In Contention

Category: Interviews

  • INTERVIEW: ‘Into the Abyss’ director Werner Herzog

    Telluride Film Festival

    Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog first attended the Telluride Film Festival at its second annual way back in 1975. He brought with him “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” which would not be released in the US for another two years, and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.” He was also set to receive a tribute, still at the beginnings of his career. He has come back almost every year since, and almost every year with a new film to show audiences.

    The film he brought to the 38th annual fest is perhaps his most accomplished documentary in some time: “Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life.” It was, as outlined from the mountains, my favorite film of the festival and a testament to Herzog’s powers of observation and reverence for everyday people and their plights.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Descendants’ actress Shailene Woodley

    Telluride Film Festival

    If anything or anyone is a break-out, on-the-rise element of this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it’s 19-year-old “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley. She stars in the film opposite George Clooney as a teenager with the appropriate angst but gives a performance that has captured the attention of many in attendance here. Naturally, she’s frequently found herself stopped on the street by admirers and well-wishers praising her work and the festival’s most talked-about film.

    When you talk to Woodley, you get the sense of a young person crossing that key boundary in life between adolescence and adulthood. Call it “finding yourself” if you like, but the experience of making the film in Hawaii with the likes of filmmaker Alexander Payne and actor George Clooney had a major impact on her.

    “The four months in Hawaii really shifted who I am as a human being,” she says at the New Sheridan Hotel restaurant in town. “It was such a spiritual thing for me. It has a different energy than anywhere else. The pace there, the way you move and talk, it’s so different. I left there being authentically happy with myself. It was both being on set and hiking and being outdoors and meeting people. I feel so fortunate to have got a callback for this movie, let alone have done it. It’s mind-blowing.”

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Albert Nobbs’ producer, screenwriter and actress Glenn Close

    Telluride Film Festival

    Actress Glenn Close has known the title character of “Albert Nobbs” for nearly 30 years. Ever since she was first asked to audition for the play “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs” in 1982, which brought her to George Moore’s short story about a woman living as a male waiter in male-dominated 19th Century Ireland. That’s a long time for any performer to live with a role, and it takes a special breed of stick-to-it-tiveness to see the journey she’s seen for the character all the way to the big screen.

    “It’s always been a little surreal,” the actress says at the Chuck Jones Theater after introducing the film to its second crowd here at Telluride. “Every morning when I would go to the set, I couldn’t believe that, something that’s been in my head so long, people were actually working on this movie.”

    The role originally sparked Close’s interest because of the inherent challenges it presented. Servants in that era, she notes, were not supposed to look people in the eye. They were meant to be invisible. And here is a character, invisible in her own right by virtue of her secret, also in a profession where she must be under the radar. It wasn’t an opportunity to be emotionally expressive for much of the narrative, but Close says that was an attraction to the part.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Contagion’ screenwriter Scott Z. Burns

    There’s a scene in 2009’s “The Informant!,” Steven Soderbergh’s tongue-in-cheek look at corporate malfeasance written by Scott Z. Burns, when Matt Damon’s pathological liar Mark Whitacre rants internally about the spread of a virus, spurred by a sneeze from co-star Scott Bakula.

    By the time the film was complete, Soderbergh had built a solid working relationship with Burns and the two were eager to dive into something new. The director asked what Burns would like to do next, and the writer brought up Damon’s rant scene and mentioned that he thought it would be cool to do an outbreak movie.

    “That was literally the extent of the pitch,” Burns says over breakfast poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “And he said, ‘That’s great. Go do that.’”

    And so the germ (no pun intended) of “Contagion” was born. The film — a dialed down, ultra-realistic look at societal breakdown in the wake of an unpredictable virus strain mutation catching hold and wreaking havoc across the globe — quickly spun away from those simplistic beginnings and became, for Burns and Soderbergh, an opportunity to metaphorically dissect the spread of misinformation in a time of crisis.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘A Better Life’ director Chris Weitz

    Filmmaker Chris Weitz has taken a ride on a rather inconsistent career path since making a splash (along with brother Paul) with 1999’s “American Pie.” He followed that raunchy comedy with the critically mauled Chris Rock starrer “Down to Earth” before bouncing back with the beloved intimate romantic comedy “About a Boy.” He then fled to the arms of big budget filmmaking with 2007’s “The Golden Compass” and last year’s “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” This year brings an effort hearkening back to the character-driven work of his early career, “A Better Life,” which premieres at the Los Angeles Film Festival next week.

