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.
Miguel Gomes‘ Arabian Nights, Volume 2: The Desolate One (our review) will be Portugal’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign-language Film, Cineuropa reports.
LA Times‘ Steven Zeitchik talks to Charlie Kaufman about the making of the masterful Anomalisa:
“I guess people will say it’s based on me,” Kaufman said when asked whether it was fair to see the constantly searching and at times discontented Stone as a screen surrogate. “I don’t think I want to address that. I welcome people’s interpretations. Everyone writes from personal experience, directly or indirectly. Maybe it’s because of ‘Adaptation’ that people make these assumptions. But it’s fine if people want to think that. I wrote the character. He is a character.”
Watch a video on the Hitchcock kiss:
Criterion on D. A. Pennebaker and his amazing Auricon:
That’s the 16 mm Auricon camera he personally converted in the sixties to make it more mobile for shooting Direct Cinema–style. This sound-recording camera was originally made for news camerapeople, but because of its heaviness (nearly thirty pounds) had always been mounted on a tripod. A group of documentary trailblazers, including Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Al Maysles, and Pennebaker, changed all that. According to cinematographer John Bailey in a great and informative blog post, “Drew had used a million-dollar grant from Life magazine to strip down the bulky Auricon to half its weight.” This is how the group filmed the 1960 John F. Kennedy documentary Primary with such dazzling dexterity.
Watch a video homage to Leos Carax‘s immaculate running sequences: