Almost all of the 18 films John Sayles has written and directed are studded with some measure of political, social or class consciousness. Actor and activist Edward James Olmos, meanwhile, has appeared in dozens of independent productions of his own, a good number with the same sort of thematic interests and preoccupation. Go For Sisters, however, represents their first collaboration. I recently had a chance to speak to Olmos in person and one-on-one, about finally working with Sayles as both an actor and producer, and the challenges of crafting his character. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

With both young adult lit adaptations and the science fiction genre each being hot at the box office over the last several years, and Orson Scott Card‘s 1985 novel Ender’s Game existing as it does it at the interstice of the two, its adaptation would seem to be an easy and especially ripe fit for these times. But what took so long for the film version? There were many hurdles over the years, and a variety of scripts and attached talent that never quite fully came together. Mostly, though, Ender’s Game is complicated, in the best sense of the word.

The book’s complex themes (it’s included on the U.S. Marine Corps’ professional reading program list), as well as its unique reflection upon some of the betrayals adults visit upon children in the name of protecting them — all rendered without giving into dystopian bleakness — make it a tough needle to thread as a film adaptation. Talking to the producers of Ender’s Game (of which there are more than a dozen), director Gavin Hood and even co-star Harrison Ford, though, there’s a shared affinity for the source material’s challenging nature. For the full read, from the News & Record, click here.

It seems hard to believe, but for an actor so associated with the science-fiction genre, Harrison Ford hasn’t been “back” to outer space since the conclusion of the original Star Wars franchise. That changes with the release of this weekend’s Ender’s Game, writer-director Gavin Hood‘s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Hugo Award-winning novel. Set a generation after the devastating attack of Earth by an ant-like alien race, the book details the selection, training and manipulation of a brilliant young military cadet, Ender (Asa Butterfield), by a forward-leaning colonel (Ford) looking to prosecute his strategy of a preemptive war to end all wars. Recently, the film’s cast and crew gathered for a press day in Los Angeles, to talk about the movie and its weighty themes, as well as some of their upcoming projects. Part of the chat with Ford is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

October’s Gravity, one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of 2013, is approaching $200 million in domestic ticket sales and has already crossed the cumulative $300 million benchmark. It’s a spare, streamlined tale and a victory for the marriage of original storytelling with cutting-edge technology. One of the aspects most commonly praised is the movie’s utilization of 3-D. Whereas filmgoers have recently been souring on lazy use of the effect, in Gravity, set entirely in outer space, its deployment is mesmerizing, and feels integral to the narrative.

But while the forthcoming big screen adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s award-winning Ender’s Game will be presented in IMAX theaters in addition to regular screens, it will not be presented in 3-D — something of a surprise to some, given the material’s science-fiction trappings. There was a lot of reasoning put into the decision, however, according to director Gavin Hood. For the explanation, from the movie’s recent Los Angeles press day, trip over to ShockYa.

Kelen Coleman is a busy lady. In addition to guest starring and recurring roles on a bevy of buzz-worthy small screen shows — The Mindy Project, Hart of Dixie and, perhaps most notably, HBO’s The Newsroom — she also has a new movie hitting theaters this week. In the supernaturally-tinged horror film Cassadaga, Coleman stars as Lily, a post-lingually deaf artist who, in trying to attain closure with her recently deceased younger sister, accidentally summons forth the vengeful ghost of a murdered woman. I recently had a chance to talk to Coleman one-on-one about the movie, her college years at UNC-Chapel Hill, her budding career and what she thinks about starting up a tabloid relationship with Kellan Lutz. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

With so many syndromes (ADHD), bureaucratic agencies (USDA) and different statistical metrics (OPS) already receiving their own acronyms, it seems only appropriate that, since one out of two marriages end in a split-up, adult children of divorce (ACOD) merit the same level of recognition.

Writer-director Stu Zicherman felt the same way. Opening in New York and Los Angeles theaters this week, his film A.C.O.D. centers on restauranteur Carter (Adam Scott), who, having survived the madness of the split of his parents (Catherine O’Hara and Richard Jenkins) as a kid, now has to oversee bringing them back together, along with their new spouses, for the wedding of his younger brother (Clark Duke). Along the way, he learns that, unbeknownst to him, the therapist (Jane Lynch) he saw years ago was actually an author doing research for a book about the effects of divorce on kids. For Playboy, I recently had a chance to talk to Zicherman about his film, divorce in both real life and as seen on screen, what quality can long mask relationship troubles, and a family secret called “the Hysterectomy Conspiracy.” The conversation is an interesting one, so click here for the excerpted read.

She’s only just recently 24 years old, but since 2006 Juno Temple has appeared in more than two dozen films, from independent fare like Cracks, Greenberg, Dirty Girl and Killer Joe to studio offerings like The Other Boleyn Girl, Year One and The Three Musketeers. In her latest movie, writer-director Jill Soloway’s tart, Silver Lake-set dramedy Afternoon Delight, Temple plays McKenna, a stripper and sex worker who is befriended by an emotionally wayward, stay-at-home suburban mother, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), with considerable consequences. I recently had a chance to speak to Temple one-on-one and in person, about the movie, learning erotic dance, how she feels about auditions, and her impressions of the forthcoming Maleficent. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Jake Johnson is a married man. Recently, however, he’s been logging some major screen time stumbling across more blurred lines than Robin Thicke. On the Fox comedy New Girl, which enjoys its third season premiere tonight, his character Nick has finally escaped the gravitational pull of a manipulative ex-girlfriend and consummated a lengthy flirtation with Zooey Deschanel‘s bubbly, optimistic Jess, one of his roommates.

In director Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, meanwhile, Johnson plays Luke, an amiable, bearded thirtysomething who, despite being in a long-term relationship with Jill (Anna Kendrick), has one of those friendships with coworker Kate (Olivia Wilde) that feels like it’s teetering on the precipice of something more. Given that they work at a craft brewery with liberal policies of workplace imbibing, that makes for a decidedly slippery slope. For Playboy, I recently sat down with Johnson to discuss alcohol, the work wife, the wandering male eye, and the perils of mixing alcohol with the work wife and the wandering male eye. The conversation is a fun and interesting one, so click here for the read.

From their groundbreaking MTV show The State to Comedy Central’s Reno 911!, movies in which they’ve acted, and a whole slate of films on which they’ve served as screenwriters, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant have kept things fresh… and often plenty weird. Their newest effort, in which they co-star, represents their feature film tandem directorial debut. A zany, ramshackle comedy about a married-and-pregnant couple (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb) who are forced to enlist the help of the Vatican’s elite exorcism team (Garant and Lennon) after they move into a haunted fixer-upper in New Orleans, Hell Baby offers up an assortment of lunacy, nudity and gross-out humor. I recently had a chance to speak to the two multi-hyphenates in person, about their film, a sketch from The State that never was, and where things stand on the Baywatch movie they’re penning for Paramount. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

A much buzzed-about premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Hannah Fidell’s feature debut as a writer and director, A Teacher, details the slipping-knot sanity of a young Texas high school instructor, Diana (Lindsay Burdge), as an illicit affair with one of her students, Eric (Will Brittain), runs its course, from white-hot and secret to its inevitable messy conclusion. I recently had a chance to talk to Fidell and her two stars in person, about the movie’s themes and production, inappropriate crushes, and the film’s as-yet-unrealized viral PR opportunity. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Whether it’s from his work on Human Giant and Children’s Hospital, guest-starring roles on small screen sitcoms like The Office, or bit roles in movies like Little Fockers, The Descendants and The Other Guys, you’ve seen Rob Huebel. You may not yet associate him with one breakout role (unless it’s as an annoying cell phone user), but that changing seems only to be a matter of when, not if.

