I chatted with Kate Beckinsale via phone a couple weeks back, in advance of the release of Rod Lurie’s journo-drama Nothing But the Truth, and there was plenty that didn’t make it into the Q&A for New York Magazine. More excerpts from the conversation, below:

Brent Simon: Critics have been very complimentary of your performances in Snow Angels and Nothing But the Truth. Do you think these two movies have somewhat changed people’s perceptions of you?

Kate Beckinsale: Oh, I have no idea. I try not to think about people’s perceptions, or I’ll go mad. The thing is, for me, my career has absolutely reflected what age my daughter has been, and whether or not I’ve been a single parent at the time, that kind of thing. I suppose if you just look at it entirely from the point-of-view [of a filmography] it can look a bit schizophrenic, but it makes sense being the actual career of a woman with a child and all that. And now that my daughter is older, I do feel able to maybe make slightly more selfish choices. I’m not primarily governed by, “Does it shoot when her pre-school is in?” Things like that that were very much factors at one point.

BS: You obviously play a journalist of a slightly different breed in the film, but having now spent time in the proverbial set of other shoes, did you gain any special insight that helps with having to give so many interviews as an actress?

KB: No, not really. I think I feel pretty much the same as I did before, which is that I just try not to be too boring, and avoid saying the exact same thing every time. (laughs) I probably do feel much more empathetic to the person asking the questions. I’m used to being in the defensive position, and I realized that being in the attack position has its own pitfalls and fears that come along with it.

BS: I always say that if I had to give that many interviews I’d need to spend several days ramping up to it, talking incrementally more and more about myself.

KB: (laughs) Exactly — though I find most actors do that anyway, actually.

BS: Not surprisingly, since there is a whiff of political content, some people seem to view [Nothing But the Truth] through wildly different prisms. Do you think there’s any concrete statement at its core?

KB: I don’t think it necessarily has a political statement. I think what I really like about the movie, what most grabbed me when I was first reading it, is the character and the pressures that she’s facing. I was so caught up with the dilemma that she’s in, personally as well as in terms of her beliefs. I don’t see the movie as a polemic, in that I don’t think it’s answering questions. I think what’s great about it is that it’s asking them, and I would much rather see a movie that raises a question than tries to tell me what the absolute truth is. I think the fact that my character is flawed and makes mistakes, takes risks and has to make sacrifices and doesn’t necessarily always do the most honorable thing [means] she’s not set up as a Joan of Arc-type character. She’s a human being with flaws who finds herself in this incredible situation.

BS: You share a number of scenes with Matt Dillon, who cuts a slick, cool, quietly menacing figure as the film’s federal prosecutor. When you have antagonistic scenes like that, is there a separation or boundary that you want to maintain during filming, or is that not how you work?

KB: I’ve never thought like that, to be honest. On a film like this, which was a very short and tight schedule, Matt would be in for a couple days and then out again, so even if I’d wanted to get to know him intimately and instantly well, I wouldn’t have been able to. But I did like him. We got along and had some good laughs. I often find that you have fun with the “bad guy,” because when you get all your hostility and everything out with someone you don’t even know, it sort of makes you giggle a bit when you’re off set.

BS: Jumping back in time, was acting something you were always interested in — was there a recognizable performance instinct in adolescence?

KB: My parents were actors as well, so I think it’s one of those things where when you’re still in diapers people start asking you if you’re going to be an actor too, whereas they don’t tend to do that with doctors and postmen. So it was something I thought some about, but I was always very personally into it too, I was doing plays and going to the theater and movies. And I think when I was 16 — I’d go to Paris with a friend of mine every Easter, and we’d absolutely fill up on all the old French movies — that’s when I thought, or felt on my own, [that] I really wanted to do this.

At the fairly recent press day for The Wrestler, a red-haired-ish Evan Rachel Wood talked enthusiastically about prepping for her Broadway debut in the form of Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man. “Rehearsals start in June and we’re supposed to go up in October,” said Wood. “I don’t know who’s playing Peter Parker yet — I’m still trying to convince Jim Sturgess to do it. But it’s incredible. Julie Taymor is taking it to the next level, just like she did with The Lion King. When I heard she was doing it I thought, ‘What, why?’ And then she asked me to come in and do the workshop run-through of it, so I got to learn all the songs and kind of see it acted out, and it’s incredible. It’s going to be really amazing. They’re using a lot of new flying techniques and different things for Spider-Man, and Bono and the Edge did the music for it, and I think it’s some of their best work. I didn’t know how well they would do writing for a musical, but they did an awesome job.”

