One needn’t worry about the financial security of young Daniel Radcliffe, that’s for sure. As the title character in the preeminent film franchise of our times — a series which has grossed around $4.5 billion
worldwide, with the two hotly anticipated final chapters readying for
production in the wings — I’m guessing that Radcliffe could pretty much
never work again, eat out for every meal and still spend his afternoons
diving into piles of money like Scrooge McDuck, with no distressing
consequences. Still, while no one was expecting Harry Potter-type grosses for December Boys, Radcliffe’s first cinematic foray outside the comfortable confines of the fantasy genre since
donning the young wizard’s trademark spectacles, the manner in which
the movie vanished with barely a whisper of significance earlier this fall was rather astonishing. Released earlier this fall in the United States in only New York and Los Angeles, the film wasn’t given much of a fighting chance by
distributor Warner Independent, ringing up just over $50,000 in a
truncated, three-week run — probably approximately the cost of
cappuccinos on the set of one of the Harry Potter
films. Yet, strangely, neither was it able to tap into the vein of
Radcliffe’s international fan base either, pulling in only $935,000
overseas. It finally arrived on DVD last week, on December 11.

That said, the financial flop of December Boys doesn’t look
to much affect the manner in which the 18-year-old actor approaches his
career moving forward, since he says he took the movie chiefly to
sample a different sort of genre and work as part of an ensemble. Says
Radcliffe with a shrug during an interview prior
to the film’s release: “I’d love for the movie to be seen and people to
enjoy it, but I know some people may be resistant to seeing me in
another role. All I can do is pick things that I feel passionately
about.” For Radcliffe, who shot The Tailor of Panama before tackling
the role of Potter, but has since hardly had the time to skip off and
indulge indie filmmaking, the differences in style and scale between
the two productions were instructive. “There are a lot less people on set,” Radcliffe admits. “It’s a much smaller crew, but also more intense.”
“With Harry Potter, if you fall a day behind schedule that’s okay, but with December Boys it’s not,” he continues. “Some locations and days we didn’t have any
more time, so you have to be prepared to do more than one thing. On Harry Potter you do one scene a day if you’re lucky, and on December Boys you are doing four or five scenes a day, and you have to get them all done. You really have to be on your toes.”
Still, says Radcliffe, “I found that I quite liked the fast pace of shooting — it keeps the adrenaline sort of pumping.”

After a holiday turn across the pond in My Boy Jack, Radcliffe will be looking to his reprise his West End turn in Equus on Broadway. From there, it’s more acting, even though he has an awareness of the unique difficulties facing child actors as they
attempt to transition into more adult roles, not to mention actors
breaking away from iconic roles. “That’s why doing something like Equus
was important for me — to test and see whether this was something I
wanted to continue doing for the rest of my life,” says
Radcliffe. “And it was.” For the full feature, from FilmStew, click here.

The wince-inducing nature of its puckered name notwithstanding, Moviehole has up a genial chat with Michael J. Anderson, aka Twin Peaks‘ “Little Man from Another Place.” No hugely revelatory anecdotes or anything like that, but I’ll pimp that guy and his red suit, why the heck not?

It’ll be a few weeks here before a full, proper review of the Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition set, but in the meantime Dugpa.com’s interview with Charles de Lauzirika, the collection’s producer, offers a fine, fine, behind-the-scenes glimpse at the digital-age reconstruction of a TV classic. We’re also trying to chase down de Lauzirika; we’ll see how that works out.

While he’s committed to taking Equus to Broadway, Daniel Radcliffe isn’t trading film for stage. As he mentioned a couple months back at the press day for the deservedly blink-and-you-missed-it December Boys, Radcliffe’s next project will land him on small screens — in his native Great Britain, at least — just in time for the holidays.

The period piece drama My Boy Jack, in which Radcliffe stars opposite playwright-screenwriter David Haig for director Brian Kirk, wrapped at the end of summer. “It’s about a
family in World War I, the Kipling family, as in Rudyard,” relates Radcliffe. “It’s about him
and his son, and that whole family, and how their lives were altered, as so many
were, by World War I, and by losing a son, which is me. It’s a really beautiful
script and I think it could be a fantastic piece of television, that’ll be on
in England in
November on ITV. And hopefully it will air in the States sometime next year.
And I tell people please do watch it because I think it will be pretty
fantastic.”

Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee doesn’t deny a greater sense of responsibility on his native-language films. While he ascribes to filmmaker Jean Renoir’s famous adage that all his films are his children, Lee admits that with
these projects there’s a special level of involvement, exacting detail
and anxiety, even, due to the additional scrutiny they receive in the
Far East. “Doing an Asian film is like doing three Hollywood movies,”
he says in a recent interview. There is a sense that “each
one is making history. I would need a long break in between if I were
to do two back-to-back.”

Brokeback Mountain, and his first abroad since 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is Lust, Caution. A wartime drama that shines a light on the clash of disparate forces
and ethics — beauty and cruelty, desire and fidelity, personal
awakening and patriotic duty — the movie is based on Eileen Chang’s
short story of the same name, and co-adapted for the screen by Lee’s
longtime collaborator, James Schamus. Part cloak-and-dagger tale of political espionage, part quite uncloaked
tale of sexual release, the movie premiered to much chatter at this
year’s Venice Film Festival, and earned a rare, if deserved, NC-17
rating for its aforementioned scenes of frenetic and not always
pleasantly erotic coupling.

“I don’t know of any other modern day Chinese writer who is more
revered and argued over than Eileen Chang,” says Lee. “And yet this
short story is very different writing than her other works.” It was the
opportunity to delve into female psychology and patriotism — two
subjects not frequently explored within China, and even rarer still
together — that most intrigued Lee, and made him want to tackle a
filmic adaptation of Chang’s 46-page source material.

Both because of this culturally incendiary subject matter and the fact that Lust, Caution hinges so completely on a young “mahjong Mata Hari” at the story’s
center, Lee knew that he would have to find just the right actress for his young leading lady. To that end, a huge search was undertaken. The winner, and
perhaps a newly minted star: neophyte actress Wei Tang, then 27 years
old, a recent graduate of Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama directing
program and a former model and Miss Universe pageant runner-up.

Tang, dressed in a knit red dress, alternates between using a
translator and speaking directly, but apart from an obviously
restricted vocabulary and some occasional pronoun slippage, her
accented English is for the most part direct and to the point — quite
unlike her character, who is steeped in masked silences and
uncertainty. A sly sense of humor even pokes through the cultural fog —
“Oh, want to sleep?” she says when a reporter’s tape recorder tips
over. Talking about the film, Tang details an exhaustive series of five auditions and call-backs,
a process that she says was intimidating because of the idea of
competing against “hundreds of other girls.” (In fact, Lee pegs the
number even higher, saying that between he and his casting associates,
10,000 girls were seen.) After making it to the second round, Tang was
granted an audience with Lee. “The second time I saw Ang, and we talked
a lot,” she says, “all about my education, my family, my background and
other things.” The Oscar-winning director’s filmography wasn’t one of
those things, however; rather amazingly, Tang hadn’t seen any of Lee’s
movies. “I just knew [he] was very nice, because I’d seen pictures,”
she says with a sheepish grin. “And so I believed my feelings.” For the full feature, from Reelz, click here. For a review of the film, meanwhile, click here.

With her key supporting role in Ang Lee’s new film, Lust, Caution, and a definitive DVD set of the groundbreaking Twin Peaks hitting stores next week, there will be plenty of opportunity to glimpse Joan Chen on screens both small and large this fall. And that’s fine with the multi-hyphenate 46-year-old.

“I think it’s great,” Chen says. “In China
they’re forever stuck on Little Flower,
which was a film I did when I was 17. So when people (see me), they’re still
like, ‘Little Flower!’ Here, it’s
mostly Twin Peaks.
I mean, The Last Emperor is a great
movie, but I think more people saw Twin Peaks, and people who followed it are so staunch. When it first came out it really was special. Never had
anything been done on TV like that. It was very exciting to do something so
different, and to know that TV could be that way. There is more sort of
copy-ish stuff now, and I think American TV is doing very well.”

Chen — who helmed 2000’s Autumn in New York, and may also soon be tackling another film behind the camera, an adaptation of a story from Lust, Caution author Eileen Chang, ironically — has writer-director Michael Almereyda’s Tonight at Noon in the can, and also just recently finished another film, titled Seventeen, in her native China. “I play a mother from this extremely remote mountain village,” says Chen, “losing her son to the big movement
to the city. The director is 25, and everybody who worked on the film is
like 20. They’re like different species; it was fun.”

Over the course the course of his career of almost half a century,
Michael Caine has, by his own estimation, been the lead in 80 to 85 movies —
this on top of nine years of near-exclusive work in the theater. So when the
actor — now 74, but still sprightly and intellectually playful — holds forth on
the differences between comedy and drama, or Hollywood then and now, it’s with
a considerable insight born of a unique combination of talent and experience. If
it seems like Caine could conduct a master class on acting, it’s not without
good reason; in fact, he already has, in the form of a best-selling DVD called Acting in Film.

Master Class on BBC2, which is the more esoteric channel,”
recalls Caine in a recent one-on-one interview, “and they asked me
for two years to do this thing on cinema. But I said, ‘I
don’t know how to tell you anything about it. I could do movie acting of a
certain standing, but I don’t know how to tell you how to do it.’ They said
well why don’t you try? So they gave me four cameras and four young actors, all
of whom were doing my roles in the theater — it was Sleuth, Educating Rita, Alfie and one other. And so
they then did their stage performance, and I had to change it to a movie
performance, and that’s what I did. That’s sold lots of copies in America,
and it’s just been released in England
and is doing very well there. …There are some good tricks in
there that one can use.”

They’re tricks that have continued to serve Caine well throughout
his own career, even though his theater work — something a lot of younger
actors of today lack — gives him a rooting and structure that he finds
invaluable, especially in comedy. “I can’t think of how you do comedy in a
movie without the sense memory and timing of a live audience,” Caine says. “No
one can laugh in the studio. So I will deliberately rehearse in front of the
unit to see whether they laugh at certain things, and I’ll do it very loud. But
if you’re doing it for the camera and the crew laughs, then you’re doing it too
big.”

“Big” is just the opposite of Caine’s latest film, Sleuth, a slick, slippery,
intimate two-hander in which he, a cuckolded novelist, and Jude Law, a
struggling actor, wage psychological warfare against one another, all in the
pursuit of a woman. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Caine played Law’s
role, opposite Laurence Olivier, in a 1972 production from filmmaker Joseph
Mankiewicz. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this Sleuth is a from-the-basement-up re-imagining of its
concept, rewritten and reconceived from Anthony Shaffer’s stageplay by legendary
scribe Harold Pinter. Caine, for one, is tickled pink over the chance to tackle
the role he always regarded as best anyway. “I like this part, it’s a good part,”
he says with a grin. “I don’t want to play the other one — anyway, Jude’s
prettier than I am. It would be very hard to do a story where I took a wife
away from Jude, you see what I mean?”

For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for Caine’s thoughts on The Dark Knight, click here.

The notion of art as an imitation of life is certainly bolstered by the
wave of documentaries and politically-infused dramas and even action
flicks making their way to theaters this year. Many are the product of
an anxious world climate in general and a four-years-and-counting war
and foreign occupation with no end in sight in particular. The latest
of these films is director Gavin Hood’s Rendition. Cross-cutting between continents, the movie tells the story of Isabella El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon),
the American wife of an Egyptian-born, domestically educated chemical
engineer named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) who disappears on a
flight from South Africa to Washington D.C.. Plying an ex-boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard),
now the senior staffer of a senator, for help, Isabella desperately
tries to track her husband down, while a young CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) at a secret detention facility outside the United States is forced to
question his assignment as he becomes party to some unorthodox
interrogation techniques. The South African-born Hood came to acclaim
with the Oscar-winning Tsotsi,
about a week in the life of a young thug who eventually tries to set
right his errant ways. While the filmmaker admits to having a
longstanding interest in matters political, he says he didn’t have a
strong knowledge about the particular interstices of U.S. detention and
intelligence-gathering prior to tackling this project.

“The script came across my desk and I started reading,” Hood recalls during a recent interview. “I read Rendition
on the cover and it could have been Beethoven’s Ninth. I dunno, maybe
it’s a rendition of a song? But I started reading and I just found
that I was captivated,” he continues. “I kept turning the pages. I
wanted to know what happened next and I thought that [screenwriter
Kelley Sane] had drawn some incredible, and incredibly diverse,
characters that were all emotionally rooted and real.” With this
initial fascination came a lot of questions. But for Hood, who grew up
in a country without a constitution and where, in the 1980s, people
were detained without trial, it was almost as if he was dealing with
the makings of a South African political thriller. “When I was a young
law student, we looked at the American Constitution as a document that
we felt our country desperately needed,” Hood explains. “And to see
chipped away that great document — and the principles of the Geneva
Convention, which America was largely behind writing after the horrors
of the Second World War — was quite a shock.”