In Huebel’s latest film, multi-hyphenate Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant‘s loose-limbed horror comedy Hell Baby, he plays a police officer who, along with Paul Scheer, gets a strange feeling about a married-and-pregnant couple (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb) who move into a New Orleans house with a most unsavory history. I recently had a chance to talk to Huebel about the movie, improvisation, national commercial campaigns and the special hope and despair of pilot season. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In Afternoon Delight, when a well-off, thirtysomething Los Angeles mother, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), visits a strip club to try to spice up her marriage and ends up getting a private dance from McKenna (Juno Temple), an unlikely friendship is born, setting in motion waves of colorful and unexpected change. I recently had a chance to talk to writer-director Jill Soloway (The United States of Tara) about her feature film debut, the state of indie film, and notions of “the divided feminine.” The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In her latest film, a sexy mystery of slipped-knot, unraveling sanity entitled The Stranger Within, the lovely Estella Warren plays an acclaimed actress, Emily Moore, who repairs to a remote Mediterranean island with her psychiatrist husband Robert (William Baldwin) following a traumatic incident. When a mysterious young woman (Sarah Butler) who claims to have just survived a terrible hiking accident with her boyfriend shows up, however, it makes Emily wonder if she might be a threat to her marriage, and indeed her life. I recently had a chance to speak to Warren about the film, social media, amazing pool tricks (though not the kind you’re likely thinking of), her self-admitted “foodie” status, and more. How did she repay me? By mocking my cooking, of course. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

One could be forgiven for wondering if Rob Corddry has cracked the code to human cloning. After all, in addition to continuing work on the award-winning Children’s Hospital, Corddry has appeared in six films this year, including Warm Bodies, Escape From Planet Earth, Pain & Gain, Rapture-Palooza and The Way, Way Back. The latest is Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s horror comedy Hell Baby, in which Corddry stars (among others) with Leslie Bibb, playing half of a married-and-pregnant couple who move into a haunted fixer-upper in New Orleans. On the eve of the film’s Los Angeles premiere, I had a chance to sit down and talk to Corddry, about improvisation, Po Boys, the future of comedy and, quite literally, the blood he shed for Hell Baby. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Filmmaker David Gordon Green has alternated between independent and studio fare with remarkable facility, but equally impressive has been the difference in styles and genres he has explored. Coming on the heels of 2011’s studio comedies Your Highness and The Sitter, his latest film marks a return to more ruminative waters. A loose adaptation of a recent Icelandic movie, the 1988-set Prince Avalanche stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as a pair of bickering men painting highway road stripes through a desolate Texas countryside that’s been recently ravaged by fire. I recently attended a press day where I had a chance to sit down with Green, and chat about the film and some of his forthcoming projects. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In writer-director Chad Crawford Kinkle’s moody horror drama Jug Face, Lauren Ashley Carter plays Ada, a pregnant, panicked teenager who tries to escape her backwoods community when she realizes she may be the latest person to be sacrificed to a mysterious pit that the townsfolk believe has healing powers. In real life, though, Carter is a young New York City actress paying her dues and just starting out in her career climb, which means there are still commercial auditions for ads about a feminine hygiene product superhero. I recently had a chance to talk to Carter one-on-one, about Jug Face, horror movies, stage fright, auditioning and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In the new, forthrightly titled, across-the-pond horror comedy import Cockneys vs. Zombies, director Matthias Hoene puts a wild, commingled spin on East-Enders cinema, mixing it up with the oeuvres of Edgar Wright, Guy Ritchie, Sam Raimi and more. I recently had a chance to speak to Hoene one-on-one, about his work as a commercial director, moustaches, his film’s violent content and his next project, Capsule, which is set up at 20th Century Fox and likely to start shooting next year. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In 1999, after an infamously turbulent development process that saw its script get snapped up and then somewhat cruelly, publicly jettisoned by Miramax, The Boondock Saints, a revenge flick about two avenging-angel Irish Catholic twins, Connor and Murphy McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus), who cut a swath of retribution through Boston’s criminal underworld, came and went in theaters in barely the blink of an eye. On the nascent digital home video format, however, it became a huge if unlikely hit.

A decade later, its writer-director, Troy Duffy, got a chance to make a sequel, Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, that continued the McManus brothers’ story. This week, an exclusive director’s cut of the movie on Blu-ray hits Best Buy, with 27 minutes of re-inserted, never-before-seen footage, two audio commentary tracks, deleted scenes, seven behind-the-scenes featurettes, and more. I recently had a chance to talk to Duffy one-on-one, about the cult appeal of his franchise and what else he’s working on next. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the chat.

