sat 25/10/2025

Film Interviews

Jeremy Irons: 'I was never very beautiful' - interview

Jasper Rees

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.

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'It was appealing to make a thriller about mental illness': Gareth Tunley and Alice Lowe on 'The Ghoul'

Thomas Barrie

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.

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Olivia Williams interview: 'Are you on drugs?' 'No I've just spent the day acting'

Jasper Rees

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...

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10 Questions for Adeel Akhtar: 'The first form of defiance is to laugh'

Jasper Rees

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...

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10 Questions for film director Roger Donaldson – 'motor racing in the 1960s was incredibly dangerous'

Adam Sweeting

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.

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Charlotte Rampling: 'I had to survive!' - interview

Liz Thomson

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.

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Brighton Festival 2017: 12 Free Events

Thomas H Green

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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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