Films In and Around The 51st New York Film Festival: Afternoon of a Faun, The Age of Innocence, The Immigrant, Nebraska and more

On Monday, September 30th, Nancy Buirski’s Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq had its World Premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, the first of three sold-out screenings at the festival. I started working as an assistant for Ms. Buirski in June, and I have had the honor of assisting with this wonderful film for the past few months, leading up to its premiere at one of the world’s greatest film festivals.

It has been an amazing experience working on this movie, which is my first professional credit out of college (I am credited as a Researcher and a Production Assistant in the end credits), as well as assisting with the New York Film Festival screenings of the film. Additionally, I have helped promote Afternoon of a Faun by running its Facebook and Twitter pages, posting many of the wonderful interviews with Ms. Buirski and the incredible press surrounding the movie, including glowing reviews from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

The official synopsis for the film reads: Of all the great ballerinas, Tanaquil Le Clercq may have been the most transcendent. With a body unlike any before hers, she mesmerized viewers and choreographers alike - her elongated, race-horse physique became the new prototype for the great George Balanchine. Amazingly, she was the muse to not one great artist but two; both George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins loved her as a dancer and as a woman. Balanchine married her and Robbins created his famous version of Afternoon of a Faun for Tanny. Tanaquil Le Clercq was the foremost dancer of her day until it suddenly all stopped. At age 27 she was struck down by polio and paralyzed. She never danced again.(Above photograph by Misun Jun.)

The film features interviews with many of Tanny's best friends and luminaries in the dance world, including Jacques d'Amboise, Arthur Mitchell, Randy Bourscheidt and Barbara Horgan, all of whom attended the premiere (I had the opportunity to meet Mr. d'Amboise and Mr. Bourscheidt, which was very exciting). Also in attendance at the premiere were legendary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, actor Michael Stuhlbarg (who provides the voice of Jerome Robbins in the film) and author Fran Lebowitz. After the screening, Kent Jones conducted a wonderful Q&A with Ms. Buirski that you can watch here on the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. 

Not only was it very exciting to help organize the screening and the after-party, it was also a wonderful opportunity to see many of the incredible people who work at Sikelia Productions, who have always been so supportive. 

At the film's second sold-out screening at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, I was honored to receive a special thanks from Ms. Buirski in her opening remarks on the film.

The popularity of the film at the festival was amazing – a third screening was added to the final day of screenings by popular demand (in the esteemed company of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, no less). 

I also attended the NYFF51 Live: Spotlight on Documentary Filmmakers event at Lincoln Center, where Ms. Buirski and acclaimed documentary filmmakers Allison Berg and Francois Keraudren (The Dog) and Jehane Noujaim (The Square) spoke about their films.

Moving forward with the film, Afternoon of a Faun will be screening with UNICEF this upcoming Thursday at the United Nations on World Polio Day. There is an upcoming theatrical release planned for the picture, and it will air next year on PBS as part of the American Masters program. (Photograph to the right by Misun Jun.)

The night after the premiere of Afternoon of a Faun at the 51st New York Film Festival, Ms. Buirski won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Programming for her film The Loving Story, an amazing documentary that has won several awards over the past year, including a Peabody Award and a Gabriel Award. 

The New York Film Festival is an amazing event, and I was very lucky to get to attend a few other screenings at the festival. On Thursday, October 10th, I attended the twentieth anniversary screening of one of my favorite films, Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, at the Walter Reade Theater, with Scorsese introducing the film beforehand with Kent Jones. It was a beautiful restoration of a heartbreaking and powerful masterpiece. You can watch Scorsese's introduction here (I was in the second row of the theater).

I want to write in depth here about three other masterful films I saw at the festival - James Gray's The Immigrant, Alexander Payne's Nebraska and Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave, as well as two extraordinary films I saw outside of the festival - Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. 

Spoiler warning for all films reviewed below.

“You Are Not Nothing.” – James Gray’s The Immigrant

The first thing that struck me about James Gray’s The Immigrant, which I saw at the Francesca Beale Theater at Lincoln Center, were the faces of the actors in the film - so many haunted, gaunt and pale faces. People looked different in 1920s New York than they do today, and this is one of many important details that lend a great authenticity to this movie. One of the most beautiful-looking films I've seen in some time (photographed by Darius Khondji), the burlesque houses, crowded tenement buildings and spectacular magic shows for Ellis Island immigrants deeply rooted me in a time and place unlike anything I’ve seen since Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002).

Gray, one of my favorite filmmakers, participated in a Q&A with the audience after the screening. The film is full of breathtaking, sweeping images of 1920s New York, and yet, like all of Gray's work, this is a very intimate movie. I asked Mr. Gray if, when writing the film, he was thinking about the number of large set pieces compared to the more intimate scenes with only a few actors. Gray answered that The Immigrant is the kind of film United Artists might have released back in 1978, but these days, it is, of course, very difficult to secure funding for a large-scale, dramatic period piece of this nature. So, yes, he did write thinking about the number of expansive scenes versus the intimate ones, and tried to include many of the larger set-pieces in the opening of the movie, allowing the picture to slowly grow more intimate.

As the film opens, sisters Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Belva Cybulski, immigrants from Poland, arrive at Ellis Island. Belva is very ill from tuberculosis, and immigration officials escort her away to an infirmary. When their American aunt and uncle fail to meet them at Ellis Island, Ewa is nearly shipped back to Poland, before she crosses paths with Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a brothel-keeper on the Lower East Side. He offers Ewa a helping hand and a place to stay – provided that she work at his brothel and serve as a prostitute. Desperate to earn enough money to get her sister out of Ellis Island, Ewa agrees.

Ewa is referred to early on in the film as a ‘woman of low morals,’ as her behavior and promiscuity on the boat to America are called into question. Throughout the film, we watch as Ewa battles with her own sense of morality and what she feels she deserves. She tests her morality by continually engaging in behavior she feels certain will send her to hell, but in order to survive in America, she has no other choice. Late in the film, Ewa asks her aunt, “Is it a sin to want to be happy when you know you’ve done so many things wrong?” I felt myself growing an extreme distaste for Bruno, who subjects Ewa to so many awful experiences.

But in the same way that the characters in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) defy our expectations of who will rise to the occasion*, so, perhaps, does The Immigrant subvert our expectations of Bruno. Though both the audience and Ewa may initially revile Bruno, my heart ultimately broke for him by the end of the picture, because he is, I believe, a good man. He is truly and hopelessly in love with Ewa and is trying, in his own flawed way, to earn her love. The jealously, longing and fury in Phoenix’s performance is breathtaking; this is a great companion piece to his extraordinary performance in Gray’s masterpiece Two Lovers.

Jeremy Renner, as Orlando the Magician, enters midway through the movie and changes the dynamic entirely. Imbued with a bit of magical realism, his character shows Ewa that there’s something beyond the dreary life of prostitution. Again, though, our expectations are challenged and a harder truth sets in – while the dashing and charming Orlando appears to have all of the answers and offers Ewa a way out of this life, does he really love Ewa like Bruno loves her? And, ultimately, is he really looking out for Ewa any more than Bruno? 

There are not easy answers to these questions, and as the film goes on, the relationship between Ewa and Bruno grows more and more complex. Is Bruno taking advantage of her, or is he offering the best version of the American Dream of which he knows? Talking about the movie after the screening, Gray described the relationship between Bruno and Ewa as strangely “co-dependent." In the final scene of the movie, there is a forgiveness and understanding between these two that moved me deeply. The beautiful and haunting last shot of the film illustrates their separation and their connectedness. 

I came away from The Immigrant feeling so much for both of these characters. Joaquin Phoenix's Bruno belongs on a list with other recent characters in cinema who, for whatever reason, stay with me and earn such an unexpected amount of empathy (I think of Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, and, further back, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine). After the screening, I told Mr. Gray that I think his work is incredible - between The Immigrant and Two Lovers, he has made two of the finest movies of the last decade.

*(In her review of Nashville, Pauline Kael wrote, ‘Who watching the pious Haven Hamilton sing the evangelical ‘Keep a’ Goin,’ his eyes flashing with a paranoid gleam as he keeps the audience under surveillance, would guess that the song represented his true spirit, and that when injured he would think of the audience before himself?’)

Alexander Payne's Nebraska

There seems to be a unique and unspoken sadness in the lives of many Midwesterners. Perhaps it’s their taciturnity and the dry wit that covers up any trace of sorrow – they don’t necessarily talk about their problems with each other in great detail or neurotically analyze their anxieties and fears. They make for wonderful film characters because they ask for no pity whatsoever, and yet the sadness buried beneath their eyes endears us to them. How many filmmakers besides Alexander Payne make movies about these kinds of people?

Even on its first viewing, Payne's new film Nebraska feels like an old, warm friend. Filmed in beautiful black-and-white by Payne’s cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (the film looked absolutely astonishing on the large screen at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center), Nebraska has many of the qualities that make Payne’s work so distinct and memorable (most notably, it's a road-trip movie, one of my favorite sub-genres and a Payne specialty). We are introduced to many characters who at first seem like slightly satirical Midwestern send-ups, but are revealed, with time, to have “private fortitude and sadness all their own,” as Nick Pinkerton so elegantly wrote in his 2011 Village Voice interview with Payne. 

Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) of Billings, Montana believes he has won one million dollars, after receiving a letter in the mail from a Publishers Clearing House-like company informing him of his fortune. Chided by everyone around him as crazy and senile, Woody insists on traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect his money - even if it means walking there by himself. Full aware that the letter is a complete scam, his son David (Will Forte) reluctantly agrees to drive his father to Lincoln, hoping for Woody to find some kind of happiness in his final years.

It takes some time before we get a full understanding of how Woody’s family and friends marginalize and take advantage of him (although Nebraska certainly acknowledges Woody’s own faults, as well). Bruce Dern’s performance here is amazing because it slowly sneaks up on you. His most moving moments are entirely wordless; he has a kind of quiet understanding about his situation and how people perceive him, even though he is, by all accounts, decidedly deluded in his quest for his million dollars.

It’s these quiet moments – none of which ever come close to looking anything like 'acting' – that we see into Woody’s soul. We come to understand how important this money is for him and how his dignity is invested in collecting this million dollars.

I mention this because I don’t think I became entirely aware of the power of Dern’s performance until the end of the movie – this is a performance that could have simply been a man falling into incoherence and dementia. But in Woody, we see so much more – so much lost time, so many dreams deferred, so many regrets and yet that same Midwestern reticence. During the scenes in which the large pack of men in the Grant family stare at the camera as they all watch television together, even the smallest of small talk seems like a word too many.

Late in the film, when someone who works at the Publisher's Clearing House-like company in Lincoln asks David if his father suffers from dementia, David replies, “No. He just believes what people tell him.” That seems to be Woody’s weakness – he’s willing to take any and every thing at face value, and has allowed himself to be stepped on over the years.

