The year 2009 has been something of a dream for Penelope Cruz. It began with her performance in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, already honored by several critics groups, winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in February. It continued with the filming of Rob Marshall’s musical Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, and the Cannes Film Festival presentation and release of the noirish, Spanish dramedy Broken Embraces.

It’s been a long trip for the little girl who began studying women at her mother’s hair salon when she was only five years old, becoming quietly aware of their public faces. Cruz is now an internationally recognized knockout beauty, which her recent appearance at a Beverly Hills hotel — brunette locks cascading over her almond brown blouse, past her shoulders and down her back — only serves to confirm. Yet for all her stardom, Cruz retains a beguiling mix of enchantress wonderment and button-cute innocence. No doubt some of the latter is due to factors of verbal intrigue; in Cruz’s mouth, the word monitor is pronounced “money-tar,” with no sense of halting uncertainty or embarrassment.

If the accent rather charmingly remains, Cruz’s grasp of English has aided her upward trajectory. “I remember when I was 20 and didn’t speak the language at all,” she recalls. “I did the casting [for a movie] on tape, got the part, and when I met [the filmmakers] they realized that all I knew were the lines for the character.” Cruz pauses here, smiles, then continues: “I’m more comfortable with English now, so the roles have become more challenging and demanding.” For the full feature piece/interview, from H Magazine, click here.

One wouldn’t have necessarily been able to predict it based on his rakish, smirky turn in Barry Levinson’s 1999 coming-of-age dramedy Liberty Heights, but courtesy of roles in films like 3:10 to Yuma, Hostage, Alpha Dog and 30 Days of Night, Ben Foster has evolved into his generation’s go-to guy for brooding, disarmingly packaged menace. Meeting him in person, it’s easy to see why; though he stands only 5”’9″, he has the same piercing eyes, and not much of a need to please. Foster, who just recently moved to New York, has a well-chronicled affinity for meditation and a perhaps less well known appreciation of tattoos, which he characterizes as “body mapping.”

He also has a moving new film, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, underscores the fact that the psychological tolls of war don’t expire at our borders. On loan from filming a remake of Charles Bronson’s The Mechanic, which he describes as “good, old-fashioned assassin entertainment,” opposite Jason Statham, Foster is an uncommonly thoughtful and intelligent, if reserved, interview subject. We chatted at a Beverly Hills hotel suite recently; for an excerpt of the conversation, from H Magazine, click here.

With two of his last three narrative movies setting records for production costs, director James Cameron has, professionally speaking, danced around the edges of volcanoes for most of his career. It’s just where he seems most at home. Apart from a pair of deep-sea documentaries, though, Cameron, now 55, hasn’t seen release of a theatrical film since 1997’s Titanic. The highly anticipated Avatar represents his play at return to king-of-the-world status, and it bears all the trademarks of a Cameron production — a reported price tag of around $230 million, and a brawny storyline that again pushes the boundaries of special effects and myriad other big screen technologies.

Like Cameron, Avatar is a rare breed. “With this film we havesimultaneously a blessing and a curse, which is the uniqueness of it,”says producer Jon Landau, just back from a quick jaunt to Hong Kong.“We don’t have a sequel to Batman or something based on anotherunderlying intellectual property. So the challenge is how to tellpeople in 30-second sound or video bites what this movie is about.”

Landau has somewhat of a unique perspective on Cameron, having workedwith him on Titanic, and having a relationship that dates back evenfarther than that. To him, Cameron’s relative absence from the bigscreen doesn’t represent any trepidation at following up Titanic‘sunparalleled success. “Jim has never been the most prolific ofdirectors,” says Landau. “What it takes for Jim to jump into a movie isa burning passion, because when he does jump in it’s 110 percent ofhimself, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Jim had that passion for theexploration that he did with both Aliens of the Deep and Ghosts of theAbyss, and no movie sparked that in him in that term. There was stuffwe put into development, but it never fully ignited that flame.” For the full read, from H Magazine, click here.

Over at Arts Meme, Debra Levine has up an interview chat with La Danse director Frederick Wiseman, if a closer look at the Paris Opera Ballet strikes you as something of interest.

Almost a decade after gracing the pages of USA Today with his unlikely success story, filmmaker Troy Duffy is back in the news with Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, the sequel to 1999’s stillborn cult flick about two avenging-angel Irish-Catholic brothers who cut a swath of revenge through Boston’s criminal underworld. At a Beverly Hills hotel, the writer-director recently talked about the strange, winding path to the screen of his first film in nearly 10 years, what he makes of his movie’s fan base and, yes, what he thinks about Overnight, the documentary that nearly derailed his career. The conversation is excerpted below:

Question: When did you first see this online fan base spring up around Boondock Saints?

Troy Duffy: I started to see it soon after it experienced its Blockbuster release. I don’t know if you know this, but we were sort of blacklisted from U.S. theaters because of the Columbine incident, and Blockbuster gave us a real, big, uncommon release — they gave us 60 to 100 copies in all their stores because they felt it was a much bigger movie. It turns out they were right. I almost immediately saw that fan base start to formulate as soon as it touched the public.

Question: Are you concerned at all about recent news of a New Jersey priest being murdered, which tracks closely with your film’s plot?

TD: These situations with political fallout don’t have anything to do with moviemaking. It’s just a fucking movie. You’re supposed to go there and have a good time. That’s why they call it the entertainment business. I don’t feel… if anything happens that shifts the political tectonic plates, that’s got nothing to do with us. You don’t want to see any copycat shit happen, but at the same time if some retard is going to go do that they’re going to come up with an excuse and blame something else anyway. We’ve seen it 100 times, and nine times out of 10 they’re just making the shit up to justify their actions and blame it on something else so that they can cut down on their prison time. I don’t concern myself with what real people do; this is a movie with actors, nobody died during the filming of this. It’s a piece of entertainment for people to enjoy, and if they happen to ask themselves a few questions and ponder a couple issues, like vigilantism and capital punishment, great. But that wasn’t my intention.

Question: How difficult was it to so much of the cast back for the movie?

TD: I’ve had that question a million times… and [people] never left, nobody went anywhere. These guys were calling me up every month or two, and I was keeping them in the loop on things. Once it got out that we had a deal, [even] crew members started hitting up my producer with messages, saying they wanted back in on it. One guy walked from a film he was doing, just said, “Hire somebody else, I’m going to do Boondock II.” That kind of loyalty? You can’t buy that, and those kinds of technicians put their full effort into the film. Nine times out of 10 you get, “Well, you don’t have the budget for that,” from stunts, special effects, make-up, the wardrobe department, you name it. What I got was, “What do you need?” Everybody just brought their A-games and realized this was a special one, this was something that they cared about it. And I believe that that transmits through the celluloid. For instance, I watched Frozen River recently, and I wanted to slit my wrists afterward, [it’s] not my particular cup of tea, but it’s obviously a film that somebody cared very deeply about, and a brilliant film and portrayal. That’s what we had to a man on this project, from filming all the way through post-production. Everybody that touched Boondock Saints looked at it like a little piece of gold that we were all hoping to mold into a vase.

Question: How acutely was the idea for the original film forged by real-life experiences?

TD: We lived in a hell-hole, me and my brothers — it’s not the most unique story. We saw crimes all the time, and we were victims of crime sometimes, and you realize that you don’t have any recourse. Your car gets vandalized, your apartment gets broken into, and the cops come and say, “Oh, here’s your report.” So we realized that Joe Average doesn’t really have much recourse when they’re the victims of crime. I believe everyone has the same reaction… when you see something truly disgusted on the news, that instant reaction is that whoever did that should die. We may not all say that, in fact probably 95 percent of us don’t. But we all have that thought, I believe that. So this was a way to play with that fantasy, and give a little bit of escape. And maybe the next time that somebody gets a crime committed against them, they can take it with a grain of salt, and realize that it will probably never get solved.

