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WPS1 Art Radio is the Internet station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, featuring an MP3 stream of music, talk, and historical recordings and a free on-demand archive of over 1200 programs.
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 #202: Frances Catherine Deneuve, A Christmas Tale listen |
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First broadcast November 17, 2008
One of the most unusual documentaries of this or any year,
Waltz is animated, a graphic novel, that begins with a
pack of howling, running dogs, a nightmare, that leads Folman to
investigate his actions as part of the Israeli Army in the first
Lebanon War in 1982. In reality Folman had major psychological
upheaval during the four years it took to make Waltz
which is Israel's entry in this year's Best Foreign
Language slot for the Academy Award. Folman won the Israeli
Academy Award for writing In Treatment, which HBO has
adapted in an English language version.
Edition #199: Gerardo Naranjo & Maria Deschamps, I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a Explotar) listen |
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First broadcast November 3, 2008
A fan of French New Wave, Italian neorealism and American pop
culture, Gerardo Naranjo tells how his Romeo and Juliet tale of two
rebellious Mexican teenagers differs in so many ways from its
Hollywood counterparts especially in its sexual frankness. As
leading lady Maria Deschamps explains, with her mother's
permission she was happy at 16 to make her film debut with a nude
sex scene. For this his third feature Naranjo was buoyed by Gael
Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as producers.
Sally Hawkins only SEEMS to be like her breakthrough character
Poppy in Mike Leigh's newest comedy-drama. As the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained English actress makes clear in
this interview, Poppy was created with her specifically in mind but
only after two earlier Leigh outings: "All or Nothing" in
2002 and the 2005 Oscar-nominated "Vera Drake" She is
also a Woody Allen alumna, after "Cassandra's Dream".
A master of social drama with the most intensive and unique way of
developing his award-winning films - "Vera Drake,"
"Topsy-Turvy," "Secrets & Lies" -
Great Britain's Mike Leigh discusses his method, the pressure, the casting and ultimately
the filming of his latest "Happy-Go-Lucky" which stars Sally
Hawkins (in her third Leigh film) and considers that rarest of human
conditions: Happiness. The film is on screens nationwide this fall.
Steve McQueen is the British Turner Prize-winning artist who makes
an award-winning feature film debut directing the disturbing
"Hunger," a chronicle of Bobby Sands' grisly death as
the hunger striking IRA prisoner. If McQueen doesn't show much
humor about his Hollywood namesake, he is open and candid about the
hurdles he faced, the goals he wanted and what he realized with this
movie which won the Camera D'Or for best first film when it
world premiered at Cannes last May. Coincidentally "Hunger"
which opens in late fall around the country, has propelled newcomer
Michael Fassbender who plays Sands into stardom.
Born, raised and inspired by his life in New York City, Antonio
Campos' feature writing and directing debut
"Afterschool" was selected for a prestigious Cannes world
premiere last May as well as a NYFF berth. Campos influences may
range from Gus Van Sant, Robert Bresson and Frederick Wiseman but
clearly this is a filmmaker whose style is uniquely his own. After
all, he's been making award-winning short films since he was
13. "Afterschool" chronicles the aftermath of a tragedy at
an elite Connecticut coed boarding school that developed partly by
his own experiences at Manhattan's private, elite Dwight School
after 9/11.
Tall, handsome, clean-cut Patrick Wilson stars with Kerry
Washington as a couple terrorized by Samuel L. Jackson's cop
next door in Neil LaBute's thriller "Lakeview
Terrace." Wilson, a Carnegie Mellon drama major with extensive
Broadway credits including the current revival of Arthur
Miller's "All My Sons," only seems born to play the
romantic leading man. From "Angels in America,"
"Phantom of the Opera," the kinky "Hard Candy" and
"Little Children" right up to "Lakeview" and the
upcoming "Watchmen," he tells us how he looks for the
cracks in guys with a perfect façade.