So from where does the Spider-Man stage story take its cues? “It takes stuff from the first and the second movie, but it’s more about
the original Spider-Man comic books and really where Spider-Man came
from,” explains Wood. Taymor “is taking it back to Greek mythology stuff, so it’s crazy. And there may be (an upside-down kiss) at the end. But Spider-Man never sings on stage in tights; he’s never there singing in the Spider-Man costume, only as Peter Parker. That was agreed upon, I know.”

It’s not just the phone connection for our interview — Kate Beckinsale speaks quite softly, perhaps a result of her prim-and-proper London
upbringing, and study of literature at Oxford University. No matter.
Beckinsale has two big-stick 2008 performances, the first in David
Gordon Green’s Snow Angels, from earlier in the year, and the second in
writer-director Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth, in which she plays a
reporter whose life — professional and personal alike — begins to
fray after she’s imprisoned for refusing to reveal a source in an
after-the-fact story about a drummed-up case for war. Just in advance
of the release of the latter, ripped-from-the-headlines film,
I spoke with Beckinsale about the challenges of not playing New York Times reporter Judith
Miller, how Lurie is like Martin Scorese, and how black leather made her famous. For the Q&A feature, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. For more on the method behind her
“schizophrenic” filmography and the insight she’s gained into the interview process after now having played a reporter, jump forward in time by clicking here.

Since it’s a known fact that certain Shared Darkness readers have a Bryan Greenberg crush, I thought I’d pass along this bon mot from the recent press day for Nobel Son, about the joys of working with Alan Rickman, even if it involves getting a bit physical:

“I was looking forward to torturing Alan Rickman for a
whole day, and I think he got a bit annoyed with me, because I kind of
one-upped him in the scene,” says Greenberg. “I had these files (in my hand), and in a wide shot I hit
him on the head with them and (director) Randall Miller said, ‘Oh I like that!’ And I saw this
look on Alan’s face like, ‘Oh great, now he has to do that all day.’ But it
was great to work with Alan, to see an actor who makes specific choices
and sticks by them. It’s kind of rare, actually. I’ve worked with a lot of actors
who kind of rest on their own laurels, and kind of get by on their own
charm and charisma and give up on the process, the work. But Alan is
really a big believer in the work and creation of character, and it’s
really inspiring as a young actor to be around something like that. You
learn a lot from a guy like that.”

After chasing around Shia LaBeouf in the $175 million-grossing techo-thriller Eagle Eye earlier this year, Rosario Dawson spends Seven Pounds with her pulse very much under control. Opposite Will Smith‘s tightly wound, curiously hermetic IRS agent, Ben Thomas, Dawson plays Emily Posa, a terminally ill young woman with a slew of past-due medical bills who sparks an unlikely connection with her auditor. In advance of the film’s release, I spoke with Dawson recently spoke about her own comic book series, her debut film Kids, and lying around post-coital with an awkward Will Smith. For the Q&A feature, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

I recently chatted to Marisa Tomei at a mid-week press day for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and if there’s probably something to reports of her on-set friction with Mickey Rourke (answers regarding him ranged from coolly polite to awkwardly short and incomplete) it doesn’t dint my appreciation of her naturalistic charms, both physically and, every bit as striking, inwardly. Excerpts from the roundtable interview follow below:

On personal curiosity, and how she initially came to acting: “That is one of the great things about acting — learning about different people, different subcultures, even different skills. I mean, who thought pole-dancing was going to be on my resume? But I think that a lot of it was survival skill. I was a really shy kid, and it was [a question of], ‘How do you get to a place where you can let your emotions out really safely?'”

On My Cousin Vinny, and how Joe Pesci’s advice sometimes stinks: “It was the first time I was on location, and only the second movie I’d ever done. I was kind of overwhelmed on that level. I was a grown-up, but still kind of homesick. And Joe (Pesci) and I are still friends, he’s always looked after me. He’s always telling me when I suck and when I don’t. He told me I was an idiot for wanting to do this movie, and then he called me and said, ‘I guess you weren’t so stupid after all!’ But he’s always telling me the truth, and he’s such a good, good friend.”

On what she looks for in potential film roles: “I want to make movies with people who really, really care. And I think that I tend to respond more thematically than anything else. With this movie, it was really talking about changes of life, or facing getting older, or performers’ identity versus quote-unquote real people’s identity. I thought that those were interesting things to think about. In this case I could relate [to them more directly], yes, but it’s more is [a script] interesting, and what are the ideas about. I guess it’s all a matter of that [aforementioned] curiosity, really.”

