Drake Doremus

PARK CITY, Utah - Drake Doremus is as engaging and open a filmmaker as you are likely to meet, but once he gets down to work, everything changes. "I close my sets as much as I can," the 29-year-old writer-director says. "I treat every scene like a sex scene - it's like the actors are getting emotionally nude. It's amazing. Different things come out when no one is watching. " What people are definitely watching in Park City are Doremus' finished films. His romantic drama "Like Crazy" won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize two years ago, and he is back at the film festival for the third time (in the noncompetitive Premieres section)

PARK CITY, Utah - Drake Doremus is as engaging and open a filmmaker as you are likely to meet, but once he gets down to work, everything changes. "I close my sets as much as I can," the 29-year-old writer-director says. "I treat every scene like a sex scene - it's like the actors are getting emotionally nude. It's amazing. Different things come out when no one is watching. " What people are definitely watching in Park City are Doremus' finished films. His romantic drama "Like Crazy" won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize two years ago, and he is back at the film festival for the third time (in the noncompetitive Premieres section)

Reporting from Long Island, N.Y. — As he stood behind the camera on the set of his new movie, filmmaker Drake Doremus watched as actors Guy Pearce and Amy Ryan improvised a scene. In one take they discussed a fear of bugs, while in another they talked about a Peter Gabriel video, the conversation unfolding in unexpected ways each time the director asked them to try again. The scene, part of an as-yet untitled drama that Doremus is shooting on Long Island, N.Y., represents the director's highly unorthodox approach.

The 2013 edition of the Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday night, but if you think a consensus has formed about the nature of this year's event, you would be wrong. While the Hollywood Reporter said the main story is a lineup "heavy on big names from the film and television worlds," Daily Variety provocatively insisted "Sex Drives 'Dance: Park City slate stocked with frisky fare. " This paper has noted that in the competition, fully half of the narrative features were made by women, while the New York Times claimed that the Utah festival, "known for championing dark and inscrutable films, has unveiled an unusually accessible - and sellable - competition lineup.

If the crush of film awards season can be good for something — really, it can! — it is simply getting people to watch films they might otherwise let slip by them. Whether it's reaching deeper into that stack of screeners or actually checking them out in an honest-to-goodness movie theater, the wave of awards-ready titles can broaden the reach of some audience members. Nowhere can this added attention be felt more strongly than with regard to the work of relatively new filmmakers, whether they are young or directing for the first time.

One's tolerance for man-child protagonists gets a healthy workout with "Spooner," a bite-sized indie from a few years ago that marks the feature directorial debut of Drake Doremus, this year's Sundance Grand Jury winner for "Like Crazy. " Doremus also directed last year's indie road comedy "Douchebag," but unlike that shaky-camera mumblecore effort ? or the improvised nature of "Like Crazy" ? he went with Coens-esque, static camera rigor for this slight portrait of male stuntedness.

Fittingly, it began with a date. Last year, Anton Yelchin, 21 and coming off his performance as Chekov in the film "Star Trek," was sitting nervously in the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, waiting for a woman five years his senior. On a flight from London, his dinner companion, the British actress Felicity Jones, was also trying to squelch the butterflies. "I remember thinking, 'I just hope he's a good guy,'" she recalled. The two were indeed rendezvousing to see whether they'd make a good couple — only not in real life.

We live in an open-ended era with question marks hovering over our lives. So maybe it isn't surprising that a quartet of current movies conclude ambiguously, leaving their characters' fates not on the screen but in the minds of the audience. We spoke recently to the filmmakers in question about their cryptic conclusions. Needless to say, if you haven't seen the movies (and, really, why haven't you?), you'll probably want to tuck this away until you've first formed your own conclusions.

The 2013 edition of the Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday night, but if you think a consensus has formed about the nature of this year's event, you would be wrong. While the Hollywood Reporter said the main story is a lineup "heavy on big names from the film and television worlds," Daily Variety provocatively insisted "Sex Drives 'Dance: Park City slate stocked with frisky fare. " This paper has noted that in the competition, fully half of the narrative features were made by women, while the New York Times claimed that the Utah festival, "known for championing dark and inscrutable films, has unveiled an unusually accessible - and sellable - competition lineup.

The final installment in Richard Linklater's “Before” trilogy, Chan-wook Park's English-language debut and Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs portrayal all will be unveiled at Sundance -- and did we mention documentaries about Jeremy Lin and Dick Cheney? Festival organizers on Monday announced this year's narrative and documentary premieres, a total of 29 films that will play out of competition as they make their world premieres. Highlights on the narrative list include Linklater's “Before Midnight,” in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their signature lovelorn roles as Jesse and Celine, this time as angsty 40-somethings.

