Dublin-born and based, Brendan Gleeson is, like many of the finest character actors, many things to many people. To some he is forevermore Professor “Mad-Eye” Moody from the Harry Potter films. Others will recall his standout turn opposite Mel Gibson in Braveheart, or the wickedly under-appreciated In Bruges, opposite a headstrong Colin Farrell. Others still might think he looks familiar from Robert Zemeckis’ motion-capture Beowulf. Most recently, Gleeson won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie for his portrayal of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in HBO’s Into the Storm. In real life, of course, Gleeson is all of these characters, and still so much more — a voluble, friendly and exceedingly insightful and intelligent guy.

In his latest film, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s dryly comedic mismatched-buddy-cop dramedy The Guard, Gleeson plays Gerry Boyle, a longtime police sergeant in Ireland’s rural Galway who yawningly meets only the basest professional obligations, and lives by his own loose moral code. Friction ensues when an American FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), arrives to oversee the investigation into an international drug trafficking operation that may be planning on using Galway as a port. I had a chance recently to chat one-on-one with Gleeson, about both his prickly and provocative character in The Guard and his desire to take a great American road trip. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

If the Beatles and the Rolling Stones spawned their own dueling fan bases, connoisseurs of late 1980s and early ’90s action flicks often have their own disagreements about the merits and appeal of Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme. While the former generally smashed heads and cracked skulls with the disposition of a sullen ox, the latter had a more compact frame, and a kind of balletic karate skill set to match a slightly more engaging personality. Known as “The Muscles From Brussels,” the Belgian-born Van Damme would put his stamp on the action genre with a string of increasingly profitable hits like Death Warrant, Double Impact, Universal Soldier and Timecop, the latter two of which were $100 worldwide smashes.

Changing tastes and struggles with drug addiction would combine to derail the genre actor, but Van Damme turned heads with 2008’s JCVD, in which he played a sad-sack version of himself, and he’s been acting again (and even directing) with regularity. In his new movie, Assassination Games, Van Damme portrays a contract killer who reluctantly teams up with a man (Scott Adkins) driven by vengeance after his most recent hit goes sideways. I had a chance to recently submit some questions by email to Van Damme, about Assassination Games, the arc of his career, the upcoming sequel to The Expendables and more. The intriguing answers, inclusive of his Facebook updates and love of dogs, are available over at ShockYa.

Don Cheadle first garnered a lot of mainstream attention with his performance opposite Denzel Washington in Devil In a Blue Dress, for which he was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association‘s Best Supporting Actor prize. Since then, of course, he’s appeared in a wide variety of mainstream and independent films, earning a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for the searing Hotel Rwanda, and further burnishing both his sociopolitical and off-camera professional credentials as one of the producers of the Oscar-winning Crash, which he was instrumental in helping get made. Heck, he was even nominated for a Grammy Award in 2004, for his narration/dramatization of the Walter Mosley novel Fear Itself.

In his new film, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Cheadle plays a FBI agent, Wendell Everett, who arrives in rural Ireland to head up a large international drug trafficking investigation, and is then forced to rely on an eccentric small town cop, Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), with a confrontational and crass personality. I had a chance to chat one-on-one with Cheadle recently, about working up a multi-layered accent for the film, the subversive racial humor coursing through this most curious and entertaining little dramedy, and his work on a long-gestating movie about Miles Davis, which will hopefully begin shooting in several months. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.

A television writer nominated for five Emmy Awards, Michael Weithorn has had a successful career dating back to the early 1980s — mostly in sitcoms, from Family Ties, The Wonder Years and True Colors up through Ned and Stacey and The King of Queens. For his feature film debut as both a writer and director, however, Weithorn toned down the overt laughs, and instead took aim at something a bit more melancholic, laced with a quieter humor. Set in suburban Long Island in the summer following the September 11 attacks, A Little Help centers on a dental hygienist and mother, Laura (Jenna Fischer), whose marriage has become tense and loveless, and whose 12-year-old son Dennis (Daniel Yelsky) has become sullen and resentful. I recently had the chance to speak to Weithorn one-on-one, talking about the challenges of putting together an independent production, what it’s like to shoot in your high school hometown, and his own history of lying. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

Independent film production encompasses many challenges, as well as an inherently skillful touch with the necessary art of compromise. But you wouldn’t always know it from interviews with filmmakers, many of whom have a tendency to latch on to one or two good anecdotes or merely fall back on thematic talking points when discussing their project. Refreshingly, writer-director Brian Metcalf is not of that ilk. His feature debut, the sci-fi-tinged adventure Fading of the Cries, faced many bumps and hurdles over the course of a 10-year period from initial conception to its eventual theatrical release this week, but perhaps none quite as rocky as a production cycle beset with fire, a compacted schedule, and on-the-fly script revisions. I had a chance to recently chat one-on-one with Metcalf, and the revealing conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

The instincts of the average person, when faced with an occupational dismissal, might be to retreat and lick one’s wounds for a while, or at least enjoy the sort of deep exhalation and no-strings-attached vacation that adulthood rarely affords. When the firing is very public, one would assume some measure of privacy would be additionally important, or desirable. Of course, celebrity entertainers are not always your average folks, even when they really are. So Conan O’Brien, on the heels of being let go by NBC so that they could re-hire Jay Leno to front The Tonight Show, threw himself into a sprawling, live musical-comedy tour, and agreed to let director Rodman Flender come along for the ride, and document the entire experience. The result is Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, an engaging travelogue that also showcases the sort of on-the-fly creativity involved in undertaking such a high-wire endeavor. I had a chance to speak with Flender one-on-one recently, and the conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

Michael Angarano is not yet 24 years old, but he’s already racked up an impressive list of credits, even if a lot of folks might recognize his face from a more cherubic state. He was the young William in Almost Famous, and the young Red Pollard in Seabiscuit. Other audiences might know him best from a stint on Will & Grace. Crucially, though, Angarano is in the process of showing he has what it takes to navigate the tricky terrain between adolescent performer and young adult actor.

A solid turn opposite Uma Thurman in this year’s split-generation romance Ceremony affirmed his keen touch with uniquely verbose sensitivity, and he gives a realistically frazzled performance opposite mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano in Steven Soderbergh’s character-rooted tale of AWOL-secret-agent vengeance, Haywire, which was just recently pushed to early 2012. Up next, however, is writer-director Gavin Wiesen‘s coming-of-age tale The Art of Getting By, in which Angarano plays Dustin, a young painter who befriends Freddie Highmore’s under-motivated high schooler, George, and becomes unwittingly caught up in a love triangle with he and Emma Roberts’ Sally. I had a chance to speak with Angarano one-on-one recently. For excerpts from the chat, trip on over to ShockYa.

A pinch of wry fatalism, and the ability to step back and view the trials and tribulations of adolescence as moments in time, fixed suffering on a much broader horizon, is an attractive quality in teenagers (and especially so once they age out a bit more, into their twenties, and begin to reflect back on younger years). It’s that sort of emotionally jumbled ironic detachment that drives writer-director Gavin Wiesen’s feature film debut, The Art of Getting By, a coming-of-age tale in which bright but undermotivated slacker George (Freddie Highmore) is befriended by and finds a kindred spirit in Sally (Emma Roberts). I had a chance to speak one-on-one with Wiesen recently, about his previous filmmaking experiences with Gwyneth Paltrow’s dad, the fierce hormonal grip of teenagedom, and his movie in general. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so trip over there for a look.

Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer may be the stuff of pat Hollywood drama, but Buck Brannaman, the quietly charismatic horseman who helped inspire both the 1998 film and the novel upon which it was based, is actually quite real. Cindy Meehl’s stirring Buck, then, is a soulful and delicately illuminating documentary portrait of the soft-spoken man — and a movie that also makes a persuasive and heartrending case for the boundless capability of human healing. The Audience Award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film is a must-see for horse aficionados, of course, but just as accessible and interesting for those who’ve never sat astride one of the creatures. I had a chance to speak with Meehl one-on-one recently, and the conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

Few performances in 2010 were as difficult to watch as Lesley Manville’s turn in Another Year. A Razzie nominee, you ask? No, far from it. Tabbed by various critics’ groups for their Best Supporting Actress award, and a BAFTA nominee to boot, Manville turned heads and wrinkled so many brows in wincing, knowing exasperation because of just how skillfully she embodied the suffocating neediness and loneliness of Mary, an aging British singleton who serves as a boozy, chatty leech on the lives of her best friends, Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and their adult son. In advance of the June 7 Blu-ray/DVD combo pack release of Mike Leigh‘s film, I had a chance to speak with Manville by phone recently, about her feelings regarding her character, her rich working history with Leigh, and the unique manner in which the award-winning writer-director shapes his material. The one-on-one conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa.

A lot of first-time filmmakers play it safe, or trade in cutesy, emo-stamped, indie-friendly clichés, seeking to woo audiences (and critics) with witty and slightly canted takes on extraordinarily familiar material, and then trade on that to-scale success for a call-up to big-league, studio filmmaking. For his feature film debut, Spencer Susser did no such thing. Hesher, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a gonzo turn in the title role, and featuring engaging supporting performances by Natalie Portman, Piper Laurie and Rainn Wilson, is a weird little thing — a warped, seriocomic effort about a sociopathic burnout who intrudes on the life of a shy, gangly teenager who has just lost his mother. It may not be for all tastes, but it’s definitely not boring or safe. I had a chance to chat one-on-one with Susser recently, and the excerpted conversation, complete with details about his new project, is available over at ShockYa. For more, click here.

Director Charles Ferguson has made only two films, but brought a crystalline, depressing clarity to both the run-up to the Iraq War and, now, with Inside Job, the 2008 financial crisis that brought America’s economy to its knees. I caught up with the filmmaker recently for a few questions, on occasion of his movie’s DVD release. The conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: So I thought I’d throw you a curveball to start — the MGMT song that ends the movie, “Congratulations” — how did that come about? The audience might be expecting something more known or up-tempo, to punch home their simmering rage in a much more direct fashion.

Charles Ferguson: We heard it and we liked it. We were told by their representatives, fairly late in the process of making the film, that MGMT had just recorded this song that was about the financial crisis, in a very elusive, indirect, poetic way. So we listened to it, both [myself] and producer Audrey Marrs, who actually has a background in rock music, was a punk rock musician a long time ago. We both loved it, so we tried to license it, and we did.

BS: Six or seven minutes on Iceland open the movie, which is like a bracing splash of cold water. How early did the film’s opening coalesce around that idea, that area of focus?

CF: I think that I had the idea to do that as soon as we filmed in Iceland. We spent a week filming there, and it was a very extraordinary experience for many different reasons. We got there just at the start of Icelandic summer, a short period of time where Iceland very dramatically changes from its very stark, dark almost lunar winter landscape to this very lush, green place. We got there just as that was happening, and so visually the place was remarkable, and the experience of interviewing people… some of the most extraordinary ones didn’t make it into the film. Ger Hartegg, who was the prime minister of Iceland during the period of the bubble, and responsible for much of the deregulation, and was indicted, was extraordinary. The experience that country had was such a triple-distilled, utterly clear, crystalline version of what happened in a much more complicated way over a much longer period of time in the United States that I thought it was a perfect introduction to the issues. And also, in film terms, it was very cinematic, beautiful and visually striking, so it just seemed perfect.

BS: You don’t inject yourself into the proceedings to the degree that Michael Moore does, but given that you’d made No End in Sight, which had received acclaim and attention, were you worried that word would get out and people wouldn’t want to talk?

