Most moviegoers don’t notice what studio is behind any particular movie. We see the studio names flash on the screen in the opening credits and then they’re gone. Even to avid film lovers, it’s the movie that matters most. Sometimes the director, often the actors. But the studio for most people just isn’t a piece of information worth retaining, if even worth noticing in the first place.

Over the last couple of decades, though, the name of one studio just refused to lurk beneath the surface. It kept hitting us film buffs again and again, flashing briefly on the screen before movie after movie. And not just on any movies, but those kinds of movies that you talk about with friends, and that stay with you for days afterwards. It just kept repeating itself with a sort of resonant frequency, powered by a host of amazingly talented new creative voices, the raw energy of doing things that were truly new, and a certain taste that defied definition or categorization. Movies that weren’t just entertaining, but that seemed to truly matter.

That studio is Miramax. To anyone who really loves movies, the name Miramax matters.

If they didn’t get you in the early days with Cinema Paradiso or My Left Foot, then they got you later with Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Clerks and Sling Blade … or The English Patient, Trainspotting, Good Will Hunting, and Amelie. Movies that mattered just kept coming with the Miramax name attached. And it wasn’t just “serious” films that Miramax did well. They even managed to make genre films like Scary Movie and Scream break the mold for such films in a way that we just had to notice.

At Hulu, we spend a lot of time thinking about innovation and how to foster it. Apart from how much I love these movies themselves, that is another reason I have so much respect for Miramax. They innovated, and they were absolutely relentless about it for more than 30 years. So, I couldn’t be more excited to announce today that Miramax films and more are coming to Hulu and the Hulu Plus subscription service. On Hulu Plus, 27 titles are available today, with hundreds more to be added steadily over the next month or so. For those of you who are Hulu Plus subscribers, enjoy playing Pulp Fiction and many other great Miramax films in HD today on your Internet-connected TV, phone, or iPad. If you’re not a Hulu Plus subscriber, it’s a great time to try the service free for a week. And, in addition to all these great movies being added to Hulu Plus, starting in mid-June, we’ll be showcasing a selection of Miramax titles each month for free on the ad-supported Hulu service. This is the first time Miramax has made films available to movie fans on an ad-supported, on-demand streaming basis.

There are some films that give you a jolt the first time you see them. The really great ones hit you hard each time you watch. With moments like Uma Thurman and John Travolta’s Batusi dance scene, Samuel L. Jackson’s “Royale with Cheese” French lesson, and Christopher Walken’s warped story about a watch, Pulp Fiction is one of those movies. Each time I see that film, I discover something new, another level of detail from the mind of Quentin Tarantino. Now that it’s available on Hulu Plus, I plan to watch it yet again and see what comes to the surface this time. I hope you do the same: It plays as well today as it did the day it was released. A warm welcome to Vincent and Jules. Great to see you again.

Andy Forssell
SVP, Content and Distribution

Want to delve into the Criterion Collection but don’t know where to start?

We’ve just introduced some changes that make sifting through the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus a lot less daunting. Some brand new features will help you discover new films to love as we continue to additional titles from Criterion — more than 100 since launching the section in February, nearly all of which stream exclusively on Hulu Plus, with many others to come in coming weeks.

Since Criterion has compiled so many great works by the world’s greatest filmmakers, we’ve added new functionality that allows you to sort by director. So now you can devote an entire weekend to watching 10 Charlie Chaplin films from just one page.

Movies are now sorted into themes, too. Want to see Francois Truffaut’s first film? It’s “400 Blows,” and you can find that out under the First Films section in Themes. We’ve grouped together titles into categories such as Oscar winners, documentaries, and titles from independent American filmmakers.

Additionally, we’ve begun adding supplemental videos from the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus. You can find these as you watch a film, and they include some fantastic highlights, including:

• - An interview with George Lucas on Akira Kurosawa for “The Hidden Fortress,” a key influence on “Star Wars Episode IV”
• - Martin Scorsese discussing “La Strada”
• - An introduction to “The Virgin Spring” by Ang Lee
• - A behind-the-scenes look at “The Making of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”

We’ll continue to roll out supplements as quickly as we can digitize them.

We think these updates will enhance your experience as you enjoy the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus. Let us know what you think!

Michael Imperioli has been your mobster and your intrepid TV detective. That’s probably how you know him — as Christopher from “The Sopranos,” or as Det. Fitch, the guy pinning down Michigan criminals as they try to make a beeline out the door of an interrogation room in “Detroit 1-8-7.” He’s tremendously proud of that show right now. It just finished its first season on ABC. The season finale was just posted on Hulu. It’s the only thing on TV right now that works like “NYPD Blue” worked, in that unrelenting, not-quite-so-perfect way procedurals should be. It fills a hole, it has great purpose, and he loves it.

But it’s not his magnum opus. That’s where “The Hungry Ghosts” comes in, an expansive window of how Michael Imperioli looks at the world in the eyes of five characters. It’s a film he wrote and directed with a few friends and some great funding, and it was well-received on the festival circuits in 2008. To mark its premiere on Hulu, we called Imperioli to talk about how he feels about “Detroit 1-8-7” after one season and “The Hungry Ghosts” a few years later.

Hulu: Now that the first season of “Detroit 1-8-7″ is over, have you had a chance to look back at it and see how it looks as a whole, and how the show’s grown?
Michael Imperioli: I’m really pleased. It’s really funny, because I think it took some time in finding out what the show is. And I’m really pleased that the direction that the writers took. It’s half character-focused and half procedural. Toward the end of the season, we put a lot more into the characters, more into the city. We wanted to extract stories from the vibe of the city and not superimpose the crime of the city on it. I think, in the end, we did a very good job that, and we did a good job of doing justice to the feel of the city.

What I think sets “Detroit 1-8-7″ apart is that it’s not quite as tidy as usual procedurals. There’s actual character development. A lot of procedurals have a whole episode and take 30 seconds at the end to advance whatever relationships are between the characters. This show cares where its characters are going.
I think it’s much more character-driven than other shows like this. It shows what happens on both sides of the law — going into their lives and seeing what their personal lives are like to see why someone might have done something. There used to be more shows like this, like “NYPD Blue,” “Hill Street Blues.” There’s a history of that in the past. “Colombo,” even. In recent years, the procedural element of it, the technology of it has kind of taken over. It’s much more interesting to me — the procedure of solving the crime — than the courtroom side of it. I find that very interesting. Some people might find that very boring.

There’s a tendency for Detroit-related shows and art to be poverty tourism, where they use the name itself as a scare tactic. But “Detroit 1-8-7″ seems to have a pretty good feel of the city.
Before the show started, I hadn’t been to the city. I had just seen the pilot script. The pilot of the show was shot in Atlanta. I think we all initially wanted to do it in Detroit, but we were very concerned about weather. There’s a very small window of time in which we could shoot. There’s lot of snow in the Midwest, and then they weren’t really sure where they’d shoot it if it got picked up. So we went to Detroit to investigate, and we found out that it was the only place where it really belonged. Some people got a little upset because they had no idea what they were making. They thought we might be exploiting the negative image. But when you’re there, you find out it’s just a label and a misconception. There are a lot of problems there, but there are a lot of problems everywhere. There’s a much richer life that’s going on there, and I think we did a very good job of letting people know about it.

Hulu is now streaming “The Hungry Ghosts,” a film you wrote, produced and directed, and it comes off as a very personal film about your beliefs at that time in your life. You’ve had a couple of years to look back on it since it came out. Is there anything you’d change in the movie because of something you’ve experienced since then?
No, no. I made the movie I wanted to make. I was lucky to have the freedom and assembly of talent to put this together just how I wanted to.

This movie comes off as sort of a magnum opus of sorts. It’s sprawling and big and has big moral points in it. Do you think writers and directors are capable of a few projects this big in one lifetime?
Absolutely. Hopefully as I grow and mature and change as an artist, these expressions are going to change. And hopefully you’re still as passionate about your work as you were in the past. I was very, very fortunate that I had some friends who financed the movie and was able to make it the way I wanted.

The way “The Hungry Ghosts” is broken up into vignettes can pose a real challenge in keeping the film moving forward. It’s usually very hard to get momentum in such a segmented sort of movie, but this has a great pace. Were you conscious of this while making it?
You’ve just got to use your instincts while you’re editing and just try to imagine the movie as a whole as you’re writing. I didn’t really look at other movies to give me any ideas, but you’ve got to keep a certain balance.

There’s a very distinct media saturation element in the film — about how affected we are by what’s been deemed acceptable in mainstream circles.
Well, this film, to me, is really about the characters and the story. That should be the first thing. I can’t predict how it’s going to be received. That was an interesting thing with “Detroit 1-8-7.” I was in Detroit during a very interesting period of time, right after the show started airing, and there was an immediate response from the people of the city. They’d see me at a restaurant and tell me how much they liked it. I got almost immediate feedback. Some people felt a very strong connection to the show. I think they felt that it was a certain quality, that the country might be able to perceive Detroit in a positive way. And that’s very gratifying.

My earliest movie exposure was heavily influenced by what my father could find at the local video store. He’d stop there on the way home from work and pick out one of new releases from the display of empty video boxes that lined the outer walls of the store. And so my early love of movies grew largely from a diet of American Hollywood blockbusters because that’s what dominated the most coveted merchandising space at our local video stores.

After college, I moved to Seattle, and some movie buffs I met there introduced me to a video store called Scarecrow Video. This was unlike any video store I’d ever encountered. It was enormous, carrying seemingly every movie ever put on video in any format, from VHS to laserdisc to DVD, including PAL videotapes and foreign region DVDs that required renting special machines to play. These were movies from all over the world, in all languages, sorted not just by new versus old but by country, director, and genre. It was at Scarecrow that I rented my first Criterion laser disc. Most of them were so rare that the store required a credit card deposit of several hundred dollars just to walk out of the store with the movie.

