The ITVS Indie Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.

You’ll never look at a dumpster the same way again. The sanitation department of Hamburg, Germany, teamed up with an advertising agency to form the Trashcan Project. They plant pinhole cameras on the dumpsters, offering a trash-level view of the city. Awaken your creative juices by perusing the 10 Gold winners from Cannes Lions 2012, the advertising festival, including a surprising interpretation of the Three Little Pigs by The Guardian. If you’ve made a film before, you understand that it’s an all-consuming labor of madness and passion. Now’s your chance for some schadenfreude. Watch other directors as they captain the impossible task of making a movie through this Sundance compilation of documentaries about filmmaking.

On a related note, don’t feel so bad if you’re going through movie-making hell. Here’s what famous directors had to say about their first feature films. Sam Mendes on American Beauty: “It was badly shot, my fault, badly composed, my fault, bad costumes, my fault … And everybody was doing what I was asking. It was all my fault.” 

Why would investors give the big bucks to a film when they could rain money on a flashy start up? Adam Davidson, the master of making economics fun and digestible, tells it like it is: “Hollywood is, somewhat surprisingly, a remarkably stable industry. Over the past 80 years or so, its basic model — in which financiers in New York lend money to creative people in Los Angeles — has been largely unaltered.” 

Wipe your tears away and remember why Nora Ephron will be so keenly missed through this recent Believer Magazine interview with the master of intimate humor. Struggling to form your own documentary website? 

This tour of the movie websites of yore will offer some historical help, guiding you through the trends that have flourished and faded. Monty Python legend John Cleese is now doling out creativity advice. At the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, Cleese preached the importance of playfulness and comfort with the unknown: “I began to see a lot of my best work seemed to come as a result of my unconscious working on things when I wasn’t really attending to them."