In the last couple of weeks, you couldn’t open a major New York publication without coming across Noah Baumbach and his perfectly coiffed hair. The New York Times and The New Yorker each gave Baumbach and his cowriter-muse-gf Greta Gerwig the profile treatment (Gerwig had her own in New York magazine), all in celebration of Frances Ha, the director’s sixth feature and a career turning point. Following a 27-year-old New York dancer (Gerwig) who’s basically trying to get her shit together, Frances was shot in romantic black and white, and on a budget far smaller than Baumbach’s grown accustomed to. After the succes of 2005′s The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach was vaulted into a certain tier of directors who make indie films that aren’t really that indie. (His last two films, Greenberg and Margot at the Wedding, featured A-list stars). But Frances, shot guerilla-style on the streets of New York, functions as a bright, spirited and very endearing eff you to conventional moviemaking. It’s also one of the most complex character pieces to come out in recent memory. We spoke to the director about his fixations with authors, our late twenties, and the push-pull of living your life in New York.

Frances Ha is more stylized than your other films with a great deal of motion. You’ve mentioned the French New Wave, but I’m wondering if any of that has anything to do with Greta Gerwig, who seems to be a very mobile person?
Yeah, I think so. I was conscious of showing Frances in her environment. Partly because the environment and the locations are very much part of the film, and the movie is divided by its different locations. I think also, because Greta is such a great physical actor. She’s very funny, physically, and she kind of puts her whole body into the performance. So I felt it was important—to show her, to show her body. It’s a lot of movement, but it’s not always getting anywhere.

There’s always an writer in your films—Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale, Ben Stiller writes letters in Greenberg, and in Frances, Greta is like an author with her choreography. Is this just a biographical detail that keeps seeping in, or do you feel like stories need these characters?
And Nicole Kidman’s character is also an author in Margot. It’s partly that I grew up with writers and I know a lot of writers, and it might just be a kind of anthropology I’m familiar with, so I’m drawn to it. There’s something interesting to me about people who want to create. There’s a psychology of people who are trying to find their own voices as human beings. I suppose it also works the same way if they’re trying to find their voice, or have another voice as authors, so it’s tied into that too.

People’s late 20s seem to be an area you’ve explored a lot. Do you feel like it still holds fertile ground for you, or are you ready to move on?
Let me think of a way to say it: I think most people for their whole lives deal with the idea of themselves versus their realities—the story they’ve written in their head of their life, and their real life. I think that’s something that keeps coming up. It comes up for healthy people and unhealthy people. I don’t think any of us ever stop contending with that in some way. Obviously in Greenberg, there’s a larger chasm between the story he’s written for himself and the story he’s living.

So you don’t really think of it as being about age, it’s about a certain pivotal moment.
Yeah. But I think when you’re 27, that’s a major moment. It’s one of the first—it can be one of the first major transitions into adulthood. And I think it’s one that you often don’t know is happening. I am interested in that stuff, but I think with Frances, we’re sort of going right to the source. This is where it begins.

Is there something about being in New York that brings a kind of grim urgency to the process of growing up?
I think there is something to New York that does. There’s both the romance of New York, and the history of going to New York to make it. The lure of the city and also the city that can eat you up and spit you out. So there’s that tradition, certainly. I also think, this is something we were very interested in that’s very true right now: the economics of living in New York. We wanted that to be very real and true for Frances. I mean, that also raises the stakes and the urgency. She has to leave because she can’t afford it. It’s played for some comedy in the movie but also it’s a very real concern for her. Many of her decisions in the movie have economic components to them.

Money is very deterministic in New York right now.
New York used to be a place where you could live as an artist. There’s even a line in the movie where Sophie says “All the artists in New York are rich.”

This is obviously Greta’s movie, but talk to me about casting some of the suppporting actors, like Adam Driver.
Adam’s such a force of nature, he’s so good, and he’s great on Lena’s show. He auditioned for me and—I think this is true for Girls as well—there’s a really exciting pool of young New York actors. Almost everybody in Frances auditioned for their roles and it was a real pleasure to see these people and be introduced to all these people. Mickey [Sumner], Mike Zegan, and even people who have small parts in the movie who are really funny, interesting actors, and it reminds me in a way of New York movies that I loved when I was a kid, like Desperately Seeking Susan or After Hours. They had all these great actors from the city, and then you’d start to see them in other people’s movies, and then they became stars. It was sort of exciting to work with these people.

In production, you called Francis “Untitled Digital Workshop,” and the next film you’re working on is still called “Untitled Public School Project,” also with Greta. Can you tell me about how far along you are?
We’re still in the middle of making it. Still shooting. I’m not sure when I’ll be done.

Do you feel good about it?
Oh yeah. I feel really good.

I live in a ditch dug with my bare hands and thieve wi-fi from the local library, so I wasn’t aware that Kanye West was playing on Saturday Night Live just a few days after going on a rant about how he wasn’t a celebrity and how he refused to play nice for the camera. I thought he was speaking hypothetically, you know? But ‘ye is playing SNL during this weekend’s season finale, which is why we have these horribly awkward promo videos to giggle over in which Fred Armisen and host Ben Affleck attempt to promote the episode even though it’s clearly West couldn’t give a shit. Yes, the script intentionally calls for things to be a little brittle—Armisen attempts to lay down a beat for West to rap over, only to be cut off—but Kanye’s dead-eyed stare and bland delivery make add a real element of #DGAF to the procedural ads. He livens it up a little bit in the final promo, but man, that second one. Lots of ennui brimming in that guy. The episode is on Saturday, doy.

Among a cast of characters that has included a sex addict, an agoraphobe, a meth-cooking granny, and a deranged wastoid father, the part of the bad-boy genius sounds rather quaint. But as Lip, the oldest son of the dysfunctional six-kid Gallagher clan on Showtime’s hit series Shameless, Jeremy Allen White exudes a subtle, brooding charm, delivering a scene-stealing portrayal of a gifted scammer who’ll do whatever it takes to support his siblings—from helping classmates cheat on the SATs for cash, to dealing pot from an ice cream truck. “In order to grow up a strong man, I think you really need to have a good childhood,” says the 22-year-old native New Yorker. “A lot of the reason why Lip might come off as angry at the world is because he feels like he never got the chance to be a kid.” Like Lip, White wasn’t a fan of high school, so he persuaded his principal to let him spend half his school days working at a casting agency, a move that helped set his career in motion. Now it’s on a roll: Alongside signing on for Shameless’ fourth season, later this year White will star as another conman of sorts, playing a thieving vagabond opposite Michael Pitt in You Can’t Win, a movie based on 1920s hobo hero Jack Black’s account of freight-hopping through Canada and the American West. White was also just cast in his first studio lead, in the forthcoming time travel odyssey, Glimmer. Here he is on getting into character, kissing Liev Schreiber, and why he’s sticking with the ass shot.

So first off, I was reading that you’re a Tammy Wynette fan. Explain.
I just started listening to her. I was doing a film in Texas, and I think an interesting way to get into a role is to find the right music. I hadn’t explored very much country, so I started listening to her and she was amazing. I begged the producers to get some of her songs in the movie, but she’s pretty expensive. When I was filming that, I also listened to a lot of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and a lot of soul. That’s what I’m into. I like the Delta Blues. I like Muddy Waters.

When did you first know you wanted to act?
It was something I was always intrigued by. It was something both my parents did. They met when they were in their 20s doing theater in New York. They don’t act anymore—they got pregnant with me and had to get jobs that could support a child. But it was something I knew they’d been very passionate about. I didn’t really get into it until I was 15 or 16. I had a really great drama teacher. He’d look on Backstage.com and send the kids he thought were really good out on these huge open cattle calls. I ended up booking my first play and my first film doing that.

You’ve said there’s quite a difference between Lip, your character on Shameless, and you. How do you get into character?
I did most of the prep during the pilot and the first season. I went to some AA meetings to hear some stories. When we went to Chicago to shoot, I really tried to get a feel for the south side of Chicago. I think the south side is just as important a character as any of the Gallaghers on the show. I thought it was important that Lip looked and felt comfortable in Chicago. Now that the other actors and I have been doing it for so long, we can memorize stuff really fast and show up ready to go. That gives us the opportunity to explore and play around, which I think is the best thing about acting.