    The film could be read as a riff on Vittorio De Sica’s “The Bicycle Thieves,” though transplanted in Los Angeles with a heavy dose of Mexican-American culture. But it’s unfair to hold it up to that agreed-upon masterpiece of neorealist cinema. Yes, the films share some plot details — “A Better Life” tells the story of an undocumented Mexican landscaper who purchases a truck and equipment to start his own business, hoping to make a better future for him and his street-smart son, only to have it stolen — but it is a successful piece of slice-of-life dramatic filmmaking that was a breath of fresh air for Weitz after his blockbuster detour.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Double Hour’ director Giuseppe Capotondi

    With this year’s Cannes circus just a week away, now is as good a time as any to point out the strangely hobbled journey taken by so many festival films to our cinema screens. For all the concentrated media attention and occasional trophies lavished upon arthouse titles at Cannes, Sundance and the like, the festival itself is little more than a starting block in a long race for distribution — and “The Double Hour,” a wickedly splintered Italian thriller currently on limited release in the US, has been running it for a while.

    The debut feature of Giuseppe Capotondi, a director hitherto acclaimed for his commercial and music-video work, “The Double Hour” was one of the under-the-radar hits of the 2009 Venice Film Festival — the only title amid a lackluster slate of homegrown features to capture critics’ imaginations, it surprised many by landing the Best Actress award for striking Russian lead Ksenia Rappoport. Despite this success, it’s taken 18 months to reach American arthouses; in the UK, it still hovers in distribution limbo.

    The wait should have been shorter, not least because Capotondi’s film is anything but obscure in sensibility: a sharp, sexy hybrid genre piece generously bookmarked with cinematic references, it touches on heist thriller, psychological horror and romantic drama, all with equal panache.

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  • Interviews with the winners

    You can check out the 37 interviews we conducted with Oscar nominees this season here, but I thought I’d offer up one more list here at the end of things, the 12 interviews we conducted with those who were lucky enough to walk out of the Kodak with an Oscar in hand last night.  The are:

    Tom Hooper (Best Director, “The King’s Speech”)
    Colin Firth     (Best Actor, “The King’s Speech”)
    Robert Stromberg (Best Art Direction, “Alice in Wonderland”)
    Wally Pfister (Best Cinematography, “Inception”)
    Kirk Baxter (Best Film Editing, “The Social Network”)
    Angus Wall (Best Film Editing, “The Social Network”)
    Rick Baker (Best Makeup, “The Wolfman”)
    Trent Reznor (Best Original Score, “The Social Network”)
    Atticus Ross (Best Original Score, “The Social Network”)
    Randy Newman (Best Original Song, “Toy Story 3”)
    Chris Corbould (Best Visual Effects, “Inception”)
    Charles Ferguson (Best Documentary, “Inside Job”)

  • Interviews with the nominees

    I thought I’d bring this around one more time this weekend.  We talked to 37 of this year’s Oscar nominees this season.  A few more have been added since we first posted this last month:

    Ethan Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, “True Grit”)
    Joel Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, “True Grit”)
    Tom Hooper (Best Director, “The King’s Speech”)
    Jeff Bridges (Best Actor, “True Grit”)
    Colin Firth (Best Actor, “The King’s Speech”)
    James Franco (Best Actor, “127 Hours”)
    Michelle Williams (Best Actress, “Blue Valentine”)
    Geoffrey Rush (Best Supporting Actor, “The King’s Speech”)
    Jeremy Renner (Best Supporting Actor, “The Town”)
    Amy Adams (Best Supporting Actress, “The Fighter”)

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  • INTERVIEW: Talking westerns and only westerns with ‘True Grit’ actor Jeff Bridges

    Last year was the best opportunity to do the career retrospective thing with Jeff Bridges, right at the starting gun of an Oscar-winning steamroll through the film awards season. This time around, the actor is nominated for his sixth Academy Award, for his work in the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and it seemed a conversation about westerns might be novel.

    So a little over a year after that hefty interview and roughly 10 months after he paid homage to his parents on the stage of the Kodak Theatre, we got together at the same restaurant to talk up the genre that sparks some of his earliest memories of the film business.

    “I was always thrilled when my dad would be doing a western,” he says, “because I knew he’d be coming through that door after work, all dressed up like a cowboy. And I’d get to put all his stuff on and I’d be smelling the horses on his clothes, all of that stuff.”

