Full Name Robert Byington Years active 1996 – present | Name Bob Byington | |
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Born April 29, 1971 (age 53) ( 1971-04-29 ) Occupation Film directorScreenwriterActor Movies 7 Chinese Brothers, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Harmony and Me, The Color Wheel, Registered Sex Offender Similar People Keith Poulson, Jason Schwartzman, Alex Ross Perry, Olympia Dukakis, Jennifer Prediger Profiles | ||
Tcff interviews bob byington director of somebody up there likes me
Robert "'Bob" Byington (born April 29, 1971) is an American film director, screenwriter and actor living in Austin, Texas. He is most noted for his films RSO (Registered Sex Offender) (2008) and Harmony and Me (2009). His 2012 film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, won The Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival. His latest film, 7 Chinese Brothers (2014) stars Jason Schwartzman, Olympia Dukakis and Tunde Adebimpe.
Contents
- Tcff interviews bob byington director of somebody up there likes me
- Jason schwartzman and bob byington talk 7 chinese brothers hollywood
- Career
- Style and content
- Awards
- Filmography as writer and director
- References
Jason schwartzman and bob byington talk 7 chinese brothers hollywood
Career
Robert "Bob" Byington grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz and received a major in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Byington directed his first film Shameless in 1996, and followed up with Olympia in 1998, which played on opening night of the South by Southwest Film Festival. He then entered a decade long "God-imposed" hiatus before directing his next three films RSO (Registered Sex Offender) (2008), Harmony and Me (2009) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (2012).
Style and content
Byington's work has been called literate, bawdy, sardonic and quirky. The Los Angeles Times described his film Harmony and Me as a "collision of joyous whimsy and bittersweet melancholy." His work is occasionally lumped in with the larger mumblecore movement in part because of his appearance in Andrew Bujalski's film Beeswax and his use of actors, such as Bujalski, Justin Rice, and Alex Karpovsky, who appeared in movies carrying the mumblecore label.
Byington considers his films thematically different from mumblecore and has resisted the label. Variety magazine agreed in its review of Harmony and Me describing Byington's work as "mumblecore without the mumble." Unlike the extreme naturalistic dialogue of many mumblecore films, Byington's work leans towards exact dialogue and, according to Roger Ebert, "perfect timing" which is "unreasonably funny". Filmmaker Magazine likened his rich humor to the New Hollywood comedies of the 1970s.
Byington often reuses performers, including Nick Offerman, Kristen Tucker, Pat Healy, Keith Poulson, Kevin Corrigan and Suzy Nakamura. Offerman starred in Byington's film, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which premiered at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Awards
Kicking the Seat praised Somebody Up There Likes Me as "the best English-language film of the last forty-six years."
Michael Moore awarded Byington the Stanley Kubrick Award for "bold and innovative filmmaking" in 2009 and praised him:
"To me, Austin is a really great example of a close-knit American independent filmmaking community that shows the kind of collaboration and inventiveness that it takes to make great films outside of the studio system. You've got a guy like Bob Byington who has developed a very unique style working with the same group of people on his last few films, and his films feel very organic as a result. They're the kind of movies that can only be made if the cast and crew are very comfortable working together. And when you watch his films you feel like you're part of their group too – it's like he's letting the audience in on a big inside joke."