Update: Cripes, with Sundance launching today the clips and trailers are coming fast and furious. Since we reported the story this morning, Joseph Gordon Levitt has posted a Banksy stencil from Park City, and the trailer has arrived. It looks like a helluva lot of fun, and seems to be a “Jackass” styled take on urban art. Nice. The film is being repped in the UK by Revolver and you can hit the film’s website here. Banksy’s Park City work is to the left, and the trailer is below.
Though kept off the official schedule, but due to be confirmed today at a Sundance press conference, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” is a documentary described as a “stealth project” that promises to be “the world’s first street art disaster movie.” Take that Roland Emmerich.
Being labeled as “A Banksy Film,” and narrated by Rhys Ifans, the film will explore “renegade urban artists and pranksters from around the world.” While the directorial credit remains to confirmed, we can say the seeds of the film came from Thierry Guetta aka Mr. Brainwash (not Terry Guetta as printed by the Hollywood Reporter), a French filmmaker and grafitti artist who came to Los Angeles nine years ago and fell into the street art world. About a year-and-a-half ago, LA Weekly interviewed Guetta and mentioned an unfinished street art movie that had Banksy “threatening to do a movie about the documentary Guetta never made.” We’re guessing this is it.
As for which direction the film takes, it sounds like it’s going to be playful. THR says “L.A.-based filmmaker [Thierry] Guetta set out to record this secretive world in thrilling detail. For more than eight years he traveled with a backpack through Europe and America. After he met a British street artist known only as Banksy, things took a bizarre turn” while the BBC quotes Banksy as saying, “It’s the story of how one man set out to film the un-filmable. And failed.” The film is also rumored to have “exclusive footage” of the reclusive, identity subversive artist, but we’re pretty sure he’ll be obscured or in some kind of disguise.
And in case you have no idea who the hell this Banksy guy is, he’s one of the most influential English street artists of the past decade. While his work has been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and been featured in galleries, he’s best known for his unauthorized guerilla pieces and performance artwork that often double as scathing social and political critiques. Even as his fame has increased, the artist himself has famously kept a low profile, and has pretty much never been seen on camera (until now?).