Full 30mn doc on watch HERE

Director and Hip Hop culture pioneer (producer/marketer/promoter/DJ) Thibaut de Longeville entered quite sensationally the international stage of filmmaking with cult-classic Just For Kicks, a Tribeca selected documentary about the sneaker culture and hip-hop. A couple films later while still blessing Paris with the world's biggest street ball tournament, the man is back with "The Art of Blending" an all-access documentary of the Hennessy Artistry's tour featuring Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Jay Electronica, E.V.E., Bobby Brown, Ronald Isley (The Isley Brothers), Mike Posner, Daniel Merriweather, D-Nice. & more. 

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XXL also sat down and talked with Thibaut to get closer to the man's vision. Here's an extract.
How did a reformed sneaker addict like you get into filmmaking?  

I started out as a production assistant in the early/mid-90s, interning and working in various production companies, assisting directors like Fab 5 Freddy, Brett Ratner, Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Michel Gondry working on music videos, hanging out on sets, trying to absorb and learn as much as I could on the field. I started producing myself in 2003, and directed my first film in 2005: Just for Kicks, which gained a lot of attention worldwide and opened a lot of doors for me in terms of filmmaking.  

Why do you prefer to direct documentary style films?  

There have been major evolutions with the documentary medium/art form in the past 10 years. I think films like Dogtown & Z-Boys, Buena Vista Social Club, Scratch, Infamy, Helvetica and some say films like Just for Kicks have changed what can be expected from a documentary nowadays. Filmmaking in general has become more accessible and now offers a lot of different ways to tell a story, so in turn you get a whole new energy in documentary films that are non-traditional and can be infused with influences coming from music videos, motion pictures, graphic design, beat making, etc. and that’s very exciting. I just love documentaries as a filmmaker, and as a Hip-Hop head I think the medium is incredibly appropriated to subject matters relative to the culture, which deals a lot with reality and the real world rather than fiction. That being said, I’m definitely not limiting myself to documentaries and enjoy all sorts of filmmaking, from music videos to shorts to hopefully soon fiction.  

What was your vision for the documentary before you started filming and did it change at any point?  

I wanted to try and capture the essence of what these iconic artists stand for, and the spirit of them collaborating in very classy settings. I actually had very little time to prepare shooting, so I kind of had to adapt on the road as we were shooting, dealing with everyone’s availability and the fact the events weren’t originally produced with the intention of making them into a film at all. As high-end and as classy as the events where, the production of the film itself was actually as ‘rockumentary’ as it gets.

Full itw here

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