Up until about two-thirds of the way through the film, we’ve only seen Kate (June Squibb), Woody's wife, humorously degrade and belittle her husband, and, like in many of Payne’s films, we think we have her figured out. But then Payne blindsides us. When the time comes, Kate stands up for Woody and defends him passionately to other members of his own family. In that moment, we see that she loves him deeply. The characters in this film are deeply full of love; most of the time, it's just masked and deflected by dry humor and a kind of laconic attitude. I see this in my uncles from East Texas. It makes me want to reach out and hug them tightly.

Roger Ebert once wrote that he does not "cry during sad moments in the movies, only during moments about goodness." During these moments, he experiences what he calls elevation when watching a movie - not exactly crying, but rather "the welling up of a few tears in [his] eyes, certain tightness in [his] throat, and a feeling of uplift: Yes, there is a good person, doing a good thing." There’s something to be said for the fact that nearly all of Payne’s movies, particularly About Schmidt, have this kind of effect on me. Nebraska continues the tradition. The end of this film has a moment of such genuine kindness and uplift that I struggled to keep it together. Payne knows how to end a movie. Everything I love about about Sideways, About Schmidt, The Descendants and Election is all here.

I want to acknowledge the amazing score by Mark Orton. Rarely is a director’s tone so well-served by such moving and sometimes hauntingly mournful music. It’s never an outright sad score; like Rolfe Kent’s beautiful work on About Schmidt, it just feels honest. Papamichael's work is also amazing - one of the many reasons Nebraska is so powerful is because of the visual poetry and beauty of this part of the country. And the screenplay by Bob Nelson will surely win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Nebraska is my favorite film of the year so far.

Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave

I don't have much to write about Steve McQueen's powerful new film 12 Years A Slave, if only because watching the movie is such a deeply visceral experience. It has four 'long-takes,' as it were, that I thought were truly extraordinary, including two scenes, one with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch and Adepero Oduye, and the other with Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o and Sarah Paulson, that are uniquely horrific, brilliantly staged and performed by everyone involved. The other two shots that deeply affected me (both of which are long close-up shots of Ejiofor) further illustrate why McQueen is the perfect filmmaker for this material - as he proved with Shame, he is an unflinching director.

Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips

Of the films I've seen recently, the one that took me by the biggest surprise was Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was attacked by armed Somali pirates in 2009.

Though the entire film is brilliant, the ending of Captain Phillips is as emotionally and politically complex a piece of filmmaking as I’ve seen. There is a sort of doomed inevitability that hangs over the characters in the second half of this film – Phillips knows, and actively tells, his captors that the United States would rather sink their lifeboat and kill all of them than let the Somalis win by reaching the African coast. And so Phillips becomes almost a kind of pawn in the larger game of American foreign policy.

Greengrass has always been a very experiential filmmaker – he’s determined for his audience to experience exactly what something feels like, often using the immediacy of handheld camerawork to achieve that effect (he is also interested in the minutia of how a ship works and how the crew would realistically respond to an attack like this, which lends the proceedings an unnerving authenticity). I have never been more affected by his style of filmmaking than I was here (Captain Phillips rivals 2006's United 93 as Greengrass' finest film). I felt like I was in that lifeboat with Phillips and the Somali pirates, and I felt the complex moral stakes for all of them that most other filmmakers would have ignored. They were are all human beings in that lifeboat. I don’t mean to indicate that I ever sided with the pirates, but I felt an overwhelming sense of despair for them, and for Phillips, as well. They don't ever stand a chance against the American warships following them.

In the last five minutes of this film, Tom Hanks does some of the finest acting of his career. Overcome with shock, Hanks breaks down as the American medical team examines him. But it’s more than just shock. It’s an indescribable kind of sadness that creeps in whenever an experience ends so suddenly – his life had become living in that lifeboat with these four men. And in an instant, the three remaining pirates in the lifeboat are shot dead. Although Phillips is safe, he's covered in the blood of the men with whom he's spent the past few days fighting, obeying and, at some points, understanding. It’s a victory, but it’s also strangely horrifying. I’ve never felt quite like this at the end of a movie.

In those closing, cathartic minutes of the film, I was suddenly able to grasp the horror of what I had just seen over the past two hours - as if the rest of the picture were an old memory, almost too immediate and unnerving in the moment to fully comprehend.

The ending of Captain Phillips embraces all of the moral ambiguities inherent in such a story, and struck me similarly to the ending of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty – it's a triumph for the United States, but at what cost for the film’s protagonist? Captain Phillips is one of the best films of the year. Watch Hanks and Greengrass talk about these moving final five minutes of the film here, and click here to read the amazing story of actor Barkhad Abdi, who gives a great performance.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity

Seven years ago, I staggered out of the theater after seeing director Alfonso Cuarón’s breathtaking film Children of Men. With his first movie since Children of Men, the awe-inspiring space opera Gravity, Cuarón has done it again. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as astronauts Ryan Stone and Matt Kowalski, who are stranded in outer space after an accident destroys their shuttle. 

Gravity marks the third consecutive year in which a masterful American filmmaker has used 3D as a storytelling technique and advanced the technology to new heights (Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 2011 and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi last year are, along with Gravity, the finest uses of 3D I’ve encountered). But the technical achievements in this movie go far beyond the outstanding use of 3D.

The very concept of space in Gravity is fascinating, because Cuarón – who is famous for his long takes – essentially stages the film in a small number of unbroken shots, which not only give a fluid sense of what it must feel like to move around in outer space, but also allow for a kind of operatic beauty to every movement in the film (like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are many scenes in which Gravity resembles a kind of ballet). There’s an incredible majesty to nearly everything we see in this film, thanks to the camera movement (the cinematographer is the brilliant Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot Children of Men and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and The New World) and the exquisite choreography of the actors.

