In Contention

Category: Interviews

  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘Bright Star’

    Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish in Bright StarIt’s not every year that my biggest cheer on Oscar nomination morning comes in the technical categories, but such was the case last week when Janet Patterson’s name showed up in the Best Costume Design lineup.

    Patterson’s inclusion (following a senseless Guild snub) is gratifying not merely as recognition for her tangibly textured, richly story-serving threads in “Bright Star,” but as a representation of one of 2009’s most immaculately integrated – and under-rewarded – technical ensembles.

    Jane Campion’s John Keats biopic derives its fresh, fragile romanticism as much from writing and performance as the combined efforts of Patterson, cinematographer Greig Fraser and composer Mark Bradshaw. Their work has prompted countless critics’ punning on Keats’s “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” chestnut, but sometimes the most obvious praise is the most appropriate.

    For Fraser and Bradshaw, “Bright Star” represents their first experience on a Campion feature, having previously collaborated with the New Zealander on a pair of short films, “The Water Diary” and “The Lady Bug.” For Patterson, however, the film extends a collaboration with the filmmaker that dates back to Campion’s 1993 breakthrough “The Piano,” and has yielded previous Oscar nominations for both that film and 1996’s “The Portrait of a Lady.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Jacques Audiard

    Jacques Audiard at the Cannes premiere of A ProphetAs pundits continue to posit art-versus-genre arguments around the 10 titles vying for Best Picture, the finest film to be nominated in any category at this year’s Academy Awards is to be found a little further down the list – and it’s one that would bridge the discussion rather nicely.

    Nominated last week for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and bedecked with numerous accolades besides, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,” is a brazen, brilliant marriage of pulp, prestige and politics.

    A bloody prison drama that phrases intricate social analysis in the language of gangster cinema at its most hardboiled, it’s Audiard’s beefiest excursion yet into the noir territory that he visited in his last two films, lean thrillers “Read My Lips” and “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.”

    Critics have been quick to make comparisons to assorted American genre masters since the film’s Cannes premiere nine months ago , with “GoodFellas” and even “The Godfather” routinely surfacing in discussions around the film. But while Audiard acknowledges his kinship to U.S. cinema – this is a man, after all, whose last feature was a remake of a 1978 James Toback thriller – he takes such talk with a healthy pinch of salt.

    “People keep saying, oh, it’s like Scorsese, or it’s like Coppola, and of course that’s very flattering,” the native Parisian says over the phone, via the translation (and occasional embellishment) of his co-writer Thomas Bidegain.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Red Riding: 1974’ director Julian Jarrold

    Julian JarroldNearly a year after they first landed on UK television screens, the three feature-length films that comprise the “Red Riding” trilogy have reached American audiences – and in the theatrical environment where they belong, no less.

    IFC is marketing and distributing “Red Riding,” an adaptation of David Peace’s decade-spanning quartet of crime novels inspired by the real-life Yorkshire Ripper murders, as a single theatrical event. The truth, however, is that these are three very distinct, even self-standing, works from three dissimilar directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker.

    Where “Man on Wire” director Marsh’s documentary chops are evident in a film that takes on the nuts and bolts of police corruption, and Tucker (“Hilary and Jackie”) takes a straightforward character-based approach to tie up loose ends, Jarrold’s film, the opener, is the most boldly stylized of the three.

    Following young journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) as he probes the disappearance of a young girl and becomes ill-advisedly involved with her grieving mother (Rebecca Hall), the film consciously fuses the languages of film noir and social realism to striking effect.

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  • INTERVIEW: Quentin Tarantino

    Quentin Tarantino at the Los Angeles premiere of Inglourious BasterdsNearing the end of January on an awards season run for a film that bowed at Cannes is an odd time to be crossing paths with a filmmaker to talk about the goods, but that’s where I found myself with Quentin Tarantino this year.

    Making the publicity rounds in the wake of the DVD and Blu-ray release of his film “Inglourious Basterds” and, of course, keeping exposure high with Oscar nominations eminent, Tarantino is nevertheless as indefatigable as ever.  Last week he popped up on one of Conan O’Brien’s final episodes of “The Tonight Show,” which the filmmaker says was an honor.  “I’ve always had a fun time doing his show,” he says.

