list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around You Won't Miss Me on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/You_Won_t_Miss_Me/398249/default.aspx Title: You Won't Miss Me
Year: 2009
Director: Ry Russo-Young
Times Tagged: 3
Number of Lists: 1
Number of blog posts: 4
]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:01:15 GMTYou Won't Miss Me2009Ry Russo-Young3Slightly Tagged (1-5)14http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s398249.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/You_Won_t_Miss_Me/398249/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/1/16/39609.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 1/16/2009 8:01:15 PM
Body: Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress. Shot on five different formats, from 16mm film to low-grade consumer video, Miss Me splays out in episodic fragments of Shelly’s life in crisis, strung together with shards of a conversation between the young lady and her shrink on the last day of her hospital stay. Russo-Young’s camera(s) follow Shelly from all-night parties, where deapan flirting gives way to either cotton-mouthed seduction or resentment-stoking rejection, to a number of auditions for “artists” whose visions of the world seem just as dangerously subjective as that of our barely-holding-it-together heroine, who punctuates many sentences with a sharp sniff. “I have nothing but time,” Shelly tells a theater director, and in a way she’s doing what a lot of early-twentysomethings do, dabbling in life experience to fill the hours of the day with the assumption that at some point, something will come into focus. But Shelly’s also drawn to acting as an escape from the real, one that’ll legitimize her uncanny knack for theatricalizing every real-life situation, and infinitely delay her deadline for assimilation in a zipped-up world. If the the intention of each discrete shooting format isn’t always crystal clear, Russo-Young pulls off the blending of the formats beautifully. The look of the film continually recalls the photographs of Nan Goldin, particularly “Nan and Brian in Bed” and other iconic images of from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The allusion comes to mind not just because Shelly is a woman who feels distant from her lovers even whilst still in bed, and not just because Russo-Young occasionally bathes Schnabel in a similar golden glow; Shelly also seems to move within a Goldin-like milieu. Russo-Young says in her director’s statement that her intention was to “make a film that could only be made at this particular moment in time, that would speak to our entire visual existence today” — and, in terms of the way she clashes technologies to talk about the way personalities mutate under different eyes, she succeeds. But the film also seems infused with the spirit of the laregly-disappeared downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, an aspect of the city’s personality that lives on in certain bars, blocks, brownstone walk-ups, but which has been scrubbed clean from the media image of the city entirely. It’s the natural environment for a story in which self-conscious creative spirit often gives way to destructive self-indulgence. Like Goldin’s slide shows, Miss Me feels less like a narrative than a private image journal-turned-enveloping time capsule. Both are so intimate that the viewer becomes not just privy to the protagonist’s self-destruction, but virtually implicated in it. This is tricky business, asking a viewer to take on the point of view of a girl who spends virtually the entire length of a film fighting against drowning; what’s actually on screen could potentially be overwhelmed by the alternating novelty and discomfort of seeing it. But when You Won’t Miss Me succeeds — which it does more often than it doesn’t — it’s because it taps into a universal sense of youthful rootlessness, recklessness, and confusion, while challenging us to look at these familiar states of being with neither nostalgia or romantic revision, nor condescension. If the narrative and its execution seems sometimes at loose ends, the volatility of the emotions at the film’s center demand it. Russo-Young’s first feature, Orphans, premiered at SXSW in 2007, where the director also appeared in a supporting role alongside Greta Gerwig in Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore super-group feature Hannah Takes the Stairs. There’s a scene in Miss Me featuring Gerwig and Swanberg, as well as Mary Bronstein, Michael Tully and, most prominently, Aaron Katz. The Quiet City director plays an independent filmmaker named “Joe” who puts auditioning actresses (including Schnabel and Gerwig) through a serious of exercises designed to rake the depths, which instead skate the absurd and resolve in hostility. Is this scene a reference — mockingly, lovingly, maybe both? — to Russo-Young’s Hannah experience? In talking about an artist like Russo-Young, who so clearly pulls from the personal, I don’t think you could count out real-life influence completely, but the more I interrogate that scene as a statement on the filmmakers who cameo in it, the more that read falls apart. Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film in which unlikeable behavior is put under a microscope so that we can critique it. As the rest of Miss Me shows, Russo-Young is a filmmaker who looks for the beauty in a character’s flaws, sympathizes with their missteps, and ultimately withholds judgement. The motives behind You Won’t Miss Me seem too generous in spirit for a single-scene gear-shift into acid in-joke. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:01:15 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog1/16/2009 8:01:15 PMRy Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress. Shot on five different formats, from 16mm film to low-grade consumer video, Miss Me splays out in episodic fragments of Shelly’s life in crisis, strung together with shards of a conversation between the young lady and her shrink on the last day of her hospital stay. Russo-Young’s camera(s) follow Shelly from all-night parties, where deapan flirting gives way to either cotton-mouthed seduction or resentment-stoking rejection, to a number of auditions for “artists” whose visions of the world seem just as dangerously subjective as that of our barely-holding-it-together heroine, who punctuates many sentences with a sharp sniff. “I have nothing but time,” Shelly tells a theater director, and in a way she’s doing what a lot of early-twentysomethings do, dabbling in life experience to fill the hours of the day with the assumption that at some point, something will come into focus. But Shelly’s also drawn to acting as an escape from the real, one that’ll legitimize her uncanny knack for theatricalizing every real-life situation, and infinitely delay her deadline for assimilation in a zipped-up world. If the the intention of each discrete shooting format isn’t always crystal clear, Russo-Young pulls off the blending of the formats beautifully. The look of the film continually recalls the photographs of Nan Goldin, particularly “Nan and Brian in Bed” and other iconic images of from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The allusion comes to mind not just because Shelly is a woman who feels distant from her lovers even whilst still in bed, and not just because Russo-Young occasionally bathes Schnabel in a similar golden glow; Shelly also seems to move within a Goldin-like milieu. Russo-Young says in her director’s statement that her intention was to “make a film that could only be made at this particular moment in time, that would speak to our entire visual existence today” — and, in terms of the way she clashes technologies to talk about the way personalities mutate under different eyes, she succeeds. But the film also seems infused with the spirit of the laregly-disappeared downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, an aspect of the city’s personality that lives on in certain bars, blocks, brownstone walk-ups, but which has been scrubbed clean from the media image of the city entirely. It’s the natural environment for a story in which self-conscious creative spirit often gives way to destructive self-indulgence. Like Goldin’s slide shows, Miss Me feels less like a narrative than a private image journal-turned-enveloping time capsule. Both are so intimate that the viewer becomes not just privy to the protagonist’s self-destruction, but virtually implicated in it. This is tricky business, asking a viewer to take on the point of view of a girl who spends virtually the entire length of a film fighting against drowning; what’s actually on screen could potentially be overwhelmed by the alternating novelty and discomfort of seeing it. But when You Won’t Miss Me succeeds — which it does more often than it doesn’t — it’s because it taps into a universal sense of youthful rootlessness, recklessness, and confusion, while challenging us to look at these familiar states of being with neither nostalgia or romantic revision, nor condescension. If the narrative and its execution seems sometimes at loose ends, the volatility of the emotions at the film’s center demand it. Russo-Young’s first feature, Orphans, premiered at SXSW in 2007, where the director also appeared in a supporting role alongside Greta Gerwig in Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore super-group feature Hannah Takes the Stairs. There’s a scene in Miss Me featuring Gerwig and Swanberg, as well as Mary Bronstein, Michael Tully and, most prominently, Aaron Katz. The Quiet City director plays an independent filmmaker named “Joe” who puts auditioning actresses (including Schnabel and Gerwig) through a serious of exercises designed to rake the depths, which instead skate the absurd and resolve in hostility. Is this scene a reference — mockingly, lovingly, maybe both? — to Russo-Young’s Hannah experience? In talking about an artist like Russo-Young, who so clearly pulls from the personal, I don’t think you could count out real-life influence completely, but the more I interrogate that scene as a statement on the filmmakers who cameo in it, the more that read falls apart. Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film in which unlikeable behavior is put under a microscope so that we can critique it. As the rest of Miss Me shows, Russo-Young is a filmmaker who looks for the beauty in a character’s flaws, sympathizes with their missteps, and ultimately withholds judgement. The motives behind You Won’t Miss Me seem too generous in spirit for a single-scene gear-shift into acid in-joke. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/16/39608.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/16/2009 8:01:00 PM