All of this would be impressive as technical achievements alone, but the real brilliance of Gravity is how camera and actor choreography are used so effectively in the service of storytelling. In order to really be immersed in a film, you have to know where you are and understand the physical geography of the space in the movie. This is a particularly tough task for a film that takes place in outer space, and yet I cannot think of a recent film that so fluidly kept me aware of where I was, and therefore connected me so deeply to what our protagonist is experiencing.

The performances here by Bullock and Clooney are amazing. Although the film has its loud moments, Gravity is also a picture that understands the power of silence. Most big-budget Hollywood entertainment is aggressively loud and oftentimes feels like an assault on the audience, but Cuarón holds us captivated as we are confronted with the eerie quiet of space. Gravity is an extraordinary film.

May 16th, 2013 - My Last Day at Sikelia Productions

On Thursday, May 16th, 2013, I had my last day interning at Sikelia Productions, where I have been an intern for the past year-and-a-half. Over the course of the past eighteen months, I have had so many joyous experiences working at the office of my lifelong hero, Martin Scorsese, including helping out every now and then on the set of Mr. Scorsese's new film The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio; assisting three-time Academy Award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker with her work; working as a research assistant and doing publicity for acclaimed documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski on her films The Loving Story and Tanaquil Le Clercq: Afternoon of a Faun; working as a production assistant on the set of the HBO pilot Guest Host with Fran Lebowitz; meeting Mr. DiCaprio on several occasions; receiving life advice from the incredible assistant editors Red Charyszyn and Scott Brock; and traveling around the city to deliver packages to the most extraordinary people.

Of course, we are not supposed to go into detail about the internship, so I'll simply say it was consistently the adventure of a lifetime. Earlier this year, for instance, I stood in the same room as Scorsese, George Lucas and Ang Lee!

On my last day at my internship, I had the most moving send-off. I was led unknowingly into the office kitchen to find the whole Sikelia team, including Thelma Schoonmaker, waiting for me with Sprinkles cupcakes, a wonderful card and DVDs of The King of Comedy, Public Speaking and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death. I have never been so moved - and I'd love to share the moment with you in this post.

On my final day, I entered the office feeling very aware that this could be the last time I would be in any of these rooms. As I sat behind the front desk midday, Kyle, one of my fellow interns, came up to me and said we were both needed in the kitchen. I followed Kyle into the kitchen, and suddenly I realized that there were many people in there, kind of crowded around in a circle. I saw Thelma Schoonmaker standing in the middle of the group, and all of a sudden, everyone started clapping. I realized suddenly that they were gathered around for my last day!

I was given a bow-tied gift, which included The King of Comedy and Public Speaking, quite literally the only two Scorsese films I did not already own on DVD, as well a card signed by everyone in the office. Thelma also gave me a DVD of A Matter of Life and Death, one of the masterworks directed by her late husband, the legendary filmmaker Michael Powell. Although I have seen and loved Powell's films The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I have not yet seen A Matter of Life and Death, and Thelma said I would love it. She also said she wanted to give me a copy of The Canterbury Tales, a lesser-known Powell and Pressburger picture she thought I would enjoy. They thanked me profusely for all of my help, and as I was led to the cupcakes, Thelma asked me, "What is your senior thesis film about?"And so I pitched my film to this legendary group of people!

I ended the day by meeting a friend at the Village East Cinema to see the last New York City showing of Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price, which was an incredible surprise – a rich and moving film with an awe-inspiring performance by Dennis Quaid. Bahrani's film is one of the best films I've seen in a long time. We were two of only a handful of people in the theater, and it troubles me deeply that more people aren't seeking out this kind of exceptional, well-made movie. Don't ever tell me there aren't masterful films currently in cinemas - they're just usually not playing at the multiplex. At Any Price joins Mud, Frances Ha, Before Midnight, Stories We Tell and The Place Beyond the Pines as one of the year's best films.

By the end of the day, it was as if everything had coalesced into something magical. I was reminded of that wonderful song by Van Morrison. 

By the way, the first official trailer for Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street was released recently, and it is perhaps the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It's particularly amazing for me to watch this trailer, having already been exposed to so many of the scenes that are featured in the trailer. As my fellow intern Natalia Lehaf said to the rest of the interns, it feels like this movie is our baby - we saw it through pre-production, the entire shooting period and now well into the post-production period. It's hard for me to believe that the movie I watched and heard Thelma edit in her office is the new picture from the greatest filmmaker of all time.

I haven't been this excited about a trailer since the trailer for The Departed was released back in the summer of 2006 (I watched the trailer over and over again online, and I remember by the time I finally saw it play before a movie - Michael Mann's Miami Vice - I could already quote every line). 

Mr. Scorsese has had a wonderful year so far. In February, Scorsese was selected to deliver the 2013 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, making him the first filmmaker to receive this honor. Previous lecturers have included Arthur Miller, Robert Penn Warren, Toni Morrison and John Updike, but never before a filmmaker. The day after the Jefferson Lecture, Scorsese spoke at a NYU Alumni Luncheon at NYU's campus in Washington D.C. with Tisch Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell.

In May, Variety revealed that Andrew Garfield and Ken Watanabe will star in Scorsese's next film, Silence, an adaptation of the novel by Shusaku Endo that Scorsese has longed to make for years. In March, Scorsese was ranked #3 on Forbes Magazine's list of the Most Influential Celebrities. And after Roger Ebert passed away, Scorsese had some wonderful words about his friendship with the great film critic.

