A feisty little kid. A crabby old hunter. A nationwide manhunt. Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a film that sounds a little bit like movies you’ve seen before, and sometimes it looks a bit like them too (Waititi visually references films like The Lord of the Rings and Mad Max), but it feels like a new experience. It’s full of heart but overflowing with, as my grandparents might say, piss and vinegar as well.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople has debuted to rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (including my own). It’s the story of Ricky (Julian Dennison), a foster kid with a history of offenses like shoplifting and loitering, who finally finds the right home. But when tragedy suddenly strikes, he runs off into the New Zealand bush with his foster uncle Hec (Sam Neill), and a series of misunderstandings makes them Public Enemy #1. The forests fill with SWAT teams, and adventure is everywhere.
I sat down with Taika Waititi to find out all about Hunt for the Wilderpeople: his influences, his innovations, his cast and fonts. And although he can’t talk in too much detail about it yet, he was able to explain the take on Marvel’s superhero Thor which earned him the coveted director’s chair on the upcoming sequel Thor: The Dark World, and reveal the new title for the What We Do in the Shadows spin-off, about the lovable werewolves of New Zealand.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Also: Sundance 2016 | ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople Bags a Big One
Crave: Would you describe this as a kids movie?
Taika Waititi: I think when I wrote it I didn’t think of it like that. I think the more films I’ve made, the more I’ve realized I want more people to see them. So I was very conscious making this film to take a lot of swearing out that I usually have in my other films, which would then get a rating where kids couldn’t see it. So I really do think that families will love this film. You know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “I like making family films.” It’s not really a family film, but kids can see it. They identify with this kid, who’s a hero. But to my mind it really is a pretty mature film even though it’s ridiculous. There’s a lot of fun to be had within that for grown-ups as well.
I think of “kids movies” as a little different from “family movies.” I feel like family movies have to be wholesome. Kids movies just have to appeal to kids.
That is true. That’s right. I wouldn’t say it’s a “family film” but I would say it’s like a little bit more mature kids film. Who knows? There’s so many crazy [elements]. The social welfare worker who’s leading a manhunt, an actual manhunt. That would never happen but it’s all in the name of having fun, and entertainment. One of the things Jemaine [Clement] and I talked about when we did Shadows was trying to make something to entertain. So this isn’t as broad a comedy as Shadows is but as far as trying to create an entertainment, not like… yeah.
Was it all in the book, the way the story escalates?
It was very, very slow. The book is very different. It’s not funny. The book is actually kind of made up of… as they move from cabin to cabin, throughout, in the book the story takes place over about three years. So it’s like they disappeared for years and then at the end of the book the kid’s like really skinny by the end and stuff. So there’s a lot of stuff that I couldn’t do, and I also didn’t want to do a thing over time like that. “Three Years Later,” like Cast Away. I thought, we’ll just make a short, powerful, energetic caper chase film.
At what point, or at any point in this movie… when a cop car is flipping over for example… do you ask yourself, “Have I gone too far or not far enough?”
Oh, every day I was like… we always talked about [it]. I just remember growing up and yeah, a lot of those films, especially in Australasia, we made car chase films all the time, and I guess you just had to flip a cop car. There’s no reason for it. Even in the shot, there’s no real logical way that that car flies through the air like that. It’s like watching all the Van Damme films when you’re a kid and stuff, and whenever he does the powerful kick it’s covered from eight angles. The same kick. It’s like that. It’s a great spectacle for people to go, “Yeah!”
I was surprised you didn’t have that one line of ADR that some films add, when you hear a cop go, “Is everyone okay in there?” followed by “Yeah, we’re fine!”
Oh, right! Yeah! [Laughs.]
For all we know that guy’s dead! That’s a serious car accident.
Yeah!
So tell me about casting Julian Dennison. Was it easy? Like, “Oh, that kid!”
It was that, it was exactly like that. We didn’t do any auditions because I’ve worked with him before on a commercial. I’ve been tracking him a bit because he’s done a couple of features, small parts on features…
It sounds kind of sinister when you say “I’ve been tracking him.”
I’ve been stalking this little 12-year-old kid. [Laughs.] He was getting a little bit more well known in New Zealand. He’s a real natural actor. There’s this air of confidence about him and he’s just so sweet-natured as well. I usually cast people who I guess display the traits of the character that I’m looking for.
Does he loiter a lot?
No he doesn’t, but I think Ricky needed to have a really sweet nature underneath it all, that he was like covering up with this gangster façade. Even though Julian doesn’t do that, he’s one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet, it’s good to have that base. I’d rather not get a kid that thinks he’s a gangster and then try and infuse that character with some sweetness, you know? […] And I’ve always wanted to work with Sam [Neill]. So actually yeah, I didn’t audition anyone for both of those roles.
Sam Neill is one of the actors whom I think everyone associates with New Zealand. There might be a perception from the outside that he’s royalty in New Zealand. Is that true?
I think in New Zealand a lot of people… I mean, he’s definitely a kind of national treasure in New Zealand. I think he’s a lot like, I feel like overseas a lot of people wouldn’t know where he’s from.
I have a select circle, perhaps.
Maybe you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m like a really big Event Horizon fan, so on the set I was always asking him about the movie and I was like, “What the fuck’s going on at the end of that movie?” I know they go to Hell but I heard there was a director’s cut that no one ever got to see.
It’s like way longer and really grotesque, and I think some of the footage of Hell is online with extra violence.
I want to see that!
I’m more of an In the Mouth of Madness fan myself.
Oh, I don’t know that one.
The John Carpenter movie?
He was telling me about it the other day.
It’s incredible. It’s like the best H.P. Lovecraft movie that isn’t an H.P. Lovecraft movie.
Amazing, yeah. Cool, cool. Well, John Carpenter is like… a lot of his scores and stuff, and Peter Weir films were an influence for me for this synth soundtrack. I was trying to do a lot of dissolves and zooms and stuff. Just because again, embracing that kind of older style of filmmaking which I don’t think is out of date or uncool.
I think it’s coming back, because everyone who grew up with those movies is now making movies…
Yeah.
What other films are an influence? You namecheck Lord of the Rings, which I was laughing about before you even made the joke. You recreated the Lord of the Rings shot [where the Hobbits are hiding from the Nazgul]. Did you shoot where they shot that scene? It looked really close.
We were looking for some roots under a tree, and we were rushed that day so we sort of chose that. It was a ridiculous amount of effort to go to just for that joke! [Laughs.]
It was worth it.
Thank you. So the films we were really looking at were, obviously, I always look at Badlands for every film I make. Especially for when they make their little village out in the woods, you know? I was looking at Romancing the Stone, Paper Moon…
I’ve actually never seen Paper Moon.
Paper Moon I really love. It’s a great flick. You know, a comedy with grown up and a kid. So yes, those kinds of films. Again, I guess Paper Moon is a funny film but it hits you when it needs to as well. Those things. What else? Pretty ridiculous things. Things with monsters, and even a lot of the New Zealand car chase films like Shaker Run, Came a Hot Friday, Goodbye Pork Pie, even Mad Max. Actually, old Mad Maxes. Actually I hadn’t even seen Fury Road when we did that chase, and then I watched it and I was like, “Yeah, that’s the way to do it.” [Laughs.]
There’s one thing in Hunt for the Wilderpeople that I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s the 360 degree montage.
Oh yeah, the 720 [degree]. It goes around twice. Yeah, so that morning we had planned to start doing the car chase and we got out onto the army land and it just dumped snow. A good eight inches of snow. We hadn’t planned for it. We couldn’t do the car chase so we had to come up with another plan.
So while we were figuring out what to do, we were figuring out what to shoot at lunch time, in those few hours before lunch all the actors were there and I was just standing around and I thought, “Why don’t we do a little montage, passing of time thing with all the characters?” We just put the camera on a tripod and we just slowly turned it round and around, and we had all the actors hiding in the trees and underneath the camera. It was really theatrical. We had doubles with all the different costumes on, walking away, and then they’d run around the back of the camera and they’d sit there, and then Julian would run around. It was really complex, like a sort of music video.
So that was just seat of your pants?
Yeah.
It’s so unique. I haven’t seen that before.
Yeah, I tried to do more as well. I mean there’s a short one that we do when Ricky is eating sandwiches and walking in the woods. We’d have a double in the background and then again he’s eating sandwiches for one shot. I always love that sort of thing, especially if it has a kind of transience. It’s a sort of meditation in the middle of the film. I like that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it resets you a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then ah, okay! New chapter.
Literally. I love your Harry Potter font.
I know! I originally used Times Roman, italicized, because I thought it was so ‘80s. I loved it but then everyone was like, “You can’t do that! It’s ugly!”
Marvel Studios
I know you can’t talk much about it, but you’re transitioning. You’re doing the Sundance movies and now you’re doing the giant blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok. How much freedom is there for you to innovate like that?
Well, I guess we’ll see once we get on set. I think on set it’s a different story. It’s basically about coming in under budget. [Laughs.] That’s all it’s about. If you come in under budget and on time you can do what you want, really. Just stick to what the idea of the story is. I always do that. And I’ve talked a lot about my style and the way I work on set, which is very improvisational. I make up a lot of shots on the spot sometimes but I always have a plan. I always plan what I’m going to do and then I’ll throw that plan away when I see what the actors want to do, and then we have to come to a common ground and figure that out.
But then often, yeah, like that trap door that opens up [in Hunt for the Wilderpeople] and there’s dirt? That’s something we came up with that morning and just said to the art department, “Come up with a trap door and we’ll shoot that in a couple hours. It’s nothing, just leaves and dirt.” They built that and the whole thing, yeah, and I like working like that because I think creativity is always going on set. It means you don’t start getting dull and slow.
Is there a danger with that, once you get a huge budget, where you can just say “We’ll add it in CGI and we’ll figure it out later?”
There will definitely be that danger, yeah, but as much as possible I like to shoot practically and on locations. This will be very different for me but luckily I’ve done a lot of commercials before, some big ones, so I’m used to changing pace on bigger sets. There’s a lot of waiting around, and nobody likes to wait around while they’re setting up green screens and weird CG stuff. But yeah, these movies are so big that they have to.
Did they come to you or did you have to pitch them?
They came to me and asked me to pitch.
Did you pitch Thor or did you pitch them something random?