“Now that I have American kids, albeit very recently, I feel even more
strongly about the subject matter,” he adds. “I believe in the
founding principals of this nation and I felt that this film would
perhaps contribute to a discussion that I feel is important. Principals
should not be abandoned without serious discussion, and patriotic
Americans should stand up for what America stands for.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.

An overly distilled slug-line — guy orders plastic woman over the
Internet, and introduces her to his family as his new girlfriend —
could easily have made for a one-note comedy of limited inspiration.
But fast rising star Ryan Gosling’s participation in Lars and the Real Girl immediately demands that it be taken a little more seriously. There’s
also the title’s implied tug between the sardonic and the sincere, one
that director Craig Gillespie uses as a springboard for a film that’s
at once funny and surprisingly poignant. “When I first heard about this
project, I thought it was wacky,” admits Gosling during a recent
interview.
“But there is a whole community of guys out there that have these dolls
and have very complicated relationships with them. For me, it was not
dissimilar from a kid’s relationship with his teddy bear; you love it
and you go through really important parts of your life with it, you
talk to it, and if you were ever to lose it, it would be heartbreaking.”

In an interesting, subdued way, Lars and the Real Girl is
actually a parable about emotionally ambivalent individuals; more
specifically, a generation plus of prosperous, peacetime beta males
thrown into turbulent, uncertain times and struggling to make choices
period, let alone make peace with those decisions. “He could have been
a part of my family or something, I felt like I knew him,” says Gosling
of his character. “It was a really great experience for me because a
lot of the other things I’ve done, I’ve been investigating the
self-destructive part of my nature.” Lars, though “is kind of like a Don Quixote-esque character,” Gosling
continues. “He is the power of belief, and whatever he believes is
true. When Quixote goes into the courtyard of the castle and he’s
talking to the prostitutes, he thinks they are royalty. And for that
moment that he thinks they are royalty, they think they are too. They
play along, and for that moment it becomes true.”

While he’s played characters both more intense and seemingly rooted in
personal experience, Gosling says that Lars, of all the roles he’s
played, has most stuck with him. “I feel like what I learned from Lars is that you can never go far enough,” he explains. “What Lars and the
movie did break down in a way for me was the
difference between who we are, who we think we are, and who we think
people think we are — how you kind of turn into five different people,
[with] one person trying to navigate all of those different agendas. For me, it was such fertile creative ground that the ideas
for him were endless. I could do a scene a million times for him and do it differently
every time, because he exists in such a positive place that so much can grow
there.”

Hey, who says there isn’t artificial life? It sounds like Lars could give The Graduate‘s Benjamin Braddock some succinct advice: “Plastics.” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.

At a press day on Friday chatting up his turn in Francis Ford Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth, Tim Roth also found time to briefly mention The Incredible Hulk, in which he plays heavy Emil Blonsky opposite Edward Norton, for director Louis Leterrier.

Chatting with Francis Ford Coppola at a press day today for Youth Without Youth, the legendary filmmaker also talked some about his next project behind the camera, Tetro. “It’s the name of a character. It’s very personal, kind of my Tennessee
Williams period,” he says. “I want to make a passionate story about brothers and
fathers and all of that different tumult that I’ve seen at different
times in my life — a little bit stuff I’ve seen in my family, but it’s
totally fictional.”

Confirming the casting of Matt Dillon and Maribel Verdu, Coppola also says that Javier Bardem’s role is “not that big,” and that the film — previously scheduled to start shooting next month — will now begin lensing in Buenos Aires immediately after Christmas. “I’ve used Youth Without Youth
as a crutch to get into a world of personal filmmaking, where I’m not
subject to the notes of studios. I get the notes from my colleagues,”
says Coppola. “It’s not that I don’t want notes — I do. But I don’t
want too many notes, to (the point) that they start contradicting themselves, or that
they start turning it into one of the typical movies that comes out
every Friday.” If Youth Without Youth is any indication of his new direction, Coppola needn’t worry about that.