But it was worth it. The Criterion Collection is likely the preeminent distribution brand in the minds of movie buffs. They’ve earned that title in two key ways. One is by curating and licensing rights to a library of truly great, enduring movies. Secondly, when they bring those movies to the world, they do so with an attention to detail and quality that can only come from the purest love and respect for movies as an art form.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve added the Criterion Collection exclusively to our Hulu Plus service today. Criterion has digital streaming rights to over 800 of the films in their library, from a who’s who roster of directors: Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Bunuel, Chabrol, Chaplin, Clouzot, Cocteau, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Kaurismaki, Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Lang, Malle, Ozu, Renoir, Tati, Truffaut, Varda, and Welles, to name two handfuls. We’re launching with over 150 Criterion movies today, and we’ll be adding more titles each month. Among the launch list today are so many acknowledged classics: The 400 Blows, L’Avventura, The Battle of Algiers, Breathless, La Jetée, Jules and Jim, M, Pickpocket, Playtime, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, La Strada, and The Wages of Fear.

But just as exciting are the titles still to come. These include not just more well-known classics but also movies that have been difficult or impossible to find on video in any format. Le Silence de la Mer, by one of my favorite directors, Jean-Pierre Melville. The extended filmography of Kenji Mizoguchi. Early shorts by Chaplin. L’Assassin Habite au 21, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s first feature. This doesn’t even include the supplemental content Criterion is famous for and which we’ll bring to the Criterion experience on Hulu Plus over time: commentaries, documentaries, interviews, original trailers, essays, and more. Many of these will be digitized for the first time. We’re honored to partner with Criterion to make all this cinematic treasure available to movie lovers, critics, and historians alike.

Movies, unlike most of our TV programs, aren’t shot with ad breaks in mind, and it has always been tricky to find opportune moments to inject ad breaks in movies on Hulu.com so that we can compensate content owners while maintaining the optimum user experience. For Criterion, thanks to our advertising partners, Hulu Plus subscribers will be able to watch the Criterion Collection free of interruption. (Any ads will play up front.) For those who don’t have a Hulu Plus subscription, each month we’ll still rotate a few Criterion titles through Hulu.com with our normal periodic ad breaks.

The first set of Criterion movies are already available across all devices supported by the Hulu Plus service. On the web, you’ll find Criterion on Hulu at www.hulu.com/criterion. Please dive in and let us know what you think!

Eugene Wei
SVP of Audience

It’s not often that you get to say you are going to meet millions of new people on a single day while making a wish come true for many of your oldest friends, but that is exactly what is happening to the Criterion Collection today, as we go live with a major new offering on Hulu.

When I first started working at the Criterion Collection about seventeen years ago, I remember coming across a file box full of typed and handwritten letters that viewers had sent to Jon Mulvaney, our longtime customer liaison. At that time, the company was sometimes referred to as the “Rolls-Royce of laser discs” — an honor, to be sure, but one that was meaningful to a vanishingly small sliver of the American public. Many of our editions sold hundreds, not even thousands, of copies, at prices as high as $125 for a single film, but we had a very dedicated audience of movie lovers who had come to value Criterion for our commitment to quality, and for the array of special features we had pioneered starting in 1984, when we published the first ever commentary tracks and special features to appear alongside motion pictures.

It is tempting to say that a lot has changed since then, but the truth is, even more has remained constant. We don’t make laser discs anymore, but we are still dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and using the latest technology to present them in editions that will deepen viewers’ appreciation and understanding of the art of cinema. Customers still write to Jon Mulvaney all the time, but now instead of pens and typewriters, they send him e-mail or post to our Facebook page or Twitter.

When I think back to all the letters I read that day, I realize that even the subjects of those letters haven’t changed much at all. Most were and are passionate pleas for us to release a favorite film or seek out a particular director’s work, but then, as now, one of the most common requests was for some kind of subscription program that would give customers access to everything we put out.

Starting today, there are more than 150 of our most important films online on the Hulu Plus subscription service. Over the coming months, that number will swell to more than 800 films. For the true cinephile, this should be a dream come true. On Hulu Plus, you’ll find everything in our library, from Academy Award winners to many of the most famous films by art-house superstars like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini to films so rare that they have never been seen in the U.S. in any medium. Some of these lost gems have been so hard to see that even most of the Criterion staff will see them for the first time only when they go live on Hulu Plus! Each month, we’ll be highlighting a mix of programs, centered on themes, directors, actors, and other creative artists, as well as celebrity picks, and mixing them with deep cuts from the catalog that will be unknown to all but the most prominent cinephiles in the world.

Criterion has always been a company driven by its mission, not by any particular medium, and while we still see our core business as producing the world’s best DVD and Blu-ray versions of the world’s best films, this new venture with Hulu represents a huge expansion of our reach. Not only will Hulu users have access to the largest digital archive of Criterion movies for the first time, Hulu Plus subscribers will now be able to stream our films (and yes, before long, many of our supplements too!) on a wide array of devices, including iPhones, iPads, PlayStations, and Internet-connected television sets.

And finally, why Hulu? In short, because they get it. As their regular viewers know, the Hulu user experience is exactly what it should be: simple, elegant, and focused on the content. Hulu has built their brand on letting the shows and movies take center stage. Nobody does it better, and we’re honored that they see Criterion as a good match for their audience. We’re going to do all we can to make the experience of Criterion on Hulu Plus an exciting adventure for all of us, so please check it out and let us know what you think.

Peter Becker
CEO, Criterion

A few hundred people this morning woke up and typed “I must be dreaming” into their status boxes on Twitter.

This raises the question: What’s the best way to get a few hundred people to type the same cheesy, four-word phrase on Twitter within a three-hour timespan?

Money, primarily. Money would probably be the best way to do that.

Or you can just sling an injustice at Christopher Nolan, the beloved director of “Inception.” He was robbed of a Best Director nomination this morning for what is largely considered his magnum opus.

Here’s friend of Hulu Richard Roeper’s first sentence written about the Oscar nominees. Let’s say he didn’t bury the lead.

“No offense to the five immensely talented individuals nominated for ‘Best Director’ on Tuesday morning, but members of the Academy must have been smoking something powerful to snub Christopher Nolan’s astonishingly creative work on ‘Inception.’”

Twitter exploded with variations of the same joke—Twitter’s Faliq Fahmie simply beat everyone to the punch, saying “Chris Nolan didn’t plant the idea inside The Oscar’s board members’ mind to nominate himself”—but Chris Rock won the morning, taking a line from Nolan’s Batman masterpiece “The Dark Knight.”

“It’s okay though, Chris Nolan is the director the Academy Awards deserve, but not the one it needs right now.”

Agreed. Plus, the publicity of Nolan getting snubbed for David O. Russell (“The Fighter”) or Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) will probably get the last four Americans who haven’t seen “Inception” yet (they were presumably incarcerated until yesterday) to go out and buy the DVD. That wouldn’t have happened if he was nominated and lost unspectacularly.

Still, the snark and hate parade soldiered on. @Ghostparticle on Twitter busted out this sort of xenophobic gem, effectively blaming all of us for Academy’s Nolan slight: “So the Americans think Chris Nolan is not a worthy director…”

Hey, man, don’t drag the whole country into this. We don’t blame Europe for Uwe Boll. Not every day, at least. It’s been about 13 days since I blamed Germany for Uwe Boll movies. Show some restraint.

There’s the only-slightly less egregious snub of Mark Wahlberg, who wasn’t nominated for Best Leading Actor for his role as Mickey Ward in “The Fighter.” Even though Christian Bale, who played his brother, is up for Best Supporting Actor. Ditto Melissa Leo and Amy Adams, who won Supporting Actress bids.

Wahlberg got edged out by Javier Bardem in a rare Spanish-language nod in a major category. The committee must have forgotten that Wahlberg is bilingual, as well. He speaks a little bit of animal in “The Fighter,” as he does in the following clip.

At least Weird Al Yankovic was able to provide a reasonable explanation as to why Wahlberg wasn’t nominated: “No #Oscar nomination for Mark Wahlberg? I suspect it’s that bitter Funky Bunch voting bloc.”

But Nolan’s snub? Seems inexplicable. Hopefully he won’t lose any sleep over it.

Let’s pretend like I didn’t just type that.

Ben Collins is an Assistant Editor at Hulu. You can find him on Twitter @globesoundtrack or email him here.

To kick off our focus on this year’s Sundance Film Festival, we asked HitFix.com’s film editor, Drew McWeeny to share his review of Thierry Guetta’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, best known these days as “the Banksy movie.” It’s now available on Hulu.com and Hulu Plus (watch it commercial-free if you’re a Hulu Plus subscriber); you can find this title and dozens more highlighted on our Sundance Favorites spotlight page. We’ll be adding interviews and headlines from Sundance throughout the weekend. In the meantime, we’ll let Drew share his Gift Shop experience.

At the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I made sure I was in the audience for the secret screening that turned out to be The Girlfriend Experience. When the 2010 festival’s secret screening rolled around, I wasn’t interested. I heard the description of Exit Through The Gift Shop from someone and I opted for something else instead.

It’s taken me almost a year to make up for this mistake.

The film begins as the story of Thierry Guetta, a boutique owner who loved to record everything with video cameras as a hobby. He did that aimlessly for a while until he encountered a street artist named Invader and became interested in his work. I get it. I love Invader’s work. And honestly, I think my attitude to street art comes down to execution. You get points for doing anything well, and there’s a lot of street art that I think is dazzling, amazing, a transformation of a mundane space into something exceptional. I’ve been involved in my share of late-night adrenaline-fueled adventures, and Exit Through The Gift Shop does a lovely job up front of capturing that feeling, the seductive nature of being involved in something like this.

