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Noah Baumbach’s comedy Greenberg probes the psyche of a man in search of himself. We consider other films that study character.

Slide 1: Introduction

It’s hard to define exactly what makes a film a character study, since nearly every film has a character or two in it. And yet it’s easy to identify different films as character studies, that is, filmic explorations that illuminate the complexity of the human psyche. Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, for example, is a comedy that gets much of its humor from the way character keeps colliding with reality. The poor guy can’t help but get in his on way. When writing the screenplay, Baumbach set out to bring a literary focus to the character. “I wanted to do a real character piece and I wanted to do something I associate more with American novels,” explained Baumbach. It is perhaps that depth, that empathy with and appreciation of the complexity and contradictory nature of human beings that makes a character study. To coincide with Greenberg coming to the screen, we lined up a few other character studies to think about.

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Nearly every year, Focus Features films show up at both the Spirit Awards and Academy Awards. Follow the company’s journey year-by-year.

Slide 1: Introduction

The Academy Awards

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Artist & writer Alix Lambert captured Greenberg’s red carpet premiere from a different angle.

Slide 1: A Woman Waits

A woman awaits the tram, but may or may not be attending the festival...

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Scott Macaulay clicks through the various characters this city has played.

Slide 1: Berlin - A City in Film

In cinema, cities have identities. They add meanings to the stories set within them. Most cities are lucky to convey two or perhaps three sets of associations. Throughout the history of film, the movie city of Berlin, however, has reinvented itself over and over again as the character of its people and politics have changed. The capital city of, successively, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and then a city divided between the East and West after World War 2 and during the Cold War, Berlin has provided a visually striking, symbol-laden backdrop to tales of love and war, politics and intrigue, historical memory and ideological denial. It is a city where loving angels debate the German character while junkie youth wipe away their memories on the streets, where the East German state police are both villains as well as comforting cultural icons, and where citizens can unite against a common threat while individuals can find their own communities to love within. The following is a list of ten significant films set in — and in many ways about — the many cinematic Berlins.

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As part of Music Month, Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macaulay picks out the most seminal movie soundtracks of all time.

Slide 1: Introduction

Independent filmmakers looking for film-music inspiration should check out the 25 scores Filmmaker magazine has selected as some of the coolest film music around. The following scores are all in some ways seminal and speak to complex and innovative relationships between music and screen storytelling.

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Greenberg premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 14, 2010.

© Photo: Hubert Boesl

Slide 1

Ben Stiller, director Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, and Rhys Ifans on the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival.

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The Berlinale turns 60 this year. What a strange journey it’s been.

Slide 1: 2010 - The Berlin Film Festival

The Berlin Film Festival lights up the city.

The Berlin Film Festival turns 60 this year, with no signs of slowing down. For Focus Features, two upcoming films––Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg and Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right––are in competition, and Yuen Woo Ping’s martial arts extravaganza True Legend (which is being handled by Focus International) is in the Berlinale Special category. Of course, there are many more films than these three. The festival that now screens nearly 400 films from some 130 countries didn’t start out that way. To get a sense of what the life of a film festival looks like, we’ve picked select years to profile (with much help from Festival’s extensive historical archive.)

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As park of Movie City: Park City, FilmInFocus’ Nick Dawson looks at ten years that have shaped the Sundance Film Festival.

Introduction

Since its humble beginnings in 1978, the Sundance Film Festival has grown to become the most important American film festival and one of the unmissable events of the international fest calendar (along with Berlin, Cannes and Venice). It has been the launchpad for the careers of numerous filmmakers – from the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch through to Brick’s Rian Johnson and Sin Nombre’s Cary Fukunaga – and has been the single biggest factor in the creation of a vibrant American independent film scene in the United States. Now, with the 2010 edition of Sundance in full swing, we look back at ten pivotal years in the exponential growth of Park City’s pride and joy.

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Over the last decade, Focus Features had developed a special relationship with the Sundance Film Festival.

The Motorcycle Diaries

The Motorcycle Diaries

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For Ben Stiller, Greenberg is only the last in a parade of remarkable characters. Click through his slide show.

Slide 1: Introduction

In Greenberg, Ben Stiller plays a character that may surprise people. While the film is a comedy, Stiller is neither zany, nor silly, nor slapstick, nor satirical. He is a lost soul who has moved to Los Angeles to find himself in a comedy of very human proportions. As an introduction to his performance, we wanted to review the unique ways that Stiller has used his different persona to create original comic characters.

