Michel Gondry has made some of the most indelible music videos of all time for some of the biggest acts of the last two decades, including Radiohead, Björk, Foo Fighters, The White Stripes, Beck and even Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones. So when Movieline caught up with him today to discuss his forthcoming documentary Thorn in the Heart, it seemed a great opportunity to feel him out on the new vanguard of the form: Lady Gaga, whose epic "Telephone" video has swept popular culture with a fury, frenzy and inspiration not seen since the glory days of which Gondry himself was a part. His response -- which swept through genre monoliths from Michael Jackson to Madonna to Marilyn Manson -- was unexpected to say the least.
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In a swank Santa Monica hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean this weekend, Miley Cyrus spoke to reporters about her upcoming film, The Last Song -- the latest romantic weepie from best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, and the first for which he also wrote the screenplay. Also a first for Sparks: Song was conceived and specifically written for Cyrus, who was looking for a project to help her break out of Hannah Montanadom and graduate to more mature roles.
"It's interesting to leave my security blanket behind. It was such a huge deal in so many kids' lives," Cyrus said about the upcoming Hannah Montana finale. But as for revisiting the character in another film, she made it clear where she stands. "[Hannah's] wig is," she whistles, "out. One will be in a museum, and one will be... burned, or something."
I admitted to having developed a guilty pleasure addiction to her Twitter feed, and went into Miley tweet withdrawal when she abruptly pulled the plug in October with a message reading, "FYI Liam doesn't have a Twitter and he wants ME to delete mine with good reason." (Liam, or course, refers to her Song co-star and now boyfriend, handsome Aussie discovery Liam Hemsworth.) So what, exactly, was that reason?
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As the lead in HBO's megabudget miniseries The Pacific, Badge Dale finally gets to rise to the front of an ensemble. The 31-year-old actor first appeared as the ill-fated Simon in the 1990 adaptation of Lord of the Flies, then resumed acting as an adult, landing a high-profile arc as Jack Bauer's partner during the third season of 24. Since then, he's been busy with a multitude of projects: In addition to his role as Robert Leckie in The Pacific, he'll appear in Robert Redford's The Conspirator and topline AMC's next drama, Rubicon.
Dale called Movieline last week to chat about all three upcoming projects, but before we began our conversation, I had a little bit of bad news for him.
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Aside from The Runaways, Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart have appeared in three other projects together -- two Twilight installments and the Kate Hudson-directed short Cutlass -- but it's only in next week's band biopic that the two finally get to show off the rapport they've always had in real life. Each is well-cast in The Runaways, and when Movieline spoke to Fanning and Stewart yesterday in Los Angeles, they recalled their characters both literally and subconsciously: The 16-year-old Fanning is as California wholesome as Cherie Currie with the same cool, intellectual drive, while the 19-year-old Stewart is all inchoate passion and feeling, channeling Joan Jett's emotional thrusts despite her own delicate frame.
So what was it like to play two young girls on the precipice of fame when both Fanning and Stewart have been dealing with it all their life? I asked them how that felt, and how they navigated the movie's tricky depictions of sexism and teen sexuality.
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Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's new weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. This week, we hear from the director of Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, which was released this week on DVD.
The cross-dressing comic and actor Eddie Izzard wasn't always the "cross-dressing comic and actor Eddie Izzard." Sarah Townsend knew him back when he was just another struggling performer desperate for a break, working round the clock and riding a unicycle for whatever spare change passers-by on the street might have in their pockets. And since 2003, Townsend has been piecing those days -- and the rest in between -- together for her debut feature documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story. I know, I know: "Why does Eddie Izzard need his own documentary?" You'd be surprised. It's quite the inspiration, really -- motivational substance for people who hate that kind of stuff. It's also a fascinating glimpse at just how comedy is conceived and delivered. Townsend talked to Movieline about this and much more for this week's Moment of Truth.
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As if the buzz around the final season of Lost didn't give Emilie de Ravin enough to contend with, the Australian actress enters a whole other realm of hype this weekend starring opposite Robert Pattinson in the film Remember Me. De Ravin plays Ally, a saucy New York University student with a tragic past and a protective NYPD-veteran father (Chris Cooper); she's the type of girl who eats dessert before her entree to get the most out of life, which she knows from experience could end unexpectedly at any minute. She takes up with Tyler (Pattinson), another saucy NYU student with a tragic past and an estranged, big-shot lawyer father (Pierce Brosnan). They're all headed for a collision (literally and figuratively) in which Ally may be the toughest party -- or at least that's how de Ravin plays her, the keeper of a certain wry grace that slices through the thick machismo and urbane cynicism around her.
De Ravin talked to Movieline recently about doubling up on her Cultural Moment, how to build a back story, and her small problem with dreadlocks.
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Playing the impish title call girl of Chloe, Atom Egoyan's luscious erotic drama and his most accessible film in years, Amanda Seyfried insinuates herself into the life of a Toronto gynecologist (Julianne Moore) whose marriage to a handsome professor (Liam Neeson) has run ice cold. It's the kind of performance that might inspire a new generation of young actresses with similarly bodacious aspirations, just as a technicolor Baz Luhrmann romance did for Seyfried back when she was a pre-teen playing dress-up in her bedroom. She told us all about it yesterday, when we asked her to play My Favorite Scene.