As the main character, Thierry, starts to get more involved in what Invader is doing, he even meets Shepard Fairey. And here’s the thing … I don’t know how much of this is real and how much of this is a put-on, but the material about Fairey is all captured before his Obama image made him infamous. They deal with his Andre the Giant picture, the ubiquitous “Obey” that was everywhere in Los Angeles, and it’s really interesting to see this thing that became part of the texture of my city explained and humanized.

So, then it’s Fairey who becomes Thierry’s main fascination. He begins to follow him around the world, doing everything Fairey does, shooting some amazing stunts. It’s great stuff, and it’s exhilarating to watch. There are more street artists he meets like Neckface, Sweet Toof, Ron English, Dotmasters, Swoon, and he manages to get most of them to talk about what they do. They explain their tagger names like Borf or Buffmonster, and he breaks law after law with them. And through it all, Banksy is treated like Bigfoot… fabled but never seen.

But even that really doesn’t sum it all up, and that’s what makes Exit Through The Gift Shop a compelling experience. Over the past year we have seen many films that have been debated due to their relationship with reality, like Catfish or I’m Still Here, but the only one that left me genuinely puzzled and enjoying that feeling at the end was Exit Through The Gift Shop. It’s a mystery, a game, a joke, and dead serious, and it might all be a put-on or it might all be exactly what it professes to be.

Banksy is a great artist, in my opinion, because of the way his art provokes and transforms and confronts. He’s like Bugs Bunny with a spray-paint can, dancing away from every Elmer Fudd that dares to join the pursuit. And once Thierry meets Banksy and starts to bond with him, the film contains some wild footage, including a trip to Disneyland that almost ended in disaster. Thierry ends up making a film out of the footage he’s been shooting for eight years by that point, and “Life Remote Control” turns out to be an experimental static nightmare, leading Banksy to wade in and ask if he can try to cut something else out of the rough footage. Thierry starts doing his own street art under the name Mr. Brainwash, and in a twist worthy of Nicolas Roeg, Banksy starts shooting a film about Thierry and his work.

It’s a hall of mirrors, and there’s not a single moment it’s not interesting. My biggest problem with I’m Still Here has nothing to do with whether it’s “real” or not; the film’s sort of dull, all things considered, a litany of bad behavior and self-pity that is just boring to sit through. There are many things I think Exit Through The Gift Shop says about art in our modern media age, things that are much broader than the world of street art, and it’s really well-crafted.

Energetic, exciting, entertaining, and at times illegal, Exit Through The Gift Shop is a wicked treat. — Drew McWeeny, Film Editor, HitFix.com

You can follow Drew’s blog, Motion Captured, on HitFix.com.

Actor Mark Duplass is a familiar face to fans of the FX fantasy football-centric guy show, The League, playing the charming troublemaker, Pete, but he actually got his start working onscreen and off with his brother, Jay, on short films and, in 2005, The Puffy Chair, which is now streaming on Hulu. Mark stars in the movie with his now-wife, Katie Aselton — also one of his co-stars on The League — as a young couple who embarks on a road trip unlike any other. In the first segment of our two-part interview series about The Puffy Chair, we asked Mark about the film, his relationship with his brother, and how the more subtle humor of The Puffy Chair is different than the raunchier jokes of The League. Coming soon: an interview with Katie Aselton. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: The first thing I noticed about The Puffy Chair was the music. There’s lots of indie favorites in there. How did you choose the music and go about getting it in the movie?
Mark Duplass: We were very naïve when we were making The Puffy Chair. We had about $15,000 of our parents’ money to make that movie. I used to play in bands a lot and I was on this label called Polyvinyl Records that had some cool bands like Of Montreal that are on the soundtrack. And so was really easy, because those guys were really friendly and willing to hook us up; I had toured with them. When it came to Spoon and Death Cab, what it really came down to was the bands were just tremendously generous and nice to us. I learned a lot about making indie movies, just lucky. The last thing you want to do when you go to bigger, cool bands like that is say, “Man, I’ve got this awesome indie movie. You totally want to be part of this because it’s going to help out your band.” I really just went to them and just said, “You have no reason to be in this movie, other than the fact that I will die if I can’t have these songs in the movie, and I need them because I am addicted to them. Please try to remember seven to 10 years ago, when you were scrapping, trying to put your stuff together and how great it was then to have one of your heroes to help you out. This is what I’m asking you to do.” And they did it, and that is very, very cool.

Let’s talk about the casting a little bit. You’re in the movie, obviously, and so is Katie Aselton. [They were dating at the time; now they are married.] Did you write the movie with yourself in mind?
Yeah, we designed the movie with something we call the “Available Materials School of Filmmaking.” We knew that we had $15,000 available, so we didn’t write anything that wasn’t readily available to us. We didn’t have money for a casting director or anything like that. Often when you’re casting indie movies, you just don’t get the talent you want. So what we decided to do was write a movie for myself, for Katie, and for Rhett. We knew that we were good and we knew that it would work, and so we designed the roles kind of around our strengths and avoided our weaknesses as actors, and likewise, that was my touring van from my band. Katie grew up in this little town in Maine, where her dad was the doctor and everybody loved him, and we knew we could get them to support for free. That was my apartment in Brooklyn. We did have to buy two chairs — two twin, matching chairs because one of them was going to get hurt. Otherwise, it was really us saying, let’s try to build this around what we have and not try to dream too big so we know we can make it.

What inspired the story?
It was a desire on the part of myself and my brother to make a feature along the lines of how we made our shorts, which were big, long scenes, cheap production value, focused on acting, story, faces, human emotions. We figured if we did that and set it in an apartment, it was basically going to be a Woody Allen movie. So we wanted to try to do something a different, so in order to give it a little momentum, we said “Let’s stick it in a genre.” The road movie seemed pretty obvious to us. And it was just this kind of conversation where we said we’re going to be dealing with some serious issues in this movie, with relationships, and it’s going to be a little sad in places. We want this movie to be fun and to have that silliness to it. So we were like, what if he’s just delivering a piece of furniture to his dad, something stupid like that? Then we just batted it around, like is it a table, is it an armoire? It was almost like it hit us at the same time: “Oh no, massive recliner!” It was more of a feel-based thing, rather than an intellectual decision.

Were any of scenes that depicted you interacting with Rhett Wilkins, who played your brother, based on any of your experiences with your brother, Jay?
You know, at the time it didn’t feel like that at all. When I look at it now… Jay and I basically share the same brain. We share the same taste, and we share a love of the same things in the world, but our modes of operation have grown vastly different as we’ve gotten older. So there is a little bit now, I would say, be being the Type A maniac, and Jay being a bit more sensitive, careful and wary. We call each other jokingly — but very seriously — I’m the bull and he’s the brakes. The way we talk about it I think is, I think we’re a perfect complement for each other. If it was just me, I’d probably be making 10 bad movies a year. If it was just Jay, he would make one half a movie over the course of the next 60 years. Somewhere in there, we kind of curve the edges a bit.

I was drawn to the relationship between you and Katie in this film. There are some dark and twisted moments between your character, Josh, and her character, Emily. Did she have any influence on the development of Emily?
Katie had a ton of influence on the character. Just to be point blank, perfectly honest. Jay and his wife were going through a lot of those things, and Katie and myself were going through a lot of those things, and a lot of our best friends were going through a lot of those issues. We were all in our 20s, dating for a bit, and we were all scared shitless about getting married. We were doing irrational things to each other on all kinds of fronts. You know, Jay and I wrote the script, but there were moments, like the big fight in the hotel room between us, and the breakfast scene the next morning when Katie’s character really rips into Rhett about marriage and what that means, where Katie would say “Guys, can I just go off here? Will you just let me say what I want to say?” And every time she did that, it was always right. I wouldn’t say they were necessarily Katie’s beliefs, because Emily is an extreme character, but they were certainly fueled by things we were all going through. There’s this quote that says anybody under 30 who tries to make a good movie better try to make it about themselves. We believed that at the time, so there’s a lot of us in there.

Your style of filmmaking is known as “mumblecore.” Can you shed some light on that movement — and is it a badge of honor to be considered mumblecore?
In my opinion, it was a cool time and place in 2005, when someone in the press made up the term “mumblecore.” None of the filmmakers ever called themselves that; it was a press item. There wasn’t a dogma movement where we all decided “Hey, we’re mumblecore!” It was really cool at the time, because we were making tiny movies and the New York Times was writing about them, selling our movies. It was giving a name and a face to something that was completely indecipherable to the public. That was nice. But now, it’s become a bit limiting, I think. Quite frankly, it came out because a certain camera came out. It allowed us to shoot good-looking stuff for cheap. That’s literally why that happened, and that’s why things look kind of similar. But now we’ve grown and we’ve branched out, and our movies have become much different. Mumblecore has become a bit limiting now, because when a movie like Cyrus comes out, and someone in the middle of the country hears it’s mumblecore, they think “What’s that? I don’t know what that is, but it’s not me,” I tend to think our movies have changed a bit and they’re not like that. Mumblecore used to be about completely anonymous people and long, drawn-out conversations. That’s kind of not what Cyrus was. So it was great for a certain amount of time, but now, like anything, you sort of want to distance yourself from it.

You star in The League, which has a totally different sense of humor compared to The Puffy Chair.
The truth of the matter is, Jeff and Jackie Schaffer run The League. We are a creative arm in that insofar as we inhabit those characters, but at the end of the day, we the vessels of Jeff and Jackie’s and their vision for this show. Those characters are basically nothing like us, I would say. Pete is overly confident and calm and secure, and I’m totally neurotic. Katie might be a little closer to her character, because Katie is a total guy’s girl. She’s very good with boys and stuff like that. I think that element kind of rings true for her. Katie didn’t a thing about football going into the show, so she had to do a shit-ton of research. I knew a bit, I’d say a lot from the ’80s and ’90s, but I wasn’t up on the current players. So she and I both went through a massive research period.