    Indeed, the actor remembers going to set and cracking up at the sight of actors sitting atop ladders and acting as if they were on horses for the camera, the veil of filmmaking totally lifted. But he also recalls an instance when his older brother and fellow actor, Beau, disrupted a take during the filming of “High Noon,” which starred their father, Lloyd Bridges.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: ‘Toy Story 3’ composer and songwriter Randy Newman

    When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, composer Alan Menken almost tied Randy Newman for third-most nominations among living artists.  But Newman inched away, nabbing his own nomination for the song “We Belong Together” (listen) from “Toy Story 3” and thereby maintaining a firm grip on the designation.

    It was Newman’s 20th nomination to date, a healthy run by anyone’s measure.  But it was extra special given his recent history with Pixar Animation Studios, and the voice he has given to the “Toy Story” franchise since its 1995 beginnings.

    He was able to put a bow on the series in his own special way, and should he win the Oscar next weekend, it’ll be his second trophy.  His first also came for a Pixar entry, “Monsters, Inc.,” which netted him the gold in this very same category.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Fighter’ actress Amy Adams

    Amy Adams.  You know the girl.  Sweet, bright-eyed, purveyor of naive, fresh-faced screen creations.  You certainly wouldn’t peg her as an expected fit for Charlene Fleming, boxer Micky Ward’s tough-as-nails bartender girlfriend in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter,” but as it turns out, she delivers perhaps her most accomplished performance to date in that role, in that film.

    “Sometimes people’s confidence in you is the most input that you need,” Adams says over lunch in December, in the middle of awards season but just before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tapped her as a nominee for Best Supporting Actress in the film.

    “A lot of times when I’ve approached projects — I haven’t ended up playing these characters — but with characters that are different than how people see me, I feel a real sense of them challenging me.  ‘Can you do this?’  There’s no real way to answer that question except to do it.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The makeup of ‘Barney’s Version,’ ‘The Way Back’ and ‘The Wolfman’

    As we have noted a number of times, the makeup branch is one of the Academy’s most independently minded. While many people have criticized them in the past for bestowing the moniker “Oscar nominee” on many mediocre (or worse) films, the makeup artists clearly seem to take the work into account regardless of perceived film “quality.”

    This year, they proved their originality once again by nominating three films which did not manage nominations in any other category. The graceful and realistic aging in “Barney’s Version,” the ultra-realistic results of a battle with nature in “The Way Back” and the transformation of Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins (not to mention a plethora of blood) in “The Wolfman” made up the slate.

    I recently spoke with makeup department heads from all three of the nominated films – “Barney’s Version”’s Adrien Morot, “The Way Back”’s Edouard Henriques (nominated with Greg Funk and Yolanda Touessing), and “The Wolfman”’s Rick Baker (nominated with Dave Elsey).

    For Baker, a 12-time nominee and six-time winner, the journey on “The Wolfman” began very early. “I did something I don’t normally do,” he says. “When I heard Universal was going to do a remake of ‘The Wolfman,’ I kind of begged. I said, ‘I really have to do this movie.’ It didn’t make for the best negotiating position but I was one of the first hired on the film.”  The chance to update his own take on the genre 30 years earlier in “An American Werewolf in London” was clearly too difficult to pass up.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: ‘Salt’ sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell and ‘Unstoppable’ supervising sound editor Mark P. Stoeckinger

    When Oscar voters spoke up last Tuesday, two intriguing craft category nominations stuck out, both coming from the same branch: Mark P. Stoeckinger’s third bid to date for the sound editing of “Unstoppable” and Greg P. Russell’s fourteenth — yes, fourteenth — for the sound mixing of “Salt.”

    The Academy’s sound branch consists of 405 members, enough to be the fourth-largest voting block of the organization.  Including Best Picture, they have three opportunities on a nominations ballot to make their voices heard, as opposed to the usual two for other disciplines.

    It seemed a good idea to sit down with these two lone representatives of their films, given that they were ushered into the race by the same community (and hey, they share a middle initial).  Both are also coming off of nominations last year.

    After one of the most intricate jobs of his career on “Star Trek” in 2009, Stoeckinger was fortunate to work with both Ridley Scott (“Robin Hood”) and his brother Tony (“Unstoppable”) for the first time this year.  “They’re similar in that sound is an important tool for their film-going experience, for sure,” he says.  “And they’re amazingly creative guys.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The wizardry of ‘TRON Legacy’

    It’s somewhat intriguing to note how far the visual effects side of filmmaking has come in the last three decades.  When “TRON” was released in 1982, it’s FX wizardry was disqualified from Academy Award consideration.  The reason: the use of computer technology to achieve its look and environment was deemed, believe it or not, “cheating.”

