Film Society's Daily Buzz

Julie Taymor, Sean Penn and Barry Levinson. American filmmakers who influenced Valeria Golino, a woman known for acting roles in a number of movies over the years (The Indian Runner, Evita, Rain Man). Now she's switched to the other side of the camera for her directorial debut, Miele. Golino, in a conversation with the Film Society's Daily Buzz over the weekend, explained that as an actress her point of view is not crucial to the director's vision, which is why she wanted to direct. "That point of view is what I am interested in," Golino said. Her film, which is screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, is the story of an independent Italian woman who is helping terminally ill patients die. "Miele (which means Honey in English) is a code name for a girl who has a double life," Golino explained simply during our conversation. Her camera spends a lot of time observing Miele as she tries to protect her secrecy and maintain her dignity. "I thought it was a very contemporary female character [who] also seems cinematographic to me," Golino explained. "I wanted to [potray] her in images." She continued, "What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema… the form." Born in Naples, Golino has had a busy career in Italy, but she said she learned a lot from specific American filmmakers (in addition to directors back home). "I was very young when I worked with [Barry Levinson] and he was very astonished by the lack of discipline that I had," Golino admitted. "He taught me, during Rain Man, to become more displined. He was very severe in that way." She continued, "I took a lot of things for granted. I thought my youth and beauty and talent was enough. Good actors don't have only that."

Mexican director Amat Escalante became unexpected poster child for his home country in the early days of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In particular, given a number of graphic scenes in Cannes competition entry Heli, Escalante has been thrust into the spotlight to comment on the violence back home. When we spoke on a terrace overlooking the Palais des Festivals here in France, he had just concluded a video interview with Reuters. "My only defense is that it's really like that," Escalante said of the drug violence in Mexico. In fact, he added, "It's worse. Worse than it is in the movie." A scene of American training torture in Mexico is depicted early in Heli. Escalante explained that he took that scene from a YouTube video he watched of American's training Mexicans to withstand torture (by torturing them). "It's a great country that has this virus that invades certain parts, and many people are suffering a lot from it," Escalante said of his home—he lives in Guanajuato—during a festival press conference. There have been more than 2,000 murders in Mexico from drug related violence this year alone, Amat Escalante added during the Daily Buzz interview over the weekend. "I wouldn't have shown those scenes they way I did if it wasn't for the idea that there were very young people being affected by that violence," Escalante explained. "That is what's happening. I felt the need to show it and, to have a great impact, I wanted to go all the way with the violence." Escalante is Mexican. His Dad was born in America and his mother in the United States. He's grew up in both countries but now lives in Guanajuato. Watching A Clockwork Orange, as well as Richard Linklater's Slacker, as a teenager inspired him to pursue filmmaking. Escalante moved to Austin, TX where he worked in a fast food restaurant and at a video store and immersed himself in the programming at Linklater's Austin Film Society, discovering the work of Ackerman, Benning, Tarkovsy, Bresson, Fassbinder and others. Heli follows a few characters who encounter dramatic violence, but it also tracks a burgeoning relationship between two young people. The director of two previous feature films, Los Bastardos (2008) and Sangre (2005), Escalante added that this is the first of his films to explore love, the start of a relationship and the creation of new life. "I am curious about sex and death and violence," Escalante said the other day during the Cannes Film Festival press conference. "So that's all in the film... Sex is the last hope in the film. It's where everything can be saved or destroyed." Escalante seems sensitive, but realistic, about the focus on the violence in his new film. He defended that more people are killed, and more recklessly, in The Dark Knight (a movie he likes). But, he feels that his depiction of violence is more responsibly portrayed. "For me, to show it the way that I think it should feel when somebody is killed in real life," Escalante said in our interview, "it seems more honest and truthful the way I do it."