When The Office star John Krasinski set out to make a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he needed a way to connect the separate stories of the sometimes heinous characters that make up Wallace’s book. The actor-turned-director’s solution? A female grad student who interviews each of the men as part of a thesis project. While Krasinski used his personal network to track down the actors who portray the emotionally detached subjects of “Sara Quinn’s” study, he had one actress in mind for the role of the grad student as he penned his script: Julianne Nicholson, who was starring as Det. Megan Wheeler on Law & Order: Criminal Intent at the time. Last week, Hulu spoke to Nicholson to get her take on working with Krasinski. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: How did you prepare for the role of Sara Quinn?
Julianne Nicholson: Mostly, it was just talking with John, actually. He approached me and first sort of pitched the idea to me, and said that he loved the book and had done a reading of it in college, and was now adapting it. He said that he had me in mind while he was doing it, which was a huge compliment. I was doing another job at the time, also, so it was working with the material and the director, and just being a woman who has had relationships with men. I could draw from those.

Had you read the book beforehand?
I had not. I was a fan of the [David Foster Wallace's] from his essays. I had read a number of his essays, which I had loved, but I had never read this book. I did after I read this script; I went back and read the book, also. I think he was amazing. I think he had an incredible hook, and if you can get into it — I had tried reading Infinite Jest , the massive tome that you would sort of see people lugging around everywhere. I had tried reading it, and I’m afraid I couldn’t really get into it at that time. I look forward to reading it — it’s still on my bookshelf. It’s still one of those that I know I will come back to. His essays proved a little bit easier for me. I thought they were incredible and very engaging. I had never read anything quite like it, with his style and his voice.

What did you think of John’s adaptation?
I thought he did a great job. It was interesting reading them in reverse. I thought he had done a great job of staying true to the original, but also creating a story, a link, through them. I don’t know if you’re going to talk to John, but he told me he had spoken — I think once — to David Foster Wallace, who I hear was sort of going back and forth on whether he wanted to hear John’s idea of how he would link it. When John told it was to create a new character, one that I wound up playing, I think that was the idea that Wallace had all along. So John picked up on that, I guess, and it had his blessing, which is also nice.

Can you tell us about Sara Quinn?
Sure. She’s just had a breakup herself that was very surprising and upsetting. She’s also doing her thesis, so she’s an academic. She’s in school, and she’s very smart and driven, but at a moment in her life where she’s just been rocked. She’s searching, I would say.

This role brought you in contact with a number of the actors who play the “hideous men,” and you shared scenes with likes of Timothy Hutton. What was that like — was the set as somber as the tone of the movie?
[Laughs] No, no. The set was never somber, especially because John Krasinski is one of the funniest people I have ever met in my entire life. Maybe there were one or two times where it called for quiet on the set, but I was usually in those scenes by myself, anyway. Everyone was so gung ho, and I think it started with John and his incredible energy and passion and intelligence and humor. It was quite a while ago, but it was great, getting to spend time with all those different people. It was such a gift, to be able to go to work and, you know, see someone new every day and watch them do their thing. It was very exciting to watch. I was the interviewer, so I was mostly listening. As you see in the film, I do a lot of watching and listening. It was great; I loved it.

You touched on this a bit, but what was it like working with John, considering his passion for the project?
It was such a treat. I was doing a television show at the time — I was doing Criminal Intent, which I loved, and it was very good to me. It was very exciting to go from — you know, Law and Order is a big working machine. To be able to go to these little stages with this smaller crew and just sort of be more quiet and collaborative was very exciting and so fulfilling for me. John was great. I wish I had some nasty story about somebody that I could share with you, but I’m afraid I just don’t.

What are you working on these days? I know you have two little ones at home, but will we see you back in the spotlight?
Well, I did a film last summer called William Vincent with James Franco and Josh Lucas, and that was just at Tribeca [Film Festival], and now they’re waiting for distribution on that — same old independent story. I’m also about to do a movie called Second Child. Have you seen this movie called The Maid last year? It was this Chilean movie, and everyone says “I’ve seen the poster!” It was such a great movie, and it got a lot great attention. This director is doing another, his first American film, hopefully in September.

Well, thank you for your time today — and good luck with the new project.
Thank you. I was so excited when I got that email that said we were doing well on Hulu!

Don’t miss our November 2009 interview with John Krasinski to learn more about this film.

Following up on its inaugural edition last year, SnagFilms is launching the 2nd annual SummerFest, a free online festival showcasing exclusive, limited-duration runs of popular new documentaries, beginning with Franny Armstrong’s acclaimed film, The Age of Stupid.

Unique for a documentary, The Age of Stupid incorporates a narrative thread, starring Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the year 2055, when the Earth has been completely devastated by climate change. The film is his recording of a last message for his archive, intended not for humanity — “It’s too late for us,” he gravely intones — but instead, “for whoever, whatever, eventually finds this recording” as a “cautionary tale.” The message consists of documentary footage from around the globe, focusing on stories of climate change and the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.

indieWIRE spoke to the film’s director, Franny Armstong, from London earlier this week about the project’s origins, its creative fundraising, and the groundbreaking (and environmentally friendly) ways the film has been reaching audiences. — Basil Tsiokos, indieWIRE

iW: One of the striking things about the film is its unique hybrid of documentary and drama. Tell us how this happened, and why you felt the hybrid form made sense for this project?
Franny Armstrong: You can find out a lot more details from watching the “Making of” documentary , but basically, the original idea was to follow five different people, with none of them being the “good guy” or the “bad guy,” because the issue is not black and white. We made the film as a pure documentary and showed the rough cut to investors. What we found was that everyone who was already into climate change thought it was brilliant, but everyone else didn’t get the links between the different people followed. It wasn’t anything greater than the sum of its parts, and it was never going to go mainstream, which defeated the point. So we had a few dark months there while we found the structure to make it

iW: And this is when Pete Postlethwaite become involved?
FA: Once we decided on incorporating a dramatic element, we needed to find the right person. Everyone in the UK adores Pete. We didn’t think we would have a chance of getting him, but I Googled him to see if there was any chance he was into climate change, and I found a recent article in his local newspaper about his efforts to get permission to install wind turbines, where he was quoted saying that “everyone’s responsible for climate change.” So we reached out and he agreed to do the project.

iW: Let’s talk about the documentary elements of the film. How did you find your subjects and stories?
FA: We had about ten researchers amassing different stories, split up into different themes we were considering – areas like ever-increasing consumption, alternative energy, etc. For example, they found the story about low-cost airlines in India, and that was perfect – we wanted to involve India or China, and it’s very difficult to film in China – we found Jehangir Wadia and his interest in ending poverty through the airline. A fascinating character, a rich guy – a person of contradictions. We didn’t want the viewers to love or hate any subject. To find all the characters around the world, it took three years of researching.

iW: Tell us about how you’ve released the film and the reactions you’ve received.
FA: We had our global premiere in September. We broadcast live from New York City to 63 countries. Rather than go the traditional route and physically travel all over the world, we could leave a much smaller carbon footprint by having one enormous event, linking everyone by satellite. We had an amazing response – Kofi Annan spoke at the event.

The most amazing thing to happen has been the 10:10 Campaign, which aims to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% this year. Huge companies have signed up, committing to this goal. It started in the UK but it’s spreading to other countries quickly.

iW: The film’s title, and the tone the archivist uses, really issues a challenge to the viewer. What kind of personal changes have you made from learning all that you have in the process of making this film?
FA: Well, I’ve been into the subject since I was in school, so I have been making changes for over 20 years now. But I can see the impact around me – My dad installed solar panels a few weeks ago. I’m most proud of the way that we made this film, and how we’re getting it out to audiences and the change that is still possible.

iW: Franny, can you tell us about how you used crowdfunding for the film?
FA: I had tried to get my previous film, “McLibel,” made in the normal way for the UK, by having it commissioned, but nobody wanted to support the project. I ended up making it with credit cards and a rich boyfriend. This meant that I completely owned the rights, and could control the distribution, and this became very important for me [and] for my next project. It was going to cost more than the previous film, and by this point, the rich boyfriend had departed, so I invented a funding plan on the back of an envelope. My lawyers told me it was the most original film financing scheme they’d ever seen, but they needed to rewrite it to make it legal.

Because I had plans to interview representatives of an oil company, I didn’t want too many people to know what I was doing, so the funding plan was kept to friends and friends of friends, which kept growing. I needed £450,000 for the production and another £450,000 to distribute the film. Under my plan, individuals could invest a minimum of £500. The maximum individual contribution we received was £35,000. And we made our first payment to our investors this January.

Jazzing us to the max, Hot Tub Time Machine hits theaters this weekend, sending John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and Clark Duke back to the 1980s through the awesome powers of a gnarly hot tub. While we don’t have a time machine here (no doy!), we did find some totally tubular clips from 1986 … year of, like, Hands Across America and Halley’s Comet, fer sher. So mousse up your hair, stop buggin’ and check out these totally boss videos — and no, they’re not on Betamax. — Martin Moakler, Hulu’s Content Editor

Pop Goes the World
Pop music. Fashion. Saturday Night Live. People constantly debate who did it better: The present or the ’80s? This clip shows that the late great Phil Hartman, the younger version of the still hot Sigourney Weaver and timelessly funny comedian Dana Carvey definitely tip the scales in favor of the ’80s.

Do You Really Want to “Skirt” Me?
The ’80s were a simpler time, when we didn’t have to concern ourselves with East Coast-West Coast rivalries, interruptions by Kanye, or whatever Muppet Lady Gaga skinned to make a dress. For pop stars back then it was all about making music and videos … and using their style to help solve crimes in their spare time.

Alien Nation
It seemed that no matter where we went in the ’80s, random aliens were dropping into our lives: Soviet defectors; rugged Aussies; extraterrestrials — everyone wanted a taste of our sweet American dream, and we were only too willing to share, even if they wanted a taste our cat, too.

Eighties Ladies
By the ’80s, lady cops on TV were just as formidable a force as their male counterparts, who had been solving crime since the ’50s. As this clip from “Hunter” demonstrates, a woman’s attempt to intimidate Hunter and DeeDee quickly devolves into a contest to see who has the bigger, um, shoulder pads.

Cool as Vice
What’s that? You’ve enjoyed these clips but so far they haven’t been totally ’80s? How about one that features bad rap by a prominent standup comedian who then watches his bodacious girlfriend get in a workout before it moves on to some ominous synthesizer music and a cheesy music video devoted to the sights of Miami? The only ’80s staple this clip is missing is a keyboard tie.

What do you consider totally 80s? Got a fave 80s TV show? Leave it in the comments!

If Travis Bickle grew up reading comic books, Taxi Driver may have looked a bit more like Defendor. It may seem that Defendor aims to be an escapist slapstick romp that turns superhero conventions on their ear but, before long, we are given the backstory of troubled hero Arthur Poppington and see shades of the dark realism that keeps this film from flying into Farrelly brothers territory. Thanks to a terrific performance by Woody Harrelson (a recent Oscar nominee for his turn in The Messenger), Poppington is given unexpected depth and sentimentality.

While I’m not suggesting that Defendor is of the same echelon as Taxi Driver, it does explore the moral grey area a bit more than I had expected. It quite stealthily raises questions about heroism and citizen responsibility. A script like this could easily feel like an after-school special, with its campy message obviously veiled by bouts of humor and action, but impressive acting — namely Harrelson and Elias Koteas as the hilariously patronized victim of Poppington’s misadventures — keep the tone balanced and honest. Thanks to these two (and Kat Dennings as a befriended teenage prostitute), Defendor deftly walks the tightrope between a gritty noir and a Pink Panther-esque blundering crime comedy.

In theaters Friday, February 26.

Jordan Bonitatis
Hulu’s Movie Trailer Guru

Ink, an independent film written, directed and produced by husband-and-wife team Jamin and Kiowa Winans, has taken the online world by storm, thanks to an open-minded approach to sharing the film. This week, I got to interview the creators of this unique and stunning film. — Jocelyn Matsuo, Content Editor

Jocelyn: Will you tell me a little bit about your writing and development process?
Jamin: Generally, I start with a visual idea. Usually it’s an image or a scene, then I just try to build off of that image. And just start asking questions, so in the case of Ink, it all started with an image of a kid being snatched out of her bed by a monster. Basically sort of a kid-fear that a monster is going to come and grab you in your bedroom while you’re asleep. Why is she being kidnapped? Who’s the monster? Who’s the little girl? Where do they go? Constantly asking questions and building the story out from that point. Something will hit me as “that will be a great scene” or a movie idea.

Jocelyn: Why work out of Denver as opposed to Hollywood?
Jamin: I just decided that I wanted to make my own films and not be under the control of the studio. There’s so much production there that it’s not very significant, and it costs money to get permits. Whereas you know, here in Denver, film shoots rarely happen here so it’s easy to get support. Permits are free, so it’s just a really easy place to shoot. That said, Colorado doesn’t have a lot of tax incentives, so as our budgets get bigger, we are probably going to be forced to shoot in tax-incentive states.

Kiowa: That’s literally the only downside to shooting in Colorado. We have a lot of friends and resources here. We were able to cash in 30 years’ worth of favors making Ink.

Jocelyn: On your website, you talk about torrents as part of your press-strategy, will you talk to me a little bit about your relationship with piracy in terms of this movie?

Kiowa: Sure, so we started selling our signed discs off of our website and shipped them out Oct. 30th. Somebody ordered, got it shipped to them and uploaded a bit torrent by Nov. 5th. We managed to generate some really good press, a lot of good buzz online. Our trailers had quite a few hits, but we didn’t have a clue either how quickly or how huge it would go. We found out on Nov. 6th or 7th that it was up on all the bit torrent sites. For that first week that it was up, it was the # 1 movie on Pirate Bay, over all the other Hollywood releases.

Jamin: It was sorta bittersweet, it was like oh that’s great…

Kiowa: We don’t condone stealing things. However, as a small independent film, we haven’t poured a ton of money into our advertising, nor can we. It gave us an enormous boost.

Jamin: On IMDB, Ink was rated No. 12,991. And the very next week it jumped to No. 16. And the week after that it jumped to No. 14. It dramatically helped our exposure, and we never would have predicted that. We are certainly glad, and if we were to do it all over again, we certainly would have released it [on bit torrent networks] ourselves. Because it was so useful, and that’s kind of our philosophy about the film — we just want to get it out there. People ask us “are you sure you want to put it out on sites like Hulu so soon?” because the traditional idea is to release your film in windows. But we want everybody, everywhere to be able to see it. If that kills certain windows, so be it. That’s the old model. Getting up on Hulu where there’s literally millions and millions of people going there every day — that’s the best possible thing we can have for the film.

Kiowa: On iTunes right now, we’re No. 7, the other day we were fourth, right after the huge releases like Star Trek, District 9. The film is getting that type of exposure because people really like it. Distributors passed on it, because it didn’t have any name talent on it, it’s very low budget, and the thing that they most shied away from was that it’s a completely unique story. It’s not a franchise, it’s not a rebooted television program from the ’80s.

Most independent filmmakers will go and play festivals for a year, year and a half, and then try to get distribution, and then their DVD comes out maybe the years after the film. We wanted to reduce that window, so we decided to come right out and open it in Denver. And it was extremely successful for us. Ninety percent of our screenings have been our own, that we promoted on Facebook, Twitter, using a lot of social networking, word of mouth. That’s an important note, especially for other independent filmmakers. You have to do that yourself these days.

Learn more about Ink on the official website.

In An Education, aspiring Oxford student Jenny (Carey Mulligan) dreams of a world that’s bigger than her genteel neighborhood, set in 1961 suburban London. She longs to smoke, wear black and listen to Jacques Brel with other like-minded Francophiles, and to be free of her upwardly mobile parents. A fateful rainstorm introduces her to David (Peter Sarsgaard), a 30-something music lover who serves as her entrée to all things sophisticated: art collections, jazz clubs and fashion. His world-class charm — powerful enough to convince Jenny’s parents to send her off with him for a weekend away — sweeps the 16-year-old off her feet. The film, based on a screenplay by author Nick Hornby — it was based on a short memoir by journalist Lynn Barber — was directed by Lone Scherfig ( Italian for Beginners), who spoke to us about the film from Denmark last week. Read on to learn how she found star Cary Mulligan and where they found all the fabulous clothes from the film. An Education is in theaters now. — — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Carey Mulligan is the breakout star of your film. She was also in Pride & Prejudice (2005), but how did you discover her?
Director Lone Scherfig: She was just in a pile of casting tapes. She had done very little, so it was chance. I knew that we probably had to find someone unknown because [her character] Jenny is so young. She was always my first choice — but we saw her again and again, and now I feel really bad that we took so long to make the decision. It’s been going so well, so maybe she doesn’t have to go through all that again.

I hope so, too! An Education is set in 1961. How did that particular time period play into the film? What did that mean for Jenny?
I think it’s really important. The way London was changing at that time is so in sync with how she’s changing. The way she’s bursting with energy for a future she can’t describe because she doesn’t know what it is yet is the way London was shaking the war off its shoulders, wanting to do things for fun and to have much more appetite for life, for art and for literature — and music in particular. That became so much more dominant straight after she [would have] entered Oxford.

I known here in the U.S. right now, that time period is really resonating with our culture — if you look at Mad Men, for example.
It’s a bit different. Maybe what is so attractive with Mad Men is that it’s a period where they, in some ways, were more liberated and also more innocent than it’s the case now. It’s a bit different in England because Jenny, she’s among the last generation of women who had that little future and so few possibilities. It’s almost as if Lynn Barber, who wrote this story, had been fighting at that. What that means is that women since Lynn could relax and take for granted that they had the right to do the things that they like to do, to try and to find individual futures for themselves and to live that future, or live that adult life, at least, if you have an education.

But my guess is about America is that it’s this combination of innocence and freedom that attracts you. Here in Denmark, as well, it was more liberated than it is now, and was definitely more innocent and less dangerous. I mean, when I was a teenager, the world was a lot safer than it is now for my daughter as a teenager, which meant that I could have a lot more fun. It wasn’t risky the way it is now.

Were you familiar with Lynn Barber’s story before you started this project?
It was just a 10-page article in a literary magazine. Later on, I think Penguin commissioned some more chapters, and she oddly became a journalist for Penthouse. She almost went too far because I know her, and I think she’s a woman who’s had a very rich, varied and happy life that is right for her. Her only regret seems to be that she now thinks that she should have been a better wife to her husband, whom she met in Oxford. But apart from that, she has fulfilled a lot of her dreams, and she’s a brilliant writer.

But no, I wasn’t familiar with her or her work, but obviously I started reading it when I got the job, to get to know her better and to portray her better. But Jenny is different. Lynn is more sarcastic, more of a fighter, and her piece has much more self-irony. Because Nick Hornby and I are not her, we could describe her with some warmth that’s not in her piece.

Speaking of Nick, what did he bring to the screenplay? Did he make any significant changes to Lynn’s story?
The story is short, so he fleshed it out. There are a couple of characters that are his, especially the teachers, but the structure and a lot of the details are actually in her original piece. I think he’s given it a tone that’s definitely Nick Hornby — and jokes, too. He’s really humorous. [Lynn] says that Alfred Molina’s role (as Jenny’s dad) is a lot more sympathetic than she had imagined. I hope we have added something as well. It’s just layer upon layer, and as long as we’re telling the same story — a group portrait of a girl and the people her surrounding her, particularly David … the more time we spent on it, the more time [it was] in this development situation, the more detail you see, the more contrast and the more integrity. But it’s the same piece that we’re all working on, and that was really important to me as a director that everyone was making the same film, that everyone contributed to the package and tried to strengthen it and get as many facets as possible but not be over-inventive, just tell the story as well as we possibly could.

