Robin Williams would be encouraged by their efforts/displays of conscience, I imagine.
http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/guest-post-paul-bettany/
Guest Post: Paul Bettany
POSTED ON DECEMBER 22, 2014
I first began working with the Coalition for the Homeless in 2012 because I needed help. I was writing a screenplay about a homeless couple who fall in love on the streets of NYC. It was inspired by a real couple who lived outside my apartment in TriBeCa – my neighbors, so to speak. I passed by them every morning on the way to take my kids to school. Initially I tried to talk to them, but in the end I gave up and began to walk by them faster and faster until finally, I’m ashamed to say, they became part of the landscape of the city in which I live. Then Hurricane Sandy hit and in the madness of trying to fit three kids, a cat and perhaps the dumbest dog in NYC into a car and head to higher ground, I didn’t once stop to question where they – my neighbors – might weather the storm. I never saw them again. And so I began to write.
During the whole process of making
Shelter, The Coalition for the Homeless were incredibly helpful, vetting my script, getting me access to shelters and also taking me out on their extraordinary Grand Central Food Program, which delivers a staggering 1000 meals to homeless New Yorkers every night of the year.
I love New York. I fell in Love with it the moment I saw it. I also fell in love in it, and I now raise my family here. But in the last 15 years I’ve watched, with sadness, as the homelessness crisis has spiraled out of control. During the Bloomberg years New York City lost 36% of its low cost housing with catastrophic results. When I began writing
Shelter the figures were already shocking: 30,000 adults and 20,000 children seeking shelter every night in NYC (many of these families have a parent in full time employment and still can’t afford NYC’s rents). It’s sobering to think that in the two years it’s taken me to finish my film, those numbers have swollen to 34,000 adults and 25,000 children. So you can see the scope of the problem NY is facing.
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http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/dubai-international-film-festival/a-feeling-of-guilt-inspired-paul-bettanys-shelter
A feeling of guilt inspired Paul Bettany’s Shelter
Rob Garratt
December 13, 2014 Updated: December 13, 2014 04:34 PM
Every day the British actor passed a homeless couple outside his New York apartment block, often stopping to spare some change.
And then one day, they were gone. Bettany dedicates
Shelter, which received its second-ever screening at the Dubai International Film Festival on Friday, to this unnamed, unknown pair.
“I passed this couple every day when I was taking the kids to school,” says the 43-year-old star of
A Beautiful Mind and
Wimbledon.
“Slowly they became more and more invisible to me, more and more part of the landscape of the city,” he says. “Then Hurricane Sandy happened. I got my family out, and when we came back, I never saw them again.”
Left to wonder what fate the pair faced, Bettany poured his feelings into a raw, unnerving depiction of a homeless couple on the same city’s streets.
“I would give them money, pass them, and that was all,” says Bettany. “This film is, in some way, a response to the guilt I experienced having not crossed that boundary.”
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http://deadline.com/2014/09/jennifer-aniston-oscar-chances-kevin-costner-jennifer-connelly-837368/
Oscar Watch: First-Class Films From Aniston, Connelly, Costner, Gere Still Seek Distributors As Clock Running Out
By Pete Hammond
Awards Editor & Columnist
September 21, 2014
Several unspoken-for films came into this year’s Toronto International Film Festival determined not only to find a distributor, but to set a 2014 release date...
One of the most buzzed-about pictures on the fall festival circuit this year was Ramin Bahrani’s intense and pulse-pounding drama
99 Homes, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon giving award-worthy performances in a film set during the housing and financial crisis of 2008. It played in Venice, then Telluride.
I saw it at the latter and cornered Bahrani to ask if the film was meant for this year, should it get a distributor. He told me they had lots of interest already then but were holding back for Toronto, when the other distribution companies had a chance to see it. I know at least one mini-major was gunning for it there when it premiered the evening of Sept. 8. But for whatever reason, it went instead in a $3 million deal to upstart Broad Green Pictures, which announced it was being held for release next year. Bahrani told me in Telluride he strongly felt it should be released this year because Shannon and Garfield “would definitely be nominated.” But it’s not in the works.
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And this week I am told potential distributors are still viewing
Shelter, another TIFF debut, which was written and directed by first-time helmer Paul Bettany and stars his wife, Connelly, and Anthony Mackie. I caught it this week at UTA’s Beverly Hills offices.
It’s an immensely powerful and provocative love story about two homeless people on the streets of New York City — each with a past that is slowly revealed. One scene would be sure to land this film, as currently edited, an NC-17 rating. But there can be no doubt Connelly turns in her finest and riskiest performance since
Requiem For A Dream.
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Writer-director Oren Moverman’s
Time Out Of Mind, another movie set among NYC’s homeless community that was for sale at TIFF, features Richard Gere in a stripped-down, startling turn as a man reduced to living on the streets. It, too, does not yet have a distributor, but I am told it didn’t come into TIFF with the intention of being released for this year’s race. It gets a high-profile slot at the NYFF...
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