latest features
Hard Knocks
With recent reports that life for the residents of Toomelah has reached crisis point, Ivan Sen’s feature about the troubled Aboriginal community hits home even harder.
From A Faraway Land
The inaugural Indian Film Festival of Melbourne will attempt to show audiences that there’s more to their thriving cinema scene than song and dance… though there’s that too.
Last Dance
Director Martha Goddard gives us the back story on shooting her experiential short film ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ which is vying for a Dendy Award at Sydney Film Festival.
Trolls and Tribulations
Having raised the funds via crowd-funding, Snowgum Films are bravely attempting to bring Terry Pratchett’s short epic, ‘Troll Bridge’, to screen.
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Extremely Close
Though sandwiched between Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, charming debutante Thomas Horn, makes the moving drama, ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’, his own.
"The word ‘diva' doesn't even begin to describe him," teases Sandra Bullock, playfully nudging her fourteen-year-old screen son, Thomas Horn, as they discuss the 9/11 drama, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. If the San Francisco ninth-grader isn't used to hanging out with glamorous movie stars, you'd never know it. The son of medical professionals, Horn had never expressed a desire to act - unless you count a walk-on role as a grasshopper in a school production of James And The Giant Peach - when his school secretary informed him that a casting agency was trying to reach him about a year ago.
Oscar nominated director, Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours, Billy Elliot), was adapting Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling novel for the screen, and while he'd already cast Bullock, Tom Hanks and Viola Davis, he'd been frustrated in his search for the right boy - essentially the star of the piece given that the story is told through the eyes of a boy suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. Daldry was not going to make the film without the perfect boy, and after seeing about 3,000 kids, the project was in danger of being cancelled. But fate intervened when producer Scott Rudin spotted the bookish Horn on The Jeopardy Teen Tournament, where he'd won $31,800 and a family trip to Alaska. Accompanied by his parents, Horn flew to New York where he auditioned for Daldry and shortly thereafter was offered the starring role of Oskar Schell.
His paediatric oncologist mother and eye surgeon father would prove instrumental in helping Horn faithfully depict Asperger's. "Oskar and I are very different," says Horn in New York, with Bullock sitting encouragingly at his side. "In the beginning, it was hard to portray someone who had so many little fears and phobias, and who was so particular about how he viewed the world. He viewed the whole world through his father before his father died, and that's the whole reason why his father's death [in 9/11] was an even bigger tragedy than it would have been for someone else. Oskar's father was his whole world. He didn't have any friends at school, and he didn't know his mother very well. His father was 95% of his focus in life, and that was really hard to play."
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is released on February 23. This is an excerpt from a story taken from our March issue, which is on sale in newsagents or via Zinio now.