Question: This sequel makes some pretty bold narrative choices, and yet it isn’t some discrete scenario which just plops the brothers down into another revenge scenario.

TD: That came from story. The Boondock fans have deemed the first one sacred ground; the kind of fandom we’re lucky enough to have is over the moon. They’ve frame-fucked this movie into the ground, and they know everything about it. Writing I sequel, I couldn’t just rest on the laurels of the first movie, and do some polished-up version of the first one. I wanted to give them a whole new story, and there was a lot of curveballs and new aspects. We pushed the humor farther, there’s a higher body count, there’s more gunfights, we went into period piece flashbacks to 1950 to explain Il Duce’s history. Boondock fans are not used to this sort of thing. We have a Mexican in there, and a female lead. That hit the fan base like cold water in the face when they heard that one. Now they can’t live without her — the three screenings I’ve seen with about 1,300 kids. It’s a way to give them everything they love about the first film, and yet throw a brand new plot and storyline at them they never could have predicted — show them the new thing that we’re going to make cool.

Question: What about the documentary Overnight, which chronicled the flameout of your original Boondock Saints deal with Miramax? Was there an axe to grind there?

TD: There was an axe to grind. At the beginning of all this, when I was a bartender who wrote my first script and lo and behold it sold and there was a bidding war and all this press on it, two of my friends asked me and the rest of the guys if they could do a documentary, and we trusted them because they were our friends. So we granted them the permission they requested and let them shoot to their heart’s content what were the three most tumultuous years of my life. They edited that down to a complete smear job — very biased, very one-sided, and I think that everyone down to not just the entire cast but also crew members from the first film coming back and doing this one again speaks much louder than that.

Question: All Saints Day takes care to set up the possibility of another chapter — are there definitive plans for a third film?

TD: There’s some ideas percolating. But I’d like to get a couple things off my chest before that. During the last 10 years I’ve written five scripts, so I’d like to knock the other four down like dominoes. They’re very different stories than Boondock, but there’s definitely a possibility for a third. …Every time I talk to fans and ask them what they like about the first film, they give me a different set of answers. Some people like the brothers’ relationship, some people had a friend like Rocco in high school, some people like the religious slant — the Old Testament shit, back when God had balls. Some people like that it’s about a bunch of lucky Irish guys that seem to get out of things by the hair of their teeth. Take from it what you will, I say. This is your cheeseburger, eat it.

Question: What about the sociocultural specificity of the film — is that a big part of the appeal, in your opinion?

TD: [in affectedly deferential tone] The sociocultural specificity! I think we have a new 50-cent word, people. I don’t know quite exactly what that means.

Question: The Boston setting, the Irish brothers, the tenets of Catholicism…

TD: To me, I do things a lot of times, in the actual intricate makings of the film, I try to do everything I can to have the audience experience that emotion one level deeper. For instance, if there wasn’t any religious imagery in the movie, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It would be just two badasses with guns. The device of religion helped bring us one level closer… whether we like it or not, the story of the Bible is ingrained in all of us, we know it. And that kind of tangibility helps bring us that one level deeper — closer to the emotions that I’m trying to get across. Same thing with music. Take a tender scene and take the music out of it and watch how less tender it is. I can only speak from my game, having done two films, but this is how I do it. There’s a lot of things I do to bring the audience closer to the characters. Using socioeconomic references, dancing around people’s sensitivities — and sometimes completely disrespecting these sensitivities — like it or not, these things elicit emotion, and if I’ve done my job right hopefully it’s the one I’m going for.

Question: What if anything does it say about the current state of the film industry, the idea that you’ve had an opportunity to return to the big screen with another installment of this story, despite all the original impediments to its making and theatrical release?

TD: I think it’s vindication. It’s no longer a matter of opinion anymore; if The Boondock Saints had been released in theaters, it would’ve been a gigantic fucking hit. The film has virtually become a financial juggernaut in the last 10 years, it’s grown and grown and grown, DVD sales are up every single year, from the time it came out until now. We didn’t get a shot back then to succeed on the level that a lot of other different films get. Being barred from theaters like that was a really big blow to us, and we worked really hard on this thing. This time we’re getting a honest chance, and I know that there are a lot of Boondock fans out there that have no idea about either film. I can tell sometimes when a guy hasn’t seen the movie, but he’d be into it. So I think that what I’m most excited about is seeing what this can really do. It’s like going to your kid’s first little league game — you hope he has a big bat and a big glove. We’ll see, maybe the kid’s a star. You never know.

Over at the 213, Telly Davidson gets under the Skin of British director Anthony Fabian.

Before Slither or even Killer Klowns From Outer Space, back when VHS genre hits were truly built on word-of-mouth, there was 1986’s horror comedy Night of the Creeps, a camp classic about a small college town ravaged by killer slugs from outer space. Out this month on DVD for the first time ever, the movie arrives in a special director’s cut with its original, never-before-seen ending and over an hour of bonus features, in the form of deleted scenes and six all-new behind-the-scenes featurettes which include examinations of the movie’s effects and creature work; cast members Jason Lively, Tom Atkins, Steve Marshall and Jill Whitlow reminiscing about the making of the cult classic; a special look at beloved genre star Tom Atkins; footage from a June 2009 cast reunion screening at The Original Alamo Drafthouse Cinema; and more. Two separate audio commentary tracks are also included. In advance of the movie’s DVD and Blu-ray release, I spoke with writer-director Fred Dekker; the conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: What’s it like to have the opportunity to revisit the movie and give something back to fans, given that there hasn’t been a commercial home video release in so long?

Fred Dekker: It’s awesome, and in the case of Night of the Creeps it’s an opportunity to finish a painting that I literally didn’t finish however many years ago. The ending of the movie in the screenplay was not the ending that we ended up releasing, because of a disagreement between the studio and myself. So when Sony came to me and asked if I wanted to remaster it and do a bells-and-whistles DVD, I said, “Great, can I put the ending back on?” and they didn’t bat an eye. So that, for me, is the real prize — that this is the version of the movie that I wanted to release originally.

BS: How much longer is the director’s cut, or can you address some of the differences therein?

FD: Well, let’s just assume that spoilers aren’t involved, and that the movie is old enough where if you haven’t seen it by now, it’s your loss. It’s not that much longer, but spiritually — or maybe that’s too prosaic and pretentious a word — or in terms of intent it’s quite different. And in fact we did a transfer from an interpositive for the feature, which looks unbelievable, but we could only find the ending as a three-quarter-inch videotape, so we had to really finesse that ending in order to make sure that you don’t notice that we’re going to a slightly degraded image. But I’m thrilled that it’s the movie that I intended it to be.

BS: What were your inspirations for the film, and what do you think of some of the other movies that it perhaps in turn inspired, from the Chiodo brothers’ work to something like Slither?

FD: The obvious ones are the George Romero Dead movies; at that point there were only three of them, Day of the Dead being my personal favorite. I’m so clearly taking a page from George’s book. And Alien is obviously an inspiration in terms of the parasite that gestates inside the body. And then there’s a whole handful of references from the 1950s, visually and plot-wise, from B-movies like It Came From Outer Space, Plan 9 From Outer Space. And the other big influence that I’ve come to realize and appreciate only in the wake of his death is what an impact John Hughes had on the movie in terms of the tone of the characters and their relationships and dialogue. …I’ve never been a horror-movies-only kind of guy, and I realized in resurrecting this movie that it was an early example of a mash-up.