On Darren Aronofsky: “He likes to talk, he likes to understand everything, and I appreciate that, and know where it’s coming from — it’s coming from really caring and wanting to support actors as much as he can. But sometimes I had to explain that it’s better for me not to articulate things, that it’s going to be detrimental to what he wants and what we all want, which is a natural feeling. But he’s right there, and tries to support you in every way he can, whether it’s bringing you little juices to make sure you don’t catch a cold and stay healthy to being available to talk about anything, if you want to. He totally notices everything — any little detail about your hair or your nail polish. I wonder what he’s like as a husband.”

Stephen Daldry has only made two feature films, but he’s overseen four Oscar-nominated performances, and netted himself two Best Director Academy Award nominations to boot. His third movie, The Reader, seems to stand a solid chance of continuing those trends. Based on Bernhard Schlink’s acclaimed novel, the film centers on a 15-year-old, Michael Berg (David Kross), who in post-World War II Germany enters into a sexual relationship with a woman twice his age, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), reading her plays and literature before their steamy afternoon clinches. Their relationship dissipates, but years later, as a law student, Michael re-encounters his former lover as a defendant in a war crimes trial. Just in advance of his buzz-heavy film’s release, I spoke with Daldry about back-loading The Reader‘s intimate scenes, and the clashes between Harvey Weinstein and producer Scott Rudin that eventually led to the latter taking his name off the project. For the full Q&A chat, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Eliza Dushku has a piercing laugh that comes across as a burst of unadulterated personality, emanating from her core. It’s in no small part that sense of ineffable genuineness — and, OK, those eyes — that helped make Faith Lehane, her character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, a fan favorite. Dushku will be back on the small screen in short order; she’s paired up with her Buffy boss Joss Whedon for the lead role in the sci-fi series Dollhouse, set to bow as a mid-season replacement on Fox in February. In the meantime, in Randall Miller’s genre knuckleball Nobel Son, Dushku plays the fetchingly named City Hall, an artistically inclined gal who spells trouble for Bryan Greenberg’s Ph.D. student after he becomes involved in a thorny kidnapping plot in the wake of his father receiving the Nobel Prize. Just in advance of the ensemble film’s release, Dushku spoke about Dollhouse, taking a knife to her Nobel Son audition, and what sort of Christmas gifts might comprise her seasonal giving. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Steven Seagal continues to find work in straight-to-video productions wherein bad guys standing near him fling themselves through plate-glass windows, while fellow late ’80s/early ’90s throat-puncher Jean-Claude Van Damme looks to reinvent himself in the recently released JCVD. It’s Jason Statham, though, who has inherited their go-to status as the gruffly charismatic star of various gritty, hand-to-hand-combat action flicks, cracking skulls in movies like Crank (and its impending sequel), Chaos, War and Death Race. His latest film is Transporter 3, in which he reprises his role as Frank Martin, a high-end, black-market courier who gets mixed up in various no-good situations. Sharply dressed in just the sort of fancy-man duds that inspire thoughts of an action scene breaking out at a moment’s notice, Statham spoke with me recently about ax attacks, his unlikely path to acting and the enigma that is that announced sequel to The Italian Job. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

The same forward-leaning kinetic energy that marks a lot of British filmmaker Danny Boyle‘s work is also present and accounted for in any conversation with him. Ask him a question, any question, and he’ll enthusiastically rip into a breakneck-paced response, sometimes tripping over his words. There are no runaway, performance-instinct answers, a la Robin Williams. Rather, it’s just that Boyle seems to have a genuine joie de vivre that colors everything he does. His favorite word might be “extraordinary,” which he frequently delivers with punctuated, wide-eyed sincerity of a child.

Diversity and culturally explorative filmmaking is nothing new to Boyle, but his latest film is something of a departure even by his own bold-stroke standards. A most uncharacteristic underclass love story, the bristling Slumdog Millionaire is an engaging, exotic drama about a dirt-poor, 18-year-old orphan who stands poised on the precipice of winning 20 million rupees on an Indian game show. It’s an ironic protagonist, given that the movie, the People’s Choice Award winner at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, was originally set up at Warner Independent Pictures, then itself orphaned when corporate parent Warner Bros. saw their release slate swell after the acquisition of New Line, and cooled on the commercial prospects of the film, despite its unique combination of energy and heart. After some cattle-trading, Slumdog Millionaire was finally picked up by Fox Searchlight, who’ve released Boyle’s last three films, and with whom he has a relationship dating back more than a decade. Now, on the eve of his film’s Oscar-buzz-heavy release, I spoke with Boyle; the conversation is excerpted below.

