mon 11/08/2025

Film Interviews

theartsdesk Q&A: actor Leonie Benesch on playing an overburdened nurse in the Swiss drama 'Late Shift'

Pamela Jahn

The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.

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theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud on sex, love, and confusion in the modern world

Pamela Jahn

"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. 

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theartsdesk Q&A: actor Lars Eidinger on 'Dying' and loving the second half of life

Pamela Jahn

To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her brooding new film 'Harvest'

Pamela Jahn

Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted.

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theartsdesk Q&A: actor Emma Mackey on 'Hot Milk' and life education

Pamela Jahn

Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director Andreas Dresen on his anti-Nazi resistance drama 'From Hilde, with Love'

Pamela Jahn

Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.

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Bleak landscapes and banjos: composer Bernard Hughes discusses his score for 'Chicken Town'

graham Rickson

Composer Bernard Hughes first met director Richard Bracewell when working on the film Bill, a 2015 Horrible Histories take on the life of Shakespeare for which he provided some of the score. The pair were keen to collaborate again but the pandemic put paid to their plans. The new black comedy Chicken Town sees the pair reunited.

GRAHAM RICKSON: This is a film made on a small budget. How do the economics of a production affect how you work?

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theartsdesk Q&A: Gary Oldman on playing John Cheever in 'Parthenope' and beating the booze

Pamela Jahn

Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of real-life personae such as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Herman J Mankiewicz in Mank. He now stars as the bibulous middle-aged American author John Cheever in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino's latest lush homage to Italy's recent past. 

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theartsdesk Q&A: film director Déa Kulumbegashvili on her startling second feature, 'April'

Pamela Jahn

One of the most exciting new voices in Eastern European film, Déa Kulumbegashvili is not concerned with conventional shot lengths. She has been described as a director of "slow cinema", which she regards as a compliment.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director Leonardo Van Dijl discusses his sexual abuse drama 'Julie Keeps Quiet'

Pamela Jahn

"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose psychological drama Julie Keeps Quiet has little to do with its sports milieu per se. "Uncovering systemic abuse often starts by listening to the silence and paying attention to the people who don't speak out."

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theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Miguel Gomes on his latest exotic opus, 'Grand Tour'

Pamela Jahn

It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his cinema is mysterious ways, allowing the Portuguese director to tackle the themes that interest him: great love, colonialism, chance, destiny, death, and a dreary Portuguese world that is by no means willing to let anyone take away its history – or its stories.

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theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on his apocalyptic musical 'The End'

Pamela Jahn

Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director François Ozon on 'When Autumn Falls'

Nick Hasted

François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).

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theartsdesk Q&A: Indian star Radhika Apte on 'Sister Midnight'

Pamela Jahn

Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. 

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theartsdesk Q&A: Raoul Peck, director of the documentary 'Ernest Cole: Lost and Found'

Pamela Jahn

With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film about African-American writer James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement not only put the Haitian-born Peck on the map as a director, but also made him one of the defining figures of contemporary black cinema.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Oscar-winner Adrien Brody on 'The Brutalist'

Pamela Jahn

Adrien Brody is on a roll. Following his Golden Globe and BAFTA Best Actor wins for his performance as László Toth in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, Brody picked up the equivalent Oscar last Sunday, celebrating it by giving the longest speech in Academy Awards history.

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