No, I was asked to pitch on Thor. They watched Shadows obviously, and they watched Boy, and I think the combination of those two films, you get that I wasn’t just like a crazy comedy director or too dramatic. They wanted to weave a little bit away from that.
What was your take on it that was so successful? What did the other directors not tell them?
I have no idea, actually. I have no idea. I did a sizzle reel for the tone, and some joke stuff.
What sort of stuff is on the sizzle reel for something like this? I remember Kenneth Branagh kept talking about David Lynch’s Dune, and you can see it in the sets. I’m curious what came to your mind.
I don’t even know… Basically how I pitched it was like, he just needs to be the most interesting character.
That would be nice. I think we missed that last time.
Yeah, if you’re going to call the movie Thor, Thor has to be the best character.
Or “Ragnarok” has to be the best character, I suppose.
Right!
Just introduce a new guy.
There you go!
Madman Entertainment
Are you planning your next movie after that, or is Thor taking up too much of your time?
I’m still planning. I’ve got two other films that I won’t be working on really quickly, but I’ve got two other ideas that I want to go straight into once I’m done with Thor, and they’ll be smaller because I feel like I will probably need to go back…
Is it too early to tell me about either of those?
One of them is like this crazy… it’s like with a kid, so I’m not sure I’m actually going to go straight into, since I might need a break from working with kids. But it’s set in World War II and it’s a kind of comedy about a kid in the Hitler Youth.
That does sound funny!
[Laughs.] And then Jemaine [Clement] and I are trying to write a werewolves spin-off.
I really want to see that.
Yeah, so that will most likely be the next thing.
Will it be called “Swear Wolves?”
It’s going to be called We’re Wolves, like “We are wolves.” We’re Wolves.
Top Photo Courtesy of Sundance Institute
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
The Top 50 Must-See Sundance Movies:
The Top 50 Must See Sundance Movies
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50. Hustle & Flow (2005)
Winner: Audience Award - Dramatic (Craig Brewer), Cinematography Award - Dramatic (Amy Vincent)
Hip-hop musicians often profit from hardened reputations, but few films examine the interplay between artistic ambition and flat out criminality as beautifully as Hustle & Flow. Terrence Howard plays a pimp who decides to take a crack at stardom, crafting a killer track in his brothel and begging his neighbors to be quiet long enough to lay it down on tape. Craig Brewer’s film is honest about his hero’s failings, and uses them to gradually expose how true artistic expression evolves from hard living. “It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp” is a great song, and deservedly won an Oscar.
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49. Hairspray (1988)
John Waters had been making independent movies for decades, but even the ‘80s popularity of Hairspray probably couldn’t have prepared him for what it became. Perhaps his most accessible film (Divine eating dog poop just didn’t cross over), Hairspray later spawned a Tony Award-winning musical, and a hit movie based on the musical based on the original movie. If that made one person watch Pink Flamingos after a night out on Broadway, it was worth it.
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48. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Benh Zeitlin), Cinematography Award - Dramatic (Ben Richardson)
"Amazing Child" read the New York Times headline from 2012's Sundance wrap-up. The Times called Beasts of the Southern Wild "one of the best films to play at Sundance in two decades." Beasts is a lovely fable about carrying on, carried by six-year old Quvenzhané Wallis. The magical realist post-Katrina Louisiana marshland's tale went on to garner four Academy Award nominations, including a surprise Best Director nomination for Benh Zeitlin (who beat out Ben Affleck, even though his Argo won Best Picture). That "amazing child?" Wallis became the youngest Best Actress nominee ever. -
47. A Brief History of Time (1991)
Winner: Filmmakers Trophy - Documentary (Errol Morris), Grand Jury Prize - Documentary (Errol Morris)
The recent release of The Theory of Everything just makes me want to go back and re-watch Errol Morris' brilliant 1991 documentary film about Stephen Hawking. Why watch actors dramatize Hawking's story when you can get it from his own lips? Or the mechanical equivalent. We talk to his friends and family, and get frank anecdotes from Hawking himself, all between clear explanation from his oblique book about the nature of the entire physical universe. Morris has always been drawn to extreme personalities, and one can't get more extreme than Hawking, one of the world's smartest men.
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46. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (2009)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Lee Daniels), Special Jury Prize for Acting (Mo'Nique), Audience Award - Dramatic (Lee Daniels)
Precious has had a journey. I don’t just mean the character – an overweight teen (Gabourey Sidibe) who lives through intense variants of abuse from her mom (Mo’Nique) in Harlem – but in the way the film is perceived. At Sundance it cleaned up awards from the both the Jury and the audience. 11 months of hype later, prominent critics were vocally revolted by the stereotypes and narrative differentiation between the skin tones of the darker-skinned black characters (largely abusive, and illiterate) and the lighter-skinned black characters (who were helpful); then Precious won two Oscars. With subsequent projects, director Lee Daniels (TV’s Empire, The Paperboy) is viewed as a camp-favoring director, closer to the heart of his heroes Pedro Almodovar and John Waters.
