by SuicideGirls
“The best ideas come from Jack Daniels.”
– Destin Pfaff
“I like horror movies, that’s all I really wanted to do,” said filmmaker turned Millionaire Matchmaker Destin Pfaff when SuicideGirls first spoke to him just over a year ago. “I was so against getting sidetracked. And she sidetracked me – magically,” he said of his reality TV star boss, Patti Stanger. “I love matchmaking, and will always do it,” Pfaff adds, however, 2011 is the year he gets his film career seriously back on track.
His first full-length feature film, Sushi Girl, has just gone into production. Co-written and produced by Pfaff, the title of the film refers to the female (played by newcomer Cortney Palm) that serves as the centerpiece of a reunion dinner for members of a gang who we’re involved in an ill-fated diamond heist.
The cast features an eclectic and surprising mix of names, which includes Mark Hamill, a.k.a. Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu in Neverending Story, and Sonny Chiba, whose breakout role was that of Takuma Tsurugi in the martial arts classic, The Street Fighter.
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by Michael Marano
“And that’s where you really see where the problems lie…”
– Duncan Jones
Duncan Jones’s debut feature Moon (2009), a retro-1970s science-fiction/art-house epic that ingeniously managed to hit a lot of the same notes that Kubrick and Tarkovskiy hit despite a miniscule budget and having only one principal character (played by Sam Rockwell), nabbed Jones a BAFTA award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer and dumptrucks full of other nominations and accolades.
His most recent feature, Source Code (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) could be pitched as “Die Hard by way of Quantum Leap served in eight-minute repeating chunks of Groundhog Day.”
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by Ryan Stewart
“There’s much more to the Saw movies than just Jigsaw…” –
– Darren Lynn Bousman
Don’t blame Darren Lynn Bousman for giving me a relatively swift interview – he’s a busy guy. Apart from Saw IV, which he’s currently out doing promotion for, he’s also shooting a film in Toronto called Repo!: The Genetic Opera, and is heavily involved in pre-production for his next film, a remake of the 1981 classic Scanners that will be shooting in Toronto in the coming months.
As if all that isn’t enough, he’s also taking part in preparations for the next Saw film, scheduled to hit theaters in October 2008. He won’t be directing that one, however – three times up to bat is enough. The reigns on Saw V are being handed over to the series’ longtime production designer and second unit director, David Hackl, and how long the gravy train will keep rolling along is anyone’s guess.
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by Ryan Stewart
“There’s no King of Pop, like Michael Jackson, in the punk world.”
– Julien Temple
What would early punk be without its incestuous bickering? It was the initial refusal of Joe Strummer to allow a young Julien Temple into his inner circle in the mid-70s that first pushed the budding filmmaker towards the other great punk originators of the day, The Sex Pistols. That led to the creation of Temple’s two seminal Pistols documentaries, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (which John Lydon loudly denounced for getting everything wrong) and The Filth and the Fury (made with his involvement and blessing).
When a movie was to be made in the mid-80s about the doomed affair of Sid and Nancy, director Alex Cox chose Strummer to write the film’s theme, much to the shock and chagrin of Lydon. Temple would then go on to record a commentary track for that film, in which he points out everything Cox gets wrong about the Pistols.
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by Fred Topel
“There’ll always be something new. It’s like whack-a-mole.”
– Leigh Whannell
I first met Leigh Whannell as the writer and costar of Saw. I thought it was a really cool indie movie that came out of nowhere. It had a mind-blowing surprise at the end and a theme that really spoke to me. When Whannell wrote two sequels in two years, I really got into depth with him on Jigsaw’s morality. Seven Saws later, and Whannell has written another script for his directing buddy James Wan .
Insidious again deals with themes that are bigger than the immediate story. In the film, parents Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) find their homes (that’s plural) haunted by spirits. So it’s a ghost story.
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by Alex Deuben
“People thought we had some political agenda…”
-Elaine Lee
Fans have been yearning for years for a hardcover volume of Starstruck. However their long wait is over, since an IDW published collection will hit stores in April. Writer Elaine Lee has lived with these characters for longer than anyone though, and she isn’t finished with them. Starstruck debuted as a play, and was then published as a comic in the early 1980s. The science fiction story is told in a nonlinear fashion with a vast cast of characters, including multiple female heroines. Starstruck was ahead of its time when it first came out, so reading the book today, it feels very contemporary.
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by Erin Broadley
“I call it method songwriting.”
– Imani Coppola
Imani Coppola is less concerned with writing a hit single and more concerned with, as she puts it, creating music that feels like having a line of coke blown up your ass. This ballsy, Brooklyn-based beauty coolly disregards designer-imposter pop stars who claim to push boundaries, when in truth, the only boundary they’re testing is our ability to stomach any more empty calorie pop songs.
However, Coppola is no stranger to the major label machine. The 29-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist signed with Columbia Records during her freshman year in college, churned out a hit MTV single “Legend of a Cowgirl” off her 1997 album Chupacabra, and was then dropped – sadly, an all too familiar story for new talent these days. But that was then, and this is now.
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