As an Oscar-winning actor ("Mystic River"), acclaimed director ("Dead
Man Walking") and political activist ("Embedded"), Tim Robbins is
often slotted with his longtime love Susan Sarandon as one
of Hollywood's most visible -- and vocal --liberals. But just
because his new film "The Lucky Ones" is about three soldiers
home from duty in Iraq, Robbins hopes audiences won't assume it
is a political screed. Robbins emphasizes the entertainment and
humanity, not politics, of his work. But during this sitdown at the
Waldorf-Astoria there's no mistaking who he will be working for this
election season when he exits by saying: "Go Obama."
There is a thread that runs through writer-director Alan Ball's work
and that is sex. With his Academy Award for writing American
Beauty, his creation of Six Feet Under, the revered HBO
funeral home series, and now his new movie Towelhead about a
13-year-old Lebanese-American girl's sexual and emotional awakening and
his new HBO series, True Blood about vampires as a newly
"out" minority, Ball never flinches from showing the passion, the
hard bodies, the missteps that make sex so fulfilling and so messy.
Interviewed at Manhattan's Regency Hotel Ball, who is openly gay,
considers sex, his own life, why the racist title of his movie was dropped
and then stayed, and why his two newest projects, both adaptations, were
irresistible.
The Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda star has found another
edgy role in fictional Samir Horn, a devout Muslim caught up in very
gray espionage and counter-terrorism areas of the war on terror.
Traitor marks screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff's directorial
debut and costars Guy Pearce as the FBI agent trailing Horn.
Cheadle, laconic and laid back, was interviewed at Manhattan's W
Union Square Hotel and talks about his choice of roles, mocks the
notion that he would ever open up about the emotional costs of
acting in an interview and disputes the idea that his political work
on behalf of the genocide in Darfur gives him a political activist
actor label.
France's blonde bombshell, known here in the U.S.
for her collaborations with director Francois Ozon in
"Swimming Pool" and "Water Drops on Burning
Rock," is happily pregnant with her second child
-- due in December -- as she discusses working with
Claude Chabrol in "A Girl Cut in Two." Another
of Chabrol's murderous studies of the French
bourgeoisie. "Girl" has Sagnier as a woman
desired by two very different men. Candid and bright,
Sagnier jokes about Ozon's "jealousy" when
she worked for Chabrol, the New Wave veteran whom Ozon
reveres, and the similarities and contrasts between
these modern masters.
Is Skylar Astin set for a major career? The featured player in
Broadway's Tony-winning Best Musical "Spring Awakening"
scored with his first film, "Hamlet 2." Astin is winning as
the shining star of a pathetically horrible Tuscson, AZ, high school
drama department run by Steve Coogan. He shines because the class
roster is two. That changes when due to downsizing, it's
suddenly filled with Hispanic transfer students and Astin's Rand
Posin not only has to face competition but his own sexuality.
British comedian Steve Coogan in an extraordinarily candid sitdown
talks about what should be his American breakthrough as the
talentless actor-turned-high school drama teacher-playwright in
Andrew Fleming's gloriously goofy "Hamlet 2." Fleming,
who did the droll send-up of Watergate's "Deep Throat with
Dick," lets Coogan steamroll with a tour de force that
overwhelms stalwart costars Catherine Keener, David Arquette and, as
herself (!), Elisabeth Shue.
Christopher Trumbo, the son of the Oscar-winning, prominently
blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, fashions a
documentary from a stage piece he'd written. Expanded with
marvelous clips from seminal films ("Spartacus," "Lonely
Are the Brave," "The Sandpiper," "The Fixer,"
"Papillon") archival newsreels of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and family photos and interviews, this
son's valentine to his father makes Dalton Trumbo (1905-'76)
a man well worth knowing.
Edition #189: Julian Jarrold and Hayley Atwell, Brideshead Revisited listen |
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First broadcast August 4, 2008
Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," rightly regarded as one of the great Catholic novels of the 20th century,
has been adapted with the cooperation of Waugh's estate into Julian Jarrold's two-hour feature film. Jarrold discusses
condensing a novel that was first seen as an 11-part Granada TV series in 1981. We also talk with Hayley Atwell who
made her debut in Woody Allen's London-set "Cassandra's Dream." In "Brideshead" Atwell is the daughter of Lady Marchmain (Emma
Thompson) and sister of doomed, gay, teddy-bear hugging Sebastian (Ben Whishaw of "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer")
whose platonic, homoerotic affair with Sebastian's friend Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) precipitates all sorts of trouble.
