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.

Called “Ahead of Time,” the film (which opens in limited release Friday, 9/10/10) by director Bob Richman follows Gruber’s remarkable career as a pioneering journalist and writer from the 1920s onward. She was a witness to history several times over, reporting everywhere from Siberia to Alaska, covering the journey of the Exodus to Palestine in 1947, working for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and the New York Herald Tribune, meeting and befriending everyone from Virginia Woolf to Harry Truman to David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.

The author of more than 20 books, she became the youngest woman ever awarded a Ph.D. at the age of 20 in 1932. And now, finally, “Ahead of Time” tells her story – that of a woman who opened doors for other women simply by refusing to be told she couldn’t.

“It never occurred to me that I was a trailblazer,” she says, sitting in her Central Park West apartment. “I don’t think what I did took courage. I just took every opportunity and never questioned the difficulty of what I was doing.”

Gruber will be 99 at the end of September. When she talks, her voice is quiet and breathy, one of the indicators of her age – but her memory is sharp and her answers are witty and articulate.

“I never stopped,” she says simply. “When I won a lifetime achievement award from the Overseas Press Club, someone asked me what my secret was and I said, ‘Four simple words: never, never, never retire.’”

Her age? “I’m aware of it everyday. I have help around the clock. I fell about three months ago and broke a vertebrae. It took time to heal. Every now and then I wake up and think, ‘Another day.’”

The film, “Ahead of Time,” named after one of her books, was discussed for years. Part of her story had been told in “Haven,” a 2001 TV movie starring the late Natasha Richardson as Gruber, about Gruber’s efforts to save 1,000 Jewish immigrants from Europe during World War II. She helped convince the Roosevelt administration to bring them to America, then helped settle them at Fort Ontario near Oswego, N.Y.

“A lot of them spoke German – and I was fluent in German, because I got my Ph.D. in Germany,” Gruber recalls. “They couldn’t believe it: How can this American woman speak German so well?”

But it took the efforts of producers Patti Kenner, Denise Benmosche, Doris Schecter and Zeva Oelbaum to get “Ahead of Time” off the ground. They raised the money, hired Richman to direct and began interviewing both Gruber and the people who knew her.

“When Patti asked me about making a documentary, I said, ‘People have been saying that to me for 20 years and they’ve never done anything’,” Gruber recalls. “But Patti and Denise made it happen.”

The interviews and filming called up many old memories and resulted in moments of serendipity. At one point, Gruber had been invited to speak in Jerusalem in 2008, so Richman and his crew tagged along. On the day that they were scheduled to film an interview with the captain of the Exodus, Gruber realized that it was, in fact, the 61st anniversary of the day the Exodus docked in Haifa.

“We were all stunned by the coincidence,” she says. “In 1947, the dock was smaller than this room. When we got there that day, two football fields could have gotten lost on it. There were tears in the eyes of the camera crew. This country grew up so fast.”

Gruber has happily made the rounds with the film when her health permits to film festivals and promotional showings. Inevitably, women come up to her and say, “You inspire me.”

“That makes me happy,” she says. “But when they say, ‘Next to you, I feel I’ve done nothing,’ that upsets me. We all do what we can. We all live our own life. Go and enjoy what you’re doing. Don’t ever feel uninspired by what you’ve done.”

When she makes appearances, Gruber always brings along copies of her books, which she sells and signs. She eagerly notes that four of her books are being released as e-books: “But I still have to figure out how that works,” she adds. “I still believe in books. There are still some books I wish I’d written.”

Regrets? “Too many – I throw them out of my mind,” she says. “So many errors – we all make them.”

Instead, she focuses on taking joy from the honors being paid her for a long career – and in enjoying each day as it comes.

“The sun rises every morning in this window,” she says, indicating a view that overlooks Central Park, “and in that window I see the sunset. If I were a painter, I’d be happy because I can get northern light. Who could ask for more?”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.

Q: Where did this idea come from?