Lip is always in trouble, and he’s always pissed. What is his problem ultimately?
In order to grow up a strong man, I think you really need to have a good childhood. A lot of the reason why Lip might come off as angry at the world is that he feels his childhood was robbed from him. He feels like he never got the chance to be a kid. He had to start taking care of his younger siblings at a very young age. He hadn’t seen his mom in a long time, and Frank [played by William H. Macy] is the man he is. So he has to learn how to take care of himself before he can take care of everyone else.

There’s also a lot of sex on Shameless—and a lot of naked dude ass.
The directors and writers have asked a lot of us—you know, “You’re going to have to show something. You can show your dick or you can show your ass.” The answer is usually ass. I will be sticking to the ass shot as long as I have control.

Some people might say that the show glorifies getting ahead through deception.
It’s something that happens. It’s something that people do. If people are offended by some of these things, Shameless is obviously not the show for them. It’s reality, and we try to do our best to make it as honest as possible.

You were also in the film Movie 43, in which you kissed Naomi Watts, who played your mom, and Liev Schreiber, who played your dad. Who’s the better kisser?
Liev had a beard going on at the time, so it was pretty rough. I had a little rash on my face afterwards, so I’m going to have to go with Naomi.

Tell me about your character in the Jack Black story, You Can’t Win.
Michael Pitt plays Jack and is telling the story. When he is about 12 or 13 years old, he runs away from home and starts taking trains all up and down the west coast. He stumbles upon a young man who’s about 20 years old named Smiler, the character I play. Smiler shows young Jack the ropes and takes him under his wing.

Were you familiar with the book before you shot the film?
Michael and I had a few mutual friends. He was attached to the project for a really long time and actually produced it. He happened to be in L.A. for a couple of days, so we had a meeting and talked about the movie. Then he gave me his copy of the book, told me to go home and read a bit of it, then come back to his hotel and talk to him more about it. I read the first 12 chapters that afternoon. When I got the role, about two weeks later, I read the book in its entirety.

What are your thoughts on Jack Black after having read it?
Jack Black had no education. He was educated until he was 11 or 12, at which point he ran away. In his 30s and 40s, he worked as a journalist in San Francisco, and then in his last days he worked in a library. The book is written so well. What really blew me away was how this man who spent so much of his life being a criminal was able to write such a beautiful story. What adds to the intrigue is, in his 50s, Jack Black went completely off the map again and no one ever saw him again. He’s a fascinating guy.

You have another film in the works, Shoplifters of the World, in which you play a crazy fan of The Smiths who holds a DJ at gunpoint. Yet another delinquent.
I know! But I don’t think he has a bad bone in his body. The entire thing takes place on the evening The Smiths break up. These young people about to graduate from high school go out mourning the death of the group. My character goes to the local DJ station with an unloaded pistol and forces the DJ to play The Smiths all night long. We got the rights to about 15 Smiths songs.

What’s your favorite Smiths song?
I am now partial to “Shoplifters of the World Unite.”

Were you ever a delinquent like the characters you play?
When I was younger, I wasn’t a big fan of school and wouldn’t go very often. I ended up talking to the dean of my high school, who let me work at a casting office in New York for half the day. I’d do some of my academics in the morning and then I’d go to 38th street and 8th avenue and work at Susan Shopmaker Casting. She’s an amazing casting director who cast me in a film called After School when I was about 17. I think I learned more there about acting than I could have anywhere else.

 Photography by Thomas Giddings. Styling by Djuna Bel.

I’m talking to Greta Gerwig hours before the premiere of Frances Ha. The film’s star, radiant in an orange dress, seems nervous. Or perhaps that’s just her trademark awkwardness––part of her immense charm (and craft) as an actress. At twenty-nine, Gerwig has made a name for herself playing young women who are often optimistically adrift, both lively and heartfelt at once, and either too self-conscious when they’re supposed to be less, or not enough when they’re supposed to be more.

So on the surface, her role in Frances Ha, which she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach (who not-so-secretly became her boyfriend during the project), is more of the same. But despite the well-worn premise (post-college artsy girl doesn’t know what to do with her life, can’t find an apartment in New York, grows jealous of her best-friend, visits home, couch-surfs, goes to Paris), Frances Ha sings. If Godard remade Vivre Sa Vie in Fort Greene, this is what it might look like. Here, Gerwig and Baumbach have both embodied and transcended much of what they’ve been striving for in their prior films. Here, the actress explains why she never reads anything about herself (including the recent New Yorker profile), what it’s like for everyone to think you’re on drugs, and why (as she puts it) she’s not not ambitious. 

Does the premiere for this film feel different than the premieres for your other films?
Um.

Let me explain. I was surprised by the amount of buzz this has been generating.
Does it feel that way to you?

It feels that way to me.
Oh, good. Because I really try not read things or look at things. I find it makes me self-conscious in a way that’s destructive. It’s like a combination of an ego trip and horrible deflation at the same time. Like, ‘I’m awesome…and terrible.’ To feel both. ‘I’m ugly and hideous…and beautiful!’ It’s like the worst combination. It’s just too much at once.

But you must be happy the film is getting a lot of attention.
I’m glad it’s getting buzz because I care about it so much. But it seems like, in this world, it almost seems like movies are a dying art. There are so many released, but it’s so easy to get lost. I’m glad it feels like people are actually caring about it because after it was on the festival circuit for a while, it felt like, ‘How are we going to shut this down and open it back up in 6 months?’ So I hope people see it. I mean, I love it.

I think it’s great. It will last, too.
Yeah. I mean, it does feel different in a way. I’m much more invested in this movie than I’ve been in any other movie that I’ve participated in. Partially that’s because I co-wrote it. Partially it’s because––it just feels like the closest thing to what I want to make.

Does the role feel close to you? To who you are?
In some ways it does. In other ways it feels like an invention. It feels like the best part of what I’m capable of as a creator and as an actress. It feels like the full extension of my talents at that moment. You can get hogtied or hamstrung by limitations in movies. But I felt like I was stretched by this role, and that felt really good. Sometimes when you allow yourself to be bigger, the more resonant and true it is.

In the writing, who approached whom first?
Noah approached me. After Greenberg opened, he asked me if I was interested in collaborating on writing something because he wanted to do something very small.

He wanted to get away from the glitz?
Yeah. He was like, ‘How small can I do this without losing my ability to make as good of a film as I can?’ That was the idea. He knew I had written plays and the screenplays for movies I had largely improvised in. But I think there was a real sense that we would work well together.

I don’t want to make you self-conscious, but have you read your New Yorker profile?
No. I did look at the picture, though.

Did you like the picture?
The picture was nice. But no. I didn’t read it. I understand it was nice and that I seem like I’m on LSD.

I was waiting for them to trot out words like ‘spacey.’
Yeah. I always get that. Everybody my whole life has thought I’m on drugs. When I first heard that, I was like, ‘I’m going to really act like I’m not on drugs now.’

The film is so great with awkwardness in general. It’s like the line where Frances says she likes things that look like mistakes.
Yeah. I do like things that look like mistakes. That’s true of me. I really love precise things that look like mistakes, but when you think about them, they couldn’t possibly have been because of how the entire thing was constructed. When I acted in high school, I would try to cultivate those weird moments, the moments when you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s what I was always looking for. But I wasn’t actually on drugs.

Well, that’s our cultural shorthand for anyone whose just isn’t on the same wavelength.
I’m definitely not. You know those personality tests where they tell you if you’re an INTP or whatever? I remember I took one and my personality was like “sees things as part of a cosmic whole.” “Might have religious inclinations.” Things that were sort of like, ‘This person is a little crazy and might think that they’re a prophet,’ which I don’t see as wrong necessarily. (Laughs)

You’re on drugs without being on drugs.
I feel like I’m capable of experiencing very intense emotional landscapes. And that has helped my writing and acting because I feel like part of what I want to do when I make things is transmit that intensity of experience to the viewer in some way. I have moments every day where I have this sense of like, ‘I’m alive right now.’ Which totally is druggy. I realize that, but it’s completely… I’m straight, you know.

Was the personality test right? Do you think you’re a prophet of our generation?
No, no! I didn’t mean it like that! (Laughs)

Sure.
Greta declares herself. Oh shit.