The final installment in Richard Linklater's “Before” trilogy, Chan-wook Park's English-language debut and Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs portrayal all will be unveiled at Sundance -- and did we mention documentaries about Jeremy Lin and Dick Cheney? Festival organizers on Monday announced this year's narrative and documentary premieres, a total of 29 films that will play out of competition as they make their world premieres. Highlights on the narrative list include Linklater's “Before Midnight,” in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their signature lovelorn roles as Jesse and Celine, this time as angsty 40-somethings.

We live in an open-ended era with question marks hovering over our lives. So maybe it isn't surprising that a quartet of current movies conclude ambiguously, leaving their characters' fates not on the screen but in the minds of the audience. We spoke recently to the filmmakers in question about their cryptic conclusions. Needless to say, if you haven't seen the movies (and, really, why haven't you?), you'll probably want to tuck this away until you've first formed your own conclusions.

If the crush of film awards season can be good for something — really, it can! — it is simply getting people to watch films they might otherwise let slip by them. Whether it's reaching deeper into that stack of screeners or actually checking them out in an honest-to-goodness movie theater, the wave of awards-ready titles can broaden the reach of some audience members. Nowhere can this added attention be felt more strongly than with regard to the work of relatively new filmmakers, whether they are young or directing for the first time.

Going into Sundance, "Like Crazy" was a modest relationship drama from a director, Drake Doremus, whose previous film bore the arm's-length title "Douchebag. " But one teary-eyed premiere and a $4-million bidding war later, it emerged as the film festival's most dramatic success story, an upward trajectory capped by awards for the film and for Felicity Jones' performance. As a young woman whose passionate crush on a college classmate (Anton Yelchin) blossoms into a long-distance relationship battered by transatlantic crossings and immigration woes, Jones loves not wisely but too well, her naive romanticism laying the groundwork for an agonizing series of separations and reunions.

"Love hurts," the classic song lyric insists, "love scars, love wounds and mars. " If you are experienced enough to understand love's fragility but still romantic enough to embrace its power, "Like Crazy" will put you away. Deserved winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance, this story is as simple as two people mad about each other and as complex as intense relationships inevitably get. Spanning two continents and a number of years, featuring fearless acting by Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones (who took home a Sundance special jury prize)

Fittingly, it began with a date. Last year, Anton Yelchin, 21 and coming off his performance as Chekov in the film "Star Trek," was sitting nervously in the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, waiting for a woman five years his senior. On a flight from London, his dinner companion, the British actress Felicity Jones, was also trying to squelch the butterflies. "I remember thinking, 'I just hope he's a good guy,'" she recalled. The two were indeed rendezvousing to see whether they'd make a good couple — only not in real life.

Going into Sundance, "Like Crazy" was a modest relationship drama from a director, Drake Doremus, whose previous film bore the arm's-length title "Douchebag. " But one teary-eyed premiere and a $4-million bidding war later, it emerged as the film festival's most dramatic success story, an upward trajectory capped by awards for the film and for Felicity Jones' performance. As a young woman whose passionate crush on a college classmate (Anton Yelchin) blossoms into a long-distance relationship battered by transatlantic crossings and immigration woes, Jones loves not wisely but too well, her naive romanticism laying the groundwork for an agonizing series of separations and reunions.

Reporting from Long Island, N.Y. — As he stood behind the camera on the set of his new movie, filmmaker Drake Doremus watched as actors Guy Pearce and Amy Ryan improvised a scene. In one take they discussed a fear of bugs, while in another they talked about a Peter Gabriel video, the conversation unfolding in unexpected ways each time the director asked them to try again. The scene, part of an as-yet untitled drama that Doremus is shooting on Long Island, N.Y., represents the director's highly unorthodox approach.

French-Canadian director-writer-actor Xavier Dolan, who turns 22 later this month, already has had two films play ? and win prizes ? at the Cannes Film Festival, the prestigious international venue that some filmmakers can toil a lifetime to never get near. He dropped out of college to make the first, "I Killed My Mother," actually financing the micro-budget film about coming out and learning to live with an overbearing parent partly with savings from his childhood acting work. The second, "Heartbeats," which opened Friday in Los Angeles and is also available on video-on-demand, tells the story of two friends vying for the affection of the same young man. Dolan starred in both films, and in the case of "Heartbeats," he also edited the film, designed the costumes and handled the art direction.