Beyond the SubtitlesAs of June 1, 2007, this page will no longer be updated. Please visit our new site to access newly added programs. Hosted by Stephen Schaefer Stephen Schaefer joins the WPS1 lineup with three decades of writing and talking about movies behind him. He is the author of the Hollywood spoof, The Autobiography of Marla Del Marr as told to Stephen Schaefer, and is currently a film critic and entertainment writer for The Boston Herald (he also contributes regularly to his movie blog at The Boston Herald website), and a contributor to USA Today and Entertainment Weekly. |
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Edition #121: Teo Gheorghiu and Fredi M. Murer, Vitus - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 28, 2007 A Tribeca Film Festival Special. For 66-year-old Swiss filmmaking auteur Fredi M. Murer, Vitus, his charming fable-like tale of the complications that arise when raising a child genius and piano prodigy, is the biggest hit of a career that began in the 60s. Murer had written his German language, Zurich-set story years ago but it wasn't until he could find a 12-year-old piano prodigy could he make his movie. Teo Gheorghiu, now 14, was discovered at a London international musical school for gifted students. Born in Switzerland to Romanian émigrés who had arrived from Canada, Gheorghiu sounds British and seems totally the typical teenager, except for his amazing ability. |
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Edition #120: Jonny Lee Miller, The Flying Scotsman - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 21, 2007 Jonny Lee Miller, who stars as Scotland's real-life cycling upstart and 1990s speed cycling champion Graeme Obree in The Flying Scotsman, remains best known to many as Angelina Jolie's ex. But though the 34-year-old English actor remains friends with Jolie, he moved on long ago. Based in L.A., he's completed a pilot where he plays a lawyer who has visions. In this edition he discusses his heritage, a working actor's life, and staying not just on the bike but in the game. |
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Edition #119: Todd Robinson, Lonely Hearts - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 14, 2007 With the true-life crime sizzler Lonely Hearts writer-director Todd Robinson has fashioned a cinematic love letter. John Travolta stars as the filmmaker's grandfather, Long Island police detective Elmer Robinson, who, with his partner (James Gandolfini), solved the notorious serial-killing spree by the couple known as The Lonely Hearts Killers (played by Salma Hayek and Jared Leto). In the late 1940s the duo seduced, robbed, and murdered women they met through lonely hearts ads in magazines. This story was previously told in Leonard Kastle's 1970 cult film, The Honeymoon Killers. In this version Robinson and his powerhouse cast view it from the detectives' point of view. |
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Edition #118: Simon Pegg, Hot Fuzz - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 7, 2007 Simon Pegg, currently the United Kingdom's most popular film comedian, has gotten to this pinnacle by writing his hit-making vehicles, beginning with an acclaimed BBC TV series and then 2004's sleeper hit, the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead. With Hot Fuzz the blond Pegg reteams with Shaun co-writer and director Edgar Wright and cherubically rotund co-star Nick Frost to send-up British bobbies and Jerry Bruckheimer movies. Pegg, godfather to Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter Apple, talks about where he's come from and where he's going, including a new made-in-Manhattan comedy this May. (24 minutes) |
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Edition #117: Mary Jordan, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 30, 2007 One of the most influential underground artists of the '60s, Jack Smith Ð filmmaker, photographer, actor and full-time, life-long eccentric - had a willful disdain for celebrity even as he became the mentor and model for Andy Warhol who famously admitted that Smith was "the only person I would ever try to copy" - and did he ever. For her film The Destruction of Atlantis writer-director Mary Jordan spent five years assembling interviews and, most importantly, extremely rare footage including Smith's notorious, censored, sued, banned 1962 sex-drugs-nudity masterwork Flaming Creatures for her incisive look at the late East Village denizen who was, in many respects, his own worst enemy. |
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Edition #116: Olivier Dahan, La Vie en Rose - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 23, 2007 With La Vie en Rose writer-director Olivier Dahan has cracked the biopic with his thrilling retelling of the tumultuous life, loves, and tragedies of France's great singer Edith Piaf. Shown at Lincoln Center's Rendez-Vouz with French Cinema series in February and opening theatrically this June, La Vie has the mesmerizing, towering performance of Marion Cotillard who plays Piaf Ð France's "little sparrow" - from her days as a teenager singing in the gutter for pennies to her last days as a legend who lived only to sing. Dahan talks about truth, casting Cotillard alongside Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Allerget as well as finding the Moroccan actor who plays Piaf's great doomed love, boxer Marcel Cerdan. |
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Edition #115: Cillian Murphy, The Wind that Shakes the Barley - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 16, 2007 For Cillian Murphy, the luck of the Irish has a literal meaning when it comes to starring in Ken Loach's prize-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It's because, he tells us, he's from Cork in Ireland where Loach's riveting drama of Ireland's struggle for independence in the 1920s takes place. Loach works in sequence, casts realistically, and never lets his actors know what's happening to their characters until the day they film each film. Unlike any of his Hollywood counterparts, Murphy, a rising star thanks to Red Eye, Batman Begins, and Breakfast on Pluto, embraced these restrictions. |
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Edition #114: Ken Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 9, 2007 Called "The Dean of Independent Filmmakers," Ken Loach's 40-year career hits a critically acknowledged high point with The Wind That Shakes the Barley. For the social realist and politically committed filmmaker, this is his first film to be set in the past - the post WWI struggle for Irish independence, the first to win Cannes' major prize, the Palme d'Or, and the first with an international star Irish actor Cillian Murphy (from Batman Begins and Redeye, interviewed on Beyond the Subtitles #115). Loach laughs about taking heat from the right wing, why Kes stands as his modern classic and where that Barley title originates. (19 minutes) |
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Edition #113: Bong Joon-ho, The Host - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 2, 2007 South Korea's Bong Joon-ho broke local box-office records last year with his amazing monster movie The Host. Like Godzilla, Bong's mutant tadpole rises from the water - in this case Seoul's Han River - to raise havoc and eat people. At once an ecological disaster film, a family comedy and a thrilling rescue drama, The Host fulfills the promise Bong displayed in his very different real-life criminal investigation, Memories of a Murder which is available here on DVD. |
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Edition #112: Gary Tarn, Black Sun - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 26, 2007 Gary Tarn, director of Black Sun, had never made a movie but the British composer was so intrigued by Hugues de Montalembert's bestselling memoir that he contacted the Frenchman and asked him to speak of how he turned devastating tragedy into a personal victory. Montalembert was robbed and attacked in his Washington Square apartment in 1978. Paint remover was thrown into his eyes; within hours this painter was permanently blinded. Within two years however he was swimming in the Fiji sea, alone. Montalembert's journey from sightlessness to "seeing" the world as a traveler and bestselling author becomes, in Tarn's unique telling, a visual poem of images and sounds that accompany the narration. A Cinemax showcase documentary. |
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Edition #111: Michael Apted, Amazing Grace - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 19, 2007 A director known for his diversity - everything from guiding Sissy Spacek to her Oscar with Coal Miner's Daughter to the first three episodes of HBO's magnificent Rome series - Michael Apted talks about the passion that drove him to make Amazing Grace, the late 18th-century English period piece about the Parliamentary battle to abolish Britain's slave trade. Apted also discusses working with an English Who's Who of actors in his cast and the film business today for a director who wants to make movies that matter. |
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Edition #110: Ioan Gruffudd, Amazing Grace - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 12, 2007 It's an amazing story. Britain's push to stop the slave trade began over seventy years before its reverberations pushed the United States to a terrible Civil War. Ioan Gruffudd (the Welsh moniker is pronounced EE-own Griffith) speaks of playing William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace, the evangelical Quaker whose 15-year battle in Parliament amounted to a "quiet revolution." He also talks about how his Fantastic Four role made this possible. |
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Edition #109: Danièle Thompson and Christopher Thompson, Avenue Montaigne - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 5, 2007 One of France's most successful screenwriters (Queen Margot, Cousin, Cousine) Daniele Thompson grew up in the business, writing with her actor-writer-director father Gerard Oury (The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob). So it is no surprise that Thompson collaborates with her son Christopher for her third film as director, the French hit Avenue Montaigne. A charming study of successful artists - an actress, concert pianist, director (played by Sidney Pollack) - whose lives intersect on this fabled Parisian street; the Thompsons write about what they know. |
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Edition #108: Philip Groning, Into Great Silence - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 26, 2007 Who would think a nearly three-hour look at silent Carthusian monks in the French Alps could be so entrancing? German filmmaker Philip Groning may not have realized the box-office potential of his subject but he was certainly determined to make this documentary, Into Great Silence. Groning first requested access to the charterhouse monastery in the late 80s and it took only 16 years before he alone, without a crew, was allowed to spend six months living, but never interacting, with the monks. Hear Groning describe the appeal of this contemplative order, the surprising discoveries he made, and how his own life has been affected -- after two decades as a filmmaker -- with a sleeper hit in France, Germany, Italy and, hopefully, the U.S. |
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Edition #107: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 19, 2007 As the writer-director behind one of the most sensational feature film debuts in years, six-foot-nine Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck really is a German giant in every sense. His emotionally compelling psychological thriller with its transcendent finale, The Lives of Others, has already won a raft of awards in Europe and given him an international career. Brad Pitt and everyone else in Hollywood is calling. His film, a 2007 nominee for the Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film, revolves around two men in 1984's Communist East Germany. The Stasi agent Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) spies on the country's leading playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend. He finds, because of the man's ideals, because of a piece of classical music, and because he sees how horribly unjust his spy mission really is, that his life must change - his spying, his life and the lives of others will see remarkable changes. Busy von Donnersmarck, 33, spoke with Beyond the Subtitles in the back of a limo as he shuttled from one interview to another. |
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Edition #106: Sienna Miller, Factory Girl - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 12, 2007 As she enticed Daniel Craig's mobster into bed in her very first film, Layer Cake, Sienna Miller's golden sexuality and irrepressible spirit brought comparisons with the great Julie Christie. Now, in Factory Girl, Miller plays another 60s icon, Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. As the fashion-forward socialite who drew comparisons with Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, Sedgwick starred in many of Warhol's downtown movies and then their platonic love affair went sour. Banished and adrift, Sedgwick died in 1971 of an accidental overdose. She was 28. For Miller this tour-de-force as a paparazzi-plagued heroine undoubtedly echoes her own life where her on-off-on-and-finally off relationship with philanderer Jude Law has made her a tabloid headliner. Here, just back from Sundance and the previous night's premiere party, she discusses Edie, her acting ambitions and the press. |
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Edition #105: Eric Bogosian, Liev Schreiber, and Stephanie March, Talk Radio - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 5, 2007 Once upon a time Eric Bogosian was a downtown performance artist doing edgy monologues. Today, Bogosian is on TV weekly as a regular on Law & Order: Criminal Investigation. Once upon a time, Bogosian's Talk Radio was a downtown Public Theater hit that became a movie. Today, Talk Radio is coming to Broadway as a major revival starring Tony winner Liev Schreiber and Law & Order veteran Stephanie March. We talk to Bogosian, March, and Schreiber about the behind-scenes story to this. |
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Edition #104: David Von Ancken, Seraphim Falls - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 29, 2007 David Von Ancken actually got the two actors on his wish list for his feature directorial debut: Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson for his post-Civil War western, Seraphim Falls. Von Ancken discusses the pressures of filming entirely outdoors, the route necessary to working with A-list stars and what happened when his original leading man abruptly split. The native New Yorker had first scored in 2001 with the short film Bullet in the Brain adapted from a Tobias Wolff short story. That won him the attention of Oz creator Tom Fontana which led to directing assignments on TV (Cold Case, The Shield). Meanwhile, he wrote with--Abby Everett Jaques--this gritty revenge western which was filmed on location in New Mexico and at a waterfall outside Portland. |
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Edition #103: Top 10 Movies of 2006 - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 8, 2007 01 The Queen - Easily the Movie of the Year. This modestly budgeted, unexpectedly emotional study of Queen Elizabeth II in the week following the death of Princess Diana has superb, often caustic writing from Peter Morgan, insightful direction via the always reliable Stephen Frears and two outstanding performances in Helen Mirren's second Queen Elizabeth this year, following her Emmy winning HBO study of the first Elizabeth, and Michael Sheen's Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is here presented at the peak of his popularity. What begins as a comedy of manners quickly becomes one of the year's most moving considerations of personal responsibility and power politics. Morgan also scripted the ingenious "The Last King of Scotland," another study of a historical figure with Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin Dada. 02 Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima - Clint Eastwood's double whammy I'm grouping as one since they are two sides of the sad siege known as the battle of Iwo Jima. While "Flags" looks at the battle and then the Stateside troubles of three of the men that raised a flag on Mount Suribachi in a movie that questions not patriotism but how the government will subvert truth for patriotism. "Letters" as I've mentioned previously is amazing not only in its contemplation of imminent death by the Japanese soldiers but also in its sympathetic portrait of the enemy. 03 The Lives of Others - Germany's sleeper hit, this look at the dreaded East German secret spy agency the Stasi gives shivers as it looks at what life was like in the 1980s police state-Communist Dictatorship when glasnost was not even an idea. Frightening and moving and romantic, it's a one-of-a-kind movie that works on every level. An amazing debut from writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. That's a name to remember. 04 Little Miss Sunshine - Another American indie that seemingly came out of nowhere with two filmmakers making a splendid debut, the husband-and-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, in a darkly comic road movie scripted by Michael Arndt who is making his screenwriting debut as well. The first-rate ensemble includes Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear as the couple, Abigail Breslin as their tubby would be child pageant star, Alan Arkin as the heroin-snorting, porn-obsessed grandpa, Steve Carrell as Collette's suicidal gay brother and Paul Dano as the son who has stopped talking. 05 Happy Feet - Easily the most ambitious movie of the year, George Miller's CGI-animated penguin tale has classic Biblical overtones like his Mad Max series and a wonderful use of music for its environmental message. And what a cast: Hugh Jackman channeling Elvis as the daddy penguin, Nicole Kidman doing a breathy Marilyn as mommy penguin, Elijah Wood as Mumble, who doesn't sing but tap dances, and Brittany Murphy as his love interest. There is also Robin Williams in two roles. All this and a new Prince song. 06 Babel - I dreaded another exercise in depression from Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu who directs and Guillermo Arriaga who writes. After Amores Perros, which I liked, and 21 Grams, which I hated, I didn't think they needed to go back to the same well for a third time. Well, they surprised me with this multi-continent, multi-language look at individual isolation and communion. Filming in Tokyo, Mexico, southern California and Morocco, Inarritu compels our attention with a puzzle whose pieces only gradually come together. 07 Shut Up & Sing - Barbara Kopple and Cynthia Peck's look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they bashed George W. Bush turned out to be a rousing study in showbiz reinvention, heartland hypocrisy and the times we live in. While An Inconvenient Truth is undoubtedly the more important documentary, I don't think we'll see a more entertaining or emotionally engaging one than this. 08 The Departed - Not as great perhaps as Goodfellas but a mighty entertaining gangsterland saga via veteran Martin Scorsese who adapted a Hong Kong trilogy and reset it among Irish Boston cops and criminals. What a pip of a cast, each of whom could not be better: Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and Vera Farmiga. 09 Dreamgirls - Bill Condon's masterful transition of the Broadway hit to the screen makes a star of Jennifer Hudson and shows what strength there is in old-fashioned backstage backstabbing and reconciliation. 10 The Painted Veil - I was totally unprepared for this third version of Somerset Maugham's tale of infidelity and redemption for a British couple in 1920 cholera-stricken China. I was totally unprepared for how vital this fiction could be, especially since it remains one of Greta Garbo's lesser vehicles. But Edward Norton and Naomi Watts are just sensationally right and moving as the two twits who grow up and find some meaning in their lives. Director John Curran, who worked with Watts on We Don't Live Here Anymore, should definitely take a bow. (30 minutes) |
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Edition #102: Lucy Liu, Three Needles - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 4, 2006 Perfectly timed for World AIDS Day, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles is an ambitious independent film that highlights this epidemic's global impact in three segments. In Montreal, Stockard Channing is a resourceful, desperate mother whose son (Shawn Ashmore of X-Men 3) has infected his porn movie leading ladies. In Africa, Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny, and Sandra Oh are nuns in a coastal mission caring for AIDS orphans. Queens-born Lucy Liu (Charlie's Angels, TV's Ally McBeal series) stars in the Mandarin-language Chinese segment as an impoverished, expectant mother who unknowingly has HIV and is killing villagers as she labors in the illegal blood market with infected needles. Liu, a UNICEF volunteer, tells us how, with Fitzgerald's blessing, she was able to dramatically change her character and her continuing work to escape Hollywood Asian-American stereotyping. |
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Edition #101: Dominic Cooper, The History Boys - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 27, 2006 It's a nice way to launch an international career that's for sure. Dominic Cooper--dark, handsome and a delight in London and Broadway in Alan Bennett's Tony-winning The History Boys--recreates his role as Dakin, the school's studly object of lust and desire in the film version. Touted as yet another Jude Law, the versatile Cooper co-stars with another rising star, James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland), in January 07's romantic comedy Starter for Ten, produced by Tom Hanks' Playtone Productions. Cooper graduated from London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, the equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge. So, like his altar ego in History Boys, he already knows a bit about making the grade. |
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Edition #100: Laurent Bouzereau, The Art of Bond - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 20, 2006 With The Art of Bond author and film fanatic Laurent Bouzereau has gotten access to the behind the scene talents that have made the James Bond series one of the most popular, long running and profitable franchises in the history of motion pictures. Bouzereau, who produces first-rate DVD extras for his own company and has authored eight film related books, discusses the surprises, the famous fans like Steven Spielberg, and the ups and downs of rebooting the franchise for Casino Royale. (49 minutes) |
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Edition #99: Robert Wilson, Absolute Wilson - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 13, 2006 One of the most influential stage and opera directors of the last 30 years, Robert Wilson's blend of music, time, repetition, visual imagery, and psychological insights have given this hard-working Texan a formidable international reputation. But Absolute Wilson has Wilson center stage, not behind the camera, for an in-depth film biography that conveys the roots of his mysterious art and the connections he has made between his life as a stuttering small town gay kid with a conservative father to a true arts pioneer. At 65 Wilson speaks of his reputation, the cult that developed around him, his 1984 Olympics debacle, and why he's never cottoned to commonly perceived notions of autism. |
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Edition #98: Gabriel Range, Death of a President - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 6, 2006 Following an illustrious lineage of provocative fake documentarians, Gabriel Range has generated intense debate with his fiction film that looks so real: Death of a President. A British veteran of real documentaries, Range considers the aftermath of a sniper's successful attack on current President George Walker Bush at a Chicago hotel in 2007, the FBI hunt for the killer, the trial, and its aftermath. Through ingenious editing and special effects Bush "plays" himself. For Range, the issues are broader than the notion of fictionally killing off a sitting US commander in chief. |
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Edition #97: Emmanuel Bourdieu, Poison Friends - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 30, 2006 How many philosophy professors become filmmakers? In the case of France's Emmanuel Bourdieu, at least one. This son of a famous French sociologist has pretty much given up his Sorbonne day job to make movies - with a philosophical twist. His new Poison Friends, which screened at the New York Film Festival, takes a cue from Les Liaisons Dangereuses only instead of focusing on the sexual hijinks and jealousies of upper-crust 18th-century aristocrats, Bourdieu's Cannes winner (Critics' Week Grand Prize) considers literature students as they exit college for life's realities -- and deceptions. Bourdieu began as a screenwriter (Esther Kahn, Place Vendome) before helming the 2001 prize-winning short, Candidature. |
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Edition #96: Rupert Grint, Driving Lessons - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 23, 2006 Probably the youngest actor yet to be on this show, at 18 Rupert Grint is world famous for playing Harry Potter's pal Ron Weasley in the hit film versions of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series. Now, growing up and learning to drive, Grint appropriately stars in Driving Lessons, an English comedy, alongside Oscar-nominated veteran Julie Walters who plays his mum in the Potter movies. Grint, who had never acted before Chris Columbus cast him alongside Daniel Radcliffe as Harry and Emma Watson's Hermione Granger in the 2001 Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, now graduates to his first (modestly shot) sex scene with Driving Lessons. |
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Edition #95: Christian Volckman, Renaissance - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 16, 2006 Leave it to the French put the pizzazz back into bigscreen digital animation. Christian Volckman's silky, black-and-white Renaissance imagines a futuristic Paris where Gothic landmarks and the Eiffel Tower have sprouted communication wings and elevated highways. This dark sci-fi tale is so damned startlingly beautiful, it's surprising to find famous names like Daniel Craig (the next James Bond), Ian Holm, and Jonathan Pryce doing the English voices. |
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Edition #94: James McAvoy, The Last King of Scotland - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 9, 2006 Hailed as the "best British actor of his generation," James McAvoy, who costars with Forest Whitaker in the ironically titled Idi Amin drama, The Last King of Scotland, has been anointed as the Next Big Thing with four films in his immediate future. Best known in the USA as the half-human, half-faun Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, McAvoy talks about his Scots upbringing, dramatic training and how he did "battle" with the "Last King" producers and director to make his Scottish doctor "an egotistical idiot." |
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Edition #93: Tom Riley, A Few Days in September - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 2, 2006 Special On Location Report from the 2006 Venice Film Festival: A discovery! With his "all-American" moniker Tom Riley seems a natural to play Nick Nolte's laid-back American son in the new French thriller A Few Days in September. But as this 9/11 drama, set in France and Italy, soon makes clear, nothing is as it seems, especially Riley who is, in fact, English and is making his film debut co-starring with Juliette Binoche and John Turturro. |
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Edition #92: Satoshi Kon, Paprika - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 25, 2006 Special On Location Report from the 2006 Venice Film Festival: Paprika is an unusual, ambitious and highly entertaining Japanese anime feature from a master of hand-drawn animation, Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers). For the artistic director who is known for his realistic depiction of the world, Paprika represents a radical change, having a consciously cartoon-y feel as it tells of a new invention that will let scientists see and experience a person's dreams. When the device is stolen and used for ill, a heroine must come to the rescue in the form of a brainy scientist who adopts the altar ego of Paprika, a peppy Japanese teen who goes inside the dreams to solve the heist. Satoshi Kon, 41 and very reserved, speaks in Japanese. (21 minutes) |