But you’ve been so good at turning the stuckness or frustration that’s pretty endemic to a lot of people’s twenties into art that’s really exuberant and beautiful. Are you worried that you’re success might actually prevent that kind of alchemy from happening?
I do worry about that. But I don’t feel like I’ve hit that point yet. I think something can happen where if you become too successful––or too visibly successful––it interferes with your ability to…Well I spend a lot of time just wandering around New York City waiting for things to reveal themselves to me. And you need to be able to be really anonymous to do that. It’s important to me to feel connected to what people’s lives are and what people’s everyday-ness is.

Would you say that you’re ambitious?
Certainly. I’m not not ambitious. So there’s a part of you that’s always striving to make your presence solid, to be a thing people know about. ‘Ah, yes. Greta Gerwig. I know exactly who that is.’ Because it relieves you from the anxiety of having to explain yourself, which I think is…that’s something difficult.

Frances is always fumbling over those kind of dinner-party explanations in the film.
Yeah exactly. She doesn’t see herself as the world sees her. It’s not like ‘this is what you are and everybody knows it and we all see what you are.’ That kind of solidness can cut you off from the experience that 99.99% of the world has, which is that there is a disconnect. So I feel like it’s important to me to maintain it somehow.

How?
I read something about this recently. I really like Flannery O’Connor. And she said that every story she writes is about grace. But grace is not something you experience. You can experience the after-effects of grace, but grace itself is this thing that’s unaccountable for. I think that’s kind of always what I’m trying to. I’m trying to gather these moments of grace. And you have to be quiet to do that, and part of trying to be successful is not being quiet. So there are these too opposing forces. But I think—I hope—I’ll be able to stay on the quiet end of it.

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Lake Bell officially became a triple threat. The versatile actress pulled double duty in Park City, there to promote her role in the thriller Black Rock, but also to premiere In a World… a witty comedy set in the wacky world of voice-over talent which she wrote, directed, and starred in. Bell, who until then was best known for roles in How to Make it in America and Children’s Hospital, got the ultimate pat on the back when she was awarded the festival’s prize for best screenwriting. But before she gears up for In a World…‘s late summer release (August 9, to be exact), Bell was busy promoting Black Rock alongside castmates Kate Bosworth and fellow triple threat Katie Aselton, who also co-wrote and directed. The thriller follows three lifelong friends looking to mend their fractured relationship with a weekend getaway to a remote island off the coast of Maine. We won’t spoil what happens, but what starts off as a moody relationship drama quickly descends into a fight for survival. We spoke with Bell recently about her transition behind the camera, her upcoming wedding to tattoo artist Scott Campbell, and her ideal writing environment.

As a female actor who’s written and directed her first feature, did you feel some pride watching Katie do her thing on the set of Black Rock?
Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I shot Black Rock before I shot In A World…, so it was absolutely inspiring, and we definitely have a little team of comrades who take on this multitasking storytelling aspect of moviemaking. Most of the people in Black Rock are that way, whether it’s Mark [Duplass], Katie, and Kate Bosworth, who produces. Even our DP directed something. They’re all storytellers. I think that a community of filmmakers with a multitude of occupations is a cool place to roll in. I feel honored to be included. I think the Duplasses both patted me on the back and were like, ‘Welcome to the club, buddy.’ Doing a movie like Black Rock where you kick ass and then go into directing is totally fitting.

As a female director, did it feel like you were entering a Boy’s Club?
I personally didn’t. I’ve had an incredible experience coming up in the independent film world. I feel like if I look to my right, I look to my left, I might see a female filmmaker or a male filmmaker, but I never felt ostracized, and I still don’t. I think in the studio system it’s a different can of worms, but my comrades and teammates in this community, I feel absolutely welcome. It feels very even. I know that statistically it’s not, but my personal experience has been very positive. I’ve never felt like people have been like, ‘Listen, girl, why don’t you get your long-stemmed legs out of this office and make me a cup of coffee.’

Did you tailor you part in In a World… specifically to your talents?
I would only want to write something I’d feel like I was going to excel in. As a director, I’d only want to put the right actor in the role. So, if I wasn’t right for something, I’d be like, ‘I’m not going to put myself in it because it’s not for the good of the piece.’ For my friends, I want to cast all of my friends in everything. I have a ton of my friends in In a World… because they were really right. And I just know them and I wrote it for them. Then there are other roles where, you know, I could have put a friend in it, but it wouldn’t have made them look as good. It’s your responsibility as a filmmaker to pay attention to the through line of the movie and the tone of the movie and to make it enjoyable and not distracting.

When you’re writing a script, how do you avoid procrastination?
Writers’ retreats, because I do enjoy procrastinating online. I try to work without deadlines. When I wrote the column for The Hollywood Reporter and I had deadlines, I obviously hate that. I have the luxury of when you’re writing a screenplay, it’s really on your own terms. It’s up to you to get the fucking thing done. So, I like to create three to four day fake writer’s retreats that are within my own home.

Describe them.
What I’ll do is I’ll clean up my entire house until 8:30 a.m., when you get yourself set up for that first day. This is probably very type A, but anyway.  I allocate a certain amount of time, I clean up the entire house, I make sure the fridge has all the good treats in it. Just like all good healthy shit and good drinks. Just stacked like it’s a hotel. I get up that morning and I put sneakers on and an outfit that’s comfortable, but no fucking pajamas because that’s some bullshit right there. You got to dress to impress. And then I go to it. Procrastination is usually me searching something online, but it’s a great way to curb your procrastination because you can say, ‘Okay. All during the week I’m going to get whatever shit I have on my mind out and then these three days there’s no fucking around.’ You’re going to put that phone away. The biggest, the smartest piece of advice is to just show up.

You’re about to get married. When’s the date?
It’s in June.

Are you more excited about your wedding day, or In a World…’s release date?
(Laughs) It’s so hard. No. Um. Look. That’s a really horrible question. Um. No, I know. Um. These are both equally exciting moments.

We’re less than two weeks away from the reveal of Arrested Development season 4, aka the most recent excuse you need to hole up in your apartment for a day or two, powering through episodes as you shirk the modern world in favor of seeing just how crusted your lips can get. The most dedicated of you are preparing for the occasion by marathoning the first three seasons; the rest of us are lazier, and will favor sites like this one to get us back into the swing of things. Recurring Developments is a site that takes every recurring joke in Arrested Development and visualizes it along a nifty map so that you can see just how many times a joke was referenced, in which episode the reference came, and the continued evolution of the joke as the show went on. It’s astonishing how much was going on and how much was set up in advance; it’s enough to make even the laziest of watchers fire up the Netflix queue in order to catch everything. Season 4 premieres on May 26.

The Croisette’s aswarm with frenzied badge-wielding journalists; the starstruck hoi polloi are already setting up their step ladders in front of the Palais to ensure the choiciest views when the bigshots finally step out onto the red carpet. Fittingly, the 66^th Festival de Cannes opens with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, which we have zero interest in seeing because it’s already playing in regular theaters. So what now? Guzzle rosé and mingle on the inflatable couches in front of the Grand Hotel till dawn, or wake up at dawn to haul ass to those morning screenings? We’re pretty pumped about this year’s lineup, and below are our top picks among the premieres. Some of these films might get some major boos (people really do “boo” here) and some just might be the best movie of the year. Who cares—we want to see them all.

The Bling Ring, Dir. Sofia Coppola -Un Certain Regard
Plenty of hype encircling this one. It’s about stealing expensive stuff from the houses of materialistic rich celebrities, which of course gives us all a little schadenfreude, and it busts out Emma Watson’s first major “adult” role, which really just means it’s now totally cool to start putting salacious photos of her on the cover of every magazine. Real-life “bling ring” victim Paris Hilton, always a good sport about this sort of thing, even makes a cameo.

Nebraska, Dir. Alexander Payne - Competition
Payne’s latest love-letter to Flyover Country comes at us in black and white, and pairs Bruce Dern with former SNL star Will Forte for a father-son roadtrip. (We’re looking forward to seeing what Forte does here.) And even more exciting: The guy who played Buzz in Home Alone is in it. Where’s he been for the past 20 years?