Along with rabble-rouser Lars von Trier, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg was at the forefront of the influential Dogme 95 movement, an austere cinematic experiment which eschewed not only special effects and technology, but also a lot of other modern conventions. Since then he’s branched out and made different types of movies; his latest is the well received The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a day care teacher wrongly accused of child sexual abuse. I recently had a chance to speak to Vinterberg one-on-one, about his hippie commune upbringing (“I grew up in the 1970s in a hippie commune and was surrounded by genitals, and it was kind of not a problem for anyone”), his new film and its in-competition premiere at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, what he now thinks about Dogme 95, and what’s next for him professionally. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

She was a child star of some note, with roles in Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, This Is My Life, Now and Then and Sleepless in Seattle, as well as a TV series and small screen version of Freaky Friday. But the Hollywood rat race wasn’t for Gaby Hoffmann. She went to college, became a doula (a person who helps home-birthing women when they’re in labor) and otherwise indulged her intellectual curiosity (“I spent most of the last 10 years doing very little,” she jokes). This summer she’s back on screen, in the first of a quartet of indie films, playing the free-spirited title character opposite Michael Cera in Sebastián Silva’s Chilean travelogue Crystal Fairy, which opens wide in July after receiving a World Cinema Directing Award following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Recently, I spoke with Hoffmann one-on-one about the movie, the hallucinogenic effects of the San Pedro cactus and, ahem, pubic wigs. The conversation is excerpted over at Yahoo Movies, so click here for the read.

At the heart of a lot of John Hughes’ most popular movies from the 1980s, there was, broadly speaking, tension between an uptight geek and a jock or more extroverted guy. Jacob Zachar (Greek) and Jayson Blair (The New Normal) occupy those roles in Alex Craig Mann‘s directorial debut, Detention of the Dead. Oh… except the movie also features zombies, in addition to a handful of other at-odds high school archetypes. I recently had a chance to speak to the actors in person, about their experience making the movie, Blair’s most awkward audition experience (hint: it involves a most unfortunate impression of Spider-Man), and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

When Brad Pitt, as a producer-star, tackled the sprawling movie adaptation of Max Brooks’ zombie novel World War Z, there was a lot of talk about the zombie genre having reached its apex, and possibly being tapped out. On the other end of the budgetary spectrum, though, is something like debut director Alex Craig Mann’s Detention of the Dead, which shows that zombie movies are, pardon the pun, unlikely to die off anytime soon. I recently had a chance to talk to Mann one-on-one, about his film, his background and his ambitions. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Sarah Wright has made impressions in The Loop, The House Bunny, Mad Love and Parks and Recreation, the latter in a small recurring role as Millicent Gergich. In the raucous comedy 21 & Over, releasing to home video on Blu-ray/DVD combo pack this week, she plays Nicole, a college co-ed who serves as the object of affection for one of a trio of randy partiers. I recently had a chance to chat with Wright one-on-one, about the movie, basketball, “flicking the bean” and whether females really talk about masturbation, and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Perhaps it’s only natural, given their often larger-than-life personas, but professional wrestlers have been among the biggest beneficiaries of modern-day “branding” and branching out in the entertainment world. Among the latest WWE figures to test the acting waters is nine-time world champion Randy Orton, who takes his first crack at a starring role in 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded, a discretely plotted sequel/spin-off to 2009’s 12 Rounds, starring John Cena. In the movie, Orton plays Nick Malloy, an emergency medical technician who finds himself locked in a Saw-like game of cat-and-mouse with a vigilante tied to his past. Recently, I had a chance to talk to Orton one-on-one, about acting outside versus inside the ring, his wrestling family roots, and his tattoos, among other things. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Liane Balaban made quite an impression as Dustin Hoffman’s sweetly sad, set-to-wed daughter in Last Chance Harvey, and will be recognizable to plenty of folks from her recurring role on the small screen’s Supernatural. In her latest film, however, Balaban gets to channel a wild, daffy femininity whose unhinged, slightly damaged siren call will strike a chord of familiarity in many a guy. Finding Joy finds disillusioned author Kyle (Josh Cooke) returning home and having to cope with various indignities tossed his way by his estranged father (Barry Bostwick) and new stepmother (Lainie Kazan). When he meets Balaban’s spunky bohemian title character, frustrated, comedically-inflected romance ensues. I recently had a chance to talk with the Canadian-born actress one-on-one, about Finding Joy, superstitions, her unisex menstruation website and more. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.