Craig Robinson is the man. You know this. I know this. In between bites of a turkey sandwich, Robinson took some
time recently to answer questions about his new film Dragon Wars, his work on The Office and the new fan base he’s cultivated courtesy of his turn in this summer’s Knocked Up. The conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: Hey Craig, thanks for the time. I’d love to be
able to ask intelligent questions, but they haven’t screened the movie for us — I’m
flying blind. So I have a few sincere biographical questions and hopefully some
fun ones as well.

Craig Robinson: Right on, let’s go, let’s do it.

BS: First off, is the movie Dragon Wars or D-War, or Dragon Wars: D-War?

CR: It’s Dragon Wars
in the States, and D-War overseas.

BS: Okay, so I’ve read about it, and how the mythology is
rooted in Korean legend, but is there a popular source material or text over
there, or is it more just an urban legend?

CR: That. Is. A great question. I do not know.

BS: No sweat. Well now, what offers more square-block
destruction of downtown Los Angeles:
this or Transformers,
even though I guess that the latter isn’t even supposed to be set there?

CR: Oh! Man, I didn’t see Transformers, but I would guess Dragon
Wars; they really get their rocks off. I mean, there’s a big snake, and
then all these other monsters just wreaking havoc.

BS: When did you shoot this, when did it fall within the
chronology of your own personal schedule and work on The Office?

CR: In 2004 we shot Dragon
Wars.

BS: Wow. So they’re capitalizing on you now.

CR: (laughs) Hey, if that’s the truth, that’s pretty
awesome.

BS: Okay, you can speak definitively to this, I think.
What’s the preferred object of choice when acting against special effects: is
it a tennis ball on a stick? A goofy A.D.? A gaping void? What works best for
you?

CR: (laughs) You know, I haven’t had that much experience
with it, so I use imagination and timing. On this it was all, “Action!” And
then just someone yelling, “Monster!”

BS: When you’re doing a movie like this, though, do they
show you mock-ups, drawings of what creatures are going to look like?

CR: Yeah, they showed us exactly what was going on. In fact,
they sent out a DVD, which was what really piqued my interest in doing the
project, and hoping that I got it. (Casting director) Christine Sheaks sent out
a DVD of the CGI they had done — the very first scene where they go to Korea,
and bomb the village. They show the monsters and the army and all the soldiers
— it was pretty awesome.

BS: I’m sure. Working with a filmmaker whose native tongue,
I would reckon, is not English, sounds a bit difficult, or at the very least
different.

CR: Oh no, it’s not difficult at all! Yeah, absolutely it’s
difficult, especially since at that time that was (only) my second movie. He
would do two takes, and I wouldn’t have even warmed up. I was like, “Oh man,
come on!” So it was very interesting, I had to learn to quickly get my game
on.

BS: What first got you interested in acting — are you one of
these people who had a big performance instinct as a little kid?

CR: Yes, actually! I would always perform, engage in some
kind of public display of talent, whether it was reading scriptures and singing
in the church choir and playing piano in church, or doing something in school.
We didn’t do a ton of plays, but we did some stuff. And then I got into doing
stand-up comedy, which was my ticket to L.A.
and ticket into acting, properly.

BS: I’d be interested in your take on the audition process. Is there anything fun come of it apart from booking a part?

CR: Well, if I can remember that it’s about the performance
for that moment, you have to throw out the window — even though it’s impossible,
you still have to do it — you have to remember that this can change your life,
and this, that and the other. You just go in there and say, “Okay, this is
another opportunity to perform.” Whether it’s for one, two, three or 17 people,
you just have to go in there and enjoy what you do. And the more that you can
be prepared for the audition, the better. I have loved it and I have dreaded
it.

BS: What was the audition process like for The Office, because that show, due to
its faux-documentary framing, has a very relaxed and naturalistic, improvisational
feel. Was there anything special or notable about that audition?

CR: Oh yeah. At the time it happened I was on a TV show
called Lucky, and there had recently
been a flurry of articles written about the show, and one of them said, “Bring
on more Mutha!” And that was my character. That article happened to be in the
office of the audition for The Office.
So I was like, “Hey, check this out!” So that was one little spark, and Greg
Daniels had happened to see me do a bit with Jerry Minor — a song, it’s a bit
about someone fucking his lady, all right? Now, if you go to YouTube and look
up L Witherspoon, you can check it out.
Greg was highly complimentary of that bit, and then what I ended up reading was
one of Jim’s asides to the camera. I got to choose one and read it. And they
dug it, so I got a call that said they want you to do this part in the
warehouse, and it has blossomed, thank God.