CF: I was concerned about that, and it turned out to be true. Not primarily, however, because of the film. The primary reason that my reputation preceded me, and I’m sure that played a role in why some people declined to be interviewed was on the contrary my prior life as an academic. You know, I know Larry Summers, and he knows me, and I know Laura Tyson, and she knows me. I know quite a number of people in the Obama administration, and many people in the economics discipline, and also a number of senior people in finance. I know John Thain. He agreed to speak with me off the record, and we had many long conversations, but he and most of the other people who know me declined to be interviewed. And I think part of the reason is that they knew that I was a diligent researcher and wasn’t going to be afraid — that if I felt like I had to ask something, I was going to ask it, whether they liked it or not, and that it wasn’t going to be easy for them to get away. And I’m sure that’s why Larry Summers declined to be interviewed.

BS: This leads into my next question, which is that the film isn’t predicated on “gotcha! journalism,” and yet one of the biggest takeaways for me was that you’re asking informed questions, but there were a number of interviewees who seemed to be shocked at the very nature rather than even the content of the questions that you were asking. It seemed that they existed in a bubble where questions concerning a greater good for society weren’t being asked, or weren’t paramount in their minds.

CF: I did notice that. I was very struck by their reactions in these interviews, and the sense that I had was not so much that they were completely oblivious to the idea of ethical standards or the greater good — not that I felt they had behaved ethically, I think that they may have behaved extremely unethically and were aware of that fact — but what was surprising was that it was extremely clear that nobody had ever asked them about these issues before, nobody had ever asked them about their financial conflicts of interest, the academic economists in particular. And I was shocked that they were shocked. It was extremely clear that they expected to be deferred to, and they found it absolutely stunning that somebody was pushing them on these issues. And I gradually realized, in the course of doing all the interviews, that they had never been asked these sorts of questions, which again, I found stunning.

BS: How do you take a film like this and help sell it to an audience outside of those who maybe are the choir, who have a native interest in politics, government and/or documentaries?

CF: It’s important, because I didn’t make this film for my six finance-geek friends. I made the film so that hopefully people in the world can understand what happened here, and that people will come to realize that finance is too important to just leave to the financiers — that we all have to do something about this. And so that certainly guided the way that we made the film. I tried very hard to make the film clear and accessible, and keep jargon out of it. I also tried to keep the film non-political and non-partisan, and I think that we succeeded in that. And I also tried to make it a cool movie; I wanted it to look good, I wanted the music to be cool, I wanted it to be an interesting, enjoyable, compelling experience to watch this movie. That was the goal — to make it as accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

BS: It’s not a thriller per se, but the dramatic components within the film are fairly timeless — greed, overreach, hubris, all those good, big meaty things. Taking a birds-eye view, do you think it’s essentially a story about addiction and the atavistic nature of humanity, a story that just happens to be writ large? Some of them are criminals, but some can be fundamentally decent people whose… ethical missteps, let’s say, have a hell of a lot more impact than someone who’s working at a gas station skimming profits from their owner.

CF: (long pause) I think it’s complicated. Part of what occured was the result of rational self-interest and greed. That’s certainly part of the story. There’s another part of what happened here which is about a different part of human nature. One thing that struck me was how disconnected these people had become from the consequences of their actions. They had come to have so much money and power, and came to use their money and power in such very specific ways to place themselves in this bubble where they never felt the consequences of the actions and were never criticized. That’s why I put in the information about the private planes and private elevators, the paying for sex, the drugs, the huge quantities of money that insulated them from all of the things that you or I would experience if we tried to behave in an equally extreme way. If we got into a car here in Los Angeles and floored it and tried to go 200 miles per hour down the city streets, we’d cr
ash and the police would come after us. We couldn’t just do that. But these people, because of all of these things, there was nothing and nobody in the world telling them to stop. And then there’s something else — it was this kind of very primal, competitive, testosterone-fueled thing, which also people talk about in the movie. There’s this amazing line in the first Wall Street: “Mr. Gecko, how many yachts can you water-ski behind?” So why did they do it? Once they had the first $500 million, why did they keep doing it when this was going to be the result? And it’s something about human nature.

To purchase Inside Job on DVD via Amazon, click here.