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For Ben Stiller, Greenberg is only the last in a parade of remarkable characters. Click through his slide show.

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Ben Stiller, From Slapstick to Satire

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A regular Sundance Film Festival attendee captures the celebrated cinema event from angles that many never get to see.

Slide 1: Ray Pride's Park City

Every January, Utah’s prime ski town, Park City, is transformed into Indie Film City, USA, when a rush of filmmakers, producers, agents, distributors, journalists and other film industry folk descend on the poor village for the Sundance Film Festival. If you regularly attend the fest, you no doubt would have bumped into Chicago film journalist Ray Pride, who has returned to Park City year after year to interview filmmakers, watch movies, and meet up with old friends. In the last few years, Ray has taken to documenting his yearly sojourn by capturing the wintry scene in photos. Click through to see the festival from the eyes of a real insider.

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Go behind the scenes with Mary Zophres, the costume designer of A Serious Man, and click through a slideshow of her work.

Slide 1: Mary Zophres, Suited Up

It only took one day on set for Mary Zophres to realize what she wanted to do in film. “I started off a costume production assistant on Born on the Fourth of July,” explains Zophres. “On the first day, there was a big pile of clothes, and the designer asked me to divide them into the 50s, 60s or 70s. I was so happy that day; because I had been a thrift store rat my whole life, I knew exactly what I was doing. From that day, it was very clear that not only did I want to become a costume designer but I was cut out for it.” Working her way up the ranks, Zophres eventually came under the wing of costume designer Richard Hornung, who’d worked with the Coen brothers on several films. In 1996, when Hornung was unable to do Fargo, he pushed his protégé to the front of the line. From then on, Zophres has been costuming the Coen brothers’ films. “Ninety percent of the reason that I love my job so much is that I have been so fortunate to work with the Coen brothers. They have assembled an amazing group of people to work with but they are also such an amazing couple of people to work for.” Click through the following slides and let Mary explain her work on a range of films.

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The Coen brothers' favored cinematographer talks about the films he’s brought to screen.

Slide 1: Roger Deakins, Director of Photography

Think of a film shot by Roger Deakins and a few things will come to mind—beautifully framed shots, sensitive lens work, and, most of all, a visual language that’s in perfect harmony with not only the film’s narrative but also its deepest themes. From his earliest work in the mid-1970s, Deakins has become one of today’s top directors of photography not by creating a signature style but by evocatively shooting in sync with story and character. “It’s always about the script,” Deakins says when asked how he chooses his projects. “I think, ‘Is this something I want to go and see in the cinema myself? Is it something that moves me? Are the characters interesting, do they have something to say to me? Do they change? Do they develop during the film?’ I read a script and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, that affects me in some way.’ But I will never read a script and think, ‘Oh, that will be visually interesting.’”

Born in England and with an early career that included the study of photography and documentary work in Africa, Deakins early on shot Michael Radford’s Orwell adaptation, 1984; Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy; and Mike Figgis’ Stormy Monday. In 1991 he shot the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink, beginning a relationship that has lasted through all their subsequent films, including the Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, all of which he received Oscar nominations for. Among his many other credits are The Shawshank Redemption, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Reader, and Kundun. We caught up with Deakins by phone and he gave us his thoughts on eight of his films, including A Serious Man and four others by the Coens.

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The designer of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man shows us how he works.

Slide 1: Jess Gonchor, Production Designer

Jess Gonchor’s first love was theater. Growing up not far from New York City, he could come down to work on off-off-Broadway theater. Then, as he recounts, “one day I worked on a film for the BBC and I saw all these lights coming in, all these big sets coming in. I was like, ‘Wow, what is this? I got to try this. This looks like I could maybe make a living out of it.’ Soon after that, I drove out to Los Angeles to work in film. It really helped me working in the theater, because there you only have $.50 to do something, and you have to make it work. So once I had a little bit of a budget I could really do something.”

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How did the Jewish community react to the Coen’s “Jewish” film?

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The Jewish Serious Man

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Faber & Faber’s Walter Donohue presents an essay by Sidney Howard, the screenwriter on Gone with the Wind, which premiered in New York City 70 years ago today.

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Gone With the Wind

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind

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Coraline

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Santa Ric

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