BS: I know it must be a great feeling to be on a show that’s
exploding like that, so how deep are you guys into the new seasons and what can
we expect for Daryl this year on The
Office?

CR: Well, we’re headed into our fourth episode, which is the
last of the hour-longs. And it’s very exciting — the table-reads for the
scripts are just a party, we’re laughing so hard in there. And then Daryl is
going to be stepping in a little bit more, and have some interaction with not
only Michael Scott. So it’s going to be a little bit more for me to do.

BS: I’m sure you don’t mind that.

CR: At first I had a problem with it, but then I got the
check. (laughs) No, I’m just kidding, I’m teasing. Of course I don’t mind!
Whatever they’ve got — sometimes I’m in there for one line, sometimes a whole
episode, it’s really pretty awesome. They know what they’re doing and I just roll
with it.

BS: Cool. So you know, of course, that this lends itself to the
ridiculous hypothetical question — if the creatures from Dragon Wars descended upon Dunder-Miflin, what would happen?

CR: Mmm! (laughs) Daryl and the warehouse crew and probably
everyone in the office too, except for Michael and Dwight, would get out of
there. Michael and Dwight would probably try to reason with them.

BS: After your turn in Knocked Up this summer, have you cultivated a new fan base in appreciative doormen?

CR: Absolutely! I’m on MySpace, and I get a lot of love
coming from them that way. Some bouncers have emailed me saying thank you, you
said what I’ve wanted to say so many times. I’ve gotten some love at the doors
of certain nightclubs. It’s a brand new fan base, absolutely.

BS: Pineapple Express
sounds pretty madcap, and yet David Gordon Green isn’t known for comedy, per
se. What sort of part do you play in the film and how would you describe its tone?

CR: It’s a stoner action comedy, and David Gordon Green was
amazing. It was like trusting a brilliant… (laughs) and I mean this with all due
respect, but he looks so young that I tease him that he’s the world’s most
brilliant fifth grader. From the minute we met… I just learned to trust him, and he got some great stuff out of all of us, so
it was fun. I play a hitman chasing Seth Rogen and James Franco around, because
Seth Rogen witnessed a murder by my boss.

BS: Sounds like a whole other potential new fan base.

CR: “Fuggetabout it!”

BS: In Walk Hard
you play Bobby Shad, which already has the ring of a classic character in name
alone, but what is that character like, and I heard you might have some musical
sequences, is that right?

CR: Yeah, Bobby Shad is a singer in a black nightclub from
the 1940s or ’50s era. What happens is Dewey Cox, John C. Reilly’s character,
is studying my moves and my songs. And then one night I get hurt, and that
happens to be the night that some Jewish record producers are out in the
audience, and Reilly gets up and performs, and does my stuff.

BS: So he cops all your moves, and Bobby is probably none
too happy about that.

CR: Exactly.

BS: Has that ever happened to you in stand-up? I know
there’s a tendency for comedians to police their own when it comes to this, but
have you had someone steal bits from you?

CR: Yeah, I have actually. But they can’t do it like I do
it, so it’s OK.

BS: So, wrapping up, is comedy
the sweet spot for you, or, given your druthers, are there other things you’d
like to soon do — branch out dramatically, or work behind the camera?

CR: I am riding the ride, my friend, and where it takes me
I’m happy to go. It’s really like that. There’s a lot of things that I dream
about (laughs), but at the same time, who knew I’d be in Judd Apatow’s camp,
you know? So I don’t wanna block anything.

Dragon Wars opens this Friday, September 14. To access the film’s trailer, click here.

We swell the rolls here at Shared Darkness as
time and inclination permits, and since I seem to randomly see Ron Jeremy every couple of months (most recently loitering outside of legendary hot dog eatery Pink’s, on La Brea), I thought I’d go ahead and slap up this age-updated interview with him, originally published on occasion of the limited theatrical release of the documentary Porn Star: The Life of Ron Jeremy, in November of 2001. To wit:

To really understand Ron Jeremy one must first have an
inkling of his offscreen persona. Of his affable desperation to please. Of his
unending quest for professional (and, by extension, personal) legitimacy. Of
how, without completely copping to it, he really, quite literally wants
everyone to like him.

Of course, these traits aren’t too difficult to glean — a
half hour phone conversation should do the trick. “What’d you think of the
movie?” presses Jeremy right out of the gate. “Be totally honest because I
didn’t make the film, I’m just the subject.”