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45. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Winner: Special Jury Prize - Originality of Vision (Miranda July)
Twee, precious, and perhaps insufferable, Miranda July's 2005 comic drama Me and You and Everyone We Know is one of the sweetest films of its decade, and easily one of the best. A man is divorcing from his wife, and wants to remain something of a hero in the eyes of his sons. A woman tries as hard as she can to be recognized by the art world. A pair of teenage girls look for a healthy way to explore their sexuality. And all of these stories are about hope, optimism, and joy. We mentally reach out into the universe, hoping for approval. Sometimes the universe approves.
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44. Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)
While a solid debut film, no one could have predicted that director Justin Lin would go on to be in charge of four blockbuster Fast and the Furious films. Lin’s microbudget crime caper got him into the big leagues, and was also a landmark film for diversity with its Asian cast. Sung Kang also confirmed for us that Han Seoul-Oh from the Fast and Furious movies is also Han from Better Luck Tomorrow, making this film a prequel to the blockbuster franchise in retrospect.
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43. Sherman's March (1985)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Documentary (Ross McElwee)
In future film classes Ross McElwee will be heralded as the original vlogger. His Sherman's March is a video diary of McElwee attempting to make a documentary about the lasting effects of General Sherman's march of destruction that ended the Civil War, but McElwee was also dealing with a difficult breakup at the time, so he met with women he'd dated before and interviewed them about why they broke up. As McElwee becomes less and less confident that he's even making a film, he includes on-camera updates about his fear of nuclear war. March isn't campy. It's a genuine march to try to be better.
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42. Super Troopers (2001)
The Sundance Film Festival is famous for discovering important filmmakers, influential new voices and championing serious motion pictures that illuminate life as we know it. It also debuted Super Troopers, a comedy that’s about as meaningless and dumb as it gets. Even the film’s trailer seems amused that Sundance even bothered. The seemingly Harold Ramis-inspired story, about a group of lazy, oversexed prankster Highway Patrolmen on the verge of getting fired, is but a delivery system for one classic gag after another. Sundance is cooler than most people realize.
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41. Donnie Darko (2001)
When Donnie Darko premiered at Sundance, it had the whole festival buzzing. What did it mean? When I finally saw it, I thought it made sense, but that it was clearly the vision of a deep thinker. We expected to see a bit more from writer/director Richard Kelly since, but his ambitious follow-up film Southland Tales landed Kelly in director jail. Donnie Darko has lasted though, as a director’s cut was released years later, and also straight to video sequel. Kelly assembled a breathtaking young cast who have all gone on to do great things: Jake Gyllenhaal’, Jena Malone, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and a reinvention of Patrick Swayze.
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40. This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)
This Film Is Not Yet Rated is not just a documentary, it’s a full frontal assault on the entertainment industry. Filmmaker Kirby Dick sets his aim squarely at the mysterious and powerful MPAA, who determine the ratings for every motion picture. When they refuse to give up their secrets, he hires private detectives to investigate who these gatekeepers of mainstream cinema are, what their agenda really is, and why films from major studios are held to consistently lower standards than their independent counterparts. What he discovers is shocking. That his revelations have had no impact on the industry is an outrage.
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39. American Movie (1999)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Documentary (Chris Smith)
Filmmakers would never become filmmakers without a healthy heaping of good old American can-do, and Sundance has always been (at least ideally) defined by ambition and originality over all else. Chris Smith's 1999 documentary follows an ambitious director named Mark Borschardt as he tries to gather the funds and shoot a short horror film called Coven (pronounced with a long o). Mark is a legitimate weirdo, God bless him, and he clearly has a vision. You want this small town wonk to succeed, to become the next underground horror icon. It's been years, but his first feature may finally be released in 2015. He may still make it.
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38. Paris, Texas (1984)
Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas is one of the best films of 1984, and one of the most achingly painful and oddly romantic films of the decade. Co-written by Sam Shepard, Paris, Texas follows a mysterious man (Harry Dean Stanton) who stumbles out of the desert after four years. He and his brother (Dean Stockwell) go to L.A. to meet up with his son. Father and son then go on a quest to find the boy's pretty absentee mother (Nastassja Kinski). This film is like kitchen sink Shakespeare, a halcyon paean to reuniting families, a quiet opera of complex unspoken emotions. It's a brilliant, brilliant film.
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37. Saw (2004)
The Blair Witch Project wasn't the only Sundance horror film whose immense buzz and popularity steered the method of mainstream horror filmmaking for the next five years. We bet you weren't even aware that Saw premiered at Sundance. But most people don't even remember that the original Saw was more of a mystery-thriller that told the story from a victim's perspective. The torture porn that the series is credited with starting came later - after there was no mystery. Just horror.
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36. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Guy Ritchie made his feature film directorial debut with this stylized British gangster film. Released in 1998, Sundance was one of the prestigious stops on its world tour. The Sundance premiere certainly lent some credibility to the U.S. release. I remember checking it out at my college town’s indie movie theater, where it probably wouldn’t have even played had it not been a Sundance hit. Richie continues to make gangster films in the same style, like Snatch and Rocknrolla, and also earned a place at the big studio table with the Sherlock Holmes films. Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones did well for themselves too. For both of them, this was their first film.