    Today, hard drives and databases are considered vital tools in the filmmaker’s arsenal, and not simply in the blockbuster realm, either.  Not only that, but digital production is very much the future of the medium.  And the craftsmen and women at Digital Domain are a big part of that ever-changing equation.

    A few weeks back I trekked out to the company’s Venice, CA production facility to talk about the work put into that film’s sequel, “TRON Legacy,” with CEO Cliff Plumer, commercial division head Ed Ulbrich, visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and animation head Steve Preeg.  That new vision was very much at the forefront of discussion.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Way Back’ actor Jim Sturgess

    When Jim Sturgess’s agents set up a meeting with director Peter Weir, who was casting for his new film “The Way Back,” the actor’s brain was in a different place.  He was in the middle of filming Philip Ridley’s “Heartless” and portraying a troubled soul character.  He had filmed until six in the morning and hadn’t slept for what he says felt like weeks.  Naturally, he was unprepared.

    But he couldn’t leave it at that.  He couldn’t let this be his missed opportunity to work with Peter Weir, his chances blown due to the realities of being a working actor.  So he steeled himself, wrote the veteran helmer a letter and, in between shooting scenes from Ridley’s film, recorded himself acting out scenes from “The Way Back.”

    Something obviously clicked, and it’s a good thing he went to all the trouble, because Sturgess is pretty sure he wouldn’t have been offered the part otherwise.

    “He called me in and said that he really liked what I’d done on the tape and would I play Janusz in his film,” Sturgess recalls over a croque-monsieur at Palihouse in West Hollywood.  “I just couldn’t stop thanking him.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The construction of ‘The Social Network’

    One of the immediately striking things about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The Social Network” is its assemblage, the manner in which he chose to tell the story with cascading elements of the narrative. And when you bring on a meticulous craftsman like David Fincher to direct a film already detailed in its larval stage, you can bet that the attention to each moving part and how it fits into the whole will be amplified.

    So it is that the construction of “The Social Network” — and the contributions from its below-the-line crew toward those ends — could be the most defining aspect of a film dominating the precursor awards circuit to date.  I recently spoke to film editors Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, sound mixers Ren Klyce and Michael Semanick and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to discuss those various moving parts, as well as their collaboration with a filmmaker who shows great respect for their art forms.

    Wall and Baxter don’t go back all that far with Fincher, believe it or not. They’re first pass on one of his films was 2007’s “Zodiac,” which was largely Wall’s film but Baxter was brought on to help out a bit. “Once I was in there I was difficult to move,” Baxter says.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Another Year’ actress Lesley Manville

    Failing to turn on your voice recorder is any journalist’s fear when conducting a great interview.  So after spending close to a half-hour with “Another Year” star Lesley Manville some weeks back, and having felt like it was one of the more enlightening and engrossing conversations I’ve had with an actor all year, you can imagine my chagrin when I noticed, indeed, the damn recorder was off the whole time.

    In my defense, the minutes-old shock of a publicist and friend’s death that morning had not yet worn off.  But I nevertheless internally chastised myself for the rookie mistake and headed down to the Four Seasons hotel bar, looking like quite the lush, I imagine, in the pre-afternoon hours, and set about remembering and writing down as many quotes as I could.

    And there was so much I wanted to recall.  Manville’s love of director Mike Leigh’s unique process of improvisation, her development in his troupe over the last two decades, her journey of empathy for her character, you name it.  Because in “Another Year,” she offers one of the year’s finest portrayals, and one the precursor circuit has thus far shockingly failed to properly recognize.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The design of ‘Alice in Wonderland’

    Tim Burton and Johnny Depp may well be poised to go down in film history as one of the famous actor-director duets.  Seven collaborations to date have delighted audiences for the past 20 years. They have also earned 11 Oscar nominations and four wins.  Their latest, “Alice in Wonderland,” exemplifies how far along they’ve come in the eyes of the public with its worldwide gross of more than $1 billion.

    At the same time, the film was immensely reliant — as all Burton films are — on its design elements.  Many of the artists who created those designs are now in the thick of this season’s Oscar race, and I recently had the opportunity to speak to three of them: production designer Robert Stromberg, visual Effects supervisor Ken Ralston and makeup artist Valli O’Reilly.

    Each certainly commented on being aware of the immense importance that his or her work would have to the project. That having been said, Ralston notes, “I had done it for so long that I wasn’t panicking. I thought it could be a blast. It is daunting when you read the script, because you realize the whole thing, in one way or another, is going to be visual effects. It’s a huge deal but with so many talented folks on board, you just have to trust them.”

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