The ravings

The screening at the Stony Brook festival was great. Almost one thousand people in the house. It was great to show the film to this many people.

I finally received my DVD this week, and believe me, I pre-ordered. I
have no idea why it took so long to get from Canada to Iceland, but I
know that Icelandic Customs held it for a few days. They wanted me to
pay a percentage of the purchase price. I had to convince them that I
didn’t have to pay for this DVD. Finally I just told them to open the
package to see my name on it: “a film by Jon Gustafsson”. They finally
gave in and stopped claiming that I had bought this one on eBay.

This week I got a message from a woman in the UK who ordered a long
time ago and hadn’t received her copy yet. After some research we
found out that there had been some labor action within Royal Mail,
and as a result they are seriously backlogged. Since I hadn’t yet
opened my copy, I decided to mail it to this woman in the UK, hoping
that it would get to her sooner. So now I don’t have a copy for
myself, but that’s ok… I’ve seen it a couple of times already.

We seem to be having a big problem with mail going to Australia, and
we are very sorry for those who still haven’t received their copies.
Brazil also seems to take a long time but the Philippines seem to be
catching up. Today we also found out that Royal Mail in the UK is
staging another strike next week, so this will affect some deliveries
for sure. It’s frustrating, but we don’t have any control over the
mail services in all these different countries.

Yesterday WRATH played at the Perth Revelation International Film
Festival in Australia. This morning I got a message from a supporter
who was at the screening. She wrote: “As we went to collect our
tickets the guy at the counter said that of all the Revelation Film
Festival movies he had seen this was by far the best, as you can
imagine that put a huge smile on my face.” Little comments like this
one mean as much to me as winning an award, so thanks.

Next week I’m heading to the Stony Brook Film Festival on Long
Island. If any of you are in the area I would love to see you at the
screening. It’s on July 25th at 7pm. After that I am heading to
California to attend a screening at the WineCountry Film Festival in
Sonoma (don’t have the screening date confirmed yet). I’m also
looking forward to getting to spend a couple of days with friends in
LA.

By the way, did you all see this clip about Gerry’s new film,
directed by Guy Ritchie (Madonna’s husband). Here is the link:
http://www.worstpreviews.com/trailer.php?id=972&item=0

We have just been through one of the best summers I can remember in Iceland. I’ve been staying up past 3am most nights just the see the sunrise. You can see some of my pictures on my Flickr page.

A friend just sent me a link to this music video that I did back in 2000. Somebody has posted it on YouTube. This brings back a lot of memories.

Fever, sore throat, bone ache, head ache…. and a radio interview with Nina Boski on LifeBites, to be broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio sometime in the near future. She also interviewed Sturla. What ever I said, hopefully it made sense. I will post  audio clips here when I receive them.

A trailer for a low budget movie that I made in 2000.

I arrived in Michigan on Thursday evening. Had a great screening in the Saugatuck High School on Friday. It’s Saturday now and I think I already have alcohol poisoning. This is the first festival that I have been to that has a help-yourself 24 hour bar next door to my room, and a Sea-Doo tied up to the dock right in front of my room at my disposal. The best say to wake up after a Friday night of partying in Saugatuck is to go Sea-Doo-ing as fast as you can across the lake and back (a few times), so I did. Forgot to put on sun-screen. I’ll survive. Just had the second Waterfront screening and once again the audience response was great. Tomorrow I’m going sailing with a friend of mine, Mark, and his wife Mary, on their 35ft sailboat. The people here are great. The whole festival is run by volunteers, but they are doing an incredibly professional job of it. Waterfront has to be one of the most fun film festivals I have ever been to.

WorldFest in Huston, Texas, received 4.500 entries this year. They just announced that they have given Wrath Of Gods a Bronze Remi Award. Thank you WorldFest! They have apparently given awards to Spielberg, Lucas, David Lynch, Ang Lee, Ridley Scott, The Coen Brothers, Brian De Palma and many more.

I was in Toronto today and I went to Duplium to pick up the DVDs, but they were not quite ready to be shipped. The disks themselves are ready (see attached photo), and the silk printing on them looks beautiful - but the cover for the plastic case around it is not. One of my co-producers insisted that we put the laurels for the Audience Award at the Oxford International Film Festival on the cover. Being the co-operative guy that I am I agreed. That meant that the designer had to re-do the design and we lost our place in the printing queue. This will add a couple of days to the printing process. I tested the disk tough and everything works as it should.

This evening we had the second screening of WRATH at the RiverRun International Film Festival. This was the first festival to show both WRATH and B&G, so Sturla was there and after seeing him struggle on screen for 70 minutes the audience greeted him vey warmly (to say the least) when I called him up on stage. The Q&A went on for almost an hour. One of Gerry’s fans, Brenda, was there, so of course we had to have our picture taken after the film.

We finally completed the design for the Canadian release of the DVD this morning. I think Jon Steinsson did a fantastic job on this one and I’m looking forward to seeing it printed. Things are moving along.