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35. Whiplash (2014)
Winner: Audience Award - Dramatic (Damien Chazelle), Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Damien Chazelle)
Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-nominated Whiplash was born and raised at Sundance. What began as a short film about an abusive music conductor browbeating greatness into his students evolved into a feature length masterwork starring J.K. Simmons as the cruel taskmaster and Miles Teller as the glutton for punishment. The film raises difficult questions about art and artists, and comes to conclusions that are both shocking beautiful and dangerously subversive. Both versions of Whiplash were Sundance breakouts, and it’s hard to imagine either of them coming from anywhere else.
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34. Spanking the Monkey (1994)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (David O. Russell), Audience Award - Dramatic (David O. Russell)David O. Russell's career started with a Sundance incest comedy. And while that's become a bit of an indie-trope, Russell gives Spanking the Monkey a Generation X slacker spin: an overgrown boy (Jeremy Davies) takes care of his injured mom (Alberta Watson) because he's bored and lost his internship. And he begins to fight a growing sexual attachment to her. Sex is a bit of a red herring, because Russell has other suburban fish to fry, but Spanking hit Sundance at a time where incest wasn't so narratively commonplace. And Russell cleverly handles the ickiness. -
33. The Spectacular Now (2013)
Winner: Special Jury Prize - Acting (Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley)
Young romance is difficult to do. James Ponsoldt's 2013 film The Spectacular Now gets it perfectly. This is not a halcyon, self-indulgent, “But daddy, I LOVE him!” tale of fantasy romance, nor is it a horndog's tale of getting one's jollies. This is a film about how teenagers ache for real love, and how they constantly announce their newly-formed life philosophies that they assume will be permanent, but usually only last a few years. This is a film that knows the way young people think, and presents it as simultaneously painful, pitiable, and exhilarating. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley are both excellent in it.
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32. The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Winner: Directing Award - Dramatic (Noah Baumbach), Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (Noah Baumbach)Perhaps the most realistic film about divorce. The Squid and the Whale is set in the 1980s, when divorce was becoming more culturally acceptable, but no less difficult on children. It was released in 2005, at a time when it is entirely culturally acceptable, but no less difficult on children. The Squid and the Whale works so well because it is told from the point of view of the kids (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) at a pubescent time when fatherly advice is sought, but during a time when the father (Jeff Daniels) is too bitter about career, stature, and women to know the entitled worldview that he's shaping. -
31. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The movie that made Richard Curtis an industry started at Sundance. After playing Sundance in January, Four Weddings and a Funeral went on to be one of the year’s biggest box office successes and a Best Picture Oscar nominee. Hugh Grant became Mr. Romantic Comedy and Curtis wrote more hits like Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary before writing and directing the ultimate rom-com Love Actually. In the decades since Four Weddings, the Working Title-produced films of Curtis would premiere in the U.K. before going worldwide, so it was a very special instance for Sundance to host the first screening.
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30. Before Sunrise (1995)
Before he tackled all of Boyhood, Richard Linklater focused on young love with Before Sunrise, one of the great cinematic romances. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Celine (Julie Delpy) on a train in Vienna, and they disembark to spend one single night together, sharing themselves in a way they only could with a stranger. This is not a passionate affair, but a soulful tete-a-tete between two intelligent people who are toying uncertainly with the idea of love. Funny, sexy, utterly believable, and only the start of an ongoing journey: Linklater, Hawke and Delpy have revisited these characters every nine years, with Before Sunset and Before Midnight, and every film has so far been a classic.
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29. American Psycho (2000)
Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho was, like so many of his works, an outright damnation of the vapid and aggressive wealth culture of the 1980s; people giving into anti-intellectual drug-laced murderous heartbreaking hedonism is the word of the day. Mary Harron's 2000 film version of the novel includes all of Ellis' yuppie evils, but folds them into the absurdity of manly machismo, making Patrick Bateman (an excellent Christian Bale) into a risible caricature of manhood. American Psycho is terrifying, and yet it is also bleakly funny. There are few films like it.
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28. Brick (2005)
Winner: Special Jury Prize - Originality of Vision (Rian Johnson)
Teen angst, gangster style. Future Star Wars director Rian Johnson emerged as a dynamic cinematic voice with Brick, which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenaged loner trying to get his ex-girlfriend out of trouble. When she goes missing, the film reveals its true intentions: to create knowing, thrilling parallels between the hard-boiled world of film noir and the soapy teen dramas of John Hughes. The joke is funny, but the slick, exciting mystery would have worked just as well without the gimmick. Brick is a powerful drama wrapped up in a clever package. Don’t confuse the two.
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27. In the Bedroom (2001)
Winner: Special Jury Prize - Acting (Tom Wilkinson & Sissy Spacek)Todd Field played the piano player in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, whose description of his freaky moonlighting gig (playing blindfolded at an orgy) sent Tom Cruise into sexual crisis mode. Two years later, In the Bedroom marked Field's directorial debut. Straight out of Sundance Field was already getting Kubrick comparisons for his ability to create everyday tension in a marriage without judgement of his characters for their actions. Set in New England, the lobster cage is a fitting repeated motif for the marriage between Wilkinson and Spacek, whose grief over their son's murder has removed them from their natural state. Their cohabitation is unbearable. -
26. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
When you think about the hundreds of movies Sundance plays every year, as prestigious as that alone is, only a small percentage of them go on to win Oscars. Little Miss Sunshine is one of those success stories, when Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor in a year everyone thought it would go to Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls (with an assist from the bad will engendered by Norbit.) Best Screenplay was all Michael Arndt. It gave Steve Carell a vehicle for a more dramatic performance, which he continued to explore this year in Foxcatcher. Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris broke out from music videos and music documentaries with Little Miss and continue working together today.
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25. Run Lola Run (1998)
Not even Breathless feels as breathless as Run Lola Run, as kinetic a film as has ever been produced. Franke Potente stars as a fire-haired woman who has only 20 minutes to find 100,000 Deutschmarks before her boyfriend risks his life to rob a supermarket. So she runs, and runs, and in her desperation briefly touches the lives of everyone around her, sending them on different paths. And when she fails, she resets the whole film and tries again, and again, until she gets it right. Truly experimental, and absolutely minimal, and yet also as exciting as any $100 million blockbuster. Only at Sundance!
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24. American Splendor (2003)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini)A quasi-adaptation of an underground comic and a quasi-documentary, American Splendor is the envy of anyone whoever thought they couldn't adapt mundane everyday life to a movie. Mundane work, the worry of health, solitude, and corporate overgrowth were the non-superhero subjects of Harvey Pekar's comics. In Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's film, Harvey Pekar is played by Paul Giamatti and appears throughout the film, interviewed by the filmmakers. This experiment was both typical and atypical in execution, making it a perfect adaptation of Pekar's work; and as it briefly features underground comic book artist Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak), it's fitting that Splendor also debuted at Sundance, where the Crumb documentary previously made waves. The first shared comic book film universe was at Sundance, y'all! -
23. Super Size Me (2004)
Winner: Documentary Directing Award (Morgan Spurlock)
Morgan Spurlock pretty much risked his life to become a filmmaker. He came up with a plan to eat nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days and see what happens. Not surprisingly, he gained weight and developed health problems. Along the way Spurlock explored the industry of fast food and our eating habits, while creating a new subset of documentaries. We’ve had Michael Moores making documentaries from their perspectives, but making oneself the entire premise, putting a big hypothesis to the test, was bold. The genius was in making it popular. We all eat fast food. That’s a lot easier to relate to than a highbrow political doc. Spurlock continues to explore big subjects in fun documentaries, and he lost his Super Size Me weight.
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22. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
One of the only Sundance films to inspire a legitimate cultural phenomenon. While the popularity of Napoleon Dynamite has waned (its animated TV version certainly died), there were a few years where you couldn’t go to a mall without seeing a Vote For Pedro shirt in a Spencer’s Gifts window. It launched Jon Heder’s acting career, and he must have made a fortune playing the many Napoleon Dynamite clone characters in other big budget studio films. Jared and Jerusha Hess have worked consistently since, and it gave Tina Majorino a bridge from child roles to teenage and later adult ones. Napoleon Dynamite was flippin’ sweet.
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21. Rejected (2000)
Don Hertzfeldt's 9-minute animated short is perhaps one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's constructed as a string of imaginary animated bumpers that Hertzfeldt was supposedly asked to draw for imaginary companies like The Family Learning Channel. The attempts are misguided at best, but as the bumpers progress, you can see the animator is clearly losing his mind, until the cartoons themselves dissipate and fly apart before our very eyes. This is absurdist satire at its finest. Rejected is a surrealist dismantling of commercial language, revealing the insanity behind what we casually consume. I live in a giant bucket. Rejected was nominated for an Academy Award.
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20. Living in Oblivion (1995)
Winner: Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award - Tom DiCillo
Tom DiCillo’s inside baseball comedy, about the making of a not particularly good-looking Sundance-esque feature, is a film by filmmakers, for filmmakers. Starring a great ensemble cast, Living in Oblivion captures the mundane, annoying struggles on a low-budget set in a fashion that feels both honest and ridiculous, so that every film student in the world can watch it and recognize a little bit of their own misadventures in their pursuit of great art. It’s required viewing for everyone who has ever been behind the camera, or ever wanted to say “Action.”
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19. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Winner: Dramatic Audience Award & Dramatic Directing Award (John Cameron Mitchell)
The directorial debut of actor John Cameron Mitchell, who played the title character and adapted his own stage musical, which continues to be performed today. Hedwig had a sex change to marry an American, only the procedure goes wrong, leaving Hedwig with a one inch mound. The music rocks and Mitchell has gone on to direct the films Shortbus and Rabbit Hole, as well as television. We’re fortunate to live in a world where “Transparent” is on the air and awareness of LGBT issues is high. Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a major piece of that social education and acceptance.
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18. Roger & Me (1989)
In recent years, filmmaker Michael Moore has become something of a political target from both the right (whom he openly lambasts) and the left (who disapprove of his polemical approach and sometimes-sloppy journalism). In 1989, however, Moore was a vital voice in a war against economic injustice, presented by Roger & Me, his documentary about the social decay of Flint, MI following the withdrawal of Ford's automotive factories. We had thought about the way giant corporations affected American life before, but never with such a slick, damning eye. All econ students need to see this film.