Porn Star: The Life of Ron Jeremy, a documentary from Scott Gill detailing the
life of the clown prince of pornography. Now 54 years old, Jeremy’s been in the
adult movie business for more than half his life. His career, launched by a “Boy
Next Door” photo in the October ’78 issue of Playgirl, includes more than 1,500 blue movies and a healthy
smattering of regular film work (from TV work on Nash Bridges and bit parts in Killing
Zoe, Detroit Rock City and The Boondock Saints to the cruel
indignity of being edited out of Ronin).
As porn’s reigning character actor, a performer who often infuses his cocksmen
with a sense of playfulness and/or self-deprecating humor, Jeremy’s been in a
position to see firsthand the sort of industry evolution on display in Paul
Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights.

“I always did the comedy, I guess, more than most,” recalls
Jeremy. “I came into the porn business with training, I came in with a degree
in theater — a BA in theater, a BA in education and a masters in Special Ed. So
I came into the business with training as an actor, and having taught theater
and done some plays off Broadway. …I took it seriously as an acting medium back
then, when you could. They had big scripts, big locations, [you were] travelling
all over the world. You might do 10 days as an actor and one day you’d have a
sex scene. So you felt kind of like an actor in a way. The scripts were
important too; they even made you read before you got a job. Nowadays they just
take a Polaroid of your body and you do or don’t work — which I can understand,
because the market really changed when [pornography] went video and people
brought it into their homes. Couples started watching it just to see exciting
things. They’d fast forward through the dialogue: ‘Hey honey, look at this guy
trying to act!’”

Through it all — improbably, for a man nicknamed “The
Hedgehog” for his roly-poly physique and general hairiness — Jeremy has remained
one of the most recognizable and enduringly popular faces (if not bodies) in
porn. But, as the film amply demonstrates, Jeremy doesn’t let his celebrity go
to his head. In fact, far from it — being the most famous person at any given
party is usually a drag, Jeremy asserts. He gets a bigger kick out of
celebrities who approach him. “I’m a big ham,” he admits. “I get a real kick
when a celebrity will stop me and
ask, ‘Are you Ron Jeremy?’” (His top five kicks, by the way, consists of Billy
Joel, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Patti LuPone and Tony Curtis.)

Jeremy even has his own criteria, detailed in the
documentary, for determining whether a party is worth investing your time in:
first, and most important, is there someone there who you can brag to your
friends that you met? Second, is there anyone present who can help your career
in any way, shape or form? Third: good food? Fourth, is there quality entertainment?
And of course, finally, are there any chicks you have a chance with?

That last lingering question might be most frequently a
losing proposition for the majority of folks, but it probably keeps Jeremy at a
lot of parties (well, OK, the food seems to as well). The fuzzy math of
celebrity ensures Jeremy not only a loyal legion of college-age male fans and
minions (indeed, Porn Star finds him
being welcomed into a fraternity almost like returning royalty) but also, for
some reason, plenty of “normal” women (read: not in the adult biz) who seem
perfectly willing — and in some cases downright eager — to view and/or test his
wares in person. “Occasionally a girl might come up to me and say, ‘Can I see
it?’ And that might occasionally lead to some fun because I’ll say, ‘Well, show
me yours and I’ll show you mine.’ And they’ll say, ‘But I’m not in the
business.’ And then I’ll say, ‘Yeah,
but I clocked out for today.’ And then we might go to some private area where
they’ll flash, I’ll flash — that gets kind of fun because it might get a little
playful.”

So what’s the upside of a documentary like Porn Star, a film that amuses,
entertains and to a degree titillates, certainly, but also highlights in
passing the cheapness, nervous aspiration and latent loneliness of its hirsute
protagonist? “It mentions all these good things,” asserts the eternally
optimistic Jeremy, citing at length his mother’s work as a code-breaker during
World War II and his interesting family history. “They promised me they
wouldn’t try to slant the direction to just
porn, [that they would show] I’ve done decent speaking parts in major motion
pictures. I mean, you have a prolific director like Adam Rifkin saying that I’m
a very good actor and have to try extra hard to break the adult stigma. I like
the public hearing that. …It shows,
‘All right, the guy’s trying to go mainstream, he’s giving it his best shot.’”

Ethan Hawke is a guy who, for better of worse, almost always follows his feelings, because his attachment to them is the strongest and truest thing he knows. He follows them with regards to the professional choices he makes, and he follows them in his personal life as well. In recent interviews, he’s talked some about the darker side of those feelings, and been more forthcoming about the stress and insecurity brought about by his wife Uma Thurman’s career eclipsing his, and how this fed frictions and fissures already inherent to the relationship, which ended in divorce in 2004.

