The Chinese calendar may state otherwise, but 2012 is most assuredly the year of Mark Duplass. After all, the multi-hyphenate extraordinaire has four films in theaters as an actor and two others, Kevin, Who Lives at Home and The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, which he co-wrote and directed with his older brother, Jay. In director Colin Trevorrow‘s Sundance Award-winning Safety Not Guaranteed, Duplass stars as Kenneth, a troubled guy who, convinced he can travel through time, is looking for a partner to go back with him. In Lynn Shelton‘s Your Sister’s Sister, he’s a damaged guy, still grieving the loss of a brother from one earlier, who gets caught in between his longtime friend (Emily Blunt) and her sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). I had a chance to sit down with Duplass one-on-one recently, and chat about those delightful films, the differences in his working relationships with each of the two directors, the perils of bicycle-smashing and… jean shorts. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the lively, considerably awesome read.

Character actor Bill Moseley is in the unique position of having one of those recognizable faces that frequently spawns a sense of unnerved dread or disgust when people place it. But that’s a good thing, actually. With dozens of credits to his name, the amiable Moseley has carved out a position as the star or featured player in a number of horror flicks with high cult appeal. He made his mark as Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and, years later, Otis B. Driftwood in Rob Zombie’s directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses, a role he reprised in The Devil’s Rejects. His latest movie is The Tortured, in which he plays a pedophile and murderer who claims the young son of Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen. I had a chance to speak to Moseley one-on-one recently, about the movie, some of his weird experiences with horror fans, his lifelong love of music, and his role in the upcoming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

He was the unhelpful principal in 21 Jump Street and none other than Jesus Christ himself in A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, but Jake Johnson can currently be seen on a weekly basis opposite Zooey Deschanel in FOX’s hit, Golden Globe-nominated sitcom New Girl, which was fairly recently picked up for a second season. Fans jonesing for an extra helping of Johnson won’t have to suffer through summer repeats, however, as his new film, Safety Not Guaranteed, debuts this week. In it, Johnson plays Jeff, a sardonic Seattle magazine employee who takes two college interns, Darius and Arnau (Aubrey Plaza and Karan Soni), on a road trip to track down the hermetic author (Mark Duplass) of a classified ad searching for a partner to travel through time with him. Unbeknownst to his employer or younger charges, however, the disillusioned Jeff is actually more interested in tracking down and re-connecting with a long-lost love interest who lives in the beachside community. I recently had a chance to speak to Johnson one-on-one, about the film, its disparate tonalities and time travel in general. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

When an unusual classified ad inspires a cynical Seattle magazine employee (Jake Johnson) and his two tag-along college interns (Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) to go on a road trip and look for the story behind it, they discover Kenneth (Mark Duplass), a mysterious eccentric who believes he’s solved the riddle of time travel, and is seeking an armed companion to embark on a risky adventure. If that, the plot for director Colin Trevorrow’s delightful new Safety Not Guaranteed, sounds a bit outlandish, it’s actually rooted in a real ad that appeared in the 1990s. I had a chance to speak to Trevorrow one-on-one recently, about his movie, his stars, what he would do if he could travel through time, and how Huey Lewis’ mullet figures into the equation. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

For an actor whose legacy status could have likely afforded him much easier paths, Colin Hanks has embraced a wide range of projects, giving example to the pursuit of a life in the arts as one big, unending education. His latest film is High School, in which he plays an assistant principal, Brandon Ellis, to Michael Chiklis’ bewigged, obsessively authoritarian principal. When the school’s would-be valedictorian (Matt Bush) takes his first and only hit of marijuana before a school-wide drug test that promises to cost him his academic standing, he and his estranged stoner pal (Christopher Marquette) set out to spike and spoil the test results by getting all their classmates unwittingly stoned. I had a chance to speak to Hanks one-on-one recently, about the movie and his own high school experience, his embrace of Twitter, and crushing the spirits of Seth Rogen in this fall’s The Guilt Trip. Oh, and FourLoko. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

