Sept. 19 THE LAST WINTER The director Larry Fessenden has found an interesting niche for himself, turning the premises of classic horror movies into intimate, actor-oriented indie films, like "Wendigo" and "Habit".
The style is hyper-naturalistic, unflatteringly intimate: the actors, chattering bourgeois inanities over each other at dinner parties and in bed, are imprisoned in tight domestic spaces, the camera scrutinising them in closeup.
You can't get much more intimate with actors than sitting in the same car with them.
The play depends upon an intimate bond between actor and audience hard to achieve in this rigidly geometrical theatre.
Close-ups accentuate the more intimate relationship the actor can establish with a film audience, an audience that has often followed the actual life of certain actors whom the industry promotes as "stars".
"Glenn is often described as having a glacial or distant quality about her, but in person she's the absolute opposite: warm and intimate," says the actor Iain Glen, who co-starred with her in the National Theatre's 2002 production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
In the film's first trailer, above, Radcliffe-as-Ginsberg takes in the sights and lessons of the world around him -- as well as the intimate glances from actor Dane DeHaan -- with a newcomer's glow, all to a frenetic bop beat.
I could be very intimate with the actors.
In his intimate production, live actors talk to projections, scenery darkens as day turns into night, and animation seamlessly blends into the background.
But by that time the director had broken out of the allegorical chrysalis and made "Opening Night," a searingly intimate story about actors and directors, in which he co-starred for the first time beside his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands.
Though lighting can alter the emphasis of a scene, theatre has no equivalent to the close-up, and the camera positions respected that fact: we never felt artificially intimate with the actors, but nor was there a sense that we were too far from the action.