Night at the Museum, and who — up until 2001’s Training Day, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and arguably only after that, with Taking Lives and 2005’s remake of Assault on Precinct 13 — never particularly seemed to take a studio job just as a commercial “gimme putt.” But then, Hawke has always seemingly been a restless spirit, full of contradictions. That much can be gleaned by how a high-intellect ambivalence and uncertainty fuel his most memorable screen characters, whether as slacker Troy Dyer in Reality Bites, a panicked police recruit in Training Day or the smitten Jesse, in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

It’s hard to say, then, exactly what feelings the relatively chilly theatrical reception of Hawke’s sophomore directorial effort, The Hottest State, based on his own novel, will elicit in him. It is obviously of him, and thus personal and valued, but to hear Hawke tell it, the film wasn’t something he particularly tackled with wide-eyed preciousness. “It just kind of rolled out. I have to say this project happened incredibly organically,” he says.

“When I was younger, when I first wrote the book, I was really just running with that ‘write what you know’ thing they tell you in writing class,” Hawke continues. “I was using the details of my real life to create authenticity for an emotional subject matter that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how much we take, how much our parents give us the vocabulary for love and how much we’re guided by that and how much that comes out in our romantic relationships. I kind of wanted to find that intersection, you know — the hottest state, an elevated level of passion, and where the protagonist comes from. That’s what I wanted to write about, so I just kind of stole pieces from my own life and from my friends’ lives and just did it.”

But now, Hawke says, The Hottest State feels like somebody else’s life. It is no longer a reflection of his day-to-day, one that encompasses two kids, a divorce and the itinerant rhythms of an acting career. “What was kind of neat, what I feel proud of about The Hottest State, the novel, is that I wrote it when I was so young that it’s not nostalgic at all,” Hawke explains. “You know normally a lot of stories about youth and romantic first love and stuff — (Ivan) Turgenev’s First Love or even (Anton) Chevkov’s The Seagull, when he writes about the young lovers — it’s done with the eye and maturity of an older person kind of mocking it or laughing at it. I wrote it as if it was really important.” Here Hawke lets out a little laugh. “And then with the movie, I felt like I could do a little combination of both.” For the full feature piece interview, from FilmStew, click here.

At the now not-so-recent press day for 2 Days in Paris, the subject of the next film both in front of and behind the camera for multi-hyphenate Julie Delpy
came up. A historical drama
set in the 17th century, The Countess centers
around infamous Hungarian noblewoman Erzebet Bathory, who allegedly sacrificed virgins and bathed in their blood; it looks to shoot later this fall, and/or into early 2008, costarring Radha Mitchell, Vincent Gallo and William Hurt, among others.

“It’s historical, there’s
no fantasy. And there’s no vampires,” Delpy says, repeating the latter bit four
times, perhaps for subconscious emphasis. “It’s about cruelty and power. I
always liked that Stanford experiment about putting students in the place of
jailors and prisoners. They were planning on doing the experiment for three
weeks and after five days they had to stop because total nice, normal people
were abusing people, which I think tells you what, when you have no limits [on
power], humans are capable of doing. And the film is about a woman who’s never
been affixed limits of what is allowed to be done. She’s very cruel and, it
seems, [also] very normal, but I tell a parallel story. Yes, she has the reputation
that she killed 600 young women and bathed in their blood, these young virgins.
But there’s also the other side of the coin, which is that the king owed her so
much money that they had to get rid of her, so that’s why they created this
mythical monster — a witch and vampire bathing in blood. So I tell both
stories.”

But no vampires. That is on the record.

Whit Stillman, Nicole Holofcener, Kevin Smith, Tom DiCillo (himself a former cinematographer), Rusty Cundieff and Daisy von Sherler Mayer, among many others, bum-rushed the gates of authority. Some found welcome reception in the marketplace’s bosom, while others receded back into the shadows and interstices of theater, TV and other creative work.

In the ensuing decade-plus, though, that philosophy of integration has largely held firm, with for the most part only visual stylists transitioning over behind the feature camera from the worlds of music videos and advertising (David Fincher, Mark Pellington and Mark Romanek being notable exceptions), as well as the occasional dutiful writer, cinematographer or other collaborator getting the backing of their filmmaking benefactors to step up to the director’s chair. Otherwise, we’ve almost come to expect directors simply going out and making their movies, however low the budgets or constrictive the means. That fact, in and of itself, somehow legitimizes their opinions and vision.