She reflects neither of the titular attractions of the campy Piranha 3DD, director John Gulager‘s follow-up to 2010’s surprise, $80-million-grossing Piranha 3D, but Danielle Panabaker anchors the movie nonetheless, starring as level-headed graduate student Maddy, whose visions of a happy summer working at her stepfather’s water park get dashed, in bloody fashion. It almost certainly helped that Panabaker had hearty, previous genre experience, in the form of Friday the 13th and The Crazies. I had a chance to speak to Panabaker one-on-one recently, about the movie and its production, her admirable dedication to education, and a certain T-shirt she might have liberated from the wardrobe department. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Matt Bush made quite an impression in Adventureland, as Figo, the impish, nut-punching co-worker and torturer of Jesse Eisenberg’s character. He’s now making impressions in a less throbbing manner. Bush has a wonky, out-there leading man June two-fer, appearing in both Piranha 3DD and John Stalberg‘s High School. In the former he’s a shy guy whose balls finally descend, as he swings into action to help his longtime crush (Danielle Panabaker) battle a piranha invasion at a water theme park. The the latter, he plays Henry, a straight-laced, would-be valedictorian who, after first sampling marijuana, teams up with estranged stoner pal Breaux (Christopher Marquette) to try to throw the test results of a mandatory drug test for the entire school, and thus preserve his academic standing. I had a chance to speak to Bush one-on-one recently, chatting about both films, his own adolescent success with the ladies (or lack thereof), his fall film with Clint Eastwood, and whether he needed to conduct any chemical research for his High School role. The conversation is excerpted over at shockYa, so click here for the full read.

If certain genre-heavy filmmakers exude a cool, self-serious air of entitlement and others chiefly a geek-made-good enthusiasm, John Gulager is the even more striking exception to these poles — a guy who’s at once shy and awkward and yet also gregarious and giving in private, talented but frumpy, and kind of shocked that he’s getting to live out his dream. After winning the directorial competition for the third season of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Project Greenlight, Gulager (the son of actor Clu Gulager) lent his talents to the low-budget Feast horror films. Now, after a bit of a break, he’s getting even crazier, in the form of Piranha 3DD, a schlocky sequel to 2010’s surprise August hit, in which David Hasselhoff pops up as a celebrity lifeguard and many folks, including scantily clad women, pay the price for the profit-happy motivations of a sleazy water park owner (David Koechner). I recently had a chance to catch up with the amiable Gulager one-on-one, chatting about practical versus CGI special effects, working in 3-D, spray tans, and his hopes for his next film. The conversation, held over coffee and one of the rubbery, giant, blood-covered piranhas used in his movie, is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

In broad-strokes genre pieces, most of the best movie concepts can be delineated in concise fashion, and bring a head-slapping (“Of course, why didn’t I think of that!”), instant sense of identification and intrigue. Such is certainly the case in director John Stalberg’s High School, in which soon-to-be valedictorian Henry (Matt Bush) takes a healthy hit of weed from his estranged stoner friend, Breaux (Sean Marquette), the day before his deranged principal (Michael Chiklis) institutes a sweeping anti-drug policy that jeopardizes the academic goodwill and standing for which Henry has labored so long. Faced with being unable to pass the next day’s mandatory drug test for students, Henry and Breaux steal some particularly potent ganja from an epically eccentric dealer, Psycho Ed (Adrien Brody), in an aim to spike the offerings of their school’s bake sale, get everyone blazed and thus invalidate the tests. I had a chance to speak to Stalberg one-on-one recently, about his movie, Stalberg’s own, ahem, altered experiences, and what cornrows and a single eyebrow signify to him. The amusing conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

Bobcat Goldthwait made a name for himself as a wonked-out supporting actor in movies like the Police Academy franchise and a funny-voiced stand-up comic who pulled no punches on stage. The unlikely canon he’s crafted behind the camera has been no less controversial and engaging. His latest film as a writer-director, the bold, ballsy, and darkly comedic social satire God Bless America, centers on Frank (Joel Murray), a loveless and terminally ill middle-aged guy who hits the road to wipe out a snotty, entitled teenager he glimpses on a reality TV show, and in the process crosses paths with Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a 16-year-old accomplice who turns out to be even more murderously motivated than him. I had a chance to speak to Goldthwait one-on-one recently, about his movie, American cultural decay and how he’s decidedly different than his protagonist. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the fun read.