On our final episode of the Daily Buzz from SXSW, director Penny Lane and co-producer Brian Frye joined Eugene Hernandez in Austin's Stateside Theater to discuss their found-footage documentary Our Nixon. The film, which will close the 42nd New Directors/New Films festival on April 31, is made up primarily of Super 8 footage shot by three of Richard Nixon's aides, Dwight Chapin, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman. The footage was long unavailable to the public due to the Watergate investigation. Upon learning that the material could finally be accessed, Lane and Frye decided to take a risk and pay to see it, even though they weren't sure what would come of it. "We figured there'd be a film," said Lane, adding that they weren't sure in advance what the film would be about. What they were after, though, was answers to some fundamental questions: "How did they get to a place where they thought it was okay to commit the crimes they committed. How did they get to that point?" The answer is not simple, and Our Nixon looks for it by employing a mixture of material. About 60% of the film is the original Super 8 footage, while the rest is made up of interviews with the three subjects—all of whom went to prison for Watergate and two out of three of whom are now deceased—news clips, and the infamous White House audio tapes. "It goes back and forth between history being lived in the present tense and history being reflected upon in retrospect," explained Lane. When asked about her reaction to watching the archival footage, she responded: "What surprised me the most was how much I liked them." Lane and Frye both spoke to the inherent irony in watching the footage knowing what was to come for Chapin, Haldeman, and Ehrlichmann, whom the filmmakers refer to as "the original oversharers." They were also quick to point out how unique a situation access to this footage is. "This is the kind of material that will never exist again, because no president after Nixon would ever have allowed this kind of documentation of his or her administration to happen," marvelled Frye. "At the time... the justified assumption was that the material all belonged to the president, that it was his personal property. Congress passed a law afterward that... anything produced by the White House was the property of the American people." Lane agreed and also pointed out that the very fact that it was footage of Nixon made it inherently more interesting: "It was the end of an era. The Nixon presidency was the end and the beginning of many things—a big turning point." Learn more about the making of this fascinating documentary in our final Daily Buzz podcast from SXSW and make sure to catch Our Nixon when it closes New Directors/New Films on March 31 in NYC. In this episode, you'll also hear from Yen Tan about his gay drama Pit Stop, plus an Interactive-focused Hot Topics roundtable and a Music-focused Festival Veterans segment.

From the Stateside Theater at SXSW in Austin, join Film Society’s Eugene Hernandez on the Daily Buzz podcast as he chats with director Carter and actress Fallon Goodson about their new feature Maladies. Maladies takes place in the 1960s and stars James Franco as James, an actor who has retired young due to a perceived mental illness and is living with his sister, Patricia (Goodson), and best friend Catherine (Catherine Keener). He struggles to reevaluate his creative process and maintain a healthy mental state while keeping his relationships intact. In breaking down her understanding of Maladies, Goodson shared this metaphor: “It’s like if you take the roof off of a doll house then you can actually see the slice of life of these people interacting,” she explained. “A lot of mental health movies focus on characters being in a hospital, but this is showing people with maladies in their actual environment. Everyone can relate to a malady in this movie and … it’s up to the audience to diagnose.” Goodson was drawn to the unique story Carter wanted to tell as well as his unique point of view as a sculptor and painter. Carter’s first film, Erased James Franco, feels more like an art piece with Franco re-interpreting Julianne Moore’s role in Todd Haynes’s Safe. This time around, Carter’s film is more mainstream storytelling, but he sees the “direct connection between sculpting, painting… and my work on set with the actors. Film is the best way to tell a story because there is talking and people and a common language whereas with painting you might need more time with (the painting) to let the story seep in.” “The film started out as a long stack of notes and poetry, … but there is a disconnect that occurs at some point between what you’re trying to do and actually doing it,” explains Carter on the difficulties of expressing ideas through other people. “The main thing is to try and make those two things jive.” Hear more from Carter on sculpting, painting and filmmaking, and from Goodson on working as an actress in Hollywood, in our sixth episode of the Daily Buzz. You'll also hear from social media expert Jon Burkhart on Twitter's influence at SXSW and Tim League from the Alamo Drafthouse. Guests: Hot Topics: Brian Brooks, Deadline Peter DeBruge, Variety Jon Burkhart, Author Jarod Neece, SXSW Rebecca Feferman, SXSW Filmmaker Interviews: Maladies (Carter & actress Fallon Goodson) The Retrieval (Chris Eska) Good Ol' Freda (Ryan White) Festival Veteran: Tim League, Alamo Drafthouse