Behind the Candelabra, Dir. Steven Soderbergh - Competition
Michael Douglas as the spangly super-flamboyant Liberace, Matt Damon as his scorned young lover Scott Thorson. Of course the press is all going crazy about the fact that the two of them smooch, which is an incredibly boring topic. (When will we stop caring when male actors kiss each other?) We’re way more interested in the costumes, which look absolutely enthralling.

As I Lay Dying, Dir. James Franco - Un Certain Regard
Yeah, yeah, Franco takes on too much. But we can’t help but be curious about what he’s going to do with Faulkner’s dense, super-literary multi-narrator novel in its very first cinematic incarnation.

Only Lovers Left Alive, Dir. Jim Jarmusch - Competition
Tilda Swinton as a sexy vampire? That’s all we needed to hear.

Seduced and Abandoned, Dir. James Toback - Special Screenings
HBO just picked up Toback’s doc about himself and Alec Baldwin running around last year’s Cannes in search of funding for their film, which in a super-meta move will be premiering at this year’s Cannes. Apparently it takes the pulse of the current state of the film industry, and includes interviews with luminaries such as Bertolucci, Polanski, Scorsese, Jessica Chastain, and Ryan Gosling.

Inside Llewyn Davis, Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen - Competition
Oscar Isaac’s on the rise! Here he plays the fictional title character in the Coen bros’ latest, about the folk scene in sixties Greenwich Village. (Could be a showcase for some nice tunes: Justin Timberlake, Marcus Mumford, and Isaac himself contributed to the soundtrack.) Bonuses: John Goodman plays a dude with drug issues; Adam Driver’s in it; and maybe this will redeem Carey Mulligan, whose cute, murine little face has been criticized as being “all wrong” for Gatsby’s Daisy but which seems just right for Llewyn’s mousy love interest.

Venus in Fur, Dir. Roman Polanski - Competition
Polanski adapts yet another claustrophobic theater piece to the screen—this time, David Ives’s acclaimed, spiky, two-person play of the same name—and lets Mathieu Amalric (who has a role in Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, also in this year’s competition) get nasty, psychologically and otherwise, with Emmanuelle Seigner.

Le Passé (The Past), Dir. Asghar Farhadi - Competition
After his riveting, understated 2009 drama About Elly, which sadly never received a proper U.S. theatrical release, we were happy to see Farhadi get some major recognition (aka an Oscar) with Iranian divorce film A Separation. Here he continues his look into the nature of splitting up, with Bérénice Bejo in her first major role since The Artist opposite the excellent Tahar Rahim (also in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Grand Central, screening as part of Un Certain Regard.)

Only God Forgives, Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn - Competition
We’re hoping for some pretty serious visual stimulation in this one, which finds the Danish director reteaming with his Drive star Ryan Gosling to go deep into Bangkok’s seedy criminal underbelly, with its drug deals and whorehouses and Muay Thai clubs (Gosling apparently did some serious boxing to train for the film). Kristin Scott Thomas plays his mom, who’s also the bloodthirsty godmother of a major criminal organization.

We like to think we deserve love, that as a celebrated facet of the human experience everyone is allowed at least a taste. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offered characters too hollowed by wealth to access anything beyond desire and ambition. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation gives us something to mourn. A classically unrequited love impeded by class and time complete with a sighing Carey Mulligan saying “I wish I could do everything on Earth with you.”

It’s this vision of Daisy and Gatsby that saves the story from being flattened by Luhrmann’s penchant for spectacle. Between Rolls Royces barreling down bridges, fireworks exploding over mansions, and beaded hemlines swishing in time to the din, a treatise on love exists quietly. For a love story to inspire it must simply confirm our deepest suspicions about what we imagine love to be. And Luhrmann indulges both cynics and romantics.

Fleeting moments in the film hint at a love worth canonizing—Gatsby’s delight at seeing Daisy in his home, flashbacks to Daisy’s devastation at a letter delivered too late (isn’t there always?), We even see a young Daisy and Gatsby experiencing the first thrills of their romance. Daisy, without a fashionable haircut yet, and Gatsby in an officer’s uniform, smitten. Gatsby tells Nick that when he kissed Daisy that night, he felt married to her. But admits he had paused, knowing it was dangerous for a man like him to “let go” in love.

Love is the chance to abandon ourselves to a redeeming ideal. Gatsby’s irony is that in doing so he dooms the possibility of being loved in return. Daisy can’t join him, as Nick warns Gatsby, “you shouldn’t ask too much of her.” Unlike the novel’s Daisy, Carey Mulligan’s isn’t careless as much as stunned into indecisiveness by Gatsby’s manic idealism.

Typical of the characters Leonardo DiCaprio plays, Gatsby alternates between boyish charm and the white-knuckled stiffness of hidden violence. Initially Gatsby takes great care to preserve propriety. The lengths he goes to to have tea at Nick’s house with Daisy are endearing comic relief. Once he realizes Daisy is not only glad to see him, but still very much in love, Gatsby’s relief doesn’t give way to satisfaction. Rather, he pursues a total reclamation of the years they spent apart. His neat manners dissolve completely in the sweaty hotel room confrontation between him, Daisy and Tom. He screams red-faced at Tom to shut up about the differences between his background and Daisy’s, differences he spent years trying to bridge. He begs Daisy to tell everyone she loves him, that she only ever loved him.

Love has always required a litmus test for authenticity; it’s too profound to not be suspect. The film posits that for all their flaws—being rich chief among them—perhaps Daisy and Gatsby did have something very real between them. Perhaps they not only experienced love but deserved it; for Daisy, a recompense for suffering an unfaithful husband, and for Gatsby justification for his years of single-minded devotion. The unrealized potential of their love allows faith in it. It’s a promise of greatness that can remain untested by a relationship. To believe in someone else’s love we must witness its origin, to be moved by it we must witness its demise. Fitzgerald offered the latter, Luhrmann offers both.

Angelina Jolie has revealed in an op-ed in today’s New York Times that she has recently finished undergoing a series of operations that resulted in a double mastectomy. Pointing out that her own mother died of breast cancer at the age of 56, and that she herself carried the “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which makes her susceptible to both breast, and ovarian cancer, Jolie, writes of weighing the odds that she would develop breast cancer, killer of  458,000 women every year throughout the world. The most shocking aspect of all of this is that Jolie, who can’t walk down the street without getting her photo taken, has managed to keep all of this secret for months.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

It’s clearly an important issue, and one that Jolie didn’t take lightly, and for good reason. If anything good will come of it, besides potentially saving her own life, it’s the renewed attention to the disease that her admission will bring. As she writes:

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

Read the rest here.

]]> http://bullettmedia.com/article/angelina-jolie/feed/ 0 http://bullettmedia.com/article/amy-seimetz-on-how-death-made-directing-seem-easy/ http://bullettmedia.com/article/amy-seimetz-on-how-death-made-directing-seem-easy/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 16:07:14 +0000 Miranda Siegel http://bullettmedia.com/?post_type=article&p=31421 Amy Seimetz has been pretty busy—she’s Chris O’Dowd’s love interest on the Christopher Guest/HBO series Family Tree, recently co-starred in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and has numerous other projects on the horizon. But she’s still managed to crank out her first narrative feature, Sun Don’t Shine. Set in the seediest, seamiest version of aestival Florida ever committed to film, [...]]]>

Amy Seimetz has been pretty busy—she’s Chris O’Dowd’s love interest on the Christopher Guest/HBO series Family Tree, recently co-starred in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and has numerous other projects on the horizon. But she’s still managed to crank out her first narrative feature, Sun Don’t Shine. Set in the seediest, seamiest version of aestival Florida ever committed to film, the low-budget thriller follows a guilt-riddled couple (Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley) as they drive along the Gulf Coast with some pretty incriminating evidence bouncing around in the trunk of their car. Though Seimetz had just taken a red-eye from Vancouver, where she’s currently shooting episodes for The Killing, she mustered enough inner sunshine to eagerly chat with us about her sensational Florida childhood, dealing with death, and what humidity sounds like.