Over on her Forbes Girl Friday blog, I’m sourced in a piece by Meghan Casserly about potential breakout actresses of 2011, along with Fandango editor Chuck Walton. Who’s rising, who’s falling, and what input or say-so does the public have on Hollywood’s star-making formula? Read on, by all means.

Over at Huffington Post (which really needs the traffic linkage), in a nice piece, Katy Hall gets into it with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance about some of the ins and outs of production on his film, and how he set up some of the tripwires (including telling Ryan Gosling to make a pass at Michelle Williams) to help his actors painfully construct a failing relationship. I link to this mainly because the non-nomination of Gosling for a Best Actor Oscar statuette — since he didn’t have the benefit of Julia Roberts hosting targeted screenings for his film — is inarguably the biggest travesty of the awards season, bigger even the cresting appeal of the mannered, solemn, well-bred The King’s Speech. I hope to get into this more in the coming days; we’ll see.

Also, over at FrumForum, Telly Davidson takes a look at 127 Hours, and questions what qualifies one for “hero” status.

I’ve been slothful in getting this up sooner, but I had the chance to chat with Jacki Weaver a while back, in advance of the Golden Globes and her delightful Best Supporting Actress acceptance speech at the LAFCA awards ceremony.

Weaver’s justly lauded turn is of course at the center of the appeal and dark pull of writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, an exceptionally engaging Australian crime caper. The film takes a while for its heart of stone to manifest, and this serves to unnerve an audience, because they’re understandably wanting someone with whom young, newly orphaned Josh (James Frecheville) can identify. That person seems to arrive in the form of Weaver’s Janine Cody, aka Aunt Smurf, Josh’s semi-estranged grandmother and the matriarch of a group of bank-robbing and drug-peddling criminal low-lifes. First appearances can be quite deceiving, however.

A lively conversationalist (“I believe in hangovers, not jetlag,” she says, in a cheery tone that makes you believe her), Weaver says that the one-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal before filming were invaluable for establishing a rapport with Frecheville, an acting neophyte. “He was only 17 when we shot, they took him out of
high school for a term to do it,” she says. “But he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.”

Remarking upon her character’s malevolent detachment and manipulation, Weaver notes that “there wasn’t room for another female
in Animal Kingdom. She wanted to be the center of all that attention, which is probably why she never had successful
relationships with all [of her son’s] fathers. In a way, they’re all a substitute for that.”

Though she’s dabbled in film for decades, Animal Kingdom represents a huge big screen Stateside breakthrough for Weaver, who’s mostly worked in theater, costarring in celebrated works like Six Degrees of Separation. “When we were making it there was a very good feeling on set, we had great camaraderie, and felt that we
were doing good work,” Weaver says. “And when we had a cast and crew screening we felt fabulous,
but maybe biased. It wasn’t until it won (the World Cinema prize at) Sundance that it seemed like this was really a film that could [capture a worldwide audience]. We had all gone to do some publicity because we were one of the 12 finalists in competition, but we didn’t expect it to win. When word came, everyone except
Joel (Edgerton) had already left!”

While more film roles will no doubt follow, next up for Weaver is a touring production of Uncle Vanya, along with Cate Blanchett, which will bring her back to the United States later this year.

Certain films meet the moment head on, and zeitgeist sensation Catfish, a nonfiction mystery unfolding within a labyrinth of online intrigue, is a movie which both takes and matches the temperature of the outside world in a variety of compelling ways. A divisive hit at this year’s Sundance Festival, the movie centers on 24-year-old New York City photographer Nev Schulman (one of the filmmakers’ brothers), who is contacted on Facebook by Abby, an eight-year-old Michigan girl who asks permission to paint one of his pictures. When she sends him her remarkable painting, Nev strikes up an online friendship with Abby, her mother Angela and the rest of the family. When Nev and his friends uncover some startling revelations, however, they embark on a road trip to find out the truth. In the midst of their own road trip, doing press for the film, I caught up with co-directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost. Spoiler-free excerpts from the conversation are as follows:

Brent Simon: What is it about Catfish that most causes people to doubt its veracity?

