Michael Drummond was Project Runway's reliable quipper this season, popping out Crucible jokes and cat-skinning metaphors with major aplomb. In as interview with Movieline this morning, he was diplomatic enough to declare Andy, Mondo, and even Gretchen his choices to win the season, but I wanted to know about the less-lovable parts of his Runway tenure. Below, the St. Louis native talks about the challenge that got him eliminated, Fashion Week, and remaining cool when Ivy disgraced him in front of the judges.
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An interview with Martin Landau really shouldn't be called that -- more than just a simple Q&A, it's as though you're sitting in on an Actor's Studio session taught by the 82-year-old actor. Though my talk with Landau this week was pegged to the release of Lovely, Still, a new indie film where he finds late-in-life romance with Ellen Burstyn, it took no time before he began discussing the very nature of acting itself using some of his most famous roles as examples -- including his Oscar-winning turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and his characters in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. In fact, when it comes to actors, it turns out that Hitchcock and Allen have more in common than you might expect.
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It was just a matter of time before the Nicole Kidman/Aaron Eckhart drama Rabbit Hole found a buyer up in Toronto, and now that Lionsgate has staked its claim, the Oscar race is reportedly next. It's strikingly new territory for John Cameron Mitchell, the writer-director best known for the cult-classic fringe musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the sexually explicit ensemble dramedy Shortbus. Here, directing David Lindsay-Abaire's adaptation of his own celebrated play, Mitchell settles admirably into a suburban idyll riven by grief, guilt, frigidity and dark humor eight months after the accidental death of Becca (Kidman) and Howie's (Eckhart) young son. And then there was the year of editing.
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When you're writing a script called The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made, you're setting the bar awfully high, and when Get Him to the Greek director Nicholas Stoller began work on the upcoming Muppet reboot with cowriter Jason Segel (star of the Stoller-helmed Forgetting Sarah Marshall), he admits that he started freaking out.
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Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. Today we hear from DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about Kings of Pastry, which opens this week in New York.
The husband-wife filmmaking team of DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus have been on hand to witness more than a few historic dramas over the years, perhaps none more famous than that of the charismatic Clinton campaign engineers profiled in their Oscar-nominated 1993 documentary The War Room. Scale that intensity and those stakes down to one guy in a kitchen, however, and you wind up with something like their new film Kings of Pastry, about chef Jacquy Pfeiffer's pursuit of one of France's most hallowed culinary distinctions: that of M.O.F., or Best Craftsman in France.
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Rowan Joffe may be in Toronto to premiere (and hopefully sell) his directing debut Brighton Rock, but the awkward afterglow of this month's box-office triumph The American -- which Joffe adapted from Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman -- followed the screenwriter north to TIFF. That's where I caught up with him to talk over the film's box-office success, the split personality of its moodiness and its marketing, and what Tony Gilroy's DVD extras taught him about writing for George Clooney.
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It took a while (and a studio debacle over The Wolfman), but Mark Romanek finally has a second feature under his belt. And it's not wanting for prestige: Opening today in limited release, Never Let Me Go features Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield as a trio of school friends turned romantic rivals turned... well, it's complicated. And, as Romanek sympathized, worth keeping on the downlow for folks unfamiliar with Kazuo Ishiguro's celebrated, genre-bending source novel. The director spoke further with Movieline about the variety of his young cast, the perils of marketing, and the pop star who might have the sway to draw him back to the music-video form that made him legendary.
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Despite the most spirited endorsement of yours truly, Dustin Lance Black's directorial debut What's Wrong With Virginia hasn't found the warmest reaction this week at the Toronto Film Festival. This has been a bit confounding to Black, whose follow-up to his Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk tells the wild tale of mentally ill Virginia (Jennifer Connelly), her teenage son (Harrison Gilbertson), her Mormon sheriff/Senate candidate paramour Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), and the small-town cauldron of love, sex, longing, desperation and hypocrisy from which each attempts to climb on the way to a bigger, better life. Whatever that is -- each has a different conception, as does Black himself, who today spoke with Movieline about the Canadian cold front and what isn't as wrong with Virginia as some might think.