Finally, here is Scorsese speaking about the restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which his Film Foundation beautifully restored. And, for a great read, here's an article from Flickering Myth about why Goodfellas has the best film soundtrack of all time, as well as an article about what your favorite Scorsese film says about you.

In other news about my heroes, Robert De Niro is re-teaming with director David O. Russell in the new film American Hustle, which already stars Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner. This is wonderful news, as O. Russell is one of the best filmmakers currently working, and his new film stars many actors who gave outstanding performances in his last two masterpieces, The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook. You may remember that I was very passionate about De Niro and O. Russell winning Academy Awards earlier this year - for Best Supporting Actor and Best Director, respectively - for their extraordinary work on Silver Linings Playbook. Although I was very disappointed they did not win, I was very happy to see Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained), Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) win Oscars. There really is no excuse for Tony Kushner not winning Best Adapted Screenplay for Lincoln, though.

The win for Ang Lee, who is a graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts, is particularly exciting, as it marks the fourth time in the past ten years that the Best Director Oscar has gone to a Tisch alumnus (after Lee for Brokeback Mountain in 2006, Martin Scorsese for The Departed in 2007 and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men in 2008). When looking at this year's Academy Awards, though, I have to agree with this article from the Toronto Star, which argues that Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln were "far more truthful" than Argo, but unfortunately "nuance doesn't make you want to pump your first in the air."

In my next post, I hope to write about the months leading up to my graduation in May, including the production of my senior thesis film You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory. 

We Can't Be Direct, So We End Up Saying The Weirdest Things

As I finish this latest post, the snowstorm known as Nemo is coming down on the East Coast, and I am taking a moment to catch up on many things from the past year about which I haven't yet written. Forgive the episodic nature of this post - I will be jumping around quite a bit. It was very depressing to make a schedule for my last semester of college at NYU last November, but now that I am already well into my final semester itself, it is a strange feeling. There are so many film shoots on the horizon (I served as Assistant Director for my friend Erica Rose's senior thesis film shoot for two weeks in January, and I have four more shoots, including my own, coming up very quickly) that graduation seems like the least of my concerns at this moment. But, like it or not, it is rapidly approaching.

Over the past year, Kenneth Lonergan's masterpiece Margaret has finally received some of the attention it deserves. Here's a wonderful New York Times piece on Margaret, as well as a link to one of Jim Emerson's essays on the film, where he writes that he's "never before seen a movie that fully recognized what human behavior is like." I was very sad to miss a screening of Lonergan's Director's Cut of the film at the Sunshine Cinema this summer, where Lonergan, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Thelma Schoonmaker held a Q&A after the film (I did walk past the Sunshine as the screening ended, and I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman getting on his bicycle and taking off into the night). Thankfully, I now have the Margaret Blu-Ray with both the Director's Cut and the original theatrical cut.

On August 13th, I received tickets to the New York City premiere of David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis at the Museum of Modern Art with Ben and Erica. I sat in the front row, too, which meant being a few feet away from Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and David Cronenberg when they spoke before the film. Stanley Tucci, Judah Friedlander and others were in the audience, as well.

In early September, immediately after my return from Austin and the first day of my senior year, my friends and I obtained tickets to the New York City premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in glorious 70mm at the Ziegfeld Theatre. We waited outside of the theatre for our most anticipated film of the year (and, in my mind, one of the best films of 2012). Amy Adams and Harvey Weinstein introduced the film (ironically, Paul Thomas Anderson could not be there, as he was doing a surprise screening of The Master in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse), and after the screening, many of us were left speechless. I've written about my love for The Master in my post on the best films of the year, but I was immediately eager to see the film again.

That next Friday night, my mother and grandmother flew into New York, along with my friend Bolton Eckert and his family, to stay for the weekend and see the Off-Broadway production of Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote (the Eckert family are relatives of the Foote family). After our Advanced Production class on Friday, my friends (including roommates Bobb Barito and Adam Boese) and I met Bolton at the Lincoln Square cinema to see The Master for a second time on opening night - again in beautiful 70mm. It was a packed house, and for the second time in a week, I was treated to a masterpiece of cinema with many by my side.

After the screening, Bolton and I journeyed downtown to meet my mom, grandmother and the Eckert and Foote families at Tavern on Jane, the wonderful West Village restaurant owned by Horton Foote, Jr. (and one of the key locations in my film Jake the Cinephile). As always, I really enjoyed spending time with the Foote family.

The next evening, thanks to Bolton's great family, we enjoyed dinner at the historic 21 Club with many of the great folks from Wharton, Texas. After dinner, we saw Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote, in which Mr. Foote's extremely talented daughter, Hallie Foote, and her equally talented husband Devon Abner, both performed. The production, as is typical with any revival of Mr. Foote's work, was exceptional, and being that it was the closing night of the play, we were invited to attend the cast after-party afterward, which was a great amount of fun.

During my family's trip to New York, we also saw the revival of Evita on Broadway, a musical with which I was not very familiar. In October, I was lucky enough to see Him, a new play by Daisy Foote (another of Horton's children) with Will and Leslie Eckert. The play was a beautiful work, and Hallie Foote once again commanded the stage.

Returning to The Master for a moment, I had the chance to see the film in 70mm a third time at Village East Cinema, and again I was struck by the beauty of the film.

