Leos Carax
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Masterclasses at Qumra 2024 by Leos Carax, Claire Denis and More
Launched ten years ago by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an industry convention held annually in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Through panels, workshops, screenings and masterclasses, Qumra brings together a cross-section of producers, festival programmers and journalists in an effort, according to organizers, to “provide mentorship, nurturing, and hands-on development for filmmakers from Qatar and around the world.” This year’s edition, which ran from March 1 to 6, arrived at a particularly fraught moment for the Middle East with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. After cancelling last November’s Ajyal Film Festival in solidarity with Palestine, the DFI, which […]
by Jordan Cronk on Mar 15, 2024 -
Leos Carax’s Green Period: DP Caroline Champetier on Annette and Her Work with Jacques Rivette, Claude Lanzmann and Philippe Garrel
For Leos Carax, stories of love—or really, most any story—mean finding a new language of filmmaking. For Caroline Champetier, Carax’s longtime director of photography, that means realizing dreams that might not at first seem possible. Annette is the story of a dream yearned for but not fully realized, the great love between opera superstar Ann (Marion Cotillard) and ornery comedian Henry (Adam Driver). They have a child who becomes a singing star herself, but their bond is undone in the dark crucible of Henry’s discontent, and Carax and Champetier craft a kind of handmade journey whose very nature expresses the […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Aug 9, 2021 -
Cannes Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Annette
Leos Carax’s Annette begins with a variant on Holy Motors’s “Entrac’te,” now split from one mid-film break into opening and (mid-end-credits) closing musical numbers that set a similarly grimly determined/celebratory tone. The director and his real-life daughter are among the first people seen, leading Sparks and the film’s main cast out of the recording studio and into the world. Adam Driver gets on a motorcycle and zooms into the night to begin his diagetic story proper as confrontational stand-up comic and antihero Henry McHenry, his castmates calling “good luck” after him. A slow-motion love triangle revolves McHenry and the Conductor (Simon Helberg) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 7, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Leos Carax’s Annette (Plus Cannes 2021 News)
The long-awaited trailer for Leos Carax’s musical Annette — his follow-up to Holy Motors, one of best films of the last decade — has just been posted online. Concurrent with a communique from French President Emmanuel Macron that seems designed to assure anxious international industry about the viability of the upcoming ’21 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where Annette will be opening night, it’s a particularly impressive publicity drop. The film’s synopsis, from the press release: Los Angeles, today. Henry (Adam Driver) is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor who falls in love with Ann (Marion […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2021 -
“…Much More Truthful and Much More Alienated than Anything I Would Produce Myself”: Jonathan Lethem on Fred Barney Taylor’s Lethem
Last week I was very much looking forward to talking with friend Jonathan Lethem about the new film Lethem, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, which screens at the Metrograph on Sunday, September 17, with the author in attendance. Before that happened though, we both received the news that Michael Friedman had died. A beloved friend and collaborator, Friedman co-founded The Civilians, a theater company where I’m an associate artist. He also wrote the score and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s 2003 novel. Fortress of Solitude tells the story of Lethem’s childhood on Dean Street in […]
by Alix Lambert on Sep 15, 2017 -
Sparks Announces Music-Film Collaborations with Guy Maddin and Leos Carax
Pioneering electro-disco band Sparks just wrapped a two-night stint in Los Angeles of an orchestral concert version of their pioneering 1974 album Kimono My House. In an interview with Chris Willman at Billboard, the band (brothers Ron and Russell Mael) teases two upcoming film projects. The first is with Guy Maddin, news of whom seems to regularly filter out into the film blogosphere. The second, however, is with Leos Carax, who usually holds his upcoming project cards closer to the vest. Here’s Russell Mael on both projects: The other thing we’ve been doing is two movie musical movie projects. One […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2015 -
Watch: Leos Carax Brings Rodin’s “The Thinker” to Life in Gradiva
Galerie Gradiva, a swanky, new Parisian gallery, hired Leos Carax to fashion a promotional riff on Boy Meets Girl ahead of its opening on May 28th. Shooting within the newly furbished space, Carax crafts a cutely subversive portrait of man and woman as nude model (NSFW?) and legendary sculpture. Fed up with his status as gallery poster boy, Rodin’s “The Thinker” airs his grievances to his partner, as Carax animates the bronze with both dialogue and camera movement. The miniature of Rodin’s masterwork is just one of many notable pieces in the gallery that features Dali, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and so forth. Watch it […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 6, 2014 -
Cahiers du Cinema names Holy Motors the Best Film of 2012
I couldn’t agree with more the top spot on Cahiers du Cinema’s naming of Leos Carax’s melancholy ode to cinematic decline and reinvention, Holy Motors as the best film of the year. At this point it’s #1 on my list too. But the other selections on their top ten…? Let’s just say it’s an eccentric list. David Cronenberg’s experiment in DeLillo adaptation, Cosmopolis, is in the second spot. Interestingly, the two films were compared to each other during Cannes as both are episodic works dealing with protagonists driven around in limousines. Number three is Francis Ford Coppola’s under-seen (including by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 21, 2012 -
“I Need to Feel When I Make a Film That I’m Not the Same Person Who Made the One Before”: Director Leos Carax on Holy Motors
“The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online,” said Sheryl Sandberg on Charlie Rose last year. “I have to be ‘me’, and you have to be ‘Charlie Rose,’” the Facebook COO told the talk show host. “It’s me” — that single line appearing late in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors unexpectedly devastated me at the film’s Cannes premiere, and perhaps its memory is what’s causing me to recall Sandberg’s statement, which is certainly in line with similar comments by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg. In an age in which online platforms offer the possibility for anyone to craft for themselves a variety […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 22, 2012 -
LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #1
The Locarno Film Festival has carved out a role for itself since Olivier Père took over three years ago, in which it offers the best of all festival worlds. Acting as perhaps the best cross-section of contemporary cinema—or something very close to it—available on the festival circuit, it has often been described as one of the true “cinephilic” fests. Additionally, in order to make this possible, Locarno still needs to be something of a hotspot, and the “glamor” that makes such a reputation possible is also a key component. However, Locarno manages to avoid being an industry-driven media frenzy like […]
by Adam Cook on Aug 6, 2012