BS: And yet when someone comes out of the gate and has any degree of success or notoriety within the horror genre, it seems like they maybe have a harder time breaking out of that mold.

FD: I’m glad you said that, because it’s absolutely true, and if I’d had my druthers I probably wouldn’t have elected to do a horror movie as my first film. But one of the things that you’ll hear quite a lot from directors is that when they get their first shot they try to put in the kitchen sink, and so one of the things that I attempted to do with this movie was to do as many different kinds of movies in one as I could, just in case I never got another shot. So there’s a film noir element, a detective story in there. There’s at least one romance — actually two romances in there. There’s some horror, some comedy, some science-fiction. There isn’t a western sequence or a musical number, but pretty much everything else is reflected there.

BS: You mentioned your disagreement with Sony — what was the nature of the conflict regarding the ending, and do you have regrets about how you handled it?

FD: Long story short, as people will see in the director’s cut and hear about in the DVD extras, is that the ending rests on an optical effects shot, and in those days there was no pre-visualization or CGI, where you could just sort of put it together in rough form. So what I had was a matte painting, a miniature and a whole bunch of elements that were ultimately going to be superimposed together. But I made an enormous mistake — and I have to take the hit for it myself — and I showed the studio, and I even showed it to an audience, unfortunately, the effects before it was finished. It had a galvanizing, negative effect on everybody, they said, “Oh, well that sucks.” And I explained to them, “Well, no, the effects aren’t finished.” But they kind of just dismissed it. And this was also the ’80s, where at the end of Carrie Brian DePalma does a wonderful scare that was hugely influential. Sean Cunningham stole the idea and had a cheap scare at the end of Friday the 13th. So it was kind of the era of the cheap scare, and at their urging I [followed that lead]. So the [ending of the] theatrical version has always had this kind of dumb, cheap scare I’ve hated. So now I’ve been allowed to rectify that mistake.

BS: Prior to recording the commentary track, how long had it been since you’d seen the movie in whole?

FD: I’ve been lucky enough with a fan resurgence over the last couple of years, so I’ve actually been lucky enough to show it a few times — in Toronto a couple of years ago, and just earlier this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. So I’ve seen it a couple times, on and off, in the last couple years. There was a fallow period in the 1990s where I’d run across it on television and avert my eyes and run away. But I’m beginning to appreciate it more than I used to.

BS: So why do think Night of the Creeps holds up and still connects with fans? Or, for that matter, why so many horror films do?

FD: Horror is a wonderful metaphor for high school. We all go to high school terrified, and to take those terrors and turn them into vampires and zombies and stuff like that is not much of a stretch. In making Night of the Creeps I didn’t have a political or personal agenda, I was just making something that I thought was fun. But in retrospect it was a really smart move, if I can pat myself on the back, to superimpose the fact that the movie takes place in 1986, rather than say present day and have everybody with the big hair and shoulder pads and that awful color palette, because by saying it’s 1986 it makes it a bit of a period piece, and it also calls to mind an era when everything was very shiny and happy and Reagan was the president, but underneath, I think, was a great sense of, “What the fuck?” And I think that’s kind of the movie — it’s colorful, fun and catchy, but there’s this undercurrent of being headed for something b
ad.

BS: When did idea first take hold, and was the screenplay something you slaved over?

FD: Oh God, no. I’ve told this story before: I was having trouble sleeping and the line, “Thrill me,” came to me, and I thought what a great way to introduce a character, to set up a guy who doesn’t give a shit. So I got up and wrote the first scene of Detective Cameron waking from a nightmare and talking to a police sergeant about a body that had been found, and I hammered the rest of it out in maybe three weeks.

BS: Do you have any other projects definitively lined up?

FD: It’s been a tough road for me, because it’s taken my movies a while to find their audience. Probably my most successful movie financially was RoboCop 3, which everybody hates. So it’s been tough. I’ve been developing [things] for three years. But in my day job, I just turned in the script for the sequel to Cliffhanger, which I had a lot of fun writing. It’s a big, smash-’em-up, fun, popcorn action movie. And then I’m developing, with producer Curtis Burch, a very low-budget drama based on a documentary film about a playwright named Oakley Hall III — a really charismatic, interesting guy in upstate New York who in the 1970s fell off a bridge and suffered brain damage. And the film is about his resurrection and redemption, and finding his way in the world. No zombies or explosions, monsters or gunshots, it’s just people.

BS: So would the Cliffhanger sequel bring back Sylvester Stallone?

FD: I cannot comment on that at this moment.

To purchase Nights of the Creeps on DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here.

Over at The Wrap, Steve Pond chats with cinematographer Gordon Willis, a honorary Academy Award recipient this year, who dances and ducks his share of questions, but does share his thoughts on being excised from the main Oscar ceremony, and working with Francis Ford Coppola.

Radha Mitchell’s mid-afternoon plans have been waylaid, but you wouldn’t know it from her sunny disposition, and a laugh that can split the air. Traffic hampered our respective arrivals at the coastal hotel that serves as our meeting spot, and now — because this is Los Angeles, after all — there’s a deejayed potable water benefit raging at the pool. “I had this whole plan where we’d chat outdoors, and afterward I’d go sit in a patch of sun, read the rest of this thing,” she says, indicating a script in her bag, “and then take a swim.”

No worries. Repairing to a quieter spot indoors for drinks, we swap stories about the somewhat abstruse, themed billboards that have just gone up all over the city for her new film, a couple of which look an awful lot like Angelina Jolie and David Beckham. “That’s [popular] according to Disney marketing, which must be based on some reliable statistics,” she says. A chattering, water-supporting socialite wanders by, and conversation amiably turns to social networking, text-messaging and Mitchell’s iPhone, only the latter of which she loves. “I do love accessing the web on the phone,” she says. “It’s changed conversation. There are no questions. And it’s not really about the facts anymore, it’s about how you use the facts spontaneously. You don’t have to know anything, which I love.”

She’s kidding, of course. Mitchell must know plenty, because in her decade-plus in Los Angeles, the Australian native has effortlessly straddled the fence between art and commerce, deftly juggling popular studio fare (Man on Fire, Silent Hill, Pitch Black) with equally well received independent films (Melinda and Melinda, Finding Neverland, Henry Poole Is Here). Even her two forthcoming projects perfectly illustrate this split.

The Waiting City, which details a young couple’s journey to India to collect their new adopted baby, has just had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival announced. Then there’s Jonathan Mostow’s brawny Surrogates, in which Mitchell plays an FBI agent alongside Bruce Willis, investigating the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a phenomenally popular technology that allows people to purchase robotic versions of themselves — fit, good-looking, remotely controlled machines that enable users to experience life vicariously from the comfort of their homes.

“It’s a comment on the state of culture now, and not that far from the way a lot of people live their lives, I guess,” says Mitchell of Surrogates. “It’s a pristine, manicured reality where you get to feel everything, because the sensory stimulation goes into your body, but it filters the pain out, and can modulate your experiences, if there are smells you don’t like or whatever.”

“At times my character is operated by other people, though I can’t tell you who, or why,” Mitchell continues. “You meet her as a real person briefly, which is interesting. It’s funny, because all the real people in this movie are fat, I guess because they’re sitting in their chairs. So I’ve got this really fat bum. I don’t know if it’s featured in the movie, but it took a while to make. And I have fake teeth. It’s quite a good look. There’s a different look with the surrogate — she had a padded bra and long hair. But what I discovered is that if there’s no other preference, the fat ass was a bit more comfortable.”