Jeffrey Schwarz stopped by the Daily Buzz studios in Austin's Stateside Theater to discuss his new documentary I Am Divine. Divine was a "midnight movie queen" and the muse and collaborator of John Waters. He starred in some of Waters's most beloved films like Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles. Tragically, Divine died at the young age of 42, just days after the premiere of Hairspray, which went on to be the duo's biggest success. In speaking about his inspiration for the making the film, Schwarz referenced this tragedy: "That was the first Divine movie I ever saw, Hairspray. I had seen it just a few weeks after he died and I remember thinking how unfair it was that the world was robbed of this incredible talent and that there would never be another Divine movie again. So, in making this movie, we're finally giving the world another Divine movie and Divine is playing himself this time." Schwarz also discussed the importance of John Waters's support in making this film, saying he never would have started the project without the "blessing from the Pope of Trash." The relationship between Waters and Divine was also a source of inspiration for Schwarz. "I love the idea that Divine and John had this symbiotic relationship," he explained. "Divine was John Waters's muse in all those early films. They developed the character together." Divine's story seems particularly relevant at a time where the problem of bullying has entered the public conversation in a major way through projects like Dan Savage's It Gets Better and Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation. I Am Divine depicts this issue in a vivid way and, fortunately, with a happy ending. "Divine was very much that kind of a kid," Schwarz said of the victims of bullying. "He had a really tough time in high school. He was beat up every day after class. He was really tormented on a daily basis by bullies. It wasn't until he met John Waters and met all these other outsiders, beatniks, other gay people, that he found a group that would accept him." Learn more about this larger-than-life character by listening to our Daily Buzz podcast from SXSW. You'll also hear interviews with the filmmakers behind The Bounceback and Los Wild Ones, a roundtable debate about the best movies to come out of the past few days, and SXSW director Janet Pierson reflecting about the festival's 20th anniversary edition. Guests Hot Topics: Bernie Cho, DFSB Korea Mekado Murphy, New York Times Kristin McCracken, Film Wax Filmmaker Interviews: I Am Divine (Jeffrey Schwarz) The Bounceback (Bryan Poyser) Los Wild Ones (Elise Solomon) Festival Veteran: Janet Pierson, SXSW

"I want to create in the way I want to create. I want to move as fast as I can think." Harmony Korine was discussing Spring Breakers with Eugene Hernandez on Film Society's Daily Buzz podcast from SXSW, and the topic had turned to film school. Korine attended NYU for dramatic writing, as opposed to filmmaking, before leaving to write Kids with Larry Clark. He explained the choice to study writing as a necessity. "I was making films already and I had a decent understanding of the technical side," he explained. "All I ever wanted to do was write my own films. I didn't want to ever be in a place where I was dependent on other people doing anything for me, and I'm still that way... I never want to be stranded." This fierce independence is evident across Korine's work, from his audacious directorial debut Gummo (1997) to his new film, which boasts the oddball cast of James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Gucci Mane. When asked how he's managed to maintain this level of freedom, Korinne again emphasized that there was no other option. "I just don't care," he said. "I make movies because that's the only thing I ever wanted to do… I can't be stopped. [Laughs] I do what I have to do. I've only ever had one vision and it's to make films in this way. Nothing else really matters much." On the topic of Spring Breakers, Korine was quick to point out that he didn't intend it as an exposé of spring break culture, or even about it at all. Instead, he described it as a "backdrop for this more criminal, menacing element." That element is embodied by James Franco's Alien, a Florida drug dealer complete with cornrows, a blinged-out grille, and coopted black slang. "At the same time I didn't want him to be just that," Korine elaborated. "I wanted him to have some type of strange inner poetry and some bizarre, sociopathic… some kind of crazy menace, this weird energy floating around." Korine explained the impetus for the film as coming from photos of teen debauchery he had been collecting for an art project, "everything from co-ed pornography to fraternity imagery." When he looked at them all together, he became intrigued. "Subject-wise, they were really sexual, overtly sexual and violent and base, and then all these details around them were very childlike: the nail polish, the Hello Kitty bags, the Mountain Dew bottles. It was kind of like this strange language. I liked it." When asked what he drew inspiration from in general, Korine's reply was immediate:: "criminals." Which begged the question, does he consider himself and his filmmaking criminal? Again, the answer came quickly: "definitely." Hear more from Harmony Korine, plus interviews with the filmmakers behind Hey Bartender, We Always Lie to Strangers, Go for Sisters, and another Hot Topics roundtable in our fourth podcast from South by Southwest. Guests: Hot Topics Joe Leydon, Variety Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine Karen Reilly, Tor Project Matt Wallaert, Bing Filmmaker Interviews: Hey Bartender (Douglas Tirola) We Always Lie to Strangers (AJ Schnack & David Wilson) Go for Sisters (John Sayles & actor Edward James Olmos) Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)

