Yes, Marshall Lewy admits, it was a risk to write the lead role of his second movie with actor Robert Carlyle in mind. If Carlyle wouldn’t do it, he would be pretty much screwed.

“Oh, I had a Plan B,” Lewy says, of his film, “California Solo,” which opens Friday (11/30/12) in limited release. “I had other people I envisioned going to. But it was written for him. I’ve always been a fan.” (More…)

It was supposed to be a documentary about the dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay.

But the material he was reading about the pollution of the bay was too scary. So director Barry Levinson made a horror movie instead: “The Bay,” a low-budget film in the found-footage category opening in limited release Friday (11/2/12).

“The facts were frightening – and making a documentary didn’t interest me enough,” Levinson, 70, says, sitting in a suite of the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. “But the facts stayed with me. So we made a sci-fi movie like in the 1950s, which used science fiction to deal with the real fears we had.” (More…)

Alan Cumming knows a little bit about feeling like a second-class citizen.

After all, aside from being a gay man in a straight-dominated world, he’s also a Scot who’s lived in London.

“There were a lot of things about London that reminded me every day of my own shortcomings,” Cumming says, sipping coffee in the Café Pick Me Up next to the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. “It has to do with class and the accent. People are politely back-handed and even mean about being different there. The same things that make me different there are celebrated in New York.” (More…)

Sure, it’s about losing your virginity – but Jon Kasdan’s new film, “The First Time,” is about something bigger: the thrill of the new that you used to get as a teen, when you’d escape the orbit of your own high school into the universe of another one, where no one knew who you were.

“There was a lot of excitement in that – in being with people who haven’t known you since grade school,” Kasdan says by telephone. “You meet someone new – someone who doesn’t know you. And you’re able to redefine yourself to each other.” (More…)

Everyone has family secrets. But when Lisa Ohlin agreed to direct the film “Simon & the Oaks,” opening in limited release Friday (10/12/12), she brought along one of her own that closely echoed the story of the film (and the best-selling Swedish novel upon which it is based).

The 1985 novel, by Marianne Frederiksson, told the story of Simon Larsson, a pre-teen living outside Gotheburg, Sweden, in 1940, as World War II begins. The lives of his family become intertwined with those of the family of his best friend, Isak, who is Jewish. It is only after the war, when he is getting ready to go to college, that Simon discovers that, in fact, his parents took him in as a baby from his mother’s sister, who had him out of wedlock – with a visiting German musician who was Jewish.

“I read it a few years after it came out,” says Ohlin, 51, sitting in a Greenwich Village tea shop. “And I thought the author must have heard about my life. But I was also drawn to it because it talks about family secrets. That’s the way a lot of people related to it.” (More…)

Yes, Matthew Heineman knows that the cost of healthcare and access to it are major issues in the approaching election.

But no, he doesn’t think that kind of political focus on the issue is helpful. When a presidential candidate says that people without health insurance can simply go to an emergency room, Heineman observes, he’s focusing on the wrong part of the equation.

Which is why Heineman and partner Susan Froemke made “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare,” a documentary that examines the raging healthcare controversy from a viewpoint that’s meant to take argument out of the equation. (More…)

At the age of 30, having deliberately stepped away from acting and show business for five years to figure out what she wanted to do, Gaby Hoffmann has decided that acting is a choice she wants to make for herself – after a successful career based on a choice someone else made for her.

“Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is,” Hoffmann says in a telephone interview. “I’d started acting as a child. But I wanted to see if it was something my true personality was interested in. I stepped away from offers when I took five years off to go to college. I’ve only really just decided to whole-heartedly embrace acting.” (More…)

The great thing about doing a one-man-show-length monologue, like “Sleepwalk With Me,” Mike Birbiglia says, is that you can go anywhere you want with it, almost as quickly as you can say it.

“I can be talking about considering going to the doctor about my sleepwalking –and then say, ‘Let me tell you about this thing that happened to me when I was 19’,” Birbiglia explains, sitting in the Thalia Café at Manhattan’s Symphony Space, where he recently screened the film (which opens in limited release Aug. 24). “I’m able to go leap-frogging around in an extremely elliptical way. With a monologue, you can be unendingly elliptical.

“Sometimes people say ‘You’re the best at digressions.’ And that’s actually a real compliment to me.” (More…)

When I mention to Susan Sarandon that the first time I interviewed her, it was for the 1981 film “Atlantic City,” she smiles ruefully.

“We were both babies back then,” she says.

She curls into the couch of the hotel room where we’re talking, for a piece for the New York Daily News. This is the first of the interviews she’ll do this day, to promote the film “Robot & Frank,” which opened in limited release Aug. 17. Though she worked for less than a week on the film, her character – a librarian named Jennifer – proves pivotal in a plot that revolves around a book-loving but aging cat burglar named Frank (Frank Langella) and the robot caretaker who tends to him, in a plot set in the near future. (More…)

Craig Zobel understands that his new film, “Compliance,” makes audiences uncomfortable to the point of creeping them out.

That’s kind of the point, the filmmaker says.

“There is that line,” Zobel says. “Obviously, it’s not ideal if you make something that disturbs people so much that they walk out. But this film needed to be challenging. It’s an important story because of how dark it goes. What scares me is that whole idea of who we think we are and who we are when put in a situation like this.” (More…)