Film Interviews

theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Paul Bettany

ASH Smyth Friday, 30 September 2011

Since breaking onto the movie scene in 2001 with major roles in A Knight's Tale and A Beautiful Mind, London-born Paul Bettany (b 1971) has pretty much gone through the card.

theartsdesk Q&A: Director István Szabó

Jasper Rees Saturday, 27 August 2011

When I interviewed the great Hungarian film-maker István Szabó (b 1938) in his native Budapest, he took me on a tour of the city centre on the Pest side of the Danube. On the way we were distracted by a flashy café designed to lure tourists. It was called Mephisto – after the film by Szabó, presumably, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981.

theartsdesk Q&A: Writer/Director David Leland

Hilary Whitney Saturday, 02 July 2011

David Leland: 'There was a lot of me in Trevor. I was getting rid of a lot of anger in my system about what I went through in terms of education - or lack of it'

David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and...

theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Christopher Eccleston

Hilary Whitney Saturday, 30 April 2011

Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch.

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Q&A Special: Film Director Wim Wenders

james Woodall Tuesday, 19 April 2011

Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Script Supervisor Angela Allen

Jasper Rees Saturday, 05 March 2011

Angela Allen: A link with the golden age of Hollywood

The credits unfold against a backdrop of a tall, exotic plant, down whose length the camera slowly pans. The African Queen, in glorious Technicolor, based on a novel by CS Forrester, directed by John Huston, shot by Jack Cardiff, starring two of the great names of the cinematic age. Katharine Hepburn, the female face of the screwball comedy...

theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Colin Firth

Jasper Rees Saturday, 19 February 2011

In some ways it’s been an odd career. Everyone else in Another Country (1982), the stage play by Julian Mitchell about gays and Marxists in a 1930s English public school, shot out of the blocks.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Toby Jones

Jasper Rees Saturday, 15 January 2011

Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Toby Jones

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Interview: Anton Corbijn on making The American

Nick Hasted Thursday, 25 November 2010

George Clooney as Jack in 'The American'; 'More brutal than Bond'

Joy Division brought Anton Corbijn to England in 1979 and, nearly 30 years later, made him a cinema director. The sleeve of the band’s album Unknown Pleasures fascinated him so deeply he felt compelled to leave Holland for the country where such mysteries were made. The photographs he took of them for the NME helped make an icon of their singer Ian Curtis even before his 1980 suicide, and were themselves icons of a school of serious, black-and-white rock photography.

theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Simon Callow

graeme Thomson Saturday, 02 October 2010

Simon Callow is on the phone when I arrive at his five-star digs, booming his apparently considerable misgivings vis-a-vis appearing in some reality TV exercise in which he will be asked to tutor disadvantaged kids in the mysterious arts of Shakespeare. “They keep saying it will be great”, he rumbles, “but it will only be great if it’s great.” And Amen to that.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Michael Sheen

Jasper Rees Saturday, 11 September 2010

Either it’s a bizarre accident. Or there’s something in the water. Port Talbot, the unlovely steel town in Wales where smoke stacks belch fumes into the cloudy coastal sky, has been sending its sons to work in Hollywood for decades now. Richard Burton was the first to put his glowering blue eyes and golden larynx at the service of Tinseltown. Anthony Hopkins, for all his American passport, has never shed the native tinge from his accent. And in recent years there has been Michael Sheen (b....

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theartsdesk Q&A: Actress Julianne Moore

Jasper Rees Saturday, 24 July 2010

Julianne Moore (b. 1960) is a true rarity. It’s not just that her hair flames like no other star since Katharine Hepburn. Or that alone of her generation she seems impervious to middle age’s indignities. There’s something else. Having worked with dinosaurs in The Lost World and a cannibal in Hannibal, she is mainstream enough to be considered a genuine leading lady.

theartsdesk Q&A: Writer Willy Russell

Jasper Rees Saturday, 03 July 2010

No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins.

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Actress Carey Mulligan, Emotionally Speaking

Graham Fuller Tuesday, 13 October 2009

“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsga

Daryl Hannah

Elaine Lipworth Sunday, 27 September 2009

Daryl Hannah’s played sexy, sassy, funny and dangerous, from the naive mermaid in Splash, to the vicious one eyed assassin in director Quentin Tarantino’s ultra violent Kill Bill films. Her leading men are among the all-time greats: Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Robert Redford in Legal Eagles, Michael Douglas in Wall St and Steve Martin in Roxanne. And it would appear that real life has been just thrilling for the alluring actress. She started acting at 11 and was a...