Profiles

While so many of Hollywood’s high-paid actors spend their paychecks on the kind of luxury items the rest of the world only comes in contact with on trashy celebrity television shows, some are emptying their bank accounts and charging up their credit cards like the rest of us—making movies. A rising group of thespians are stepping behind the camera and taking a shot at directing.

Although the cinematic possibilities of Hawai’i—those that lay beyond the tropical tropes of tourism and military patriotism— have always been clear to local residents of the island, only recently has there been notable validation of that truth.

Marcelo Zarvos is scoring big in the independent film world these days. The thirty-five-year old Brazilian-born Zarvos, who has made New York his home for the past twelve years, has composed music for a handful of independent films, including Tully (2000), Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), and this year’s The Door in the Floor—all award-winning and critically acclaimed.

The line to see The Last Word at the Minneapolis Oak Street Cinema snakes down the block, splitting in two directions. It’s a pleasing sight, even after a week spent loitering around movie theatres. Of the numerous events I’ve attended, The Last Word (2003) screening has the highest draw.

I knew Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair was going to be an interesting and challenging project.

I spent June of this year in Ghent, a small town near Hudson, New York. Hoping to rent some John Sayles movies one night, I headed into town, pulling up alongside a group of heavily pierced teenagers—your average counterculture youth. I asked them where to go to rent a video, and they suggested the Hollywood Video on Route 9.

Sometimes you think you don’t need any help, that you can do it on your own. That’s exactly what I was thinking before I started shooting my new feature, Ur4Given. I should have known better. I had a Sony PD-150 given to me by my brother Spike (yes, Spike Lee) and some tape stock.

When Jim de Sève began working on his documentary, Tying the Knot, four years ago, it was a small, personal film. He had fallen in love with Kian Tjong and both men wanted Tjong, an Indonesian immigrant, to stay in New York. Had they been a straight couple, says de Sève, they would have married immediately and solved Tjong’s Green Card problem.

Jonas Mekas used his camera to survive. When Mekas, the founder of the Film-Maker’s Co-Op, emigrated from Lithuania to New York City in 1949 after having endured the brutality of the concentration camps, he immediately began to make home movies.

The question on everyone’s mind is, Will it last?