Just as Marion Cotillard and Julie Christie blossomed last year into
Oscar certainties, Melissa Leo's towering performance as a
never-give-up single mother in Courtney Hunt's "Frozen
River" won't be forgotten or ignored come awards season.
Native New Yorker Leo, a veteran of the "Homicide" series
who won accolades as Benicio Del Toro's explosive mate in
"Nine Grams," talks about the ups and downs of an artist's
life. As Ray Eddy, a woman with two sons whose gambling addict
Indian husband has run off with their savings and the family car,
Leo's been blessed with what may be her defining career role. Shot
in upstate New York where a river and a Native American reservation
divides America and Canada, "Frozen River" puts Ray in
harm's and the jailer's way when she agrees to
help smuggle illegals across the border.
It's one of the wonders of the 20th century, French wirewalker Philippe Petit's 45-minute
stroll between the World Trade Center's twin towers on Aug. 7, 1974. Now, courtesy of
James Marsh's amazing documentary "Man on Wire," Petit's startling daredevil stunt, or
"poetry" as he calls it, can be reconsidered in all its fascinating detail.
As "Man on Wire" makes clear, via home movies, vintage news clips and recreations,
Petit needed a gang and subterfuge to gain access and carry nearly a ton of equipment
to the top of what was then the world's tallest buildings. The courage was all his own.
How does one of America's bestselling thrillers become a French-made box-office hit?
In the case of Harlan Coben's "Tell No One," it was simple. The option by English
director Michael Apted lapsed and French actor-director Guillaume Canet got lucky.
As Canet tells us, he fought to keep Francois Cluzet, an '80s leading man and a ringer for
the young Dustin Hoffman, and easily transposed the action from Manhattan and Washington,
D.C., to contemporary Paris. Coben naturally is thrilled and hopes Canet will
do the English-language remake.
As the director of the Pixar-Disney $160 million robotic
futuristic fantasy WALL-E Andrew Stanton hardly
qualifies as either an independent or a foreign filmmaker.
But Stanton's innovative work would make any indie
filmmaker proud for following "Finding Nemo,"
WALL-E intentionally nods to the silent comedy of
Chaplin and Keaton along with Kubrick and "Hello, Dolly!"
references. The ninth employee hired at Pixar nearly 20
years ago, the Cal Arts grad is now a veep as well as a
personal filmmaker. Stanton talks about how he did it, what
Chaplin and Keaton films he loves most and how Pixar's
personal visions remain alive and well under the Disney
umbrella.
With two features Oscar-nominated as Best Foreign Language Film, Russian director Sergei Bodrov knows he's doing something right. But as he explains, after his first nod for Fire on the Mountains, a 1997 adaptation of a Tolstoy story about war in Chechnya, he knew when Mongol was nominated this year, "It wasn't going to change my life." What changed Bodrov's life was the death of his movie star son Sergei Jr., nearly six years ago in an avalanche. The younger Bodrov, on location as director and star, along with 39 others was lost in a matter of seconds. Maybe Mongol, an epic biography of Genghis Khan, is Bodrov's search for human resilience in the face of great misfortune.
61st CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: Independent filmmaker Kelly
Reichardt scored a major success at Cannes with the world
premiere of her latest feature, "Wendy and Lucy" which stars
Michelle Williams. The disarmingly unpretentious and low-key
Reichardt speaks of living in Queens, teaching, her mentor
Todd Haynes and why her bare bones way of filmmaking attracted
for the first time a name like Williams who proved she was
very much in the Heath Ledger mindset of the movie's the thing
as she hauled electrical equipment after takes, didn't bathe
for two weeks, slept in her costume. All to play Wendy who
with her dog Lucy (who is actually Reichardt's dog, last seen
in her "Old Joy") is on the road from Indiana to Alaska when
an unexpected stop in a small Northwest town shows what can
happen to those who are down and out in Bush's America.
