Management 360 fell victim to the online hoax known as catfishing when an intern-turned-mailroom trainee hired in April was discovered to have created more than a dozen fictitious e-mail accounts that she utilized to make herself appear to be a well-connected industry insider. In the guise of such names as Christopher Nolan, Anthony Kiedis and model Behati Prinsloo (Adam Levine's fiancee), she networked and flirted with a number of her superiors -- at one point inviting people over to a property she claimed she was house-sitting for David Fincher.

Reminding us that its slate of films and filmmakers is a wealth of talent waiting to be mined, the Slamdance Film Festival has announced that its first-ever Founder's Award will be granted to Christopher Nolan.

Before reinventing the Batman franchise for Warner Bros. and brewing original ideas like Memento, Inception, The Prestige and the upcoming Interstellar, Nolan screened Following, his first film shot for a mere $6,000, at the 1999 festival.

Nolan will be honored at the Slamdance Film Festival headquarters, in the Treasure Mountain Inn in Park City.

"Throughout his incredible successes, Christopher Nolan has stood firmly behind the Slamdance filmmaking community. We are honored to present him with Slamdance's inaugural Founder's Award," said Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter in a statement.

In the same statement, Nolan gratefully accepts the award, thanking the festival for giving him his first chance to connect with audiences.

“Slamdance continues to provide an important forum for emerging filmmakers and I'm proud to be part of their history,” Nolan said.

Slamdance's 20th anniversary line-up consists of 93 films, including the premiere of DIY , a short documentary following the historical development of the Do-It-Yourself indie film movement, which spotlights he careers of Nolan, Benh Zeitlin, Rian Johnson, Marc Forster, Nina Menkes and Oren Peli.

The 2014 Slamdance Film Festival will take place from Jan. 17th - 23rd, 2014 at the Treasure Mountain Inn, located at 255 Main Street.

"Behind every good director is a great producer...": On Nolan's wife and producer Emma

Christopher Nolan: Emma has been a key component we've grown together, in sort of different senses... 16mm evolved into films in the studio, as somebody close to you who can support you but who also knows your weaknesses as well as your strengths and has no other agenda but to try and make a film the best it can be. See you do your best work as a director. That's what Emma's been for me.

What's the deal with Brad Pitt and "Memento," did Nolan turn Pitt down?

No, he turned me down! [Laughs] Truthfully, [Pitt] did read the script, that’s where the story comes from, is he read the script and he met with me about it when he didn’t have any reason to know who I was or anything about it. And nothing came of it, other than him being interested in it, I think within the sort of agency world where the script was circulating, just sort of perked up a bit of interest in what was a very obscure project otherwise.

And I think really that’s how it came to Guy Pearce’s attention, he sort of got the ball rolling. I'm very grateful to him... It was a very nice thing that he liked it.

Does Christopher Nolan ever get to the editing room and hated his takes? On "Inception"

Every film is a little bit different. I tend to start from scratch in the edit suite. My editor will do an assembly as we shoot, but I might never watch it fully. We’ll watch a scene at a time, and then we go back to dailies and review the dailies and we start putting it together. So the first few weeks when I cut the film is a process of discovery. And there are things that you’re thrilled with because they work better than you thought, and there are other things that you realize are going to be very difficult.

Cutting "Inception" with Lee [Smith], my editor, I remember we got to reel three and watched it. It was completely incomprehensible. And it took several weeks of sleepless nights of really trying to figure it out. Weirdly though, when I look back at the script compared with the way that section of the film turned out, it’s not that different.

But it can be very hard to find those things. One of the reasons I don’t watch the assembly as a lot of filmmakers do, is it’s four hours long and it’s a terrible film. So I just don’t want to start from that place. I’d rather start from the place of its sense of possibility, which is what you have in the dailies.

Much ado about the internet and criticism

Well one of the things I took away from doing the festival circuit — having a film here, for example — is that anybody paying any attention to your film is a fantastic thing. I remember the first time we were reviewed... and it wasn’t a very good review, apparently. But I was just thrilled and I called my then-agent and he said, "Oh don’t worry, no one’s gonna notice it, it’s Weekly Variety."

And I said, "But we got reviewed in Variety, it’s amazing!"

"They didn’t say great things."

I’m like, "Okay, well…"

By far the hardest thing for a filmmaker is to get eyeballs on your material. So I would never complain about people over-analyzing the detail. I mean, there can be a somewhat unrealistic level of analysis, in terms of divining the filmmaker’s intentions to be. But I think it’s a fun game anyway. I would never begrudge the attention on a film because it means that the film will have its chance. You get it out there, people see it, then they can judge it.

Will he return to smaller movies?

There are a lot of filmmakers that have taken a very different approach than me. My friend Steven Soderbergh for example, who helped me with my first studio film, he’s always made a very, very specific point about going back and forth between different sizes of film.

I’ve only ever been driven by story, set of characters that would grab me. And I try not to really think too much about why I want to make a film. It’s just if you want to make it, then you sort of go for it. And I think there’s also a sense in which if you have the opportunity to work on a big scale, that opportunity’s not always going to be there, so I certainly avail myself of it while it’s there.

I would never want to go to making a smaller film in an artificial sense. I would never want to do it for the sake of it. I’d be very very thrilled and happy to do it if I found the right story and the right thing in the back of my head that I wanted to get across, and I’m pretty sure that’s something I will do eventually. But I’m not in any rush. I like working the way I’m working now.

In a special lunch presentation on March 26, director Christopher Nolan will look at his career and the future of filmmaking in the digital age.

Barrett wrote:http://www.thewrap.com/interstellar-chr ... ttle-sets/

Christopher Nolan was tightlipped about “Interstellar,” his closely-guarded new cinematic spectacular. But he did reveal during an onstage interview at CinemaCon on Wednesday that the film deals with wormhole travel.

He downplayed suggestions that the film might have a time travel element, and said that “Interstellar” is about using celestial shortcuts to reach parts of space that might otherwise be inaccessible. Producer Kip Thorne, a noted theoretical physicist, has been consulting on the science behind wormholes.

“It's something that really looks at who we are as people,” Nolan teased.

He went on to say that “Interstellar” harkens back to the “golden age of blockbusters,” a time of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” and one in which the phrase “family film” did not have “pejorative connotations,” he argued.

It's also a throwback in another key way. Instead of relying exclusively on computer imagery, Nolan had his production crew design and build spaceship sets.

“We shot it like a documentary,” Nolan said.

It meant that his design team had to prepare their futuristic visions ahead of time, but it “paid huge dividends for the actors.”

“Interstellar” will be shot largely in IMAX and boasts a cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway.

The director would not reveal McConaughey's role in the film, beyond saying he acts as a surrogate for the audience.

“I needed somebody who was very much an everyman… somebody really relatable,” he said.

Nolan seemed as pleasantly surprised by the newly minted Oscar winner's recent run of critical successes. He knew McConaughey primarily from his star turns in commercial fare, but felt the jolt of rediscovery after screening a rough cut of “Mud.”

“It was a transformational performance,” Nolan said.

“Interstellar” launches on Nov. 7, 2014.

Barrett wrote:http://badassdigest.com/2014/03/26/how- ... ary-style/

Christopher Nolan just did a 45 minute Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy at CinemaCon and - to no one's surprise - his most common response to questions about Interstellar was "I can't say much about the movie." But he did drop a tidbit that intrigued me, and it was about how he shot the spaceship interiors.

Is it news that Nolan confirmed space ships? Well, he did, and he says they built vast sets. Nolan says he prefers to go practical with sets as much as possible, and that giving people something tangible onscreen supports the VFX illusions (sorry for the paraphrasing, I didn't record the talk and am working from notes). On most movie space ship sets the windows would open up onto green screens, but Nolan didn't want to do that.

The director said that he worked with the special effects team to "put reality outside the windows" of the enormous ship sets. Actors could walk around and look out the windows and see what their characters would see. "It paid huge dividends for the actors in terms of oerformance," Nolan said.