Brent Simon: Were you familiar at all with the novel Q&A, by Vikas Swarup, before tackling the project?

Danny Boyle: They sent the script and the only description that they really gave was that it was a film about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and I remember thinking, “Well I’m not going to do that.” But it was written by Simon Beaufoy, who is a terrific writer, and so I thought I’d better read it, out of respect, so at least I could reply to him in a decent way. And I completely fell in love with it. But I read the book and it was irrelevant, really, to this extraordinary screenplay, because what he’d done is just kidnap the central idea — slum kid goes on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and wins it, because his life experiences enable him to answer the questions they just happen to ask. But beyond that everything is Simon’s invention.

BS: To me, a portion of the film felt like a tweaked, re-contextualized Oliver Twist, with the character who rescues young brothers Salim and Jamal coming across as Fagin-esque. Was that a parallel that struck you?

DB:
Yeah, when I met Simon and talked to him about writing about the city,
he said, “It’s completely Dickensian.” He would feel it most acutely as
a writer, of course, but everybody else observed that in certain
scenes. It’s the extremes of the city; there are clearly parallels with
London in the Victorian era, which is what Dickens was writing about,
and led to that heightened, melodramatic, very story-oriented
storytelling. The city is like that, just throwing stuff at you the
entire time. I mean, if you keep bored there you need to get medical
help, because it’s so extraordinary. And obviously London must have
been like that when it was growing, and I guess Manhattan as well, in
those periods when they’re just exploding, and you have these vast poor
populations helping create this enormous, staggering wealth on top of
it.

BS: So many times when we see a film set in a slum there tends to be
a tendency on the part of a lot of filmmakers to ennoble and
romanticize the area, and this film doesn’t quite do that. Instead, it
aims more to capture the vivacity of an area like that, where many
people have so little and yet there’s this shared, surging, aspirant
energy.

DB: It’s also pride, I think. We worked in a couple of the slums, including Dharavi, which is a massive slum; they think about two million people live in it. Everyone was so helpful to us, you know? All they said was, “Just don’t keep saying we’re poor the whole time, because we don’t think we’re poor, we don’t look at it like that. We’re trying.” They’re very industrious, very organized, but they don’t have any sanitation, they don’t have any running water, there’s unreliable electricity, which is stolen and fed-in and stuff like that. But none of that’s their fault, really. They’re making the best of what they’ve got, and they are doing a remarkable job, really. So you can’t help but feel tremendous admiration for them. You can’t not show that they’re poor — and there are some horrors, you can’t stint that either — but it also has this extraordinary redemptive energy about it, and it’s because life is lived there in fast forward. I think in modern society we stare in wonder at these cities that explode; we’re pouring into cities, all of us. And I think also you get a sense of how cities are going to have to be in the future, because you can learn a lot. Although it looks behind us in terms of infrastructure, you get a glimpse of the future, ironically. It’s too many people sharing too few resources, and how are you going to do that calmly and peacefully? For the most part they do, somehow. There are these occasional, terrible religious riots, which are shockingly violent, but most of the time they do manage to live side-by-side, and on top of one another, and with not enough water to go around. And maybe not in our lifetimes, but that’s going to be a massive problem in the next 50 or 100 years.

BS: In that regard, at least, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld will prove prophetic.

DB: (laughs) Yes!

BS: You’d worked previously with your cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantel, but I was interested to learn that you had to scrap the initial visual approach to the film.

DB: Well, I wasn’t sure about doing it in film. Anthony, like any cinematographer, to be honest, wants it to endure on celluloid, because it’s such a gift for a cinematographer — there’s so much to look at, so much color range, and the light is so extraordinary because of the pollution and the dust, and the mass of humanity that’s there. So we did a test on it, and I didn’t like it. It confirmed what I felt, that I didn’t want to make it in that way. So, credit to him, he came up with this digital system called an SI-2K, which is a hard drive that sits on the cameraman’s back in a rucksack. And the camera is then quite small in the hand, and it’s very flexible and very dynamic for city scenes. I absolutely loved it. So we set out to try to capture the city, but in an accumulative way. We didn’t set out to say, “Wow, look at that,” which is sort of very tempting to do in India, because there’s so many extraordinary pictorial moments. But we abandoned that, we just tried to accumulate the city, and felt that by the end of it the audience will have felt the color, the light, the vivacity of the place.