A: It comes from a pregnant woman. This film was not in my plans. I was supposed to go on holiday. But an actress I know called me to announce that she was pregnant. I had always wanted to make a film about a pregnant woman, so I said, Would you act in a film about a pregnant woman? At first she said yes. She was excited. Then later on she said, I know you – you’re demanding and I don’t want to work for you while I’m pregnant.

Q: So what did you do?

A: My casting director then told me that three other French actresses were pregnant during this summer. And so I spoke to Isabel Carre, who is someone I’ve liked for a long time. Because it was the first time she’d been pregnant, she didn’t know how it would be to work and be pregnant so she said yes.

Q: Why seek that particular kind of realism?

A: It was important to me to have a real pregnant woman for the reality of the film. Usually, they have a fake belly. But there’s just something about the body of a pregnant woman.

Q: Was this a tough role for Carre, with her actually being pregnant?

A: The character is so much the opposite of who she is so there was no confusion between the pregnancy in her life and the one of her character, Mousse. She liked that distance, that it was always the opposite of her character’s life.

Q: This film has a tough opening.

A: I wanted to begin in a very dark way, start with something dramatic and dark and then move to something lighter.

Q: It’s pretty stark at the start. These people seem irredeemable and self-destructive. Yet Louis is almost idealized by Mousse.

A: I don’t want people to forget that character – I want him to be like a ghost. And I wanted to kill the clichés about drugs. They can be very idealized in films. I thought it as important to show the reality of drugs – that they can bring pleasure but also violence. I wanted to show the love between these two characters, so they felt like a real couple.

Q: The house itself is like a character in the film. How did you choose the location?

A: It’s in the southwest of France. It wasn’t my first choice but when Carre accepted, she told me she’d do it on two conditions. And the first one was that we shoot there because she was going there on holiday with her family, so it was more comfortable for her to be there. I did a location scout and thought that the country was beautiful there. It was important for me to have the beautiful landscape.

Q: You mentioned two conditions. What was the other one?

A: The other condition was that, at the end of the movie, her character have a girl. She knew she was going to have a boy and she didn’t want any confusion between real life and the film.

Q: You don’t do much to make Mousse a likable character. She never does anything to earn the audience’s sympathy.

A: It’s a story of a character who is very lost. She’s not very likable at the beginning. At the end, you understand who she is and why she has such behavior. She and Louis’ brother Paul are misfits who are looking for their own identity. At the end, there is a transmission between the two. They are from different worlds but they’re able to help each other. At the end, she’s very logical.

Q: Was this a hard movie to get made?

A: It’s very low-budget. As a director, I’m very close to the production. I knew I won’t have the budget of “Avatar.” With such a subject, I decided to shoot it digitally with a small crew. That gave me great freedom to do what I wanted. There’s a kind of intimacy to that. We didn’t need a lot of money to make it. For me, it was important to adapt your budget to your subject.

Q: Is this kind of movie hard to get made in France?

A: In France now, it’s easy to make very low-budget or very expensive films. The difficulty is working in the middle. If you want to make an expensive film, you need to do a comedy with a big French cast. If you’re trying to make something twisted, like “Ricky” – which was not a French blockbuster, and not arty but in between – then it’s more difficult to finance.

Q: What would you do if you had the kind of money that “Avatar” cost?

A: If I had the budget of “Avatar”? I could do 20 films. Maybe more. I would not do that film.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

Remakes? They hold no interest for award-winning Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

And yet here he comes with “A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop,” his remake of the Coen brothers’ 1985 debut feature, “Blood Simple.”

“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.”

Zhang’s films range from the cool, deliberate beauty of “Raise the Red Lantern” to imaginative, even operatic martial-arts stories such as “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers.” So he seems an unlikely candidate to adapt the darkly comic film-noir of the distinctly American Coens. But it was the first film that came to mind.

“I first saw it over 20 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival and it left quite an impression,” he says. “I never went back to watch it but the impression lingered. In the last few years, when nothing grabbed me, I thought, why not try a Chinese version of that film? If I did a reinterpretation, I could speed up the process because I had solid material to work with.