Sun Don’t Shine captures something about Florida that I’ve felt, but have never seen in a film before.
Before I wrote the script, I was piecing together visuals and sounds that indicated what it felt like to be in Florida in the summer. Damp, sweaty, gross. You feel dirty all the time, like you can’t take enough showers. Even getting out of the shower, you feel dirty again because the humidity just clings to you. And if humidity made a sound—and I explicitly said this to the composer, the DP, everyone—it would be this buzzy, bass-y drone. As a teenager, I’d ride around with boys who had, like, the souped-up speakers in their cars, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be there. That drone would vibrate through your body, reinforcing that feeling. You could feel it to your core.

And the violence?
Florida’s a very violent place. I mean, you can walk on the street and be fine, but nobody walks anywhere in Florida anyway. There’s an aggression that I haven’t found anywhere else. In California, it’s passive aggression. In New York, people get it out by yelling. And then in Florida it’s scary because no one says anything—they just do violent things.

Where do you think that comes from?
I think the heat makes you crazy. The crime rates in certain areas are, like, the worst in the country. I didn’t realize this until I moved away, but the end to an argument isn’t always a fist fight. And then there’s all the crime stories that come out of Florida, the strange, bizarre characters.

The face-eater, the seven people who killed that one guy.
Casey Anthony. And usually serial killers make a stop in Florida. It’s, like, on their tour. I always joke that people are either escaping to or from Florida, on vacation or running from the law. And then the kidnappings! So many kidnappings. I felt like I was going to get kidnapped all the time. My elementary school teacher told us that the men trying to kidnap you might actually like it if you screamed, so you should do something weird like blow snot in their face to throw them off so you can get away.

What were the biggest challenges in making a narrative feature?
I hate saying this, but it came out pretty easy. I did it at a time when there was a lot of death in my family and nothing, in a film sense, seemed hard. It made me fearless in these other realms. Like asking for money: All they can say is no. All you can do is make a bad movie and who cares—there’s tons of bad movies out there.

You’ve worked with Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley before. Let’s talk a bit about how you got them involved.
I wrote the script specifically for them both. Kate I knew from Silver Bullets—we worked on that for like two-and-a-half years. She’s demure, delicate. But she’s incredibly complicated: She likes to be the wallflower, but when you tell her to perform, she goes 100%. She also has that bass-y vibration going on behind her eyes when she gets emotional. And we both love films with explosive performances by women. Kentucker I met a long time ago at SXSW; I was in his film Open Five. He’s a strange dude: evasive, elusive, alluring, incredibly charming, and looks like a scruffy young Paul Newman. And he allows ridiculous things to come out of his mouth in this natural, tumble-y way that’s very southern.

Was any of the film improvised?
There’s certain lines I needed them to say, but I wasn’t a stickler. Part of the reason I brought anyone into the project is because they’re a good storyteller. They know the tone, so they know what to do.

You shot on 16mm. How come?
We wanted to evoke a seventies feeling—I had been looking at Two-Lane Blacktop and A Woman Under the Influence. We wanted to capture this new form of Americana, of the road trip. We needed something textured that had a life of its own, and the grade of film is much more vast than digital. We were shooting at high noon and I didn’t want white skies with a well-lit face. I wanted to see a grade.

How do you feel about the film now?
I love it; it’s so personal. There are meditations on death that are directly from my life. You can be as intellectual as you want about death, but internally there’s a survival mechanism that makes you not feel it. You have to deny it to keep going, which is kind of the point of the movie: To keep going, they have to deny there’s that thing in the back of the truck. You’re supposed to let go, but when you lose somebody, suddenly there’s something that needs to be solved, a mystery. You’re supposed to stop everything and be like, “I can’t go to work right now. I have to solve why human beings die.”

You’re in Christopher’s Guest’s new HBO series Family Tree. How did that come about?
He’d seen stuff I’d done and then I went in and just talked to him. That’s it. It was one of the strangest jobs I’ve ever gotten. I didn’t even audition. Well, there was a casting director involved. [laughs] But in my fairytale world, Chris Guest is going through Netflix movies and is like, “Oh, who’s this girl!”

Photo by Jeff Vespa/Contour by Getty Images.

Today the internet feels like a proud father on his daughter’s wedding day, or his son’s graduation from college—his irascible, drunk daughter and his fucked-up loser son. That’s because the day that we thought would never come, one we didn’t even really allow ourselves to imagine, is here. The Arrested Development Season 4 trailer, filled with all sorts of callbacks to the series’ most memorable gags, has arrived, which means, at long last, we can finally let ourselves believe this long-delayed season of television, premiering on Netflix on May 26, will actually come to pass.

Eli Roth needs no introduction, but what the hell. Ever since the fiendishly funny Cabin Fever hit theaters in 2002, the Boston native has been working tirelessly to establish himself as the master of the horror universe. Mission accomplished. The success of Hostel and its sequel, Hostel II, made Roth the primo purveyor of so-called “torture porn”—a label Roth rejects—and pretty much gave the filmmaker carte rouge to lend his hemoglobin-soaked vision to a bunch of diverse projects. They include everything from a role in Inglorious Basterds, to the Vegas tourist deathtrap Eli Roth’s Goretorium, to Netflix’s latest attempt at original programming, Hemlock Grove (Roth directed the pilot and is executive producer).

Roth’s latest fever nightmare is Aftershock, a blood-n-guts disaster romp he stars in and co-wrote with the film’s director, Nicolas Lopez. The movie, which is loosely based on Lopez’s real-life experiences, follows three bros who head to Chile for some VIP partying, only to discover how much things can suck when an earthquake traps them in an underground club. But the twist: things suck even more when they finally escape—think escaped prisoners, general lawlessness, and worst of all, no cell service.

Roth recently returned to the director’s chair with The Green Inferno (Amazon, cannibals, total fucking chaos), and we caught up with the delightfully talkative mini-mogul to discuss his insanely busy life, the power of the retweet, and some “asshole” from The Hollywood Reporter.

In the last few years you’ve stopped directing movies and focused much more on your brand. What’s behind that?
A whole lot of marketing. Right from the beginning, I saw five stages to make a movie. Write the movie, then you raise the money, then shooting, then editing the movie, and the last stage which is the most important, which is the promotion. And it never ends. I remember when I was shooting my first feature, making sure the behind-the-scenes was as funny as the movie, and mine was the first DVD that had multiple commentary tracks. I had five of them in Cabin Fever, and people didn’t even know you were allowed to do more than one. I had a lot to say. I wanted it to be a DVD for people to listen to over and over, and slowly digest over a thousand years. But really I put myself out there as the new face of horror, and people liked me because I could speak articularly, be camera-friendly, and I looked very much against the type of what people expected directors to look like, and especially people that made horror movies to look like. But also I have had very interesting opportunities in my career, like the collaboration with Tarantino as an actor, and then collaborating with RZA in Man with the Iron Fist. Life presented me these strange and wonderful opportunities and I just fully dove in it.

Is it hard to figure out what it is you want to do? You must be presented with a plethora of opportunities.
Yeah, and I certainly think I exceeded my bandwidth last year. I was opening a haunted house in Vegas, the Goretorium, which is going great. Tourists are going there and freaking out and throwing up. But it does become hard to pick and choose and narrow down what you really, really want to do, because it like you’ve waited your whole life to do all these things and suddenly you can do all of it. I certainly think my new word for 2013 is “streamline.”

In Aftershock, you’re in front of the camera. You obviously don’t need the money. Are you doing it just for kicks?
Yeah. All of it I do because it’s fun. Aftershock really came from my conversations with Nicolas Lopez, whose films I love. He’s so innovative. He’s the one who figured out shooting on a Canon 7D. That’s what our approach to Aftershock was. Let’s shoot it in five days. If you put a Zeiss lens or a nice Canon lens on it, it looks like you’re shooting film and nobody cares what it’s shot on, because they’re going to watch it on iTunes, they’re going to watch it on their iPad. It’d be great if they’d see it in the theater, but it’ll be digitally projected anyways, so fuck it. And we wanted to do something that felt like an old school disaster movie where we really destroyed shit. And there’s a little bit of CG, but it’s 99% practical in the movie. We wanted to make an old school movie where you really, really felt the destruction. And his stories of that night of the earthquake were so fucking horrifying. We didn’t have to invent anything. We just strung different events together in a row.