Body: Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress. Shot on five different formats, from 16mm film to low-grade consumer video, Miss Me splays out in episodic fragments of Shelly’s life in crisis, strung together with shards of a conversation between the young lady and her shrink on the last day of her hospital stay. Russo-Young’s camera(s) follow Shelly from all-night parties, where deapan flirting gives way to either cotton-mouthed seduction or resentment-stoking rejection, to a number of auditions for “artists” whose visions of the world seem just as dangerously subjective as that of our barely-holding-it-together heroine, who punctuates many sentences with a sharp sniff. “I have nothing but time,” Shelly tells a theater director, and in a way she’s doing what a lot of early-twentysomethings do, dabbling in life experience to fill the hours of the day with the assumption that at some point, something will come into focus. But Shelly’s also drawn to acting as an escape from the real, one that’ll legitimize her uncanny knack for theatricalizing every real-life situation, and infinitely delay her deadline for assimilation in a zipped-up world. If the the intention of each discrete shooting format isn’t always crystal clear, Russo-Young pulls off the blending of the formats beautifully. The look of the film continually recalls the photographs of Nan Goldin, particularly “Nan and Brian in Bed” and other iconic images of from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The allusion comes to mind not just because Shelly is a woman who feels distant from her lovers even whilst still in bed, and not just because Russo-Young occasionally bathes Schnabel in a similar golden glow; Shelly also seems to move within a Goldin-like milieu. Russo-Young says in her director’s statement that her intention was to “make a film that could only be made at this particular moment in time, that would speak to our entire visual existence today” — and, in terms of the way she clashes technologies to talk about the way personalities mutate under different eyes, she succeeds. But the film also seems infused with the spirit of the laregly-disappeared downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, an aspect of the city’s personality that lives on in certain bars, blocks, brownstone walk-ups, but which has been scrubbed clean from the media image of the city entirely. It’s the natural environment for a story in which self-conscious creative spirit often gives way to destructive self-indulgence. Like Goldin’s slide shows, Miss Me feels less like a narrative than a private image journal-turned-enveloping time capsule. Both are so intimate that the viewer becomes not just privy to the protagonist’s self-destruction, but virtually implicated in it. This is tricky business, asking a viewer to take on the point of view of a girl who spends virtually the entire length of a film fighting against drowning; what’s actually on screen could potentially be overwhelmed by the alternating novelty and discomfort of seeing it. But when You Won’t Miss Me succeeds — which it does more often than it doesn’t — it’s because it taps into a universal sense of youthful rootlessness, recklessness, and confusion, while challenging us to look at these familiar states of being with neither nostalgia or romantic revision, nor condescension. If the narrative and its execution seems sometimes at loose ends, the volatility of the emotions at the film’s center demand it. Russo-Young’s first feature, Orphans, premiered at SXSW in 2007, where the director also appeared in a supporting role alongside Greta Gerwig in Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore super-group feature Hannah Takes the Stairs. There’s a scene in Miss Me featuring Gerwig and Swanberg, as well as Mary Bronstein, Michael Tully and, most prominently, Aaron Katz. The Quiet City director plays an independent filmmaker named “Joe” who puts auditioning actresses (including Schnabel and Gerwig) through a serious of exercises designed to rake the depths, which instead skate the absurd and resolve in hostility. Is this scene a reference — mockingly, lovingly, maybe both? — to Russo-Young’s Hannah experience? In talking about an artist like Russo-Young, who so clearly pulls from the personal, I don’t think you could count out real-life influence completely, but the more I interrogate that scene as a statement on the filmmakers who cameo in it, the more that read falls apart. Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film in which unlikeable behavior is put under a microscope so that we can critique it. As the rest of Miss Me shows, Russo-Young is a filmmaker who looks for the beauty in a character’s flaws, sympathizes with their missteps, and ultimately withholds judgement. The motives behind You Won’t Miss Me seem too generous in spirit for a single-scene gear-shift into acid in-joke. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:01:00 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/16/2009 8:01:00 PMRy Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me is identifiable as a film about a young woman made by young women, which is unusual enough at Sundance that the film’s very existence is almost a revelation. By immersing us in the world of 23 year-old aspiring actress/recent mental patient Shelly Brown, and burying the point of view so deep within the character that Shelly’s social imbalance sometimes feels contagious, writer/director Russo-Young and co-writer/star Stella Schnabel remind us how rare it is to see a film about the inner life of a beautiful, troubled young lady without the objectifying filter of the male gaze, without the beauty and the trouble fusing into a fantasy cipher of a postmodern damsel in distress. Shot on five different formats, from 16mm film to low-grade consumer video, Miss Me splays out in episodic fragments of Shelly’s life in crisis, strung together with shards of a conversation between the young lady and her shrink on the last day of her hospital stay. Russo-Young’s camera(s) follow Shelly from all-night parties, where deapan flirting gives way to either cotton-mouthed seduction or resentment-stoking rejection, to a number of auditions for “artists” whose visions of the world seem just as dangerously subjective as that of our barely-holding-it-together heroine, who punctuates many sentences with a sharp sniff. “I have nothing but time,” Shelly tells a theater director, and in a way she’s doing what a lot of early-twentysomethings do, dabbling in life experience to fill the hours of the day with the assumption that at some point, something will come into focus. But Shelly’s also drawn to acting as an escape from the real, one that’ll legitimize her uncanny knack for theatricalizing every real-life situation, and infinitely delay her deadline for assimilation in a zipped-up world. If the the intention of each discrete shooting format isn’t always crystal clear, Russo-Young pulls off the blending of the formats beautifully. The look of the film continually recalls the photographs of Nan Goldin, particularly “Nan and Brian in Bed” and other iconic images of from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The allusion comes to mind not just because Shelly is a woman who feels distant from her lovers even whilst still in bed, and not just because Russo-Young occasionally bathes Schnabel in a similar golden glow; Shelly also seems to move within a Goldin-like milieu. Russo-Young says in her director’s statement that her intention was to “make a film that could only be made at this particular moment in time, that would speak to our entire visual existence today” — and, in terms of the way she clashes technologies to talk about the way personalities mutate under different eyes, she succeeds. But the film also seems infused with the spirit of the laregly-disappeared downtown New York of the late 70s/early 80s, an aspect of the city’s personality that lives on in certain bars, blocks, brownstone walk-ups, but which has been scrubbed clean from the media image of the city entirely. It’s the natural environment for a story in which self-conscious creative spirit often gives way to destructive self-indulgence. Like Goldin’s slide shows, Miss Me feels less like a narrative than a private image journal-turned-enveloping time capsule. Both are so intimate that the viewer becomes not just privy to the protagonist’s self-destruction, but virtually implicated in it. This is tricky business, asking a viewer to take on the point of view of a girl who spends virtually the entire length of a film fighting against drowning; what’s actually on screen could potentially be overwhelmed by the alternating novelty and discomfort of seeing it. But when You Won’t Miss Me succeeds — which it does more often than it doesn’t — it’s because it taps into a universal sense of youthful rootlessness, recklessness, and confusion, while challenging us to look at these familiar states of being with neither nostalgia or romantic revision, nor condescension. If the narrative and its execution seems sometimes at loose ends, the volatility of the emotions at the film’s center demand it. Russo-Young’s first feature, Orphans, premiered at SXSW in 2007, where the director also appeared in a supporting role alongside Greta Gerwig in Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore super-group feature Hannah Takes the Stairs. There’s a scene in Miss Me featuring Gerwig and Swanberg, as well as Mary Bronstein, Michael Tully and, most prominently, Aaron Katz. The Quiet City director plays an independent filmmaker named “Joe” who puts auditioning actresses (including Schnabel and Gerwig) through a serious of exercises designed to rake the depths, which instead skate the absurd and resolve in hostility. Is this scene a reference — mockingly, lovingly, maybe both? — to Russo-Young’s Hannah experience? In talking about an artist like Russo-Young, who so clearly pulls from the personal, I don’t think you could count out real-life influence completely, but the more I interrogate that scene as a statement on the filmmakers who cameo in it, the more that read falls apart. Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film in which unlikeable behavior is put under a microscope so that we can critique it. As the rest of Miss Me shows, Russo-Young is a filmmaker who looks for the beauty in a character’s flaws, sympathizes with their missteps, and ultimately withholds judgement. The motives behind You Won’t Miss Me seem too generous in spirit for a single-scene gear-shift into acid in-joke. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/1/6/39144.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 1/6/2009 1:00:55 PM