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Edition #91: Michael Sheen, The Queen - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 18, 2006 Special On Location Report from the 2006 Venice Film Festival: Stephen Frears' The Queen, which opens the New York Film Festival, took high honors when it world premiered at the 63rd edition of the world's oldest film festival, winning Best Actress for Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II and Peter Morgan's original screenplay. Michael Sheen, though relatively unknown in the US, is the film's other standout as Prime Minister Tony Blair, the man who must convince the Queen to go public with her mourning following Princess Diana's untimely death. |
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Edition #90: Laurie Collyer, Sherrybaby - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 4, 2006 Laurie Collyer graduated in film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and now she's a Sundance Film Festival baby. Her prize-winning 2000 documentary Nuyorican Dream premiered there and Sherrybaby, her first feature film, was workshopped at the Sundance Filmmakers' Lab before being made into a tour de force for Maggie Gyllenhaal. This summer Sherrybaby became the first American film since Salt of the Earth in the early '50s to be named Best Picture at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival where Gyllenhaal was also named Best Actress playing an ex-junkie just released from jail who tries to re-establish a relationship with her pre-school aged daughter. Collyer, who was seven months pregnant when she filmed Sherrybaby in New Jersey, was inspired by a friend she knew growing up, and finds it appropriate that as the film opens Gyllenhaal is now pregnant. (24 minutes) |
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Edition #89: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, Quinceañera - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast August 21, 2006 Q: What porn producer and the brains behind America's Next Top Model made a Sundance hit? A: Wash Westmoreland, an Englishman who's helmed hard-core gay sex videos, and Richard Glatzer, a supervising producer on Tyra Banks' hit reality series, are the real thing, a gay couple who wrote and directed Quinceanera, the big winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Quinceanera refers to a Latino girl's 15th birthday celebration and for the writing-directing team this teen marker is a springboard to examine colliding cultures in contemporary L.A. Inspired in part by their own move to the Silver Lake district which rapidly transformed from working to yuppie class, Glatzer and Westmoreland will next set their sights on early 20th-century Paris to tell a story about Collette. |
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Edition #88: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast August 7, 2006 Winning a bidding war at the Sundance Film Festival is hardly a guarantee of commercial success - or even a good movie. But January's Sundance buzz won a highly-prized summer opening for this low-budget look at the American Dream from the perspective of one of the most dysfunctional - and funniest - families the cinema's seen in a very long while. Little Miss Sunshine marks the feature directing debut from the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Dayton and Faris, who have come to films (like Ridley and Tony Scott) as established figures in the commercial and music video arenas, waited literally years before deciding on Michael Arndt's original comedy. They insist the script attracted their superb ensemble: Greg Kinnear as the always-up, motivational speaker father, Toni Collette as the sane wife in her second marriage, Alan Arkin as the heroin-snorting, porn-obsessed grandpa recently booted from his assisted living home, and Steve Carell as Collette's suicidally-depressed gay sibling, dumped by his lover and no longer the world's number one Proust authority. Faris and Dayton discuss their partnership, working with Oscar-worthy actors on their first film and finding their seven-year-old star, Abigail Breslin. |
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Edition #87: Jesse Garcia, Quinceañera - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast August 14, 2006 It's rare for a young Latino actor to play a sympathetic gay. For Wyoming native Jesse Garcia, who has a breakthrough turn in the Sundance prize-winning Quinceañera as a gay Latino who becomes the third wheel with a gay power couple, the sexual frankness was never an issue. Shaving his head to look like a cholo however was. He worried -- foolishly as it turns out -- that his head wasn't good enough to be seen naked. A social activist, Garcia will be seen this summer co-starring with Kyra Sedgwick in her hit TNT series, The Closer. |
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Edition #86: Uma Thurman, My Super Ex-Girlfriend - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast July 31, 2006 Who knew Uma Thurman was self-conscious about her standing as a kick-butt action heroine? On a comedic roll with last fall's Prime, followed at Christmas by The Producers and now her third consecutive Manhattan-set comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Thurman discusses her initial reluctance to don a superhero's cape for Ivan Reitman's battle-of-the-sexes farce. In the afterglow of acquiring fans worldwide for her part in Quentin Tarantino's ultra-violent two-parter Kill Bill, Thurman also sketches the career choices she's made as a six-foot actress in an industry where many leading men just aren't. (17 minutes) |
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Edition #85: Amy Sedaris, Strangers with Candy - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast July 17, 2006 Stephen Schaefer speaks with actor and writer Amy Sedaris about her Comedy Central hit, Strangers with Candy. (22 minutes) |
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Edition #84: Kevin Bacon, Loverboy - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast July 10, 2006 Once again Kevin Bacon directs his wife, Kyra Sedgwick; this time in Loverboy. Adapted from Victoria Redel's novel, Loverboy is about the legacy of childhood trauma. Sedgwick's Emily Stoll, neglected as a child, is determined to have a child of her own as a single mother. Only her fierce overpossessiveness prompts her six-year-old son to rebel. A tour de force for Sedgwick (a series sensation in TNT's The Closer as a sassy Southern police chief working in L.A.), Loverboy is every bit a Bacon family affair. The director plays Sedgwick's father in flashbacks (with Marisa Tomei as the besotted mother), their children, Sosie and Travis, are featured, and his brother Michael did the music. This marks Bacon's second time behind the camera as director. He made an acclaimed 1999 directing debut with the TV-movie Losing Chase, also with Sedgwick. |
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Edition #83: Julia Loktev, Day Night Day Night - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 26, 2006 A NYU Film School graduate whose video work and installations have been exhibited at P.S.1, Julia Loktev's debut feature, Day Night Day Night was chosen for the 59th Cannes Film Festival's prestigious Directors Fortnight and won the Prix Regards Jeune, given to a first-time director. With documentary-style precision and a couple of wild cards Day Night Day Night is, especially for New Yorkers, an intense, intentionally unnerving work, chronicling as it does what may be the last two days - the morning, night and the next morning and night - of a female suicide bomber whose destination is Times Square. Loktev was interviewed atop the Cannes Hilton during the 2006 festival, steps from lounging sunbathers by the pool, with a view of the sun-soaked Mediterranean that might prove distracting to a less committed filmmaker. (17.5 minutes) |
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Edition #82: Rachael Leigh Cook, My First Wedding - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 19, 2006 Not all the movies or actors who come to the Cannes Film Festival have films in competition. While the world's focus is on the official entries with their red carpeted premieres, Cannes' real business is a much bigger deal that gets far less press: The buying and selling of films worldwide. That's why Jamie Foxx and Beyonce showed up to promote Dreamgirls (coming in December) and why we sat down with Rachael Leigh Cook at the Carlton Hotel, the festival's unofficial headquarters. Her romantic comedy My First Wedding opens this August with Leigh as a jittery bride. A teen star with movies like She's All That and Josie and the Pussycats, Leigh, now 25, is a poised veteran who alternates between indie films and studio fare like Warner Bros.' upcoming Nancy Drew. (15.5 minutes) |
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Edition #81: William Friedkin, Bug - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 12, 2006 William Friedkin will forever be known as the man who made pea green soup scary with 1973's The Exorcist. With the low-budget, high-intensity psychological thriller Bug (which opens in December for the Oscar sweepstakes), Friedkin shows he can still unnerve a theater full of thrillseekers. Interviewed aboard Roberto Cavali's luxury yacht at the 59th Cannes Film Festival, Friedkin discusses how he saw Tracy Letts' off-Broadway hit, pursued the rights, convinced Ashley Judd to go starkers, and resisted big names to let Michael Shannon repeat his stage role. Also on the agenda: Marriages with Jeanne Moreau and former Paramount chief Sherry Lansing. |
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Edition #80: Gael Garcia Bernal, The King - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 5, 2006 Call Gael Garcia Bernal Mexico's reigning international superstar and (as he sits for an interview for James Marsh's disturbing new drama, The King) you can see him shrink behind his rectangular black-framed glasses and sink into the chair. It's not necessarily shyness that makes the magnetic actor retreat from what might prompt chest-swelling smiles in others with his status, but rather a refusal to look at his career beyond the most personal terms. Ever since he was launched with global hits like Amores Perros, Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, Bernal has attempted to ignore the clamor and concentrate with an almost childlike simplicity - and an artist's ferocious self-protection - on the complex, often troubled characters he plays. |
