Interviews
Interviews
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“It’s Better to Be Somebody Negative than Nobody”: Breaking Bad‘s Vince Gilligan on Walter White
The following interview of Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of The TV Showrunner’s Roadmap: 21 Navigational Tips for Screenwriters to Create and Sustain a Hit TV Series by Neil Landau. It is exclusively excerpted here thanks to Focal Press. Neil Landau: The toughest thing for most screenwriters is creating original characters. People come up with ideas for what might be an interesting show, but creating complex characters is extremely difficult to do. What’s your process when you’re starting with the pilot? Walt [Bryan Cranston] is all about the choices that he makes in life. How do […]
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Chris Tucker in Toronto: “I Don’t Do a Lot of Stuff, Because I’ve Seen Everything”
Earlier this week, Chris Tucker braved the latest polar vortex to be honored at Black History Month in Toronto, presented by the Canadian Film Centre and Poor Boy’s Game director Clément Virgo. The 41-year-old co-star (with Jackie Chan) of the hugely popular Rush Hour franchise was revered as an elder statesman by the mostly young, black audience of filmmakers, actors and fans. Though known as a rapid-fire comic on screen, Tucker this evening was alternately funny (raising the roof by dancing like Michael Jackson) and thoughtful as he reflected on his his two decades in a Hollywood where non-whites have […]
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“I Wanted to Live in That World From Morning to Evening”: Fyodor Bondarchuk on Stalingrad
Fyodor Bondarchuk’s father Sergei made the 1967 War And Peace, a famously profligate Soviet production with thousands of army soldiers as extras and the biggest budget in the USSR’s history. His son came up through music videos and advertisements, making a splash with 2005’s Afghan War drama The 9th Company. The lavish Stalingrad was shot in two parts, as much as possible in 3D; if nothing else, it’ll go down in a sub-section of film history as Russia’s first IMAX film. It’s a tremendously odd film, the kind of overtly nationalistic take on the WWII battle you’d expect from an […]
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Loving Vincent: Animation in Oil
In an age when everything has already been done, it’s a rare feat to devise a way to make a film that no one has ever tried before. But that’s what the team behind Loving Vincent did when they decided to make their film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life by animating with actual oil paintings, each one executed by a professional artist on a full-sized canvas — in the style of Van Gogh himself, of course. As anyone who remembers the Van Gogh sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams knows, the effect of the master’s artwork on […]
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Con Game: David Grovic on The Bag Man
In David Grovic’s The Bag Man, John Cusack plays the title character, a courier for an underworld figure named Dragna (a genuinely terrific Robert De Niro), who’s charged with fetching a mysterious bag and staying put in a fleabag motel until the silver-suited and -haired criminal overlord can come to pick up the goods. It’s the type of movie that has no business being good and not just because the constituent parts feel, well, worn out — the motel that the movie takes place in bears an eerily resemblance to the one Cusack spent most of the forgettable 2003 thriller […]
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Dead Dad: Keeping Ultra-Low-Budget Productions Alive
Dead Dad, out now on VOD through FilmBuff, is quite a debut, a mature and entertaining first feature from writer/director Ken J. Adachi. Financed mainly via Kickstarter and from the director’s own pocket, it was shot in 15 days on a Canon 5D Mark II and with a crew of eight or nine people, all volunteers. The film tells the story of three estranged siblings who meet at their father’s funeral and are forced to spend time together while working out what to do with his remains. Filmmaker spoke with Adachi and his co-writer Kyle Arrington (who also plays Russell […]
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The Shape of Something Squashed Director Tom Noonan on How Jennifer Lawrence Inspired His New Play
Playwright, actor, director and screenwriter Tom Noonan is currently debuting his latest play, The Shape of Something Squashed, at New York’s Paradise Factory, but it might never have been written if it weren’t for an invitation to meet with Jennifer Lawrence one day. I’ll let Noonan tell the story below, but suffice to say that the bent emotions and darkly comic introspection that near-encounter produced are the stuff Noonan has memorably mined in his writing and directing work for years. Noonan’s film roles include singular turns in Heat, Mystery Train, Manhunter, Synecdoche, New York, and House of the Devil, to […]
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The Luxury of Unhappiness: Director Hany Abu-Assad Talks Omar
In 2002, Palestine made its first Best Foreign Language Film submission to the Academy Awards. Despite accepting films from Puerto Rico, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not accept their submission. But by the next year, the policy had changed: the Palestinian Ministry of Culture’s submission, Divine Intervention by Elia Suleiman, was accepted. Three years later, Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the acclaimed and controversial story of two Palestinian men planning a suicide attack on Tel Aviv, was not only accepted as Palestine’s submission, it was also one of the final five nominees competing […]
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“Walter Murch: From The Godfather to the God Particle”
Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.
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In the Ruins: Paul W.S. Anderson on Pompeii
Pompeii, so-called vulgar auteurist Paul W. S. Anderson’s latest extravaganza, is a love story and a disaster movie, a prison film and a paean to a certain kind of tried-and-true action pic many directors attempt but few make as involving and effortlessly enjoyable as “the other” Paul Anderson. Since his 1994 debut, Shopping, he has, with moxie and aplomb, uncorked one high-concept genre thrill ride after another. In his first film since 2008 without his wife, the actress and model Milla Jovovich, the British veteran deftly takes on the sword-and-sandals adventure epic. After opening with an odd epigraph about the […]