An ebullient Malcolm Ingram joined Eugene Hernandez on the third installment of Film Society's Daily Buzz podcast from SXSW to discuss his new documentary Continental. The third in an unofficial gay history doc "trilogy"—Ingram's previous docs Small Town Gay Bar (2006) and Bear Nation (2010) premiered at Sundance and SXSW, respectively—the film takes on a surprising but important legacy: that of New York City's most famous gay bathhouse. "I heard about the Continental the same way everyone else did: Bette Midler," explained Ingram, when asked about the impetus of the film. "It was the place Bette Midler performed. That's a piece of gay history I didn't know anything about so [I said]: let's see if there's a story there. And boy was there ever." The story of the Continental Baths is the story of Steve Ostrow, whom Ingram describes as an "incredible gay P.T. Barnum-type character." Just after the Stonewall riots in the late 1960s, Ostrow envisioned and built a multi-purpose gay meeting place complete with a cabaret, disco, Olympic-size swimming pool, non-denominational place of worship, and, of course, saunas. Ingram emphasized the community service the batthouse provided, noting that "the Continental was one of the first places to introduce things like on-site testing for STDs. It was really a revolutionary concept, especially for 1968." The popularity of the Continental Baths coincided with a period where gay culture was in the zeitgeist. Frankie Knuckles created House music, in part, in the bathhouse's basement disco, straight people regularly visited the establishment, and it would go on to inspire renowned New York nightclubs like Studio 54. Ingram attributed all of this with increased awareness of gay life not just in New York City, but around the country. "One of the subjects in the films talks about the fact that all of a sudden Bette Midler is on the Johnny Carson show talking about a gay bathhouse... It was a big gay beacon!" Learn even more about Malcom Ingram's fascinating and entertaining documentary and the history of the Continental Baths on today's podcast and listen to interviews with the filmmakers behind the "first post-post-Katrina documentary" Getting Back to Abnormal and LGBTQ senior citizen doc Before You Know It. In addition, a jam-packed roundtable of critics recaps the first weekend of SXSW Film in Hot Topics and Josh Braun of Submarine explains just what a sales agent does and reminisces about his band with Jim Jarmusch. Hot Topics: Krista Smith, Vanity Fair Dan Kois, Slate Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times Scott Foundas, Village Voice Dave Karger, Fandango Filmmaker Interviews: Getting Back to Abnormal (Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker, Peter Odabashian, Paul Stekler) Continental (Malcolm Ingram) Before You Know It (PJ Raval) Festival Veteran: Josh Braun, Submarine

Shane Carruth stopped by the Stateside Theater on day two of SXSW to discuss his highly-anticipated new film Upstream Color with Eugene Hernandez on Film Society's Daily Buzz podcast. The film World Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January to a glowing reception. It will have its New York Premiere later this month in Film Society and MoMA's 42nd New Directors/New Films festival. When asked about the original idea that gave birth to this incredibly unique second feature—part thriller, part science fiction, fully immersive sensory experience—Carruth pointed to his fascination with identity and personal narrative. "I wanted to take some characters and strip them of their narrative or their identity and have them have to rebuild it based on, potentially, the wrong information.," he explained. "They wake up in a moment and they have to atone for what it looks like they did, so they decide: 'Oh, I must be this kind of person.' And then they try to fulfill that role, but there would be this tension because it would always be just a bit off." Perhaps surprisingly, Carruth also stressed the inherently romantic nature of the story he was telling. "I have something in me that finds it really romantic to have characters that are broken down and destroyed and having nothing left to lose. There's this romantic promise in the air," he said. When asked what it was about this moment of desparation that he found romantic, he noted how hard it was to verbalize. "That feeling of nothing left to lose is palpable. Maybe because then the romance isn't just a fun thing or a date. Maybe this is the salvation. Maybe this is the thing that will make me feel not so destroyed and alone. It's not trivial at that point. Like his first feature Primer, which took the Sundance Film Festival by storm in 2004, winning awards, near-universal praise, and an almost immediate cult following, Upstream Color plays with natural and, sometimes, more-than-natural cycles in a way that wraps the audience into the storytelling. "All of the otherworldly elements are there to get us to that moment," Carruth justified. "I needed something that was affecting [the characters] at a distance, things they could not put their fingers on or why they were experiencing them. There's a lot of criteria that needed to be met to come up with this life cycle of weird things that are happening around them." Listen to today's Daily Buzz podcast for more from Shane Carruth, plus a preview of SXSW Music from Jason Bentley of KCRW, interviews with the filmmakers behind Mr. Angel and No More Road Trips, and a spirited Hot Topics roundtable. Guests: Hot Topics: Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle J.J. Colao, Forbes Filmmaker Interviews: Upstream Color (Shane Caruth) Mr. Angel (Dan Hunt and subject Buck) No More Road Trips (Rick Prelinger) Festival Veteran: Jason Bentley, KCRW