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Edition #79: Chen Kaige, The Promise - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 29, 2006 Chen Kaige came to prominence alongside Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou) in the early 1990s as one of a group of Fifth Generation mainland Chinese directors. His Farewell My Concubine was the first Asian film to win the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or as well as be Oscar nominated and a Golden Globe winner. While he made one English-language film in London, Kaige continues to work in China. His newest feature The Promise, a Golden Globe nominee this year as Best Foreign Language Film, is an epic $31 million fantasy, the most expensive yet filmed in China. In fluent English, Kaige explains how he was inspired to write Promise, what it means in today's world and how he views it against Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. |
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Edition #78: Deepa Mehta, Water - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 22, 2006 Deepa Mehta grew up in the movie business; her father distributed films and ran a theater in India. But only when she was in college and began working on documentaries did Mehta discover her calling as a writer and director. Water, her latest film, completes a trilogy that began in 1996 with the controversial Fire, which presented two unhappy Hindu housewives in contemporary Bombay as lovers. When it was shown Hindu fundamentalists attacked theaters and caused riots and Mehta received death threats. Earth, in 1998, looked at Britain's 1947 liberation of India by carving the country into India and Pakistan - prompting the continuing Hindu vs. Moslem vs. Sikh violence we see today. As she began Water in 2000, again 12,000 Hindu fundamentalists rioted, burned sets and threatened her. It took Mehta another five years before she could begin anew - in neighboring Sri Lanka as she filmed in secret - to tell her story of the plight of Hindu widows cast aside as beggars or prostitutes because of 2,000-year-old Hindu religious texts. |
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Edition #77: Laurent Cantet, Heading South - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast August 7, 2006 Stephen Schaefer speaks with director Laurent Cantet, who follows up his critically acclaimed Time Out -- set during an austere wintertime in France and Switzerland -- with Heading South, set in Haiti during the late 1970s. Based on stories by Dany Laferriere, the heat comes not only from the summertime tropical setting. Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, and Louise Portal head a group of single middle-aged women who have come for sun, fun, and romance. |
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Edition #76: Terry Zwigoff, Art School Confidential - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 15, 2006 As a director, Terry Zwigoff, whose new film is the satiric Art School Confidential, has an undeniably solid scorecard. Three years ago with Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa, Zwigoff made the ultimate anti-holiday holiday movie; a new director's version is due on DVD soon. Zwigoff's 2001 Ghost World, written by underground comic artist Dan Clowes (who also wrote Art School), was a mainstay of many critics' Ten Best lists. His breakthrough 1994 documentary, Crumb, about underground comix artist Robert Crumb, remains the definitive look at an artist and his dysfunctional family. For Art School Confidential, a relaxed Zwigoff got confidential about casting unknown Max Minghella as his lead, Sophia Myles' issues about nudity and John Malkovich's teasing demands that as director Zwigoff actually direct. |
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Edition #75: Josh Hartnett - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 8, 2006 Josh Hartnett knows only too well that in Hollywood hot hunks can cool off pretty quickly. That's why this 27-year-old former teen idol has learned to take control of a career that saw the Minnesota college student skyrocket out of obscurity at 18 when he floated in front of Sofia Coppola's cameras for 1999's The Virgin Suicides. And that's why the tall, rangy actor has opted now for offbeat, risky fare like Lucky Number Slevin (a hipster-gangsta murder mystery that teams him with Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu and Sir Ben Kingsley) and next fall's eagerly awaited Brian De Palma noir, the 1940s-set The Black Dahlia (with his girlfriend Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, and Aaron Eckhart). This summer he will play a father for the first time, in Resurrecting Champ. That's a long way from teen idol land. (17 minutes) |
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Edition #74: Alfonso Cuaron and Fernando Eimbcke, Duck Season - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast May 1, 2006 A quirky black-and-white movie, set entirely in an apartment in Mexico City with basically four characters: three teenagers and the pizza delivery guy? That's the deal for Duck Season, the Spanish-language discovery by the boyish-looking writer-director Fernando Eimbcke. A movie with a rare wisdom about the complexities of growing up, this unknown's talent was impressive enough to convince Harry Potter and Y Tu Mama Tambien director Alfonso Cuaron to take Duck Season under his wing -- much like Martin Scorsese does with imports he admires -- and "present" it to American audiences. The duo, whose easy rapport is obvious, tried to speak mostly in English for the interview. Mostly, they succeeded. (27 minutes) |
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Edition #73: Asia Argento, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 24, 2006 As the trashiest, foulest mother this side of a madhouse with a scary resemblance to a down-and-out Courtney Love, Asia Argento knew exactly what she was doing when she adapted, starred in and directed the sure-to-be-a-cult feature film, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. The Italian daughter of horrormeister Dario Argento, who has been acting since childhood, got a shock once filming was finished. Heart, supposedly autobiographical short stories written by J.T. Leroy, an HIV-infected former child prostitute and sexually abused boy, was unmasked as the creation of Laura Albert, who presumably wrote the fiction, and Savannah Knoop who, with dark glasses, floppy hats and shyness, was the public "face" of Leroy. Argento discusses her "pregnancy" by Leroy -- as reported in the New York Post -- and also working with Sophia Coppola in the upcoming Marie Antoinette film plus how she takes charge on a set and protects her child actors as they created this disturbing story. |
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Edition #72: Aaron Eckhart, Thank You for Smoking - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 17, 2006 Ever since his blond, square-jawed good looks and nasty character made In the Company of Men a surprise 1997 hit (and established writer-director Neil LaBute as the Nasty-Nastiest Chronicler of the Battle of the Sexes) Aaron Eckhart has been an actor in search of an appropriate follow-up. It's taken nine years - and many bad movies - but as tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor in the politically incorrect satire Thank You For Smoking, another surprising indie hit, Eckhart once again basks in the glow of critical appreciation and popular acceptance. After good but supporting work in Erin Brockovich, LaBute's Your Friends & Neighbors (where he gained 30 pounds) and Oliver Stone's football classic, Any Given Sunday, Eckhart's attempts to be Hollywood's next Harrison Ford stumbled badly. Now he seems to be on track, co-starring this fall in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia with Josh Hartnett, Hilary Swank and Scarlett Johansson and the American remake of the German hit Mostly Martha with Catherine Zeta-Jones. This May he costars with Helena Bonham-Carter in the low-budget Conversations with Other Women. |
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Edition #71: Zooey Deschanel, Winter Passing - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 10, 2006 As a favorite of kids for her singing and dancing with Will Ferrell in Elf, Zooey Deschanel has made her way in movies both funny and serious with a distinctive, sometimes loopy sense of timing and a hipster's downtown sensibility. This spring she has been seen to advantage in two films that couldn't be more different. In Winter Passing, playwright Adam Rapp's low-budget directorial debut, she shines as an East Villager struggling to make a living as an actress who returns to her Upper Peninsula Michigan home to confront her reclusive, world-famous novelist father (Ed Harris very much in a J.D. Salinger mode-coincidentally, Deschanel was named after Salinger's Franny and Zooey). In contrast to this self-destructive daughter, Deschanel won raves and stole scenes playing Sarah Jessica Harper's mockingbird-harassed roommate in Failure to Launch. The daughter of legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Passion of the Christ), Zooey's sister Emily is also an actress. |