In the third act, Aftershock veers away from the disaster element and becomes more about humans turning on each other. Why did you take it in that direction?
We’re making a movie that shows society unraveling. That’s what the film is about, the collapse of society and people reverting to some feral state of survival or attack. The film’s about moral choices and what do you do when you’re presented with these various challenges. We are also are making a horrific movie, so we wanted to show the horror of what humans are capable of. If a prison breaks open, prisoners have to behave like prisoners. One of the nice things about independent cinema is you don’t have to play by anybody’s rules. I find most movies are so boring, because I see the same thing over and over and over again.

You often retweet fans’ positive reactions to your work. What’s it like having such immediate access to your audience?
It used to be the IMDB message board. First it was the Ain’t It Cool News review and then all the fan comments which were always, fuck you, this sucked. Then you could see IMDB message boards or message threads. I’d go on Bloody Disgusting or Dread Central and read the threads of what people were saying, but that’s a specific type of fan. I would say fan boy. And they’re coming from a different place.

Horror fans, too.
Horror fans, they fucking hate everything and they hate you, especially. No matter what you do, you’re fucked. But Twitter is incredible. House of Cards was like the greatest show ever made, so after House of Cards, anything was going to get killed critically. You’re not making the show thinking you’re going to be compared to House of Cards. And then you see the fan response and it broke records for downloads. It just blew everything away.

When it comes to retweeting fans positive reactions, you’re very prolific.
It’s partly marketing. Yeah, I’m going to lose followers by re-tweeting, but fuck it. People love the show. They want me to know they watched all 13 episodes, and I’m letting them know I appreciate that. And by the way, Netflix is counting and looking and watching, and they have data on how much #HemlockGrove gets re-tweeted, what’s the buzz word, and are we a trending topic? You can’t imagine the impact that data makes on a corporation whose stock price depends on this stuff. So part of my job is to get out there and trumpet the success of it and let other people know that people love the show. And I know this asshole in The Hollywood Reporter ripped me a new one, but fuck it.

Did he?
He was just like it’s the worst thing ever that happened in history. It’s hilarious. It’s so bad it makes you want to watch the show.

What do you mean he ripped you?
They tore the show to pieces and me in particular, because I’m the brunt of it. I put myself out there as the face of it, so of course I’m going to be attacked. It doesn’t matter. People love it and they’re dying for season two.

After Hostel 2, so-called “torture porn” faced a backlash. Do you resent that term?
I think it’s silly. It’s like parents describing that “damn rock’n’roll music.” Whoever uses that phrase, you instantly know they’re not into those movies, and they have some agenda against them. It always says way more about the person using it than the movies themselves. And chances are they never watch them and never would watch them and use it as a platform to feel morally superior.

Selena Gomez has a tiny cameo in Aftershock. Was there ever any pressure to use that in your marketing?
No, no, no. Of course not. It’s a cameo. We didn’t cast Selena. Selena’s a friend. She was doing a concert in Santiago. We were shooting nights, and I said, do you want to come by on set and see what we’re doing? She came by just to hang out and was so impressed and so into it, that we were like, why don’t we just shoot something with you. And we made up a scene and shot it. If you blink, you’ll miss it, but that’s part of the fun was. I was like, we’re not going to sell it as a Selena Gomez film. I know what her name means, and it’s not fair to do that to her. That was never the spirit of what we did. It’s just fun and random and a nice little aside. Besides, my name’s enough to open it. You’re not going to sell a horror movie on Selena. I love Selena, but you have me, so sell it from my name.

Just like it says right up there in the headline, here’s a picture of Zooey Deschanel without her iconic bangs (by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images). Don’t ever say we don’t put the thing that the headline says in a post around here.

So what do you think of this new look she unveiled at the MET Gala the other day? It’s pretty disconcerting, right? Like seeing Spider-Man with his mask off, or Donald trump without his wig on straight, or me wearing pants. But after a minute, when the life-changing shock settles, it actually looks pretty nice, right? She’s a natural beauty. Dat forehead, as they say on the internet.

We’re all pretty much agreed that Ryan Gosling is the apex of humanity, right? Acting, singing, saving people from oncoming cars, reducing 85% of the world’s female population to quivering puddles of sexual despair? Is there anything that this man can’t do? Well, yes, there is, actually. Big Baby Goose would do anything for you, girl, but he won’t do that. That, in this case, is eat his cereal, as seen in this week’s exciting new meme “Ryan Gosling Refusing to Eat Cereal”, created by Ryan McHenry (via Gawker). Check out a few of our favorites below.

The Source Family, which premiered at IFC Center in New York City last Friday and hits the rest of the country throughout the month of May, follows the story of one of the most  outrageous documented cults. Formed in Los Angeles and active in the early and mid-1970s, the Source Family was stocked with humans of the most physically beautiful, mentally experimental, spaced-out, and open-hearted variety. Many of them were young artists, and most of them found their way into it through food.

The point is, someone on this planet felt that he got it, and then he stood up with that message and shouted it as loud as he could, so sure of himself that he didn’t care if anyone thought he was a weirdo. And herein lies the heart of potential usefulness today of a cult that disbanded 38 years ago: the importance of knowing and believing. And it’s crucial to talk about, considering from a certain angle it could be inferred that the directors of The Source Family, Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wille, are currently reviving, or at least revisiting, elements of the cult to some degree.

Besides screening the film, they’ve been appointing musicians in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago to form tribute bands to Ya Ho Wa 13; performances coincide with show times. Last week in Brooklyn, New York’s chapter of the band performed at a sacred temple in Harlem and at Spectacle Theater, the latter which also screened rare home movies captured by Isis Aquarian, the Source Family’s official Keeper of Records. And at Body Actualized, a center and collective dedicated to raising human consciousness, Electricity Aquarian led a traditional Source Family Star Exercise ritual—108 breaths of fire; afterward, chef Anne Apparu prepared a meal from Source restaurant recipes, and the band played once again.

David Nuss curated the group of folks in New York’s chapter of the Yah Ho Wa 13 tribute, the second band he’s helped form in paean to a disbanded cult. The first was—and still is—his work with the long-defunct Process Church, an obscure sect that formed in London in the 1960s and practiced a telepathic occult version of Jesus psychology with deep Scientologist undertones. Nuss found their hymnals and with them formed the Sabbath Assembly. Five years later, he’s now using the constructs of the Process Church to make his own music within the Sabbath Assembly. Over the phone, he explained why one might consider him a fringe religious music junkie.

That very sense of devotion and willingness is a big part of what hooked Demopoulos into co-directing The Source Family. “I really appreciate the discipline and ritualistic social experimentation,” she says. “I also appreciate that there was no rulebook for this, they were just doing it, and doing it in a very public way. They had the restaurant, which was their interaction with the community, and then they had a secret mystery school in the Hollywood hills, which was very separate. They just went for it, and they didn’t soft pedal it.”

Zoroastrians leave their dead for the vultures to eat. Viking kings were cremated in their boats surrounded by royal Scandinavian tens. English outlaws were butchered into pieces and sent to the far corners of the kingdom as a warning. Pharaohs were mummified in pyramids, Jesus was stabbed then entombed, and American millionaires are sometimes shot out into space to circle the earth for all eternity.  Our beloved goldfish Bert, who for months inspired and motivated us here at BULLETT, got tied to a balloon and let off the top of a Chelsea high rise.  Send us a postcard from above, slippery little buddy.

R.I.P. Bert from BULLETT MEDIA on Vimeo.

RuPaul’s Drag Race, which aired its season finale on Monday, has in its fifth season attracted more gushing, unguarded praise than most reality shows ever dream of. (It has also attracted some thoughtful criticism.) Purely on a technical level, it’s very much deserved. Where other creativity-based competition shows can feel arbitrary in their decisions and meaningless in their outcomes, Drag Race offers consistently convincing eliminations and engaged competitors. But why? Sure, its execution is flawless, with a host who has actual personality and competitions that don’t take themselves too seriously, but it may just be drag itself that’s providing the oomph.

Given the inherently subjective nature of art, making it into a competition is a strange and illogical business. But drag, which already emphasizes competition, is a small artistic community with relatively few performers and venues. You saw it this season with two competitors who, before the show began, had feuded and fallen out after a one-two finish in a pageant (Coco and Alyssa), and another (Alaska) who’s in a relationship with the season four winner. As a result of this small community, uniform standards for the artform exist in a way they simply don’t for music, food, or fashion. That leads to a creative process that’s entertaining for a national audience who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in going to a drag show, a competition compelling regardless of what they’re competing about. But it’s the nature of drag that makes that possible.