BS: To my mind, so many films that use a hand-held style use it in a default lazy fashion, as if hand-held camerawork by itself equals intense. With this film, while watching it, I scrawled in big letters in my notes, “visual/character identification,” because the visual approach underscored and implored a deeper identification with the space, and therefore the characters themselves.

DB: Absolutely, I hope so. The film begins very deliberately with huge close-ups, and then you literally drop off a cliff and start hurtling through the city, and it’s a completely subjective approach to the film, so that you’re with the characters. There’s no sense of objectivity, standing back, wide shots, things like that. Because you’re a white guy, and a white writer going in there making a film about local residents. And the only way that you’re ever really get inside those characters is by literally trying to live their lives with them with a camera just beside them. It felt very much that we should subjectify the film like that, and these digital cameras really helped do that because they’re incredibly flexible. There were teething problems with them, because they’re a prototype, and the biggest one was keeping the hard drive cool, because they didn’t have a fan system worked out. So we had to have blocks of dry ice around the notebook in this rucksack. So there were extraordinary moments in these slums where we had a dry ice factory pouring out dry ice in the middle of this blistering heat in Bombay. It was bizarre!

BS: Your also filmed rehearsals. Was that atypical, and dictated by the new environment?

DB: It was partly that. I’ve also learned to do that. What you get when your crew turns up, especially when you’re abroad, is this very lazy time that you’re paying for when they want to settle in. They call it checking camera equipment, doing the tests, all this. And of course I’ve seen it. There’s just settling in, hanging around. And so the advantage of digital is that it doesn’t really cost anything to shoot, not like celluloid, where you’re paying money to buy, develop and print it — so on Slumdog Millionaire I said straightaway that I’ll do half a day’s rehearsals with the actors, and you can do your preparation, and then for the other half of the day we’re going to go out and shoot. And everyone said, “Whoah, whoah, whoah, we’re not ready!” And I said, “No, it’s fine, it’s a test, really. If it’s not good, I won’t use it.” So we did two weeks of this, and managed to accumulate stuff for the (aforementioned) chase, for instance, but also there was a hotel called the Tulip Star, which was empty and locked in a decade-long court case. But they do hire it out by the day to film crews. So we rehearsed and shot a couple scenes set in a busy hotel there, and then ended up keeping it, because I thought we couldn’t better it in a crowded hotel. So you end up making little incremental gains like that, that get you ahead. And then you have a chance to then use your budget to make the film appear bigger, and more epic than your six or seven million British pounds suggest you’re going to be able to do. It’s just being canny like that, really, but it’s also the best way to learn to use new equipment — to get out there and use it. And if it’s a disaster and we don’t use anything, it doesn’t matter because it was a rehearsal day, you don’t have to fill in any report forms.

BS: What about casting the child actors — how difficult was that?

DB: The kids were a really interesting case, because the film was written and financed because it was in English. I had to reassure the financiers that the accents would be fine. But when we got there and started casting, the kids that we started seeing who could speak English at seven years old were not the right kids. They were very middle-class kids, different than the slum kids that you would see. So we brought some of the latter in, but it meant we had to translate it into Hindi, which we duly d
id, and of course it became completely alive. The kids, so many of them there, are fantastic little actors, because they have no fear, they love movies. It’s like America, just a part of life. I remember ringing up Warner Bros., having to tell them that a third of the film was now going to be in Hindi, with subtitles.

BS: And how did they take that?

DB: (laughs maniacally) Oh, you can imagine, they were over the moon — so delighted! They would say, “Oh, well we can enter it for Best Foreign Language Film.” But because we hadn’t taken too much money, I can just about get away with it, bully my way through something like that one. And I also said, “Look, the subtitles will be really exciting once you see them.” So anyway, there is a barrier, because you can’t communicate directly with them, and judge it as accurately as you can normally. But basically you can tell, even in a foreign language, whether someone is doing it right, it’s just a feeling you get as you watch them. And then I had a casting director, Loveleen Tandan, who we made the co-director, because she spent so much time on the set with the kids and then helping me culturally.

BS: What about Dev Patel, who plays the 18-year-old Jamal?