Ariel Schulman: I think it’s the style or structure of the film. It’s edited like a narrative thriller, which is not your typical documentary structure at all, and I don’t think a lot of people are used to seeing a true story told [in that manner].

BS: The reaction at Sundance was overwhelmingly positive, but some people immediately talked about it being staged, or phony. Was that surprising?

Henry Joost: No, we had a small inkling of it because at an early screening before Sundance where we started showing it to people who didn’t know us personally an older documentary filmmaker brought that up. He said, “I think it’s a great film, but it’s clear to me that you staged certain scenes. There’s no way that you had the camera all those times.” But that’s the truth, nothing is staged in the film. We pulled out our cameras, which are these tiny little things that we carry around all the time. It’s not like we’re carrying 16mm cameras in our backpacks, it’s just these little consumer HD cameras. So it wasn’t totally unexpected, but it did catch us a bit off guard at Sundance, because you don’t expect people to question a real experience that you have. But I think it’s a product of the way that we put the film together, and decided not to use talking head interviews or voiceovers or things that documentaries traditionally use. And also I think audiences are more suspicious these days, because of sneaky movie marketing and the fake documentary as an emerging style, like with The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. But this idea that we could have created such an elaborate fake documentary is to me inconceivable. It’s a little [flattering], on a certain level. It would mean that we are much, much more intelligent than we are. It would be up there with War of the Worlds by Orson Welles, and we just don’t think that way.

BS: One of the things that people respond to is the degree to which fraternal jocularity informs the narrative. The first third of the film unfolds over eight months, in grab-as-grab-can snippets, and then the narrative reaches this tipping point and gathers all this downhill momentum.

HJ: That’s kind of a generational thing, and ties into social networking also — I feel like people take a lot more photos and videos of themselves these days, and are a lot more comfortable sharing things, so they understand that [condensed backstory]. And we’ve actually never really shared these little things that we shoot before this. Ariel and I do it mostly for ourselves, making these little short films. We’ve also gotten a lot of a feedback from people [in their 50s and 60s], and I feel like sort of almost unintentionally the movie explains how Facebook and Google Earth work to people our parents’ age, who say, “OK, I finally get it.”

BS: On some levels, the film could be read as a luddite’s manifesto, a tech-age cautionary tale. Where do you guys come down on the revolution in social media?

AS: My social networking is below average among our friends. I really just use it as much as I feel like I have to to stay in touch with people I want to stay in touch with, and check out their photos. (laughs) But social networking has made me a little uncomfortable from the beginning, even though I recognize its value. My favorite thing about it is that it’s allowed me to connect again with people I went to kindergarten and middle school with that I probably never would have seen again.

BS: The reception of this film has obviously opened a lot of doors — what’s next?

HJ: We always had dreams of making a narrative fiction film, so we’re thinking of doing that next, and we’d love to continue making feature documentaries also. But we’re not going to plan on it, we’re just going to be ready if happens, I guess. It’s obviously a very hard experience to duplicate, but right now we’re writing and looking forward to getting back to work. We’ve been doing screenings around the country and doing Q&As, and every time we screen the film a great conversation follows. Another thing is that people have been sharing their own stories with us. And usually people want to know how Nev is doing — they’re concerned for him. He’s very vulnerable. This has sort of reinvigorated his photography career, and he’s also traveling around with us. People want to meet him more than us.

Catfish expands in theaters today. For more information on the film, click here.

Adrian Grenier became famous on HBO’s Entourage playing an actor who shoots to stardom and has to cope with paparazzi marking his every move. Naturally, Grenier then became a real-life target of the paparazzi. Last year, Grenier directed a movie, Teenage Paparazzo, which introspectively chronicles the true story of his unlikely, evolving relationship with a precocious 14-year-old paparazzo, Austin Visschedyk (below left). And while I talked to Grenier a couple weeks ago about this project, in advance of its September 27 premiere on HBO, paparazzi snapped his photo. Snake, meet tail! The conversation is excerpted below:

Brent Simon: The idea of a youngster skulking about at night as a paparazzo evokes a strong first response. How objective or subjective did you want your film to be?