Sagging asses give way to talk about mortality, and before long we’ve tripped headlong into a heady discussion of the possibility of virtually freezing time. At what point would one want to stop aging, though? “In the 30s,” Mitchell says, point-blank, then pauses. “But then I think there’s something interesting about being in your 60s or 70s. I’m sure it’s not great, going through that process of decay. But it must be interesting, and there’s something quite important about that cycle of taking care of your parents and then being taken care of — the reversal of that situation.” When I point out Americans typically aren’t as hands on in elder-care as other cultures, Mitchell has a one-word rejoinder prepped: “Florida.”

Diminutive, but powered by fitful spasms of energy and a seemingly boundless wit, Patton Oswalt has slowly made a name for himself in comedy circles, courtesy of his writing work (four seasons on MadTV), small screen supporting performances (The King of Queens), zonked-out cameo appearances and various stand-up specials. Then, a couple years back, he won over kids and adults alike as the voice of Remy in Ratatouille. None of this prepares one for Oswalt’s starring, sad-sack turn in Robert Siegel’s Big Fan, however. Of a certain piece with The Wrestler, also written by Siegel, the film — which centers on an obsessive New York Giants fan who has a brush with one of his idols, and through a radio show develops a seemingly irrational relationship with a nemesis he’s never met — could also play alongside One Hour Photo in a double-feature at the New Beverly or Varsity Grande. Is Oswalt on the verge of crossing over into meatier and/or more heartrending dramatic fare? I caught up with the affable multi-hyphenate recently at a Los Angeles hotel, and he talked about his work on Big Fan, honing his comedic instincts, and why my theory about guys may be misguided. The conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: Since it seems on a certain level an unlikely fit with you, how did Big Fan first come your way?

Patton Oswalt: Robert approached me and gave me the script to read, and I liked it. And the fact that he had the confidence in me to do it gave me the confidence to do it. But I was also very excited because it’s the kind of movie that I love, and the kind that used to get made a lot more often in the early 1970s. I love those kinds of movies — like Fat City and The King of Marvin Gardens — so to get to do something like this was a big deal for me.

BS: Is there a truth to the whole “tears-behind-the-clown” tag comedians get saddled with?

PO: Somewhat, but I think that comedians are also just like anyone else — we’re sad, we’re happy, we’re angry, we’re content. “The reason he succeeded in law is because he’s sad?” Well, no. We contain multitudes.

BS: George Will once wrote about sports being a cultural unifier. Are you a sports fan in general, or is there one that sticks out for you?

PO: Never followed sports, sorry.

BS: Really? I have this theory about guys: they can not drink at all, or they can not follow sports, but they can’t do both, or other guys on a certain level distrust him.

PO: I don’t know about that. I enjoy drinking, but I know friends who don’t follow sports or drink, and they’re perfectly fine. So I’ve never thought of it that way. I think that’s way too sweaty a generalization, sorry.

BS: My theory crumbles down around me, then. Maybe that only applies to less enlightened folks. What about Robert, then — did he talk about what fandom meant to him?

PO: I think it’s based on his imagination about these people that call into these shows. You get this two-minute glimpse into people’s lives, and he must have thought how empty and desperate it is, or does it just seem that way to other people? Are they actually content and happy? I actually think this guy’s fandom is pretty extreme, just not to him. He doesn’t judge it, or see anything wrong with it, so the only time he gets irritated is when people try to compare him to life, but he’s rejected life, so why are they comparing him? That’s what frustrates him a little bit.

BS: Were you familiar at all with this whole AM subculture out there?

PO: The only research I did was to hang out in Staten Island a lot and look at parallels to that kind of obsession in my life, or the lives of my friends — like with politics or movies. I was more interested in the fuel that drives it. Same spark, different fuel, you know? I was more interested in trying to be in tune with the general of it than the specifics, so I never listened to any sports radio or anything.

BS: You’ve missed out, I tell you, because it’s fascinating. …Most especially after losses, the Dodgers and Lakers post-game radio shows have their own entertainment value. So you wrote for MadTV for many years; doing more performing, is that muscle something you still exercise regularly, or only when the urge strikes?

PO: I still write. I like to do all three — write, do stand-up and act. They all interest me, so I’ve stoppped thinking of it in terms of career phases, like, “Well, that’s over, now I’m acting.” What it really comes down to is I want the money and the anecdotes, so it’s got to be something interesting to me and it has to pay. Stories and memories are currency to me.

BS: You did some writing for the stand-up material in Funny People, and Judd Apatow was effusive in his praise of you.

PO: Really? I’m so excited about that guy’s career, just as a film buff. …As exotic as the subject matter may seem to some people, he always ties it back to how it effects people, he makes it so universal. I haven’t seen that in a filmmaker in a while. There seems to be this new crop of guys, like David Gordon Green and the guy who made Man Push Cart and Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani), and then Kathryn Bigelow always — we’ve been in such a rut of special effects and blood ballets that now we’re getting back to the idea of, “Hey, what happens when you shoot a human face when something is happening to it?” There’s something so beautiful about that.

BS: What was it like crafting material for fictionalized characters, essentially slipping on other voices?

PO: Well, it was funny, because depending on where the character was in the movie — someone like Seth Rogen’s character, who early in the movie was a very inept comedian — you could kind of go with the first joke that came to mind, which is what beginning comedians do, they don’t dig deep. And then as the movie progressed I could flex those muscles more. But it was kind of nostalgic for me to go, “Oh yeah, when I was starting out I would go with the very first joke that popped into your head and that was the routine.”

BS: How long, then, when you write for stand-up, does it take for a new routine to take shape?

PO: It’s different, man, because I don’t write before I go on stage. I just go on stage over and over again until I hone the thing down. It changes every time. Sometimes I get it pretty early on, sometimes it takes a few times. Sometimes I do something that doesn’t work, I put it away and bring it back later, and it goes off like a rocket. So my technique is to just go on stage over and over again until I get it where I want it. That’s my only technique.

BS: So is it built, at least very loosely, around certain themes or ideas?

PO: I don’t have set themes or ideas, it’s just based on whatever is affecting me. And I don’t know what that’s going to be anymo
re. They’re coming in fast and furious. Everything in your life is going to change your comedic point-of-view — living your life, getting older. So I just accept everything, without being judgmental about what’s coming in, and looking at it from new angles.

BS: Was a comedic outlook on life something that formed early, and/or came naturally for you?

PO: Yeah, I had a really good childhood. My parents were great and we saw a lot of humor in things, and that became a much better way to accept life for me than pessimism or fear. The people around me that had a sense of humor seemed to be getting more out of life than the people who took things so seriously. And I wanted more out of life so I went with the comedic route.

BS: There you go. Back to Big Fan, what was Robert like as a director, because I don’t know that, unless people were told, they would maybe put together that this was also the guy who wrote The Wrestler and also used to edit The Onion.

PO: Well, he had so many other things on his mind, like the money and locations, that he was a great director because he didn’t have time to talk to me, so we were all allowed to breathe and develop our characters. But I think that he wanted that anyway, that he doesn’t want to bother you with (affecting a whiny voice), “This is what I think.” So he let everyone figure out their own thing, and he trusted everyone. He cast exactly who he wanted, and he got what he wanted.

BS: There’s such a great specificity of place to the film.

PO: That was him and (cinematographer) Michael Simmonds really looking around Staten Island and shooting the hell out of it. The bleakness was beautiful, and they really captured that.

BS: Back to the touring life of a comedian — what were the salad years like?

