Pretty Cool People Interview: Tommy Pallotta
Director Tommy Pallotta made a compelling documentary about his friend Stephen Prince: a very engaging storyteller who worked extensively with film icon Martin Scorsese in the seventies, both as a producer and as an actor (Taxi Driver).
Prince was also the subject of Scorsese's lost film 'American Boy', in which the young Stephen tells fascinating, some time totally absurd anecdotes from his rock&roll life. For example: the most memorable scene from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in which Travolta injects adrenaline into the heart of Uma Thurman who overdosed, is based on a story that Stephen tells in this documentary.
Three decades after Scorsese's film was released, Tommy Pallotta brings us 'American Prince', where he draws out Steven Prince once more to recount his days since 'American Boy', share why he turned his back on the entertainment industry and to compose the next chapter of his story.
Since SubmarineChannel helped American Prince to come about and since we distribute the film, we had a nice talk with the Amsterdam-based director Tommy Pallota. We talked to him about how he met Stephen Prince (their first encounter wasn't particularly friendly) and how Pallotta started in the film industry himself, still being a philosophy student in Austin. Here in Austin he met Richard Linklater with whom he work on movies like Slacker, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.
Watch American Prince exclusively on submarinechannel.com/articles/item/319
Pretty Cool People Interview: Olivier Marquézy
In Paris we met with one half of the design duo that makes up Studio Deubal - a French creative agency consisting of Stéphanie Lelong and Olivier Marquézy. We fell in love with their original character-based film title sequence designs. When we visit Olivier in his studio, he's on his last legs. He's been pulling an all-nighter.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Ivan Sijak
Director and visual artist Ivan Sijak (1969) is considered as some kind of local hero of the creative scene in Serbia. On a lot of people that were young in the nineties his music videos had a big impact. Artists that grew up with seeing his stuff on tv can still relate to his visual language today.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Alex Courtes
He dropped out of high school and didn't finish his art studies either, but that did not prevent him from making it big in the industry. Paris-based graphic designer and video director Alex Courtes is a busy man, but he still managed to invite us for a coffee in his apartment and escorted us on his motorcycle to Machine Molle, a motion and graphic design agency. Here, Alex is working on his latest project: a new commercial for Ebay.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Erwin Wurm
I knew from a fairly early age, about 15 or so, that I wanted to be an artist. The problem was, my father was a detective in the police. In his view, artists were almost as suspect as criminals, explains Austrian artist Edwin Wurm. He obviously withstood his father's objections to his artistic ambitions and followed his vocation. Good for him and for us, because Edwin Wurm is now one of the most successful contemporary artists in the Northern hemisphere.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Genevieve Gauckler
The French illustrator and graphic designer Genevieve Gauckler has made up questions by the dozens for her exhibition Food Chain. The show consists of beautiful prints with funny and sweet characters and their obsession with eating.
Pretty Cool People Interview: TKV
TKV is the artist name of Sashka (1988), a Serbian street artist, living in Belgrade. Doing stencil art is a basic need for TKV: she has to go out and leave her creative marks throughout the city. It's as essential as eating or sleeping.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Aleksandar Macasev
Aleksandar Maćašev doesn't mince matters: "The real center of power in Serbia is the pharmacist. Give the people a lot of tranquilizers and they will not complain." According to the Belgrade based artist and graphic designer, a lot of Serbian people are on drugs.