It’s rare anymore that a first-time feature writer-director has the list and type of credits that Right at Your Door‘s Chris Gorak (above) does. Gorak served as art director on Tombstone, Rosewood, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club and The Man Who Wasn’t There, among other movies. He was also production designer on Blade: Trinity and Lords of Dogtown, and the supervising art director on Minority Report. It’s an experiential set that he insists has served him well. “It’s immeasurable, it’s priceless, for sure — definitely the core foundation of what I do,” says Gorak during a recent one-on-one interview, a small tuft of brown hair sticking straight up, making him favor Alton Brown even a bit more. “I always say that I got paid to go to film school, and enjoyed the process too,” he adds. “Starting from the base up, there’s an appreciation to the craft of the making a film. I learned a lot about collaboration, I learned a lot about telling the story, creative process, and also [that] the art department is a hub for the filmmaking process. It accesses or touches, is a part of, special effects, wardrobe, prop, set dressing, camera, lighting, grip. Every department deals with the art department and the art department deals with every department.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here. For another tidbit with Gorak from the same intervie, click here.

It’s easy to bask in the reflected glow of filmmakers like Jean-Luc
Godard, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Richard Linklater, and learn something from
working with them. But during a recent one-on-one interview with Julie Delpy,
I asked the 2 Days in Paris
multi-hyphenate about what she’s learned in her career from bad directors.

“I mean, I’ve been on films where the hairdresser
is taking over the directing of the film, really, and that’s when you know
you’ve got not a winner,” she says. “Because you know that the director is not
the captain, and it’s over — the film won’t have coherence. What I’ve learned
from working with bad directors is two things. Number one, it’s bad to be a director that screams at everybody,
I feel, because you lose a lot of the people that could and should be your
allies. And for me, even when people were driving me crazy — it didn’t happen
on this film, but someone was trying
at times to drive me crazy — I never lost it, I was always together. It’s
actually interesting for a woman to be a director, because we have a tendency
to be a tiny bit more emotional than men, so it’s really about keeping in check
your emotional side, and being together. The other thing is when a director is
confused and doesn’t know where he’s going… I’m not saying I was perfect, at
times I was confused and overwhelmed. But you have to make strong decisions,
and if you’re confused and you show it, it’s over.”

I had a 1-on-1 sit-down with Chris Gorak on Tuesday regarding his directorial debut, Right at Your Door, a two-hander of claustrophobic paranoia starring Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack. Since Gorak’s background in art direction and production design had placed him on plenty of big-budget film sets before, I figured he’d have a unique point-of-view on the difficulties of production, and maybe a leg up on other first-time directors. With that in mind, I asked him if he still had any “oh-shit” moments during production, a cramped 20-day shoot.

Gorak’s answer was telling. It wasn’t the production itself that stressed him out; it was a pre-production wrinkle that kept him on his toes. “There was Rory’s character, Mary’s character, and then
the third main character that I didn’t realize until I was in it was the house.
And so the hardest thing to do was cast the house,” says Gorak. “The script is written and you
cast your actors to it, but how do I cast a house, because I can’t build a
stage set. Usually on a bigger film you’d build a set to fit the story — like, here’s
the hallway, and this is where he’s going to enter. But here I was searching,
combing the hills of Los Angeles
looking for the perfect house with view of downtown, and finding someone who
wanted production at their home. And then I would go scene by scene if I felt
right, then I would sit there… it was this exhaustive process and we didn’t
lock the house location until two weeks before we were shooting. So that was a
little hairy.“

At the recent press day for the chatty, loose-limbed relationship dramedy 2 Days in Paris, the subject of multi-hyphenate Julie Delpy’s
two “Before collaborations” with
Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke came up, and not merely because of her most recent
film’s thematic overlap — namely a mixed-culture couple who may or may not be
right for one another working through some issues in voluble fashion — with
those projects. No, it was because Before
Sunset was so well received, in fact, that it kicked up some talk of
another possible installment.

For her part, Delpy isn’t discounting the possibility, but
says that it’s far from a certainty, even in the theoretical realm. “You know,
it depends on if we ever stumble onto the right idea. It took us nine years to
really come up with the right concept for the second film, and we wouldn’t like
to do a crappy third one that will suck, you know? And we could make a crappy third one, you know? It could happen,” she
says. “But we’d really like to stumble onto the right thing for it. Every time
anything is well received is a surprise for me, especially when I’m involved as
a writer, because I’m so happy — that means I say something that has a little
sense. I’m amazed because, for example, when I was writing Before Sunset, my agent fired me because he thought I was wasting
my time writing a stupid sequel to a movie that would never be made, and even
if it was made it would do nothing for my career. So you have to have a lot of
faith and belief in yourself to keep on writing when you’re ditched by your
agent, who tells you you’re crazy to write a stupid sequel. But in the end he
called and was like, ‘Why did you leave us?’ I was like, ‘How could you turn it
around?!’ The guy is so in denial over what he did that he’s actually thinking
that I left them.”

