sun 24/11/2024

Film Interviews

theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 1

Jasper Rees

David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 2

Jasper Rees

In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on the night in 1967 before he killed his lover Joe Orton, also with a hammer. But however many Orton plays Storey indirectly lost, he pulped many more of his own.

Read more...

10 Questions for Director Olivier Assayas

Nick Hasted

Olivier Assayas was born into French cinema, as the son of screenwriter Jacques Remy, but his three acclaimed decades as a director have followed a mazy course.

Read more...

10 Questions for Director Gurinder Chadha

Jasper Rees

Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful...

Read more...

10 Minutes with Director Paolo Sorrentino

Nick Hasted

Two Neapolitans are wrestling for Italian cinema’s crown. Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone’s rivalry was for a time so personal that, though they were neighbours, they didn’t speak for years.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Actress Emily Watson

Jasper Rees

Emily Watson made her remarkable debut in Breaking the Waves (1996). In Lars von Trier’s grim parable, Watson plays Bess, an ingénue from a remote religious Scottish community who, when her husband is paralysed on an oil rig, perpetuates their romantic life by seeking out liaisons with other men and telling him about it.

Read more...

10 Questions for Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight

Jasper Rees

Twelve months ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was the focus of an intense campaign on social media. The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite protested the lack of recognition for black talent at the 2016 Oscars. This year the picture looks a little different, mainly because Barry Jenkins's quietly remarkable film Moonlight has deservedly scooped eight nominations.

...

Read more...

Interview: Marius de Vries, musical director of La La Land

Jasper Rees

La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years.

Read more...

When Snowdon starred in Peter Sellers' home movie

Jasper Rees

On screen, two hoodlums in macs and homburgs debate the best way to waste a victim. One of them, played by Peter Sellers, proffers a revolver. The other, who from under his hat has something of Herbert Lom about his profile, pulls on a cigarette and shakes his head. How about the acid in the bath routine? Another shake of the head. Case him in cement and drop him in the river? No. Sellers’ gangster is bemused. No gun, no acid, no cement: so how’s he going to do it?

Read more...

'It’s a much more freeing experience than Harry Potter'

Jasper Rees

David Yates is not the best-known film director in the world, but he has been at the helm of four of the most successful. All of them had “Harry Potter and the” in the title.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Robert Vaughn

Adam Sweeting

New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect.

Read more...

Captain Fantastic

Tom Birchenough

If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.

It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son...

Read more...

10 Questions for Actor Don Cheadle

Jasper Rees

Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and first wife Frances Taylor, the film was trapped in a pipeline for aeons.

Read more...

Marni Nixon: 'It ended up being totally my voice'

Jasper Rees

Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name.

Read more...

10 Questions for Actor Toby Jones

Jasper Rees

What is it about Toby Jones? A decade ago he had a stroke of luck when a film producer spotted his physical similarity to Truman Capote and cast him as the lead in Infamous. The luck wasn’t unadulterated. Philip Seymour Hoffman played the same role in a different film and won an Oscar. While Infamous was overshadowed, Jones wasn't. The latest advance in his career finds him playing...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Filmmakers Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson

Graham Fuller

The Forbidden Room, reviewed here yesterday, brings to a climax Guy Maddin’s thirty-year orchestration of the ghosts of world cinema past. A movie like no other, it’s a hectic, twilit construction and deconstruction of What Might Have Been: a pullulating assemblage of vintage movies that were either lost or never made reinvented by the Canadian filmmaker and his co-writers Evan Johnson and Robert Kotyk.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Music Reissues Weekly: Stefan Gnyś - Horizoning

For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single...

Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger

"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later...

Akram Khan, GIGENIS, Sadler’s Wells review - now 50, Khan re...

London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The ...

Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director...

Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of...

King James, Hampstead Theatre review - UK premiere drains a...

Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not...

Album: Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More

The progress of Kim Deal has been one of the great delights of modern music. Much as one wishes Pixies well, they have never been the same without...

Kavakos, Philharmonia, Blomstedt, RFH review - a supreme val...

From a privileged position in the Festival Hall stalls, I could see 97-year old Herbert Blomstedt’s near-immobile back as he sat on a piano stool...

Hannah Scott, Worthing Pavilion Theatre Atrium review - fill...

London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the...