An Encinitas filmmaker is determined to create a new Hollywood by the sea with a community of like-minded movie makers who want to pursue their craft outside Los Angeles.

“There are L.A. refugees who love the art, and they want to make it work,” said Jeremy Saville, a veteran actor and director who is bringing Hollywood how-to expertise to Encinitas with a new group called SoCal Moviemakers.

The group meets each month at the Encinitas Library.

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Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet tell a Revolutionary Road screening audience about why they chose the project for their first collaboration since Titanic.

It’s the first film to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as onscreen lovers since the highest-grossing film of all time, Titanic. But anyone expecting “King of the World”-style moments of euphoric melodrama could be in for a shock. New movie Revolutionary Road eschews stirring romance and self-sacrifice on the high seas for suburban angst, bickering and even physical confrontation.

“We were very interested to let it go and see where it went. I was like, ‘If you want to smash me up, OK, you want to smash me up’,” said Winslet at a Q&A session which followed a screening of the film in Los Angeles at the weekend.

“We’re old friends and we know where we can go with each other,” agreed DiCaprio. “She will let me strangle her until she literally passes out in the scene.”

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 Ellen Kuras started filming Thavisouk Phrasavath and his family in 1984, when Thavi was 21, shortly after they fled Laos and landed in Flatbush. For 23 years, she followed the family through a long exile, joyful reunions, and painful separations. The result, The Betrayal, is a moving documentary about refugee life in America. The title refers not only to what Thavisouk’s soldier father suffered when the U.S. military pulled out of Laos in the seventies but also to the more intimate, personal betrayals that followed. Kuras talked to Dan Kois.

Since you began The Betrayal, you’ve become an in-demand director of photography, shooting films for Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Spike Lee (Summer of Sam), among others. Is that why it took so long to finish this movie? 
I shot a lot of the material in the late eighties and nineties, but there were three or four years where I didn’t work on the film because I was doing features back-to-back. When I was in between movies, I would spend a week here or there with Thavi’s family.

The movie alternates between lushly shot, lyrical passages and gritty cinéma vérité. 
I was writing a lot of poetry at the beginning of the film. I was much more interested in making a meditation of a particular worldview. But then I became so involved with the family, and I just couldn’t help but put the camera on what was happening around me, being the silent witness to this family drama unfolding.

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In the freezing forests of Belarus, as the Nazis swept through Europe, handfuls of Jewish refugees banded together under the leadership of the Bielski brothers to survive the killing winter and beyond. But they didn’t just survive; they struck back, attacking German soldiers and collaborators, performing acts of sabotage and supporting other partisan groups. All told, the Bielskis are said to have rescued about 1,200 Jews.

And you’ve probably never heard of them until now.

“So many things were injunctions to this piece of history,” said Ed Zwick, director, co-producer and co-writer of “Defiance,” which chronicles the struggles of the community that sprang up in that forest.

“Surprisingly, many of the survivors are loath to talk about it. The Bielskis too — I’ve gotten to know the family, and the [brothers'] sons say their parents had to be pushed; they didn’t want to talk about it. People would come up and say, ‘You know, your father saved my life.’ Eventually, it all became revealed to them.”

Daniel Craig,“Defiance,” Liev Schreiber “Defiance,” and Jamie Bell play the three adult brothers, farmers and sometime troublemakers reluctantly transformed into guardian — and avenging — angels. Zwick (”Blood Diamond,” “Glory”) describes the popular image of Jewish resistance as generally limited to the ill-fated Warsaw Ghetto uprising; he was presented with ample evidence to the contrary at a “Defiance” screening for families of survivors at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.

“They had a map that showed all the places in which there had been resistance,” he said with some residual amazement. “It was ubiquitous. It was usually thwarted and futile. But in fact, there were thousands, many of whom joined the Russian partisans.”

Zwick, bearded, slightly rumpled, looking and sounding like the cool professor, said in his Santa Monica offices that he and co-writer Clayton Frohman had spent 10 years on the project, knowing that to get a drama of this scale made, everyone — the stars, the production team, the crew — would have to take steep pay cuts and endure some rough weeks in ugly conditions. The film, which opens Dec. 31, convincingly re-creates the misery the refugees suffered through.

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The Ron Howard film goes behind the scenes of the high-stakes televised gamble that pitted a disgraced Richard Nixon against a diminished David Frost in a quest for salvation.

They eyed each other like boxers at a weigh-in. Richard Nixon ( Frank Langella) peeked through the curtains of the Western White House to size up his interviewer. David Frost (Michael Sheen) walked up to Nixon, cautiously appraising the former president before they battled in their landmark televised interviews.

Ron Howard may already have made a big fisticuffs film — 2005’s ” Cinderella Man” — but the boxing metaphors abound in Dec. 5’s “Frost/Nixon,” the director’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s celebrated play about the 1977 conversations between the British talk show host and the exiled president.

In Howard and Morgan’s telling, Nixon and Frost both have their corner men: advisors to prepare them for and coach them through the contentious interviews. Nixon says it will be a “no-holds-barred” fight and describes the showdown as a “duel.” Frost agrees. “Only one of us can win,” he says. The only thing missing is a ring announcer.

“There’s a connection between these two. They don’t hate each other. But they have to beat each other,” Howard said during a break in “Frost/Nixon’s” filming in September 2007, when the production enjoyed unprecedented access to Nixon’s former coastal beachfront hideaway, also known as Casa Pacifica, in San Clemente

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Sony Corp.’s movie unit may join with Viacom Inc.’s Paramount to finance Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s planned “Tintin” movie, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Sony is close to agreeing to pay half of the $130 million budget for the movie, the newspaper said, without making it clear where it got the information.

Sony is stepping in after Vivendi unit Universal passed on the opportunity deciding the motion-capture computer animation format is “too risky,” the Times said. Motion capture computer animation uses 3D-sensors to digitize real-life actor’s movements and create animated characters.

Tintin is the title character in a Belgian comic book series.

SOURCE: Bloomberg

RELATED: Meet the new screen Tintin »

Kirk Douglas knows all about “runaway production” to foreign locales.

Sitting on a striped couch in the living room of his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by paintings by Balthus, Vuillard and other modernist masters, the screen legend can still feel the sting of betrayal 50 years later.

After an arduous day of shooting boat-rowing scenes for “The Vikings” (1958) in Norway, Douglas decided to reward the locals who served as oarsmen with a party featuring a burlesque show, starring himself and castmates Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

The extras ate the food, drank the booze, laughed, applauded and yelled for more.

(Reuters)

Have video games become so complex and cinematic in their storytelling that they’re a good breeding ground for films?

Or have studios gotten so lazy that they figure, hey, this game’s popular. Let’s toss off a movie and maybe the kids who play it will buy tickets?

“Max Payne” offers a little evidence for both sides, but more of the latter.

The film, based on a popular third-person shooter game, stars Mark Wahlberg as Max, a cop whose wife and child were killed by thugs. He’s working the cold-case unit, and he’s a loner. He cares little about his job but is obsessed with solving his wife’s murder. That means long nights out on the streets, chasing leads, meeting with unsavory characters and, naturally, shooting a lot of guns.

(Detroit Free Press)

It’s 3 a.m. on a crowd-clogged New York City street and ? Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have spent the past few hours trying to fall in love. So far, they’ve come up just short of true romance. The point of diminishing returns is drawing dangerously close on the set of Revolutionary Road, where the Titanic stars are struggling with an important party scene in which they must meet, connect, and set themselves up for a life of misery together.

(EW)