Pretty Cool People Interview: TOM14
Born in Brazil and based in Barcelona, he combines the best of both worlds. Tom14 is a street artist in more than one way. He works on the streets, sometimes literally on the surface of the road, but besides this, his work is also deals with the rights on the street. It's all about reclaiming the streets from real estate investors who make large profits from urban planning projects and do nothing about improving the situation for the local people.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Studio DDT
Gushing wounds, rabid bats, decrepit corpses and oozing crevasses, welcome in the macabre world of Studio DDT, a Barcelona based company that produces state-of-the-art special effects. It is run now by David Marti and Montse Ribe. They experienced some terrifying times but managed to claw their way back to life. Now, they are responsible for one of the most mind-boggling characters in special effects, El Fauno, from Pan's Labyrinth.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Martha Cooper
Photojournalist Martha Cooper was one of the first to recognize the creative power of the New York graffiti scene. In the seventies she started photographing the first generation of spray can artists, now three decades later she is called the Grande Dame of Hip Hop Documentation and has produced a series of much celebrated photo books like Street Play and Hip Hop Files.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Valerie Pirson
There's no stopping the tidal wave of digital animation coming at us on the web, in the cinemas, and on tv. But there's also a counter movement (if you can call it that) of animators who use old school animation techniques, like stop-motion. Stop motion animation is the "slow food" of animation. It's hands-on, physical and magical. But also a lot of hard work and very time consuming.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Mike Mills
Imagine that. Bumping into a famous music video director somewhere where you least expect it. And you just happened to be there with a crew to shoot an interview. It happened to our Pretty Cool People crew. They were in a city in the South of Holland called Eindhoven to shoot a Pretty Cool People Interview with Miranda July and they sort of bumped in to director Mike Mills, who was accompanying Miranda to her show at the art space MU.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Miranda July
Miranda July was a prolific performance and video artist in the 1990s who stepped into the mainstream limelight when her 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know became an international hit. But instead of working on a second feature film, Miranda has been "in a hurry to do everything else". Like making exhibitions featuring do-it-yourself art taken from the ever-expanding Learning To Love You More project, an ongoing collaboration with Harrell Fletcher.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Anna Biller
The lovely, multi-talented Anna Biller shocked and surprised audiences everywhere with her high-camp (s)exploitation flick 'Viva'. The film takes place in 1972, during the hayday of the sexual revolution. Anna Biller plays Barbi - a bored, naive suburban housewife who gets sucked into a life of prostitution, drugs, sexual experimentation, nudist camps and orgies, and subsequently reinvents herself as the selfmade, sexually liberated godess Viva.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Taika Waititi
Taika Waititi is a director with a very original mind. In his homeland New Zealand, he's known foremost as a stand-up comedian. But Taika also directs, writes and paints. We met him at the 2007 International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he presented his first feature film, 'Eagle vs Shark' - an offbeat romantic comedy featuring two socially inept misfits.
Pretty Cool People Interview: Kustaa Saksi
Although he thinks it's a bit cliché for an artist from Scandinavia , there is no question about it: Kustaa Saksi is heavily inspired by nature. His organic shapes and arabesque lines easily remind us of dark woods, meandering rivers and steep mountain slopes. Kustaa: "Especially in Finland, you don't have to go far to find yourself in total wilderness."
Pretty Cool People Interview: Sixeart
Like so many talented artists, Sixeart started out spraycanning the streets in his hometown Barcelona, back in the Eighties. These days however the vivid paintings of Sixeart are on display in international galleries and museums. Last year for instance he made a gigantic mural on the façade of Tate Modern in London.
Safety First
Safety First explores the indirect effects of 9-11 on our lives after entering an airport or travelling at ten thousand feet. Anyone who travels by air knows that since 9-11 our private lives are under extreme scrutiny in order to prevent terrorist attacks. Although many countries have endorsed the War on Terrorism, nations worldwide are still entitled to their own ways of dealing with potential terrorist attacks.
Room 2017
It's every director's nightmare: to return home without your material. This is exactly what happened to Rob Smits, the acclaimed director of Jungle Rudy and other documentaries. Smits is the epitome of a filmmaker who speaks through images, not words. Long, silent shots of ragged beauty are his trademark. At the beginning of Room 2017 we find him in a hotel room in Taipei. He has just returned from a trip to the Yanomami Indians in the deep green of Venezuela...
Dear Oprah
A year before the presidential elections of 2008, a crew of young European filmmakers goes on a journey all across the USA in a little old motor home to search for America's missing voters.
Celebration
Celebration is the latest version of the American Dream, a town built in 1996 in the swamp of central Florida by the master of make believe The Disney Company. The entertainment company famous for happy endings ventured into new territory: reality. Once again Disney had its thumb on the pulse of the American public: to return to community, to a neighborhood.
American Prince
Director Tommy Pallotta made a compelling documentary about his friend Stephen Prince: a very engaging storyteller who worked extensively with film icon Martin Scorsese in the seventies, both as a producer and as an actor (Taxi Driver).
Prince was also the subject of Scorsese's lost film 'American Boy', in which the young Stephen tells fascinating, some time totally absurd anecdotes from his rock&roll life. For example: the most memorable scene from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in which Travolta injects adrenaline into the heart of Uma Thurman who overdosed, is based on a story that Stephen tells in this documentary.
Three decades after Scorsese's film was released, Tommy Pallotta brings us 'American Prince', where he draws out Steven Prince once more to recount his days since 'American Boy', share why he turned his back on the entertainment industry and to compose the next chapter of his story.



























