October 12, 2008
For the past four years, Jamie Stuart has made short Web films at the New York Film Festival (as well as Sundance and Toronto). Commissioned by Filmmaker magazine, and with a love for the quirky detail, he has brought a poet's eye to festival junkets, news conferences and sundry rituals of ballyhoo, creating off-the-cuff observational essays that vividly capture the nexus between art, absurdity and celebrity. (He once focused an entire piece on Sienna Miller's cocktail ring; in another he gave Amy Adams the camera and had her interview him.) But now Stuart, who hopes for a feature career, is ready for his own close-up. For his coverage of this year's New York Film Festival, which closes today, the 33-year-old director has created an ambitious fictional framing narrative, a "low-fi sci-fi" thriller in which he stars as a time-traveling mystery man. Here he discusses a shot in the third episode, set on the Queensboro Bridge:
I've been looking at the 59th Street Bridge for years and years, I see it on the train whenever I go to and from the city, and I've always wanted to shoot there. It's this decrepit old bridge and there's nothing elegant about it whatsoever. It's Gothic-looking, with these crusty steel beams. Nobody ever shoots on the bridge, it's not a walkway you see in the movies, because it's very narrow and the cars are on one side and for the first 100 yards the train is on the other side, so it's noisy and ugly ... For this shot, I decided it would be an interesting composition if you could see the train tracks ramping up in the background, and I thought it would be a great image, as I'm walking away, to see this train above me screeching along.
I was always into doing stuff that was tightly scripted, tightly preplanned and storyboarded, then all of a sudden, I'm inserting myself into these live situations, where you really have no choice but to improvise. Now I'm finally able to fuse together both aspects. I'd love it if this were the thing that can get a feature going. I need to show that I can handle narrative, that I can script, that I can storyboard and that I can work with actors. Hopefully this will be the thing that will get me back to where I want to be.
-- Interview conducted and condensed by Ann Hornaday
To see Jamie Stuart's NYFF films, visit www.filmmakermagazine.com/nyff46.php. His other work appears at http://www.mutinycompany.com.
PHOTOS: Jamie Stuart WEB EDITOR: Stephanie Merry - washingtonpost.com