The Grey, starring Liam Neeson, pulled in over $50 million earlier this year, but its theatrical gross only tells part of the story. Chronicling the fight for survival by a crew of oil rig roughnecks after their plane goes down in the remote Alaskan wilderness, director Joe Carnahan’s movie belied conventional wisdom about early January releases, winning overwhelming critical praise that has distributor Open Road pondering a re-release in October timed more to awards consideration. Pegged to the film’s home video release, I had a chance to speak to Carnahan one-on-one recently, about the movie, swapping in Neeson for Bradley Cooper, getting in trouble for eating wolf meat during production, and the remake of Charles Bronson’s iconic Death Wish that he’s currently penning. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read. For an update on Carnahan’s long-gestating plans to adapt James Ellroy’s White Jazz, meanwhile, click here.

I chatted with director Joe Carnahan a couple days ago, to promote the home video release of The Grey, certainly one of the better films of 2012 thus far, and of course I lobbed him some quick questions about other projects. One was White Jazz, an adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel that George Clooney was at one point attached to star in. He’s been laboring for around half a dozen years to get it off the ground, but I feel like I jinxed Carnahan back when Bunny Lake Is Missing, another film he was set to direct, fell apart in the spring of 2007, and I joked that White Jazz would be next to disintegrate. Sorry about that, Joe.

He’s still hoping to eventually get it to the screen, however. “Every time I make a movie it’s like, ‘Why didn’t you make White Jazz?,'” admits Carnahan. “I’m actually hoping Gangster Squad does gangbuster business (in September) so we can draft off that film and finally get this movie made, because it’s a period film. I just think it’s incredibly difficult because that character, the Klein character, is such a tricky bit of business. I’m almost waiting for someone like Chris Pine to be old enough to play Klein, because back when Chris and I started talking about this he was going to play Junior Stemmons, and now it’s at the point where if I wait a few more years Chris can play Dave Klein. I really want to make it, both that and Pablo — it’s in the canon of movies that I really want to make, that’s the triptych along with The Grey. I’m really trying, but it’s just hard — there’s five guys that will bankroll that film and they’re all busy at all times.”

For a link to the more robust chat with Carnahan on The Grey, click here.

Operating both on screen and off, Oscar nominee Chazz Palminteri has carved out a career playing both to and against his perceived tough guy strengths. In his new film, writer-director Debbie Goodstein’s 1970s-set Mighty Fine, the 60-year-old actor plays charismatic, high-spirited family man Joe Fine, who relocates his wife Stella (Andie MacDowell) and two daughters (Jodelle Ferland and Rainey Qualley) from Brooklyn to New Orleans, in search of a better life. With his apparel business experiencing hard times, however, Joe’s depression and anger starts to manifest itself more and more in emotionally abusive outbursts. For ShockYa, I had a chance to speak to Palminteri recently, about the movie, his beloved New York Knicks and big screen adaptation plans for his next Broadway stageplay, Human. Again, the conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

The Grand Jury Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and recipient of more than a dozen Cesar Award nominations, Polisse represents a unique French entry in a well-worn genre — the grizzled police department drama. Centering on the myriad investigations of the Child Protection Unit of a Paris bureau, the movie features all sorts of shocking, sad and scandalous subplots about child abuse, abandonment, underage pickpockets and predatory sexual behavior. But it’s also surprising for another reason — its writer-director and co-star, Maïwenn Le Besco, is a female, trading in a genre most typically reserved for men. I had a chance to speak to Maïwenn recently, about her movie, its life-changing reception at Cannes, her love for Las Vegas, and what drew her to the arts. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s latest movie, the satirical, gleefully deranged God Bless America, centers on an unlikely pair of spree killers. Joel Murray plays Frank, a depressed, middle-aged office drone who’s diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. When Frank sets out to off some of the stupidest, cruelest and most repellent members of society, he comes across Roxy, a 16-year-old high school girl who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement. The role of Roxy is a star-making turn for 18-year-old Orange County native Tara Lynne Barr, and not merely for all its foul-mouthed gun waving. Like Ellen Page’s breakthrough in Juno, it’s a performance that hinges largely on the loquaciousness of its young actress. I had a chance to speak to the wonderfully sweet Barr one-on-one recently, about the movie, auditioning and exactly who can get the middle finger. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so please click here for the read.

Joel Murray has been in show business for more than two decades, but he’s blessed/cursed with an Everyman countenance that often makes people mistake him for their dad’s dentist or accountant, or that across-the-street neighbor from your first house. In Bobcat Goldthwait’s new social satire God Bless America, his first lead role, Murray plays Frank, an overwhelmed and irritated middle-aged office drone who, having been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, finally cuts loose, starts speaking his mind, and much more. After he meets up with Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a teenage girl more demented than him, the pair goes on a killing spree, taking out myriad targets representative of America’s cultural rot. I recently had a chance to speak to Murray one-on-one, about his breakthrough role, working with Goldthwait, his disdain for reality television, and the acting advice he didn’t receive from his older brother Bill. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

At first, Devon Sawa is a bit frazzled. The 33-year-old actor has just returned to find a parking ticket on his car. Still, shaking off the disappointment (“If it’s the worst thing that happens to me all day, I’m OK with that”), Sawa is enthusiastic when it comes to the subject of his latest movie, Philly Kid. Releasing this week in theaters and on VOD from After Dark Films, the movie co-stars Sawa as the pal of a former NCAA champion wrestler (Wes Chatham), recently paroled from prison, whose unsavory connections lead said friend into a series of brutal cage fights. I had a chance to speak one-on-one to Sawa by phone recently, about his movie, his affinity for MMA, great pranks unplayed, and what he made of that twist in the latest Final Destination movie. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Hollywood can be a tough place for young actors and actresses, and the seeming benefit or advantage of nepotism isn’t always what outsiders might make it out to be. Such is the case for Kristopher Van Varenberg, the 24-year-old son of notoriously limber action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Gladys Portugues, an ex-bodybuilder and fitness competitor. Mixing action roles and bit parts in movies alongside his dad with character work in other films — including two new After Dark Films releases, Dragon Eyes and Philly Kid, debuting this week — the friendly and candid Van Varenberg is out to leave his own mark in the entertainment business. I recently had a chance to speak one-on-one to Van Varenberg, about his two new movies, mixed martial arts and the workout routine he’s perfected with his father. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

Along with his older brother, Jay, Mark Duplass has carved out a varied career largely on his own terms, parlaying the indie success of The Puffy Chair and Baghead into Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home, two higher-profile yet still idiosyncratic comedies. This year les frères Duplass will be out in force, showcasing the full array of their talents as writers, directors and, in Mark’s case, as an actor. His latest film is Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, in which he plays a buttoned-up doctor named Bryan who, while helping his family search for a missing dog, develops a crush for an exotic, quirky housesitter, Carmen (Ayelet Zurer). Recently, on the eve of he and his wife, Katie Aselton, having their second child, I had the chance to speak to the younger Duplass one-on-one, about Darling Companion, sibling relationships, his packed summer schedule, and his thoughts on that famous “mumblecore” tag. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.

It’s been said that virtually everyone has wanted to switch families at some point in their lives, but if everybody’s dirty laundry and closeted skeletons were dragged out into the light of day and put in the middle of a room, how quickly most of us would snatch back our own little bundle of dysfunction. That maxim is on display in The Perfect Family, a comedy about a mother forced to choose between her engrained religious beliefs and her family. Director Anne Renton’s film stars Kathleen Turner as a devoutly Catholic suburban mother, Eileen Cleary, who — when running for the “Catholic Woman of the Year” title at her local parish, an award she’s coveted for years — is forced to cope with an unhappily married son, a gay daughter’s impending nuptials, and the strains of her own marriage. I recently had a chance to speak one-on-one to the Australian-born Renton, about religion, Turner and the state and struggles of independent filmmaking. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.

In her first two films — Another Earth and Sound of My Voice, both Sundance Film Festival sensations last year, with the latter just now seeing release, to give it some modicum of distance from the vaguely thematically similar Martha Marcy May Marlene — actress Brit Marling exhibits a unique skill set, coming across as at once ethereal and commanding. But she’s no mere ordinary big screen find; she also co-wrote each of the films, giving the Georgetown University graduate and class valedictorian a leg up other actresses of her generation out to establish a career foothold.



Penned along with friend and director Zal Batmanglij, the Los Angeles-set Sound of My Voice centers on Peter and Lorna (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius), a pair of would-be documentarians who infiltrate the quasi-religious sect of a mysterious woman, Maggie (Marling), who claims to be from the year 2054. Weird things ensue. Recently, I had a chance to speak to the 29-year-old multi-hyphenate one-on-one, about her film, her writing and acting processes, a Cranberries song, and a past, present and future spent trying to avoid drinking the “cultural milk.” The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, engaging read.

He has a rugged physicality that’s served him well in movies like Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down and even Wimbledon, but Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (the “j” is pronounced as an “i”) is an actor still probably best known by face, and not name. That could be changing, though, as the Danish-born actor has a plum role on HBO’s zeitgeist smash Game of Thrones and a meaty part in Tom Cruise’s next film. His latest movie is the deliciously twisted dark crime comedy Headhunters, a Norwegian import that centers on a corporate recruiter (Aksel Hennie) who also moonlights as an art thief in order to pay for his lavish lifestyle, and finds his double life compromised when he crosses paths with Coster-Waldau’s character, a disgraced CEO who’s more than he seems. I recently had a chance to talk to Coster-Waldau one-on-one, about his movie, cinema’s greatest shit-centric scene since Trainspotting, acting in different languages, and what he can’t say about Oblivion, that Cruise film. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full, fun read.

It’s no great knock on most actors and actresses to say that conversations with them, even when exceedingly pleasant, are often of the same genus, broadly speaking. After all, unless it’s a grand cover story for a print publication (a dwindling breed, it seems) such interviews are typically prescribed and tightly scheduled affairs, with the promotion of a specific project chiefly in mind. And if you don’t have much time, it can certainly be difficult to leave feeling that you’ve glimpsed a bit of who the interview subject really is.

But chatting with Greta Gerwig is an expansive experience, full of rich anecdotes, asides and pockets of intrigue. It helps, certainly, that she’s formally educated, having graduated from New York City’s Barnard College, where she studied English and philosophy. But it’s also in large part because of her easygoing nature, her lack of emotional or social guise. Her voice has a lilting quality that exudes thoughtfulness; Gerwig is not of the canned-answer clan, mindlessly reciting soundbite-friendly talking points. That her name is an anagram of great is no small surprise; it’s a fact that just seems right.



Gerwig’s latest film is writer-director Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress, in which she plays Violet, the quirky yet focused leader of a dynamic group of girls who set out to rescue fellow college students from depression through an on-campus suicide prevention center that peddles a combination of dance, donuts and hygiene improvement. Over breadsticks and iced tea, amidst sidebar discussions about college life and Andrew Jackson biographies, I recently had the chance to speak to Gerwig one-on-one, about Damsels, Stillman’s unique authorial voice, the Internet, personal reinvention, her thoughts on future life as a multi-hyphenate and why she’s still a certified aerobics instructor. The conversation is excerpted below, with an even longer excerpt over at ShockYa:

Brent Simon: So what was your first contact with Whit’s script?

Greta Gerwig: Well, I loved, loved, loved Whit’s movies. My friends and I from college used to do what we called the Chloe Sevigny from Last Days of Disco dance, where she just moved her shoulders. It’s not really a dance, I guess, but just a way she moved that looked really cool that we tried to emulate. So he was on that list of filmmakers that I would do anything to work with and for, and I was just so excited that there was a script and that he was going to make something. I thought that maybe he just had made three perfect films and was done. Along with everyone else, I had no idea what he was doing. It was like that feeling you get at the end of a movie that you just adore, where you just wish there was more of it — you want to keep living in that world, and you wish someone would say, “There’s another one right here.” Or [it’s the same] way I feel about writers I really love, where I’ll read a book and say, “Thank God, they have seven other books, I’m occupied.” It was that feeling of (excitement) over him having more characters and ideas, so I was enthralled and taken in by that at the outset. I don’t even really remember reading it with a particular character in mind. I just read it like a book or a play that I was studying.