For the second year in a row, the first day of the South by Southwest Film Festival was a dark and rainy one. But that didn't stop us from putting together a bright and shiny first episode of the Film Society Daily Buzz with Eugene Hernandez podcast! Austinites and festival-goers can listen to the show every night at 9:00pm on our broadcast partner KUT 90.5 and online at kut.org. For those who can't wait another moment, we've got the full podcast right here and on iTunes (subscribe). Today's Hot Topic roundtable with Eric Kohn and Dana Harris of Indiewire and Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land quickly turned to the increased presence of television at SXSW and audiences' demand for instant access to the content they hear about out of festivals like this one. "I remember a few years ago, IFC had Portlandia here… now TV is everywhere. If you open the SXSW app, the opening ad is for Shameless," noted Harris. She and Kohn lamented the shift of focus away from the low-budget filmmaking that has traditionally characterized the festival, but admitted: "That's where a lot of indie filmmakers are going. That's where they're making not just their money but a lot of their art, which is great. You can't be a snob about it." Adding his two cents on where the festival's Interactive section fits into this debate, Sullivan said he'd like to see the lines blur even further. "Last year I think they had one session focused on tech and marketing aspects of TV and I've seen several of those going on [this year]… Then, of course, there's the popular topic of piracy and getting video on demand and film on demand. [Laughs] Maybe sometimes it's good that the Film side and the Interactive side aren't getting together in that sense." When asked more about the topic of quick access to Film and TV content online, Sullivan elaborated: "People will usually pay for the content. That's not the issue. The issue is that people can't find what they want when they want to be able to get it. I think down the line things like windowing releases are going to go, well, out the window." The issue of piracy is central to one of this year's SXSW documentaries, TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard. Director Simon Klose visited the Daily Buzz studio in the Stateside Theater to introduce his film, which depicts the controversy and legal battles surrounding Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. Klose was adamant that online filesharing is not the enemy: "Access to information and access to films and culture is good for artists… We shouldn't build up walls on the internet. We shouldn't try to make a cable TV network of the internet, which a lot of big companies are trying to do." When asked what obstacles stood in the way of the open model his film defends, he replied: "I think we should try and give the consumers the products in the way they want to see them. People do want to stream and they do want to download… That's why I've licensed my film with a Creative Commons license that lets me spread the film and share it online." Klose released TPB AFK on the internet four weeks ago and 1.5 million people have already watched the film. In his opinion, that kind of instant access—the ability to watch a film immediately after first hearing about it instead of months or even years later—may be the future of film distribution. He acknowledged, however, the fiscal freedom he enjoys as a filmmaker because he is mostly financed by television stations in Europe. "I think we need to experiment more," Klose concluded. Day One Guests: Hot Topics: Eric Kohn, Indiewire Dana Harris, Indiewire Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land Filmmaker Interviews: TINY: A Story About Living Small (Christopher Smith, Merete Mueller) TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (Simon Klose) SAKE-BOMB (Junya Sakino) Festival Veteran: Jonathan Marlow, Fandor

