In a distant future full of intelligent machines, the wealthy and powerful live their lives to the fullest, without limits, without restraint, and seemingly without end. But what happens if the artificial intelligence that makes this “perfect” world possible wants to share in it? David is a former planetary cop who resigned in disgrace. He is a freelance clone hunter now, a glorified gun for hire. He and his junior partner, Rachel, are hired by Montserrat, a brutal Oligarch, to track down a murderous clone that threatens the stability of Montserrat’s private planet. The more David and Rachel delve into the case the more corruption and rot they discover, until they come face to face with their own darkest secrets and must decide which side they are on.
That's the synopsis of the new cult Sci-Fi Hit, CLONE HUNTER directed by Andrew Bellware.
IFC recently had chance to sit down and talk with Andrew about his latest directorial effort...
IFC: Clone Hunter is the fifth science fiction film produced by your company, Pandora Machine. How did you ever resist the urge to make a fine piece of navel gazing mumblecore and do such a mainstream genre film instead? Andrew Bellware: We resisted by the fact that with as little money as there is in genre films, there’s even less in art-house pictures. Ha!
Truthfully, there’s more artistic freedom in making a good “genre” picture -- I mean as long as you have the appropriate amount of spaceships you can basically make any kind of picture you want. Really, nobody makes as strongly political pictures as George Romero. His movies are subversive, man! The zombie proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie? You’d never be able to do that in an art-house flick.
Besides that -- my first two pictures were a Hamlet we shot on a toy Pixelvision camera and a movie based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nobody but nobody can sit through either of those movies. If I’m going to do an art-house film it’s going to be a day in the life of my cat. It’ll be mostly about sleeping.
IFC: I have to ask you about your company logo sequence with the naked woman at the beginning of the film. Who came up with that one?
AB: You see, it’s Pandora -- the mythological character who opens the box which contains all human misery -- but in our world when she reaches into the box she finds a laser gun and blows you away with it. Right? Get it? OK, yeah, that was my idea. It amused me at the time. Heck, it still amuses me.
"Jake Reid travels to smalltown Covelo, CA to dig up the past and the missing loot from the botched robbery that killed his outlaw father years earlier. But Covelo proves to be a town of many dark secrets, and a strong dislike for nosey outsiders."
This is the synopsis from Days of Vengence, a crime thriller that is the latest release from Lifesize Entertainment. We sat down with the director of the movie, Isaac Pingree and asked him relate his experiences making this feature.
Indiefilmchat: Tell us a little about your background and how you came to make Day Of Vengeance?
Isaac Pingree:I'd wanted to make a feature since I got interested in film at age 15 or so. While in college at UC Santa Cruz, I was feeling impatient and decided that it was something that I could do if I properly used all my resources. I was lucky to have an older cousin, Mike Foodman, who was pursuing a career in cinematography and a friend, Sebastian Passanisi, who was pursuing screenwriting. We teamed up and did the best we could.
IFC: A big failure of recent American indie cinema has been the rather fuzzy storytelling. Day Of Vengeance avoids this problem by being a classic genre narrative with a very tight script. Was this an intentional choice or did this kind of storytelling just evolve organically?
Isaac Pingree:The town of Covelo inspired the choice of genre. A friend of ours lived there and it seemed like the perfect setting for a crime thriller with a modern western feel. The key to almost every genre movie is telling a story efficiently and keeping things moving, so we worked very hard to make sure that the script didn't let the pace drag too much. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that the town of Covelo and its inhabitants felt real, so we tried to work scenes around places or events that already exist in the town. This was both an attempt to let the story flow from the place and the characters as organically as possible, and to maximize our very small budget.
Oral Fixation is Jake Cashill's feature debut as a writer/director. His writing accolades include being named the Grand Prize Winner in American Zoetropes inuagural Screenplay Contest, for his Irish epic, The Fergus Cycle - which is currently in production. His other writing and directing credits include several short films as well as cowriting a script for Showtime with actor/writer Steve Kampman.
Indiefilmchat: Tell us a little about your background and how you came to make Oral Fixation.
Jake Cashill: I had been making some modest advances as a screenwriter, getting a handful of scripts optioned and doing a few writer-for-hire gigs, but nothing was getting made, so I wrote Oral Fixation with the intent to raise money for it and direct it myself. The idea for the story came during the filming of a short film I made years ago; one of the producers was recounting how her dentist had to change his phone number and move because a female patient was dropping by the office a lot and calling him at home, generally stalking him. So I thought, Hey that's a real oral fixation, yuk, yuk. And the movie was born. Of course I extrapolated a great deal on the core story, but the essence remained. Then, of course, it took several years to raise the money. But that's a whole other story.
IFC recently had the opportunity to chat with Elisabeth Moss, actress and mild-mannered Peggy the Ad Exec on AMC's Mad Men. She tells us about her experience on that plus we talk at length about her starring role in the new drama, El Camino, which is being released on DVD next week.
Chris Denham is one of Hollywood's bright young stars, steadily building a career with memorable roles in some of the most respected studio films of the past few years; Charlie Wilson's War and the soon to be released Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese, foremost among them. Denham moves easily between large studio productions, live theatre and independent productions like El Camino, where he gives an unforgettable performance as the conflicted womanizer, Gray. We caught up with Denham while he was on location.
IFC: You've been a working actor for a while now. Why do a "small" indie production like this?
Chris Denham: When it comes to choosing projects, I always choose story over budget.
Having worked on studio films affords me the luxury of working on independent films. But, whether or not the budget is $200,000 or $200 million, the story is the only essential. Maybe that sounds banal, but it is so easy to forget. It doesn't matter if they offer me forty million dollars, I don't want to be in a movie about exploding robots.
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In a distant future full of intelligent machines, the wealthy and powerful live their lives to the fullest, without limits, without restraint, and seemingly without end. But what happens if the artificial intelligence that makes this “perfect” world possible wants to share in it? David is a former planetary cop who resigned in disgrace. He is a freelance clone hunter now, a glorified gun for hire. He and his junior partner, Rachel, are hired by Montserrat, a brutal Oligarch, to track down a murderous clone that threatens the stability of Montserrat’s private planet. The more David and Rachel delve into the case the more corruption and rot they discover, until they come face to face with their own darkest secrets and must decide which side they are on. 
Andrew Bellware: We resisted by the fact that with as little money as there is in genre films, there’s even less in art-house pictures. Ha!
"Jake Reid travels to smalltown Covelo, CA to dig up the past and the missing loot from the botched robbery that killed his outlaw father years earlier. But Covelo proves to be a town of many dark secrets, and a strong dislike for nosey outsiders."
Isaac Pingree:
Oral Fixation is Jake Cashill's feature debut as a writer/director. His writing accolades include being named the Grand Prize Winner in American Zoetropes inuagural Screenplay Contest, for his Irish epic, The Fergus Cycle - which is currently in production. His other writing and directing credits include several short films as well as cowriting a script for Showtime with actor/writer Steve Kampman.
IFC recently had the opportunity to chat with 
SUBSCRIBE to the INDIE FILM KIOSK MINI CATALOG for valuable news, coupons and discounts! Get the pdf catalog downloaded to your computer and into your Itunes or other xml/rss feed reader:
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