A delusional agent? Shocking, I say. Shocking…

As I’ve mentioned previously, I chatted with Danny Boyle a couple months back about Sunshine,
for a feature piece that will now apparently be pegged to its DVD release later this year, but among the other odds and ends that came up in the interview was the notion of expressly
national cinema, which is to say whether filmmakers have a certain duty or
obligation to their countries of origin to contribute to those cultures, and if
so whether and how Boyle saw himself fitting within those strictures.

“I don’t know whether it’s an obligation,” Boyle says, “but
I personally prefer to work (at home) because I sort of know it, the things
that are important to me, and I can answer the questions. I don’t have to ask
other people to answer them for me.” Here Boyle explains being able to size up
a person and tell roughly what kind of car they drive, or if he’s wrong about
the guess, then figure out why he’s wrong. In America,
Boyle notes, he’s more frequently baffled and adrift.

“The film industry in Britain
I always describe as occasional, which is really the best way of describing
it,” Boyle continues. “Because occasionally
we have a decent film, but we get the film industry we deserve — and we don’t
really go to the cinema enough. Why should we have an industry like America
or France?
That’s what everyone always winges (note: I suppose the British equivalent of
whines) about in Britain,
why don’t we have a movie industry like Hollywood?
And you think, because we don’t fucking go! If it’s a sunny day the cinemas are
completely empty because everyone’s at the pub drinking or at the park. There
isn’t that love or fanaticism about film that you get here, and in France
and in India —
you get it there as well. What we’re good at is music.”

The daughter of French actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet,
Julie Delpy was born into an artistic family, and the values with which
she was inculcated extended beyond those of your typical actress.
Echoes of this are glimpsed in Delpy’s own eclectic career both in front of and behind the camera (she not
only attended but also graduated from NYU Film School) as well as the fact
that she nurses a long love of music. In fact, in 2004, in addition to
co-writing the film’s screenplay, Delpy penned and performed several
songs for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, a follow-up to Before Sunrise.
One of three tunes on the soundtrack, the heartrending, acoustic “A
Waltz for a Night” served as her character Celine’s pivotal confession
to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, with whom she spent a single evening in Vienna nine years prior.

It’s seemingly kismet, and not particularly surprising, then, that music features prominently in the making of 2 Days in Paris, Delpy’s latest film — which she wrote, directs and stars in opposite former, if brief, off-screen beau Adam Goldberg. “I co-wrote a song with a band named Nouvelle Vague,
which is actually a really good French band, and it was the way that I
financed all the music in the film, all the songs playing in the
background,” Delpy says. “Because if I gave (a song)
to the music company that works with the financing company in Germany
who financed the film, then they would pay for all the songs in the
film. So I gave them the song,” she continues. “That was the deal, and that’s what you do on independent films; all sorts of little deals, and you have to give a bit of yourself to
get money from them. But it wasn’t bad, though I had to write the song
at night while I was mixing the film. That was a bit exhausting.”

Delpy
doesn’t seem to know any other way, though. In fact, talking to her, and
listening to digressive, flight-of-fancy stories about a brisk, 20-day
production schedule on location in the City of Lights last summer, one
can reasonably come to the conclusion that she in a way feeds off of
such chaos, breakneck pacing and on-the-fly pacts and revisions. For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Relaxing at the recent press day for Stardust in a
T-shirt emblazoned with an iconic photograph of the famous meeting between Andy Warhol
and Bob Dylan, young actor Charlie Cox had plenty of time to reflect on his
meteoric rise from near-obscurity (he’d appeared in Casanova prior to being plucked for the lead role in Stardust by director Matthew Vaughn) as
well as his next movie, Stone of Destiny.
Written and directed by nebbishy actor Charles Martin Smith (The Snow Walker, Air Bud), the film is a rooted-in-truth caper comedy, in which Cox stars
opposite Kate Mara (We Are Marshall, Shooter), Billy Boyd and Robert Carlyle.

