Sundance 2021 – There’s a First Time for Everything : Sonic Cinema

Sundance 2021 – There’s a First Time for Everything

Posted by Brian Skutle Posted on Feb - 7 - 2021 0 Comment

Even though this is the second fully virtual film festival I’ve covered in the past year (yes, there were Satellite screenings at Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre, but the times didn’t really coincide with the virtual Premiere screenings I wanted to catch), the 2021 Sundance Film Festival was the first one I felt like I was able to actually take in as a festival. As much as I loved the experience that was Fantasia Fest, geoblocking prevented me from watching all but 1 “live screening,” meaning I had to rely on press screeners to cover any of the films. (That the panels and Q&As were available did help alleviate that feeling.) So for Sundance, I didn’t do much in the way of pre-festival screenings, and preferred to, instead, let the festival happen to me. I’m grateful that I did.

Even though I have only been covering film festivals since 2019, I’m anxiously awaiting the time when fully in-person festivals return. The structure of having set times to watch films, of having to be at certain places at certain times, of having to building in breaks, less you burn yourself out. This is mostly missing in a virtual setting. Not completely from Sundance; we had three-hour windows during the “screening times” to watch the film in, during which we could start the film at any time, especially if we had to start late. The “second screening” times gave us 24 hours to watch the film if we missed it the first time, and any screenings started had to be finished in four hours. After Fantasia Fest, this was a welcome change-of-pace.

That being said, the relative looseness of the festival, where early-access allowed critics to take in the previous day’s films prior to the public second screening, also meant we could have a free-for-all and watch as much as we could in between premiere screenings. I know I am not the only one who took advantage of that, and it resulted in 33 features, and 33 short films, in a little over a week. That was a lot of time in front of my computer monitor over that time.

What a week-plus it was as a moviewatcher, however! As a first-timer for the festival, I loved the variety of films, and the collective quality of the films, that were part of the selection this year. I will talk more about what my favorites and best films are from the festival in my podcast, but there is still a lot to say about the festival experience, and the films.

=One thing missing is the sense of community that I’ve heard so much about from Sundance, and experienced from past film festivals. A virtual festival is going to cut out a lot of that by the nature of it. Fantasia Fest set up a Discord channel that was fantastic to use and engage with as we went through the films. Sundance had a virtual “waiting room” where you could chime in and “watch” the theatre fill up while a pre-show program played. While I appreciated the effort, the messages come in too fast to pay attention to, and not easy to truly converse with others. The Discord was more effective, and the group chat I had with other Sundance-covering critics felt like more of a community-building accomplishment than the “waiting room” and chat that was available during the Q&A sessions. Hopefully, when it’s safe to return to Park City, I’ll be able to experience that for the first time.

=With only a week for the festival, there are a number of ways to cover the films one watches. Some people do daily updates with a number of reviews within that update of the films they watched throughout the day; that’s a good way of doing it. Other people review the films as they go; that is the option I went with, as that is how I’ve done past festivals, but with so many films, that’s a lot of writing. For Sundance, I wanted to give each feature a review, but again, that is a lot of writing. If you’ve followed the evolution of the Sonic Cinema Podcast YouTube channel, you’ll notice that I will occasionally do “Quick Take” reviews of films; sometimes, it’s because I want to share my thoughts immediately, and will not get to a print review right away, while other times, it’s for a movie I want to discuss, but don’t necessarily have enough for a print review. As Sundance went along, I decided that for every feature film I caught up with after their premiere screening, they would receive a “Quick Take” review. Some of them will get written reviews when the film goes into release (I can’t wait to discuss “CODA”, “Flee”, and “In the Earth”, among others, after a second viewing), but for others, there is not much else that needs to be said. You can watch all of them here, and decide for yourself, if there’s more to be said on some of them.

=It was an experience to finally be able to discuss films playing at Sundance at the time they are showing, rather than after finally seeing them months down the road. Yes, that included distribution deals like the massive one “CODA” received from Apple+, “Passing” going to Netflix, and “Summer of Soul” getting tapped from Searchlight, but also being able to take part in immediate discussions with fellow critics on the films, our schedules, and just being part of the conversation on social media. After years of being on the outside looking in, it was a welcome change.

=As with the Women in Horror Film Festival last year, I feel as though Sundance has set me up for the type of films I’ll respond most to going forward this year. Musical documentaries like “Summer of Soul” and “The Sparks Brothers” have me curious about what type of compelling real-life stories I’ll connect with, while the way movies such as “Mass”” and “Passing” dealt with powerful, resonate themes have me wanting to watch other films like them coming out of the festival. And then, there are the oddballs like “The Pink Cloud”, “Strawberry Mansion” and even a film I wasn’t that high on such as “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet” that left impressions on me with their unique visions of the world. What other films coming in 2021 will have that same impact on me? I cannot wait to see what they might be, and where they’ll come from.

To close, I had the chance to talk to filmmaker Sean Ellis, the writer-director of the werewolf thriller, “Eight for Silver”. Here is a transcribed version of that interview (with spoilers); I will have two more, along with my favorites of the festival, in my podcast about the Sundance Film Festival. I hope you enjoy!

