More than a year after the film began its journey across the film festival circuit in Toronto in 2013, John Ridley's year-before-superstardom portrait of rock icon Jimi Hendrix, Jimi: All Is by My Side, finally arrives in cinemas. The writer/director and his star, André Benjamin, best known to many as André 3000 of Outkast, discussed a variety of topics on the production of this unconventional biopic of the music legend at a press conference in Beverly Hills on Sunday, September 21.
Jimi: All Is by My Side opens in limited release this Friday, September 26, from Xlrator Media, with expansion in cinemas nationwide over the weeks to come.
When Kevin Smith talks, one cannot help but just sit back and listen. After all, not for nothing has the famously loquacious writer/producer/director has made a name for himself as a popular draw in public speaking engagements (immortalized on an ever-growing series of DVD's), which then paved the way for a project that, in recent years, has superseded his efforts as a filmmaker: building SModCo, a network of consistently popular podcasts, a number of which he hosts himself. Ironically, it is through the popularity of his podcasts--specifically, one episode in particular--that Smith has returned to filmmaking after a three-year absence, with Tusk, a part-horror, part-comedy, all-WTF man-as-walrus, walrus-as-man movie idea he spontaneously thought of and then further developed live on the fly across the cyberspace airwaves. Appropriately enough, when Smith sat down for a roundtable interview at the film's press day on Monday, September 15, what ensued was not so much an interview but rather an in-depth podcast, where he engagingly and rather thoroughly discussed all the various minutiae behind the movie's unusual conception, development, and eventual production before a small audience. Since text transcription can never do justice to Smith's singular gifts as a raconteur, below is the audio of the session, which is an amusing entertainment unto itself.
Tusk opens in cinemas nationwide today, Friday, September 19, from A24.