IFP » Matt Porterfield

Every Day I’m Hustlin’

Matt Porterfield — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:41:26 +0000

A lot’s happened since my last post:

PUTTY HILL has been playing strong throughout the US; we’re preparing for a wide release in France through ED Distribution (supported by ACID, it opens in Paris theatres September 7th); I was part of a group show at the Baltimore Museum of Art and won Maryland’s prestigious Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize; I attended the Robert J. Flaherty Film Seminar last month on a fellowship; I broke my right arm.

But the most important and exciting thing happening in my world right now is the feature film we’re shooting in Baltimore August 1st, I USED TO BE DARKER

Once again, we’re cobbling together investments and using Kickstarter to launch a very time-sensitive campaign.

My producers and I wanted to craft a campaign that pushed beyond what we’d done with our successful effort to finish PUTTY HILL in 2009. In a typically impulsive decision, I decided to make a bold gesture and shoot a video that would demonstrate my commitment to this project. I told no one but my student intern, Clayton Lee, we shot and edited it in less than three hours, and launched it the following day.

Will it be successful? I certainly hope so. We’re asking for $40K, three times more than we set out to raise for PUTTY HILL, but already, in three days, we’re close to 15% of what we need to meet our goal. Our hope is to have enough money in place mid-way through production to push it into the can.

I USED TO BE DARKER is a project co-written by partner Amy Belk, starring musicians Ned Oldham (brother of Will and Paul) and Kim Taylor, as well as very-talented newcomers Deragh Campbell and Hannah Gross. It will be shot by my good friend Jeremy Saulnier, who DP’d both my previous features, and will combine many of the same crew and collaborative team behind PUTTY HILL with some new friends, like Amy Dotson and Nomadic Independence Pictures.

I feel a bit like I’m playing chicken with a freight train, pushing ahead without all our financing in place; but at this point, two weeks out, I won’t back down. I may not have an abundance of talent or even great luck, but I don’t give up, and I’d like to think that goes a long way.

Putty Hill / The Little Picture That Could

Matt Porterfield — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:38:57 +0000

After a successful opening weekend in New York, I’m happy to say that PUTTY HILL will stay another week at Cinema Village through the end of February and into March. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, please come out and support this little-picture-that-could as it begins its rollout nationwide.

For the theatrical premiere of PUTTY HILL last week, we decided to try something a little different. Each weekend night, Cinema Village hosted three post-screening discussions with the filmmakers and some very special guests, friends of the film from inside and outside the industry. The idea was to join new audiences in conversation with audiences we’ve found along the way. Our hope, to cultivate the dialogue that’s taking place around the film and carry it into the theatre.

The guests that presented the film were Yancey Strickler (Kickstarter), Jonathan Couette (TARNATION), Yance Ford (POV), Esther Robinson (ArtHome, DANNY WILLIAMS: A WALK IN THE SEA), Ross Kauffman (BORN INTO BROTHELS), Jeronimo Rodriguez (NY1 News), Richard Brody (The New Yorker), Amos Poe, Amy Dotson (IFP), Chris Keating (Yeasayer), and filmmaker Jem Cohen.

In addition to these discussions, we installed a temporary show in the back room of Café Select (which is still up — if you care to check it out, it’s through the kitchen) featuring behind-the-scenes photo and video from the film. The reception opening night was packed, but we all squeezed in and danced to the sounds of Co La and blackmoth till it was time to go home.

The weekend ended with a great party at Lit Lounge, featuring four bands and some of the best musicians out of Baltimore: Roomrunner, Matt Papich, Dustin Wong, Spank Rock, and Dope Body. It felt right to end the weekend with friends, old and new. I’m so proud of what’s happening in Baltimore right now. Importing some of that talent to rep the city and our film was an honor and a privilege.

On March 4th, PUTTY HILL opens in Washington, DC and Baltimore simultaneously. After, I’m off to the Wexner Center in Ohio, for screenings on March 11th and 12th. Our schedule through April will be announced on our website mid-March.

Keep your eyes open. And tell your friends!

Co La (Matt Papich) @ Lit Lounge

PUTTY HILL review in the NY Post

Dustin Wong @ Lit Lounge

PUTTY HILL: The Biggest Release of 2011 (for me)!

Matt Porterfield — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:08:13 +0000

I’m ~~pleased~~ totally-fucking-stoked to report that after a great year of festival play, Putty Hill will see its theatrical release in the first quarter of 2011. Cinema Guild is handling the rollout stateside, which will begin in NYC at Cinema Village on February 18th.

In an attempt to push this opening as wide as possible, we’re planning a number of special events surrounding our New York dates: a gallery show featuring photos and video from the film and its collaborative team, parties featuring top Baltimore bands and guest DJs, and a series of Q&A’s with a diverse group of guests. Our challenge between now and February is to find press amidst the buzz of Sundance titles and Oscar nominees. Our advantage: Putty Hill has wide appeal. Our strategy: look beyond the independent film world to generate interest and excitement in what is truly a remarkable American movie.

Extras on location during production of PUTTY HILL

One of the things I’m most excited about is that the version of Putty Hill we’re releasing next month is better than the one that played festivals in 2010. If you read my October post, you might have picked up on the fact we experienced some frustration trying to attain all music clearances for the film, but I’m happy to report good news since then. In the end, we were granted all rights to Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and the re-shoots that were necessary to replace the other big song in question garnered better material than we ever could have hoped for (i.e., a killer version of a public domain hymn sung with pure intensity by a guy who happened on set for a Miller Light). In addition, new tracks were created in record speed by Baltimore’s own Nick Rivetti, Mickey Freeland, and Dave Barressi to replace two more songs-in-question, resulting in a film with no strings attached and an all around better sound.

In development news, my most recent screenplay, I Used To Be Darker (co-written with Iowa Writer’s Workshop alumna, Amy Belk), has undergone some re-writes and is ready to send to friends and family. While waiting for feedback we’ll begin writing our next feature script, a B-more style reinterpretation of Rear Window tentatively titled Take These Broken Wings.

Though I feel most comfortable behind the camera, an interesting opportunity to appear onscreen has presented itself from across the globe. If I get my visa, I’ll be traveling to Algiers and Beirut this month to play a supporting role opposite Amos Poe in Tariq Teguia’s new film Ibn Battuta. Remarkably, Tariq’s not known in the States but has two features to his name that have been very well-received on the international circuit, Roma wa la n’touma (2006) and Gabbla (2008). We met when our films played together at the 2007 Viennale.

In an excerpt from the English-language synopsis, Ibn Battuta is described as follows:

Thirty odd year-old Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in southern Algeria on a basic job assignment, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation, though allegedly to study the state of the “Arab nation” for his paper, he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of all the Arab World. There, he finds himself unsettled and now at loose ends, stunned by the sheer breadth of the Tigris, agaze and drifting in a “mashood” on the waters of the Shatt-el-Arab, with a weapon in hand and the Arabian Gulf within arm’s reach.

Amos and I play neo-cons. There will be some covering of tattoos to do.

Happy New Year, everyone. Hope to bump fists soon at a cinema near you!

Los Angeles plays Matt Porterfield

Matt Porterfield — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:05:04 +0000

Just returned from a super-productive trip to LA!

I went to screen Putty Hill at AFI Fest and UCLA, where they also screened my first film, Hamilton (2006), on 16mm. Both screenings were fantastic. If you’re wondering about AFI, hospitality was outstanding and the program was strong. For the second year (thanks to their corporate sponsor, Audi) all tickets were free, which meant many of the screenings, including ours, were sold out.

This was only my second time in Los Angeles and I took the opportunity to connect with as many friends and industry folk as I could. I met with managers from Caliber and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, producers from Rough House and FilmNation (Juliana Cardarelli and I used to skip school and hang out by the docks). It was great to see my friend and lawyer, Kim Jaime, who represents me and who’s done all legal on Hamilton and Putty Hill, and another high school friend, Debbi Berlin, now a distributor with Palisades. Add to that list filmmakers Aza Jacobs, Monte Hellman (maker of great movies and perfect margaritas), Eugene Kotlyarenko, and Brendan McFadden. For bonus points, I even reunited with a homeboy from junior high school, Chad Fisher (see pic below, far right).

Amy Belk, my co-writer on I Used To Be Darker, and I sat down with Ilyse McKimmie and Cullen Conly of the Sundance Institute. It was great to discuss the script we just submitted. Whether or not it’s accepted into the January Labs, their feedback was invaluable.

We had our share of good food (Phillipe’s The Original, El Siete Mares, Delilah Bakery, Umami) and some Only In Hollywood thrills. I was star struck eating lunch next to Parker Posey. Amy got giddy riding an elevator barefoot with Gael Garcia Bernal. It’s awesome and bizarre to enter a space in which everyone is making films or aspiring to make films. In all my years living in Baltimore, I’ve never once entered a coffee shop and seen someone else writing a screenplay. When we sat down in coffee shops in LA to write, everyone around us was doing the same.

Across the board, I left LA with lots of ideas – just affirmation that collaboration is key. In particular, the managers I spoke to offered great advice and encouragement, pushing me to think about how I envision my career and the best way to move forward. I aspire to speak candidly, with transparency, especially when it comes to movies, and both meetings were no-bullshit.

At the same time, I met many young filmmakers at UCLA who seemed inspired by Putty Hill, its ideology and aesthetic. As my producer Steve Holmgren says, “Don’t forget: small movies.” And he’s right. I think I’ll write one for Casey Affleck.

The filmmaker as a young man, reppin

Auteur Matt Porterfield on Script Development

Matt Porterfield — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:47:08 +0000

In Europe for 10 days of festival travel with my film, Putty Hill (sitting in lots of planes, trains, and automobiles, especially with the various French strikes). It plays France and Austria this month, along with festivals in Scotland and eastern Oregon. In November, it will screen Los Angeles for the first time, as part of the AFI Film Festival’s “Young Americans” program.

Last week, I finished a new screenplay, I Used To Be Darker, and submitted it for consideration to the Sundance Institute. I can’t say too much about it, except that I wrote it with Amy Belk, a fiction writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it’s the expansion of a project I started in 2007, about a young woman from Northern Ireland who spends a summer working in Ocean City, Maryland. She gets into some trouble and goes to Baltimore to stay with family, where she lived her junior year of high school, only to find everything’s changed.

As Amy put it in our letter of intent:

“For us, this is a story about relationships: people taking care of each other and letting each other go. It’s about family: what pushes us away from our own, what draws us back, how we negotiate new terms of engagement as we carve our own space in the world. And it’s a story about home, based on our belief that you can too go home again, but it always involves building something new.”

Collaborating with another writer really frees the imagination. Amy and I decided on every word together. We wrote fast, sometimes over ping-pong. If it weren’t for the Sundance deadline, I’m not sure we would’ve pushed so hard. We’re so close to it right now. I love the script, but I’m welcoming the fresh perspective distance will give us before we dig back in and make another pass.

I Used To Be Darker is a project that I’d like to shoot next year, using more traditional methods of financing than we did on Putty Hill. Putty Hill was shot for $20K, which was made possible with a grant from IFP and Panasonic — we raised another $20K for post-production through Kickstarter, and cobbled together the rest through equity investments, sales, and festival awards.

Moving forward, I think the key is to diversify, not only in content but also in the methods of production and financing we employ. My goal for 2011 is to have at least three projects ready for development: I Used To Be Darker; another more boundary-pushing feature set in Chile, for which I’ll seek foundation and grant money; and a third, smaller film I can make with little or next to nothing close to home.

It’s easy to let the imagination run free when you’re writing something you really want to see. In the case of I Used To Be Darker, we’ve already begun thinking about who we’d like to cast, houses with grass roofs, and what music we’d use if only we could.

Speaking of music, I really fucked myself on Putty Hill. We’re scheduled to release in the first quarter of 2011, but there are two publishing rights still outstanding. If you’ve seen the film, you know what they are. It doesn’t matter. Apparently, they’re out of our league. The publishing companies won’t even quote us a figure.

We won’t give up, because we believe in the artists whose music we’ve chosen and hold them in the highest regard. We’ll do whatever it takes to release the best version of the film we can next year, but it’s hard not to cry fair use. I’m not that naïve, but I do hope that intellectual property rights change, because they subjugate the artists and their work (the original and the derivative) to the gatekeepers of culture. I position myself firmly on the Biz Markie side of the argument – we’ll all get paid one way or the other if we do good work and keep it real.

(Here’s my footnote: for a more articulate discussion on the issue of intellectual property, read Lewis Hyde’s new book, Common As Air.)

photos 1 & 2 by Joyce Kim, 3, 4 & 5 by Andrew Laumann.