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Edition #70: Christian Carrion, Joyeux Noel - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 20, 2006 Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) is only the second feature film by writer-director Christian Carrion. What began as an investigation into a repressed incident in French military history has turned into an unlikely box office triumph at home and an international success. France's losing entry in this years Best Foreign Language Film category (South Africa's Tsotsi took the prize), Joyeux Noel tells what Carrion insists is all true: how the miraculous Christmas Truce of Dec. 24-25, 1914, happened in the trenches when Germans, French and Scots fighting forces threw down their arms to share champagne, a game of cards or soccer and sing Christmas hymns. |
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Edition #69: Julianne Moore and Edie Falco, Freedomland - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 13, 2006 Freedomland may not be a high point in any retrospective of the careers of Julianne Moore and Edie Falco but for both actresses, just the making of this long-aborning adaptation of Richard Price's novel is the point. The four-time Oscar-nominated Moore plays a recovering addict, a woman who fakes her child's abduction to cover her own lapses in judgment. Falco, who is single and adopted a baby daughter in the past year, returns this season to wrap up her signature role of Carmela Soprano after a nearly two-year break. In Freedomland she is nearly unrecognizable with black hair, no makeup and the demeanor of an avenging angel to Moore's flighty liar. |
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Edition #68: Gavin Hood, Tsotsi - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 6, 2006 An actor-turned-filmmaker, Gavin Hood has hit the international big time with the searing Tsotsi (pronounced Sot-see). The subtitled drama is South Africa's Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Language Film. A burly six-foot-two, Hood was not the first writer to attempt an adaptation of Athol Fugard's novel. South Africa's most famous playwright, Fugard tells of a teenaged gangster whose life is changed when he kidnaps a baby. It was set in the apartheid era of the late '50s. Hood contemporized the setting, added several characters and changed the ending - all with Fugard's positive endorsement, "A perfect understanding of my intentions in telling that story." Only his third feature, Tsotsi shows Hood's sure way with actors, especially the diminutive Presley Chweneyagae as the gangster Tsotsi. (30.5 minutes) |
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Edition #67: George Butler, Roving Mars - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 13, 2006 Though British-born, the American-educated, naturalized citizen George Butler first became prominent as an anti-Vietnam war activist and VISTA (the domestic Peace Corps) volunteer when he befriended and collaborated with John Kerry on The New Soldier, a film about Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Butler's real notoriety began when his documentary Pumping Iron launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's controversial careers as actor and eventual politician. His 2000 trio of documentaries about Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton (The Endurance) is a master's example on maximizing your research: it became an IMAX feature, a two-hour TV special and a theatrical release. During the Kerry Presidential campaign Butler's doc on his old buddy, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, was a bright spot. Now, with Roving Mars, Butler has made what is easily the best IMAX documentary ever made, starring two incredible roving robots that defied their makers and continue to work, years after they landed on the angry red planet. |
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Edition #66: Lajos Koltai, Fateless - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 27, 2006 One of the world's great cinematographers, Lajos Koltai has closely collaborated on all of the most recent films of Hungary's internationally known director Istvan Szabo including the Oscar-winning Mephisto, the epic Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes, and the Oscar-nominated Being Julia with Annette Bening. With Fateless, an adaptation of Hungary's Nobel Prize-winning writer Imre Kertesz's debut 1975 novel, Koltai finally makes his directorial debut. Fateless was Hungary's offical entry for the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film (but it was not nominated). It chronicles Kertesz' autobiographical experience as a 14-year-old in 1944 Budapest who was rounded up by the Nazis--even though the war was known to be virtually unwinnable--and sent to Auschwitz. Because Koltai insisted on filming chronologically so when the production was halted for four months until new financing could be found, Fateless got a boon as the young teenaged lead was found to have grown several inches -- giving new gravity to the film's ending. Fateless is, like its maker, a testament to artful determination and a clear vision. |
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Edition #65: Natasha Richardson, The White Countess - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 20, 2006 You don't get more "family" making a film like The White Countess if you're Natasha Richardson. The Tony-winning star of Broadway's Cabaret--whose film career started out with her playing Patty Hearst and ranges to last summer's doomed-victim-of-obsessive-love in the sexually-charged Asylum-co-stars with her mother Vanessa Redgrave and aunt Lynn Redgrave in Shanghai in what turned out to be the final Merchant Ivory picture. Naturally, Vanessa and Lynn play her relatives. Richardson is married to Ireland's internationally-known Liam Neeson with whom she has two children. For someone happily married and effortlessly stylish, she has shown a decided penchant for the angst-ridden heroine, ranging from Anna Christie and Blanche DuBois on Broadway to this aristocratic Russian emigre who supports her starving impoverished family by taxi dancing and occasional prostitution. Her character is saved by the attention of Ralph Fiennes' blind American diplomat who opens a nightclub that he names in her honor, The White Countess, and hires her as its hostess. (25 minutes) |
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Edition #64: 2005 Year End Special with Michael Musto and Jami Bernard - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 9, 2006 Reviewing 2005 in movies, host Stephen Schaefer is joined in this special edition of Beyond the Subtitles by Village Voice columnist and critic Michael Musto and Daily News film critic Jami Bernard to have a roundtable discussion -- and listings -- of the Top Ten Movies. Caustic but never cranky, the panel humorously dissects each other's favorites. (30.5 minutes) |
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Edition #63: Richard Shepard, The Matador - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 23, 2006 Few directors are as interesting as their interesting films but The Matador writer-director Richard Shepard certainly is. His story of how this darkly comic script came to the screen is a beaut: The Matador was done simply as a personal exercise and then sent to Pierce Brosnan's Irish Dream Time company solely as a writing sample so Shepard might be hired to pen the Thomas Crown Affair sequel. Instead, Brosnan was so taken with this end-of-his-rope bisexual hitman, he optioned the script and Shepard's career entered a whole new phase. It's not the first time, however, that he's tangled with success, as he explains on Beyond the Subtitles. A hotshot N.Y.U. Film School grad, he made his first movie soon out of college - and saw it flop. For the next decade he had to confront the reality that his dreams, his huge expectations, might never happen. Luckily, Shepard's kept a sense of humor - and his focus on his talent. |
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Edition #62: Pierce Brosnan, The Matador - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 30, 2006 Always known as a debonair Irishman with old-fashioned sex appeal, Pierce Brosnan does a mid-life course-changing spin with The Matador, an edgy black comedy from New York born-and-bred writer-director Richard Shepard. It was Brosnan's surprising decision to play the bisexual, end-of-his-rope hitman from Shepard's original script, which his company, Irish Dreamtime, also produced. But then, daunted by the idea of playing this worn-out, outrageously over-the-top killer and maybe even more daunted by worrying how audiences would accept him, Brosnan had a crisis of confidence and was ready to quit. All this and more in this intimate conversation with the man who is best known as Secret Agent 007 James Bond. (See also the Edition #63 interview with director Shepard.) |
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Edition #61: Stephen Frears, Mrs Henderson Presents - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 23, 2006 Long known for his sociologically relevant films, including Dangerous Liaisons, My Beautiful Laundrette and Dirty Pretty Things, director Stephen Frears' Mrs. Henderson Presents is obviously a departure: a sentimental, old-fashioned star vehicle for two pros, the Golden Globe nominees Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. Inspired by the backstory of London's famous Windmill Theater with its nude revues in the 1930s and '40s, which was due entirely to Mrs. Laura Henderson, a wealthy English widow, who bought the theater and, with Hoskins' Vivian Van Damme as her partner and stage manager, became an architect of a new kind of stage magic. Mrs. Henderson Presents has musical numbers, nude girls - and men! - and a stiff-upper-lip-in-the-Blitz storyline that makes it as entertaining as it is retrograde. Precisely because of that, Frears says in this interview, This is the most radical movie to come out of England this year. |