Though “drag” is of course a timeless thing, what Drag Race means by “drag” basically consists of cabaret performance and balls. These practices emerged during the last half of the 20th century in large urban centers with sizable gay populations, and its audience was (for much of its history) limited primarily to those gay populations. Take another tiny percentage of this group to get your pool of available performers and what you end up with is a small, intense community creating something relatively new — just the kind of thing a savvy corporation would love to bring to the masses. But drag is fiendishly hard to mass produce, being a performance art that relies heavily on the personality and skills of individual performers rather than reproducible stuff like scripts or recordings. (Which is not to say it wasn’t occasionally ripped off.) In this relatively left-alone state, drag developed a set of standards about what is and isn’t “good drag” (which are contested, sure, but at least contested along one or two lines rather than ignored entirely) that were unified in a way that standards about what “good rock music” or “good movies” simply can’t be. When RuPaul managed to bring the experience to TV, these standards served as a “rulebook” that most shows have to create from scratch.

There are two main ways to have rules on reality competitions. One is to create them from scratch, artificially. When this works, it creates a set of standards that emerge in the first season and are picked up by new contestants in future seasons, so that even without an official rulebook there’s an agreed-upon way to win, say, The Bachelor. American Idol has been successful as a creative competition because it successfully put a set of rules on the expansive domain of “doing things with your voice,” limiting contestants’ performances (at least at first) to covers of pop standards, and having judges who could articulate how we’re supposed to evaluate the wildly different types of performers who came in. The other way is to rely on existing standards, and lately that’s been a little rough. For all that Top Chef was once great, it’s increasingly hard to understand how you could judge the relative merits of a massaman curry versus a country pâté. The show literally compares apples and oranges. While there are standards in cooking, they tend to be about comparing a restaurant to itself, or at the very least to its genre of cuisine. The drama in restaurant reviews isn’t whether Union Square Café will get more stars than Eleven Madison Park, it’s whether it will lose or gain stars. “Y’know, food” is just way too broad a category to work consistently as the focus of a competition.

Small, focused creative communities are where new kinds of art generally emerge, at least as a comprehensible thing: the Harlem Rennaissance, the French new wave, and riot grrl all started as small groups of artists and audience members in a handful of places making an intense new thing insularly before it broke wide. In so doing, these movements were successful in structuring how we think about art. They produced not only the works themselves but, through their manifestos and feuds and insularity, the standards by which we evaluate the works, and other works besides. (Think about how bebop and punk produced new standards by which to judge other music.)

This is not to say all great art is produced through these scenes, or that all insular scenes are necessarily good; most insular scenes fail spectacularly, and produce as their major accomplishment a group of former friends who hate one another. But for a creative pursuit to work as a competition — competitions being one easy way to bring the pursuit to wider prominence these days — it needs exactly the kind of shared standards that small creative communities produce. And that’s why drag, above and beyond even the delightful subject matter and visuals and characters and sensibility, brings to Drag Race.

Max Joseph is probably best known for his role in front of the camera as Nev Schulman’s salt-and-pepper-haired sidekick on MTV’s Catfish. But behind it, Joseph has mastered the snappy, digestible art of the web video. Take his short, Follow the Frog: A whip-fast, entertaining clip with a strong message that reveals itself in the final moments—tailor-made for generation ADD (the video won TED’s Ads Worth Spreading challeng).  The New Yorker has also helmed award-winning ads for  Nike, Pepsi, Starbucks, and just released his latest digital effort, the 13-minute documentary, 12 Years of DFA: Too Old To Be New, Too New To Be Classic, about the legendary New York record label. Joseph is currently working on his first feature film for Working Title, but before he leaves the web behind for big-screen glory, we asked him to leave us with his essential tips on the way to achieving viral success.

Well for starters, who am I to write about the steps to making yourself a better director?  I haven’t made anything longer then 20 minutes, I haven’t won an Academy Award, and I haven’t directed an episode of an HBO series.  To this point, I have been pretty much a web filmmaker, which I guess is a new breed of director. You can’t really even call it “directing,” since you are generally writing it, shooting it, and editing it by yourself or with a small team. That’s filmmaking. It is also worth mentioning that I am addicted to the game of getting views, likes, and shares. I want people to see what I make. I want my films to go viral. And if the film has a strong simple concept and is well-executed, chances are it will. I have not by any means perfected the art of making web films, but I have found that these tips make me better.

1.  It’s got to be better than porn. Let me explain. Someone who owned a bottled water company once pointed out to me that he considered Coca-Cola to be his competition. He needed to think that way in order to build a product that could hold its own on the beverage shelf where Coca-Cola dominates. Well, the most watched films on the internet are porn films. The experience of watching your film has to be better and more stimulating (intellectually at least), then watching the most depraved sexual acts ever to be caught on camera. Good luck.

2.  Comedy is king.  If you can make people laugh they will pass your movie around.  One of my problems is that I am not a comedian (although my films generally do have a sense of humor).  In my mind I am competing against porn AND really funny people.  That’s stiff competition.

3.  Simple Concept + Great Execution = Good Web Film.  I think this is the winning formula for any good web film that’s not comedic or pornographic.  You need one simple clever concept that you then must illustrate extremely well.  A concept my buddy Casey Neistat came up with was: instead of making the Nike commercial he was hired to direct, he would use the budget to fund an adventure around the world with his buddy Max.  Very simple to understand and immediately intriguing.  But a clever concept is not enough.  It’s just a promise you’re making to the audience.  Now you’ve got to make good on your promise by showing the most interesting and exciting aspects your concept.  This involves good storytelling.  Giving it a good beginning, middle, and end.

4.  Figure out the A to Z.  For a story to have a beginning, middle, and end, it must start somewhere and end somewhere else whether that distance is emotional or geographical.  In order for the viewer not to get bored she has to feel like she knows exactly where she is in the film—or more specifically how far she is from the end.  If she doesn’t, she’s lost and bored.  Present a clear track at the outset of your film so that the viewer knows story-wise when the film will end.  In the example of my film for Nike with Casey the viewer knows the film will end when we make it all the way around the world.

5.  Before making your movie tell your idea to lots of people.  Don’t get nervous they will steal it.  The more times you tell it to people the better your delivery gets.  And the better your delivery gets, the better your story gets.  As you’re saying the words you begin to change things, add things, omit other things just based on the other person’s reaction.  As you get better at telling your idea notice where people smile or seem engaged.  That will give you the basic blueprint for how to tell your story.

6.  As you’re shooting always be willing to throw out your plan and improvise based on what you discover on the day.  Sometimes that’s where the best moments come from.  As I was shooting a scene for my Follow the Frog film, there was a huge wildfire in the desert and no one was there.  So we walked right up to it (foolishly) and found a way to incorporate it into the movie.  Then the fire trucks showed up and we bolted.

9.  Make Mix CDS.  The emotional flow of a movie is the most important thing.  If I ever taught a class in filmmaking I would have everyone make a mix CD as an exercise.  Because a good mix CD is actually a perfect movie.  The mix CD is designed to seduce its listener.  Inherently, we all know to kick off a mix cd with something fun, light and fast.  Then as it goes on, you vary it up.  Three fast songs in a row can be exhausting.  So you throw something a little softer in to break it up.  Eventually you’ll want to drop that soulful love song that’s going to make the other person start crying about you.  But you can’t just put it anywhere.  You’ve got to lead up to it.  It’s got to feel earned, like a logical step from the song before it.  And then end strong.  A song that feels like it has a sense of finality.  A good mix CD maker can make great films.