But more than that having the reality outside the windows offered Nolan a choice in how he shot the scenes. "It allows cinematographer] Hoyte Van Hoytema and myself to shoot like a documentary," he explained. That means scenes on the ship could be played with naturalism instead of worrying about hitting FX marks. Nolan concedes it was tough on the FX team, who needed to have their work finished on an accelerated schedule.

There was almost nothing else revealed about the film, except that Nolan is going for a tone similar to the family-friendly ("Before that became a disparaging term," he explained) all-audiences blockbusters of his youth. Star Wars came up a lot, and Nolan called it a "perfectly cinematic experience."

"It's about harking back to the films I grew up with that took me to places I could never imagine," he said. He's looking to explore something simple: "The universality of human experience."

In the '90s, newly accessible video tech- nology gave adventurous filmmakers (such as Lars von Trier and his colleagues in the filmmaking movement Dogme 95) an unprecedented wedge for questioning the form of motion pictures. The resulting 20-year process of radical technical and aesthetic change has now been co-opted by the very establishment it sought to challenge.

Hungry for savings, studios are ditching film prints (under $600 each), while already bridling at the mere $80 per screen for digital drives. They want satellite distribution up and running within 10 years. Quentin Tarantino's recent observation that digital projection is the "death of cinema" identifies this fork in the road: For a century, movies have been defined by the physical medium (even Dogme 95 insisted on 35mm film as the presentation format).

Savings will be trivial. The real prize the corporations see is the flexibility of a nonphysical medium.

As streams of data, movies would be thrown in with other endeavors under the reductive term "content," jargon that pretends to elevate the creative, but actually trivializes differences of form that have been important to creators and audiences alike. "Content" can be ported across phones, watches, gas-station pumps or any other screen, and the idea would be that movie theaters should acknowledge their place as just another of these "platforms," albeit with bigger screens and cupholders.

This is a future in which the theater becomes what Tarantino pinpointed as "television in public." The channel-changing part is key. The distributor or theater owner (depending on the vital question of who controls the remote) would be able to change the content being played, instantly. A movie's Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week's blockbuster. This process could even be automated based on ticket sales in the interests of "fairness."

Instant reactivity always favors the familiar. New approaches need time to gather support from audiences. Smaller, more unusual films would be shut out. Innovation would shift entirely to home-based entertainment, with the remaining theaters serving exclusively as gathering places for fan-based or branded-event titles.

This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals—the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives. We moan about intrusive moviegoers, but most of us feel a pang of disappointment when we find ourselves in an empty theater.

The audience experience is distinct from home entertainment, but not so much that people seek it out for its own sake. The experience must distinguish itself in other ways. And it will. The public will lay down their money to those studios, theaters and filmmakers who value the theatrical experience and create a new distinction from home entertainment that will enthrall—just as movies fought back with widescreen and multitrack sound when television first nipped at its heels.

These developments will require innovation, experimentation and expense, not cost-cutting exercises disguised as digital "upgrades" or gimmickry aimed at justifying variable ticket pricing. The theatrical window is to the movie business what live concerts are to the music business—and no one goes to a concert to be played an MP3 on a bare stage.

The theaters of the future will be bigger and more beautiful than ever before. They will employ expensive presentation formats that cannot be accessed or reproduced in the home (such as, ironically, film prints). And they will still enjoy exclusivity, as studios relearn the tremendous economic value of the staggered release of their products.

The projects that most obviously lend themselves to such distinctions are spectacles. But if history is any guide, all genres, all budgets will follow. Because the cinema of the future will depend not just on grander presentation, but on the emergence of filmmakers inventive enough to command the focused attention of a crowd for hours.

These new voices will emerge just as we despair that there is nothing left to be discovered. As in the early '90s, when years of bad multiplexing had soured the public on movies, and a young director named Quentin Tarantino ripped through theaters with a profound sense of cinema's past and an instinct for reclaiming cinema's rightful place at the head of popular culture.

Never before has a system so willingly embraced the radical teardown of its own formal standards. But no standards means no rules. Whether photochemical or video-based, a film can now look or sound like anything.

It's unthinkable that extraordinary new work won't emerge from such an open structure. That's the part I can't wait for.