While recently chatting up Sleuth, Michael Caine also found time to touch upon The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated sequel to Batman Begins. “I’ve seen all the Batman (movies), and I think by a long way Christian is the best Batman I’ve ever seen,” says Caine. “He’s certainly the best actor — a wonderful actor, as he’s proven in Yuma now,
and (even) The Machinist.”

“Batman Begins I thought was the best Batman ever,” Caine continues, “and this one will
be better. And the big surprise out of this one… although it’s called The Dark Knight, with a
K-N, [is] the Joker. There you’ve got the shadow of Jack Nicholson
looming over you, which is incredible performance. But we’ve got Heath
Ledger, who’s gone in a completely and terrifyingly different direction. He’s
extraordinary, he’ll be the big surprise. He’ll frighten the life out
of you. He did me, the first time I saw him, because we did a rehearsal on the
first day, and we hadn’t met or anything, and he had to come up on an elevator
to Batman’s home. And I think I’m letting friends in, but instead he’s killed
them all and he’s coming up in the lift. So on the first rehearsal, he’s coming
up, and he has like seven dwarves with him — like Snow White, only it’s not
like that. When the bloody door opened on the lift, he came tearing out, and I
forgot every line I had.”

While recently chatting up Sleuth, his directorial effort starring Michael Caine and Jude Law, Kenneth Branagh also found time to touch upon Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, his latest acting gig. “Chris McQuarrie, of The
Usual Suspects fame, wrote it with Nathan Alexander, and it’s about an
assassination attempt on Hitler that was attempted by Claus von Stauffenberg,
played by Tom Cruise, and recruited by my character, Henning von Tresckow,” says Branagh of the film, currently in production and slated for release next year.

“It’s a really brilliantly put together thriller. It’s incredible when you are
completely aware of the outcome; they didn’t succeed, but it nevertheless is this
spine-tingler. The nearness to changing the entire course of 20th century history,” Branagh continues, gesturing for emphasis, an act
“that was averted by where a briefcase was put on either side of the wooden
leg of a table at the end of another series of quite incredible near misses and
coincidences was great. And Tom Cruise is brilliantly cast. He looks quite like (von Stauffenberg)
just by the by, the historical character. I have high hopes of the film.”

Robert Benton is no stranger to exploring the inner workings of the
human heart. A humanist to his core, it’s the propensity for
disappointment and rebound — both forced and embraced — that seems to
most fascinate him. As the co-writer of 1967’s groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde and the Oscar-honored filmmaker behind the seminal Kramer Vs. Kramer, as well as Billy Bathgate, Nobody’s Fool, 1982’s noirish Still of the Night and the equally tangled films Nadine and Twilight,
Benton is an ace chronicler of heartache. To varying degrees, his films
often focus on desire, and busted or turbulent relationships; he shines
a light on how love is jointly a fuel and an accelerant, driving us
ever forward but also making certain inherently sticky situations even
more combustible.

Feast of Love, is a culmination of sorts of
the mining of this theme. Adapted by Allison Burnett from Charles
Baxter’s novel of the same name, the Portland-set movie is a richly
sketched ensemble drama with light grace notes of comedy. Like certain
cinema of the 1970s, it’s a film that deals in frank terms with adult
problems (and sexuality), yet retains a general sheen of positivity
entirely of this era.

To capture in more realistic tones the full breadth of romance, both
blooming and fading, Benton stripped away a lot of the artificialities
usually found in Hollywood movies, from coyly placed bedsheets (one
vehement argument in the film unfolds entirely in the nude) to swelling
strings. While Benton goes out of his way to praise the work of
composer Stephen Trask, in a lot of Feast of Love, there is no score at all. “We didn’t ever want to underline moments of love,” he explains in a recent in-person chat.
“They’re very delicate and fragile and almost unseen, but they’re
there. And yet if you point at them, then I think you do them a
disservice. I think that the audience is so used to having emotions
really shoved in their face, that when you see it and there’s no
underscore, or minimal underscore, it allows you to more truly be a
part of that scene.” For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.

I met with Richard Shepard recently to talk about his latest film, the quite fun The Hunting Party, but amongst other topics we touched on was his first movie, 1991’s The Linguini Incident, still commercially unavailable… and blissfully so, according to Shepard. “You know, it’s funny, because I’m not particularly proud of
that movie. I was 24 and it’s not the movie that I meant it to be on any level,” he says of the caper flick, starring Rosanna Arquette, Marlee Matlin, David Bowie, Maura Tierney and Buck Henry.
“But I think about it often. I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could somehow
track down the negative to that movie, re-cut it, re-score it and re-do it,
because there was a good movie that we shot, I just didn’t edit it correctly.”