I’m blown away. The Oxford International Film Festival received around 500 submissions from 36 countries, and they chose WRATH to be their Opening Night Gala film. Not bad for a little film shot on an old MiniDV camera… the first ever MiniDV camera to be produced by Sony. When I started shooting it I had nothing but that old Sony camera, 50 tapes (at $4 each), and two batteries that lasted for less than an hour each. I’ve had people trying to stop the film, and others adding their support to make sure that it would survive (not mentioning any names, but thanks GB).

I don’t think there will ever be a better screening than the one at the NSI FilmExchange. The audience laughed throug much of the film and at least three times they started clapping and cheering. This was the first time I show the finished film to an audience. The film works. Last time I showed it to a group of audience in Canada, the DVD player exploded and burst into flames. This show went smoothly. Terry David Mulligan was funny in the Q&A session. This morning I few to Seattle (for some filming) through Vancouver. The flight was delayed by a few hours, but the good thing was that I got to hang out with some of the Vancouver filmmakers who were on their way home. Mulligan also showed and we got him to pose for a picture with us. It’s good that there is a festival for Canadian films only.

Just got a call from the Oxford International Film Festival. Oxford, Ohio, another young ambitious college town festival has invited Wrath of Gods. The festival director is a filmmaker himself and it sounds like they are going to have a great first festival.

I just received a message from the RiverRun International Film Festival. in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wrath Of Gods has been invited, and we are in their 2007 documentary feature competition. Not a bad Valentine’s day present. I’ve read nothing but good things about this festival, and apparently Winston-Salem is one of the best places to live in the U.S. After all it is “The City of Arts”. I like their “Arto-O-Mat” project. Clever idea.

The designer (Armann Kojic) just sent me the final version of the poster. Now it’s just a question of making a deal with the right printing company. Hopefully we can start shipping the posters soon. Click on the poster to see a bigger version

I just received an e-mail with the program listing from the Wrath Of Gods listing from the NSI FilmExchange festival. Here is what the wrote:

WRATH OF GODS

Saturday, March 3, 6:15 p.m.
Canada/Iceland, 2006, 71 min

Canadian theatrical premiere

Director/writer: Jon Gustafsson
Producers: Jon Gustafsson, Karolina Lewicka
Co-producers: Jón Ármann Steinsson, Gerard Butler
Cinematography: Jon Gustafsson, Gunnar Orn Heimisson, Sarah Moffat, Ósk Gunnlaugsdóttir, Wendy Ord
Cast: Sturla Gunnarsson, Paul Stephens, Wendy Ord, Gerard Butler, Eric Jordan, Michael Cowan, Andrew Berzins, Stellan Skarsgård, Sarah Polley

In July 2004 film director Sturla Gunnarsson arrived in Iceland to begin production on the movie Beowulf & Grendel. Delays in closing the funding for the picture, a Canada/Iceland co-production pushed the start of shooting to the beginning of September and before long the cast and crew found themselves coping with filming a movie outdoors in the stormiest autumn in Iceland in 60 years. The international crew and cast, which included Scottish actor Gerard Butler (Phantom of the Opera), Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves) and Canadian actress Sarah Polley (My Life Without Me), braved wind, rain, mud and cold, all the while wondering if perhaps the pagan blessing invoked at the start of filming had actually been a curse. Documentary filmmaker Jon Gustafsson was there, capturing it all with his own camera — the physical hardships, the anxiety caused by delayed financing and the formidable beauty of the windswept Icelandic coasts. A “making of” documentary that attests to the passion and folly of movie-making.

I just saw some preview materials for the movie 300. It looks very impressive and I would go see this film, even if GB wasn’t in it. I think this will be an amazing year for Gerry, and he deserves it. I remember back at the Toronto Festival when he was telling me about the different kind of “hardship” they had to go through for this one. This is all about to pay off for them. The film looks masculine and tough and visually compelling at the same time. Their promotion is genious as well. They seem to have taken everything that I was attempting with the internet campaign of B&G to a new level - and done a fantastic job of it. The difference is that I had $10 to do it, but Warner Brothers has realized that it is worth spending a lot of money on the web campaign.

Icelanders have been making a bit of a splash in Danish busines lately. Some people say that the Danes are a bit sensitive over the whole thing. I went drinking in downtown Reykjavik with a friend last night. The bars were packed as usual. My friend told me about his recent trip to Denmark. The Pakistani taxi driver told him that he loves Icelandic people, not for their hard work and for what they have been building up in Denmark, but because they are now so hated in Denmark that they have “taken the pressure of other immigrant groups”. Anyway, we ran into a journalist from one of the TV stations.
He asked if he could get to see Wrath Of Gods because he has heard so much about it. He is hoping that it will restore his faith in the Icelandic documentary world. It is true, we have a very poor documentary tradition over here, and a very limited knowledge and understanding of what a documentary is. We need to make more documentaries in this country.