Ken Russell is still at it (sort of)...

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Paul MacLean
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Ken Russell is still at it (sort of)...

#1 Post by Paul MacLean »

Ken Russell, the sometimes-compelling (but often kooky) British director is, at the age of 78, still busily making films. However, the director of Mahler and Altered States is now self-financing them (one cost £100) and distributing them online. Acording to The Guardian:

Future of film is on the net, claims Ken Russell

Jacqueline Maley
Saturday January 28, 2006
The Guardian

The controversial film director Ken Russell has turned his back on the conventional movie business, launching a cottage film industry in his back garden with plans to distribute his latest works through his own website and the auction site eBay.
The 78-year-old who brought male nudity to celluloid and caused outrage by depicting composer Richard Strauss as a Nazi toady yesterday revealed he has already made three films, beguilingly called Hot Pants: 3 Sexy Shorts.

He used a studio built from his garage and collaborated with friends and neighbours. "I hope to distribute it through eBay or the internet or my own website," he said.

Russell's plans come as Steven Soderbergh this week released his latest movie, Bubble, a low-budget drama starring nonprofessionals, simultaneously in cinemas, on cable TV and on DVD.

Some industry figures, led by the president of Disney, Bob Iger, have predicted that DVDs will soon be released on the same day as film premieres in cinemas. A recent survey showed a majority of Americans now wait to take their movies as home entertainment.

Russell said he was also working on a feature film, entitled Braveheart Versus the Loch Ness Monster, which was shot on video. "I hope [it] will have massive distribution and will cost me £100," he said. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Russell said he disliked the mass cinemagoing experience, and the "talk and chatter" of its patrons.

"It's like going to church," he said of the multiplex film experience. "Some need the cathedral full of people to worship but others, like me, I live in the middle of the forest. I just look at a tree and to me that's a religious experience."

Russell, whose work since the 1990s has been largely commissions for television, said the last three films he had seen were on DVD and he was a huge fan of the medium.

All three films were "masterpieces" which didn't get much of a run in his local cinema.

"It's the beginning of the end, I think, for the old form of distribution," he said.

Adrian Wootton, former director of the National Film Theatre, who was also on the radio programme, was not so quick to sound the death knell for cinema as we know it.

"People, for a whole range of social reasons, like going to the movies and like sharing that experience," he said.

Russell, whose most famous films include Women in Love, starring Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, the rock opera Tommy, and The Devils, based on a book by Aldous Huxley, could not be contacted for comment yesterday.

His publicity agent said he had recently been in the US working on a third project - Trapped Ashes - described as a horror anthology with segments from four directors.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0 ... 24,00.html



Paul

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