“One of the things that I learned from that experience is that you have to
test your movie,” Shepard continues. “First-time filmmakers get terrified and paranoid that their
film is going to get ruined by showing it too much, but that also comes from
insecurity. You have tons of insecurity when you’re a first-time filmmaker, but now I try to
show my movie every week that I’m cutting, and really try to get feedback — not
that I listen to everything that everyone says, but if people are bored, then
they’re bored. You can’t fake that, and certain lines of mine, some people find
funny, some don’t. And if there’s a group of people watching and a few people
laugh but not everyone, that’s good, that’s fine. But if no one laughs? That’s
interesting. You might say, ‘Oh, that one’s missing.’ One day maybe I’ll be rich
enough to hire someone to track that down and go back to it.”

Meeting with Robert Benton recently to talk about Feast of Love, I also had occasion to chat with him a bit about Bonnie & Clyde (a film he co-wrote), on occasion of its 40th anniversary. The violence of that film is always talked about,
but it is kind of a love story as well, one that has in retrospect been seen and
embraced as that more and more. I asked Benton if he and David Newman thought of it in those terms when they were writing the screenplay, and his enthusiastic reply was, “Yes!”

The emulation that the movie would in turn inspire, though, is another matter. That was unforeseen. Answering a question by way of question, Benton says, “Did you read the A.O. Scott piece in the (New York) Times?
It’s an interesting piece, isn’t it? He’s a smart guy, and I agree with some of
it, but I think the point he missed is that one of the reasons the violence
seemed so terrible is that you got to know the characters and you liked them. You had
sympathies with them, and when the violence started you were in the car with
them, and once it started, you couldn’t get out of that car. You were trapped
like their undertaker. And it was their humanity that made the violence seem
more awful. If you had looked at them as sociopaths, or psychopaths, the violence
wouldn’t have seemed as bad.”

“And the third thing is,” Benton continues, “the violence came from one
line in the script. In movies, we were so used to, when someone got shot,
seeing them clutch their chest and having a death scene and falling down, and
we said in the screenplay, when bullets strike people in this movie, they
should hurt. And what Arthur (Penn) did with that was so brilliant; he made the
beautiful slow-motion sequences that he did with (editor) Dede Allen, and they really
owe an enormous amount to Kurosawa, with Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai. Now, nobody
has accused Kurosawa of fostering a culture of violence, but it’s the same
thing. Perhaps because it’s foreign we don’t identify with that. But I think
it’s not just the beauty of those shots, I think it’s because you weren’t able
to ever put the characters at arms’ length — that seems to me the thing that
made the violence seem worse.” The films that stylistically nip from Bonnie & Clyde, of course, rarely plumb such depths of identification.

There’s no cool intellectual sheen or pretense to filmmaker Richard Shepard. Meeting for an interview in the bar of a Beverly Hills hotel, he’s whip-smart but instantly sociable, and he retains the raw
enthusiasm of a college kid just talking movies — minus any of the
manic geek factor awkwardness that can shade conversations with
similarly effusive filmmakers, like  Quentin Tarantino. His is a laidback personality that’s somewhat at odds with the stamp of
intensity most usually associated with authorial moviemaking. Age and
experience, however, have taught him important lessons. Unlike many a
headstrong, would-be indie wunderkind, the early 40-ish Shepard knows
facile entertainment can be an entrée into something more
intellectually and emotionally substantive.

Richard Gere),
who reconnects with his former cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) in
post-war Bosnia, the scene of his nationally broadcast meltdown five
years prior. Now stringing for a variety of low-rent international
outlets, Simon convinces Duck that he knows the whereabouts of Bosnia’s
most wanted war criminal (Ljubomir Kerekes), a brutal former Serbian
commander known as “The Fox.” Along with rookie reporter Benjamin
(Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college graduate and the to-the-manor-born
son of a network vice president who’s been handed a tag-along ticket to
this reconciliation coverage as a means of getting his first
international “merit badge,” Simon and Duck embark on a dark and
dangerous mission that takes them deep into hostile territory, where
The Fox is still a hero of the people. Along the way they uncover a
tangled web of international complicity that seems to help shield a
killer and ethnic cleanser supposedly being sought at the highest
levels of government.