    He was coming off a weekend that yielded Critics’ Choice Movie Awards recognition for his film’s ensemble, supporting actor Christoph Waltz and a screenplay honor for the writer/director himself at the time, but in the week since, Waltz and the ensemble were again rewarded, this time by the Screen Actors Guild.

    The film awards circuit is a much different beast than it was 15 years ago when Tarantino exploded onto the scene with “Pulp Fiction,” even if his long time confidant Harvey Weinstein is still at the campaign’s helm.  So it’s a little difficult not to press him for how those differences strike him, now that he’s back in the season’s good graces.

    Interestingly enough, he’s reminded of a similarity first.

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  • INTERVIEW: Anthony Mackie

    Anthony MackieSome performances are so selflessly and expertly integrated into a film’s ensemble that awards voters tend to take them for granted, looking instead to more assertive scene-stealers from sometimes starrier names.

    Nobody better demonstrates that this season than Anthony Mackie, rising star of stage and screen and the secret weapon of awards heavyweight “The Hurt Locker.”

    While Jeremy Renner has deservingly caught the eye of multiple precursor bodies, many of them have curiously failed to notice that much of Renner’s performance exists in a tensely riveting pas de deux with Mackie, whose sternly pragmatic Sgt. Sanborn is not only the yin to the impetuous yang of Renner’s SSgt. James, but a striking study in its own right of internalized male insecurity.

    Together with Brian Geraghty, as a weaker soldier dependent on Sanborn’s stabilizing influence, the three actors, alongside a smart selection of cameo players, perform some of the year’s most delicately attuned ensemble playing. And even if Mackie hasn’t received quite the level of individual attention he deserves, he accepts praise for the film (and a well-earned SAG ensemble nomination) as evidence of a job well done.

    “Look, when you work on a film like this, any idea of ego goes out the window,” the 30 year-old New Orleans native tells me over the phone from New York. “This is a story about brotherhood, so it’s dependent on the synergy of a great ensemble. As actors, we were just concerned with taking care of each other, making sure we had each other’s back. It’s not about being pretty, you know?”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: Sound mixer Greg P. Russell

    Greg P. RussellWhen you’re coming off of one of the most elaborate and intensive sound mixing gigs in movie history, let alone of your own career, how do you top it with a sequel?

    That’s the challenge sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell faced when he and his team set about weaving in the various sonic elements of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” His seventh collaboration with director Michael Bay, the film proved to be the most aurally ambitious film Russell says he has mixed to date.

    “Back in the day when a large movie had three or four set pieces within a film, we have two set pieces within a reel now,” Russell says in his spacious media room in his home, a number of Academy screeners stuffed into a basket on the coffee coffee table in front of him.  “And this was an eight-reel film, so you can just see the size factor alone.”

    Let alone the new variations in robot sounds and articulation, the amount of artillery and weaponry featured on the screen this time around dwarfed anything Russell had ever seen before.  According to one of the film’s technical advisers, Bay filmed every aircraft that exists in the military save for one.

    “Everything from helicopters to hover boats to aircraft carriers to submarines, the artillery alone just from a human level was enormous,” Russell says.  “Then you add on top of that massive robots and their weaponry and all their intricacies, it’s a very complicated movie to bring to life.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Michael Fassbender

    Michael FassbenderMichael Fassbender is unemployed.

    This, at least, is what he tells me at the outset of our conversation, and he sounds entirely relaxed about it. As well he sound be: after 18 months of back-to-back film projects, a catholic range spanning the gruelling physical demands of “Hunger,” the arch larking-about of “Inglourious Basterds,” the kitchen-sink grit of “Fish Tank” and the blockbuster polish of the upcoming “Jonah Hex,” the 32 year-old Irish-German thesp has more than earned himself some downtime.

    Not that Fassbender is entirely sure how to enjoy it. “I don’t really know what to do with myself, to be honest,” he tells me over the phone from Los Angeles, where his next vehicle – “A Single Shot,” a “very quirky” thriller in which he has the lead role – is currently in pre-production.

    “When you’re trying to make it as an actor, all you want to be is busy. After nearly two years of bouncing from one shoot to another, even a little time off is kind of disconcerting. I don’t even really have a home at the moment to spend it in.”

    He laughs, but there is a trace of weariness in his voice, its lolloping West Irish rhythm occasionally colored with harder enunciation that only faintly betrays his half-German parentage. His professional restlessness, however, has made him one of the past year’s most visible young actors.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘A Serious Man’

    Aaron Wolff in A Serious ManThe Coen brothers’ latest film “A Serious Man” opens with a quote from French Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (better known as Rashi):  “Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you.”

    It’s obviously quite applicable to the themes of fatalism and inevitability strewn throughout the film.  But that word, “simple,” also comes up over and over again when discussing below-the-line elements with the directors’ collaborators.

    Jess Gonchor is the newest craftsman to join the Coens’ party, having first jumped on board with 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.” When the sibling directors got a look at “Capote” two years earlier, they were quite taken by the stark, understated look of the production design and wanted to meet with Gonchor about potentially designing their Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

    “I guess I just talked about it intelligently enough,” Gonchor remembers, with an air of humility.  “We were on the same page never having met each other.  And also, I come from making movies that are low budget if any budget.  You can do anything with money.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘The Hurt Locker’

    Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerWhen it comes to extravagant Hollywood blockbusters, we’ve become accustomed to the phrase “the money is up on the screen” – delighting in the filmmakers’ own delight in the tools and tricks at their disposal.

    “The Hurt Locker,” however, invites a very different kind of wonder. An independent with a budget of a mere $11 million, it is nonetheless more kinetic action film than many a title coming in at 10 times the price, immersing the audience in the sights, sounds and sensations of Iraq combat. The money is on the screen, sure, but the screen belies the money.

    For this, the already multi-laurelled Kathryn Bigelow shares the credit with a highly resourceful and imaginative team of craftsmen, variously bringing mainstream studio-picture experience and indie-sector knowhow (or both) to the table.

    I talked to cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, sound designer Paul Ottosson and special effects supervisor Richard Stutsman about their contributions to this humble spectacular.

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus’

    Jude Law in The Imaginarium of Doctor ParnassusTerry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is the latest entry in the director’s long history of wondrous, fantastical worlds. The film might be best remembered as containing Heath Ledger’s final performance. But Gilliam’s rich imagination is also seen in the work of below-the-line craftspeople who brought his world alive with splendid visuals and a rich color palette.

    Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, production designer Anastasia Masaro, original designer David Warren, costume designer Monique Prud’Homme and composers Jeff and Mychael Danna all had pivotal roles in bringing the work to life on screen. I recently spoke to each them about their contributions to the film.

    Without any doubt, the experience of working with Gilliam had an immense impact on the crew. Jeff Danna describes the helmer as “a dream come true for a composer – he understands, reads and plays music, which very few directors do, but he doesn’t try to take over our job.” Danna says Gilliam is clear about want he wants and will “make noises…all sorts of crazy stuff to describe what he’s looking for musically.”

    Masaro agrees that Gilliam will stop at nothing to get at his vision. “He likes to work in chaos,” she says.  “You can see his ideas from film to film to film and what you have to do is carry your aesthetic but work within his framework.”

    Warren describes Gilliam as being very appreciate of the crafts crew on his films.  “He knows what film will look like in his head,” Warren says.  “He’s obviously very visual. He follows certain details into obscene proportions, such as ‘What’s that spoon going to be made out of?’”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘Up in the Air’

    Up in the AirBecause some of director Jason Reitman’s work tends to be stylistically traditional and classic, he says there might be the assumption that he’s not a visual filmmaker. But seven years as a commercial director tends to make you as visual as the next guy. And make no mistake.  He is absolutely specific when it comes to below-the-line elements on his features, and “Up in the Air” was no exception.

    Early on the director established a department-wide below-the-line arc on the film that everyone on the crew worked toward. The idea was that at the beginning of the film, the audience is meant to see the world through the main character, Ryan Bingham’s eyes and by the end of the movie, they would see what the world looks like for real.

    For instance, “at the beginning of the movie, camerawork is wide angle, lots of moving shots,” Reitman says. “Color-wise, everything is muted tones. Production design-wise, everything is giant open atriums, walls of glass, everything is gleaming and spotless. Extras-wise, people are attractive, trim, their clothes are tailored, they’re told to walk in straight lines and not bump into each other. There’s a functionality to everything.”

    By the end of the film, things are being shot with longer lenses, hand-held, with warmer tones.  The costumes are sloppier, extras are sloppier, production design is more lived-in. Even the idea of the film’s general setting — airport terminals — reflects this in some way.