10.  Get better haircuts.  As you grow beyond the do-it-all-yourself method of filmmaking, you realize that you have to rely on and work with other people.  This is not art, it’s leadership.  When I got into filmmaking I didn’t realize that to make films you have to basically lead a small army.  But you learn quickly how to work with others to get the best product.  The best analogy I’ve found to collaborative filmmaking is getting a haircut.  Most people can’t cut their own hair so they go to someone who can.  If you sit down in front of a hairdresser who has never cut your hair before, it is your responsibility to tell them what you want.  The same is true if you are working with a cameraman or an editor.  This is a creative partnership and it can go in a few different ways.  You can say nothing (“make me look good”) and let them have their way with you, oftentimes resulting in profound bitterness and no tip.  You can micro-manage their every snip until you both hate each other’s guts and made worse by the fact that you still don’t like your haircut; or you can give them a clear and specific direction leaving enough space for creative freedom.  I oftentimes find that showing a hair-dresser a picture of a haircut I like is the best way to go—a common visual reference (there was once a time where all I had to say “Tom Cruise. Mission Impossible” and not a word more).  If you can’t get a good haircut then you’re going to have a hard time making a movie.

11.  Find your voice.  Make something only you could have made.  To put it in more cliched way: be original.  Everyone has a very specific way of looking at the world and nothing is more exciting than hearing a new voice.  Don’t emulate your favorite filmmakers, figure out what you can do by doing it fast over and over again until you can see the patterns shining through.  That’s your artistic voice.  Embrace the idiosyncrasies and own it.  Everyone will want you and while you may inspire impersonators no one will ever be able to do what you do.

James Franco showed up for another installment of Zach Galifianakis’ interview series “Between Two Ferns”, and a Lonely Island video broke out. Aside from a few standard zingers at Franco’s expense — anyone kind of missing the days when Franco wasn’t constantly poking fun at James Franco? — the highlight comes from Lonely Island’s epic banger which, rightly, riffs on how sexually contradictory bro culture at spring break is. There’s nothing quite so gay as bragging about crushing pussy.

Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl’s stunning, confrontational Paradise trilogy, which centers on three women in search of both loving tenderness and primal sexual validation, is finally getting a stateside release. So what can we expect? In Paradise: Love, a flabby, fiftysomething Austrian “sugar mama” travels to Kenya to pick up eager young African boy-toys; Paradise: Faith’s repressed Jesus fanatic loses it when confronted by her hot-headed, alcoholic Muslim ex-husband; and the chubby, pretty teen in Paradise: Hope parses her confusing relationship with the gentle yet lecherous doctor at diet camp. It’s intense stuff, but Seidl’s mesmerizing geometric compositions interspersed with handheld sequences featuring a loose, improvised momentum—not to mention the performances he wrangles from his professional and nonprofessional actors—keeps it from feeling too heavy-handed. We spoke with him for some insight. 

Besides being about three related women—an aunt, a mother, and a daughter—who are all longing for similar things, what are the connecting themes among the films?
The idea of the relationship to one’s body, this consciousness of one’s body. In Love, you have Teresa, an overweight older woman who feels that because of her appearance she’s unable to find, in the West at least, the kind of man she’s looking for. She feels she needs to go to Africa, to a place where appearance is irrelevant—where despite her appearance, she’s still desirable. In Faith, Anna Maria uses her body to expiate her sins, to experience lust through pain. And in Hope, Melanie is an overweight young girl who’s looking for love.

How did you cast the main roles?
Casting’s a very long process for me; building a mutual trust is very important. That was the case with Teresa, played by Margarete Tiesel; that was also the case for the Kenyan beach boys she lusted after. Over two years, I visited Kenya repeatedly to build that trust with them. Also, all of my films involve improvisation. I never wrote dialogue, so it’s important that the actors are capable of improvising on set. In my experience, there aren’t that many actors who, in fact, are capable of it, who are truly suited for the collaboration.

The Paradise trilogy tackles pedophilia and class, race, and body issues, and features some pretty intense sexual sequences—not to mention a scene in which a woman pleasures herself with a crucifix. Was everyone on board, or did you have to convince anyone?
The actors who want to work with me are able to see my previous films. They know what my work is about. They just have to ask themselves whether they want to be involved. I can always tell if someone is really appropriate for the role, if they really understand my intuitions, if they’re able to open themselves. Tiesel, for example, knew from the there’d be scenes where she would be naked in Paradise: Love, where she’d be intimate with black men, and she had to ask herself if she’d be able to do that, especially given her personal background—she’s married and has a family. It was probably the most challenging role of her entire career.

What about Melanie Lenz, who plays the 13-year-old girl in Paradise: Hope?
Just like with the role of the sugar mama in Paradise: Love, there were many girls I was considering for the lead in Paradise: Hope. We visited summer diet camps all around Austria, met with girls, talked about their diet camp experiences, their family backgrounds. Up until we began filming, I was considering two girls for the lead: Melanie Lenz and Verena Lehbauer, the dark-haired girl who plays her best friend. In the end I chose Melanie because she looks more innocent. When we started filming, she hadn’t yet had sexual relations; Verena already had.

Was it difficult to shoot the scenes between Melanie and Joseph Lorenz, who plays the camp doctor? How did you make them comfortable with each other?
I wasn’t sure what would come of the interaction between the two; I didn’t know what the chemistry would be, what emotions would develop. Very quickly I saw that scenes involving a lot of dialogue didn’t work, so I chose to concentrate on longer scenes without dialogue. What was odd was that there was no contact between Melanie and Joseph beyond the set. Usually when you have two actors playing extensively together, particularly with intimate scenes, they seek each other out and spend a lot of time together away from the set as well. But no closeness developed beyond the set. Just the opposite. Melanie would go off on her own; she actually fell in love with one of the young boy actors during the shoot.

Did she and Verena know each other beforehand?
No. Prior to the shoot I’d bring all the boys and girls to prepare together, and it was during that period that they became friends. What was interesting for my work was that parallel to our shooting in a fictional diet camp, we set up a real diet camp for the kids to attend together. It really allowed them to grow together. The scenes in which you see this natural sense of trust—like the spin-the-bottle scene—that’s the result of the group spirit that developed.

So you’d just say to them, “Play spin the bottle and see what happens?” Or, “Talk to each other about how beautiful the camp doctor’s eyes are?” Those scenes were so compelling and natural.
Yes. For that scene, I told Melanie that I wanted her to talk about her first kiss, to touch upon about her notions of sex. That was the only precondition.

You wrote the films with your wife, Veronika Franz. What was the dynamic between the two of you as collaborators? Was it important to have her perspective when developing the characters?
When we collaborate, we don’t sit down and actually “write” together. Rather, I’ll write out the ideas and scenes, send them to her, and she’ll either give me her comments or rewrite the scenes and send them back to me. It’s very helpful, of course, that someone’s there giving you feedback, bouncing ideas back at you—and all the better if that other person is a woman who can give you her perspective.

Can you talk a bit about your compositions? Sometimes you work with a fixed, locked-down camera and very geometric compositions, and other times you go for a more loose approach.
It’s strange that these two approaches can co-exist in a single film: You can have very realistic moving shots, quasi-documentary, followed by artificial shots in which the people are very small elements in the composition. As a filmmaker, I have different means at my disposal for transposing the story into pictures. There’s the possibility of using various structured images, scenes that are very formally set up. And then there are other scenes that I shoot with a handheld camera. It depends what the scene requires. The striptease scene in Love, where one of the Austrian women brings a young Kenyan man to her friend as a birthday gift, involves a lot of movement; in that case, the handheld camera is the best approach.

But for some scenes, a tableaux, a more formal approach feels better. I like, for example, the scene on the beach in Love with the European women at the hotel lying on their chaise longues one side of the rope, the local beach boys on the other side of the rope, and the armed hotel security guards patrolling between them. You can capture the entire world in a single shot.

American audiences, I’ve noticed, are much more sensitive to depictions of racism than are European audiences. How do you feel these films will play in the U.S.?
I can’t tell you because I’m not familiar enough with American audiences—but I must say, even for European audiences, the film is very provocative and sensitive and really pushes the limit. Showing a woman acting in a racist manner, that’s a taboo. For some time, it hasn’t been taboo to depict men engaging in racism, but for women, it still is.

Do you ever think about how an audience will respond to your work while you’re filming?
I think it’s a quality of one’s work that you’re able to disturb the audience, to provoke them, to lead them into a sense of disquiet, make them question themselves and the values that they hold, and make them want to talk about what you’re showing. It leads to a different consciousness, a different awareness of the world. That’s my task, providing a different view of the world—not confirming what we already know.