Description
Ethan Hawke portrays Nikola Tesla as a kind of steampunk New Romantic in this captivating imaginative drama from Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, Festival 2015). Tesla recounts the life of the inventor of alternating current and the subsequent electricity wars that pitted him against powerful Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) and brought him the romantic attentions of Sarah Bernhardt. Almereyda has great fun exploding the trappings of the “period piece,” positing new possibilities and ways to represent history and its winners and losers with playfulness and verve.
“Pinging back and forth in audacious ways between the late 18th century and the present, Almereyda assembles an aptly livewire account of an unknowable outsider whose ideas about a world connected by wireless technology now make him seem like a field-leading visionary.” –David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
Michael Almereyda made his feature debut with Twister (1989), capturing a Film Independent Spirit Awards nomination for Best First Feature. Among his films are Nadja (Festival 1995), for which he received as a second Spirit Award nomination for Best Director; Hamlet (Festival 2000); William Eggleston in the Real World (2005); Experimenter (Festival 2005); Escapes (Festival 2016); and Marjorie Prime (Festival 2017), for which he received the Sundance Film Festival’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize. Almereyda developed Tesla, the winner of a second Sundance Sloan Prize, while he was a resident at SFFILM FilmHouse.
Film Details
LanguageEnglish
Year2020
Runtime102
CountryUSA
DirectorMichael Almereyda
ProducerUri Singer, Christa Campbell, Isen Robbins, Lati Grobman, Michael Almereyda, Per Melita
WriterMichael Almereyda
EditorKathryn J. Schubert
CinematographerSean Price Williams
MusicJohn Paesano
CastEthan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson
Print SourceMillenium Media
sam@millennium-media.net