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Edition #60: Felicity Huffman, TransAmerica - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 6, 2006 One of America's favorite smart funny women, the Emmy-winning Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman is enjoying an unexpected triumph playing a man in the final stages of transgender surgery to become a woman. Transamerica has already brought Huffman several acting awards as well as put her in the Best Actress nominee ranks for the Academy Award. Huffman talks about the "lucky" aspects of getting to play Bree in Transamerica, a casting coup that coincided with the beginning of filming for the first season of Desperate Housewives, the series that permanently changed her career profile. |
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Edition #59: Sophie Scholl, The Final Days - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 6, 2006 Writer-director Marc Rothemund towers over Julia Jentsch (pronounced Who-lee-ah Yench), his leading lady in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, but they are obviously a perfect team. This six-foot-four filmmaker and his diminutive actress (The Edukators) have made an Oscar-nominated hit out of the inspiring story of one of WWII's best known martyrs. Sophie Scholl was a Protestant college student who joined the pacifist Hitler resistance group the White Rose. While the story of the White Rose was previously told in Michael Verhoeven's well-regarded 1983 film, Rothemund gained access to the actual Nazi archives of Scholl's trial and interrogation. This material had been stored in Moscow and was kept secret until the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany when the files were returned to Munich. Winner of three German Film awards, both Rothemund and Jentsch were also honored at last year's Berlin Film Festival. The duo was interviewed in L.A.'s historic Roosevelt Hotel lobby. |
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Edition #58: Dani Levy, Go for Zucker - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 30, 2006 Born in Switzerland during WWII after his mother had fled the Nazis in 1939, Dani Levy returned to Germany in the 1980s and began making small, independent films that were notable for their strong social content. Now comes his wacky, Jewish comedy about two brothers raised on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, one a rabbi and the other an agnostic con artist desperate to pay off a debt. The farcical Go for Zucker, which finds the warring brothers forced to become like family - anyone see a parallel here to the two Germanys? - became a major European box-office hit. That means Levy has gone from a low-profile filmmaker of modest potential to a hitmaker and a cultural phenomenon: Go for Zucker is the first comedy that addresses Jewish stereotypes to become a hit in Germany since WWII (Visit the site of his production company x-filme). (36.5 minutes) |
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Edition #57: Craig Lucas, Dying Gaul - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 26, 2005 Award-winning playwright and screenwriter (Longtime Companion, Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless) Craig Lucas makes a distinguished feature film directing bow with an adaptation of his '90s stage drama, The Dying Gaul. Lucas, who was abandoned at birth in Atlanta, GA., and adopted by a Pennsylvania couple, often covers the combustible emotional mix of love and loss in his work and Dying Gaul, which features a powerhouse trio of Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott and Peter Sarsgaard, is no exception. Writing about a world he knows all too well, Hollywood, screenwriters, compromises and deception, AIDS, gays, bisexuals, heightened by a dash of homicide, Lucas has fashioned a compelling work, marked by the intensity and humor he shows in this highly uncensored interview. The title, incidentally, refers to the ancient sculpture on view in Rome. (28 minutes) |
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Edition #56: Ballets Russes - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 14, 2005 A remarkable documentary due to its subject, two competing companies of the famous Ballets Russes, its rare, mostly never-before-seen archival footage, and the amazingly vital and often funny veterans of the troupes, some of whom have since passed away, Ballets Russes is that rare film that enchants even as it instructs. Produced, directed and written by the San Francisco-based team, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Ballets Russes begins with the end of the original Ballets Russes, the company founded in Paris in 1909 by the famed Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev that gave the world Nijinsky and ground-breaking works with music by Satie and Stravinsky in Picasso, Dali and Matisse settings. Geller and Goldfine also address what happened after Diaghilev's death in 1929. They follow artists like Leonid Massine, George Balanchine, Dame Alicia Markova and Maria Tallchief and observe their surprising legacy to dance not only in Europe but the United States, South America and Australia. Ballets Russes veteran dancer Wakefield Poole, who became a groundbreaking gay porn filmmaker in the '70s with Boys in the Sand, joins the interview with the filmmakers. |
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Edition #55: Hany Abu-Assad, Paradise Now - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 21, 2005 Using classic film technique in Paradise Now to present his three main characters--a pair of Palestinian boyhood friends who are enlisted for a suicide mission in Jerusalem and a foreign-educated Palestinian woman who knows nothing of their plans--writer-director Hany Abu-Assad has given "a face" to this fearsome affliction of today's world. This has made his film controversial and given Hany Abu-Assad international attention. He has, however, been making films for the past dozen years. A Palestinian who lived and worked in the Netherlands since he studied and worked as an airplane engineer, in the early 1990s Abu-Assad made his first film, the 1992 short, Paper House, which he wrote and directed and was broadcast on Dutch television. Since 2000 he has partnered with producer Bero Beyer. Their first production, Rana's Wedding, about a Jerusalem woman's determination to marry before 4 o'clock, was selected for the Cannes' Critics Week. That same year Abu-Assad's documentary about a taxi driver, Ford Transit, was shown at Sundance. For Rana's Wedding he won the Nestor Almendros award for courage in filmmaking at New York's Human Rights Film Festival. |
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Edition #54: Cillian Murphy, Breakfast on Pluto - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 19, 2005 In one of the year's big switcheroos, Cillian Murphy, the scary blue-eyed psycho of Batman Begins and Red Eye, dons a dress, heels, hat and makeup as a 1970s free spirit and full-time drag queen in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto (see our interview with Jordan, Edition #52) . Murphy's Michael "Kitten" Braden is a hippie-era Candide whose odyssey, from Ireland to London and back, is a search for the mother he never knew. For the 29-year-old Murphy, who prodded Jordan for four years to make the film after he first auditioned, Kitten is pretty special: "Of all the characters I've played, this is the character that I fell in love with most, ever." For his next picture, Murphy reteams with Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) for a sci-fi adventure, Sunshine. "And I'm not the bad guy in it!" he brags. |
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Edition #53: Chan-wook Park - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast January 16, 2006 No less a critic than Dave Kehr of The New York Times considers Chan-wook Park's Lady Vengeance as the film of the year. Shown in the Venice and New York film festivals, the surprising Lady Vengeance confirms the South Korean Park as one of the world's great living filmmakers. Park's ascension began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a brutal film that was followed by the equally violent Oldboy, an international success. This year, the U.S. saw the release of the horror triptych Three Extremes with offerings from three of Asia's famously edgy directors: Hong Kong's Fruit Chan (Dumplings), Japan's Takashi Miike (Box) and, easily the most disturbing of them all, Park's Cut, where a famous, handsome film director arrives home to find a stranger has tied his wife, a pianist, to the piano and will slice off her fingers one by one unless he follows orders and murders the small child he's kidnapped. |
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Edition #52: Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 12, 2005 An interview with director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with a Vampire). Jordan's new feature film Breakfast on Pluto follows the exploits of Patrick "Pussy" Braden, an endearing, witty, clever and deceptively tough young transvestite. Patrick flees Ireland for London during the politically tumultuous 1970s on a quest to find love and a place to call home. Abandoned as a baby in his small Irish hometown, Patrick is aware from a very early age that he has been born into the wrong body. He survives this harsh environment with the aid of his wit and charm, plus a sweet refusal to let anyone and anything change his being. His odyssey to self-discovery is a hilarious, memorable and emotional series of misadventures as Patrick, or Kitten as he prefers to be called, journeys in search of love and happiness. |
