What, more preview? Well, the Film Issue of the Austin Chronicle is now out, and it’s chock full of goodies, whether you’re planning to be here for the fun or you just want to experience it vicariously from your igloo. Highlights include:
- A roundtable discussion with three documentary filmmakers now living in Austin: Bradley Beesley (Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo), Ben Steinbauer (Winnebago Man) and Alex Karpovsky (Trust Us, This is All Made Up).
- A preview of Tobe Hooper’s long-lost first film. “Eggshells makes explicit what many have long assumed – that Hooper's sense of cinema is the defining characteristic that makes Chainsaw great. Eggshells is a true 1968 film, psychedelic and political; it seems clear that Hooper had watched more than a film or two by Jean-Luc Godard. The film celebrates alternative lifestyles and politics and people and an odd, kinky semimysticism that is grounded more in humor than the supernatural. It captures what Austin looked like in the Sixties as well as the political sensibility shared by so many at the time.”
- An interview with Beeswax director Andrew Bujalski. “I needed a wheelchair-accessible vintage-clothing store. My whole script depended on that ... and they're really hard to come by. Vintage stores are usually very cramped places, and that's part of their charm, but I started to panic a little bit, because I thought I had written something that doesn't exist. ...So I spent a week driving around Austin. I went to every vintage store you could find. And the last place I walked in the door was Storyville on 51st and Duval, and it was eerily right on. It was so much how I had written it, down to there being this sort of back room behind the counter, which is what I had written. And the counters were low, so it also made sense that someone in a wheelchair would be back there. ... So that more than anything seemed like a sign from God that we should be here.”
- A look at the new wave of Australian films well-represented at this year’s festival. Could this be Ozsploitation: The Sequel? “Australia has given us tales of crazy villages in the outback (Welcome to Woop Woop), cross-dressers on the rampage (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), and, of course, hard men with big hearts (Crocodile Dundee), but this year at South by Southwest, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade wants us to know it's not all about kangaroos and costumes anymore. The filmmakers of seven Down Under films, which range from slashers to piss-your-pants drollery, will attend SXSW 09, the result of a government grant for the Australia International Cultural Council through film body Screen Australia.”
- A visit to the editing room of Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), as he works around the clock to finish The 2 Bobs in time for its SXSW screening. “For two days, McCanlies and Reisch have been going through the film with a fine-tooth comb and a digital equalizer, raising and lowering volumes so that vital bits of plot information come through and less vital bits recede into the background, and cutting frequencies in the tone of certain actors' voices so they don't sound like they're speaking from inside a well. They watch and rewatch shots over and over again until the untrained ear becomes completely numb to the experience.”