DB: I’d phoned everyone in Bollywood, really, everyone in Mumbai, but I couldn’t find the main guy because the guys there are like bodybuilders, that’s the look everyone is looking for. So all the young kids, the 18-year-olds, looked wrong — they would have sat in that chair, on the show, and just looked like a fucking wrestler or something. I thought that wasn’t right. And my daughter recommended that I watch this show Skins, and I watched him and he had a small comic part and was good. And so I met him and he looked right, he looked vulnerable and fragile. You got to do that, because he’s cunning. What he does, as well as in an obvious but predictable way, is win the show, but also he’s hijacking the show because he has a complete other agenda that nobody knows about. He’s going on the show not to win the money, really. So he’s got to be tough as fuck to do that, but he has to look vulnerable so that you can’t quite work out what his game plan is. So Dev was wonderful, because he has a tough side, is very funny and enjoyable, but is also serious about the acting, and has real application as well.

BS: To your mind, is there a legitimate ratings controversy with the film?

DB: I was very disappointed, yeah, because in the original contract with Warner Bros. in America you have to say that the film will not be longer than a time you agree on — with us it was two hours — and you have to agree that it’ll be a PG-13 or lower. So I deliberately shot everything to get that certificate because I take those contracts very seriously. And then the MPAA saw it and said it was too intense, and we said OK, we appealed for advice about how to reduce sufficiently. And they came back and said there’s no point in trying to do anything about it really, because the overall journey is too intense. Because in fact I think they realized when they went back to look at it that I had shot it to get a PG-13, there’s no particular moments in it where you see anything that shocking, really. It’s implied. I guess it is intense, because it’s an intense city. But you’ve got to do it justice, both in joy and in horror — they both sit alongside one another the whole time.

BS: Do you have anything else definitively on tap next?

DB: No, there isn’t actually. I was going to do an animated film, but that’s fallen apart, sadly. It doesn’t look like something I’d return to, which is a shame, because it really would have taken people by surprise. (laughs) I mean, I loved it when George Miller, who’d done Mad Max, turned up with Happy Feet, this all-singing, all-dancing animated film about penguins — talk about blindsiding people! And it’s unusual for me to even have anything partially set up, because I tend to do one thing at a time.

For more on Slumdog Millionaire, click here for a review, or click here to visit its official web site. For Boyle’s thoughts on the state of English cinema, meanwhile, click here.

After years of hefty television work and playing ruinous indie film heroines, Vera Farmiga is now the definition of an in-demand actress, with more than a dozen films in the last four years, including memorable turns in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared and the Oscar-winning The Departed. She’s back this fall with roles in two high-profile dramas, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and writer-director Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth. In the former she’s a German wife and mother who unravels as she finds out more about her husband’s complicity in prosecuting Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution; in the latter, she’s an undercover CIA agent who gets outed in the press, and is none too happy about it. I spoke one-on-one recently with Farmiga, almost seven months pregnant but still in great spirits, about her work, the little indie film that jump-started her career and how happy she is not to be living in New York City or Los Angeles. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

With a jut-jawed profile, gregarious persona and filmography steeped in genre fare, Bruce Campbell has for years been a favorite of the convention set, treated like royalty and warmly peppered with trademark lines of dialogue from his films upon arrival. So it makes a certain amount of cosmic sense that in Campbell’s new movie, My Name Is Bruce, he plays… himself. Mistaken for his character of Ash from the Evil Dead films, Campbell finds himself drafted into doing battle with a real monster. I recently caught up with multi-hyphenate via phone, to talk about his new film, his recent “Centrum Silver moment,” and the fan love he’s getting that Tom Cruise probably isn’t. For the full Q&A chat, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

