There’s a large iMac sitting on her desk and she writes everyday – but Ruth Gruber still says, “I’m technologically illiterate.”
Then she laughs, her eyes crinkling in amusement: “They’re inventing the 21st century,” she says. “I’m learning a new language: Twitter, Google, things like that. They could probably put together a whole dictionary just of 21st-century words.”
The computer is still a tool that she’s learning to use – “At least I can make the type big enough so I can read it” – the latest in a life that’s lasted almost a century, and which is finally being given the kind of public acclaim it deserves in a documentary film. (More…)
At the age of 42, director Francois Ozon is known in the U.S. primarily for films such as “8 Women” and “Swimming Pool.” A student of Eric Rohmer, he sees himself as part of the generation of French filmmakers that followed the generation that followed the Nouvelle Vague.
“We’re the same generation as Tarantino,” he says. “But France doesn’t have a generation like Coppola and Scorsese. There was no place for the French directors of the ’70s in that history of cinema. People like me and (Olivier) Assayas and (Arnaud) Desplechin were not crushed by the Nouvelle Vague.”
Ozon’s latest is “Hideaway (Le Refuge),” a film (opening in limited release Friday, 9/10/10) about a girl who survives a heroin overdose that kills her musician boyfriend. Pregnant, she escapes to spend the summer at a beach house she borrows – where she is looked after by her dead boyfriend’s gay brother. It’s notable for how cheaply and quickly Ozon shot it – and for the fact that he was inspired to write it by the idea of making a film using an actress who actually was pregnant. He spoke about it during a recent trip to New York. (More…)
“At the time I was looking for material for my next film, there were no good screenplays,” Zhang, 59, says through a translator in a telephone interview. “As a principal, I like to avoid remakes. But when it comes to a situation where I couldn’t find a script I liked, then I turned to the possibility of a remake.” (More…)
The closest that actor Danny Trejo ever came to doing a love scene before he made “Machete”? That would be in Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Con Air.”
“Yeah, I played a rapist and I attacked Rachel Ticotin,” Trejo says, pausing and adding with a laugh, “I didn’t get the girl.”
By contrast, in Robert Rodriguez’s “Machete,” which opens Sept. 3, the menacing-looking Trejo has romantic scenes with not just one actress but several – because they come on to him. In a telephone interview, you can hear the amazement in Trejo’s distinctively deep and raspy voice.
“It’s my first lead in a film and I get the girl,” he marvels. “And not just any girl. I get THE girl – Jessica Alba. We had a kiss and I kept messing up – but I swear I didn’t do it on purpose.” (More…)
Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall live near each other in the Virginia countryside – but had never met until they worked together on Aaron Schneider’s “Get Low.”
The two play long-time friends with a secret from the past (and a prickly history) that brings them together in “Get Low.” Get them together in a New York hotel room, however, and it’s less an interview than a directed conversation, with the reporter as a privileged guest. The two Oscar winners have an easy-going camaraderie that flows through the conversation. (More…)
Movies? Well, yes, says Glynis Murray, she does dabble in producing them (most recently, “Everybody’s Fine,” starring Robert De Niro).
“But that’s not my regular day job,” she says in a recent Skype interview. “Henry (Braham, her partner) is a director of photography and I’m a producer. We’ve been doing ads and documentaries forever and produced our first feature 10 years ago. But this is our real day job.”
“This” is Good Oil, which is just being introduced into the American market. Good Oil is the first culinary oil made from the seed of hemp plants – and Murray and Braham are evangelists about both its flavor (for cooking and salads) and its health benefits. (More…)
Yes, the season is right there in the title: “Winter’s Bone.” Not autumn. Not spring. Certainly not summer.
But as much of a character in Daniel Woodrell’s novel as the season turns out to be, writer-director Debra Granik was just grateful that, when she filmed her adaptation of Woodrell’s book in Missouri two winters ago, it was one of the milder in the state’s recent history.
“Had we shot it this past winter, it would have been a winter that more closely mimicked the book, with a lot of snow and cold,” says Granik, whose film opened in limited release on Friday (6/11/10). (More…)
Making a documentary is always a crapshoot, but Madeleine Sackler is hoping she’ll get a little help from the headlines.
Sackler’s documentary, “The Lottery,” opening in limited release on Friday, deals with the issue of charter schools in Harlem. It reaches theaters just as New York State made the decision to raise its cap on charter schools from 200 – which it has nearly reached – to more than 400. In doing so, the state will qualify for more than $700 million in federal education funds under President Obama’s “Race to the Top” incentive program.
“It’s a historical moment, a critical moment, and this is another example,” says Sackler, 27, a Greenwich, Conn., native. (More…)
Neil Jordan and Colin Farrell, in New York for the screening of their film “Ondine” at the Tribeca Film Festival in late April, make an amusingly mismatched couple: Farrell, guarded with dark good looks and mix of bohemian and working-man apparel; Jordan, rumpled in an oversized shirt and a skeptical sneer.
The pair share an Irish background – and careers whose fortunes seem to rise and fall based on their films’ relationship to the Hollywood studios. Jordan, 60, won an Oscar (and was nominated for another) for the indy classic “The Crying Game” – but his last film before “Ondine” was “The Brave One,” a studio bomb starring Jodie Foster.
Farrell, 34, had a reputation as an actor of range and subtlety, then nearly squandered his reputation by allowing himself to be slotted into one big-budget Hollywood dud after another: “Alexander,” “SWAT,” “Miami Vice.” But by moving back to smaller-scale independent films – such as “In Bruges,” “Triage” and now “Ondine” – he has reestablished himself as an actor to watch.
The two of them chatted about “Ondine,” in which Farrell plays a fisherman, a reformed alcoholic in a small Irish town, who gets a new lease on life when he pulls a young woman up in his fishing net – and suspects that she might be a mythical selkie, a sea creature capable of shifting to human form on land. (More…)
Tall and willowy in a summery off-white ensemble, Rachel Weisz allows that she has a certain ignorance of science and astronomy.
“I’m so bad at math – I had a lot of cramming to do,” Weisz says. “Do you say ‘cramming’ in America? But this was way outside my comfort zone. Let me just say that nothing about science has trailed back to my everyday life.”
Weisz needed the tutoring to play the real-life astronomer and mathematician Hypatia, who lived in Roman Egypt about 400 years after Christ. In her new film, “Agora,” which opened in limited release last week, she is part of a story that hypothesizes that Hypatia, who had translated the work of Ptolemy, could have conceptualized the Sun as the center of the universe, rather than Earth, perhaps a millennium before Copernicus and Galileo. As the film shows, that notion didn’t go over any better in Hypatia’s day than in Galileo’s. (More…)