Each year the Sundance Film Festival introduces an "it girl," but this time around the person worthy of that distinction is a guy. David Lowery, the Dallas based filmmaker, ushered a whopping three feature films to Sundance 2013 and they were among the most exciting and distinctive films of this year's festival. "It's been a significant 12 months, I have to say," David Lowery told The Daily Buzz as we began our conversation about the films he worked on this past year. Lowery not only wrote and directed his first feature, Ain't Them Bodies Saints (a movie that sold to IFC Films for a reported $1 million just last night), he co-wrote Yen Tan's gay Texan story Pit Stop and co-edited Shane Carruth's anticipated New Directors/New Films entry Upstream Color. Ain't Them Bodies Saints, starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, plays out as a classic American tale of star-crossed Texas outlaws who head off in different directions in the wake of a crime. The title for the film came from a song lyric that Lowery says he misheard. He kept it anyway because it applies literally, but also establishes an appropriate tone for his tale. Lowery explained that he sees Ain't Them Bodies Saints as a movie in the tradition of other American stories. "There's a muscular tone that I really admire and I wanted to make something in that vein, something that felt in sync with folklore in America," David Lowery elaborated, "a story that had been told for a long, long time." That tone expresses itself not only in the story, but in the striking cinematic components of the film, from the music and cinematography to the design and the costumes. Lowery's team included cinematographer Bradford Young, production designer Jade Healy and costume designer Malgosia Turzanska, with a score by Daniel Hart. "Texture is something thats hugely important to me," Lowery explained. "I love having films where you feel like you can sink your finger into or bite into them, that there's something that would rub off... from the tenor of the character's voices to the light that was hitting their cheek bones." David Lowery also brought a texture to Pit Stop, working with good fried Yen Tan on dialogue for the naturalistic look at gay life in Texas. An accomplished editor on numerous indie features, Lowery had hoped to also edit the movie, but Tan started shooting Pit Stop just as Lowery was making Saints. In the case of Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, Lowery was editing Sun Don't Shine by the film's co-star Amy Seimetz when Carruth tapped him to work on his second feature. While Carruth was still shooting the film, he sent a hard drive with footage and Lowery began assembling the movie. Lowery finished with just days to spare before he hit the road for Louisiana to shoot his own feature. "That's a collaboration I am truly proud of. I was just on his wavelength," Lowery enthused about Carruth. "I feel so lucky to be on that wavelength because I think he's a true genius." David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints gained momentum one year ago after Lowery participated in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and was quickly signed by WME. A few of this year's Lab Fellows joined program head Michelle Satter and sat down with The Daily Buzz to tease their upcoming projects on this final edition of our Sundance festival series. Also on the show are Rose Kuo from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Ira Deutchman from Columbia University and Emerging Pictures, as well as filmmakers Lucy Walker (The Crash Reel) and Robert Stone (Pandora's Promise). Guests: David Lowery – Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Pit Stop, Upstream Color
Michelle Satter – Sundance Institute Chinaka Hodge - 700th and International Russell Harbaugh - Love After Love Pamela Romiaowski - The Adderall Diaries
Lucy Walker – Sundance Institute Sara Bernstein – HBO Robert Stone – Pandora's Promise Ira Deutchman – Columbia University, Emerging Pictures
Rose Kuo – Film Society of Lincoln Center

"Television is like boot camp," declared actress Kathryn Hahn. "You have to make choices really fast. It helps you trust your gut in a way that's not indulgent. You don't have a lot of time to talk about it, which I love. I like to jump in." Hahn and co-star Josh Radnor were in the Daily Buzz studios to discuss their roles in Jill Soloway's Afternoon Delight, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the week, and the topic had turned to the relationship between television and American independent film. Radnor also remarked on the speed required by both mediums: "Studios, it seems, have abandoned films about recognizable people going through recognizable problems and the independent film world has picked up that baton. But you only get 23, 25 days to shoot these things. And you work so fast in TV. It's not a big deal to shoot five to seven pages a day in a television show... so someone who knows how to shoot that quickly [can handle it.]" Both actors have a background in television. Though Radnor has directed two films that premiered at Sundance, he is best known for his starring role on How I Met Your Mother. Hahn got her start on Crossing Jordan and recently appeared in several episodes of Lena Dunham's Girls, perhaps today's best example of the indie-TV crossover. Afternoon Delight's writer-director Jill Soloway also has a history in the medium, having written for Alan Ball's Six Feet Under and Diablo Cody's The United States of Tara (are we seeing a pattern here yet?). Radnor praised what he saw as the flexibility television had taught Soloway: "You can really tell she's worked in TV because I think TV writers are used to being rewritten, so she's not precious with her stuff. She wrote a whole scene for us to do and it wasn't working and she said: 'you know what, let's just throw it out.' And we came up with another thing that was so much more pure. She trusts the in-the-moment process and she trusts us as collaborators." And with a growing roster of television auteurs who got their start in independendent film—among them Mike White (Enlightened), Michael Cuesta (Homeland), Todd Haynes (Mildred Pierce) and the aforementioned Lena Dunham (Girls)—as well as television to indie film stories like Radnor's and Soloway's, the lines between the two worlds seem poised to only blur further. GUESTS: Hot Topics Roundtable Logan Hill – Esquire Jada Yuan – New York Magazine Interview Segment: RJ Cutler – The World According to Dick Cheney Interview Segment: Josh Radnor – Afternoon Delight Kathryn Hahn – Afternoon Delight Interview Segment: Josh Braun – Submarine Festival Veterans: Ted Hope – San Francisco Film Society