In the quietly heartrending French drama I’ve Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas stars as recent parolee Juliette, who after 15 years in prison on a murder charge gets out to go live with her younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein), and a brother-in-law and nieces she’s never met. The slow revelation of the full reason behind Juliette’s incarceration gives writer-director Philippe Claudel’s spare, slow waltz of a film some extra emotional heft, but it’s first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Thomas, as a woman who learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured her soul. Taking a brief respite from her Broadway debut in The Seagull, I spoke with Thomas recently about Claudel’s directorial note-passing, her work balancing English- and French-language films, and the stomach-turning ramifications of on-screen chain-smoking. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Charlie Kaufman is the rarest of Hollywood commodities — a brand-name writer. He’s branching out, though; his directorial debut is Synecdoche, New York. The film is a sprawling think-piece that stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a New York City theater director who crafts an equally sprawling “living play” against a decades-long backdrop of personal turmoil and heartache. In a Los Angeles hotel suite in advance of the film’s release, Kaufman spoke with Vulture about what his unusual film most assuredly isn’t titled, the serendipitous chase of a unifying aesthetic, and how Spike Jonze has to sometimes remind him of his own ideas. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Part teen sex comedy, part anarchic road trip, Sex Drive has a punchy, forward-leaning energy that marks it as one of the best high school comedies since the original American Pie, and a big part of that success is up-and-comer Clark Duke, who plays the wryest side of a love triangle, opposite Josh Zuckerman and Amanda Crew. Perhaps to date still best known for the hilarious web series Clark and Michael, Duke seems poised to drink Jonah Hill’s milkshake, as evidenced by choice forthcoming wisecracking supporting roles opposite Eddie Murphy and Nicolas Cage. As part of a weekend built around his very first press junket, I recently sat down with Duke to talk about pal Michael Cera, the state of film comedy and why he now loves Hyundai Sonatas. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

At the recent press day for Sex Drive, costar Seth Green talked about the possibility of a fourth Austin Powers flick, joking, “I’m sure it’ll get made at the same time as The Brazilian Job.”

Snarkily played, Seth. Kudos. Green then went on to realistically assess the chances of another spy spoof from multi-hyphenate Mike Myers, though. “I don’t think Mike would get behind something that wasn’t good,” he says. “You look at what happened with the Dieter movie, and that’s a testament to the fact that Mike doesn’t want to put shit out in the world, he wants to make things that he really believes are good. He took a big hit for not making that Dieter movie, and it turned into The Cat in the Hat [which Myers agreed to star in to help settle pending litigation from Universal Studios]. So I don’t know how gun-shy he is, but I do know that he’s sincere about his quality-control. So my suspicion is that if Mike wanted to make another Austin Powers, it would be because he had a great idea, and if Mike had a great idea then I’m sure we’d all come back to make that movie.”

It’s been four years since Anne Hathaway last sported a tiara, but the beaming, very proper good-girl image established in large part by Ella Enchanted and two Princess Diaries movies still to some degree exists. That will change. This summer’s Get Smart shook things up for Hathaway, and in her new film, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, she plays Kym, a recovering addict who arrives like a hurricane at the Connecticut wedding of her older sister (Rosemarie Dewitt), with whom she shares a hot-cold relationship.



Sitting for a chat at a Beverly Hills hotel on a recent Monday, Hathaway — wearing a designer T-shirt, jeans, and a clutch of bracelets that jangle when she gestures or pitches forward in laughter — confesses that she’s “still in weekend mode,” though one wouldn’t know it from her unerringly pleasant demeanor and thoughtful answers. For the full Q&A, from H Magazine, click here.

Whether a product of occupational anxiety or some secret PR class in vacuous doublespeak, a lot of young, up-and-coming actors and actresses speak in carefully packaged sound-bites, offering up only smiling platitudes and generic praise for costars. Trying to nudge them off script can be a lobotomizing experience, leading to one-sentence replies or answers to questions not asked.

Amanda Crew is not one such actress. A 22-year-old native of British Columbia who plays, opposite Josh Zuckerman and Clark Duke, the most attractive member of a love triangle that gives the wild new teen road-trip comedy Sex Drive its requisite pinch of emotional mooring, Crew is warm and engaging, but not falsely ebullient, like she’s tackling an interview as another role. She’s real, in other words. There’s no guardedness or pretense, so when talk turns to matters of technology, and how keeping in touch with friends has changed radically in only a half dozen years, Crew self-effacingly chides herself for her poser past (“I remember my dad getting a pager but never using it, so I’d just walk around with it, to look cool”) and confesses to occasionally losing four or five hours on Facebook.

Instinctively, she knows comedy’s “rule of three,” joking about the manufactured distraction of fabricated list-making during the current production holding pattern, owing to the possibility of a Screen Actors Guild strike (“I’ve always enjoyed lists, but now my to-do lists are literally like: ‘shower, take the dog out, buy toilet paper.’ I’ll put ‘brush my teeth’ on there just so I feel like I accomplished something”), and then amusingly circling back to her comment at various points in the conversation.

