Another year, another... oh, couple hundred interviews in the books for the staff at Movieline HQ. It's next to impossible to whittle this towering stack down to a manageable year-end review, but read on for a reasonable cross-section of the best, smartest, funniest and/or most candid moments from our magnanimous guests of 2010.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (Jan. 23)
On filmmaking in combat: "[Junger:] The most scared I ever was was in a situation where we were hit very hard, and I was separated from my camera. There was too much gunfire for me to get to my camera, which was like 10 feet away. I was completely discombobulated. As soon as you have the camera in your hand, you have a purpose -- a point. Without the camera you're just getting shot at. The camera was its own kind of anesthetic. I felt that my job was to record what was happening as thoroughly as possible, and there was a real sense of purpose to my job. Without the camera, it was a passive situation and I was just getting shot at. It was terrifying. The camera was the only refuge."
Tilda Swinton (Jan. 25)
On Conan O'Brien wanting her to play him in the movie version of his exile from NBC: "I've heard about Conan! I'm so thrilled. I would just be only too happy [to play him]. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. What I really would love to do is get him to do some of the things I get to do. It would be nice if he were here at Sundance maybe, wearing this coat, talking about I Am Love. And why not? Every girl should have a doppelganger."
RuPaul (Feb. 1)
On being a role model: "Role model territory is a tricky thing to navigate though. I've never conducted my career with the idea that I am a role model. I think if people are inspired by the things I do, I think that's rocking, but it's not my goal to be a role model because the truth is that people find inspiration from all over. I'm human and I would never want to thwart my creativity because I think it offends someone. I'm always going to do what inspires me first. If somebody else gets off on it, right on. And if they don't, right on."
Jackie Collins (Feb. 17)
On what makes a penis "angry," as described in her latest novel: "That's a very interesting question. But you can tell immediately: They have kind of a shriveled look, and red. Very red. You can spot an angry penis a mile away, can't you?"
Michel Gondry (March 15)
On Lady Gaga and the decline of the music video: "I'm not interested. To me it's like a form of Marilyn Manson. It's hard for me to talk about it; I've seen a couple of videos of hers, and not for very long. I stop watching them each time because I don't think there's melodies. I'm sorry to be negative. [... I]n 1999 or 2000, MTV and VH1 did the 100 Best Videos of All Time -- two different selections -- and I had zero videos in either of them. So when people tell me I'm the 'MTV Generation,' I just say, 'No.' I never won any MTV [Video Music Awards]. Oh, except for one for a video I did for Massive Attack, actually, and I lost it. My producer was furious. He wanted to put it in his office. But I loved videos. I remember watching videos very late at night -- Michael Jackson videos. The first rap videos were amazing: Run-DMC, Tone Loc, all of that was just amazing. The Beastie Boys videos were always great. But then it became very stereotyped. There was this confusion. Also: The MTV Video Awards were never about the video, but about the song. Most of the time it was just to glorify people for the wrong reason."
Nicolas Winding Refn (July 21)
On flirting with the mainstream: "I think every time I make a film, I say to myself that I write, produce and control. That's all I've done so far. Now I say, 'Oh, this is the one. Now I'm really going to show [Hollywood]!' You know? But at the same time, I've been very lucky with them. They get released, people watch them, and people have emotions about them, either good or bad. It truly doesn't matter to me as long as people have a reaction. I am going to Hollywood now to do a movie with Ryan Gosling called Drive, which is about a stuntman by day and a getaway driver by night. But the sensibility of the novella that it's based on [by James Sallis] very much speaks to me. So I feel very comfortable working within that. But I would love to make one of those Hollywood, $100 million extravaganzas. At the same time, I'm also very content in my situation. I get to make the films I want to make. I don't have the ego of world dominance."
Robert Duvall (July 28)
On the upside of subversion: "[Bill Murray] took [Get Low director] Aaron [Schneider] aside and said, 'There are a lot of people here you're not listening to, and you should listen more.' I didn't do that. With the other actors, maybe I'll do that. I don't know if you saw Broken Trail. One of my favorites -- TV again. But there was AMC and all these different camps trying to take the writing a different way. So finally I said to the writer, "Every day, we have to practice quiet, continuous anarchy. We'll slip the writing under the door, we'll rewrite when we want to. We've got to, because they're ruining it." And in 16 days we re-edited it. We had to! And it was one of the best experiences of my life -- even though it was craziness. So you can work under duress, you can work under friction. Sometimes when things are perfect, they're too perfect. Resistance is good."