Brian: First of all, let me say that I really enjoyed “Eight for Silver.” I appreciate that type of horror movie, and this one very much worked for me. (Sean: Oh good, thank you.) What inspired you to make the movie?

Sean Ellis: Well, I finished “Anthropoid,” and my producers wanted to know what I wanted to do next. They suggested that they would love to do a horror film, and asked if I had any ideas in that genre. I said, “Yeah, I had a few,” and they said, “Good, what is it?,” and I pitched them an idea about this village that’s dealing with the death of one of their children, and it’s in the middle of nowhere during a Cholera pandemic, so they can’t go anywhere, and there may or may not be some kind of force threatening them. They got excited by that, and asked if I could write it out and develop it further, and from the initial page I had written, it became what we saw over a period of 3-4 months before the producers said that they didn’t want to miss this winter, so how about we start shooting, and we’ll do two blocks. We’ll do the first block, stop and edit, and then towards the end of the year when winter comes back we set up the rest of the shoot. It was fine, but the second part became much bigger and much more complicated than we imagined because when we were done with the first part, they wanted more of the world, more scenes, and more in depth, but we also knew what was working, what wasn’t working, so we were able to shave certain ideas and subplots away, and then push other subplots and characters forward. We originally called the second block “reshoots” but it was really whole new sequences and scenes like the World War I opening, which became a bookend, allowing us to go back in time and see the why this has happened.

Brian: Were there any particular films that you found yourself inspired by while developing this story? I couldn’t help but think of the old Hammer horror films of the ’50s and ’60s while watching this.

SE: I loved Hammer House of Horror and grew up with those movies; I thought they were great, as well as the Hammer TV show which was really dark as a young kid. And I formed a lot of my love of movies throughout the ’80s, and that was a pretty interesting time for the horror genre. Films like “Alien” and “The Thing” and “An American Werewolf in London” for this or “The Howling” and “Wolfen”; they were all films that set my imagination and so, in some ways, those all served as inspirations, and there are splatterings of those in this. But ultimately it was about doing something completely original, and present this idea in a new context.

Brian: I want to go back to the World War I opening right quick. That was not something I was expecting when the film started, and I really liked that not only does it set a framework for us to flashback to the time where most of the movie is set, but personally, it also ties into the idea of WWI being a sanctioned act of horror and violence that happens in real life, and we also see, in what happens to the gypsy caravan, and that being another sanctioned act of violence. I like how those two things seem to tie together, and how one starts this story in motion, and another ends it.

SE: Yeah, I think the sequences are brother and sister, and even shot quite similarly with a very large, wide static camera to make both of those events feel very poignant towards one another.

Brian: When it came to shooting what violence we do see in the film, what was the balance you found yourself going in between as hard of graphic violence as possible versus seeing it more at a distance, which almost gives it more of an impact as opposed to full bore with gore effects?

SE: You mean with the gypsy massacre?

Brian: That is one of them, and I love that it is shot from a distance, as a wide shot, as opposed to a typical action sequence.

SE: Everybody said, “Are you sure you don’t want to get coverage on this?,” but I wanted to hold the audience captive to it, and the only way to do that was with a long shot. That allows us to see it from Seamus’s point-of-view, what he’s witnessing. I think it’s far more graphic that way, and it also locks the audience into it, with no edits for them to get away. It’s also a more realistic depiction of violence, and it makes it more horrific.

Brian: I really love the creature effects in this movie, and when you brought up “The Thing,” it made me appreciate one of the particular creature effects when we first see the wolf, and its prey, up close. It feels like there is such a fresh take on the design of a werewolf in this movie. What was the process in designing the creature effects?

SE: It was a very long process of research and development. It started with discussions I had with Mark Coulier, who had done some effects on “Anthropoid,” and I asked him what he would do if you were going to design a werewolf. I guess that’s every designer’s sort of dream, and one of the first things he said was, “Well I never saw a werewolf change underwater,” and we knew early on that that was going to be part of the film. And we went through a series of concept art, and he did one sketch that was really good, then a clay model, then a regular model, and I felt that was a really good representation of what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, though, Mark couldn’t do the film because of scheduling conflicts, so Jean-Christophe Spadaccini came on board and took Mark’s design and sculptured a life-size version of it. It was a bit chunkier, and a bit more aggressive-looking, and it had a particular way of moving, and we had three of those beasts built. We shot with those three, and then having some time on the other side to look at it, I wanted to tweak the design a bit more, so I had another concept artist come in and take a look at it, and figure out what we needed because the initial CGI tests on top of the animatronic one were unsatisfying. So we redesigned the beast a bit more, and then CG in Paris took the new concepts and applied it to what we had, at which point it was working really well, and they were able to get the beast to do things we were unable to get the animatronic to do, and they took the lead on it.

Brian: Thank you very much for talking with me today. I really enjoyed the film, and I look forward to seeing what the reaction is like.

SE: Thank you, Brian. Me as well.