Film Interviews
Michel Hazanavicius: 'Losing himself is how he found himself'Friday, 11 May 2018
French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. Read more... |
Andrew Haigh: 'In the end you have to be able to make the decisions' - interviewMonday, 30 April 2018
Very early in his career, Andrew Haigh worked as an assistant editor on such Ridley Scott blockbusters as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. He didn't actually meet Scott in person until years later, when the eminent director had no recollection of him. Read more... |
Juliette Binoche: ‘Repetition feels like near death’Thursday, 19 April 2018
It’s about time Juliette Binoche and Claire Denis teamed up: the legendary French actress, Gallic film royalty known by her countrymen and women as La Binoche, with one of the country’s most unique directors, both talented and formidable women who have very much forged their own paths in the... Read more... |
Milos Forman: 'The less you know about yourself, the happier you are'Tuesday, 17 April 2018
The second thing I noticed about Miloš Forman, who has died at the age of 86, was the spectacular imperfection of his English. Read more... |
Clio Barnard: 'We need to talk about sexual abuse' - interviewTuesday, 20 February 2018
Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Read more... |
Daniel Day-Lewis: 'I'm quite good at mending things'Tuesday, 30 January 2018
Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t look like a 60-year-old retiree. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt under a dark blue shirt, light brown trousers which descend no further than mid-calf and boots laced high above the ankle he could easily have worn as a young actor in My Beautiful Laundrette. Ditto the earring. He remains as thin and sleek as a whippet. Read more... |
Jeremy Irons: 'I was never very beautiful' - interviewMonday, 22 January 2018
In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni. Read more... |
'It was appealing to make a thriller about mental illness': Gareth Tunley and Alice Lowe on 'The Ghoul'Saturday, 05 August 2017
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s directorial debut, which was produced by Ben Wheatley. Read more... |
Olivia Williams interview: 'Are you on drugs?' 'No I've just spent the day acting'Monday, 24 July 2017
Olivia Williams’s first film was, (in)famously, seen by almost no one. The Postman, Kevin Costner’s expensive futuristic misfire, may have summoned her from the depths of chronic unemployment, but the first time anyone actually clapped eyes on her was in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, in which Bill Murray most understandably falls in love with her peachy reserved English rose. Then came The Sixth Sense, in which with great subtlety she in effect gave two performances as... Read more... |
10 Questions for Adeel Akhtar: 'The first form of defiance is to laugh'Saturday, 15 July 2017
Earlier this year Adeel Akhtar won the BAFTA for best actor. In Murdered By My Father, he gave a heartbreaking performance as the widowed father of a daughter who goes against his desire to arrange an advantageous marriage for her. In a nuanced domestic tragedy, he revealed fresh depths of agony, fear and rage that will have surprised those who mainly knew him as Faisal, the dimwitted terrorist in... Read more... |
10 Questions for film director Roger Donaldson – 'motor racing in the 1960s was incredibly dangerous'Tuesday, 23 May 2017
An Australian who emigrated to New Zealand in 1965, Roger Donaldson cut his teeth in documentaries and TV before launching into a career in feature films. His first feature, Sleeping Dogs (1976), on the unlikely theme of a New Zealand plunged into totalitarianism, immediately attracted attention, and after he made Smash Palace (1982) Hollywood came calling. Read more... |
Charlotte Rampling: 'I had to survive!' - interviewTuesday, 11 April 2017
The seizième arrondissement, the Paris equivalent of Kensington and Chelsea, or Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Haussmann’s Paris par excellence. Here, in a gated complex where American heiress Florence Gould hosted lavish wartime salons, indulging in conduct which, come the liberation, she was required to explain, lives Charlotte Rampling. The marble foyer is vast, the lift small and cranky, like something out of a movie. Read more... |
Brighton Festival 2017: 12 Free EventsThursday, 06 April 2017
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 1Monday, 27 March 2017
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 2Monday, 27 March 2017
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 AssayasMonday, 20 March 2017
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... |
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