According to Crew, she wasn’t always this personable and outgoing, though. “They used to call me Mouse when I was a kid, because I was so shy and quiet,” she says. “I think it was in third or fourth grade when I had this switch, I don’t know what caused it. I was the class clown, but not the obnoxious one getting kicked out of class; I loved to do Mr. Bean impressions, I was obsessed with him. Then in elementary school I became involved in some of the school plays, and in high school they had a film and television program in our school and I had a teacher who recommended that I take a film acting class.”

An agent saw Crew there, at a showcase, but her mother wouldn’t let her get an agent until she was a bit older, and more settled and serious. Small parts in a few films (Final Destination 3, She’s the Man, John Tucker Must Die) followed, along with larger roles on TV shows Whistler and 15/Love. Crew moved to Los Angeles in April, and seems invigorated by the plunge. “I’ve spent some time here before and hated it, but I have to honestly say I’m really enjoying it this time,” she says. “I’m living with this girl that I met on a film I did in Winnipeg. She’s in the industry, so she gets it, but she’s not an actress. It’s really good vibes to have in the house. She’s very career-oriented and Miss Independent, so I like to have that around me, because it pushes me to be more goal-oriented.”

Indecision and a bit of romantic waffling is part of Crew’s character Felicia in Sex Drive. With two guys as best friends, she can’t see the forest through the trees. Crew cops to having some personal experience with friendship-launched romance. “Yeah, there’s a few people I could think of,” she says with a reflective laugh. “I think everyone has someone like that, that you hang out with for a long time and just think of as a buddy, and then all of a sudden they do something or something changes with you, or someone will say something, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess he is cute. And nice.’”

Crew is physically striking, but has a relaxed demeanor and carefree sense of humor that help her give as good as she gets in a couple scenes in Sex Drive. “I connected with the character in that she gets along so well with guys,” says Crew. “I have lots of girlfriends, but I do feel comfortable hanging out with guys and being myself. Some girls feel they have to act and dress a certain way around guys, and I definitely went through that stage in early high school, but now I’m just like, ‘Whatever.’ I can kick it with the boys, which is what I had to do for the shoot, because it was all guys. It was fun because I have this side to me that’s very crude, I guess you could say. I have a mouth like a truck driver, and if someone ignites it I have the dirtiest sense of humor, so after two or three months of working with those guys I came home and my mom was like, ‘What did you just say?’”

Next up for Crew is the already completed The Haunting in Connecticut, a based-on-a-true-story horror thriller opposite Virginia Madsen. For now, though, she waits, a bit anxiously. “I do better when I have a lot on my plate, I get a lot more done,” says Crew. “Right now I have so much free time that I feel like I do nothing.” To that end, she’s taken to dabbling in photography. One gets the feeling, though, that it won’t be long after Sex Drive until the camera is turned back on Crew.

If New York cinema belongs to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, no other British filmmaker of the past 30 years has chronicled London quite like Mike Leigh (Naked, Vera Drake, Topsy-Turvy),
whose renowned, hands-on style entails months of improvisatory sessions
to shape narratives and bring fuller personality to his often
working-class characters. His latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, is centered
around Poppy (Sally Hawkins, above left), an irrepressibly free-spirited singleton
and primary school teacher marked by an unsinkable optimism — giggling
through back pain and offering up an endless stream of cheery
rejoinders and interjections, no matter the situation. When Poppy’s
bike is stolen, she signs up for driving lessons with Scott (Eddie
Marsan), who turns out to be her polar opposite — a cynical,
rage-filled bigot simultaneously repulsed and enchanted by his new
pupil. Just in advance of the film’s release, I spoke with Leigh about
his methodology, the surprise reception of Secrets & Lies in Japan,
and the fact that culture doesn’t stand still. For the full Q&A interview, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. More from the interview to follow next week.

Hong Kong-born, San Francisco-bred director Wayne Wang was an influential part of the American independent film movement of the 1980s and ’90s, with movies like the groundbreaking Chan Is Missing, 1993’s unlikely hit The Joy Luck Club and Smoke. This fall, after a six-year, three-film detour into studio filmmaking, he returns with not one but two intimately scaled movies adapted from author Yiyun Li’s work: The Princess of Nebraska (premiering on YouTube on October 17), about a young Chinese college student (Li Ling) in the United States who leaves school to contend with an unwanted pregnancy, and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, in which a retired Chinese widower (Henry O) comes to Los Angeles to visit his only daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu). In advance of their release, I sat down with Wang not long ago at a Beverly Hills hotel; for an excerpt from the Q&A chat, from H Magazine, click here. More to follow from the interview in the coming days.