“I wanted to take the original and attempt a Chinese-style interpretation. I wanted to inject aspects of Chinese culture and, in that way, adapt it to a new context. One aspect is the theatrical element that I tried to incorporate. I’m indebted to the Peking Opera for that.”

Still, Zhang found it challenging to adapt a story set in the late 20th-century Texas flatlands to a Chinese setting. He eventually chose a period in Ming Dynasty-era China, in a remote desert outpost. He set the story in and around a noodle shop, instead of the honky-tonk bar where the story of infidelity, betrayal and murder was originally set.

“The most difficult part was finding the basis of the logic beneath the story,” Zhang says. “It was an organic, contemporary story. The mood and outlook had a lot to do with the story. In moving it to traditional China, the most difficult thing was making that aspect make sense, so that the actions make sense in that time.”

That included finding a way to introduce a gun – in this case, an unusual three-shot derringer-style pistol – into a period dominated by swords, spears and bows-and-arrows: “We had to dig through a lot of historic material to make it work. We finally decided the gun had to come in from outside. That was the most logical explanation.”

The film came on the heels of Zhang’s work directing the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for which he received international acclaim. His work on the Olympics kept him occupied for a solid two years leading up to the event.

“It was a very long process,” he says. “It was a great experience through which I learned so much. Just the scale of it – I was working with tens of thousands of participants. So it was a great source of experience on an international scale. I was dealing with artists and producers from around the world. For me, in terms of interpersonal relationships, it was a wonderful experience.”

Zhang’s work has brought him critical attention in the United States, and made stars of actors such as Gong Li; he’s also worked with such Hollywood-friendly performers as Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat. But, while filmmakers from around the world have gravitated over the years to Hollywood, in hopes of making a movie in America, the idea holds little appeal to Zhang.

“Since I don’t speak English, there’s not much for me to do outside China,” he says. “Most of my inspiration comes from China, although it’s possible that my next film might involve American actors. But I live in China. It’s an environment I understand. I know the people and the culture. I’ve been to the U.S. and I don’t understand it in the same way. If I leave behind my roots, it would be difficult to shoot a good movie. I’d be out of my element.

“I’m quite happy that many of my films have done well abroad. Film is a cultural bridge that helps humankind understand each other. I’m humbled when one of my films does well in America. But there are so many stories in China waiting to be told. But I’ll have to wait until China is open enough to shoot them.”

Zhang faces a milestone in November, when he will turn 60. He laughs when asked what it will mean to reach that age.

“I just hope I can maintain my good health and do interesting work,” he says. “For many Chinese, the age of 60 is a landmark age, representing the start of a new cycle. When I was 30, I thought 60 was old. Now I look at it as a new beginning, a new page in my life. I just hope I can keep my health and make a couple more good films.”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.”

And not just Alba – Trejo gets frisky with Michelle Rodriguez and Lindsay Lohan: “I love strong women,” says Trejo (pronounced TRAY-hoe).

A character actor whose rugged face, imposing scowl, long hair, droopy mustache and massive chest tattoo have made him a favorite of directors and audiences alike, Trejo sounds slightly stunned at where he finds himself, at the age of 66. A one-time drug addict and seeming career criminal who did 10 years in California’s San Quentin penitentiary, Trejo now finds himself a hero in the Latino community, an in-demand performer whose IMDB page lists more than 200 film and TV credits since he made his debut in “Runaway Train” in 1985.

And now he’s the star of his own film: “Machete,” in which actors ranging from Alba and Rodriguez to Don Johnson and Cheech Marin – to Robert De Niro – play supporting roles to him.

“Every time I think about that, I laugh,” Trejo says. “I mean, I played a supporting role to De Niro in ‘Heat.’ When he showed up on the set for this, he told me, ‘I knew you’d make it.’ And I said, ‘Mr. De Niro, can I get you a cup of coffee?’ I mean, he’s one of the greatest actors America has seen.”

In “Machete,” Trejo plays the title character, a one-time Mexican Federale who comes out on the losing end of a confrontation with a Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal) and winds up as an itinerant and undocumented worker in Austin, Texas. There, he is recruited into a plot to help the reelection of a right-wing senator (De Niro), who’s running on an anti-immigration platform. But Machete’s real goal is revenge against the Mexican drug lord, who is also secretly involved in the reelection campaign

.

The Machete character first appeared in what most people assumed was a mock trailer for the film, which was shown between the two halves of “Grindhouse,” Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 hommage to exploitation movies of the 1970s. But Trejo says the film’s genesis began much earlier.

“Robert told me about 16 years ago that he wanted to make this movie,” Trejo says. “We were in a little town in Mexico, shooting ‘Desperado,’ and nobody knew who Antonio Banderas was at the time. And he was the star of the film. But everybody had seen me in movies and so people were gravitating to me for autographs. And Robert said, ‘I’ve got a role for you. You’ll be the first Latino superhero.’”

Twenty-five years into his acting career, Trejo still can’t quite believe it – not just that he’s the star of a film, but that he’s an actor at all.

“I never imagined myself out of prison, honestly,” he says. “In my record, it says I didn’t play well with others. The violence was turned outward. Actors like to say that they grew up on the streets – but I really did and it wasn’t that glamorous. It cost me the penitentiary.

“At one point, I figured I was either going to the gas chamber or I was going to change it around. Once I took alcohol and drugs out of my life, I got better. I did it when I was in the hole at Soledad one year from May 5 to Aug. 23 – a long stretch. I had a lot of time to reflect and it was a rude awakening. I even remember the prayer I said: ‘God, if you’re there, I’m going to be OK. If you’re not, I’m fucked.’ He must have been there because I got out.”

When he got out of prison, Trejo went to work as a drug counselor: “Everything good that’s happened to me has been a result of my helping someone else.” But a chance encounter with an old prison friend, writer Edward Bunker, led to Trejo’s first chance in films.

Trejo was summoned by a young man he knew, who needed Trejo’s help supporting his sobriety while the youngster was working as a production assistant on a movie set, where drugs were rampant among the crew. The film was “Runaway Train,” and Bunker, who was its screenwriter, remembered that Trejo had been a prison boxing champion. So he suggested Trejo work as boxing coach to the film’s star, Eric Roberts. When director Andrei Konchalovsky met Trejo, he put him into the film – as Roberts’ opponent.

“They said they’d pay me $320 a day – and I thought, ‘Hey, I’d have done it for $50’,” Trejo recalls. “They said, ‘The actor might accidentally sock you.’ I said, ‘For $320 a day, you can give him a stick, if you want.’”

He’s worked steadily ever since, amassing credits in films, TV, even voicing video games and modeling characters for them.

He doesn’t box anymore, staying in shape by doing cardio and lifting weights: “I don’t spar much,” he says. “Once you get past a certain age, you hate getting hit in the face.”

The father of two grown children, he proudly points to his son’s and daughter’s activities as producers and directors.

“My son is 22 and he just produced a film that I’m in,” he says. “When I was 22, I was jacking off to ‘Betty and Veronica’ in San Quentin. Oops, maybe you shouldn’t print that.

“But I love this industry. Thinking about what I’ve done and what my kids have done, it almost brings me to tears. My passion now is talking to kids who are in trouble to help keep them out of trouble. When I’m not working, I do that all the time. And when I am working, I ask the producers to find me a juvenile hall to speak to. And the film industry has gotten me their attention when I walk on to campus.”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.

Q: You play a hermit in “Get Low.” Do you have any hermit-like tendencies in real life?

Duvall: When I’m at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.

Spacek: Now, don’t make it sound too good.

Duvall: It’s less that I’m a hermit and more my sense of privacy.

Spacek: It’s that security you get when a person is surrounded by the things that comfort you most.

Duvall: The most solitary I ever felt was when I was living in New York. I used to live in Enrico Caruso’s old apartment and I had a special staircase that took me up to the roof. There was nobody up there.

Spacek: Really? Living in New York always felt to me like living in the middle of a carnival. It never stopped. There was something very exciting about it.

Duvall: Still, it felt sometimes like everyone in New York was living in a box.

