Friends Making Good - Jon Mullane and John Rosborough, "The One That Got Away"

New music video by my friend Jon Mullane. It was directed by my old pal and fellow adventurer / bon vivant John Rosborough, who has worked on most of my projects over the years, and made me look better for being there. Kudos to everyone who was involved!

Paul Kimball

Filmmaking 101, Vol. IV

Wilder on the set of Double Indemnity

with Barbara Stanwyck

"A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard." - Billy Wilder

Wilder was one of the great filmmakers of all time (the noir classic Double Indemnity is one of my favourite films), probably because he clearly understood exactly what it took to be a director.

Paul Kimball

Filmmaking 101, Vol. III

"I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful." - Kim Novak

I've always been a fan of Kim Novak, perhaps because Vertigo is one of my favourite films. I think she hit the essence of acting spot on. I knew an actor once who, when I asked her why she had taken up acting, said it was because she wanted to be famous. I told her she might get the fame part someday if she was lucky, but she would never be an actor.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 30 August 2011

“The TV business is soul crashing, talent destroying, and human being destroying. These men in their black towers don’t know what they are doing. It’s slave labour. There is no elegance left in anybody. They have no taste. Movies are being financed by conglomerates, which take a write-off if they don’t work. The only people who fight for what the public deserves are artists.” - Olivia de Havilland

Filmmaking 101, Vol. II

"Technical skill counts for nothing if it is used only to manufacture films which have little to do with humanity." - Edward Dmytryk

Interview with Art Malik

Art Malik is one of the best actors of his generation, always worth watching no matter what film he's in. He's probably best known for his roles in the excellent TV series The Jewel in the Crown, the David Lean classic A Passage to India, as the bad guy in the blockbuster True Lies opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, and for his supporting role in one of my favourite James Bond films, The Living Daylights. In this interview, he talks about his background and his career, and offers some valuable insights about acting, both as a process and a profession.

Paul Kimball

PK on Filmmaking

I've appeared on Atlantic Filmmakers in 2008, 2009, and 2010. This is the latter episode, wherein I discuss my career, and my views on filmmaking, directing and storytelling.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 6 August 2011

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it." - John Huston

Thought du jour - 4 August 2011

"Most people don’t know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, it’s very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad – to be willing to risk everything to really express it all." - John Cassavetes

That's about as true a statement for an artist, regardless of the medium, as you can get. Of course, I think it's also true about all professions, and life in general, but it's in the arts that the principle is put into practice in the most public of ways.

Paul Kimball

Thought du jour - 2 August 2011

"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything." - Plato

And with that in mind, here is Canadian pianist Derek Yaple-Schobert from the television series The Classical Now, which I produced and directed for Bravo in 2003 and 2004, performing Bach's Tocatta in E Minor, BWV 914. 

I've made television programming that covers a wide variety of subjects, but nothing I've done has been as rewarding as the programming I've created which has dealt with music.

Paul Kimball

Orson Welles interview

A fascinating and very personal interview with Orson Welles, perhaps the greatest filmmaker of all-time (and one of the great iconoclasts of the 20th century). Welles remains one of my two or three favourite filmmakers, and a great influence on my own work, or at least my method. I absolutely agree with his statement (in the third segment) that there's no point in watching your own movies once they've been made, because it's locked in time, and there's nothing you can change about it.

Of course, as a filmmaker you never get to see your film fresh for the first time on the screen anyway, because you've seen bits and pieces of it so many times in post production. A premiere of a film is a wedding for everyone in the theatre but the filmmaker himself, for whom it is a divorce.

But that's fine, because a filmmaker has seen the film long before anyone else - the first time it plays is in your head, and it is there that the only true version of it will ever exist. The challenge of filmmaking is to make as much of it come to life as possible for everyone else; the secret of being a filmmaker is that you always keep a bit of that original film out of the finished production, so that there will always remain that one special part of the film that will be yours, and yours alone.

Paul Kimball

Synchronicity

This performance film I made for Bravo in 2007 featured pianist Heather Schmidt and cellist Shauna Rolston, talking about their friendship and creative collaboration, and performing music written by Schmidt, including a piece I specifically commissioned for the film titled "Synchronicity".

Heather and Shauna also talk about how they "fit together". I've always wondered whether these kinds of things are just coincidences, or whether there might be something more at work. Do we just get lucky when we meet people with whom we have a connection, or do we meet these people for a reason? Perhaps, if you give any credence to the idea of reincarnation, we travel through our "lives" linked to the same group of people, each of us fulfilling a different role in the next life (my dad, for example, might be my son or daughter in the next life, or my best pal). Maybe that's why, when you first meet someone and feel like you've known them your whole life, you have - just not this "life", but one before... or, if you see time not as a linear construct but more of a circle, then perhaps a "life" still to come.

That would be the ultimate synchronicity.

Paul Kimball