Though it takes place in Bosnia, and not during wartime, some parallels between The Hunting Party and the mysterious, now six-year search for Osama bin Laden are undeniable. Shepard is obviously a political animal — speaking not of his specific
views, but his grasp of the birds-eye interconnectedness of policy,
rhetoric and state action, both public and covert — and in interviewing
source writer Anderson and all the other journalists who comprised his
coterie, as well as officials from the UN, NATO and the Hague, Shepard
began to get a more complete sense of the black comic potential that The Hunting Party
offered, of an interesting story with definite relevance to today. “We
all say that we want to catch war criminals, and yet the biggest one,
Osama bin Laden, hasn’t been caught,” Shepard says. “And maybe it’s
because we’re not really looking. And if so, why wouldn’t we really be
looking?” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.

At the Los Angeles press day for the forthcoming Lars and the Real Girl, Ryan Gosling talked about finding the look and actions of his characters, and in particular the Midwestern loner he portrays in his latest film. “Those things — like I had a beard and I was shaving it off
for the film,” explains Gosling, interrupting himself. “Then I caught a glimpse of myself with the
mustache and I saw him, I thought, ‘There he is.’ So the mustache just came
that easily. And everything, for me, I have all these, what I think are great
ideas about the character, and then they never make the movie. They are never
very good. But then in the process of me trying to attain these goals, all
these little things happen. They are things that are specific to each movie
that I work on.”

“All
those mannerisms and stuff are not conscious is I guess what I’m saying,” continues Gosling, “or
things that I plan. They just kind of happen. It’s up to the filmmaker whether
he wants to put them in or not. And most films that I work on, directors always
cut them out because they think they are distracting or something. Craig is
great because he recognized they are specific to that character. And in Half Nelson they included a lot of that
stuff too. Then when I finish the film they kind of go away.”

Ryan Reynolds got his start as a child actor on Canadian television,
and then, straddling the new millennium, spent the better part of four
seasons making small swatches of ABC’s Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place
bearable. It’s no great stretch, then, for him to play a TV
writer-creator… well, it wouldn’t be, really, except in just about any
other project than The Nines.

The Nines
is a flawed film, maybe what some would even call a failure, but it’s
getting a raw deal at the box office, not the least of which because
it’s a movie with an indefatigable curiosity one finds in few mainstream modern films. Set in and around Hollywood, the movie is a labyrinthine, very loosely autobiographical tale of
creativity, collapse and emotional and spiritual responsibility. It
features three actors (Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy)
playing three parts apiece in three different stories, roles that sort
of overlap but, apart from their place within discrete narratives, may
or may not have something to do with one another. Reynolds is the
front-and-center star, playing a self-destructive actor, a videogame
designer/family man and the aforementioned small screen
multi-hyphenate, the character most directly based on August. “It’s really a difficult movie to logline,” concedes Reynolds during a recent spate of interviews for the film,
sporting a beard that he characterizes as his own personal salute to
lethargy. “Most people want to kind of grab onto what they think is the
hook, which is that you play three different people in one movie. And
[that’s] not really a hook, it’s actually part of the story.”

“It’s not done in this indulgent, vain kind of way,” he continues. “But… even my parents say, ‘Ooh, that’s
the one where you play three different people, I can’t wait to see
that!’ My mother’s like Marge Simpson. It’s a difficult thing to
explain; I usually just say it’s three separate stories that interlock
in mysterious ways.” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Despite all the gossip-page chatter, Daniel Radcliffe has
found reaction to his much-discussed disrobing in a West End
stage production of Equus (below) to be
almost entirely encouraging. “No one actually [has] come up to me and talked to
me on the street about it. Everyone I’ve talked to has been really, really
positive about it,” says Radcliffe at the recent press day for December Boys.
“There’s a paper in England
— which shall remain nameless, but isn’t exactly a bastion of truth — and they
printed a story which was written about ‘an angry mother, unnamed.’ And I was just
thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure that this angry mother exists. I think this paper
has invented this angry mother to try to perpetrate a bit of a backlash toward the show.’”

was getting pretty nervous, wondering if the critics were going to
go to this just because I’m in it, or what’s going to happen,” he says. “And
actually they didn’t, which I was really happy about. The thing that I just had
to keep reminding myself was that this was being designed by John Napier, who
designed the original. I’m being directed by Thea Sharrock, who probably will
end up being one of the most important directors in British theater. I’m with
Richard Griffiths, who has more experience than most other stage actors… it’s
lit by David Hersey. If I’m going to screw up, I couldn’t screw up with better
people around me, which is quite a comforting thought.”

Far from screwing up, the show’s commercial and critical embrace has spawned talk of a tour across the pond. Radcliffe, for his part, is game. “Next year in New York
I might be doing Equus on Broadway,
which would be very exciting,” he says. “It seems more probable by the day that it will
happen, which is great news, and terribly exciting.”

At its core, director Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People
is largely a movie about class and cultural clash, so it’s no wonder
that a conversation with Diane Lane about the predominant themes under
the microscope in the film — the collision of haves and have-nots, with
almost everyone screwed up in their own way — revolves largely around
the sociological differences, real and perceived, between the rich and
the rest of us. “I think people tend to group together with whoever
makes them feel more accepted, and water does seek its own level,” Lane
says during a recent interview,
decked out in a fashionable red dress, accentuated with a smattering of
gold jewelry. “So within any level you’re going to find subgroups; the
self-destructive types, the philanthropic types, the types who are
obsessed with other people or people obsessed with themselves.”

the cover of Time, emblematic of Hollywood’s younger generation of so-called “Whiz Kids.” After the one-two punch of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in 1983, Lane appeared poised to write her own ticket for pretty much the rest of the decade.
But then, Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club bombed, she turned down Splash, and suddenly Lane’s rising star took a hit. Apart from the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award,
Lane spent the better part of the next 15 years working in mostly
forgettable fare. “I always was working, but never in things that were
necessarily aiming high in terms of the money they would make,” Lane
says. “No expectation was attached to me, I was just allowed to work,
which was fine with me, because then there was no burden on me to
deliver.” It wasn’t until 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, opposite Eastern Promises star Viggo Mortensen, that people remembered she could act, Lane says. “That was good,
because then I was afforded movies that people would see,” she recalls.

For Lane, it was the cracked characters and some unanticipated narrative twists that made her want
to sign on for Fierce People in the first place. “It reminds me a little bit in my most enthusiastic, hopeful way, of Little Miss Sunshine,
in that you visit all these characters, you see all these
points-of-view, and it’s not a feel-good movie, but it’s a complete
journey. Every character has an arc, more or less.” For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Eighteen-year-old Anton Yelchin immigrated to the United States from Russia with his figure skater parents before he was even a toddler. Even though he’s grown up here, though, it’s that latent outsider’s perspective that has informed his own personal sociological curiosity, and helped him establish an occupational beachhead playing a variety of wide-eyed innocents, including in 2001’s Along Came a Spider and Hearts in Atlantis; in David Duchovny’s 2005 directorial debut, House of D; and in last year’s sweaty teen kidnapping tale, Alpha Dog.

Fierce People, with Donald Sutherland, Diane Lane and Chris Evans — felt an affinity for his character. “He’s 15 (too), I get what he’s feeling — he’s undergoing emotions natural to somebody that age,” says Yelchin, whose genial speech is peppered with copious “likes” and wide smiles. “I think the type of kid Finn is existed 100 years ago, he exists now; he’s kind of a smart-ass kid who has to take care of this mother, who he loves. It didn’t seem like anything that wouldn’t be relevant today. I suppose if it were of a story about some hippie kid in the summer of love, dropping acid, then I’d have to do more research about the time period and everything, but this is just a regular guy.”

Spanning time, though, will soon become second nature to Yelchin. After all, he’s set to bring to life the role of Pavel Checkov in J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek franchise, which starts filming in November. “I’m waiting to read the script, actually,” says Yelchin. “I guess they’re withholding that until they get casting done or whatever. I plan on… becoming as much of a Trekkie as a I can in the couple weeks before we start shooting — just renting all the box sets, not going outside, not seeing the sun rise, just having the shades drawn.” For the full interview/feature, from Reelz, click here.

So once upon a time I had a phone interview set up with Alan Rickman, and then, when I slipped up and called him Hans Gruber, he unleashed a torrent of obscenity upon me and hung up. Or he simply stood me up, missed calling me. Or maybe had an assistant call in and cancel. One of the three, I honestly can’t remember. (Such is the curse of an active imagination.)

For the full piece, from FilmStew, click here.