On Thursday, October 11th, Mike Cheslik and I went to a screening of Seven Psychopaths at the Cantor Film Center, followed by a Q&A with the film's writer and director, Martin McDonagh. McDonagh is one of my heroes, as his play The Pillowman easily ranks among my all-time favorite plays (after seeing an outstanding production of the play in 2007 at Austin's Hyde Park Theatre, I frequently used monologues from the show for auditions and later directed a scene from the play for my Sight and Sound: Studio final at NYU). McDonagh gave a great Q&A with the students, and the film - starring Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Colin Farrell and Woody Harrelson - is hilarious. McDonagh's first feature film, In Bruges (2008), was a masterpiece, and this is a wonderfully deranged follow-up. I can't wait to see his next film (or play - I had a fantastic time seeing his A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway in 2010).

The next week, the Fusion Film Festival held an advance screening of Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer's film Cloud Atlas at the Cantor Film Center, as the Launch Event for the 2013 Fusion Film Festival. This movie was too much fun, and I really wish it had been a bigger success upon its release - with six different narratives, genre-hopping ambition and an all-star ensemble (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant) willing to play any role, gender or race, Cloud Atlas is unlike anything I've ever seen attempted onscreen before.

I had another amazing semester with the Tisch Dean's Scholars. In September, for the second year in a row, we received box seats at a New York Mets baseball game at the historic Citi Field. We were treated to fantastic food from Shake Shack, a great game (the Mets beat the Miami Marlins) and quality time with Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell and Tisch faculty. After the game, I enjoyed some late night snacks with a few friends at the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy.

In late November, the Scholars attended a dance performance titled The Tempest Replica by the group Kidd Pivot at the Joyce Theater. It was a truly outstanding show, with a fascinating dance interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. For our final meeting of the semester, the Dean's Scholars met at Color Me Mine, a popular pottery studio in Tribeca, where we each hand painted a piece of pottery that was then put in the fire and delivered to us (I chose a piggy bank).

Already during this current semester, I went on a tour of 30 Rockefeller Center with the Dean's Scholars group, which was a fascinating opportunity to explore the NBC building. We visited the set of Saturday Night Live and many other shows. Later this semester, we are taking a trip to Washington D.C. over Spring Break, which will be an enormous amount of fun.

I haven't written in great detail about my internship for professional reasons, but suffice to say my time there this past year - and particularly this summer - has been incredible. The opportunities have included meeting Leonardo DiCaprio several times (after shooting one day, he came into the office and recognized me from an earlier encounter and said, "Hey, how's it going?" and I was flabbergasted); being in the same room as Scorsese, DiCaprio, and writer Terence Winter while they work together on the script; being on set for the first day of shooting Scorsese's new film The Wolf of Wall Street; and late nights at the office with the other interns. With this internship, I really can't believe it's my lifelong hero, smiling and nodding his head at me as he walks out the door of the office.

By the way, congratulations are in order for Mr. DiCaprio, after winning the National Board of Review's Best Supporting Actor award last December for his extraordinary work in Django Unchained (as well as receiving a Golden Globe nomination for the performance). Sadly, the Academy once again did not nominate DiCaprio for his work. With brilliant and complex recent performances in Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (2008), Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011) and now Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, DiCaprio is unquestionably the best actor of his generation, and I wish the Academy would recognize him.

Congratulations are in order for Mr. Scorsese, as well, for winning two Emmys this fall for Outstanding Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming, for the masterful George Harrison: Living in the Material World, and to Thelma Schoonmaker, for winning the Gucci award for women's achievement in filmmaking in August.

While interning at Sikelia Productions this past semester, I also been worked with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Nancy Buirski with research for her new film, as well as promoting her extraordinary film The Loving Story in advance of its U.S. Theatrical Premiere in December (it was also shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and played on HBO earlier in 2012). Some of the Sikelia interns and I had a wonderful time attending a screening of The Loving Story at the Maysles Cinema in December, after which Buirski participated in a Q&A with the audience. It was such an honor to be a part of her work.

Speaking of Scorsese, Time Out New York released a list of the 100 Best New York City Films earlier this year that's pretty exceptional (they were wise enough to include films like Margaret and James Gray's Two Lovers, a powerful film that features another great performance from Joaquin Phoenix). They missed quite a few New York classics, though. Where are Gangs of New York (2002), Raging Bull (1980), The Godfather Part II (1974), Prince of the City (1981), Bringing Out The Dead (1999), The Age of Innocence (1993), A Bronx Tale (1993) and New York, New York (1977)? But I can't complain when the list as a whole is so good.

Sight and Sound Magazine announced the results of their very famous Greatest Films Poll this summer, which only comes around every ten years. This year was particularly notable because, for the first time in fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) took the place of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film ever made. I have to admit, I think I prefer the Directors Top 100 to the Critics Top 100 for this decade's Sight and Sound Poll. The directors rank many of my personal favorites higher than the critics, with Taxi Driver at #5, Raging Bull at #12, Goodfellas at #48 and Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978) at #91. It's particularly fascinating to read the top ten lists from our finest living filmmakers, including Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann (who just turned 70 last week) and Quentin Tarantino.

All in all, there are so many pictures in the works by many of my heroes - according to a report, Scorsese is going to executive produce a film version of Roger Ebert's memoir, while Al Pacino has been cast as Joe Paterno in a film by Brian De Palma. Meanwhile, Scorsese has all kinds of amazing projects in the works.

Going back into this past summer, it was my first summer in New York, and it was a fantastic one. Most of my time was split between working at my internship at Sikelia Productions and intense pre-production for my film Jake the Cinephile. I like our neighborhood quite a lot. Celebrities are always out and about - I've seen Sam Rockwell walking his dog near our apartment, passed Adam Sandler on Prince Street, watched as Colin Farrell and director Niels Arden Oplev shoot a new picture on my street, and noticed Susan Sarandon at the cinema near my apartment.