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  • INTERVIEW: Jane Campion

    Jane CampionJane Campion’s laugh comes as a rather lovely surprise: full, throaty and often directed at herself, it betrays a personality more robust, mischievous even, than one might surmise from her fragile, often solemn films. It’s a disconnect she cheerfully acknowledges, and credits in part to her collaborators.

    “As a filmmaker, it helps me to be around young people,” she says, referring to the unusually youthful cast and crew of “Bright Star,” her exquisite meditation on first love, nature and poetry – via the star-crossed affair of John Keats and his teenaged lover Fanny Brawne.

    “People in their twenties can be quite moody and quiet, and not in a bad way – they know how to be alone with their thoughts. People my age tend to blab on a bit without thinking, like I’m doing now.”

    She laughs again. If that’s a frequent occurrence over the course of our phone conversation, it could be because Campion is as relaxed and content as she has ever been in her career. Her first feature since 2003’s harshly-received erotic thriller “In the Cut,” “Bright Star” has placed the New Zealander back in critics’ good graces, even if it looks increasingly unlikely to emulate the Oscar success of her 1993 breakthrough “The Piano.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Scott Cooper and Robert Duvall

    (from left) Robert Duvall and Scott Cooper at the Los Angeles premiere of Crazy HeartIn a quiet corner of the Four Seasons restaurant late one afternoon, Robert Duvall gives “Crazy Heart” writer/director Scott Cooper a little grief for singing his praises too loudly.

    “Oh, quit playing humble,” he says. “Come on, man!”

    Earlier, when Cooper tries to pass credit for his film’s financing on to Duvall, the six-time Oscar nominee offers more of the same.

    “I’m not so sure I believe that,” Duvall says. “Maybe.”

    It’s the standard back-and-forth between mentor and, for lack of a better term, protégé. Reverence and respect from the younger southern gentleman, sincere commendation and dismissed flattery from the older industry vet.

    But that’s their dynamic. Duvall, who never had children of his own, certainly seems to think of Cooper as a son. The director was married on Duvall’s 360-acre property in the plains of Virginia. The two met as actors on  “Gods and Generals,” worked together again on television’s “Broken Trail” and, most recently, Aaron Schneider’s “Get Low.” And the truth is, “Crazy Heart” would have had a bumpy road to the screen if it was just Cooper out there banging on doors.

    To his credit, Cooper knows it.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Terribly Happy’ director Henrik Ruben Genz

    Henrik Ruben GenzTwo striking films in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race probe the theme of moral drift, both individual and communal, bred in a rural European community – the very opposite of what Hillary Clinton meant by “It takes a village.”

    One of them, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” you’ve probably heard of. The other you’ll hopefully hear much more about in the months to come: Danish entry “Terribly Happy” is a terrific thriller from Oscar-nominated writer-director Henrik Ruben Genz that has taken its homeland by storm and is ripe for a U.S. remake.

    A wickedly comic flipside to Haneke’s solemn social critique, Genz’s film trades in twisty suspense and coal-black humor as it follows the misadventures of Robert (Jakob Cedergren), a mysteriously disgraced Copenhagen cop reassigned to an unwelcoming one-horse town with its own share of nasty secrets.

    As Robert gets drawn into the void by a hesitant relationship with abused housewife Ingerlise (Lene Maria Christensen), the film has drawn comparisons to the Coen Brothers of “Blood Simple” and even the David Lynch of “Twin Peaks” in its cool unveiling of the macabre within the mundane.

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  • INTERVIEW: Saoirse Ronan

    Saoirse RonanStill fully engaging at the end of a long day of interviews, actress Saoirse Ronan seems as eager to dive into the particulars of Peter Jackson’s latest film, “The Lovely Bones,” as she might have been before being asked every question in the book. Her energy is undeniable, as well as her poise, a young actress grounded but hungry for challenging work.

    Her performance in Jackson’s film is a considerable notch in the 15-year-old’s early career. As Susie Salmon, the ill-fated youth at the center of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel, Ronan had to go places she certainly never has as a performer. But the working environment and relationship her director developed on the set deserves a great deal of the credit, she says.

    “I don’t think I could really label what I’ve learned from Pete,” Ronan says. “I was with him for about nine months and being with someone like that every day that gets the best performance out of you that I can give makes you work hard as an actor and therefore makes you grow as an actor, and hopefully makes you a better actor. So I suppose you could say he’s made me a better actor.”

    Ronan was particularly fond of Jackson’s upbeat, energetic approach to the work. And it is fair to say it was, as far as she is concerned, a non-traditional environment, but at the start of her career, she embraces the idea of eschewing the typical, just as Jackson has.

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  • INTERVIEW: Abbie Cornish

    Abbie CornishTo call Abbie Cornish’s astute, china-delicate performance in “Bright Star” a “breakthrough,” as so many critics this year have done, is to do something of a disservice to her similarly remarkable work in a pair of underseen Australian titles.

    No informed viewer should be taken off-guard by the tart questioning and quiet sensuality she brings to the role of Fanny Brawne, the teenaged lover of famed Romantic poet John Keats, in Jane Campion’s period biopic.

    What’s surprising is that, after winning a bevy of Australian awards at the age of 22 for Cate Shortland’s 2004 coming-of-age drama “Somersault,” and following it up with a searing turn opposite the late Heath Ledger in Neil Armfield’s harrowing junkie romance “Candy,” it’s taken three years for another starring role to come her way.

    In that time, Cornish dipped her toe into international waters with supporting roles in ill-fated vehicles like “A Good Year,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” and “Stop-Loss” – though if those lean years were troubling to the Next Big Thing monitors, they weren’t to Cornish, who had “Bright Star” on her radar all along.

    “I was sent the script for the film about two-and-a-half years ago, and I fell in love then and there,” the 27 year-old actress tells me over the phone, gentle Australian twang very much intact. She’s in Los Angeles to pick up her younger sister, before returning to the Vancouver set of Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Bryce Dallas Howard

    Bryce Dallas HowardBryce Dallas Howard dominated M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” with a beautiful performance of intensity, ferocity, gentle sensitivity and vulnerability.  She made the audience fall almost instantly in love with her character, the blind, though all-seeing Ivy.

    With her flowing red locks, warm smile, and imposing gaze, the young actress appears to be to be an old soul in the body of a youth.  And she has fast made a name for herself as a major rising talent.

    Talking to an actress on the cusp of greatness is always interesting because in many ways the attitude she brings to interviews will define her to the media.  With Howard, there is no trace of ego at all.  There is, however, an excited young mother eager to discuss her role as a mom, the trials and tribulations of being a mom for the first year, etc.  And, of course, there is the work.

    Howard’s latest role comes in Jodi Markell’s “The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond,” from a lost screenplay written by legendary playwright Tennessee Williams. The film is the story of Fisher, a spirited young southern lady, vivacious, exciting to be around, fun loving, and perhaps in love with a young man she convinces to be her escort during the party season of the roaring 1920s.

    When an incident occurs that could forever alter their relationship, she is forced to make a decision that will decide which way her life goes, and the manner of woman she will become.

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  • INTERVIEW: Ben Foster

    Ben FosterBen Foster became an actor I knew I would watch for a long time during an episode of the now canceled TV drama “Boston Public.”

    Foster was cast as a high school student dying of cancer and had an extraordinary monologue about wanting a Christmas with no crying, with no tears; he wanted his last Christmas to be about joy, so he kept the fact that the cancer was no longer in remission from his family.  He had what Pauline Kael called, “Bite you on the nose talent.”

    In the last few years Foster has slowly been building up a strong filmography that I believe has placed him as one of the most gifted and exciting young actors in American cinema.  Even a role on “My Name is Earl” was electrifying.  With major roles in “Alpha Dog,” “3:10 to Yuma” and now “The Messenger,” it’s a quick cross-section of a talent on the rise.

    Many times interviewing young actors on the way up is an exercise in tedium because they can be so full of themselves there is barely room in the same room for us both.  Not so with Foster, a thoroughly engaging, intelligent, brutally honest young man with his head firmly attached.

    Films dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been popular with audiences or critics over the last few years. “In the Valley of Elah” was superb because of the haunting performance from Tommy Lee Jones, and this year Kathryn Bigelow gave us “The Hurt Locker,” which is easily among the best films of the year and could see her become the first women to win an Academy Award for Best Director.  So I waded right in: Why this film?

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