So in the midst of the most amazing RiverRun International Film Festival yet, I haven't really made time to blog....that is until tonight when I get to share a really cool interview with director Aaron Katz. We'll get to the fun stuff in a second, but first business. Next week, Monday, April 18 thru Thursday, April 21, we will be screening the indy hit Cold Weather.
Cold Weather was written, directed and edited by Aaron Katz, who also by the way graduated from the UNCSA School of Filmmaking. He has already seen success with films such as Quiet City and Dance Party, USA. Aaron will be in town to serve as a Juror for RiverRun and he has graciously agreed to stay on for a couple of days while we screen his latest work. He will be stopping by a/perture on Monday 4/18 and Tuesday 4/19 for a q&a session following each screening.
Check out the interview below and trailer below that:
What film do you remember from film school at UNCSA having the greatest influence on you and why?
There were a lot of movies I saw for the first time while in school.
It's hard to narrow it down to just one. For some reason the main
thing that's occurring to me is Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom
Beam starring Jim Varney. I've never actually seen this film as an
audience member, but when I was learning to project in the NCSA
archives this was one of our practice prints.
Did you know that wikipedia cites you as one of the two founders of the mumblecore movement? Can you define mumblecore for us in your own words? When you made your first film Dance Party USA did you think it would lead to a movement?
Mumblecore is odd for everyone who made Dance Party and the other two
movies as well. Though it's mentioned often in conjunction with the
movies we've made, it feels completely outside of any part of making
those movies. It was coined (apparently, I wasn't there) by Andrew
Bujalski's sound mixer in a bar in Austin, TX sometime in 2005. I
guess he made a joke about people mumbling and making sound recording
difficult. Somehow this caught on with journalists and began to be
used to describe low budget films made by people like Bujalski, Joe
Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers, and me. On the one hand it was pretty
useful with Dance Party (which we made right after graduating from
NCSA) because that movie was so small and we didn't have money to hire
a publicist or anything. Honestly, we were just happy to have people
writing about the movie we made. Beyond that though the term can feel
a little frustrating, especially because it frequently has a
pejorative slant. Fortunately I don't think it's had much impact with
Cold Weather and most of the reviews focus on the movie itself rather
than contextualizing it within mumblecore.
You've shown all of your films at SXSW so far, what is it about that particular festival that really attracts you?
My feeling is that if it wasn't for SXSW no one would have ever seen
any of my movies. Back in 2006 SXSW was the first festival Dance Party
played in and the reason it played there is because the head
programmer at the time was a guy named Matt Dentler. Matt watched
every cold submitted screener and was willing to take risks on films
and filmmakers that no one had ever heard of. Additionally Austin is a
fun city and the community of filmmakers both from Austin and there
for the festival is really great.
So Cold Weather is a mystery film, have you always been a fan of the genre and did you always want to make a mystery at some point in your career or did the story idea just come to you all at once with no regard for the genre?
I'm a huge fan of the mystery genre, particularly in book form. The
script was originally not a mystery. It was just a story about a
brother and sister living together and getting to know each other
better. At that time I happened to be reading a book (from around the
same time period as Sherlock Holmes) about a gentleman thief named
Raffles. I had been reading a lot of older crime fiction and it
started to creep into the script. At first I wasn't sure if it was a
good idea because it was totally unplanned, but then I started having
a lot of fun with it. It made a lot of sense to me to have real
characters interacting with things usually only encountered in genre
fiction.
You've gotten some pretty amazing reviews from critics like Manohla Dargis, Roger Ebert and Christy Lemire for Cold Weather..kudos...and it got picked up for distribution by IFC Films...when you were filming, did you get the vibe that Cold Weather was going to be "bigger" than your previous films?
We had a bigger budget so the production itself was on a somewhat
bigger scale. We definitely hoped that we'd get a positive response,
but mostly we wanted to make movie that we were proud of. It was
exciting that the people at IFC loved the movie and it's been great
that critics understand the film.
The poster for Cold Weather is pretty cool...did you come up with that idea? Will you sign ours?
I love the poster. Marc Ripper, who graduated with me in 2004 and
produced Dance Party designed it. He based it off of the covers of
Penguin crime paperbacks from the 60s. I will sign yours.
Do you think you might ever come back and shoot a film in Winston-Salem?
I love Winston-Salem and I'd love to shoot something there at some point.
Last question...we've heard that you like the milkshakes from Cookout...what is your go-to shake?
Cookout is one of the main reasons I love North Carolina. My favorite
shake is the peanut butter banana, but there's a ton of other good
ones as well. I'm hoping to get at least five or six while I'm in
town. I also love West End Cafe and I'm hoping to go there as many
times as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment