Sponsor love: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing and HippoCamp21. Use CNFPod21 for $50 off your registration!
Become a Patron!Cecilia Brown (@cecilbrownn) is on the show to talk about “So Nice to Hear Your Voice,” her This American Life essay about her grandmother. We get into the behind-the-scenes of the piece. Great stuff.
What else do we get into?
Continue reading “Episode 269: The Visionary Life of Cecilia Brown, Making Pictures, and This American Life”
Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale Zappia (@natzappia) wrote a killer little book based on a killer documentary called Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Heavy Metal Scene (University of Nebraska Press).
I mean, you know I was into this, right, CNFers?
Continue reading “Episode 238: Ashkan Soltani Stone and Natale Zappia Rock Out with ‘Rez Metal’”
“If I fail, I want to fail because of me. If we succeed, I want to succeed because of us.” —Vlad Yudin (vladar.com)
“You can’t become best friends with the subject of a documentary. You have to make it objective. I like for the audience to make their own decisions.” —Vlad Yudin
Today’s guest is Vlad Yudin, a Russian-born documentary filmmaker best known for the trilogy of Generation Iron bodybuilding films. His Vladar Company makes and producers lots of films in the fitness industry and we unpack a lot of what makes him a particularly free spirit.
In case you’re new to the show, I should mention that this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories, how they got to where they are, what struggles they deal with, and how they still manage to get the work done.
Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. You can also follow the show on Facebook and Instagram.
Pulling straight from Vlad’s bio on the vladar.com website:
Born and raised in Central Russia, filmmaker Vlad Yudin grew up in Moscow before moving to New York where he would pursue his career in film. In 2008, Yudin formed The Vladar Company to create a platform for production and distribution of various feature and documentary projects. Some of the produced titles include “Last Day Of Summer,” “Big Pun: The Legacy” and most recently the documentary box office hit, “Generation Iron” that went on to become one of the top five documentary’s at the box office for The Vladar Company in 2013. Vlad will continue to produce under the Vladar banner as well as handle the operations and overlook the expanding catalogue of Vladar’s media content.
Visit vladar.com for a list of all the movies he produces and to find links on where to find them. The first Generation Iron film and the Ronnie Coleman film are my faves, FWIW.
Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College’s MFA in Nonfiction, Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and my monthly newsletter (sign up below!).
By Brendan O’Meara
“You’re whole life adds up to who you are.” —Lisa D’Apolito (@lovegildafilm)
“The most successful people create the best experience for the people on set.” —Lisa D’Apolito
You probably want to know who’s on the show this week. This is of course The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to bad-ass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories whereby I unpack their artist journey and tap into their routines and habits about doing the work.
Continue reading “Episode 129—Lisa D’Apolito Talks ‘Love, Gilda’, Her Connection to Gilda Radner, and Documentary Film as Discovery”
By Brendan O’Meara (@BrendanOMeara or @CNFPod)
“You’re really finding the film in editing the documentary.” —Emer Reynolds (@emerpreynolds on Twitter).
Ever catch yourself staring at the sky at night and being categorically floored, hair blown back by the scope of it all?
This happens to me almost nightly and there’s two distinct approaches you can take and I’ve taken both of them, believe you me.
Continue reading “Episode 111—The Empowering and Exciting Nature of Film with Emer Reynolds”Tweetables from Penny Lane (@lennypane):
“You can beg, borrow, and steal, cut corners and set your expectations are low, or say, ‘Fuck that! My time is important and I’m going to pay myself.'”
“I wanted the movie to be a con the way Brinkley conned people.”
“You just have to muddle through.”
“Being a director, your only job is to understand the big-picture goals of the film.”
Penny Lane is a documentary filmmaker whose films include Nuts!, Our Nixon, and The Voyagers. The latter got her a nod from Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.
The Voyagers is a gorgeous movie and a love letter of sorts to her then-fiance. Popova writes:
The Voyagers is a beautiful short film by video artist and filmmaker Penny Lane, made of remixed public domain footage — a living testament to the creative capacity of remix culture — using the story of the legendary interstellar journey and the Golden Record to tell a bigger, beautiful story about love and the gift of chance. Lane takes the Golden Record, “a Valentine dedicated to the tiny chance that in some distant time and place we might make contact,” and translates it into a Valentine to her own “fellow traveler,” all the while paying profound homage to [Carl] Sagan’s spirit and legacy.
In this episode we talk about that, but also her longer films Nuts! and Our Nixon, and also about raising the bar of her own ambitions and finding ways to make her work more visible. Anybody who may be hiding in obscurity will find this episode inspiring.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Grizzly Man
The Gleaners and I
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