Spacek: Yes, but some boxes have bigger windows than others.

Q: You both live in Virginia. Did you know each other before this film?

Duvall: No, we didn’t. (to Spacek) My wife once went to your property to look at a horse. I don’t know if you were there.

Spacek: Isn’t that amazing?

Duvall: I once lived in an apartment that (Spacek’s cousin) Rip Torn bought on W. 22^nd St. here in New York. I had the upstairs and Dustin Hoffman had the downstairs.

Q: You’d never worked together – so did you have any expectations about each other?

Spacek: My only preconception was true: that he’s brilliant. The thing that amazed me was how simple he makes it look. You never see him act. All you have to do is react. He’s found the railroad track and he’s in the groove. I know he does a lot of preparation but he makes it look effortless.

Duvall: Well, it’s like my movie, ‘The Apostle.’ Some people in the North don’t get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don’t shout, you can’t play one of those guys. But for me, the challenge is how you turn a character into behavior. Once the director says action, you just try to live between those two worlds.

Q: What was it like working with Bill Murray?

Spacek: The beautiful thing about Bill is that he’s funny all the time. He doesn’t turn it off and on.

Duvall: He’s always funny.

Spacek: I went to a mall with Bill in Atlanta and he was so dear with people who recognized him in stores. I told him, “You’re going to ruin your reputation.”

Q: You’ve both done some great TV in the last couple of years with “Broken Trail” and your character on “Big Love.” Is that where the quality is these days?

Duvall: I’d wanted to do “Broken Trail” for a while as a movie and couldn’t get any interest so I thought, well, why don’t I do it on TV? And they were interested.

Spacek: Things are all changed now. There are stories you can tell on TV that can’t be told in movies anymore.

Duvall: I’ve got one on the Pony Express I want to do. And a two-part miniseries about border sheriffs. It’s a wonderful script but I don’t know if I’ll ever get it done.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.

“Initially we were growing hemp as a step toward sustainable farming,” says Braham, cinematographer on such films as “Waking Ned Devine,” “The Golden Compass” and several others. “But we found that the seeds were nutty and tasty. So we started reading up about the oil and realized it had been out there for centuries.”

Still, it took them 10 years to refine the process of turning hempseed into a hempseed oil that not only was beneficial to a human diet but appealing to a human palate.

“It’s been sold for years in health stores,” he says. “But you’d have to be pretty sick to want that taste. So we worked at developing it with an attention to detail that focused on it as food rather than medicine.”

“Our challenge was how to capture the taste and make the oil in a time scale that made sense,” Murray adds. “What we wanted was to find an alternative to olive oil – and we found one that was far more healthy.”

As the Good Oil website points out, hempseed oil has 25 times the Omega-3s as olive oil – and half the saturated fat. And even olive oil is a relatively new innovation in home-cooking in northern Europe.

“Before olive oil, most recipes started with a slab of animal fat,” Braham says. “That was the core, the start. It’s only in the past 25 years that olive oil and other vegetable oils started being used. Now there’s a mesmerizing array of oils to choose from. People are more interested in what they’re cooking with.”

Hemp, Braham says, is “a unique story. Nothing is wasted. It’s the fastest-growing plant around, it’s incredibly efficient at capturing carbon, it takes little cultivation and it doesn’t use any chemicals or pesticides. We use the seed to make food with serious health benefits – and the rest goes into building products.

“We’re always hearing tips about how to live a greener life. And here it is, in a bottle. It’s a pretty exciting kind of story.”

The pair has been farming for almost a decade and a half, having escaped from a full-time life in the film industry: “We both came from a farming background,” Braham says. “We went off and made films, then reached a stage in our lives where we wanted to go back to our roots. We were looking for something sustainable, economical and environmental.”

Good Oil is being marketed “in serious food stores in Paris and it’s taken seriously by chefs as well as nutritionists,” Braham says. In the U.S., the product is being sold at Whole Foods in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, with plans to expand its distribution.

And no, Murray and Braham point out, there are no psychotropic effects associated with hempseed oil.