BS: Whit’s films are so urbane and particular that feel like they should come with footnotes, so I was surprised to learn that he doesn’t really like to have rhapsodic discussions about historical or philosophical or social commentary in his films.

GG: Whit doesn’t really encourage any sort of intellectualizing or mythologizing of his own work, especially on set. He’s very dismissive about all of that, he’s very quick to say, “Oh, I’m stupid,” which is obviously not true. I mean, I think… well, we didn’t specifically talk about them with Whit, but the ideas that he puts forth, as you learn the script and say the lines, you come to think that they make a lot of sense and are really rational. In the process of getting inside a character and why they say these things, you inevitably believe all of the things that they’re espousing on some level. At least I do, I don’t know if everyone does. (laughs) When I first read the script I thought, “Oh, what a funny and ridiculous idea,” but by the end of shooting I thought, “No, that’s totally reasonable, people actually are happier when they’re dancing.” Even though he didn’t specifically sit down and talk about the decline of decadence and all of that, it all works its way in there if you just say it enough.

BS: He also has a very specific pitch and meter to his dialogue. Did he talk about that a lot?

GG: Not per se. He wouldn’t give us specific direction regarding sound, but I would say the big thing for me, because I had such an idea of other people doing his dialogue, was getting those voices out of my head — like getting Chris Eigeman out of my head, or Kate Beckinsale out of my head. I didn’t want to be doing an imitation of the way they sounded when they did his dialogue, which is what I think what happens a lot with writer-directors with a very strong voice. In their later films, when people know what they’re doing, it’s what happens in Woody Allen films where they do an imitation of him. But when he was making films in the 1970s people weren’t doing imitations of what they thought it was. I think sometimes when things become iconic, the rhythms get set in a way that’s hard to break out of. The big thing for me was that I tried to come at it internally. It’s so tempting when you get a big monologue to score it almost like a musical score, and say, “Here’s the first thought, here’s the next,” to block it off and underline operative words and really prepare it because it’s a large chunk of text. But I tried to almost memorize it without meaning beforehand, and then find the meaning as I’m making my point to another person, so that I didn’t do this intellectual rhythmic process before, which would have been based on what his other actors had done. I tried to find the words spontaneously based on the thought pattern, if that makes sense. (laughs) Other people may do other things.

BS: You mentioned Woody Allen, [and you’re in his] next film. Other films have proxy Woody Allens; is that phenomenon part of your segment in To Rome With Love at all?

GG: Not in my role. I don’t think the female characters are usually written as a proxy for him, so there’s less of a trap to fall into. I’m with Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin and Ellen Page. It was great, and a lot of fun. It’s really funny, and definitely one of his comedies — less along the lines of Match Point or Vicky Christina and more like Midnight in Paris.

BS: One of the things that struck me about Damsels was its idea of radical conceptual reinvention, and that we accept that in artists, like Madonna or Lady Gaga or whomever, but less so in everyday life, from our friends and peers. Did you ever experience that feeling as you moved out of adolescence, a desire to shed a skin, if you will?

GG: I’ve always had the desire to get to the most authentic version of myself, whatever that means, and in the past&n
bsp;I’ve harbored some misplaced belief that there is an authentic version and I’m not there. I think it’s now more popularly accepted in psychology that we have many selves that are true selves, and depending on the occasion you’re one way at work and another way at home. You are adaptable and they’re all you. But I find the time that I have felt most pulled toward reinvention has been more with the stuff that happens outside of acting — dressing up for the premieres or doing that kind of stuff. That all feels like I need to transform Greta into something else, and I don’t feel that I’ve been successful at doing that, nor does it make me very comfortable.

BS: Does that feel like a need?

