Jonathan Peters has taken a beating from the judges during this season of Project Runway, and it all came to a head in last night episode after tart harangues from Michael Kors, Nina Garcia, and Heidi Klum, who was supposed to wear the winning garment to a red-carpet event. Now that he's been eliminated, the 29-year-old Rhode Islander opens up to Movieline about the judges' misinformed ideas, Tim Gunn's role, and how he felt when Maya Luz auf'd herself.
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Last night's episode of Project Runway featured a jarring triad of events: an elimination, the return of an evicted contestant, and a baffling exit from 22-year-old Santa Fe designer Maya Luz. The young, über-banged talent claimed she wasn't ready for Bryant Park's big stage, and opted to leave the competition prior to beginning this week's challenge. Now that she's had time to mull over the ramifications of her exit, Movieline caught up with Maya to discuss her reasons for leaving, her ambitions, and unfair criticisms from the judges.
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Expect to see a few new sides of Thomas Haden Church as the title character of Don McKay, a wildly genre-hopping indie featuring the actor as a Boston janitor summoned home after 25 years by his high-school sweetheart Sonny (Elisabeth Shue). Terminally ill and under the care of a brusque, officious nurse (Melissa Leo), Sonny wants to spent the rest of her short life with Don -- who wouldn't mind that himself if not for the mounting levels of suspicion and secrets towering around them. Rookie writer-director Jake Goldberger cites Blood Simple as a seminal influence, but the film draws its primary energy from Church's strapping, coiled reticence -- not to mention the star's leadership behind the scenes, where he labored for four years in the afterglow of his Oscar-nominated Sideways role to help bring Don McKay to fruition.
Church recently spoke with Movieline about building McKay from scratch, wearing his producer hat, the backlash to last year's loathed All About Steve, and what it was like going to work with Marlon Brando and Charlie Sheen (at the same time!)
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It's hard to call a director prolific when her first film hasn't even been released yet, but Shana Feste makes a good case for it. Feste wrote and directed The Greatest (out this Friday in limited release), which stars Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, and Carey Mulligan in the story of a family who's lost their teenage son. That film premiered at Sundance in 2009, and in the interim, Feste has already wrapped her next movie Love Don't Let Me Down, a country musical with Gwyneth Paltrow and Tron Legacy's Garrett Hedlund. When Feste tells you that her intention is to make a film every year, Woody Allen-style, it's not hard to believe she'll do it.
The young talent sat down with Movieline last week to discuss her speed vis-a-vis other woman filmmakers, the family story that inspired The Greatest, and the karaoke audition that landed up-and-comer Hedlund a role in her next film.
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Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. This week we hear from Oscar-winner Michel Gondry, whose documentary Thorn in the Heart _opens Friday in limited release.-
Michel Gondry is known to make warm, densely tricky and unfailingly personal films; one can even imagine him subverting the superhero genre with his forthcoming big-budget adaptation of The Green Hornet. But what might Gondry do with a documentary? His new film Thorn in the Heart delivers the answer, training his camera on his own family -- his aunt Suzette in particular, whose decades of success as an educator are starkly contrasted against the more haunting pitfalls and woes of matrimony and motherhood. It's an unsparing yet sensitive approach for the first-time docmaker, whose most probing inquiries are woven into animation and vintage home movies until a typically handmade Gondrian tapestry results. In the same candid spirit in which he dismissed Lady Gaga to Movieline a few weeks ago, Gondry he shared his take on nonfiction, grilling one's own family and the thrill of confronting failure.
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In Shana Feste's new drama The Greatest, Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon play parents who are grieving the car accident death of their teenage son (Aaron Johnson) in wildly different ways: he's buttoned-up and avoiding the issue, while she lashes out at others, including their younger child (Johnny Simmons) and the woman (Carey Mulligan) who's pregnant with their late son's baby. It's heavy material, and Brosnan was originally reluctant to sign on: the 56-year-old actor has dealt with his own fair share of grief in real life -- his first wife Cassandra died of ovarian cancer in 1991, and his son Sean was almost killed in a car accident in 2000 -- and Brosnan was unsure if he wanted to go to those emotional places while filming.
In an interview with Movieline, Brosnan discussed how he changed his mind, the guilt he feels over using his personal experiences as an actor, and his take on the evolution of the suddenly white-hot Mulligan.
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Back in November, ABC premiered its re-imagining of the 1983 miniseries V after an expensive sky-writing campaign that advertised the show over 26 U.S. landmarks. The show premiered to strong ratings and favorable reviews but was yanked by the network after only four episodes for a four-month long hiatus. Network executive Steve McPherson explained that the break would make the series more of a "television event" but fans mourned the show and begged cast members to bring it back as soon as possible.
Last week, Movieline caught up with one of V's besieged stars, Joel Gretsch, who revealed that he is just as eager for his latest sci-fi venture to return before discussing his pivotal role on the United States of Tara and whether or not his father-in-law, William Shatner, has plans to guest-star on his ABC series.
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When you're making a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, you need actors who are in on the joke. Fortunately, that's what Lizzy Caplan excels at -- not only can she nail a punchline, but her sardonic smarts were well-used both in Mean Girls and in the hit Starz series Party Down, which is about to return for its second season. (She's also more than capable of dramatic range, as anyone who caught her bad-girl True Blood arc can attest.)
A few weeks ago, Caplan rang up Movieline to reveal just how odd the Hot Tub shoot was (and how many writers it employed), what's new on Party Down this season, and why she never gets recognized for Mean Girls.