PO: Oh, I would do almost 200 shows a year at one point, not just on the road but also in town — you’d just go up every night. I don’t have a chance to go up as much, but when I do I have the same circle of friends that I think are all funnier than me, that I aspire to — which is good, because it keeps me working hard, rather than thinking that I’m the funniest guy in the room. Maybe I just subconsciously didn’t let certain aspects of the salad days end, so they’re still with me, which is good.

BS: You seem like a pretty film savvy guy. What kind of movies do you most enjoy watching?

PO: Anything good. I’ve moved beyond genres. So to me a documentary like The September Issue or Not Quite Hollywood is just as valid to me as The Hurt Locker or Crank 2 or The Hangover or In the Loop. As long as it’s good, that’s what I like. Fuck, is [In the Loop] great! I was like a starving man when that came out… then I saw it, (and was) so happy.

An old-ish (well, a couple months) print interview/profile I did with Aaron Paul, of Breaking Bad and The Last House on the Left, finally sees the light of day online, perhaps unnerving Paul’s handlers, because he admits he’s not a leading man. Also, he doesn’t come right out and admit to trying crystal meth (blame my lack of Hardball-style follow-up), but read between the lines.

Over on LA Examiner.com, Marvin Miranda has an excellent interview with Enzo Castellari, the director of the original (correctly spelled) Inglorious Bastards, in which the filmmaker talks about exploitation flicks of years gone by, his cameo in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, his own new movie and more.

For his first long-form return to the documentary format since the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim cranked his amp to 11 and convened a real-life guitar hero summit. It Might Get Loud brings together Jimmy Page, Jack White and the Edge, letting the ax men tell stories of their bands, songs and upbringings. I met up with Guggenheim last month at the Beverly Hills Hotel to talk about his film, the beautiful mystery of music, and the perils of the Guitar Hero franchise, and how it’s seemingly weirdly commodified the creative/expressive experience for a generation of kids. For the Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Over on LA Examiner.com, Marvin Miranda has up an excellent interview with Mark Hartley, the director of Not Quite Hollywood, in which he talks about using his interview with Quentin Tarantino to help get the movie made, coining the term “Ozploitation,” and more.

In a long and varied career studded with outrageous characters, Johnny Depp has played a puppet, a a pirate, a a poet, a pauper, a pawn and a (drug) king. So it stands to reason that, after dabbling in gangsterism in 1997’s excellent Donnie Brasco, as an undercover FBI agent infiltrating the New York Mafia, he’d finally go full hoodlum at some point. That’s the case with Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, in which Depp stars as charismatic gangster John Dillinger, a 1930s-era bank robber whose daring antics deeply embarrassed a young J. Edgar Hoover, and ironically helped shape federal law enforcement procedure for decades to come. Last week, Depp answered questions about the film — and, inevitably, some of his other high-profile projects — at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. Excerpts follow, below.

Question: Your costar, Christian Bale, said he responded positively to his first experience with shooting in digital. What are your feelings about digital cinema?

Johnny Depp: It’s definitely got its advantages, chiefly among them the idea that you can keep rolling for 52 minutes. It’s really cheap, I think roughly a grand for a 52-minute tape. But there are disadvantages, too. Me, I like the texture of crude, grimy cinema. I sort of prefer that.

Q: What do you make of Dillinger’s chivalrous side?

JD: I think he was just not unlike any other sort of Southern gentleman, in a way. The fact is that he made a relatively grave error in his youth in a fit of drunken ignorance — and I certainly remember a few of those — and got sent to prison for 10 years, where they dropped a ball-and-chain on him. Coming out of prison in 1933, from about 1923, suddenly the world was Technicolor — women were wearing tight clothes and skirts, it was a whole new world. So I think that there was that Southern gentleman in there, but also the almost supreme existentialist, who decided that this day and every day is mine.

Q: You’ve talked in the past about an affinity for quirky characters. Is John Dillinger quote-unquote normal?

JD: I think they’re all normal, (the characters I play). But with saying that, I think most people are pretty weird when you get right down to it. I’d say Dillinger is one of the more normal guys (I’ve played), in that he wasn’t much more than an Indiana farmboy who stepped in a pile of something unpleasant, ended up prison where he essentially was in criminal school for 10 years, and that was his college education. He became very good at what he learned. The fact that this guy became that sort of mythic Robin Hood figure is just because he really took the ball and ran with it. That’s pretty normal to me. Most people run with it when they get the ball.

Q: Did you watch and/or consciously avoid other portrayals of John Dillinger?

JD: There was no way not to remember Warren Oates as John Dillinger. I remember seeing that movie when I was a kid and just loving it. But I did stay away from it in regards to starting this film, because I didn’t want to accidentally steal anything from the guy, because he was so good. The one thing that stayed in my mind from the (1973) Oates version directed by John Milius was that I felt like at the time they did it there was a certain amount of colors available on that palette that they put on the canvas, and I feel like now with the new information that came out with regards to Dillinger’s personal life there were a few more colors available.

Q: How do you think the character will resonate now? Do you think people will start robbing banks?

JD: I don’t know if I’d go that far. People are different than they were back then. In 1933 there was some degree of innocence left, and today on some level we’ve really hit the digital wall, a kind of wall where everything is available if you can make your way to it. So I think people are radically different than John Dillinger, and I don’t know that you could have a similar type of folk hero as today. Maybe Subcomandante Marcos down in Chiapas, who’s trying to protect the Indians in Mexico — he might be the closest thing we can have to that, in terms of innocence and purity. Because in 1933, the banks were clearly the enemy, they foreclosed on homes and were taking people’s lives away from them. Although not that it’s all that different now. Here we are teetering on a similar kind of recession/depression, and… (pause) well, the banks are still the enemy, I guess you’re right. I don’t know, if someone starts robbing banks, as long as no one gets hurt… I may start robbing 7-Elevens.

Q: In Public Enemies, Dillinger is portrayed as practiced and cautious most of the time, but he also exhibits some psychotic or at least curious behavior, as when he walks into the police station. What did you make of his actual psyche?

JD: He actually did walk through what was called the Dillinger squad room in Chicago. He pulled his car up out front, walked into the headquarters all by himself and wandered through all these cops, even though his photograph was everywhere. That’s all true. He had an enormous amount of, for lack of a better word, chutzpah, you know? He had an incredible confidence. One of the things that I admire about him is… to have gotten so far and become an existentialist hero. Every day was his last, he’d made peace with that, he was fine with that: “Yesterday doesn’t exist, I’ll just keep moving forward.” There’s something admirable about that.

Q: Do you think Dillinger felt he was untouchable?

JD: I think he felt the clock was ticking. When you’re on an adrenaline high, you may feel like no one can get me. But I don’t think he was dumb. To really feel like he was completely untouchable would require a certain amount of ignorance. I think he just felt like, “I got that one, what happens next?”

Q: Dillinger also has some traits in common with an actor, in that he thrives in improvisation, and seems to yearn for immortality in people’s memories — did any of those parallels strike you while filming?

JD: Well, as I was saying before, if someone hands you the ball, depending on where you’ve been in your life — whether you’ve worked in sewers or pumped gas or worked in construction — you run with it, as far as they’ll let you. And that’s all I’ve been doing for 25 years, really. John Dillinger getting out of prison after 10 years is just like getting handed the ball, and I hate the idea of [people talking about] him manipulating the media, because I don’t think that he did. I think he just understood that there was a game to be played, and because of his savvy and the stuff he’d learned while inside, he learned how to play the game well. So there are some parallels. I also think Dillinger had somewhat of a semi-fascination with Hollywood and movies, and the idea of his legend and leaving his mark. I think most people feel like that.