GG: No. I used to (even) be worried about things like drinking too much coffee because I thought it altered my personality, so the Madonna transformation or something like that makes me nervous. I don’t have that architect’s view of myself. I think some filmmakers have that, actually — they design themselves and their lives, and look a certain way. They want to change or invent a persona as a way of protection.

BS: I think Hollywood is like that in a lot of respects. A big part of it is the entertainment industry, yes, but it’s also a destination city with so many people constantly moving in and out.

GG: Not to get too heady about it, but it feels like everyone is famous now, in the sense that everyone is documenting themselves really heavily. When I was in college, which was from 2002 to 2006, Facebook happened and I was at Columbia and we all joined because it was exclusive. Like, that montage in The Social Network? That totally happened to me! It was really funny to watch it, because it was my life being dramatized in a (David) Fincher movie, and I didn’t even have to go through a serial killer experience. But for me I think the most extreme version of reinvention I’ve gone through is just a honing of tastes. In college it was (about discovering) good movies, music, books and theater, and feeling a little bit ashamed about your high school CD collection and hiding it, but then in your mid-20s owning it again. That’s a whole process. Now I think that people are so aware of their persona and what they’re putting out there, and have a need to micromanage their own image. Even if you’re not a so-called public person it’s so part of life now, I think everyone is their own Madonna.

BS: I do sometimes think that social networking and the ubiquitousness of connection is re-wiring the human brain a bit, because it’s depriving it [of needed] downtime.

GG: I read this article about Facebook where Zadie Smith had written a piece in the New York Review, and it was her musings on stuff technological, and she said that all these things that we take for granted have a mind and a creator behind them, and the key thing to know about Facebook is that it was basically made by an adolescent boy — these are [the things] that he thought was important. So then you filter your entire identity into the categories that an adolescent boy thought were important at one time — like, a smart adolescent boy, but one nonetheless. …But I think the whole idea of invention depends on a viewer, and someone looking at you and setting up a situation where people are looking at you. I mean, I love it — I think it’s so strange and extreme and great — and I think Whit loves artifice too. I mean, I know he does; I don’t feel uncomfortable saying that. I think he would appreciate the well-told lie, I don’t think it’s something that he finds upsetting. It’s almost like this enjoyment of the surface, but that doesn’t have to be shallow or trite. It just is this sincere enjoyment of the surface.

BS: Are you big on social media, then?

GG: No, I’m not on Facebook or any of that stuff. But I do think about it a lot. I’m very interested in it. I don’t think anyone has really written anything great about it yet, in an academic way that’s also accessible to a lot of people. Like, I re-read On Photography, this (Susan) Sontag book recently, and I don’t think there’s an equivalent for the Internet and what’s happening now. She’s so smart about photographs and the way they’re utilized. She points out such smart things, about how you can’t imagine a modern family without photographs, and how photography is a part of the family, part of what that glue is. It’s part of the government, and it’s hard to imagine being on vacation anymore without photography. I just feel like someone needs to take a really intellectual look at the Internet. I feel like some people have written really smart things about it, but almost from a scientific point-of-view — like what is this in relationship to your brain? [There hasn’t been] a look at the paradigm shift that’s happening. I think there are things that have been touched upon — I read that (Nicholas Carr) book The Shallows, which was pretty good but didn’t go far enough, I thought — and someone needs to do it. You could really make some statements about some stuff. It’s odd — I participate so little in that world, and yet I’m so interested in what somebody will say about it because I think it’s huge.

BS: Because your route to acting was a little bit different than a lot of other younger actors, which is something I think comes through regardless of which movies someone might have seen you in —

GG: (laughs, interrupting) OK! That’s great. (laughs) It’s funny, because I just wanted people to see me as an actor at one time, I was so sad that I (thought it) would never (happen). I love writing and doing those things, I’m totally happy. But it was that moment of identity (crisis) where I was like, “I wish I could just be an actor and have everyone see that.”

BS: What age was that?

GG: Twenty-five. (laughs)

BS: See, that’s what I’m saying — that’s relatively late. Regardless of skill or attributes, I think there’s a particular thing — and I’m not knocking it, because it’s understandable for actors raised on pilot season auditions or television shows — that often comes through in performers who have a few more years of life experience, or who aren’t thrust into a bunch of films at a very young age.