“I playing a guy called Ian Hamilton who’s a real guy,
still alive, and he’s amazing,” says Cox, who on his arm sports a butterfly tattoo
comprised of two skulls, created by New York
tattoo artist Scott Campbell. “It’s the story of him and three of his mates
during their university years in the 1950s, 1951 actually. They drove down to Glasgow
from London in the middle of the
night on Christmas Eve, and they stole a very famous Scottish relic out of
Westminster Abbey. …It’s called the Stone of Scone, but
it’s better known as the Stone of Destiny. I’ll tell you what
it was — Jacob had his vision of the ladder where he fell asleep with his head
on this stone. And so the stone become the throne of Scotland,
and the Scottish monarch would sit on it. So what happened was, when the
English got rid of the Scottish monarchy, they took it away and they placed it
under the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, therefore symbolizing by
Scotland’s own rule that whoever sat on the throne of England was sitting on
the throne of Scotland as well. So it was kind of a massive gesture to steal
it.”

“But it’s actually very funny as well,” Cox continues. “I like to call it
the worst successful heist of all time, because it’s so badly thought out and
everything went wrong, but they did it. Somehow they broke this big stone, they
lost it — all sorts of things went wrong. But they still pulled it off.”

UPDATE 8/16: In regards to the comment below, there was a slip of the tape, and it was somewhat mangled. I assumed “Field” was a nickname, but upon further review, I tend to doubt that. I believe it was just “Ian,” garbled. Ergo, corrected above…

The Bourne Ultimatum star Matt Damon, the anarchic manner in which his signature film series
takes shape is an exception to the normal rules of production, and not
necessarily a technique to be emulated. “You know, it’s not an
advisable way to make a movie,” Damon confesses at a recent press
conference. “You couldn’t teach that in film school and send people out there. But it works for Paul, and there’s something
about the chaos and the alchemy of [producer] Frank Marshall and Paul Greengrass. But it should come with a stamp. It’s not an advisable way
to work if you want to live a long life.”

For returning director Greengrass, who secured an Oscar nomination for helming United 93 between making The Bourne Supremacy
and this film, the methods behind this sort of madness are rooted in
the material, as well as his penchant for shooting in handheld fashion,
frequently on location. “I think that in my films, and I’m not [saying]
across the board here, but it’s certainly true of The Bourne Ultimatum,” Greengrass says,
“you’re trying to bring together two forces that essentially are going
in opposite directions. And those two forces are structure, order,
planning, story — all the things you can lay down in advance
logistically, narratively, whatever it is. Then you’ve got the forces
of freedom, improvisation, ‘the moment,’ the happy accident — the
unstructured bits of filmmaking. …I think what I try to do all the time is bring those two [influences]
into the closest possible proximity, and where the two meet, that’s
where a Bourne movie should be,” he enthuses. “It means that they’re fresh, you know? A Bourne movie is not an airline meal, it’s made on the run.” For the full interview/feature, from FilmStew, click here.

At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum, director Paul Greengrass talked about the
special, deferential contentment that his Oscar nomination for United 93 brought to him. “It was very
nice. I was actually on the set of Bourne Ultimatum at that time, and everybody was very nice,” says Greengrass. “It
meant a lot to me most of all because of the journey we took with all those
families. They were so incredibly supportive of us and it meant the world to
them. And of course on a personal level it was a great honor, but it meant most
because they felt acknowledged in this city, by Hollywood.
I think that was fantastic.”

Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie (the four whores of the apocalypse?) ruled the
tabloids with their tales of boozy excess, criminal mischief and the
like. That era was powered by Jennifer Lopez. The artist formerly known
as J. Lo owed her ubiquity partially to her high-profile relationship
with fellow actor Ben Affleck, naturally, but also to the fact that at every turn, she seemed to be
launching a fragrance or shooting a music video or opening a (generally
cruddy) movie or feting the opening of an Arby’s.

If there was a red
carpet, she was on it. No wonder so many people seemed eager to
celebrate her Hollywood downfall or demotion. That turbulent time is
not too far in the past, but Lopez — with the aid of new husband Marc
Anthony, her costar in El Cantante — is working hard to make sure it remains in the rearview
mirror. “Marc helped me with this in the beginning,” she confesses in a recent interview.
“I just didn’t know there was another way to live.”

“At that time, I
was like, ‘I’m going to live my life, I’m not going to let this change
me,’” Lopez continues. “But you’re out there and then all this stuff is
happening to you and you’re on the cover of the tabloid every week. And
you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, this is not working in the way that I want
it to work.’” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer scored positions at Saturday Night Live — Samberg as a performer and the latter two as writers. Less than two years later, a movie they’ve done together (that would be Hot Rod) is coming out and one of their more robustly received digital shorts for SNL, the raunchy R&B parody Dick in a Box, just received an unlikely Emmy nomination. (Imagine that being performed live.)