The sixth episode of the Film Society’s Daily Buzz podcast brings the heat with a fast-paced wrap-up of the best so far and the best yet to come at Sundance with writers Jennifer Lee and Jascha Hoffman, director Albert Maysles and his love-driven filmmaking (The Secret of Trees), how one documentary stokes the fire of controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty (Greg Barker's Manhunt), and more! From the director of seminal documentary and cult favorite Grey Gardens comes a 3-minute documentary about a 13-year-old inventor, The Secret of Trees. How does Albert Maysles get people to do what they do and say what they say in front of a camera? Through love. And being at the right place at the right time. "When I pick up the camera, since I let everything happen on its own, it requires that I have access. I get that access through my appreciation and love of people. I acquire that friendship," explained Maysles during his Daily Buzz interview. "Then that friendship extends to the rest of the world that sees the film. In other cases we learn about other forms of love with a mother that’s 82 and a daughter who’s 56 and can’t get away from her mother. Love is a binding force in her life [referring to Grey Gardens]." Grey Gardens has spawned an HBO film, a broadway musical, and a cult following, all because of the Maysles and his team were able to gain access, for six weeks, to a mother and daughter in the Hamptons who had not left home in 20 years. Maysles's love for people and unique ability to observe are driven from a sense of what's going on behind the scenes. "Too many documentarians depend on interviewing somebody instead of going to the action, going behind the scenes where things are taking place, which gives the viewer the opportunity to be there or feel like they are there," he explained. "That is documentary at its best ... And as eccentric as these characters are, they are not crazy. They’re just like us in many ways, but to extremes." These beautifully human eccentricities can be seen in The Secret of Trees, which is available to watch at Focus Forward Films. In what some have billed as the documentary version of Zero Dark Thirty, Greg Barker wanted to put a face on the work behind finding Osama bin Laden, which he captures in his seventh nonfiction film Manhunt. "They do very tactile things," Barker said about CIA officers and analysts. "They work with spreadsheets, they draw lines connecting organizations, they put up faces on a white board, it’s something you can relate to on a human level. I wanted to give people a sense of how our national security works while showing them emotions they can relate to." The story begins in the early 1990s with mostly female CIA officers, known as the Sisterhood, who uncovered a secret terrorist organization: Al Qaeda. Although Al Qaeda was on the CIA's radar before 9/11, it still took 10 more years to finally track down the man behind the organization. Barker takes his audience through all the paperwork and red tape and shows us the many faces behind the manhunt for bin Laden. Former CIA officer Marty Martin explains that even though bin Laden is gone, the work is not complete. "We as a society need to not be driven by that cult of hate out there, but address it and give people hope." Listen to our riveting interview with Barker, Martin and two former CIA analysts in epidose six of the Daily Buzz! Guests: Festival Hot Topics: Jennifer Lee – Writer Jascha Hoffman – Science and nature writer Interview: The Secret of Trees Albert Maysles – Director Interview: Manhunt Greg Barker – Director Marty Martin – Former CIA Officer Nada Backos – Former CIA Analyst Cindy Storm – Former CIA Analyst Alamo Drafthouse: Tim League – Founder/CEO Slamdance: Peter Baxter – co-founder Sony Classics: Tom Bernard – co-president