“I think there’s a huge awareness of the difference between hemp and cannabis,” Braham says. “Still, there’s this perception. That’s one of the reason we market it as Good Oil, rather than hempseed oil.”

“It’s not like we’re using Woody Harrelson as a spokesman,” Murray adds. “In the United Kingdom, there’s been no antipathy to it at all. Still, we put a number of health claims on the side of the bottle and one of the ones we used at first was ‘good for the joints.’ That shows you how naïve we are.”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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). “In his book, winter is more of a character. It was a trade-off for a low-budget film. A mild winter is a godsend because you want to keep the crew warm and able-bodied. Cold temperatures require special precautions. They have ice storms out there – they had one prior to shooting. But fortunately, not when we were shooting.”

So there’s the winter part of the title – but what about the bone? In Granik’s film, which won both the Grand Jury prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the two words are never spoken. And, Granik admits, while she’s got her own interpretation, that’s all it is.

 “When I read the novel, the title seemed very abstract,” Granik says. “But in this part of the country, so many of these families are hunters and take the meat straight off the bone. I was in a place in the United States where bones are being handled in a very existential way. And, metaphorically, the winters get hard and you’re living with no buffer, no extra flesh.”

“Winter’s Bone” tells the story of Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a teen-ager in backwoods Missouri whose father has skipped out on bond after being arrested for cooking methamphetamine. Now he’s disappeared – and he’s put up the family home and property as collateral. So Ree must track down her father to keep her family from becoming homeless. But she faces a culture of silence among the drug-addled and drug-dealing crews, who also happen to be related to her – but who threaten her nonetheless.

The film is unusual in its willingness to focus on characters living below the poverty line, without making poverty – or drug addiction – the focus of the film. Rather, Granik was caught up in the story of Ree Dolly, a character who grabbed her and wouldn’t let go.

“She caught our hearts,” she says. “It borrowed an age-old tradition and was really American in a delicate way. You’ve got a hero who has to go into an obstacle-laden, semi-hostile territory and does it with a lot of moxie. There was something about her tenacity and the way she’s got a lot of resources in her heart and brain. I couldn’t predict the character. Daniel Woodrell created enough qualities in her personality that I was fully absorbed. We all recognized that this book was very well-constructed, that it was an American story with very classic elements.”

The film is actually Granik’s second Sundance-award winner. Her previous feature, “Down to the Bone,” won her the director’s award at Sundance in 2004 and starred Vera Farmiga. Though it won sterling reviews, the film itself – the story of a divorced mother trying to keep her family afloat while coping with crack addiction – wasn’t exactly a box-office hit.

Which meant that Granik took another five years to make “Winter’s Bone,” her second feature. In that period, she wrote two other scripts, taught at New York University – and had a daughter.

“I didn’t think ‘Down to the Bone’ would make things easier,” she says. “The recognition it got was based on people enjoying the work of Vera. People were pleased to see a very talented actress they hadn’t seen enough of. But that doesn’t qualify a film as having commercial value. It says there can be viable life for a film made for under $500,000. It doesn’t give anyone the sense that this is a filmmaker likely to be a candidate to do something more commercial.”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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. “The fact that the president is articulating reform and that it’s working is great. Giving parents more choices is fantastic. If I was a parent with a child, I think the chance of finding the right thing for my child would be increased by having more options.”

Sackler’s film follows several Harlem parents, whose children are about to reach school age – and who are eager to have them accepted into the Harlem Success Academy. Harlem Success, a high-performing charter school, each year offers fewer than 500 spots for approximately 3,500 applicants. The places in the incoming class are decided by a drawing – with each prospective student having the same 1-in-7 chance of winning a spot.

Sackler, a Duke University graduate who dumped graduate school plans to study neuroscience when she discovered her love of film editing, was inspired to make her film after seeing TV news footage of the 2007 lottery. So she plunged into the idea of filming the next year’s drawing.