61st CANNES FILM FESTIVAL SPECIAL: From the world’s biggest and most important film festival we speak with Washington, D.C. residents and Boston natives, the brotherly cousins Dan Boylan and Guy Taylor who screened their self-financed 24-minute short A Free Radical in the market’s Short Film Corner. Filmed in Cape Cod, Washington, D.C., and Argentina, Radical also finds them in front of the camera as inept terrorists. Their hope? “We’re using this as an audition to raise $100,000 to make a straight-to-DVD film,” said Boylan.
Classically trained as an actress in New York and London, Katherine
Waterston has her first lead in David Ross's sensual, sexual,
slightly controversial The Babysitters.
As Shirley, a suburban high schooler who quickly escalates from an affair with the
father (John Leguizamo) of one of her charges, to running a
prostitution ring at school known by the code The Babysitters,
Waterston might shock her own father, Law & Order and
Public Theater veteran Sam Waterston. The Babysitters bombed
at the box-office but heralds a promising career.
The Oscar-winning documentarian who has developed a style entirely his own now examines the "mystery" behind the notorious photos taken by American soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Standard Operating Procedure explores the inequities of the criminal charges – no one above the level of sergeant has been tried and jailed; their "crimes" were taking pictures, not prisoner abuse or murder. Morris, who saved a man from Texas' Death Row with The Thin Blue Line and rehabilitated Robert McNamara's reputation with his more recent The Fog of War, explains his method, his approach and what surprised him.
Too many years after his critically acclaimed debut, Swoon, a black-and-white consideration of the notorious Loeb-Leopold murder case that became a landmark of New Queer Cinema, director Tom Kalin reemerges with Savage Grace starring Julianne Moore. Another sad, disturbing story of violence among the privileged, along with social climbing, drug abuse, infidelity and incest, Savage Grace costars Eddie Redmayne, Stephen Dillane and Hugh Dancy (Beyond the Subtitles #141: Hugh Dancy, The Jane Austen Book Club). Kalin explains why he wanted to tell Barbara Baekeland's story, what he's been doing since 1992 and Swoon, and why he expects laughs during his film's most shocking moments.
There are many reasons why Tarsem, India's innovative director of The Cell, took four years to make his fantastic, fabulous – in all senses – The Fall, that rare family film that appeals to stoners and is being presented by two other visionaries, Spike Jonze and David Fincher. Lee Pace was an unknown when he filmed his starring role opposite six year old Romanian discovery Katinka Untaru. Now the Julliard School-trained Pace stars in Pushing Daisies and is Hollywood's Next Big Thing.
Edition #174: Nick Broomfield and Elliot Ruiz, Battle for Haditha listen |
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First broadcast May 5, 2008
The veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield, whose pugnacious in-your-face reporting in Kurt & Courtney and Biggie and Tupac, made him a celebrity of sorts, has created the best movie yet on the Iraq War: Battle for Haditha. Shot in Jordan, using ex-Marines and eyewitness reports from Iraqis and Marines, he recreates the awful Nov. '05 atrocity that saw 24 unarmed Iraqis slaughtered by Marines following a roadside bombing that killed one of their colleagues and seriously injured two others. Broomfield's star, Elliot Ruiz, an Iraq veteran whose war wounds are incorporated into the film, talks about his experiences there and in the very real landscape of Hollywood.
The only surprise about Tina Fey's appearance as the star of Baby Mama opposite her onetime Saturday Night Live cohort Amy Poehler is that she did not write and direct this comedy about the dilemmas of surrogate pregnancy. That was Michael McCullers. But Fey downplays her breakthrough into the majors with a Peabody Award for her critically beloved 30 Rock TV series and a chick flick comedy.
Acclaimed as the greatest Othello in living memory last winter in the London stage production that costarred Ewan McGregor as Iago, Chiwetel Ejiofor now strides into Hollywood leading man territory with David Mamet's pulpy Redbelt. Ejiofor, a Briton of Nigerian descent, keeps busy. He stole the laughs and surprised everyone in Kinky Boots as a glam transvestite, played Denzel Washington's sibling in American Gangster and was Mark Wahlberg's nemesis in Four Brothers.