Adrian Grenier: Well, obviously I have my own opinion about paparazzi, especially so often being the victim of their disrespect. I think when I saw Austin that was the last straw for me. I knew I had to do something. I had to figure out, just for myself, what was going on in a culture that would embrace that, and encourage young people to engage in it.

BS: Austin comes across as pretty bright, if typically self-involved. How reticent was his family to participate?

AG: Oh look, there’s a paparazzo! (pause) You should put this shot they’re taking of me right now with the article. There they are. I hope I look OK. (laughs)

BS: Irony of ironies! How much of an influence are paparazzi on your everyday decisions?

AG: They always tend to dominate a situation. You could be having a casual stroll with a friend or loved one, and they just come in and destroy any nice moment. But I think as an actor and performer, we speak in the language of images and stories, and paparazzi are really no different. They get content for tabloids to make stories. And who better to use than performers? What upsets celebrities is that they don’t have control over the story. I don’t think I’ve met any celebrity that doesn’t love a nice fluff piece about them, a picture that says look how gorgeous they look. But what they don’t like is when all the media can’t be positive about them; they can’t take the bad with the good.

BS: Paris Hilton has some interesting insights in the movie.

AG: One thing I really respect about Paris is that I consider her an artist of a different art form — her canvas is the tabloid media. She’s extremely talented in being able to utilize and create on that platform, and I look up to her for that. She taught me a lot about how to be able to roll with it, embrace it.

BS: What percentage of paparazzi maybe is charged mainly by the thrill of pursuit, and actively antagonizing celebrities?

AG: Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s the same proportion of douchebags in any population. They’ll make more money if they can conjure a good story [and] prod a celebrity to do something, whether it’s do a little dance, hold up a peace sign, pose, or throw a punch. They’re like mini-directors on some level, I guess, no different than Stanley Kubrick pushing someone to the brink of sanity to get the shot. The only difference there is that the actor is a willing participant who’s being paid.

BS: The film talks some about parasocial relationships, those one-way feelings of intimacy people have for celebrities. Are any paparazzi like this?

AG: I think we mostly tend to have very simple relationships in our capitalist, consumer society, and paparazzi aren’t different necessarily. They look at celebrities as a paycheck, as food on the table. One thing I am excited about is that the Creative Coalition has invited the film to be part of their spotlight initiative slate, and take it to high schools and colleges around the country as a way to invite students to look at the way they consume media. And I hope TeenagePaparazzo.com will be a continuation of the film, where people who’ve seen it, and users in general, can have a two-way conversation.

BS: How about Austin today? Are you still in contact with him?

AG: Austin will be a presence on the website. I want to give him an outlet to express himself, and also give people an opportunity to see what he’s up to, and what sort of photos he’s taking. Right now we’ve yet to see. I think he’s growing up in his own way, and thinking about college. He’s a much more mature person than he was, and I’m curious to see what the experience of the film’s release will mean for him.

For more on the film, click here.

Over at the L.A. Weekly, Karina Longworth chats up Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, who is pushing 60, remarkably enough, and has a new Movie Macabre, launching tomorrow in syndication.

Twenty years after the making of GoodFellas, GQ interviews nearly 60 members of the cast and crew, for a comprehensive look back at one of the most endlessly rewatchable American movies ever made. Sadly, there isn’t a knife fight about the various spellings of the film’s title. Money quote from the piece, from John Malkovich, who turned down the role of Jimmy Conway: “It sort of came at a bad time in my life, when I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to think about working. It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas. But Robert De Niro is fantastic.” For the full read, click here.

Iowa may not seem like the most logical destination for a film premiere, but when the movie in question is about one of the Hawkeye State’s longest-running sociocultural landmarks, it’s a good fit. Such was the reason and case that I found myself in Sioux City a bit over a month ago, just a couple miles from the Nebraska border, for the debut of A Million Spokes, an engaging independent documentary charting the annual RAGBRAI marathon.