GG: I wouldn’t trade college for anything, it changed my life. And I also think it’s an opportunity to exist — well, it’s not outside of the economy, because it is very expensive — but the work you do there is outside of the economic world. Most of your life is spent doing things that are directly engaged with a consumer economy. You’re either making something for consumption or buying shit, or your life is formed around that. It’s idealized, and it costs money to be there, so it doesn’t totally work (as an example), but spending 18 to 21 or 22 not doing anything that’s actually useful — or making, buying and selling at that moment — is I think spiritually rich and important. Even though it’s not religious, I think the time spent reading books because they’re great and talking about them because they’re great is valuable, because there’s more to life than utility. And that’s probably a reason why I love Whit’s movies so, because he’s so a part of that mindset and the way that he views the world. And even though he makes fun of pseudo-intellectual characters, they still are so smart and funny — like in Metropolitan, with the reading of the book reviews and what not. (pause) If I could be only an actress and that be that work then I would do it, but it doesn’t really work for me. (laughs) I hate saying “just an actor,” I don’t like that implication, but… it’s just not the whole thing for me.

BS: Do you think you’ll end up back behind the camera? [Note: Gerwig c
o-directed 2008’s Nights and Weekends]

GG: Yeah, I think that’s totally where I’ll end up. And I’m satisfied knowing that it may not ever be one thing. It may be a combination of things. I might be happiest doing lots of stuff.

BS: I remember on a certain level having a profound jealousy of the founding fathers, because of this idea of [their very] scattered intellectual interests.

GG: Yes! It’s the best. I always think of them, and the issues of people who did everything. Not to sound like a communist, but because everything is so monetized today and everyone is so trained for what they do that I feel like it’s hard to elegantly take something up. Because there’s always a school for it, or whatever — a specialty. The ability to be a dabbler and an amateur takes a lot more [courage]. But I love people who dabble. I read a lot, and spend a lot of time trying to learn foreign languages, which I’m not good at. I’m not a natural, but I really love them and also I got this idea in my head since Kristin Scott Thomas acts in French films and speaks French really well. I thought, “Oh, how brilliant!” and because I really like Arnaud Desplechin, (I thought) maybe if I become really good at French I can be in one of his films. But I also like a lot of Korean films right now, and Korean is so hard! (laughs) So I have tons of those audio programs. Oh, and I’m also certified in a lot of weird jobs, because in high school I had an idea that I wanted to be an actor or writer, and that I might not get paid, so I thought I’d become good at all these lower-level jobs that I wouldn’t have to take all that seriously. So I’m a certified aerobics instructor, and [also] a certified paralegal.

For the full, original interview, from ShockYa, click here.

With her statuesque beauty, Israeli-born actress Ayelet Zurer has made a strong impression in genre fare like Angels & Demons and Vantage Point and especially heavy, hard-hitting dramas like Fugitive Pieces, Adam Resurrected and Steven Spielberg’s Munich, in which she played Eric Bana’s sympathetic wife and served as his emotional mooring. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, then, represents a nice, unexpected change-up for Zurer, who plays Carmen, an exotic seasonal housesitter who ends up helping her employers (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline) search for their missing dog, and in the process develops an unexpected connection with a member of their extended family, Bryan (Mark Duplass). I recently had a chance to sit down with Zurer one-on-one, and talk about the movie, Kasdan, psychic inclinations, and her role as Lara Lor-Van in Zack Snyder’s hotly anticipated Man of Steel. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.

Precocious doesn’t even begin to describe Henry James Herman, the central figure of Jesus Henry Christ, and a 10-year-old boy genius who rabble-rousing manifestos on the nature of truth and upsets the carefully ordered world of his doting single mother (Toni Collette) when he sets out to find his biological father (Michael Sheen). I had the chance recently to speak one-on-one to writer-director Dennis Lee, about his reaction to the rocky commercial reception of his debut film, Fireflies in the Garden, and the challenge in crafting his nine-years-in-the-making follow-up, based on an award-winning short he made in film school. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.