Film Interviews
theartsdesk Q&A: director Jacques Audiard on his Mexican trans gangster musical 'Emilia Pérez'Friday, 25 October 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Anna Bogutskaya on her new book about the past decade of horror cinemaTuesday, 22 October 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Alice Lowe on 'Timestalker' and what women rue through the agesFriday, 11 October 2024
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. Read more... |
The Third Man rides again - 75th anniversary of Carol Reed's noir classicFriday, 06 September 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'Wednesday, 28 August 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Viggo Mortensen on 'The Dead Don't Hurt', Westerns and the dangers of patriotismWednesday, 12 June 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Matthew Modine on 'Hard Miles', 40 years in showbusiness and safer cyclingSaturday, 01 June 2024
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. Read more... |
'I think of her as a proto-punk': documentarist Svetlana Zill on Anita PallenbergWednesday, 22 May 2024
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Eddie Marsan and the American Revolution, posh boys and East End gangstersWednesday, 22 May 2024
He’s not the kind of actor who has paparazzi following him around Beverly Hills or staking out his yacht in St Barts, but Eddie Marsan, born into a working class family in Stepney in 1968, has amassed a list of acting credits that your average superstar will never be able to match. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Marco Bellocchio - the last maestroSaturday, 27 April 2024
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco Bellocchio was a Marxist firebrand when he made his iconoclastic debut with Fists in the Pocket (1965). Now aged 84, he makes intellectually and emotionally muscular, hit epics about abused Italian power. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Wim Wenders on 'Perfect Days'Wednesday, 21 February 2024
Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old German director in existentially questing mode. Read more... |
10 Questions for 'The Settlers' film director Felipe Gálvez HaberleThursday, 08 February 2024
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s Chilean Western The Settlers traces the roles played in the genocide of the country’s indigenous Selk’nam people by the Spanish businessman José Menéndez (1846-1918) and his brutal Scottish sheep station manager Alexander McLennan (1871-1917). Read more... |
Scala!!! interview with documentary co-directors Jane Giles and Ali CatterallThursday, 04 January 2024
There’s no shortage of documentaries about movie stars, film directors and production studios in their heydays, but very little attention has been paid to the cinemas that showed the movies they made or the diverse audiences they attracted. Read more... |
32 Sounds: Interview with innovative documentarian Sam Green about his audio and visual feastThursday, 23 November 2023
Sam Green’s film 32 Sounds has been described as the greatest documentary you’ve ever heard, which is a pretty noisy claim – how does anyone know all the documentaries you’ve experienced? What is certainly true is that the way Green presents his films as immersive events, where musicians play the soundtrack live, the audience wear headphones and the director narrates, makes for a very unusual cinema experience. Read more... |
Composer and conductor Carl Davis, 1936-2023Friday, 04 August 2023
May 2021 should have seen the appearance on Netflix of a new restoration of Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoleon, lasting nearly seven hours and timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death. The release was delayed, but, in anticipation, theartsdesk spoke to the composer and conductor Carl Davis, who has died aged 86. Read more... |
Isabelle Huppert and director Jean-Paul Salomé: 'Cinema is about a little trade, a little business'Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Isabelle Huppert is French cinema’s icon of icy transgression, from Bertrand Blier’s outrageous Les Valseuses (1974) to Paul Verhhoeven’s Elle (2017), in which her character Michéle denies rape’s trauma, instead seeking out her rapist for sadomasochistic sex and mind-games. Huppert was Oscar-nominated for the latter, though she was ultimately too much for Hollywood. Read more... |
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