Body: This post is part of a series of brief, email interviews that we’re conducting with select filmmakers who are showing work at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. All of our Sundance 2009 coverage lives here. Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature Orphans was recently released on DVD by Carnivalesque Films, makes her first trip to Sundance next week with You Won’t Miss Me. Described as a “kaleidoscopic narrative”, this New Frontiers section selection stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) and incorporates a wide variety of formats, including 16mm film and 1-chip video. You can check out the trailer at the filmmaker’s web site; her answers to The Four Questions We Ask Everyone, including praise for Steve Martin and creative Xeroxing, are below the jump. Miss Me has its premiere on Friday, January 16 at the Holiday Village. Tell us about your movie: who did you work with, what did you shoot on, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out. You Won’t Miss Me is a portrait of a 23-year-old misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.  The lead character Shelly Brown is played by Stella Schnabel, she and I co-wrote the movie together.  I shot on five different formats to capture this character in fragments as she floats through love affairs and the earliest stages of an acting career. I guess the movie is like Don’t Look Back but in modern times. If you funded your film through a day job or through working on projects that were not your own, tell us about that. If not, tell us a story from your past work life, before you became a professional filmmaker. I mainly funded the film through grants.  While making You Won’t Miss Me I was working as a freelance editor, cutting video content for websites mainly.  I like to xerox my face because it looks cool so I was caught by a guy in the accounting department of my editing place while I was xeroxing my face, that was kind of funny and awkward. Based on your impressions of Sundance, what are you most (or maybe least) looking forward to at/regarding the festival? I keep hearing about how Sundance films are always crowded or sold out, that sounds like it could be a fun screening. I’d love to watch my movie with a full attentive audience at the festival. Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature? Actually, one of the first movies I thought of was an Italian film called The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It’s about very poor pesants and a little boy who’s shoe breaks.  It might help me cope with the impending execution.  That and maybe a Steve Martin movie like All of Me. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:55 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog1/6/2009 1:00:55 PMThis post is part of a series of brief, email interviews that we’re conducting with select filmmakers who are showing work at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. All of our Sundance 2009 coverage lives here. Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature Orphans was recently released on DVD by Carnivalesque Films, makes her first trip to Sundance next week with You Won’t Miss Me. Described as a “kaleidoscopic narrative”, this New Frontiers section selection stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) and incorporates a wide variety of formats, including 16mm film and 1-chip video. You can check out the trailer at the filmmaker’s web site; her answers to The Four Questions We Ask Everyone, including praise for Steve Martin and creative Xeroxing, are below the jump. Miss Me has its premiere on Friday, January 16 at the Holiday Village. Tell us about your movie: who did you work with, what did you shoot on, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out. You Won’t Miss Me is a portrait of a 23-year-old misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.  The lead character Shelly Brown is played by Stella Schnabel, she and I co-wrote the movie together.  I shot on five different formats to capture this character in fragments as she floats through love affairs and the earliest stages of an acting career. I guess the movie is like Don’t Look Back but in modern times. If you funded your film through a day job or through working on projects that were not your own, tell us about that. If not, tell us a story from your past work life, before you became a professional filmmaker. I mainly funded the film through grants.  While making You Won’t Miss Me I was working as a freelance editor, cutting video content for websites mainly.  I like to xerox my face because it looks cool so I was caught by a guy in the accounting department of my editing place while I was xeroxing my face, that was kind of funny and awkward. Based on your impressions of Sundance, what are you most (or maybe least) looking forward to at/regarding the festival? I keep hearing about how Sundance films are always crowded or sold out, that sounds like it could be a fun screening. I’d love to watch my movie with a full attentive audience at the festival. Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature? Actually, one of the first movies I thought of was an Italian film called The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It’s about very poor pesants and a little boy who’s shoe breaks.  It might help me cope with the impending execution.  That and maybe a Steve Martin movie like All of Me. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/6/39143.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/6/2009 1:00:43 PM