I had a wonderful Fourth of July holiday, seeing the new Pixar film Brave with my friend Jess, and then spending time with friends at a rooftop cookout in Brooklyn. Later that evening, I had some homemade pulled pork with friends on a Manhattan rooftop and watched the official city fireworks. The summer was full of fun activities, including a great afternoon picnic in Prospect Park with friends.

The summer was a lot of fun in terms of film, too - three of my favorite filmmakers - Spike Lee, Woody Allen and Oliver Stone - all released terrific movies: Red Hook Summer, To Rome With Love and Savages.

Speaking of Spike Lee, he was kind enough to both ReTweet and reply to some of my Tweets regarding my admiration of his work. I wrote, "Every one of your films has had such an impact on me, ever since I saw 25th Hour at age twelve in cinemas," and "Vulture interview was outstanding. Cannot wait for Red Hook Summer. With love and admiration from a NYU Tisch senior." He replied, "Many Thanks. NYU VIOLETS." He also Re-Tweeted my link to a great interview with him.

Throughout May, June and July, the pre-production on Jake the Cinephile was nonstop. After shooting the promo video for the film with Bobb, I launched my IndieGoGo campaign for the film (to which many of my friends and family so generously contributed). Soon after, actor Tom Corbisiero very kindly drove my cinematographer Ben Dewey and me upstate to scout the Beacon Theater in Beacon, New York, which served as an excellent location for the picture. In preparation for the shoot, I re-watched and took a lot of notes on Scorsese's The Aviator (2004) and Taxi Driver (1976), which both influenced Jake the Cinephile quite a bit (I'm more convinced than ever that The Aviator is one of Scorsese's greatest achievements - it is a masterpiece, flawless in every respect). Later, Ben and I had a pre-production night where we watched scenes from The Aviator, Taxi Driver and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) for reference, as we shot-listed for Jake the Cinephile. The coming weeks were full of meetings with my producers, Erica Rose and Harry Tarre, rehearsals with actress Bethany McHugh and script supervisor Nicole Cobb and a camera test in Queens with the Red Scarlet Camera and anamorphic adapters.

The feedback on the edit of Jake the Cinephile this fall semester has been really fantastic. At the end of the semester, I had a wonderful phone conversation with Ray Hubley, the editor of Dead Man Walking, who expressed his admiration for Jake the Cinephile. He said the film has taken quite a journey over the semester. He applauded the thought and time put into every cut, and encouraged me to never let go of my own compass, finding my own way with the edit of the film. I've never been so proud of a film I did - I feel it's the most fully-realized visualization of my fears and anxieties that I've made so far. Hopefully my senior thesis film, You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, will go even further. Jake the Cinephile will soon be picture-locked, thanks to the incredible work of my friend and editor Jonah Greenstein.

Speaking of my thesis film, my Advanced Production class with Yemane Demissie has been the best and most rewarding course of my college experience. It is both an intricate production class and an endlessly helpful writing workshop, and I am very lucky to be in the class again this semester as pre-production begins on my new film. The eleven other students who are making their films this spring are such thoughtful and mature filmmakers, and I look forward to all of us making our own pictures this coming year.

I had a very nice Thanksgiving in Austin, and I want to thank my friend Bolton Eckert for filming my late aunt's house over Thanksgiving break and helping me with a small family documentary I wanted to shoot in the wake of her passing (he's studying film in Los Angeles right now). Once back in New York after Thanksgiving, I continued preparing for my advanced film. Adam, Bobb and I received a Christmas care package from my mom, complete with nerf guns, Christmas decorations and candy, food galore, and slug zombies.

For our final Advanced Production class, we watched Michael Haneke’s devastating new film Amour, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. It appeared near the top of many end-of-year top ten lists, and deservedly so. After a long two day ordeal at LaGuardia Airport attempting to get back to Austin, I finally returned for winter break, just in time to catch the Austin press screening of Tom Hooper's outstanding Les Miserables a little more than a week before it opened.

I'm late on congratulating my heroes, but I want to acknowledge that Robert De Niro, my all-time favorite actor, has had quite a wonderful year. He gave one of his best performances in David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, and he received his seventh Oscar nomination for his work earlier this month (he deserves to win the award). He has been ignored for so many powerful performances (this is only his seventh nomination). His work in Mean Streets (1973), The King of Comedy (1983), Once Upon A Time in America (1984), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), Heat (1995), A Bronx Tale (1993), Wag the Dog (1997), Jackie Brown (1997), New York New York (1977), The Good Shepherd (2006), Everybody's Fine (2009) and Stone (2010), among many others, was overlooked by the Academy. He was also excellent in Paul Weitz's Being Flynn earlier this year. He received the Hollywood Supporting Actor Award for his performance in Silver Linings Playbook, and later won the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. In Roger Ebert's review of Silver Linings Playbook, he writes that he's "been on an almost lifelong journey with Robert De Niro, and [feels] intimately familiar with him as an actor." "Here," Ebert writes, "his work unobtrusively charmed my socks off." Congratulations to cinema's finest actor and my hero on an outstanding year.

