CONVERGENCE MICRO-BUDGET Soderbergh iPhone movie to be self-distributed

From a great site for students of film comes news of a true iconoclast further blurring the pro/am line with his own smartphone movie.

Soderbergh is an awkward so and so but an unquestioned auteur and 80s Indie pioneer, like Alex Cox bringing something of a punk attitude to 80s film a decade after the upstart Indie outsiders had become Hollywood insiders (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola).

Soderbergh is a name you'll see frequently in Peter Biskind's fantastic sequel to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film which features on the 80s and 90s rise and fall of the Indies.

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Steven Soderbergh's Unsane shot with iPhone - NoFilmSchool report.

According to the Hollywood trade publication Tracking Board, Soderbergh shot his latest film, titled Unsane and starring The Crown's Claire Foy and Juno Temple, in secret with an iPhone. Little else is known about the film except that Soderbergh plans to self-distribute it domestically through his Fingerprint Releasing banner, which the director founded in order to test out distribution models for his most recent film, Logan Lucky. Before that, Soderbergh pushed boundaries by shooting Starz' The Girlfriend Experience on high-definition video with mostly non-actors. Since kicking off his career with 1989's seminal indie film sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh has consistently been at the vanguard of risk-taking in low-budget filmmaking.  

Recently, Soderbergh encouraged aspiring filmmakers to "get a script and start shooting on an iPhone" in a Reddit AMA. We're glad to see he took his own advice. 

DIGITISATION Hinterland £8k budget 15 year-old camera...

Harry Macqueen (centre) and Ben Hecking on stage after their Ilkley Film Festival screening

HINTERLAND (Harry Macqueen, 2015)
DISTRIBUTION: Indie/arthouse/world cinema specialist Soda Pictures (digital); self-distribution deal with Curzon Pictures, linked to director/cinematographer Q+A appearances
PRODUCTION CO: Inheritance Films [Macqueen inherited £10k and decided to make a film with this!]
BUDGET: £8k
SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter;



Thanks to Martin Pilkington, organiser of the Ilkley Film Festival, I got to see Hinterland gratis, and to speak to the debut director (and co-star/writer/producer) Harry Macqueen plus cinematographer (Director of Photography) Ben Hecking afterwards.

The film is archetypal arthouse; an essay on male diffidence with French New Wave part of the aesthetic: montage sequences, dialogue over fairly abstract shots, some non-linear strands. That's simplifying rather - both said their influences were just too numerous to really pin down; "unconscious osmosis" would amount for much of this. Richard Linklater was held up as a particular influence and, indeed, inspiration to all Indie filmmakers (and Macqueen noted how Linklater had similarly gone out and produced his debut feature for a very low budget). Both professed a love for and strong influence from this unheralded 1979 British Indie road movie, re-released on DVD by the BFI (Radio On, Christopher Petit):


(Read more on this film: IMDB; Wiki; ScreenOnline)

Both describe Hinterland as a road movie. It centres on the friendship, with clear undertones of desire for more, of a late-20-something man and woman, childhood friends, the woman a free spirit, the man seemingly a more sedate character.

DIGITISATION: Kevin Smith, podcast auteur?!

Jay and Silent Bob in Clerks; they've inspired a shoe range!

I'm not sure what traction the name has with today's teens, but for (some of!) my generation, Kevin Smith, a remarkably foul-mouthed film-maker who put together a classic/cult debut film for peanuts (Clerks, $28k!) whilst working full-time in a dead-end job, has made a remarkable claim about his status:

Filmmaking is the only art form where you say, "I wanna express myself. Give me $10m and Ben Affleck." ... But all along what I could do was talk. If podcasts were movies, I'd be up there with Spielberg, dude.

Read a Biskind interview here.

If it was now, I would have seen Slacker and written a blog about it or recorded a podcast. That would have been enough. The entire message of my career is that if you want to do it, you should try. I am a chimp and I built a career out of making films. And I don't even consider myself a film-maker! Oh yeah, and PS: neither do the critics.

For a film-maker who created the iconic/cult characters Jay and Silent Bob, and who has two decades of film-making behind him, that's quite a statement.
In a real sign of the times, he's currently in the UK touring a combination of a 60-min animation and a podcast recording!

Peter Biskind's book Down and Dirty Pictures, which tracks the rise and fall of the Indies from the 80s to the mid-noughties (including glimpses of WT), frequently features Smith, whose up and down relationship with Miramax and its fierce co-head Harvey Weinstein tells you a lot about how the industry works (or malfunctions!) ... and is a sequel to arguably the best book ever written about cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

The current (June/July 2014) tour is an indication that film may be undergoing a similar shift to the music industry, in which CDs are increasingly a secondary revenue stream compared to tours and merchandise. As is becoming a widespread music concert practice, there is a VIP option for keen fans:

The mini-tour even has an official sponsor! Screenshot from seesmod.com.

I've blogged on similar events on the MusiVidz blog (on the music industry/videos), but can also make a link to the book industry where, once again, there is a decline in sales of physical texts and publishers are looking to author tours as one means of replacing the lost revenue:

the rise of Amazon and the Kindle is transforming the nation's publishing institutions, which are being forced to seek new sources of revenue. As bookshops close, authors are embarking on rock star-style tours; the newly formed mega-publisher Penguin Random House sold 10,000 tickets for a reading tour by Caitlin Moran. The publisher is also turning one of its most famous characters, Peter Rabbit, into a cartoon and is seeking tie-ins with toymakers and chocolatiers.
Some publishers are looking at diversifying into new forms of content, for example by combining books, films and games into a new narrative genre. A new iPad thriller called The Craftsman, launched last year, turns the reader into the main character in a gothic, cinematic chiller.

(from this article on eBooks set to overtake print books by 2018)
  
You can read the full article below, or click here.