Body: This post is part of a series of brief, email interviews that we’re conducting with select filmmakers who are showing work at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. All of our Sundance 2009 coverage lives here. Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature Orphans was recently released on DVD by Carnivalesque Films, makes her first trip to Sundance next week with You Won’t Miss Me. Described as a “kaleidoscopic narrative”, this New Frontiers section selection stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) and incorporates a wide variety of formats, including 16mm film and 1-chip video. You can check out the trailer at the filmmaker’s web site; her answers to The Four Questions We Ask Everyone, including praise for Steve Martin and creative Xeroxing, are below the jump. Miss Me has its premiere on Friday, January 16 at the Holiday Village. Tell us about your movie: who did you work with, what did you shoot on, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out. You Won’t Miss Me is a portrait of a 23-year-old misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.  The lead character Shelly Brown is played by Stella Schnabel, she and I co-wrote the movie together.  I shot on five different formats to capture this character in fragments as she floats through love affairs and the earliest stages of an acting career. I guess the movie is like Don’t Look Back but in modern times. If you funded your film through a day job or through working on projects that were not your own, tell us about that. If not, tell us a story from your past work life, before you became a professional filmmaker. I mainly funded the film through grants.  While making You Won’t Miss Me I was working as a freelance editor, cutting video content for websites mainly.  I like to xerox my face because it looks cool so I was caught by a guy in the accounting department of my editing place while I was xeroxing my face, that was kind of funny and awkward. Based on your impressions of Sundance, what are you most (or maybe least) looking forward to at/regarding the festival? I keep hearing about how Sundance films are always crowded or sold out, that sounds like it could be a fun screening. I’d love to watch my movie with a full attentive audience at the festival. Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature? Actually, one of the first movies I thought of was an Italian film called The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It’s about very poor pesants and a little boy who’s shoe breaks.  It might help me cope with the impending execution.  That and maybe a Steve Martin movie like All of Me. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:00:43 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/6/2009 1:00:43 PMThis post is part of a series of brief, email interviews that we’re conducting with select filmmakers who are showing work at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. All of our Sundance 2009 coverage lives here. Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature Orphans was recently released on DVD by Carnivalesque Films, makes her first trip to Sundance next week with You Won’t Miss Me. Described as a “kaleidoscopic narrative”, this New Frontiers section selection stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) and incorporates a wide variety of formats, including 16mm film and 1-chip video. You can check out the trailer at the filmmaker’s web site; her answers to The Four Questions We Ask Everyone, including praise for Steve Martin and creative Xeroxing, are below the jump. Miss Me has its premiere on Friday, January 16 at the Holiday Village. Tell us about your movie: who did you work with, what did you shoot on, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out. You Won’t Miss Me is a portrait of a 23-year-old misfit recently released from a psychiatric hospital.  The lead character Shelly Brown is played by Stella Schnabel, she and I co-wrote the movie together.  I shot on five different formats to capture this character in fragments as she floats through love affairs and the earliest stages of an acting career. I guess the movie is like Don’t Look Back but in modern times. If you funded your film through a day job or through working on projects that were not your own, tell us about that. If not, tell us a story from your past work life, before you became a professional filmmaker. I mainly funded the film through grants.  While making You Won’t Miss Me I was working as a freelance editor, cutting video content for websites mainly.  I like to xerox my face because it looks cool so I was caught by a guy in the accounting department of my editing place while I was xeroxing my face, that was kind of funny and awkward. Based on your impressions of Sundance, what are you most (or maybe least) looking forward to at/regarding the festival? I keep hearing about how Sundance films are always crowded or sold out, that sounds like it could be a fun screening. I’d love to watch my movie with a full attentive audience at the festival. Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature? Actually, one of the first movies I thought of was an Italian film called The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It’s about very poor pesants and a little boy who’s shoe breaks.  It might help me cope with the impending execution.  That and maybe a Steve Martin movie like All of Me. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/Sundance/MemberTagFilms.aspxSundance
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Number of films tagged: 117

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