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17. Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Winner: Special Jury Prize - Dramatic (Jim Jarmusch)With minimal cost and minimal story, Jim Jarmusch's first film demolished the idea of what an American movie could be, and birthed numerous indie imitators. In Stranger Than Paradise, Manhattan is presented as a boring, isolated place. Bare apartments. No landmarks nearby. It isn't starving artist romanticism - it's just empty. Paradise is an anti-road movie (even though Screamin' Jay Hawkins gives the car a good driving tune). Cleveland is icy, and has tall buildings, and Florida has racetracks. Return to New York, and everything looks the same. It's the No Wave answer to Pop Art. Everything's been done, so why do anything? And it puts a spell on you. -
16. Winter's Bone (2010)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize Dramatic, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini)
Winter’s Bone was in many ways a typical Sundance movie, a gritty low-budget drama set in a forest community with a breakthrough performance by a young up and comer. Jennifer Lawrence was doing The Bill Engvall Show before she starred in Winter’s Bone, although I had seen her in 2008’s The Poker House as well. Winter’s Bone got Lawrence her first Oscar nomination, along with a Supporting Actor nominated for established character actor John Hawkes. True story, I was offered several interviews with Lawrence during her awards campaign and at the time I could never do them. Man, am I kicking myself now. It was Granik’s second feature, and her follow-up film was the documentary Stray Dog.
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15. Crumb (1994)
Winner: Grandy Jury Prize - Documentary (Terry Zwigoff), Cinematography Award - Documentary (Maryse Alberti)
Not just one of the best Sundance films, but possibly one of the greatest biographical documentaries of all time, Terry Zwigoff's Crumb doesn't so much dissect famed underground cartoonist R. Crumb as is does present him as a hypersexual, hyperawkward, hypercynical kindred spirit. Crumb is frank about his own sexual foibles, depression, and oddball interests because he's too stilted and awkward to be any other way. And yet we can't help but admire him as a creative soul. A deeply disturbed, totally relatable creative soul.
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14. Bottle Rocket (1996)
One of the most distinctive voices in American cinema began speaking with Bottle Rocket, the first of many films in a series about dreamers who make the world not into their own image, but into their own, obsessive-compulsive idea of what it should be. Brothers Luke and Owen Wilson star as affable kids who decide to pursue the romantic life of crime, but they don’t have the grit to pull it off. Even when they commit real larceny, it’s as though they’re playing a childlike game of robbers. It's an innocent film about innocent men, trying - and failing - to prove that they're not that innocent.
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13. Primer (2004)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Shane Carruth), Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize for Science and Technology (Shane Carruth)
Primer is a $7,000 (!) time travel film, made by a mathematician that featured so much tech speak that you either came away thinking it was the most technically sound time travel film ever, or a failed experiment. For example, pop culture cool dad Chuck Klosterman wrote (five years after his first attempt at unraveling Carruth's movie) that "[the time travelers] talk, act (and think) like the kind of people who might accidentally figure out how to move through time, which is why it's the best depiction of the ethical quandaries that might result from such a discovery." And on the other side, Esquire critic Mike D'Angelo noted, "anyone who claims to know what is going on is either a savant or a liar." -
12. In the Company of Men (1997)
Winner: Filmmakers Trophy - Dramatic (Neil LaBute)
Sundance films are not afraid to be dark, displeasing, or – in the case of Neil LaBute's 1997 debut In the Company of Men – outright confrontational. LaBute's film is about a pair of Caucasian office wonks, both unlucky in love, who decide, in a fit of cruelty, to seduce and then abandon an emotionally vulnerable woman. They want to take emotional revenge on all of womankind. There are misgivings along the way, but the soullessness of Aaron Eckhart's Chad cuts through the drama like a scythe. You cannot walk away from this film unshaken.
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11. El mariachi (1992)
Winner: Audience Award - Dramatic (Robert Rodriguez)
Robert Rodriguez sold his body to science, and used the money to make El mariachi, an ambitious, action-packed drama with the soul of a struggling artist. A hapless mariachi (Carlos Gallardo), mistaken for a wanted criminal on a mission of revenge, is targeted for execution, and discovers - to his own surprise - that he is up for the challenge. Simple, exciting and human. Rodriguez would transform the can-do attitude of El mariachi into a miniature studio mentality of his own, creating endless genre films that cater to his favorite fetishes, gradually losing track of sad, struggling, spaghetti heart that made this first film such a trailblazer.
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10. Pi (1998)
Winner: Directing Award - Dramatic (Darren Aronofsky)
The mind is a terrible thing to use in Pi, the debut film from future Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky. In his bleak, intimate sci-fi thriller, a mathematician named Max tries to use complex number theory to predict the stock market, only to - perhaps, just perhaps - discover a mathematical formula that guides the universe. The film features subplots about corporations and secret societies who want to steal Max’s discovery, but where it really excels is in its depiction of how madness can spring from pure logic. Pi was the clarion call of a filmmaker who would turn obsessions into nightmares and then into beauty, again and again and again.
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9. Memento (2000)
Winner: Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award (Christopher Nolan and Jonah Nolan)
After Memento played Sundance, the buzz about “the backwards movie” grew. It was the Nolans’ second feature (Following premiered at TIFF), and became a phenomenon in its own rite by people trying to piece together its reverse narrative. The success of Memento got Nolan studio jobs like Insomnia, which led Warner Brothers to give him a crack at Batman, creating a seminal cinematic version of the character. That success then gave Nolan the clout to create Inception, a trip inside the levels of our subconscious. If Memento was an experiment in nonlinear storytelling, it paid off and gave Nolan the confidence, and gave audiences confidence in Nolan, to explore these kinds of stories on a blockbuster scale.