Q: A lot of John and Billie’s relationship isn’t on the page, per se. What was it like working with Marion Cotillard, and establishing a quick rapport to sell the whirlwind passion of this relationship?

JD: Well, Marion’s simply great — she was there months before she even started shooting, just working. She went down to the Menominee Reservation and spent time with Billie Frechette’s family, and was deeply dedicated and worked so hard on her accent. I thought she was amazing, and perfect for the role. When you read about Dillinger and how he felt about that woman, they were oddly these uninvited, perfectly matched outsiders — her being half-French, half-Menominee Indian, and working as a hat-check girl in Chicago, him being this ex-con who’d never been able to keep a woman in his life, and had his mom die when he was little. When they met, it was absolute fireworks, and I honestly believe that Dillinger, had he not been sold out by Anna Sage, would have made one last hit and gone to South America and waited for her. I’m totally convinced of it.

Q: We’ve now seen the pictures of you as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. How was the movie?

JD: The Mad Hatter was awfully fun.
Doing something like John Dillinger — it’s a performance that is somewhat necessarily restrained because of the responsibility you have to that guy and his memory. The Mad Hatter was more like being fired out of a cannon. It was great fun, and it’s another one of those roles where I’m amazed I wasn’t fired. All I’ve seen is the bits and pieces, but Tim did a great job, and (the Mad Hatter) looks like exactly what I first thought he should look like.

Q: And what about The Lone Ranger and a fourth Pirates film?

JD: With The Lone Ranger we’re still in the super-early stages, so there are all kinds of possibilities, but I feel like I have some good ideas for the character that are interesting and haven’t been done all that much before. And with Pirates, call me a glutton. If we can get the screenplay right to Pirates 4… well, virtually no cinema is perfect. The first film had its own thing, and I suppose (parts) two and three had their own thing, and it got a little confusing here and there during the stories — not that I’ve seen the movies, but I hear tell. But for me, because I love the character so much, and enjoy playing him so much, and people seem to like it, if there’s an opportunity to try again, it’s like going up to bat — you want to get out there and try and see what you can do again. At this point what I’m trying to do is turn it into a Beckett play, let’s see how far we can take it. (laughs) Jack Sparrow could come out in some geisha clothing, we could really explore a lot of possibilities.

Q: Terry Gilliam has talked about remounting Don Quixote. Any interest there?

JD: We’ve talked about it. I love Terry and would do virtually anything the guy wants to do. The thing with Quixote is, my dance card is pretty nutty for the next couple years, so I’d hate to put him in a position, or ask him to be in a position, to wait for me. That would be wrong. But also, in a way, I feel like we went there and tried something and whatever it was, the elements and all the things that got up underneath us, were there and documented well in the film Lost in La Mancha. So I don’t know if it’s right to go back there.

Q: Terry Gilliam and Michael Mann both come across as very detail-oriented, but they do it in very different ways. How are they similar and/or different?

JD: Oh, boy, there’s almost no way to compare the two. The only thing you can say about Terry and Michael’s similarities comes in the form of their drive, or passion — an intense scratching out of the truth of the moment. But they’re very, very different. Terry giggles a lot.

Q: Dillinger is something of the first rock star, was he not?

JD: There was definitely an element of the common man standing up against the establishment and saying, “Oh no, I’ve had it up to here, and so now I’m going to get something back, whatever the cost.” And as far as the comparisons to Dillinger being the Robin Hood of the time, there is some truth to it — he did literally see farmers in the bank with their life savings, and hand it back to them, saying, “I don’t want your money, I’ve come for the bank’s money.” That’s not to say he was a saint, but he stood up against authority. At the time, certainly the government and J. Edgar Hoover were, at best, a bit slimy. So who were the criminals, really?

Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge has up a nice interview with Anil Kapoor, of Slumdog Millionaire, in which the 49-year-old actor-producer talks about his 10-episode arc on the eighth season of Fox’s 24, the English language version of his 2007 production Gandhi, My Father, and what sort of changes he sees for the Indian film industry.

Filmmaker Kirby Dick caused quite a stir a few years back with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, his incendiary documentary about the secret inner workings, and often glaring double standards, of the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings classification system. Now he’s back with Outrage, a name-dropping indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted homosexual politicians with appalling gay rights voting records, and the media’s complicity in blanching at reporting on the matter. I recently had the chance to chat with Dick by phone; the conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: To your mind, why is the mainstream media squeamish about exploring potential disconnects between public and private personae?

Kirby Dick (below): Actually, I think they’re afraid to write about
issues that deal with gay sexuality. I think they’re concerned with
their readership — which [is presumably] mostly straight, with maybe
some fundamentalists — finding it offensive, or just uncomfortable. Now,
that’s kind of homophobia in my mind. I don’t think the individual
reporters are homophobic, but the policy breeds homophobia because as
Barney Frank has said, they’ll write everything about his personal
life, but they won’t write the fact that he’s gay. What is the message
that gets out? That there’s something wrong with being gay. That
message gets disseminated, and instills homophobia. And I think there’s
another reason. In terms of reporting on the
hypocrisy of specific politicians, these news outlets are reluctant to
do so because they’re often owned by major corporations that have a lot of
business, if you will, running through Congress. So these members of
Congress might be voting on legislation that has to do with things that
might very much effect these corporations’ bottom lines. And so they
just see no upside in telling the truth or doing this sort of
reporting, because they’re just going to anger these politicians.

BS: Is it perhaps also an issue that hypocrisy is just a relatively nuanced “sell” in a soundbite-driven media age?

KD: I think hypocrisy is often too tough of a sell, but that’s
no reason not to do it. I think you’re right; people would like to
gloss over the more complex issues, of which this is certainly one. In
some ways it’s uncomfortable to write about these things, but that’s
the job of the press.

BS: What was the genesis of the idea for this film — was it the 2004 election?

KD: Well, it was actually from August, 2006. I was in Washington, D.C. promoting This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which was a story I knew about primarily because I was in the film business. So in D.C. I said, OK, there’s probably a number of stories that people inside the Beltway know would make great subjects for a documentary, and I started talking with folks and very quickly learned about these closeted politicians, many of whom were voting anti-gay. And again, when I realized that this wasn’t being covered in the mainstream media, I thought it was the perfect opportunity.

BS: What were your feelings, then, about the 2004 presidential election, and specifically all these marriage-protection constitutional ballot measures, which didn’t seem to have a lot of feeling behind them, but instead seemed designed almost solely for political gain?

KD: In some ways it makes it worse. The fact is, here’s George W. Bush, who has gay friends and gay staff, who by all accounts of people we’ve talked to who’ve interacted with him personally is not homophobic, and yet he decides to pass an amendment that restricts the rights of millions of American citizens solely to maintain power and be elected again. That is one of the most cynical and crass uses of the legislative process ever.

BS: I expected its tough-minded investigative nature, which is considerable, but I was surprised a bit by the strength of Outage‘s emotional component, and in particular the powerfully articulated reflections of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. How tough of an interview get was he, and did you know or suspect going in that he was going to have some of the heartrending insights that he did?

KD: You’re right, he was incredibly eloquent. It took some time to get him, but we were able to. This is what happens when someone comes out of the closet; they have a story to tell about the anguish of being in the closet, they have a story to tell about how great it is to be out of the closet, and I think they want that story shared not only with the public, but with politicians and young people going into politics. It’s kind of a cautionary tale — don’t make the same mistake I did, I’m much happier now, I wish I was out from the very beginning. So for both (former Arizona Congressman) Jim Kolbe and Jim McGreevey, it is a very personal and emotional story, even still, and you can tell in the way that they talk about it.