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."
James Franco (Oct. 29)
On his treatment in the media: "Things like a picture of me sleeping in class? What am I going to do? It actually wasn't class; William Kentridge was giving a talk that I didn't need to be at. It's kind of OK with me because I think it's very hard for people. People don't want the guy from Pineapple Express to be going to Yale and getting a Ph. D. They don't like it. I think people just want to... If they can't get pictures of me drunk coming out of a club, the worst they can get of me is sleeping in a 10 p.m. lecture. OK. If they want to paint the picture of the stoner going to school, it's kind of OK with me because it actually takes a lot of pressure off. If that's the way they want to depict me, it's fine. Because my schoolwork isn't a performance. I'm going there because I'm getting so much out of it and I'm getting to work with all of my favorite writers or professors. So if that's how they want to depict it, it's not taking away from why I'm there. And it takes pressure off. So you kind of have to roll with it."
Tom Bergeron (Nov. 15)
On Dancing With the Stars conspiracy theories: "I have no patience with my friends who believe there is a conspiracy keeping Bristol on the show. They'll say, and they're friends of a similar political persuasion though I have friends across the spectrum, 'Oh, well! She's still on the show! She's obviously not the best dancer! She gets the lowest scores!' My response to that is similar to my response to the midterm elections. I'll say, 'OK, right. So who did you vote for instead of Bristol?' 'Uh, well, I don't vote!' 'Well, then, f*ck you.'"
Amber Tamblyn (Nov. 22)
On the overblown 127 Hours fainting controversy: "Recently, we had the premiere here in L.A. and Huffington Post posted this huge article saying that somebody had a seizure at the screening, which is very true, but they clumped that story in with other reports of people fainting and having seizures during the [amputation] scene. The truth of the matter is that the person had a seizure within the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film. She had a seizure because of diabetic shock, which was completely unrelated to the film. [...] I think there is a thing going on here. It is like a symptom poll where people hear about this 'terrifying, scary, shocking, disgusting scene' and so when they go to see the movie, they hear that people are passing out and there is an inclination to traumatize their feelings about it. Honestly, that part of the film is three minutes. Seriously, three minutes. It's nothing. It's seriously nothing. I just shake my head. I feel bad for people who aren't going to see the movie just because they hear that and think that it's going to be horrible. It's such an incredible film about one man's survival and the triumphs of the human spirit."
Jesse Eisenberg (Dec. 6)
On winning awards: "The first movie I was in was called Roger Dodger. And the main actor in that [Campbell Scott], he won this award, the National Board of Review award. [...] I remember that day where I was because I had never heard of that award nor did I pay attention to any awards. And then I was kind of exposed, very briefly, because the movie was a $1 million movie. After he won that award, the movie people and the distribution company got a little bit confident about what that could be, at least for him. And I was immediately kind of turned off to the seemingly very kind of complicated process. And lengthy process. I just loved working with those people that I was working with, so I was happy to get to see them at these dinners and stuff. And luckily I didn't have to deal with any of the pressure because the pressure was not on me personally. This is a bit more intense because the movie is big, the expectations are higher. And so it's a lot of pressure, and it's something you can't do anything about. Like I can't go and react if you don't get acknowledged for something. And the other part of it, which is possibly more frustrating, is that I just did a play reading all day. And I felt like I was so much more effective in this reading that I just did all day -- there were 10 people in the audience -- than I was in The Social Network or other films. So it's a bit frustrating that you feel it's not really... The acknowledgments don't necessarily coincide with how you feel about things."
Nicole Kidman (Dec. 17)
On the evolving meaning of the Oscars: "They're just as exciting -- if not more so -- as you get older because there's a sense of what it means, actually. Particularly in a lifetime of work, the pursuit of excellence is something that's important. And I think once you've got things to compare it to in terms of work that hasn't reached where you want it to reach or hasn't been acknowledged, and, you know, have certainly had failures... That contrast puts everything into a much sweeter spot. And also, when I won the Oscar it was a very strange time for me. I was alone. I had the Oscar, but I didn't really have a life. So that was strange, and it was actually that which propelled me into going, 'My God, I actually have to find who I am and what I am and what I actually want for the next 50 or 60 years of my life, if I live that long.'"