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8. Slacker (1991)
I recently revisited Richard Linklater's 1991 film, and I discovered that it is now one of my favorite movies. Linklater, with little budget and a robust streak of youthful anti-establishment enthusiasm, took to the streets of Austin, TX following conversation after conversation, musing on, well, just about anything. Slacker reveals that precious time in 1990s film when dismissal and dissection and good-natured Gen-X navel-gazing was something of a national sport. Are they apathetic? Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.
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7. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
Winner: Audience Award - Dramatic (Steven Soderbergh)Teasing title aside, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is about emotional impotency. A man (James Spader) interviews women about their sexual history because he cannot engage in sex himself. In his library of women, many are aroused simply by being asked to open up. Sex, Lies, and Videotape is the only Cannes Palm d'Or winner from a first-time director. But it never would've made it into contention at that prestigious festival if the buzz at Sundance hadn't been so overwhelming (and perhaps the title so enticing). Steven Soderbergh's film is often credited with officially kicking off the American independent film movement of the 1990s and made Sundance a destination for movie moguls. -
6. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
It may be hard to imagine what a discovery The Blair Witch Project must have been at Sundance, where no one knew yet what it was, or even whether or not it was real. Such a discovery, such a mystery, could never be replicated for a mass audience, whose awareness of the found-footage horror film would eventually be tainted by hype, overhype, and later, from many, a casual dismissal. But this faux documentary about filmmakers lost in the woods, victims of the supernatural subject of their own documentary, rides a thin line between realism and madness. If you can put yourself back in the mindset of that first, innocent audience, unaware of what was in store for them, you can briefly replicate just how special The Blair Witch Project originally was.
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5. Hoop Dreams (1994)
Winner: Audience Award - Documentary (Steve James)Steve James' 171-minute documentary about two black Chicago youths who are recruited to play basketball at a predominantly white upper-class school 90-minutes away, took five years to shoot. By merely observing both environments (the impoverished, violent areas of Chicago and the cleaner upper-class school) and the commute between, Hoop Dreams visually contrasts societal divisions in class and education. There's no guaranteed triumph-over-adversity ending. No talking heads. Just Arthur Agee, William Gates, their families, and the recruiters who promise a better life by winning basketball games. It's a moving, difficult film that should be required viewing for any American. Immense support from critics (especially Roger Ebert) helped push Dreams to an $11 million box office tally, a remarkable feat for a documentary. -
4. Blood Simple. (1984)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Joel Coen)
The Coen Bros. are one of the most dominant forces in the world of indie film. They first appeared in 1984 with this small town neo-noir that would announce their wry style and criminal interests to the film world for the following three decades. The story of Blood Simple. is, well, simple. A rich man hires an aging PI to murder his wife and his wife's lover. In true Coen Bros. fashion, however, everything goes hideously wrong. While the film is dark and violent, Blood Simple. contains a strange edge of comedic clarity that only the Coens can do.
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3. Clerks. (1994)
Winner: Filmmakers Trophy - Dramatic (Kevin Smith)
Clerks., the debut film from writer/director Kevin Smith, may be the apotheosis of Sundance. It’s a micro-budgeted film starring amateur actors, shot in black & white (because it was cheaper), about the ennui of low-paying retail jobs. It was made by a first-time filmmaker who was clearly learning the craft as he went. And its inclusion at Sundance, as well as Cannes, helped it find it a voracious audience who appreciated its celebratory depiction of no-class problems, lowbrow humor and an almost pathetic search for deeper meaning in popular culture: the only culture available to its heroes (and its target demographic). And best of all, for all its naiveté, it’s also a really great, genuinely funny film, whose sparse style perfectly mirrors the sparse lives of its hapless characters. If Kevin Smith can do this, you can too.
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2. Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)
Winner: Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic (Todd Solondz)With Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz absolutely destroys the fond nostalgia for adolescence that is constantly told in movies, books, commercials, and at family gatherings. Middle school sucks for Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo). It probably did for you, too. But most likely it was not as awful as it is for Dawn. Did I mention her last name was Wiener? Solondz's film portrays cruelty more than it revels in it. And it even puts the kibosh on the idea that running away to New York City instantly makes everything better for everyone who's ever been picked on. -
1. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
It was the Cannes Film Festival that launched Quentin Tarantino’s seminal, game changing film Pulp Fiction, but there would be no Pulp without his first film, Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino’s first two films ushered in a wave of what we now lovingly refer to as post-Tarantino cinema. That means everyone tried to copy his cool dialogue and time shifting narratives, and to lesser success. Tarantino is a true example of a filmmaker turning his lifelong passion for film into a unique voice, and the success of his current films shows he wasn’t just a one hit wonder. Aside from inspiring a generation to crib his style, his films changed what cinema could be in the ‘90s. Violence didn’t have to be conventional shootouts. Dialogue didn’t just have to be about the scene. Movies could shake up what you know about genre, and it all started here.