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Edition #51: Uma Thurman, Prime - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 31, 2005 Uma Thurman began her spectacular career posing nude as Botticelli's Venus for Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchausen movie. She was 15. In the 20 years since then, this Boston-born daughter of college professors has established herself as a world-class beauty and first-rate actress. From Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill to the Merchant Ivory Golden Bowl and Richard Linklater's Tape, Thurman has consistently exhibited a range that belies her extraordinary facade. Check a personal favorite, her devastatingly accurate portrayal of sad but valiant Debby Miller, a New Jersey girl facing a lot of Mr. Wrongs, in Mira Nair's Hysterical Blindness, an HBO movie for which she won a Golden Globe. Now in Prime she does glam comedy with a soulful side, spars with Meryl Streep and talks about the end of the road with co-star and husband Ethan Hawke. |
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Edition #50: Holly Hunter, Nine Lives - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 7, 2005 One of America's most honored and respected actresses, Holly Hunter once joked that she wished she could have a career like Isabelle Huppert. But Hunter easily ranks with France's hardest-working actress when it comes to first-rate work in offbeat projects. With her career reinvigorated by a disturbing independent drama (Thirteen), the Oscar-winning star (The Piano) is currently onscreen among a starry ensemble that includes Glenn Close and Robin Wright Penn in the female-dominated Nine Lives from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia. What makes this Chekovian feature unusual is that each of the film's nine vignettes is shot in one continuous take. As the actress explains, she completed this complicated character in just one day. Finally Hunter, divorced and pregnant with twins, is adamant about protecting her privacy no matter how innocuous the question. |
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Edition #49: Norman Jewison - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 24, 2005 Director Norman Jewison's body of work ranges from the Golden Age of live TV (Playhouse 90 and Judy Garland's landmark specials) to a roster of film classics that show a range from an innate social consciousness to fluffy comedies: Doris Day in The Thrill of It All, Steve McQueen's Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair, Rod Steiger's Oscar-winning cop opposite Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night, two religious-themed '70s epics, Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as A Soldier's Story, Agnes of God, Moonstruck and Denzel Washington as boxer Hurricane Carter in The Hurricane. Genial, well-liked and funny, Jewison sat down to reminisce, as he does in his just-published memoir, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press). |
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Edition #48: Rian Johnson, Brick - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast April 3, 2006 Rian Johnson, who spent six years raising the money to write and direct Brick, his debut feature, is the kind of gritty, determined success story that makes Hollywood seem slightly unreal. Interviewed at last fall's Venice Film Festival, the filmmaker is amazingly modest for having made what The New Yorker's David Denby calls, The most entertaining picture to be released so far this year. Johnson's take on classic film noir puts his shamus (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a California high school. He shot Brick in just 20 days and edited the film on his home computer. Its Sundance premiere won it a distribution deal -- and now a not-so-low budget career awaits... |
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Edition #47: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast March 27, 2006 Most kids who grow up on TV in a sitcom, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt did with Third Rock from the Sun, fade into a perpetual rerun afterlife, never to transition to adult careers. That's not going to happen with Gordon-Levitt who stars in the California-set murder mystery, Brick. Interviewed at the Excelsior Hotel during the Venice Film Festival, this well-mannered actor scored his breakthrough in 2004 at this festival with Mysterious Skin playing a sexually self-destructive gay teen. Suddenly, there was a Gordon-Levitt on the big screen no one had imagined: a sexy, lustily sexual predator. In Brick he is Brendan Frye, a high school senior intent on tracking down the killer of his ex-girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin from TV's Lost). Since Mysterious Skin, he tells us, People come up to me and look me in the eye and speak genuinely about a movie they care about. I know how important movies - movies, TV, books - are. So to be a part of that dialogue where people find what they need to find in the world through important works of art, well, it does seem now that after 18 years of working I'm finally doing what I want to do. |
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Edition #46: Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 10, 2005 Viggo Mortensen, who stars in David Cronenberg's well-received A History of Violence, has carved out a career as the thinking person's sex symbol. Although born in Manhattan in 1958 he grew up, the son of a Danish father and an American mother, mostly in South America. He made his film debut with a small role in Peter Weir's 1985 Witness and received his first real critical notice as the drug addict brother in Sean Penn's 1991 directorial debut, The Indian Runner. Whether as Gwyneth Paltrow's deceitful artist lover (in A Perfect Murder) or Diane Lane's extramarital fling (in A Walk on the Moon), Mortensen's sensitivity combined with his finely chiseled features has made for memorable movie moments. His last-minute casting as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy cemented his global standing. Now, after the Cronenberg, he will star in a Spanish-language period epic. |
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Edition #45: Elijah Wood - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 17, 2005 Acclaimed as the finest child actor of his generation, Elijah Wood, now 24, survived the 80s, the fame and movies like Rob Reiner's awful North pretty much intact. A veteran of showbiz, not rehab, Wood discusses how he consciously sought to counter the global phenomenon of starring as Frodo, the Ring bearer, in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with offbeat, challenging roles. Currently playing a faux version of author Jonathan Safran Foer in Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Foer's bestseller, Everything is Illuminated, Wood can also currently be seen in the complete opposite of this rueful comedy: the violent, sociopolitical English-made actioner, Green Street Hooligans. |
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Edition #44: Mark A. Vieira, Greta Garbo, A Cinematic Legacy - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 19, 2005 As part of the September 2005 nationwide celebration that observes the centenary of Greta Garbo's birth, Mark A. Vieira's handsome Abrams book, Greta Garbo, A Cinematic Legacy, is much more than simply a photographic record. The appeal of the enduring, mysterious Swedish star who made "I want to be alone" an essential element of her legacy and legend is chronicled by Vieira with a meticulously researched account of the making of each of her 24 American films. Vieira began the book in the hope that by seeing how Garbo (1905-1990) worked, he might better understand the way she created pathos, tragedy and romance in a way what can only be described as magical. The answer may have eluded Vieira but Garbo's life and work now has another worthy chapter to an ever-expanding list of biographies. Garbo will continue to enchant audiences for another century. |
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Edition #43: John and Janet Pierson, Reel Paradise - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 3, 2005 Called the guru of the independent film movement, John Pierson became a player on the indie scene when he and his wife Janet - whom he met when they both worked at Film Forum, Manhattan's shrine to independent cinema - invested their life savings, $10,000, to help Spike Lee complete his debut feature, She's Gotta Have It. But after years of helping to discover and launch independent filmmakers, the Piersons left the scene for Fiji where, along with their two children, they lived for a year and operated a free cinema that was supported in part by friends like Kevin Smith. A video crew headed by director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) documented their experiences including a collision with the local Catholic priests, a burglary and John's dengue fever and turned it into Reel Paradise. |
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Edition #42: Marton Csokas, Asylum/The Great Raid/Aeon Flux - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast September 26, 2005 A New Zealander with a Hungarian surname, Marton Csokas is making his mark starring in a variety of roles on an international scale. Csokas (pronounced Cho-KARSH) began acting at home, working in the Xena syndicated TV series and then winning raves as the handsome drifter who has an affair with an unhappy wife in New Zealand filmmaker Christine Jeffs' Rain. Since that launch, Csokas has been seen as the evil French knight in Ridley Scott's Crusades drama, Kingdom of Heaven, as the selfish POW who jeopardizes his fellow soldiers with his escape attempts in John Dahl's The Great Raid and most effectively as the tormented, mentally ill wife killer, a psychiatric patient who falls in love with his doctor's wife - Natasha Richardson - in David Mackenzie's Asylum. This fall Csokas co-stars with Charlize Theron in Karyn Kusama's elaborate sci-fi adventure, Aeon Flux, as another villain. |
