“After September 11th I sat in my house for a year and was scared.”
– Albert Brooks
Albert Brooks gets treated like a living comedy legend by nearly everyone in the world, deservedly so, except by studio executives looking at the bottom line. Brooks is releasing his seventh feature as director, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, through Warner Independent Pictures after Sony dropped it because of their fear.
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is the hilarious story of what happens when the US Government sends comedian Albert Brooks to India and Pakistan to find out what makes the over 300 million Muslims in that region laugh. Brooks, accompanied by two state department handlers and his trusted assistant, goes on a journey that takes him from a concert stage in New Delhi, to the Taj Mahal, to a secret location in the mountains of Pakistan.
“I have no fear of zombies breaking in here ever.”
– Ti West
Ti West is becoming a major name in horror movies. His 2009 film, The House of the Devil, harkened back to 1980s atmospheric horror, to the point where it was available on VHS in a big plastic shell case. He’s been invited to speak on numerous panels, such as the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival’s Directing the Dead one, where he joined Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, and Cloverfield and Let Me In’s Matt Reeves, and memorably spoke about the awkward moment when you have to direct a woman to show her naked breasts.
His new film, The Innkeepers, premiered at this year’s SXSW. After continuing to play the festival circuit, it’ll finally creep into homes via VOD on December 30 (and will get a theatrical release on February 3, 2012).
The Innkeepers is a horror comedy about two clerks working at a soon-to-be defunct hotel during its last weekend in business. Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) pass the time by speculating about ghostly inhabitants and attempting to record EVP.
Claire’s slapstick bumbling and Luke’s sarcastic comments are a change in tone from the popular House of the Devil (a satanic cult movie that exploited the power of silence with nary a laugh). West has also directed The Roost and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, although he disowns the latter because it was taken away from him in editing. He also directed segments of the forthcoming films V/H/S and The ABCs of Death.
Midway through the SXSW festival in Austin, I caught up with West at a point when we didn’t have a full night’s sleep between us. I was going on three hours and he just barely had me beat. Those are the glorious moments when you just push through the exhaustion on pure adrenaline because you just have to keep up with the prevailing film geekery.
“God, that was amazing when Steven was talking about Close Encounters.”
– Nick Frost
Whenever Nick Frost and Simon Pegg get together, funny stuff happens. Some of their best work has been under the direction of Edgar Wright, as seen in Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Still on their own they make the magic happen, like in Paul, which they also co-wrote.
In The Adventures of Tintin, Frost and Pegg work under the tutelage of Steven Spielberg, so that’s not bad. The film is based on the Belgian comic books by Herge. They’re a big deal in Europe, but they’re perhaps best known in the US thanks to references in Spielberg’s own movies. The sprawling adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark was compared to Tintin in reviews, sparking Spielberg’s interest in the original source from 30 years ago.
Normally it’s easy to tell Pegg and Frost apart. Pegg is blonde and Frost has dark hair – what did you think I was going to say? In Tintin they are virtually identical. They each play the Thompsons, a duo of inspectors who bumble their way through life, attempting to help Tintin (Jamie Bell). Since the film is shot with performance capture, Frost and Pegg look nothing like themselves.
Frost was in New York for the U.S. premiere of The Adventures of Tintin, which has already opened to huge box office success abroad. He got on the phone to talk about his work on the film, the upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman, and his future collaborations with Pegg and Wright.
“For me at least, with comedy, it’s mostly about friction.”
– Todd Strauss-Schulson
Todd Strauss-Schulson is a filmmaker whose journey to directing features is inextricably tied up in his journey into manhood; it all began when his grandpa bought him a video camera for his Bar Mitzvah. From those humble beginnings, Strauss-Schulson has gone on to nab Panavision’s New Filmmaker’s Prize, has traveled to Asia for an extended gig directing MTV’s Whatever Things, a reality show billed as “a more stylish version of Jackass with an all western cast.” His comedy shorts have played South By Southwest Film Festival and the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. Most recently, he directed his first feature, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, in which everyone’s favorite stoners are getting older and facing the responsibilities of career and fatherhood.
After a quick discussion about whether or not guys who are half-Jewish need to only be half-circumcised, SG caught up with Todd Strauss-Schulson in a bar in downtown Boston, down the street from his alma mater, Emerson College.