While all three Lonely Island guys — friends since junior high
school — have enjoyed a huge bump in profile, it’s Samberg, as the
“face” of the trio, who stands poised to break out as a bonafide new
comedy star, and with that face down all the fresh challenges it
creates. Still, the steep upward trajectory doesn’t seem to bother him, and in making the leap from SNL to movies — a perilous chasm that not all have survived with grace or dignity —
Samberg seems to be taking a decided long view of things. “For people that
I’ve looked up to, they have all gone through ebbs and flows in their
movie careers,” he says. “Now that I’m actually in it a little
bit, I understand the desire to do something different. Even as early
as now, having done [just] this movie, I think personally I want to
keep doing weird stuff. I don’t think I have really proven myself in
terms of comedy yet.”

For the full feature on Samberg, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for discrete bits on Samberg’s recent appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, click here; for his thoughts on Hot Rod‘s original script, which has been bumping around since late 1999, click here.

At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon talked about wrapping up a series
that has meant so much to him, personally and professionally, and why he thinks
the Bourne movies have so connected
with audiences. “Maybe Good Will Hunting
did, because it pulled Ben and I out of total obscurity, but in terms of having
an impact on my career, there hasn’t been a role that’s had a bigger impact on
my life,” says Damon. “The movies have come out over the course of five, but
it’s been seven years of my life coming back to the character.”

“All the movies I think are very much of the time that they came
out,” continues Damon. “The first one [came out in] 2002, and it’s a post 9/11
movie, with all of the fear, all of the paranoia, everything in there. And what
I love about them is that you’ll be able to look back and know the second one
is (from) 2004, when things are starting to turn in Iraq,
and now this kind of American guy, this iconic American figure, is going and
apologizing and atoning for his misdeeds, for things that he’s done — he’s
taking responsibility. Now you have the movie ending where Bourne is pulling
the gun and putting it to the head of the person who lied to him, who said,
‘This is what you’re going to be doing, you’re going to be saving American
lives.’ And Bourne’s saying, ‘I see now that you led me into something under
false pretences, and now I understand that and I’m not going to do that
anymore.’ And so each movie is very much a reflection of the time in which it’s
made. We obviously have all the images of water-boarding, of somebody getting
shot in the corner of the room who Bourne doesn’t even know what he did. He
asks what did he do? He’s told, ‘We’ve been through that; you can’t know that.’
So there’s somebody who’s an American who’s killed without a trial. And all of
these things are just little nods to the world that we’re living in right now.
And I like that about the movies, they feel relevant. Bourne has a lot of
integrity, I do think he’s a very American character, and I like that about him
— his thoughtfulness, his intelligence, the fact that he’s trying to do the
right thing, doesn’t always do the right thing or his misled, but is trying to
do the right thing.” For the review of the movie, click here.

While it seems perfectly suited for his own silly,
free-flowing style, the script for Andy Samberg’s new film, Hot Rod,
has actually been around a while, as Samberg recounted at a recent press day
for the movie. “It was written by Pam Brady, who co-wrote the South Park movie and Team America, which are two of our
favorite movies, and it was originally developed for Will Ferrell,” he says. “I
guess it was ’99 or something when she wrote it, so it definitely had been
around, and just [because of] that alone there were adjustments we had to make.
A lot of other movies had come out, and things had been done since then. But if
you actually read her original script, there are so many movies that came out
since she wrote that… she was ahead of the game, it was actually kind of crazy.
But the first thing we had to do was make it something I was comfortable
performing and so it didn’t seem like I was doing a bad Will Ferrell
impression. And I think we got away with that.”

The “we” to which Samberg refers to isn’t a royal (or schizophrenic) affectation — it’s Lonely Island collaborators Akiva Schaffer, who makes his feature directorial debut, and Jorma Taccone, who appears in the movie. To that end, though uncredited, Samberg and his longtime pals “threw every idea and weird bit that we had into
it while staying to the original idea and characters Pam had put in place.” One of those ideas: a fetishistic homage to Footloose. “Many years ago Akiva and I were just watching Footloose on cable and I was like, ‘This
scene is amazing!,’ just the idea [that he’s] so angry and furious with rage
that he has to dance,” explains Samberg. “And Akiva, Jorma [and I] have
written a bunch of other stuff together, and we had that scene in a few other
things before this project that never got made. So when we got to Hot Rod, I was like, ‘We can do the Footloose
scene!’” Yes, Samberg got to dance, at long last. It’ll be another 24 hours or so before projected box office numbers dictate what form of loose celebration, if any, next takes place…