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James Gunn just spent one of the most successful weekends of his life in Toronto, premiering his new superhero-splatter-comedy SUPER to Midnight Madness raves before selling it off to IFC Films in the festival's first distribution deal. In the end, though, Gunn's biggest triumph may have come in writing and directing the film he wanted to make exactly how he wanted to make it, with Rainn Wilson's nobody Frank adopting the crimefighting persona the Crimson Bolt after his wife (Liv Tyler) is all but kidnapped by a local drug baron (Kevin Bacon). It's a lot harder than it sounds in an age of indie-market turbulence, comic-book genre saturation, and even Gunn's own creative apprehensions following his 2006 debut Slither. He spoke to Movieline about these and other subjects -- from Joe Strummer to God -- over the weekend.
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Another year of TIFF almost always means another year featuring Michael Sheen, and 2010 is no different. Though the subject most definitely is: The Welsh stage and screen veteran arrives this week with the world premiere of Beautiful Boy, featuring Sheen opposite Maria Bello as a dissolving married couple who must relearn how to live with each other after their son goes on a mass murder-suicide gun rampage at his college. Writer-director Shawn Ku's debut feature goes a few places you might expect and a lot more you probably wouldn't; Sheen spoke about the film, his role, his diligence at character "fusion," and intriguing news about his future (or possible lack thereof) with the Twilight franchise.
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It's been a busy 15 months since Bo Burnham was featured by Movieline in The Verge, and movie roles, tours, network pilots, and Comedy Central specials have all followed. I spoke to the 20-year-old comedy songwriter just this afternoon, and he exclusively announced to Movieline his plans for a brand-new tour called Bo Burnham and (No) Friends, which starts in October, the same month as his Comedy Central special, Words, Words, Words. Burnham told Movieline what to expect from his new tour -- "weird" seems to be the answer -- discussed his new MTV pilot, and imagined a world where Yo Teach! was a reality.
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Project Runway's strangest and most endearing contestant, the unimonikered Casanova, befuddled the judges while still managing to win the greatest team challenge of all time. Movieline spoke to Casanova today about his problems making "resort wear" and what he likes about Gretchen (and even Ivy!).
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Look out: Here comes another Skarsgård. The fourth in the venerable Swedish acting clan to get into full-time acting after father Stellan and brothers Alexander and Gustaf (younger brother Valter may be right behind him), Bill Skarsgård arrived last week with his leading-man debut Behind Blue Skies, a '70s-era coming-of-age tale about a Swedish teenager whose escape to a resort job yields first love, new responsibilities and -- wait for it -- his involvement in the biggest drug scandal in the nation's history. Not a bad breakthrough for a kid who just few years ago used to think he'd wind up as a doctor. Movieline caught up with Skarsgård the day after the TIFF premiere of director Hannes Holm's drama.
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Pick any random film that's opened in the last year, and odds are about 50/50 that Malin Åkerman starred in some capacity. OK, so I exaggerate, but let me put it this way: A week after interviewing Åkerman for her film The Romantics -- which opened last week in limited release -- the Swedish-Canadian actress is in Toronto for the world premiere of her latest effort The Bang-Bang Club. Busy!
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Andrew Garfield's lunch arrived before he did this afternoon in Toronto: a light salad with chicken and broccoli, vinaigrette on the side, and six slices of tomatoes. Digging into the greens, one of the journalists gathered to discuss Garfield's new film Never Let Me Go asked if this was actually the Spider-Man diet. "It's food that I'm eating," the actor replied. "So yes." And so continued the enduring push-pull between the 27-year-old's smoldering, carefully cultivated dramatic presence and his future as the Great White Blockbuster Hope.
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