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If it feels like it's been a little while since Edward Norton last starred in a film, at least you get double the actor in Leaves of Grass. Norton plays twins Bill and Brady Kincaid In Tim Blake Nelson's indie dramedy -- one an Ivy League professor, the other a tattooed pot dealer. Acting opposite oneself isn't an easy thing to do, but at least Norton has always been a consummate multi-tasker on his sets, often screenwriting (as he did on Louis Letterier's The Incredible Hulk, which Nelson also starred in), directing (Keeping the Faith), or producing.
Shortly after Leaves of Grass had its Austin premiere at South by Southwest, Norton rang up Movieline to discuss the perils of split-screen, his long-promised adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, and his bemusement at becoming a fanboy headline.
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Liam Hemsworth may have landed a starring role opposite Miley Cyrus in The Last Song at age 19, but that doesn't mean that his young career hasn't had its fair share of false starts. The Australian native thought he got his big break when he was cast in Sylvester Stallone's upcoming The Expendables, but being cut from the film made him nearly throw in the towel. Next, Kenneth Branagh flirted with the idea of handing him the title role in the big-budget Marvel adaptation Thor, but instead chose his older brother Chris. Still, The Last Song soon came along -- as did a high-profile romance with Cyrus -- and now Hemsworth is the hot property Hollywood's always intended him to be.
Just as he was being cast in a new 3D adaptation of Arabian Nights, Hemsworth sat down with Movieline to discuss what exactly went down with The Expendables, why he think his brother beat him out for Thor, and the racy, naked role he had before he made his way to America.
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Still grieving after the elimination on last night's Project Runway? At least we've got one last blast of the latest castoff's special mix of candor, sage advice, and refreshing personality here in our day-after Movieline interview. Still, though the eliminated designer is a fan favorite, some not-so-sweet things are said about two Runway judges, including one who is "a big contradiction."
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It's been a monumental week for John Corbett. On Monday, the (far superior) second season of his Showtime drama United States of Tara premiered to numbers so impressive that the premium cabler has already ordered a third season. Meanwhile, the actor best known as Carrie Bradshaw's lost-love Aidan lied to Movieline about his involvement in the Sex and the City 2 movie. When an official trailer for the franchise's second film revealed a (gasp!) coincidental desert rendez-vous between Carrie and her former furniture designer beau, Corbett took to the Ellen DeGeneres Show to apologize to the journalists he had thwarted over the past few months. Apology reluctantly accepted.
Corbett talked about subjects other than the Sex and the City 2 movie when he spoke to Movieline recently though -- like being intimidated by Diablo Cody on the set of United States of Tara, his behind-the-scenes pet peeve and that Sex and the City whiskey buddy of his.
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When you're an in-demand star, the rumor mill can churn dramatically about what upcoming movies you're planning to star in. Leave it to Movieline, then, to go in and help actors clean up their IMDb profiles, separating fact from fiction.
Today's happy-to-oblige star is Carey Mulligan, who's riding high off of her Academy Award nomination for An Education and her new drama The Greatest, out April 2. Mulligan has press duties for Wall Street 2 and Never Let Me Go in the fall, but in the meantime, she'd like to sneak in another film. Will it be John Madden's remake of My Fair Lady? How about Effie, an Emma Thompson-scripted biopic about artist John Ruskin (to be played by Thompson's husband, Greg Wise) and his short-lived marriage to Effie Gray? And hey, aren't there rumors that Mulligan might play the lead in David Fincher's adaptation of the white-hot novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Movieline put all these potential projects to Mulligan for her clarification.
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As noted here last month when he joined Movieline for a round of My Favorite Scene, Irish actor Ciarán Hinds is known to work frequently. OK, a lot. And this week, the face you know from scores of high-powered indies (including There Will Be Blood and Margot at the Wedding), studio blockbusters (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Race to Witch Mountain) and a TV watershed here or there (Rome) stars in his first leading role in The Eclipse. Writer-director Conor McPherson's genre-bending tale present Hinds as Michael Farr, a widower dealing with grief, single fatherhood, a clinically depressed father-in-law, a hyper-jealous prick (Aidan Quinn) going after a mutual love interest (Iben Hjejle), and ghosts. Or so Michael thinks -- and so the viewer thinks, thanks to McPherson's exquisite cocktail of atmospherics and jolts and Hinds's vulnerability to phantasmagoria of what may (or may not) be his own making.
In a free-wheeling interview with Movieline, Hinds spoke about how to act in a ghost story, the spookiest legends of Ireland, watching Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis build There Will Be Blood from scratch in eight weeks, and a few spoiler-ish insights about playing a Dumbledore in the next Harry Potter film.
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One of the most successful crossover novelists to hit Hollywood since the days of John Grisham and Michael Crichton, North Carolinian writer Nicholas Sparks has seen his best-selling love stories (he considers the term "romance novel" a dirty word) adapted for the silver screen a half-dozen times now, beginning with 1996's Kevin Costner/Robin Wright Penn pairing Message in a Bottle, through to 2004's hit The Notebook, to this year's Iraq War weepie Dear John and the upcoming Miley Cyrus vehicle The Last Song, soon duking it out for your date-night dollars at a multiplex near you.
We caught up with Sparks recently, where he talked about bucking the author-turned-screenwriter trend, why he never writes gay love stories, and what he meant when he recently described Cormac McCarthy's "horrible" writing as "pulpy, overwrought, and melodramatic." Read on for an engaging chat with Hollywood's favorite publishing phenomenon.
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