“I was also inspired by a series of devastating statistics about the achievement gap,” she says. “I saw one that said 17 percent of kids in New Haven were working at grade level. But one of the higher performing schools had 71 percent at grade level. And I wondered why that was. Then I saw footage of the lottery we covered in the film. You realize that hundreds of thousands of kids are on the waiting lists for higher performing schools. Parents are fleeing under-performing schools. But you never hear about parents who are dying for something better and having to rely on luck.”

As she made the film, Sackler discovered that one reason under-performing schools are unable to pull themselves out of a tailspin is the lock that the contract for the teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, has on the making of policy. The charter schools, however, are mostly nonunion, allowing for greater flexibility in the way schools and teachers are able to address problems and focus on education, rather than rules.

“The teachers’ union actually takes control away from teachers,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much impact they had. You think of them as representing teachers, but they represent custodians and principals and others. And I didn’t realize how much influence they had on policy affecting what goes on in the classroom.

“I’m not sure the power dynamic is right. Protecting the teachers doesn’t necessarily mean doing what’s best for the kids. Why not have a union for kids? I’m afraid they get lost in all these negotiations. What charter schools are able to do is be very adaptable. They’re very lithe. If a handful of students in one class are not keeping up, they can give them more time.”

Sackler’s film examines the political clout the AFT carries in Albany and shows protests, organized by the AFT but fronted by ACORN and other organizations, when Harlem Success asks the city to allow it to take over a Harlem public school that has failed. There are no AFT spokespeople in the film – but not for lack of trying on Sackler’s part.

“We were very persistent about wanting to talk to the teachers’ union from the beginning,” Sackler says. “In the beginning, they said they were too busy. I suspect they decided right away not to do it. We called them over and over, right up to the week that we locked picture.”

The AFT, the film shows, incites neighborhoods against the charter schools by pushing the erroneous idea that charter schools are private, for-profit institutions.

“The charter school are nonprofit,” Sackler says. “People say they’re privatizing public education but the public schools are not doing what it takes. Public school systems have remained the same or worse for the last 40 years. We’re spending 40 percent more than in the ’70s. There are a lot of forces involved – but they seem more interested in what’s best for adults than for kids. The idea that this is implicitly racist or classist is wrong. It’s systemic. The country is not taking responsibility.”

Sackler doesn’t take her own privileged background for granted. If anything, making the film reminded her just how lucky she is.

“That’s my I’m passionate about this - because I could make that choice,” she says. “I could decide whether to be a doctor or a struggling filmmaker because I was able to get to and graduate from college. I’m cognizant about how lucky I am in terms of where I was born, my family, my race, my class. Everybody looks at the education system as this beacon of democracy, the great equalizer. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.

Q: Why would this guy believe that this woman is actually a selkie?

Farrell: The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors’ fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that. This particular man has spent a lot of the past 10 years in a marriage that was dying or flat on the floor. Here’s the perfect opportunity to take what his business is and offer it up. I think he allows himself the suspension of disbelief. He doesn’t ask questions. He’s like Marlon Brando in “Last Tango”: Don’t tell me too much. Until the myth infects him with the reality of the circumstances.

Q: Where did the idea come from?

Jordan: Just an idea I had. When the idea came into my mind, I began reading all the things I read when I was a kid. I thought of western Ireland because things were not extremely real.

Farrell: Magic is at the core of myths.

Q: Is the world too modern for a myth like this to really capture the imagination?

Jordan: The country has become very quotidian, with its projects of modernity. With the economic collapse, it’s all coming back.

Farrell: He says to her, “What are you?” He can only stretch to a certain degree and then he crumbles. The reality becomes a fairy tale, a better alternative than the life he’s dealing with. He’s somebody who’s experienced pain, who equates love with loss. He can make her be what he wants her to be.

Q: A good chunk of the film was filmed on the ocean. How challenging is that?

Jordan: There are two ways to shoot on the ocean. If you’re in Hollywood, you use a tank and support boats. But we just strapped the camera to the back of the boat and went from there. Chris (Doyle, the cinematographer) wanted the photography to mirror the experience – and the sea is very tempestuous. The waves get so big so fast. I’ve shot underwater before. Underwater photography is beautiful.