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Let's return now to Movieline's roving video powerhouse Carly Steel, who had the happy fortune recently to catch up with Clash of the Titans co-star Izabella Miko. The actress plays the film's Athena, goddess of wisdom and war -- and apparently the repository for a massive python that Miko wasn't quite ready to share the screen (and especially her shoulders) with. But that was just the beginning of her animal problems. Carly gets the full story from Miko -- along with an appeal for environmentally conscious single men with a spare $100,000 lying around -- after the jump.
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There's not anything inherently fresh and vital about doing a remake, but Cary Fukunaga's upcoming take on Jane Eyre may buck that trend. The 32-year-old director of the art house smash Sin Nombre is regarded as one of Hollywood's most promising new talents, and he's lined up two other up-and-comers to star in his adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel: Alice in Wonderland heroine Mia Wasikowska, and Michael Fassbender of Inglourious Basterds and Fish Tank. This weekend, Fukunaga spoke to Movieline about what he's got planned for the film.
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Passionate sex. Cigarette smoking. Gun violence. Fistfights. Frank dialogue. Adult themes. F-bombs. The "twist" ending (don't worry, no big spoilers here). Robert Pattinson's new film Remember Me plays out with all the salty, sultry vigor of the New York summer in which it's set. Yet somehow, director Allen Coulter and distributor Summit Entertainment trimmed and tucked enough of that vigor to avoid the R-rating that would keep the film from its Pattinson-rabid teenage fan base. It was a job that likely meant the difference between a $25 million and a $50 million opening or maybe even more -- not to mention one that, as Coulter told Movieline recently, he almost refused to do.
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The titular mother of Mother -- the new film from South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the 2006 creature thriller The Host -- is a ginseng seller and under-the-table acupuncturist, whose only child is a man in his early 20s, gifted with great looks but cursed with an under-developed mind. Her doting over the boy, who tends to get into trouble hanging out with his no-good friend, verges on the obsessional -- they share a home, every meal, and a bed at night. Then comes her worst nightmare: before her eyes, her son is snatched away by cops, as he was the last person seen with a local promiscuous teen found dead that morning. Thus commences to churn a hurricane of a performance from Korean national treasure Kim Hye-ja, perfectly cast as a frantic parent running on nothing but adrenaline and desperation in a race to find the real murderer. It's a crackerjack of a thriller. Movieline sat down recently with Joon-ho for a lively discussion about moms and monsters; it turns out the two are not always mutually exclusive.
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One of last night's biggest Academy Award upsets came when Geoffrey Fletcher's name was called as the winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, beating out heavily tipped frontrunners Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for Up in the Air. Fletcher was clearly moved by the win, as he was on Friday when he won Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards for his work on Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
Movieline spoke with Fletcher this weekend about his awards season ride, which ended with those two dramatic high points.
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In her role as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's little sister in (500) Days of Summer, the joke was that Chloë Moretz is wise beyond her years. We'd all better get used to it. The 13-year-old actress has lined up a series of challenging, mature parts over the next several months: She'll first be seen as the ultraviolent Hit Girl in Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, then star as a child vampire in Let Me In (a remake of the recent Swedish sleeper Let the Right One In). In between, a more G-rated audience might catch Moretz in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, though the actress herself is no pushover.
As Moretz prepares for the release of the already controversial Kick-Ass, she talked to Movieline about her suddenly high-gear career.
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You saw it in this morning's trades: Adam Scott, so poignant and funny on Starz's Party Down as a struggling commercial actor who returns to the depressing milieu of cater-waitering to pay the bills, has joined the cast of NBC's Parks and Recreation. If ever a show didn't need more cast members, Park's bloated ensemble, which also now includes Rob Lowe, would be the one. Scott's loose contract with Starz requires that he only appear on three episodes on Season 3 -- a similar arrangement that led to the show losing Jane Lynch to Fox's smash-hit Glee this season. (Lynch does return for the Party Down season finale -- an episode revolving around her wedding.) When Movieline spoke to Scott in December, he seemed to be down with Down, calling it "my favorite job, I just love it," and telling us "he could keep doing it forever." So what happened? Probably a mixture of money and visibility -- though it would be presumptuous to assume Scott, who has a producer credit on the series, is gone for good.
Meanwhile, his costar Ken Marino, who plays the dimwitted cater supervisor Ron Donald, was forthright when we asked him yesterday how he felt about losing Lynch to a network series:
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Movieline caught up with Megan Mullally today on the set of Children's Hospital, the gleefully subversive web series from Rob Corddry that graduates to Cartoon Network's Adult Swim this summer. We asked the Will & Grace star and two-time Emmy winner, who seems to have no qualms with moving freely between network, cable and online, if there's perhaps a looser attitude now among TV actors when it comes to choosing projects. We also asked her how she felt about Conan O'Brien's recent treatment by her sometime-employer, NBC. In a word? Pissed.
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