RAGBRAI is an acronym for the Register’s Great Annual Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, since the event is sponsored by the Des Moines Register, and has been ever since it was first thrown together in late August of 1973, as part of a friendly challenge between feature writer/copy editor John Karras, a biking enthusiast, and Don Kaul, the newspaper’s Washington, D.C. bureau columnist. What began in modest fashion as an invited ride-along for Register readers has evolved into a sprawling seven-day event beginning the last week of July along the western border of the state and ending a week later along the eastern border. (Participants typically dip the back wheel of their bike in the Missouri River upon the event’s kick-off, and then celebrate completion by dipping their front tire in the Mississippi River.) The route changes every year, with overnight camping locations rotating among dozens of small towns, many of which understandably see a good portion of their burgh’s businesses enjoy a big boom in sales, since the event routinely draws over 10,000 week-long riders (some from as far away as Australia) and 1,500 or so “day bikers.”

Directed by Varda Hardy and produced by Talia Rodriguez-Shakur and Ken Gorrell, A Million Spokes focuses on a handful of bicyclists, each of whom has a different motivation for taking part in the ride. Some are first-time participants drawn to the sociability of the event, others are hardcore biking enthusiasts (and even competitors) who enjoy RAGBRAI as a sort of late summer tune-up. The challenges facing independent film — of effectively and economically locating a given niche or submarket, and the audiences that are most likely to respond to that sort of storytelling — are myriad, but A Million Spokes, while playing a bit for the heartstrings, admirably encompasses a more robust humanity than a simple glance at its logline might indicate.

Ostensibly a feel-good tale of community spirit and familial bonding, the film does feature some moving narrative strands, including a young, widowed participant riding for his recently deceased wife, with whom he had enjoyed the trip the previous year. But there is also a subject who suffers from severe alcohol poisoning (visiting all sorts of assorted small town watering holes is a big tradition for many riders), and one of the couples in the movie, who good-naturedly joke about their widening personal differences during filming, have since split up, we come to learn in a coda. The movie, in other words, is by turns touching, funny, poignant and sad (like life, really), as well as just flatly curious about its backdrop.

In a lunchtime conversation with the Santa Monica-based Hardy — who was brought on to the project after Rodriguez-Shakur secured an exclusive term-contract window for film rights, and contacted her — the filmmaker confesses no great passion for cycling, per se. Instead, she comes off as someone for whom curiosity is just second-nature, even turning a little flip-cam on her lunchmates to query them about tangentially related matters. It’s that innate trait that helps power A Million Spokes; the level of thought and care that went into capturing the actual RAGBRAI ride, and conveying its experiential essence, rivals that of a production with a hundred times more means and man hours. For the filmmakers, it was important to be able to give viewers various and sundry engaging personalities with whom to identify along the trip, but also a sense of something a lot of us miss these days, in the hustle and bustle of our ever-connected, digital-era lives — of existing within nature and passing through a space not as a silent, distracted traveler, but someone actively doing, in this case quite literally, the legwork of locomotion. To achieve this tack, they commissioned the construction of a special rig which allowed for them to place a cameraman alongside bikers on the route, and also deployed mounted cameras in choice fashion. Finally, certain participants were also given mini-cameras and asked to record their thoughts along the trek, which are then woven artfully into the chronological narrative.

The film’s Friday evening premiere — at a local commercial theater near the Stoney Creek Inn, where an equally convivial dinner reception was held afterward — was a nice affair, attended by several of the film’s subjects, as well as participants and media covering the impending RAGBRAI 2010 launch. The Sioux City humidity — a throwback to childhood for this Southern-raised writer — dampened the enthusiasm not one bit, but instead just made it a bit thicker. Plans for A Million Spokes‘ distribution are currently up in the air, though several heartland-centric film competitions, in addition to other festivals, remain in the mix as possibilities. Stay tuned for updates. For more information on RAGBRAI, meanwhile, click here.