Since receiving his seventh Oscar nomination, De Niro has deservedly been celebrated around Hollywood. The American Cinematheque, in association with The Actors Studio, held a retrospective of De Niro's work, billed as an In-Person Tribute to Robert De Niro at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles, screening Silver Linings Playbook (with De Niro in attendance), as well as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Cape Fear (1991) and Awakenings (1990). With more and more talk building around De Niro's ninth collaboration with Martin Scorsese, The Irishman, as well as De Niro getting his footprints in cement in Hollywood, thankfully people are recognizing the greatest film actor of all time for his consistently extraordinary work. And in one of the most moving interviews I've ever seen, De Niro gets particularly emotional when discussing his work in Silver Linings Playbook. It's very exciting to see my all-time favorite actor receive such recognition (if only I had been alive to see him win Best Actor for Raging Bull in 1981). And, thankfully, in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, De Niro said he'd like to do "at least two [more films with Scorsese]" to "make it an even number - ten," adding that that's his "obsessive-compulsiveness." There is no actor I love and respect more than Robert De Niro.

In late January, I went to see Scorsese's Mean Streets at Film Forum with Ben, Jonah and Spencer. The film was screening as part of Film Forum's New Yawk New Wave film series, and although I've seen Mean Streets an endless number of times (it is one of my top ten films of all time), it was extraordinary getting to see the picture on the big screen, particularly in advance of shooting my senior thesis film in April (my film draws a lot of inspiration thematically, stylistically and visually from Mean Streets). There are few films that shake, enthrall and move me as deeply as this one - one day, I'll get around to writing a full essay on what the picture means to me.

Although I released my end-of-year Top Ten List of 2012 exactly a month ago, I need to revisit the list and update it with several films I saw in early January, including Gus Van Sant's outstanding Promised Land, David Chase's Not Fade Away, Michael Haneke's Amour (I needed to see the film on the big screen, at Film Forum, before putting it on my list) and especially Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty. Looking back on the year in film, I have to admit that the most affecting piece of cinema, for me, was unquestionably Silver Linings Playbook. Last month, I ranked the film at #2 on my Top Ten (just behind The Master), but I really do feel that Russell's film is the best picture of the year. No other movie had such deep understanding and care for its characters, and, in my opinion, a stronger directorial vision. Without my realizing it, the film sort of shifted my attitude last semester - Russell's movie hears the call of a misunderstood man (boy, does this film accurately capture the feeling of having so much going on inside your head), but without ever losing the darkness, Russell answers that call with love and warmth. The film acknowledges the pain and delusions of every character in its sight, and it's downright kinetic in the way it keeps up with the whims and obsessions of these same characters. The lifelike way in which the film changes course in the middle of any given scene reminds me, actually, of Margaret.

Every time I go back to see this film, I am reminded of how movies can make you feel and come to define an entire section of your life. For the past few months, I've been living with Silver Linings Playbook, and I think it should win the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (here's an excellent video essay on why Press Play thinks the film should win, as well). Of course, to talk about the year in film as a competition seems inappropriate. All nine Best Picture nominees are extraordinary films, and having seen a large number of them more than once, I feel deeply tied to many of these pictures. When you look back on 2012, it will be the year of Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Amour, as well as other masterpieces that weren't nominated, such as The Master, Moonrise Kingdom and Flight. I spend a lot of time in cinemas, and I've come to understand many things from this year's great films. 2013 will have a tough time matching 2012 in terms of movie quality.

There were an overwhelming amount of tragic deaths in 2012 (as there are any year, but perhaps this year seemed worse with the passing of my aunt). Gangster Henry Hill, the subject of Scorsese's Goodfellas, died this summer. Mr. Hill's story was first told in the outstanding nonfiction book Wiseguy by Nick Pileggi. Not only is Goodfellas my all-time favorite film, I've probably seen it more times than any other movie, so I have a certain love for Mr. Hill's life story and background. Here is a great interview with Mr. Hill. His death brings to mind one of the saddest scenes in Goodfellas, when Joe Pesci kisses his mother goodbye before he is about to get "made," and Hill (Ray Liotta) says in voiceover, "You know, we always called each other goodfellas. Like you said to somebody, you're gonna like this guy. He's all right. He's a good fella. He's one of us. You understand? We were goodfellas. Wiseguys."

This summer, the great writer and director Nora Ephron also tragically passed away. I saw many of her films theatrically at a young age, including Michael (1996), Hanging Up (2000) and particularly You've Got Mail (1998), which I'll never forget seeing on Christmas Eve of 1998 with my mom and aunt. Oddly enough, 1990's My Blue Heaven (always a favorite of mine, starring Steve Martin and written by Ephron) was also loosely based on the life of Henry Hill, and Ephron's husband was Nick Pileggi, the brilliant author of Wiseguy and co-screenwriter of Goodfellas and Casino (1995).

The list of names goes on - Frank Pierson, screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke; author Gore Vidal; the wonderful film critic Andrew Sarris; the incredible cinematographer Harry Savides, who shot Zodiac (2007), Milk (2008), Greenberg (2010), Elephant (2003) and American Gangster (2007); and NYU's own Time Keeper, who passed away in October.

I wrote earlier that I'd like to devote an entire post or essay to Mean Streets. The same can easily be said for Goodfellas and The Departed. Re-watching both films recently, I was reminded of how so many choices I make in my work as a filmmaker come from these movies. But that's not simply because I want to pay homage to them - it's because these films have influenced much more than just the way I think about films. The Departed and Goodfellas are such instrumental parts of my life that they influence how I experience and remember things. Both movies are tied strongly to so many events in my life - watching these movies, I'm transported to a different time and place, to memories that exist far outside the film itself. Yes, I would love to write long essays about all of these films and what their various parts mean to me, but time just slips away.

There are many more things to write about, but it's the most hectic semester yet, and I can never seem to write about all of the things I wish I could. One day.

On your way out of this post, check out this Gentleman Party sketch directed by Mike Cheslik! It briefly features my voice talent near the end, but more importantly, it's very funny.