I really enjoyed Alfred Molina’s performance. Can you tell us what he brought to his character?
He has really good timing. He’s very musical, and so is Nick. That means that lines are something where Alfred Molina feels immediately at ease and pitches them very well from the beginning. Also, [Alfred] felt that he knew that world very well — he grew up in Notting Hill and he thought that Jack who he portrays was definitely someone that he knows, and that Jack and England have a lot in common at the time, the xenophobia and the fear of everything: the fear of food, the fear of excess of any kind, and also the insecurity because he didn’t have an education, so that’s one of the reasons why they would let someone like David into their home. He seems worldly, and they’re afraid to be prejudiced as well. So they let him in and let him run off with their little girl.

I wanted to ask you about the clothes. I loved the costumes in this film, particularly Helen’s [a friend of David's who takes Jenny under her wing], but also Jenny’s as well. I read that you brought mood boards to your meetings with Odille Dicks-Mireaux, the costume designer…
That was about Paris, though, it wasn’t about clothes. But I did a board for each of the characters because it is a character-based film. I thought that’s a good place to start, to ensure that if I have a language problem, that’s not going to be our problem, that we’re all speaking the same language. A lot of film people, it’s helpful to have visual examples rather than to explain. So it was clothes, but it was also photos of real people at the time and props. Because a lot of people on the crew and in the cast had not experienced that period, it was also about communicating that London was not that “swinging” yet, and it wasn’t that long ago. It may be a period film, but a lot of the things are the same still.

She and I had a really good collaboration, and all of the costumes are just real clothes that have been saved. We only made one single dress, which was the nightclub singer’s dress. It was a copy of my Barbie doll’s ’60s dress. Because the singer is so small, she didn’t fit into any of the clothes that they had at the prop house. But it was so easy, and they have so much stuff in England, it’s probably the biggest place in the world for that kind of thing, and because the actresses are so beautiful, they just jump into anything, everything just fits. It was a good way for me to go and talk to the cast about the characters and to be at the costume fittings because then you get to express the character’s style and what would be in his pockets. I do the same thing with the props department, which kind of wristwatch would she have, who gave it to her, it’s a very concrete and specific way of building characters. It’s a good place to start dialogue with the actors, rather than sitting at reading tables.

Thanks, Lone, for speaking to us about the film. An Education is in theaters now.

When I was 10 years old, I sat down to watch a movie with my dad that he referred to as a “classic spaghetti Western”. I had never heard of anything like that, or even that Italians made Westerns, but it clearly wasn’t like any other movie that I had seen before.

The movie was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And from the iconographic opening credits to the tense final showdown, the movie proved to live up to its title. And yet despite its name, this Western had no clearly defined “good guy” or “bad guy”. There was no cavalry riding in to save the day, no Indian enemies, no settlers to save. Just three men, hardened by the day to day in a rugged west, trying to make a few dollars and the best of several rapidly deteriorating situations.

Even watching this now, I’m still amazed at the long stretches between dialogue, which really gives you the sense of the barren loneliness in the early western desert when often only your horse, canteen and a revolver stood between you and death.

I was hooked. It was a few years later that I learned it was actually the third in a series of westerns starring the enigmatic Clint Eastwood as “the Man with No Name”.

The first movie, A Fistful of Dollars, is still is one of my favorites. While new to most of the American audience at the time, it is actually a credited remake of an Akira Kurosawa movie, Yojimbo (starring Toshiro Mifune) and was later remade as Last Man Standing (starring Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken). One of my favorite things about Fistful movie is how easily a classic story has been translated from and mimicked in these other periods.

Far grittier than other Westerns that had preceded it, A Fistful of Dollars introduced Eastwood as the new Western hero, or more appropriately, the anti-hero. Establishing Eastwood’s character from the opening scene, director Sergio Leone follows the enigmatic traveler to a well, where he stops for a drink of water, and is then begrudgingly dragged into a small-town gang war. Playing on the gangster’s fear and greed, Eastwood quickly manages to turn the tables on them by playing both sides against each other. Besides the classic storytelling, Eastwood’s cool character is a deadly shot and you can’t help but cheer him on against the gangs.

For a Few Dollars More introduces Lee van Cleef’s tough-as-nails character Mortimer while he’s on a bounty hunt. Through clever flashbacks, we learn that Mortimer’s sister had been killed by the fugitive El Indio and Mortimer is tracking him for the reward. Enter Eastwood’s character, who is also tracking El Indio, but for far less than revenge. Eventually, Eastwood’s character orchestrates a duel between Mortimer and El Indio, and surprisingly in character, makes sure it’s a fair fight. Although this was another atypical western for the 1960’s, Eastwood’s character eventually rides off into the sunset with his questionable moral standing intact.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the most brutal of the three. Looking for buried Confederate gold, it juxtaposes three hardened men against each other with a backdrop of greed and loose, shifting alliances between our anti-heroes. This is an emotional movie where you’re meant to identify with each of the characters, even though you may not like what you see. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Mexican standoff at the end is worth it alone.

The greatest thing about these movies is that they’re not a typical trilogy – you can watch one movie without feeling like you’re missing something from the other two. But fortunately for you, Hulu is able to provide all three of these classic westerns for the month of November. So throw on your poncho, strap on a six-shooter and get ready for a wild ride.

Mark
Hulu’s Content Gun For Hire

NOTE: This film will be available for streaming until Monday, Oct 26, 2009 at midnight PST.
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Last spring, Hulu spoke to Andrew Robinson, the writer and director of the new film April Showers. The film, which chronicles the April 20, 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, is an extremely personal project for Robinson: he was a senior at Columbine that year. His ultimate goal for this film is to empower kids to make a difference, to be proactive and get their voices heard to prevent something like this from happening again. Robinson sought input from school administrators, school boards and teachers to create a film that could reach a wide audience, prompting conversation at home and in the classroom. Below, he shares his insight into the movie, which is now available on Hulu. [Note: the following interview originally appeared in the discussions area for the movie trailer on Hulu.] — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: You attended Columbine High and were at school the day of the shootings, so you clearly bring an insider’s perspective to April Showers. Can you talk about that? Where were you when the shooting began?
Robinson: Well, I was in school and a senior at Columbine on that day. We broke for lunch and, instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch, which I rarely ever did, I went up to the computer lab, which is kind of dead-center in the building. It’s kind of a study hall thing, and I was hanging out with a couple of my friends. They were editing some video projects that they had and I was just there for a second opinion. Apparently the shooting had begun outside in the student parking lot, which is behind several layers of concrete from where we were, so we didn’t hear it. The fire alarm was pulled and you immediately think “We’re two weeks from graduation, it has to be a student prank.” We walked out into the main hallway, which was empty, and within a few moments a whole horde of students came running up the hallway towards us, screaming and yelling “There’s a gun, there’s a gun!” and “They’re shooting people,” stuff like that. So we ducked back into the computer lab and kids were putting themselves into closets and cabinets and hiding under desks. My friends and I just didn’t feel comfortable there. We didn’t want to be in a room if whatever was out there came in there. We were going to be in real trouble, so we left the computer lab and found a way out of the building without encountering any direct gunfire or anything like that.

Is the film told from your perspective?
The film follows about six different points of view. You witness the event primarily through the eyes of the main character, Sean. However, with him as he’s going through the event, are two, three, four other people that, in various stages of the day, kind of get separated and branch off so they have their own unique experiences, and certain experiences that came before the shooting happened, that influence the things that they do during the day. We’ve got some other characters that don’t intertwine with the three main storylines, but you go through it through their eyes and then, at the end, how they all come out the other side — some do, some don’t. The film is not about the shooting. When we were discussing how to film it, I was very adamant that I didn’t really want to stage the shooting in the film, but I knew that I needed to, to some degree, in order for the audience to take the journey with the characters in order for them to understand the rawness of the emotion that they’re going to see onscreen, because that’s one thing the general public doesn’t really see in real life when the news media sweeps in and covers these things. They tend to cover the live pictures of it unfolding, or just after it’s unfolded with a couple of sound bites. Then they bring in experts, but you don’t really see the two dozen, three dozen kids having impromptu gatherings in basements trying to figure out where their lives go from here, or some people having backlash against others, that whole thing. I needed them to see just enough, just enough of the horror to be in the position where our characters and the audience go through the same kind of journey. What you get out of it and how it affects you and how you look to tomorrow is different to each individual, just like in the film.

Was it hard for you to revisit these scenarios? How did this project affect you?
I couldn’t have done this project three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. I’m in a really good place now, emotionally, mentally, everything with regards to that day. I harbor no ill will about the shooting. It is that day, and I’ve come to grips with it.

What was really difficult for me was having to put other people through it, even in a make-believe film sense. But we used 1,500 real high school students. Having to stage these events and talk them through them and get them into that mindset, to put them there and to watch their reaction… after a while, people on the crew were saying “These extras are really good actors,” but I said “I don’t think they’re acting. I think they’re feeling it. What you’re seeing is genuine.” It was hard to all of a sudden be a spectator to this because I went through it and wasn’t able to see it. Now I’m orchestrating it and being a spectator, watching people as it plays out this thing in my life. That was difficult because, I know when we came to town and were looking for extras, everyone was like, “Oh, I’m gonna be in a movie.” But it’s not a Zac Efron movie. A lot of kids, the first day they’re on the set were like, “Oh, we’re in a basement… it looks like a house party scene!” Meanwhile, I’m telling them “No one’s talking. You’re all fixated on the TV.” Then I start describing the images that are on the TV, which the audience never sees because their faces tell you the whole story. Just watching them go there and imagine all of this… It was difficult to have to do that to kids. At the same time, as we kept filming, you could see a bond growing. You could see people reaching out to one another. We had several different schools participate and so it was just really cool at the end of it. You saw these kids go through a transformation without having to lose friends to do it.

Last night I watched an early screening of The Road (in theaters Nov. 25), and I am still reeling from its power. It is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses) and directed by John Hillcoat, who also directed The Proposition. If you haven’t seen The Proposition, you should rent it no later than immediately. With a screenplay by Nick Cave, it’s set in late 19th-century Australian backcountry and opens with an arresting officer freeing a prisoner under the condition that, unless he tracks and kills his older outlaw brother within nine days, his younger brother will be hung by the law. It is one of the best directed and most gripping films I’ve experienced in a very, very long time. And now I can say the same for The Road.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) heading south in an attempt to avoid the impending winter as they struggle against the deteriorating environment, gangs of brutal men, starvation, and their own haunting fears and memories.

In a culture that seems to use apocalypse-scenarios as vehicles for completely action flicks (Escape from New York, Terminator: Salvation) or as fodder for laughs ( Dr. Strangelove, Zombieland), The Road introduces realism. Every detail rings true, from the fleeting surge of electricity in a discovered bomb shelter to the makeshift braces and bandages taped across their bodies. Every interaction is meaningful. Every endeavor bears the burdensome weight of maintaining a dimming morality. Joe Penhall’s screenplay does not shy away from the atrocious, nor does it manipulate the audience for simple shock value.

For those diehard fans of the book, the trailer may have you wondering about the role of The Wife (Charlize Theron). Let me assure you, every liberty screenwriter Penhall took in this regard only works to deepen the connection I felt towards Mortensen’s character while adding highly dramatic moments I hadn’t imagined as I read the book.

As a member of the first generation born into a world bearing technologies capable of annihilating all of it in a moment’s notice, The Road is a story that needed be told and must be watched. It is simply a wake-up call to the fragility of our Earth. And by imagining a world stripped to its core, we see humanity stripped to its bare elements, as well. The Road shows us the worst in people, but ultimately, it is a film about our best. It is not only a story of the bonds between father and son, it is a story about the timeless responsibilities of a man and mankind.

Jordan Bonitatis (jordan.bonitatis@hulu.com)
Hulu’s Film Fanatic

We all know him as Jim, the affable, shaggy-haired salesman from the Dunder Mifflin paper company. But actor John Krasinski (who also appeared in this summer’s Away We Go) has set out to prove he’s no one-trick pony. With his latest project, a film adaptation of the late David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Krasinski proves he can hold his own behind the camera, as well, directing such stars as Will Arnett, Will Forte, Christopher Meloni, Bobby Cannavale and Timothy Hutton. Today Hulu premieres an exclusive “making of” featurette (featuring an intro from Krasinski himself) for this pet project. We also had the opportunity to speak to the 29-year-old actor about the film, which hits theaters September 25. (You can watch the trailer here.) And for all of you Pam and Jim fans — is that “Jam” or “Pim?” — we asked for a little scoop about the Season 6 premiere of The Office, which airs on NBC tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT. We’ll have it on Hulu first thing tomorrow morning. — Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

There’s a bit of an announcement we’re hoping you can make about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Can you tell us about that?
John Krasinski: Hulu’s premiering the movie first on the Internet [after it finishes its run in theaters], so we’re a part of that, and that’s fantastic. I think anybody in this business would be incredibly fortunate to be a part of anything having to do with Hulu, to be honest. Hulu is one of those ideas that is so cutting edge, that you just know it’s going to be a huge, huge part of people’s lives from now on. Not only for what it is doing and is capable of doing now as an interactive site, but also for what it has potential to grow into, which I think is nothing short of world domination. [Laughs] So we have that to look forward to, that our president will be Hulu.

To have Hulu support you in any way and display the ads for the movie and things like that is incredibly exciting, but then to have the movie be premiered on Hulu after its first run in the theaters is incredible. I think that Hulu’s done an incredible amount for The Office, and we are indebted to [Hulu] in a huge way. I think that it’s a massive part of our popularity, and why people have continued to watch us. We’re really, really lucky to be part of it — I have had experience with being part of a project [The Office] that benefits from being on site like Hulu, so to have our movie on Hulu and accessible to anyone at anytime, it’s really an honor, to be honest.

Well, thanks! And of course, I would say we wouldn’t be Hulu without The Office.
Awww, that’s nice.

Now you lined up some really incredible people for this project. Did you have some of the actors in mind from the start?
Absolutely. When I got the pilot to The Office, I used that money to buy the rights [to the book], but I had actually started writing the script a little bit before I got the rights, which was incredibly — in a negative way — ambitious. I’m sure it’s what more people would call stupid. In doing so, I started writing the script and knew exactly who I was going to cast. At the time, I was waiting tables in New York, and though I was having a great time, I wasn’t necessarily creatively stimulated, so I was constantly looking for inspiration anywhere I could find it. I definitely found it all the time in the theaters, by going to the theater, and by going to independent movies. I just consistently did that as often as I could. The people who I saw have these awe-inspiring performances were the people that I knew I wanted to be in this movie. And all these incredible New York actors who were just so brilliant on stage and in these small, independent movies, where a lot of them were coming out in New York, I just knew that those were the people I wanted in it, and I was just lucky enough to get them.

This being tied to David Foster Wallace, did that make it easier to get these actors?
Yeah, I’m sure it did. I think that being part of a project that is not only based on but also very much his actual writing … The movie’s not at all based on the book. It is completely the material itself. In doing this movie, my only intention was to bring his material to a wider audience in a different medium, but in no way to take the movie and change it in some drastic way. My being involved in the movie and so connected to the book was because of his writing, so I just wanted to do him justice and sort of show more people how incredible this author is and show what an impact he could have on you. I think that, truly, without him knowing it, I think David Foster Wallace wrote near-perfect acting material in these characters. So I didn’t have to pitch the movie very hard to these actors who I said had to come in a day, maybe two for some of them, and have these interviews that they could basically act in one day and really sink their teeth into. They very much appreciated it.

As a writer, how do you approach such a revered author’s work? I would have been intimidated!
Yeah, it’s funny, because to be really honest, Brief Interviews is the anomaly, I think. I can totally see why he hasn’t been adapted before, because his work is incredibly intimidating in that respect. It’s intimidating because you’re so admiring of it as a reader. When you’re a reader of his books, it’s a unique experience that you’ll never have with anyone else. I think he’s bar none one of the best writers ever to have lived, and he’s right up there on the pedestal with all the greats, in my opinion. And the real truth is, there’ll ever be anyone who writes like him again. For me, this book is the anomaly because he actually wrote these characters speaking dialogue, so there are actual words being said that were actually written as characters representing themselves. To me, it was almost near-perfect dialogue and the biggest challenge was editing it down to a piece that could actually fit into a watchable movie rather than an epic miniseries or something. And then also, he was also an incredibly literary guy, and so there were moments where I chose to leave some of the literary vibe into the dialogue, and some where I had to tone it down in order to allow the guys to be a little more accessible. But other than that, really, the script in the movie is all David’s work. I can’t take much credit for it, because the work he did as a writer in this story is what brings such incredible life to these characters.

I understand that he actually called you to give you his blessing. How did that call go?
It was thrilling, for lack of a better word, it was just fantastic. He was incredibly kind, and incredibly generous. I remember him being so soft-spoken and so nice. He put me at ease right away. I remember him being flattered that someone had taken up this book and tried to run it up the hill. He told me that his intention for Brief Interviews was to write a story about a character that you never see or hear from, but by using all the characters around that person, you find out all you need to know about them. And that’s exactly what I’d done. I’d already written the script when I talked to him, and I’d done just that in the script, because all the signs were there. It was just incredible to have that connection with him; that I was not only on the right path, but charging down the right way. It was so inspiring and such a pick-me-up that it was a great way to go into the actual shooting of the movie, knowing that we were on the right path and that we were representing him in the correct way.

You know, the big cinematic move that I did and probably the biggest part of the adaptation that I did is that [the female lead, played by Julianne Nicholson] connected to one of the characters, and I remember he was incredibly excited about that. He said that he had seen Brief Interviews as sort of an incomplete project because it hadn’t fully tied into itself, and there was nothing that could tie them all together. So when I sort of brought one of the characters in the book and connected it to her personally, all of a sudden there was a linear aspect to the movie. I had written one draft that was extremely linear and had all these incredible arcs that were fitting in pretty well, but at the end, when you re-read it, you realized that it just didn’t feel right, that it was feeling forced and fake. And so I realized that the best way to adapt the book was to go back and allow it to be what it wanted to be, which was spontaneous and slightly erratic and something that basically presented itself when it wanted to present itself.

You end up appearing in the film, but that wasn’t always your intention.
It wasn’t at all. My intention was solely to direct. I was pretty sure that these actors could do any of these characters way better than I could, but then we had an actor pull out at the last minute. There was this scheduling conflict, just one of those things that happens. We only had two weeks until we shot the scene. Normally that would be fine, but unfortunately that is such a big monologue and, as such, a huge part of the movie. I had shot all of the other interviews, so it was the last one and it needed to fit in just right. It would be a very stressful situation for any actor to just come in and sort of take on that much dialogue and that much intricate storytelling without knowing any of the other pieces, and I was the only one who knew the pieces. So the producers and I sat down and we decided that I’d be the best person to do it, solely because I’d read it 100 times, for no other reason than I knew what I was talking about when I was sort of relating the story to her and how it would connect to everything else.

Because this was a passion project for you, was the acting easier for you?
It was by far the scariest performance I have ever given; rather, it was the most scared performance I’ve ever given. It has solely to do with the fact that I was the director, and not because it hard to direct myself or anything like that — that’s not at all what happened. The reason why it was so scary was that I had sat behind the monitor and watched all these incredible actors turn in performances that were nothing short of awe-inspiring. The day before, we had shot the bathroom scene, which is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, and so to literally be the last person to go and to be the last piece of the puzzle, and to know that if this didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work, was probably the worst position I could have put myself in. But I really didn’t want to fail everybody else. Hopefully it works out.

I can imagine how challenging this must have been for you, but I think it worked, I really do. But I have to ask — on behalf of all of the fans of The Office — can you tell us what we’re going to see in the new season? A little teaser, perhaps?
It’s funny, the season premiere is just sort of an old-time structure of The Office — it’s just a really funny episode of The Office. There aren’t necessarily any incredible spoilers; it’s sort of getting back to the season in a way that I think is a really smart way to do it, which is just getting everyone back in the office. But then definitely the wedding episode is coming up and it is fantastic. I think that — and I think I can speak on behalf of the entire cast when I say this — we’re all just huge fans of the show and we love it so much. To get those scripts, we’re as excited as any fan would be to see what’s going to happen next, the way they deal with the wedding and how [Pam and Jim] get together. It’s a scary thing to get married on a show, because it’s always a tough conundrum of whether it’s good for the show or bad for the show. Of course the writers are so fantastic that they did it perfectly.

Last season was such a great season that I really can’t wait to see what’s in store now. Well, thanks, John for your time – we really appreciate it.
Absolutely. Thank you.

Our partners at SnagFilms have extended their SummerFest of films for one extra week on Hulu. For one week only, we’re featuring the online premiere of Holy Land Hardball, the tale of a man with a dream, a dream to bring baseball to Israel. Filmmakers Erik Kesten and Brett Rapkin document the journey of Larry Baras, a “bagel baron” from Massachusetts, as he sets out to get recruit players and kick off the Holy Land’s inaugural baseball game. And, as you might guess, the challenges were plenty: first, Israelis don’t necessarily have an affinity for baseball — they prefer the fast-paced nature of soccer and basketball, for instance. Then Baras had to put together a respectable roster of players. And then what may have been the most challenging aspect: he had to find a place for the teams to play. Hulu recently spoke to Kesten and Rapkin about “Hardball;” the interview follows. – Rebecca Harper (rebecca.harper@hulu.com), Editor

Hulu: How did you find out about this story and what made you interested in following it on camera?
Kesten: Well, it starts from a New York Times article, I believe it was around June of 2006. Murray Chass wrote the article, and it showed essentially the group of middle-aged guys who were attempting to start a professional baseball league in Israel. The only problem being that they didn’t have any players, they didn’t have any fields, and they didn’t have any uniforms. They looked like basically just a bunch of guys hoping to start a league. But being Jewish and being baseball fans certainly intrigued us on that level, but if you’re going to start filming something for over a year and promote it for longer than that, you know, it’s got to be something that’s a little bit stronger. For me, personally, it was just sort of the comedic level of the premise. You’ve got a guy who essentially made bagels for a living with no sports management experience, who was basically heading up this dream of baseball in Israel. It always seemed as if they pulled it off, it’d be this tremendous story, but even if they failed, it would still be a tremendous story, but maybe on more of a comedic level. I think the instinct that we both had was that, no matter what the end result was, the journey was just as important and intriguing. We just went ahead, picked up our cameras, and followed them around for a year to see what happened.

You’ve said that this film ends up being less about bringing baseball to Israel and more about following one’s voice. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Rapkin: I’m always attracted to characters that are outliers, because that’s where I think life gets interesting. This guy, Larry [Baras], despite incredible odds, tried to introduce a sport to a country that really had very little interest in it. It required raising money, a lot of money, millions of dollars. It required just rallying people. It’s almost like trying to make a film. For me, it was a metaphor for trying to make a film, because you have to rally so many people to motivate them between financing and all the resources you need. I immediately felt drawn to Larry in particular and his quest.

How did he end up funding this league? How did he get investors?
Rapkin: Well, Larry put together a really impressive executive board, the most notable name being Dan Duquette, the former Red Sox general manager. He really shook the trees, went out to the community, Jewish or not, and just had this passion and vision. He was able to inspire people who were both sports fans and fans of Israel and liked the idea. One at a time, they started stepping up to the plate, to use a baseball metaphor.

One of the people you feature in the film calls baseball a very Jewish game. What did he mean?
Kesten: [Laughs]That was the one man’s opinion, and I’m not sure I could replicate that, but what he was saying was that it is a very Jewish game because there are a lot of rules — which is the difficulty the league had in attracting a fan base in Israel. For starters, Israel is, I guess, a little more of an aggressive culture than a lot of baseball fans would be used to. And you can understand why. Basketball and soccer are popular; with baseball, you just have to be patient. You have to know a lot of rules. It’s just a difficult game to pick up unless you’ve been playing it your whole life. In that respect, I guess you could call it a Jewish game.

Rapkin: The quote you’re talking about is this guy who said baseball reminded him of the Talmud. What I think he was suggesting was that baseball is very meditational and has a lot of depth to it. It has layers; it’s something you can study for your entire lifetime, and that’s why I think a lot of intellectuals have been attracted to baseball, because of its textured quality. So I think these guys that have studied different religious texts — whether it’s the Bible, the Talmud or the Bhagavad Gita — there’s a similar quality there.

Kesten: And baseball, as far as American Jews are concerned, certainly in the 40s or 50s and 60s, was an assimilating tool, and I think that’s one of the reasons a lot of people did jump on board in terms of this league and that’s why there was this hope for the league’s success. The league captured a lot of those passions that a lot of American Jews have: baseball and Israel.

What kind of turnout did you see at the tryouts?
Rapkin: A very wide range, first off. The league players ranged in age from 17 to 51. Only about 40 percent of the league was Jewish, which surprises a lot of people. There were a dozen Dominicans, like a dozen Canadians, maybe eight or nine from Australia; there was a guy from Japan, and a couple of other countries were represented. The league was extremely diverse, and that not only went for demographics of the league, but also the level of play, the quality of the talent. When they first started out, they had no idea whether or not that would be the only tryout. So they ended up signing some guys that perhaps would not have made the league or been signed if they had known they’d be going to the Dominican Republic to recruit players, or to Miami, which is a hotbed of young talent. So as the tryouts went on, the talent got better, but there was actually a very wide range. It was very much a ragtag league, really, from top to bottom.

What drew these athletes to try out for the team, especially some of the more talented players who came on board later on?
Rapkin: I think every one of these guys is a dreamer in some way. I mean, to take time out of your life to go to an open tryout for a baseball league that hasn’t even formed yet that’s, like, halfway across the Earth — maybe more than halfway — you’ve got to be somewhat of a dreamer. Every one of these guys had a dream to play professional baseball, whether they were from any of the nine countries that were represented in the league. That’s one of the biggest misconceptions about the story. I think people assume it was a bunch Jewish guys, or a bunch of Israeli kids. In a lot of ways, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I think one of the things we’re most proud of in the story and the way that we told it is the diversity of the ballplayers, especially.

What are some of your favorite moments from filming this?
Rapkin: There’s a lot. I mean, obviously, when you’re making something like this, there’s a whole journey that goes on behind the camera that unfortunately you can’t show. We did get to do a commentary track for the DVD, which has some stories on there.

Kesten: I mean it was all incredibly memorable. I think the second trip to Israel where we stayed in the same sort of dorms as the players were staying was pretty incredible. To arrive with them, be on the ground with them, see their excitement and surprise at the living conditions.

Rapkin: One moment that was really special was when we were in Israel, the lead-up to opening day, a couple of players, main characters in the film, went over to Jerusalem. It was two Jews and two pretty devout Christians who were all interested in the league because Israel is the founding place of their religion. So it was really interesting to see those four players going through the Jewish corridor, the Christian corridor and the Muslim corridor and pointing things out to one another. We have one of the Christian characters, Willis Bumphus, putting on a yarmulke to go to the Wailing Wall. One of the Jewish characters, Dan Rootenberg, wondered where the tomb of Jesus is, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So that was a really special moment, especially because it was actually the first time I had been to Jerusalem. There was a lot going on during that trip.

What’s in store for the film now?
Kesten: There seems to be an endless flow of festivals requesting to show the film. We are going to be releasing the DVD on September 15. [Available through holylandhardball.com.] We’re working on a TV deal.

And what are you guys working on these days?
Kesten: Brett and I both have a television background, mainly sports. We’re both looking to branch out a little bit into some other things. I’m actually working on producing a Travel Channel series right now. We’re always looking, keeping our eyes open for new projects.

Rapkin: I’m just getting started on a film for ESPN about Marion Jones, the track star. And I’m writing my first screenplay, which is based on the winter I spent
with the U.S. ski team doing a documentary series with Bode Miller.

Kesten: I am going to be writing a documentary for HBO Sports on the Broad Street Bullies, which is the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team of the 1970s. It’ll be on early next year.

The Hulu team got to see a whole new side of Sacha Baron Cohen on Friday. The group of us were shocked and awed by his latest onscreen antics as Bruno, the Austrian fashion correspondent who pushes the envelope in his pursuit of becoming a celebrity. Thanks to our partners at Universal, we had an entire theater to ourselves to witness the spectacle that is Bruno.

Sure, we had glimpses of what was to come through appearances on The Tonight Show, The Today Show and the MTV Movie Awards (a moment Eminem will surely never forget), as well as the trailer. But those clips don’t give it all away — there are dozens of moments meant to offend, shock and poke fun at society as Bruno travels the world in search of fame. We’ll just let the fashionista speak for himself:

Rebecca (rebecca.harper@hulu.com)
Editor