BS: There’s a lot of talk, given the beatdowns that they have suffered in the last two election cycles, about more inclusive language and even issue stances within the Republican party, but so far there doesn’t seem to be a gene for shamed silence, let alone much honest introspection. Do you think there will be an intra-party come-to-Jesus, for lack of a better phrase, with regards to the issue of gay marriage?

KD: I would hope so, and I think you’re seeing that debate. I don’t think it’s by any means definite. Reactionary elements in the political arena will always use this technique of demonizing the minority, particularly if there’s some sort of morality or health issue that they can pull into it. This will come up again, so I don’t think we should be surprised to see if in 20 or 30 years down the road there isn’t another attack on the rights of gays and lesbians. Right now things are trending positively, but let’s see what happens with the Supreme Court decision on the case in California. I’d heard that before Iowa legalized same-sex marriage, they were almost certainly going to vote to uphold Proposition 8, but now I think they’re looking at the situation and realizing how the trend is going, and realizing maybe that if they vote in support of Proposition 8, they may be the last major court in this country to support this kind of bigotry. Hopefully they’ll realize that it’s the right thing to do, and the wrong thing in terms of their legacy. But it’s a very important decision, and I really hope they make the right one.

BS: What do you make of, in the wake of [Supreme Court Justice David] Souter’s recently announced exit, the Republicans’ attack on the word empathetic… that it’s coded language that Obama is using to prick the ears of liberal foot soldiers and activists? What of the notion, as I believe Laura Ingraham opined, that empathy is a singularly ridiculous, loopy and disqualifying quality to aspire to have in a judge?

KD: Yeah, that’s absurd. I think Republicans are struggling, and still operating in the arena of counter-attack, in that I think they’ve been so trained, certainly since Newt Gingrich in 1994, their modus operandi is to just hit, and it’s hard for them to get out of that. I think they’re continuously looking for anything that they can mount a charge on, and somehow damage the president. They were very successful with the whole impeachment, and this is what the whole far right-wing of the Republican party has grown up with, this strategy of [destruction], and so I think that’s what you’re seeing, a knee-jerk reaction to strike even if there’s no logic to it.

BS: The film touches on something I found interesting — the so-called “nine families,” and The Heritage Foundation, which I was familiar with in name, but not inception. I hold no illusions that a lot of what is talked about in politics is insincere; you’re trying to vote-wrangle, looking for a wedge issue that you can push and exploit, so we pass through entire administrations where nothing happens on truly pressing matters like Social Security, fuel efficiency, energy or global warming. But was there more that you learned about the genesis of gay marriage as a political issue?

KD: Well, I think there was and are two strands of the Republican party over the last several decades, and one is a more fundamentalist and religious, and one is more economically-oriented. So these nine families were looking for a way to platform capitalism, particularly after the counter-culture movement of the 1960s. And for a long time, they didn’t see any benefit in aligning themselves with the fundamentalist movement, which they didn’t seem to share many interests with. But I think a calculation was made in the late 1980s and particularly early ’90s that the issue of gay marriage could be used to get Republicans elected who [would] then support this pro-capitalist agenda. That’s related to George Bush’s decision in many ways. The constituency and the power behind him really didn’t care about gay marriage. In fact there’s a lot of revelation that they viewed fundamentalists as kooks. But they saw that they could use them. Again, it’s incredibly cynical, because it’s one thing to make a political calculation, it’s another thing to demonize American citizens in order to do so.

BS: Given t
he many subjects, from Larry Craig (above) to Charlie Crist, what was the process of winnowing down Outrage like, and was Mike Rogers, the blogger at the heart of the movie, someone you latched onto at the beginning of production?

KD: Certainly, he was one of the major forces in the second or third wave of outing. What was happening in 2004, with this incredible build-up of anti-gay hysteria leading to the Federal Marriage Amendment, was that a lot of people, paricularly gays and lesbians, both Republicans and Democrats, were working to derail it behind the scenes. But because D.C. is such a closed town, people weren’t coming out and operating in the public arena, and that’s when Mike Rogers stepped out and said, “Look, there’s a lot of closeted gays and lesbians who are supporting this, and I’m going to expose this hypocrisy publicly.” And he tapped into a great deal of anger across the country, got these tips, particularly around Ed Shrock and Larry Craig. So certainly that was extremely important for us to show.

BS: I think I was most struck by some of the thoughts of Rich Tafel, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, when he talked about friends and colleagues who embraced “the strength and stamina” required to stay in the closet. Was that something you encountered in your interviews — this willful pride at leading secret lives?

KD: In particular with closeted staffers; we just couldn’t get people to speak. We were actually very surprised, but we couldn’t. That statement by Rich Tafel is one of the most fascinating things in the film. When I first heard it it seemed absurd, but the more I thought about it, it made sense. These people have made the decision to put their political ambition ahead of anything in their personal life, and you what? It probably works.

BS: Kirby, thanks for your time. Wrapping up, is there anything else definitively on tap?

KD: No, I’m working on another closet, so to speak, but I can’t really talk about it yet because I don’t want them to know that I’m coming their direction.

Just as Matteo Garrone‘s lauded Gomorrah provided an aerial snapshot of Italian power, crime and political corruption, so too does Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo , the winner of the Jury Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The difference is a matter of focus. Whereas Garrone’s sprawling mob drama ensemble took a somewhat impressionistic approach, Il Divo stars Toni Servillo (also a bit player in Gomorrah, incidentally) as seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a man whose almost otherworldly ability to hold onto power despite all sorts of nasty rumors and criminal charges (including a murder rap) made him one of the most fascinating political figures, Italian or otherwise, of the last half century.

Il Divo has already rung up around $11 million abroad, including an impressive $8.5 million in its native Italy, and if its Stateside commercial prospects, where it opens in limited release this week via Music Box Films, seem relatively low-burning, the movie is at least interesting for the manner in which it seemingly indicates a burgeoning desire on the part of foreign filmmakers to further explore the defining, controversial sociopolitical players of their day and age.

“Andreotti is very
mysterious man, which is why I wanted to make the film,” says Sorrentino, who was not yet 10 years old when the politician was elected to the first of his seven terms as Prime Minister. “He’s always
been very popular, because in addition to being a politician, he’s also
been a very popular writer, and he’s been on television a lot. Also, I’m very drawn to characters that are alone or affected by solitude, and even though Andreotti is constantly surrounded by other people, there’s a very deep sense of solitude in his character, which leads to this interesting sense of melancholy.”

Melancholic, yes, but also devisive, and somewhat unknowable. In fact, the story goes, ask any 10 people about Andreotti, and you’re llikely to have a neatly split opinion on the man, complete with all sorts of fractured, at-odds anecdotes. To capture that sense of swirling mystery — some paint Andreotti as the ultimate quiet, back-room broker, a sort of forerunner to Dick Cheney, others view him as a corruptible pawn in larger power games — Sorrentino (above, setting a low-angle shot) settled upon a lively style seemingly out of step with the staid subject matter of political ascension and shell games.

“Of course we [knew it was] going to be a devisive
film, because Andreotti is a figure that is either loved or hated,” says Sorrentino with the aide of a translator. “Andreotti is a man that’s full of irony; this is something that
comes forward often in many of his jokes. But it had to be expressed in
a way that went beyond just the spoken word, and that’s what led to the
decisions with certain song selections, and the way the film was
framed. I choose the music as I write the script, because I need the
music in order to be able to write the script.”

