times—to now be here with a film is another dream realized. There’s still no better place to see an American independent film and especially documentaries. You can randomly pick any documentary at Sundance and it will be great.”
Junge credits his ad/branded content experience with helping to advance his longer form endeavors. Recent projects he’s directed via HeLo include a soon-to-be-released branded short for Liberty Mutual out of agency Hill Holliday, and a project for the Bezos Family Foundation which, among its charitable activities to help low-income parents, is providing funding for VROOM, an initiative designed to help foster mental acuity in children during their early years.
“It’s informed my filmmaking,” said Junge of his ad work. “In commercials, everything has to look great, you have to be more concise with your message. As a result, you see more polish, more sophisticated visuals, my taking bigger risks as a filmmaker in the LEGO Brickumentary and Being Evel. I’ve been able to push myself in the last couple of years—bigger crews, better cameras, complexity in the postproduction process. I’ve been able to do this having been exposed to the commercial world. I’m not sure I would have been able to do this prior to HeLo.”
Brett Morgen
An Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary in 1999 on the basis of On The Ropes which he directed with Nanette Burstein, filmmaker Brett Morgen now marks his fourth film at Sundance. The first was On The Ropes, followed by 2002 closing night film The Kid Stays in the Picture (with Morgen and Burstein again as co-directors), and 2007 opening night film Chicago 10, which looked back at the anti-war protestors who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Now Morgen returns to Sundance in the Documentary Premieres program with Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, which provides insights into the life and creative spirit of Kurt Cobain, the late, lauded lead signer, guitarist and songwriter of Nirvana who remains an icon 20 years after his death. The film premiered at Sundance on January 24.
This is the first documentary to be made with the cooperation of Kurt Cobain’s family. Morgen was first approached years ago by Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love. Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Love, served as the film’s executive producer. Morgen did the first ever on-camera interviews with Kurt’s parents, sister, and others who were extremely close to the legendary artist. “We used the interviews sparingly but they were essential in providing context for a lot of work you see in the film,” said Morgen. “We had access to Kurt’s work spanning the arts and other never before seen material. It became clear that Kurt had an innate need and desire to create and he used any means available—a microphone, a paint brush, a piece of clay, photography, super 8 film. I had never before encountered someone who had documented his or her life in such a visceral manner. He created a kinetic and visceral diary of his life that translates to cinema. This isn’t the story of Nirvana. It’s not the story of Kurt the musician even though that’s a part of it. This is a psychological portrait of his journey through life—and what that journey looked and sounded like.”
Morgen described Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck as being “the documentary equivalent of Boyhood.
We’re with Kurt since he was six months old. We see him mature before our eyes. We go through his last years of life in never before seen home movies. The film is almost like a box of Kurt Cobain goodies.
Nobody knows what’s in the box until they see the documentary. There’s never before heard music, audio, film footage and home movies. A portion of the documentary is from a never before heard audio autobiography that Kurt recorded. We bring some of these components to life through a number of different animations. We have 12 minutes of cel animation and 37 minutes of motion graphics. It’s a visceral film meant to capture Kurt’s spirit.”
Morgen said that for the first time he’s in a position to finally sit back and enjoy the Sundance experience.
That’s because TV and theatrical distribution are already set and he won’t have to scramble to secure either during the course of the festival. In the U.S., HBO is scheduled to debut Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck in May. And Universal Pictures is releasing the documentary worldwide this spring. The documentary was co-produced by HBO Documentary Films and Universal Pictures International Entertainment Content Group.
Via Anonymous Content, his long-time roost for commercials, Morgen continues to be active in spotmaking and branded content. He has directed more than 150 commercials over the years for such brands as GE, Google, Nike, Dominos, ESPN and HSBC. Recently Morgen directed the Exxon Mobil “Enabling” broadcast campaign for BBDO. The centerpiece commercial shows the simple task of boiling an egg being reverse-engineered to create an epic journey which reveals the massive scale effort needed to bring energy into our homes.
Marc Silver
After notable short films and art installations that addressed human rights issues, director Marc Silver debuted his breakout feature documentary Who Is Dayani Cristal? at the 2013 Sundance Fest. For his lensing of that impactful film, Silver won Sundance’s Cinematography Award in World Cinema Documentary. The film—which was also nominated for a Sundance Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary—centered on an anonymous migrant worker whose body is found decomposing in the Arizona desert, a stretch of grueling geography where such discoveries are sadly commonplace as people look to enter the U.S. from Mexico to realize better lives for themselves and their families. This particular corpse carried an extra layer of mystery as the documentarian looked to ascertain the person’s identity, backstory and the meaning of a tattoo on his body which simply read, “Dayani Cristal.”
Now, two year later, Silver returns to Sundance with 3 1/2 Minutes, one of 16 films selected for the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film explores an incident on Nov. 23, 2012 in which unarmed 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis was shot and killed at a Jacksonville, Florida gas station by Michael David Dunn.
Davis and three of his friends had pulled into the gas station; one of the youngsters went into the store for a soda and a pack of gum. Meanwhile the kids had the music blaring in their automobile when a second car pulls up carrying a man and a woman; the latter enters the store while Dunn, the adult driver of the second car, asks that the music be turned down. An argument ensues and 10 bullets later, Davis was seriously wounded. He died later that night.
Silver gained access to the February 2014 trial; two cameras were in there already. “I became the third camera and was able to mix the three-camera feed.” A mistrial was declared on the first degree murder charge. The jury could not reach a verdict as to whether the shooting was justified under stand your ground laws. A retrial in October/November resulted into a guilty verdict on the charge of first degree murder.
“In between these two trials, Ferguson happened,” pointed out Silver. “I wonder if the second jury was affected by that, if that may have changed people’s minds.”
Silver ended up with 200 hours of material from three trial cameras. “We tried to put the audience in the mindset of the jury so there wasn’t a presumption of guilt or innocence at the outset,” related Silver.
“With the trial unfolding, we wanted our audience to also see who these characters were who surrounded the shooting—Dunn, his fiance, the four boys. One strand of the documentary is the trial itself. The parallel strand includes intimate moment’s with Jordan’s parents, Dunn’s phone calls in prison to his fiance—all recorded and in public domain in the State of Florida. We learn more and more about these people, which helps with our approach of trying to keep it all feel like a movie.”
The inclusion of the film in the Sundance lineup was of paramount importance, said Silver. “The second trial wasn’t completed until November so we were pushing to get this film out there in January. Sundance enables us to get the perfect high-profile exposure. It’s hugely important to Jordan’s family who will be there. On a personal note, the people at Sundance were hugely supportive from the outset when they found out about the film.
“Seeing your film for the first time with a Sundance audience is an amazing moment,” continued Silver. “I remember it with Who Is Dayani Cristal?“
Silver not only directed but also served as writer and cinematographer on 3 1/2 Minutes. He also continues to be handled for commercials and branded content by production house Pictures in a Row, aka Picrow. Among his work there is a short for Telemundo titled Latino Soy. Aqui Estoy, which translates into I Am Latino. I Am Here. The film puts a human face on the Latino community and underscores Telemundo’s bond with its viewership.
Silver said he hopes to open up a window of opportunity in his schedule to take on other select ad/branded content projects.
