Holly Herrick's blog

Five Questions for Eliza Hittman, 'It Felt Like Love'

Holly Herrick — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 18:30:40 +0000

Filmmaker Eliza Hittman comes to Austin on Saturday, September 21 for the Austin Film Society and Cinema East presentation of It Felt Like Love at AFS at the Marchesa.

Hittman's first feature film was an instant critical success when it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Drawing favorable comparisons to films by Catherine Breillat and Larry Clark, the movie was most celebrated for having a cinematic vision all its own of teenage girlhood. Hittman's sublime artistry and masterful knack for storytelling makes It Felt Like Love one of the must-see indies of the year.

In answering my five questions about the film, Hittman discusses the predatory instincts of teenage girls, her own Brooklyn summers at age 14, the one photograph that inspired the feature, and breaking the mold.

Holly Herrick: The movie feels like an anti-coming-of-age story, which is so refreshing. There is no voyage of self-discovery -- the heroine is charging forward towards an idea of her desires, yet they are unclear to her. Can you discuss how you approached this dilemma?

'Mud' Returns to Austin Today

Holly Herrick — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:30:56 +0000

On weekends as a kid, my sister and I would go play on my godparents' farm, which was just outside of the county seat where we lived in rural Maryland. Their two kids were our greatest friends, and together we formed a fearsome foursome, subjecting ourselves to our own glorious reign of terror that included snapping turtle bites, egregious poison ivy, falls from trees, fences, tire swings, horses and roofs, unfriendly ghost sightings, four-wheeler accidents and various fights with fists/mud/sticky burrs/chewing gum. We were always filthy and often bloody, but it was always an amazing adventure.

Some great children's films, like The Goonies, The Black Stallion and The Wizard of Oz, have captured youthful myth-making and discovery to cinematic advantage, and often use childhood dramas as a metaphor for adult problems happening just outside the frame. In Jeff Nichols' latest movie Mud, the grown-up world is at the center of the story but is seen through the electric naivete of youth. The magic of Mud is that you don't have to pretend to remember the heightened feeling of being a kid who finds an adventure. With Mud, you can watch the movie through a 12-year-old's eyes without ever leaving your own.

Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play Ellis and Neckbone, a contemporary Arkansas version of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Like those two, one of the boys has a family and one is essentially an orphan, but both have problems at home and find that in this world, trouble itself is routine. The boys have a confidence that's both impressive and comic; they can fish, drive and operate a motorboat, but they are still learning how to curse.

Jodorowsky of the Pacific Northwest: Calvin Reeder, 'The Oregonian'

Holly Herrick — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:30:36 +0000

Film lovers and outside-the-box horror fans have had their eye on filmmaker Calvin Reeder since his visually stunning, terrifying and absolutely mind-bending short films that made the rounds at Sundance and in midnight-movie sections of festivals around the world. Garnering comparisons to David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Luis Buñuel, Reeder is often categorized among directors who are themselves ride the edge of familiar genres. The Oregonian, Reeder's Sundance-selected first feature film (starring True Blood's Lindsay Pulsipher), looked and felt like it might be a horror movie, but was something else entirely. The film won an aptly titled special award for "Independent Vision" at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival.

Until this month, Reeder's films had yet to screen here in Austin. On January 11, The Oregonian will have its Austin premiere at the Austin Film Society as part of this month's spotlight on the indie distribution label Factory 25. (Tickets and info here.)

While in the midst of finishing his latest feature film, Calvin took a few minutes to reflect back on the real-life fever dreams that brought The Oregonian to life, he and Lindsay Pulsipher's creative collaboration, and what he expects when his newest, star-studded feature, The Rambler, hits Sundance at the end of this month.

If you want to hear more from Calvin, he'll be joining us via Skype after the AFS screening of The Oregonian. You can also view his short films online: Little Farm, The Rambler and The Snake Mountain Colada.

Holly Herrick: Before making The Oregonian, you had made several great short films (The Rambler, The Snake Mountain Colada) that captured some of the visual themes you explore in the feature, such as terrifying situations of isolation and confusion, people stranded on the roadside, and a strange, colorful interpretation of gore. Would you say that making the shorts compelled you to push yourself narratively to explore these themes further in a feature?

Reeder: I think so, it seems like most ideas I have come in pieces, and it's a struggle to connect them at first. Like in The Rambler short I knew I had this sort of cliché guitar rambler guy and I knew I there had to be a scientist. There was a bunch of other ideas that came with those characters but a lot of those ideas were really just color and sound. I guess it was a feeling I was trying to get out, it was my goal to give people that or something close to that.