Actress Brit Marling and director Mike Cahill talk about their Sundance winning film, “Another Earth.”
[flowplayer src=’https://www.sidewalkstv.com/flash/video/anotherearth.flv’ width=480 height=360 splash=’http://sidewalkstv.com/photogallery/albums/userpics/10001/normal_anotherearth6.jpg’ autoplay=false popup=”Would you like to share the video or play it once again?”]Video Content: “Another Earth” (2011) – SIDEWALKS host Maaika Westen interviews actress/writer/producer Brit Marling and writer/director/producer Mike Cahill about their film, “Another Earth.”
Mini-Biographies:
Brit Marling is an rising actress, as well as a writer, producer, and director.
Brit’s foray into filmmaking started during her college years at Georgetown University, as she began writing and starring in projects that her friends were working on. Taking a leave of absence from school, she moved to Havana, Cuba to co-direct the documentary “Boxers and Ballerinas,” which followed young artists and athletes living in the communist country. She graduated valedictorian from Georgetown, having studied Economics and Studio Art. Her work experience included a stint as an investment-banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Brit’s first feature length, narrative film is “Another Earth,” a project she starred, co-wrote and co-produced. She has some upcoming project including “Sound of My Voice” (another project that Brit stars, co-wrote and co-produced) and Nicholas Jarecki’s financial thriller “Arbitrage,” starring opposite Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and Eva Green.
Born in New Haven, CT, Mike Cahill at a young age would experiment with filmmaking on Fisher Price and VHS camcorders. Studying Economics at Georgetown, he bought a Hi8 camera from a pawnshop and taught himself to edit on Adobe Premiere.
Instead of pursuing a career in Economics, Mike began working for National Geographic, first as an intern, but within a few months he became the youngest field producer, editor and cinematographer on the NG staff. After several years filming sharks, turtles and other sea life for the Crittercam series, Mike moved to Cuba for a year to make the award-winning documentary, “Boxers and Ballerinas.” He later migrated to Los Angeles where he worked on various docs – he edited Sundance 2006 films, “Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man” and “Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out.” He also produced and directed several episodes of MTV’s “True Life.”
Additionally, Mike creates video art under the name Day Old Teeth, and he directed the Hand of God installation that showed in March 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In December of 2009, Mike decided to make his first narrative feature film “Another Earth,” which he directed, co-wrote, produced, shot and edited.
Trailer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hEwMMDtFY[/youtube]
Studio Synopsis for “Another Earth”:
If you could meet another version of yourself — what would you say? What if you had another chance at a life just like this one, only different — what would lure you, what would scare you; and what, if anything would stop you?
In Mike Cahill’s intimate and provocative first feature, ANOTHER EARTH tells the starkly moving story of Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a brilliant young woman searching for a way to right a terrible tragedy. She lives in a world just like ours, except that suddenly, overnight, a mysteriously similar planet — provisionally dubbed Earth 2 — has appeared in the sky, like a giant, reflective mirror hanging over us.
For Rhoda, that strange, eerie planet, and the parallel reality scientists ssay it promises, is her last hope. Lost after a shocking accident halted her dreams of becoming an astrophysicist, she has no sense of the future. Driven in life only by the need to confront her past, Rhoda ends up at the front door of the man whose life she irrevocable changed: renowned composer John Burroughs (William Mapother).
Both disconnected, mistrustful and full of doubts about who they are, they fall into an unlikely, and risky, love affair. But when Rhoda gets the incredible chance to travel to Earth 2, it will expose the hidden truth between them and raises the question that what if the greatest mystery in the vast unknown is ourselves.
ANOTHER EARTH, a breakout hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for best film focusing on themes of science and technology.
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents, an Artists Public Domain production, ANOTHER EARTH, directed by Mike Cahill and written by Cahill and Brit Marling. The producers are Hunter Gray, Cahill, Marlin and Nicholas Shumaker. The executive producers are Tyler Brodie (PI) and Paul Mezey (HALF NELSON, MARIA FULL OF GRACE) with Phaedon Papadopulos and associate producer. The creative team includes costume designer Aileen Diana, producer designer Daris Monaco, music by Fall on Your Sword, sound design by Ryan M. Price, cinematographer and editor Mike Cahill and assistant director Liang Cai.
Links:
Interview Credits:
Recorded: July 14, 2011
Host/Segment Producer: Maaika Westen
Editor: Richard R. Lee
Special Thanks To: Fox Searchlight Pictures and Terry Hines and Associates