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Interviews
Mighty Movie Podcast: Clio Barnard on The Arbor
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 29 April 2011 21:59
- Written by Daniel Persons
Director Clio Barnard uses what was originally a theatrical technique in her hybrid documentary/drama The Arbor: She interviewed the friends, family, and acquaintances of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar and her troubled daughter Lorraine, then brought in actors to lip-synch to the resulting soundtrack. The process, shot partly in the working-class housing project that Dunbar both grew up in and chronicled in such plays as The Arbor and Rita Sue and Bob Too, surprisingly results in a singularly filmic experience — intimate, intense, thoughtful, and at times disturbing. That the lives of these two women contain no shortage of drama — despite her success, Andrea never moved out of her neighborhood and, after having born three children out of wedlock and lapsed into alcoholism, died at 29 of a brain hemorrhage, while Lorraine eventually became a heroin addict and prostitute before bearing three children herself — only helps to make The Arbor a stunningly unique look into the both the potential and limits of art to redeem a life.
Click on the player to hear my interview with Barnard.
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Mighty Movie Podcast: Bertrand Tavernier on The Princess of Montpensier
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 15 April 2011 02:00
- Written by Daniel Persons
Supposedly, when Madame de Lafayette wrote her 17th century novella, The Princess of Montpensier, she was chronicling the romantic intrigues of her own time. Propriety, however, prevented her from making the parallels between her fictional characters and their real-life counterparts too obvious, so she displaced the drama some sixty years earlier, when France was torn apart by a civil war between Catholics and Protestants.
Come the twenty-first century, and director Bertrand Tavernier is able to bring some modern insight — plus a love for John Ford’s way of weaving strong character with historical action — to his lush, stylish adaptation of the tale. With Mélanie Thierry as the young princess trapped between duty to her family and a growing realization of her own identity, Lambert Wilson as the guardian who instills the spark of autonomy in her, and Gaspard Ulliel and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as the men who fall in love with her almost in spite of themselves, The Princess of Montpensier is an ambitious melding of history and romantic drama.
Click on the player to hear my interview with Tavernier.
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Weintraub's Way -- An Exclusive Film Interview
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Monday, 04 April 2011 05:00
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Even in the rarefied air of show business, Jerry Weintraub's life and career have been unique. As the new HBO documentary about Weintraub, His Way, shows -- and many of his showbiz friends, from George Clooney and Julia Roberts to George and Barbara Bush confirm on-camera -- the Brooklyn-born and Bronx-raised Weintraub has always gone his own path, whether managing music acts ranging from John Denver to Led Zeppelin, producing movies as diverse as Robert Altman's Nashville, George Burns in Oh God!, Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, and Oceans 11, 12 and 13, as well as unapologetically living with his current girlfriend of 20 years while staying married to his wife of 45 years -- with whom he's raised four children.
The indefatiguable 73-year-old Weintraub popped into HBO's Manhattan offices to talk to journalists about the film His Way, which follows last year's memoir -- just out in paperback -- When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead. He answered questions on his career in movies, even throwing in a George Clooney revenge story.
Mighty Movie Podcast: Quentin Dupieux on Rubber
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 01 April 2011 19:23
- Written by Daniel Persons
Yes, RUBBER was released theatrically on April 1st. No, it's not some kind of a joke -- I've seen it, I know. It's actually a film about a tire that gains consciousness in the middle of the desert, finds it has the power to destroy objects and animals (including the human kind) with its mind, and then goes on to wreak fear and destruction amongst the inhabitants of a small motel. That director Quentin Dupieux (a.k.a. electro musician Mr. Oizo) goes ahead and has characters regularly address the audience -- both in the actual auditorium and on the screen (the latter are placed on a hilltop and conveniently provided binoculars to watch the action) -- then gives Wings Hauser possibly his best role to date as one particularly cantankerous spectator, and did it all with a bare-bones crew (Dupieux wrote, directed, composed (with Gaspard Augé) and photographed using the Canon 5D, the same digital still camera used for TINY FURNITURE) on a short schedule (less than one year from conception to final cut), only adds to the rarefied nature of the entire project. But have no doubt: It exists, and it's pretty damn cool.
Click on the player to hear my interview with Dupieux.
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