The first weekend of the Sundance Film Festival begs the question: Would you like your cider with or without rum? Through the fog of more than 300 events and parties, it can be hard to keep your eye on the film-watching prize. In the fifth episode of Film Society’s Daily Buzz podcast, we grapple with the issues posed by one documentary (After Tiller) and two narratives (Computer Chess, Escape from Tomorrow), discuss festival sales with John Sloss, and more. Ten years after the success of his indie comedy Funny Ha Ha, director Andrew Bujalski looks at a digital game through an analog lens in Computer Chess. Using cameras from 1969 and a book from the 1980s, Bujalski asks if computer intelligence is really intelligence and how digitization has changed the meaning of the word. "I’m a terrible chess player, but I started reading a book written in the 80s about chess-playing and computer chess, which started to plant images in my head about this funny little world," Bujalski explained during his Daily Buzz interview. "As I worked on it more and more I delved into my own childhood memories of computers coming into our lives. It was both very exciting to a young child and scary, in that I’m still intimidated by digitization of our world." Bujalski began his film without any concern over its commercial success, but wanted to tell a story intuitively from start to finish. Computer Chess does just that in its story of a few geniuses trying to create the perfect chess program. Entering our childhood psyches even further is director Randy Moore's Escape from Tomorrow, about family man Jim White, who has just lost his job but curbs the bad news by taking his family to an amusement park. Sparking a legal debate about fair use (the film was shot without permission on a Canon 5D inside Walt Disney World), Escape from Tomorrow is much more than its surrounding controversy (which you can read more about here). "Disney is in everyone’s DNA now. Even if you try to shelter your kids from it, it’s impossible. It’s everywhere you look. But on a more personal note, my father moved to Orlando after my parent’s separated and I spent all my time going to that park," explained Moore. "The emotions that I felt being there and my relationship with my father merged together ... I just wanted to write from the heart and not think about any implications, which may have been foolhardy, but it was the story that just came out." In the film, Jim seeks distractions by following around two teenage girls, which begins innocently enough, but morphs into creepy obsession and blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Moore explains his emotional ties to the park and how childhood memory and current reality were blurred for him as well. "The father and the park are symbiotic because I can’t separate my father from Disney World. When I went back with my own kids the space that was so magical and so wonderful started to change because I saw stuff that I didn’t pick up on before: Parents having nervous breakdowns trying to calm their kids, fathers that looked miserable," explained Moore. "It became a different experience. I tried to link the two and go back to what it felt like with my father." Moore has not spoken to his father in a long time and felt like the film was a strange sort of message to him. Escape from Tomorrow, although deeply personal for Moore, is also a strange sort of message to his audience about emotional connections to space and the surrogate for intimacy technology provides.

Off screen at this year's Sundance Film Festival, some attendees paused for a moment to acknowledge the second Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Meanwhile, on screen a number of new films grappled with issues that some are hoping will make it onto the agenda of the new administration. On today's edition of Film Society's Daily Buzz, guests included former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich with director Jacob Kornbluth (Inequality For All), filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Citizen Koch), as well as filmmaker Park Chan Wook (Stoker) and Sundance Institute head Keri Putnam. Robert Reich is pounding the pavement in Park City in an attempt to raise awareness about widening economic inequality in this country. Addressing societal economic realities just as An Inconvenient Truth raised environmental issues, Jacob Kornbluth's Inequality for All is targeted at opening the eyes of everyday Americans. Reich and the filmmakers hope to affect change by mobilizing citizens. "We're at an extreme, economically divided moment," explained filmmaker Kornbluth. He noted that the goal is not to divide, but rather show that the issue affects rich, poor and the middle class alike. In the movie, Kornbluth follows Reich as he travels to advocate awareness of this divide. "Not only are we on a path to wider inequality with concentrated income and power at the very top, but it damages our economy," Reich explained during an interview with the Daily Buzz. "The wealthiest would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than they do now with a big share of one that's anemic." I wondered whether the reelected President understands the severity of the situation evidenced in Inequality for All. Reich said he's spoken with President Obama about the issue but he offered caution. "Here's the most important thing to understand: you can have the best person as your President and great people in Washington, but if there are not good people outside Washington pushing to make good things happen then nothing good will happen," Reich explained in the interview. For Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the story of their film Citizen Koch began four years ago when President Barack Obama was first inaugurated. They saw the extreme opinions on the right just days after his swearing in and, shortly after, they began investigating how right wing groups—some fueled by funding from the Koch brothers—were strategizing to make him a one term President. Along the way, Deal and Lessin travel to Scott Walker's Wisconsin and also talk with Republicans who are afraid that they are losing sight of the goals of their own party. "We hope that it will engage people in conversation, at the very least," Deal explained, adding: "We all have to hold everybody to account, including President Obama. This isn't a partisan film in that sense." Jacob Korbluth and Robert Reich concurred. "Nothing changes unless people outside Washington are mobilized an organized and energized and they've got to understand the facts," Reich concluded. "They've got to understand the truth and they've got to see the big picture and connect the dots and that's what we are trying to go." Guests: Critics Roundtable: Raj Roy - MoMA Interview: Inequality for All Jacob Kornbluth - Director Robert Reich - subject Interview: Citizen Koch Carl Deal - Director Tia Lessin - Director Interview: Stoker Park Chan Wook - Director Jeong Wonjo - Producer Emily Wells - Musician Festival Veteran: Keri Putnam - Sundance Institute

Director Anne Fontaine and star Naomi Watts on the reaction to their provocative "Two Mothers," Travis Mathews on working with James Franco on "Interior. Leather Bar.," festival veteran Christine Vachon of Killer Films, and more.