thu 03/04/2025

Film Interviews

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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theartsdesk Q&A: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof on 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' - 'It became a question of self-respect'

Nick Hasted

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

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theartsdesk Q&A: filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson on 'Rumours'

Nick Hasted

Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly apocalyptic crisis. Farcically human, they pocket hors d’oeuvres, flirt and pull rank, lose tempers and trousers.

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theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Payal Kapadia on 'All We Imagine as Light'

Pamela Jahn

Payal Kapadia’s lyrical fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light, which received the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, is now accruing end-of-year prizes. This week, the New York Film Critics Circle and the voters for the Gotham Awards (which honours independent movies) named it 2024’s Best International Film. More prizes will follow.

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theartsdesk Q&A: director Jacques Audiard on his Mexican trans gangster musical 'Emilia Pérez'

Pamela Jahn

Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinema

Harry Thorfinn-

You may have heard the phrase “elevated horror” being used to describe horror films that lean more toward arthouse cinema, favouring tension and psychological turmoil over jump-scares and gore.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Alice Lowe on 'Timestalker' and what women rue through the ages

Justine Elias

Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.

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The Third Man rides again - 75th anniversary of Carol Reed's noir classic

Adam Sweeting

It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film.

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theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'

Adam Sweeting

Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Viggo Mortensen on 'The Dead Don't Hurt', Westerns and the dangers of patriotism

Nick Hasted

Viggo Mortensen has parlayed film stardom into the life of a hard-working, bohemian-minded gentleman scholar. His Lord of the Rings fees financed Perceval Press, which publishes books of poetry, photography and anthropology by himself and others, and Mortensen’s extensive discography as a musician.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Matthew Modine on 'Hard Miles', 40 years in showbusiness and safer cycling

Adam Sweeting

Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of employability that must make many of his fellow-actors green with envy, Modine has been clocking up a stream of memorable performances for 40 years on both the small and big screens.

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'I think of her as a proto-punk': documentarist Svetlana Zill on Anita Pallenberg

Nick Hasted

Anita Pallenberg was a vital presence in the Stones’ most vital years. Her bright eyes and hungry mouth betrayed a ferocious appetite for pleasure and adventure, taking her from a nun-schooled Rome childhood to New York’s downtown art crowd, then modelling in Munich, where in 1965 she engineered an encounter with “shy” Keith Richards, a similarly callow Mick Jagger and her first, violent Stones lover Brian Jones.

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