An Interview with Zachary Levy, Director of ‘Strongman’

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Zachary Levy’s film, Strongman, is one of the rawest and best cinematic portraits in recent history. In it, he follows Stanley ‘Stanless Steel’ Pleskun, the self-proclaimed ‘strongest man in the world at bending steel’. Over the course of the film, we intimately see Stan’s ups and downs, which are at times comedic, at times tragic, and at times, that perfect, indescribable mix of both. This is a film one watches and never forgets, and thinking back on it later, you almost feel as though you’re thinking back to a chapter of your own life, even though you may have nothing in common with Stan’s experiences and surroundings. It’s that vivid.

I reviewed Strongman a few weeks ago, and I recently had a chance to sit down with Zach and chat about his film. The interview is spoiler-free, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, no worries. But do yourself a favor and see it soon. It’s currently available on iTunes and on DVD.
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My Streets: The Best ‘So Bad It’s Good’ Movie You’ve Never Seen

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My Streets (2009)

When I was sixteen, I made an extremely bad feature-length film called The Velvet Autumn.  It’s two hours and thirty minutes, and it makes absolutely no sense.

The reason it doesn’t make any sense is because at that time in my life, I was obsessed with the visual construction of a movie, and I didn’t yet understand that you don’t just construct images, you construct them in a way that expresses a story. I was consciously working off of the Raging Bull hypothesis—that you create the images first, and your story will come later. Scorsese did a better job at this than me, although he had access to much better materials and had way more experience.  But in any event, The Velvet Autumn, and Raging Bull alike, are proof positive that the hypothesis is incorrect—you gotta have the story first.
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How (And Why) To Collect Blu-Rays and DVDs

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A small portion of my collection.

If you’re reading this site, you probably love movies, and if so, you should probably collect them. Now, before you say “No way, collecting is for turkeys!” and turn me down like I’m a bad influence out of a Ninja Turtles PSA, let me explain—this is for your benefit. Collecting gets a bad rap these days, what with shows like Hoarders and whatnot, but a real collector ain’t like those people. A real collector is fucking G. Not to toot my own horn, but I own over a thousand Blu-Rays and DVDs, and if I sold them all off right now, not only would I break even, I’d turn a profit. My collection pays for itself. I repeat—the movies I love pay for themselves. Wanna be like me? Here’s how.
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Ender’s Game: Hollywood, Please Let Me Re-Edit It

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Ender’s Game (2013)
Written and Directed by Gavin Hood
114 min.

Very minor spoilers ahead.

I read Ender’s Game a week before seeing the movie, and now I almost wish I hadn’t, because the book is fucking great. I don’t know whether I would have liked the movie more, or less, if I hadn’t read the book first, but I do know that I won’t be able to talk about the movie without talking about the book.

Don’t worry, though—I’m not going to make a checklist of everything the book did right that the movie did wrong. In fact, I’ll say up front that I don’t think that movie adaptations of books have any business being ‘faithful’. Or rather, I think they should be faithful in specific ways, and not in others. For instance, it’s important that an adaptation captures the themes, character arcs, and, whenever possible, the tone of its source. It’s not important that it hits every plot beat, or revisits every location, or namedrops every side character. That sort of keeping faith does little beyond providing little jolts of recognition to fans of the source material. A movie can get bogged down in superfluous details, or tripped up in its pacing, if it just methodically ticks off a checklist of things that happened to have happened in the book. And this, unfortunately, is what happened with Ender’s Game.
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Special Effects: Why They Look Right When They Look Right

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The late, great Ray Harryhausen. (1920-2013)

When I was a little kid my grandpa showed me King Kong, the 1933 one.  King Kong doesn’t look real, but it looks good, because it looks right.  Looking ‘right’ is the key.

Special effects are perhaps film’s biggest point of separation from the other arts.  In literature, if you want a monster in your story, you just describe it.  But a movie has to convince you what you’re looking at is real, even when you’re looking at the most not real things humans can dream up.  This takes a perfect synthesis of human imagination, technology, and innovation.
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