News, News, News: Telluride, Walking Dead's Secret Stash, Soderbergh Says Why He Joined The Hunger Games

The line-up for the 38th annual Telluride Film Festival was announced yesterday. It's pretty much in the middle between the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Movies playing this year include The Descendants, Cannes darling The Artist, Martin Scorsese's documentary Living In The Material World and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. Go to Collider.com for the full line-up.

Kevin Smith has had a busy little year. He's been promoting Red State endlessly (It's out on VOD now) and he's heading back to television. AMC has greenlighted a new one-hour unscripted series to show what happens inside Smith's comic book shop, Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash. The first season will have six episodes and is expected to air early next year. AMC also announced that the second season premiere of another one of my favourites, The Walking Dead will be 90 minutes. That will start on October 19th at 9/8c. Six more episodes will follow after that. There will be one little change though. The show will take a hiatus and will return for the final six episodes on February 12th at 9/8c.

Earlier last month, it was announced that Steven Soderbergh is second unit director on The Hunger Games, but yet people were still wondering why even though reasons were mentioned. Moviefone spoke to him while he was promoting his thriller, Contagion (out Sept. 9th) and he took the time to tell them the full story of why he joined one of the most highly anticipated films of next year. This is just an edited version of the story. You can click on the link for more.

The story is really simple. Back in April, [director] Gary [Ross] -- who is a close friend of mine I've exchanged creative favors with non-stop over the last 15 years -- when he got the boards for the shoot in April called me and said, "Hey, first week of August, I got these two days of second unit. Is there any way you can come down and help me out? Because I'd rather have you do it than hire somebody who I don't know." I said, "Actually, that works out." We'll just be finishing 'Contagion' and prepping 'Magic Mike' and, yeah, it could be fun.

Cut to two months later, and I show up to do this thing. Of course the whole design of it and what's fun about it, for me, is my job is to come in and duplicate exactly what Gary and Tom Stern, the [cinematographer], are doing. To mimic as closely as I can to their aesthetic. And that's what I attempted to do. But if I've done my job properly, I hope I did, by design, you won't be able to tell what I did. Because it's supposed to cut seamlessly into what they're doing. That's the whole point. That's why he asked me to come down, because he knew that I would be rigorous about matching what they were doing.

You know, he showed me stuff on either side of the area in which I was going to be shooting stuff and we talked at length. And I thought, OK, I see what you guys are doing. I know what the tool kit is. I know what the rules are. And it's fun in a way. I found it much more nerve-wracking than when you're shooting for yourself. Because I was constantly thinking, Oh, I hope that he likes this. I hope he likes that.