Then there was the director’s choice for Andreotti — longtime friend and collaborator Servino, a multi-hyphenate threat in his own right who perfectly captures Andreotti’s hounddog dourness and slouch, the one part of the public record with respect to Andreotti that brings no argument or dissension. “I
told Servino to become a machine, or a robot, which was a very quick
way of giving him direction for the part,” recalls Sorrentino. “He’s one of the most
extraordinary actors of his generation, so it
was absolutely unthinkable that he wouldn’t play the part.”

Given the rebuke of overt religious political grandstanding that American voters delivered unto the Republican party in the last two election cycles, an interesting undercurrent of Il Divo is found in the masonic secrecy of Andreotti’s supporters in the Italian Christian Democrat party, and the manner in which they pull levers of power. How does this intersect with Andreotti’s own faith? Is his worldview shaped by it, or is it a cynical alliance of convenience? Even Sorrentino, after all sorts of meticulous research, isn’t sure. “The question of the sincerity of his faith is something that no one will ever know, it’s a completely private issue,” he says. “However, the way he carries and conducts himself is in fact very much tied to the culture of the church, which is a much different thing than the issue of faith. This is a very complicated issue, and one that’s changed a lot recently. Now, the great majority of the population doesn’t really feel that there’s an honest and sincere role of the church in the execution of politics.”

For more on Il Divo, click here.

Over at Box Office, Amy Nicholson lets Terminator Salvation‘s McG defend his life and work, asks him about potential robot domination, and refreshingly doesn’t ask about Christian Bale’s epic screamdown of cinematographer Shane Hurlbut. It is amusing, though, when McG name-checks Children of Men, and says, “I don’t like cutting as a false sense of action. I think that that is a bluff, and I don’t like rewarding filmmakers who choose to go down that road.”

Meanwhile, over at The 213, Telly Davidson entertainingly recaps the recent Dollhouse panel in Los Angeles, part of the Paley Center for Media’s 26th annual festival salute to TV past and present, and gives us a reason to re-link something having to do with Eliza Dushku, which is never a bad thing.

Rubber-faced Trevor Moore is thus far best known as part of the New York-bred The Whitest Kids U Know, a comedy collective that got snapped up for their own show by IFC. That point of reference could be changing, though. Along with fellow “Whitest Kid” Zach Cregger, Moore recently made the leap to feature films as a writer-director-star of Miss March, about a virginal guy who wakes up from a four-year coma to discover
his high school girlfriend is now a Playmate. With his hornball friend
(played by Moore) urging him to finally partake of carnal knowledge,
road trip shenanigans ensue as the pair scheme to crash a party at the Playboy Mansion. I caught up with Moore recently, to talk
prosthetic genitals, explaining slang to Hugh Hefner and the
gamesmanship involved in going Greyhound. An excerpted Q&A from the conversation is available over at H Magazine.

As the floppy-armed kid at the center of the fanciful and inventive Son of Rambow, young Bill Milner made a solid impression, conveying the electric charge of a surging imagination. In his latest film, Is Anybody There?, Milner stars opposite Michael Caine‘s curmudgeonly retired magician as Edward, a kid obsessed with what happens to the patrons of his parents’ nursing home when they pass on. I recently spoke by phone with Milner; the conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: You hadn’t acted before Son of Rambow — how did that come to be?

Bill Milner:
I never said, “I want to be an actor, that’s what I want to do with my
life.” I’d always planned on going to college and living normally, I
guess, but when the opportunity came up it was mad. I didn’t really
know what to expect, but now I’ve definitely been introduced to the
film industry, and I really like it.

BS: Like Son of Rambow, your new film is a period piece, but it’s very different in how it intersects and interacts with its period. Was that interesting to you?

BM: Yeah, David (Morrissey) had the bad haircuit. I think one of the reasons you don’t really notice that the movie is a period piece is because instead of it being about growing up in the 1980s, it’s more about remembering everyone’s life, in the past. So for most of it, it’s a lot about how the residents of the old people’s home lived. Unlike Son of Rambow, it’s more about death and having to learn to let go rather than living and growing up and having fun.

BS: There are actually some intriguing parallels to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, particularly as it relates to the notion of growing up in a nursing home, and the wisdom and knowledge that can be gleaned from older people. In real life, have you had the opportunity and blessing to spend a lot of time with your grandparents, or other older folks?

BM: I never met either of my grandfathers, but during the filming I did understand the idea of Alzheimer’s and going senile. But now, after seeing the movie, I realize it even more, because I have a grandmother that’s going a bit senile, and I think it’s a really important message to get across, what that does. So the movie is approaching a kid’s view on an issue in life in a really different way, which I like.

BS: What sort of hobbies do you have?

BM: Basketball is my favorite sport, and I also like animating a bit. I just recently started that, like stop-motion animation, and I’m really enjoying it. Now that I’ve been introduced to it, I always want to be involved in the film industry.

BS: How did that introduction come to be?

BM: My uncle writes for television. Other than that I really didn’t know much about the film industry. But from straightaway I was interested in not just acting, but other areas too — that’s what’s so great about it, there are so many different parts of the film industry, and all of them are so interesting and fun to explore.

BS: A lot of times, with films that have kids as central characters directors will talk about finding someone who’s just believeable for the role. For you, is there a lot of process, or work on character details, or is it more just about learning about the whole story and how your character fits into it?

BM: I think especially with this script that it was so good that you could really learn a lot from it — there was a lot about the character and what he’d been through, just by reading it. With help from the director, it was very easy to understand how the character was feeling, and the emotions he was going through.

BS: Why do you think Edward is so interested in ghosts, and the paranormal?

BM: Just because that’s what he’s grown up with. Instead of normal kids, playing sports or drawing pictures, he’s used to the morbid side of life. Say if you’re dad was a footballer, you’d be more interested in football; I think he’s interested in it because of the way his parents have brought him up. Most kids only encounter death when they’re 10 or so, or maybe later than that — they still don’t have much knowledge about what happens. But from a young age Edward has been pushed into this lifestyle, and so it’s his curiosity.

BS: Is Anybody There? also features a good bit of magic — did you pick up any fun tricks?

BM: I thought it was great, because loads of kids buy the magic sets and read the books, and get then two pages in and get bored, or they don’t seem to work, or they break. But I think learning these tricks was brilliant. I learned a lot. The disappearing card trick was my favorite; I like it because it’s so simple, and yet effective. Surprisingly, it didn’t take much practice. They said because I was young and still have nimble fingers that I handled it quite easily.

BS: He plays quite a gruff character in the film, but what was Michael Caine like on set, just talking to and hanging out with?

BM: It was quite nerve-racking finding out that you might be working with such a great actor, but when you actually meet him he’s so normal that you get on with him really well. He’s such a natural actor that I always felt really comfortable in his presence.

BS: Did you notice any major differences between [directors] Garth Jennings and John Crowley?

BM: They’re both brilliant directors. I think from Garth’s point-of-view, Son of Rambow was about kids being introduced to new experiences and growing up, and I am a kid growing up, and that was what we were going through at those very moments, so I think he taught us to go wild, and he made us feel really natural. I think John… instead of telling you what to do, he guides you without you really knowing. If there’s an emotional scene to do he’ll talk with you in the corner for just a moment. He understands the script really well and talks you through it. I think going over emotional scenes more than once is tough, and going over them more than four times is just hell. So I do like to know that when we’re about to shoot, you’re really into it, and know exactly what we’re going to do, because if you’re not too sure and you get something wrong it can be hard to go again. But being sad isn’t necessarily the hardest thing to do in acting. It might seem easier to look happy or excited, but it might not be easier to show that on screen, and actually feel that feeling.

BS: Is acting something you’d like to stick with as a career?

BM: In general the film industry is very fun, and I think being involved in any way with that would be great, really.