Shared Darkness

Vera Farmiga is a wonderfully talented actress, but with her self-effacing laugh, easy disposition and comfortable slouch, she has a lot of work to do before she perfects the character of a swaggering director. She swears life behind the camera wasn’t a burning professional goal of hers, but Farmiga spent several years work-shopping a screenplay based on Carolyn Briggs’ The Dark World with Briggs and fellow writer Tim Metcalfe. The result is her wonderfully subtle directorial debut, Higher Ground, and it’s as full-bodied, honest and moving a portrait of a young, fundamentally religious family, and all the struggles they experience, as has ever been put to screen — perhaps no small coincidence given that Farmiga cites another labor of love, Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, as a case study for her work. At a recent press day at a Beverly Hills hotel, I had the opportunity to take part in a roundtable interview session with the Oscar-nominated multi-hyphenate, who also stars opposite Joshua Leonard in the movie. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Few actors get to star in a monster commercial smash that is also a zeitgeist hit, but that was Joshua Leonard’s experience with The Blair Witch Project, which turned a meager $60,000 production budget into almost $250 million in worldwide theatrical receipts, and owned the summer of 1999 (and beyond, in the form of countless spoofs, homages and far less inspired rip-offs) like no other indie movie of its time. Leonard continued to act over the years, and achieved a second peak of artistic acclaim two years back in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, in which he and a fellow heterosexual friend (Mark Duplass) find themselves locked in a pact/dare to make a gay porn flick together, as an entry for an avant-garde art festival.

Leonard’s latest film is Vera Farmiga‘s directorial debut, Higher Ground. In it, Leonard plays Ethan Miller, a would-be rock star turned family man who comes to relate to his wife Corinne (Farmiga) chiefly through the orthodoxy of their church’s teachings. I recently had a chance to talk to Leonard one-on-one about religion, sex tapes for Christians, the film’s relaxed rhythms, and his own directorial debut, The Lie, which debuted alongside Higher Ground at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and sees releases via Screen Media later this fall, in November. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

At 84 years old, Jerry Stiller is still going strong. Married for more than 56 years to fellow performer Anne Meara, he’s entered the twilight of a long and varied show business career with a uniquely entertaining sort of feisty grace. In his latest movie, the London-set comedy Swinging With the Finkels, he plays grandfather to Mandy Moore, whose marriage with architect Martin Freeman is suffering from a sort of sexual drift. I had the pleasure of talking with the elder Stiller recently, about swinging, longevity in relationships in general, the entertainment industry, and the possibility of dispensing any sexual advice to his son, Ben. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the enjoyable read.