Ask Away: The Best of 2010's Movieline Interviews

James Cameron (Aug. 20)

On casting Kathryn Bigelow in his infamous 1988 Martini Ranch video" "I said, 'OK, I'm gonna make her the Clint Eastwood character, with the serape and the hat and the cigar and everything,' She got into that. That was before we were going out. I might have fallen in love with her during the making of the video... She still looks pretty good!"

Jimmy Fallon (Aug. 27)

On his dream guest: "The Queen of England, but I don't know how to get a hold of her. I lost her e-mail during the move, but she doesn't even have to leave Buckingham Palace. She could Skype me from the Palace or we could play Nintendo Wii over the Internet. Wii Bowling with the Queen."

Vincent Cassel (Aug. 26)

On the trouble with hiatuses: "I went back to Quebec where we were shooting [Mesrine], and I freaked out. I mean, totally. Something went wrong, and suddenly I was like, 'What have I been doing since the beginning [of the shoot]? We were all wrong!' I lost my confidence. It's like Tyson being knocked down once and then he doesn't win ever again! I said to the director, 'I need to see all the dailies again, I need to rewatch everything. I think we really f*cked up.' And he was really freaked out! He said, 'Please, Vincent, don't say that!' [Laughs] The minute he freaked out, I felt secure again, but I needed that moment of panic to get tense again. You need to be extremely relaxed and confident, but I'm sorry -- you need a hard-on, perpetually.</ If you start to go a little soft, then it's not a good time."

Tim Gunn (Sept. 2)

On the deterioration of English: "There's a terrible erosion of, first of all, practical knowledge or general knowledge, I should say, of -- forget about other languages because people don't speak or write any -- the English language! I'm very unnerved by it. [...] My first experience with email was when I was at Parsons, part of the New School, and it was an email from the provost of the University. The provost is the chief academic officer. This email contained no capitalization and no punctuation. I. Was. Horrified. I asked her about it, and she said basically, 'You've got to get with it, man!' Get with it? I had a similar experience with someone who I won't name. I'd been part of a very lengthy cover story about her, and the interview took three days and probably collectively 10 hours. It was a lot. But when the article came out, it was wonderful, and I wrote her a long e-mail about how great the article was and congratulations and I was honored to be a part of it. Two days later -- the time doesn't matter, but I'm setting the stage -- but two days later I get an email back: 'T-H-N-X.' I didn't even warrant a vowel! T-H-N-X! Horrified!"

John Cameron Mitchell (Sept. 16)

On compromise while making Rabbit Hole: "I could have pulled up a wall. Certainly other people who don't have final cut say, 'I'm not doing it.' That's right. And there were a couple of moments where one of them said, "This music is perfect." And I said, 'This music is perfectly wrong. You can go over my head, legally, and put that in, but I will always hate it. And I will never be quiet about it.' And so we decided to use something that was a little of both of what we want. This is only at the end because we got all panicky, but there were really few of those moments because we had this amount of time. I think when you have expedited time -- 'Oh, God, we've got to open that day' -- that's when people start getting bitchy. In this case, I have to say, they made some calls that I came around to that people point to as very important bits in the film. I acknowledge that. They also came around to my choices."

Gillian Jacobs (Oct. 28)

On the meaning of Community's ratings: "I was at a coffee shop earlier in the year and the barista said, 'Oh, I love your show.' And it was Thursday and we had a new episode on that night, so I said, 'Oh great, we have a new episode on that night.' And she was like, 'I don't even know what night my favorite shows are on.' Just like zero awareness of TV scheduling. Things that TV executives build their careers on are just totally irrelevant to a whole new generation of TV viewers. That flies completely in the face of all the hard work that executives do to come up with nice programming. And if you think about it -- I don't know that I would be home at 8 o'clock in front of the TV. It's a hard hour and we don't have any lead-in. We haven't ever been able to piggyback off a show. When we did last season -- we were after The Office for our first few episodes -- our numbers were great. 8 o'clock is a very hard hour."

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