Q: Do you also find something special about that part of Ireland?

Jordan: It’s a very unusual part of the world. I spend a lot of time there and I thought, it would be lovely to make a movie there. When I wrote it, I set it in places I knew deliberately. I knew all the locales.

Q: But this isn’t the part of Ireland the tourists normally see?

Jordan: These days, there’s a tourist route. American tourists fly into Shannon and do the lakes. This area is a bit too far. It’s a little-known part of the world. It’s all seascape; the main existence is the fishing boats.

Q: How hearty is the Irish film industry? Was it hard to get this made?

Jordan: For a while, there was just Jim Sheridan and myself. Now there are quite a few Irish filmmakers. But the films are very small, with stripped-down budgets. Once Colin read this script, it happened quite quickly. The main thing was the writers’ strike in America; we got a waiver, then had to do it without an American distribution deal. It took a long time to finance because all those companies that used to make this kind of film seemed to have vanished. We shot it – and emerged out of the water with the film in our hands to a changed landscape.

Q: Colin, what attracts you to a script these days?

Farrell: I don’t know how to quantify what’s good. It comes down to an element of whether it makes me laugh, engages me, makes me keep reading. It can be as simple as reading it in one sitting. This one was simultaneously a story that felt uniquely unconventional and thoroughly familiar. That’s happened to me a couple of times. I felt I understood the character. Neil was hesitant with the script. He said, “I wrote something, tell me what you think.” And I loved it. I read a lot of stuff but I don’t find a lot. I haven’t been on a set for seven or eight months.

 Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

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.

“Oh, they thought it was heresy,” Weisz says. “What’s remarkable is that everything she was doing was imaginary because she was working in the time before the telescope. Everything she was figuring out, she was doing with her imagination. There was some math to back it up – but what she did was imagine things. Which is what I do for a living as well.”

“Agora,” a film by Alejandro Amenabar (“The Sea Inside”), captures a moment of upheaval in Hypatia’s world, in which the ruling-class pagans’ multiple gods are mocked and attacked by Christians, who are also subject to strife with the Jews. Even as Hypatia uncovers her own mathematic hypothesis about the heliocentric universe, the balance of power is shifting away from the world Hypatia knows.

The themes of religious intolerance and religious extremism were “why I wanted to do this,” Weisz, 40, says. “When I first read it, it was clear to me that it was a contemporary story set in the Fourth Century. We go for more of an anti-biography, because it seems so contemporary. I mean, even with things like stem-cell research and other ways we’ve evolved, there are still places in the world where women are not allowed to be educated.

“People still kill in the name of religion. We haven’t evolved to the point where we’re one tribe called humans. And that’s an important message. In that sense, the pagans of this era were actually pretty enlightened. They didn’t have fundamentalism. On the other hand, they had slavery, which was a giant blind spot.”

The British-born Weisz, who lives in Brooklyn with director Darren Aronofsky and their young son, has moved easily between independent films like “Agora,” where she got her start, to studio films such as “Fred Claus” and “The Lovely Bones.” She won an Oscar for best supporting actress for 2005’s “The Constant Gardener.”

“That was an incredibly surreal moment,” Weisz says. “I became very British. One wants to be present, to be in the moment but I would defy anyone. It’s like an out-of-body experience – and the odd thing is having it happen to you. It’s the kind of thing that happens to other people. And as a result, you get more interesting directors offering more interesting scripts.”

Since 2008, she’s been in “The Lovely Bones,” “Agora,” “The Brothers Bloom” and “Definitely, Maybe”  - and has two more films (“Dream House” and “The Whistleblower”) awaiting release this year and next.

“I work in both worlds,” she says. “I just did ‘Dream House,’ a studio film for Jim Sheridan with Daniel Craig. And then I did a very low-budget independent film with a first-time Canadian director, ‘The Whistleblower.’

“When I first had my baby, I just wanted to do romantic comedies. My brain went soft, I think. I only wanted to do light things. But now I hope that, if anything, I’m more fearless. Having given birth – what could be scary after that?”

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.