Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Manchester By the Sea (our review) will open in limited release on November 18th thanks to Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions.
Michael Mann is launching a book company with a Heat prequel on deck, Deadline reports:
Writer-director Michael Mann, long one of the most literate translators of words to the screen, has made a deal to launch Michael Mann Books. The imprint will generate a series of novels with a stable of writers and the properties will simultaneously be developed for film and television. Mann will look through his own long list of credits for ideas, and a big piece of news here is that high on the priority list is a prequel novel dealing with the principal characters of Heat, Mann’s seminal crime thriller. The prequel novel will cover the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shihirles (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters so brilliantly layered in the 1995 film. Mann based that film on stories of a lot of real criminals and cops, and references to past experiences are peppered throughout the picture.
Watch a video essay honoring ten great female film editors:
Jon Brion discusses the music of Punch-Drunk Love at Vulture:
We were actually talking about the music a year before he shot. Paul asked if I could make some pieces of music that were just rhythm for him to shoot to. I had him sing into a little handheld Dictaphone, just making little percussion noises, and then I looped those and played along. In the middle of shooting, he realized there was another type of rhythm he needed, so we went into his studio together and made an extra percussion piece. Then, once he was editing, we started working on the more melodious aspects, and that was done during the editing, not after he’d made a rough cut and handed it to me. We were doing unorthodox things, like we’d do an orchestra session and edit it into the film, and then we’d make decisions about changes we wanted to make, and we’d do a separate session again later. Normally there’s just one orchestra session at the end and that’s it.
After reading our in-depth interview, listen to a talk with Arnaud Desplechin at The Film Society:
At The Talkhouse, Michael Tyburski recalls his experience as a PA on Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood:
The opening scenes of the movie, in which Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview digs for silver, were shot at an abandoned mineshaft near Shafter, a ghost town just a few minutes north of Mexico. In the days leading up to principal photography (which was, for the most part, shot in order), the locations department tasked me with a 12-hour security shift guarding a large grip rig that had been built atop the mine. Like Plainview, I found myself completely alone under the relentless sun. Instead of being trapped in the mine, though, I took shelter inside my old, AC-deprived Volkswagen, in fear of a giant insect called a tarantula hawk flying near my hood. I was warned that beyond the incredible pain, the insect’s stings could swell into a welt the size of a golf ball.
Watch a video on the imagination of Guillermo del Toro: