Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Meryl Streep has funded a screenwriters lab for female writers over 40, Variety reports.
Lars von Trier reveals he is writing his eight-part TV series The House that Jack Built will follow a serial killer, “as seen from the murderer’s point of view,” but he’s not sure if he wants to do television, according to an interview with The Guardian. Returning to drinking so that he “can work,” he also shares his experience on Dancer in the Dark:
I meditate a lot as well. But when you shoot, you don’t have time to do something for yourself, and you tend to drink just to be able to get there in the morning. I remember doing this film (Dancer in the Dark) with Björk, and I was crying – almost kind of giving up. It was such a struggle, and she was so crazy that she always wanted to run away. Then I had to go get her and persuade her to come back. But she was one of the best actresses that I have worked with. When we worked, we had such an intense contact, but when we didn’t work, we were just fighting. It was ridiculous.
Michael Shannon will perform The Smiths‘ The Queen Is Dead in full on June 6th, Pitchfork reports.
Abbas Kiarostami is currently location scouting in China for his 2016-bound film that will feature monks and “revolve around language issues,” Fireflies reports:
Watch a video essay on Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence:
At The Talkhouse, Faults director Riley Stearns discusses Roar:
I’ll just go ahead and say it: Roar isn’t a good film. OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way I can tell you why you’ve got to see Roar and why its distributor, Drafthouse Films, is currently the most exciting player in the game.
Directed by The Exorcist executive producer Noel Marshall, Roar was originally released in 1981 to lackluster box office and poor reviews. It went massively over budget and took 11 years to finish, and once again, it’s not a good film. Unlike another Drafthouse re-release, Wake in Fright (1971), which was a forgotten masterpiece that got a second chance at life and will now go down in the books as an all-timer, Roar sort of deserves its obscurity. Similarly, when compared with Miami Connection (1987) which also got a re-release thanks to Drafthouse, Roar lacks that film’s fun, crowd-pleasing energy.
Watch The Last Reel, a short documentary from NYTimes on 35mm: