When Tilda Swinton told Movieline the other day how eager she was to play Conan O'Brien, that was only the tip of the interview iceberg. The Academy Award winner was at Sundance to promote Luca Guadagnino's romantic melodrama I Am Love, where she stars as Emma, a rich housewife who finds carnal excitement and personal fulfillment outside of her marriage to a wealthy Italian industrialist (if you're unfamiliar with her early work, it might shock you that Swinton speaks fluent Italian throughout the movie; then again, the actress has all but made a career out of such stylish surprises).
I sat down with Swinton in Park City for a lengthy talk about the state of melodrama, her opinion of film festivals (she organizes a rather unconventional one herself), her directorial ambitions, and the boggling thing she'd just discovered moments before.
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Yvette Nicole Brown's role as Shirley on Community pairs what the actress describes are her two best attributes: snark and sweetness. Now that the jocular NBC comedy has been picked up for three additional episodes, we'll be able to watch more of Brown adding spicy, sometimes vitriolic zeal to the series' community college setting. Just ahead of tonight's new episode, Brown talks to Movieline about where the show is heading, the most challenging acting on Earth, and that opening credit sequence with the inadvertent O.J. Simpson parallel.
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In America, we'll get our chance to know Sam Taylor-Wood soon, and she's hoping you'll keep an open mind. In her native Britain, the 42-year-old is different things to different people: a famous visual artist (with headline-grabbing portraits of stars like Robert Downey Jr. and David Beckham), a cancer survivor, a feature film director making her debut with the young John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, and a tabloid fixture for dating the movie's 19-year-old-star Aaron Johnson (soon to be seen as the lead in Kick Ass) and becoming pregnant with his child.
Movieline sat down with Taylor-Wood last week in advance of her film's Sundance premiere (Nowhere Boy's U.S. release is thus far undated by the Weinstein Co.) to discuss the scrutiny of Beatles fans, the tyranny of physical resemblance when making a biopic, and the circuitous, fortuitous theft that got her the project in the first place.
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It's time once more to add to the growing ranks of Movieline's One-Page Screenplay project, in which some of Hollywood's hottest writers try their hand at composing something bite-size. The newest contributor is Craig Titley, who's developed a reputation for kickstarting family-friendly franchises (Cheaper By the Dozen, Scooby-Doo) and has his biggest-budgeted attempt to date hitting theaters next week: the Christopher Columbus-directed Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Titley's one-page screenplay isn't quite as effects-heavy, but it does employ a crucial bit of on-the-page CG. Enjoy Pull My Finger!
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Movieline's first stop on the Oscar-reaction rounds is Armando Iannucci, the In the Loop director whose caustic political satire today earned an Adapted Screenplay nomination for him and his co-writers Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche. However, more than just being rewarded for the innovation of its characters and story -- which focuses on how one press-office zealot engineers a multinational war effort -- the Academy may very well have nominated Iannucci and Co. for their exhaustive efforts in developing Loop's stirring new lexicon of profanity. Their side-splitting effort is the only comedy recognized in its respective category -- no doubt an underdog against the likes of Up in the Air and Precious, but one that will be happy just to be in the Kodak Theater March 7.
Iannucci spoke with us this afternoon about his reaction to being nominated, Loop's improv factor, and taking Oscar to the outer limits of screen vulgarity.
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Since Lost's third season, Nestor Carbonell has popped up several times on the show as the mysterious, ageless Richard Alpert, but when the sixth and final season premieres tonight, Carbonell will finally join the cast as a regular. It's a sign that Richard (who seems inextricably linked to the island's mythology) is going to prove pivotal in revealing many of Lost's big secrets, but it's also a tribute to the ingratiating slow burn Carbonell's managed while revealing hardly a thing about Richard's true nature.
Movieline spoke with the actor yesterday about what's in store for Richard in season six, what we can expect from a Richard-centric episode, the tragic origin story of his much-discussed heavy eyelashes, and his willingness to play Khan in a potential Star Trek sequel.
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Tina Majorino's history in refined television series (Veronica Mars, Big Love) has led her into revealing that she's a bit refined herself. Just before the premiere of her new ABC legal series The Deep End, we caught up with the 24-year-old actress and grilled her about her favorite film scene of all time. She whistled a happy tune, and no one suspected that I was afraid she'd bring up Waterworld.
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These days, every channel has its reality competition workhorse that pays the bills. Fox has American Idol, Lifetime has Project Runway and after last year's breakout season, Logo now has RuPaul's Drag Race. Tonight, RuPaul kicks off the show's second iteration by honoring one of her favorite films, Gone With the Wind, in a challenge that requires the dozen accomplished drag queens to craft fierce looks out of curtains, and as usual, the bottom two will lip-sync for their lives in front of an esteemed guest judge (in tonight's episode, Kathy Griffin). But this is only one of the latest ventures for the cultural force, whose new book Workin' It!: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style hits bookshelves tomorrow. In June, Ru will give straight women the confidence to use "all of the colors in their crayon box" with a new show called Drag University.
Movieline caught up with RuPaul to discuss expanding her reality empire, owning your power, and how everyone could benefit from a little drag.
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Hesher may have scored one of the biggest distribution deals at Sundance on the weight of names like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Natalie Portman, but it's Devin Brochu's breakout turn that makes the drama's biggest impression. Playing T.J., the disaffected youth at the film's center, 13-year-old Brochu takes a serious licking -- he endures everything from eating urinal cakes to being threatened with hedge clippers to getting tossed around by heavy machinery. That he manages through it all to render such an astoundingly mature performances is a testament to his talent. We caught up with Devin minutes after taking questions from an enthusiastic Sundance screening, and were relieved to find a sweet, well-adjusted and thoughtful kid on the cusp of something big.
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From its lengthy introductory shot of the nude protagonist fussily mixing feminism, art and vanity to a cryptic, haunting closing shot I shouldn't spoil, a number of factors make Zeina Durra's feature debut The Imperialists Are Still Alive! among Sundance 2010's most fascinating films. None, however, make it more intriguing than the way it compels one to describe the indescribable -- starting with Durra herself, a London-bred, New York-trained filmmaker of Jordanian/Lebanese/Bosnian/Palestinean heritage. Imperialists! presents her alter-ego Asya (Elodie Bouchez), a successful artist in Manhattan with links to both the Palestinean resistance and upper-crust Western hegemony. Negotiating between the two with her tight circle of comrades, Asya falls in love with a Mexican lawyer/Ph.D candidate (Jose Maria de Tavira) and avoids the prying eyes and ears of spy agencies including the CIA, Mossad and Mi6. Oh, and it's a comedy. See where I'm going with this?
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In May of 2002, handsome football player Pat Tillman turned down the fame and fortune of the NFL to enlist in the Army and fight in Afghanistan. "We might want to keep an eye on him," then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to a colleague, and indeed, when Tillman was killed almost two years later, the administration advanced the narrative that Tillman had been shot while bravely defending his troops from the Taliban.
Only, that's not what happened. Tillman had actually been killed by his own troops in a case of friendly fire, and the Army's cover-up was so outrageous (Tillman's body armor, uniform and vest were burned) and all-encompassing (as leaked memos from the highest levels of government would show), that Amir Bar-Lev's Sundance documentary The Tillman Story can't help but compel. Movieline spoke to Bar-Lev this week about the film's deleted moments, the influence of the Greatful Dead on his style, and his outrage that a key conspirator is an important part of President Obama's administration.
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Sundance's Park City at Midnight section is always among the most discussed group of films every year the festival, and in 2010, the Sarah Polley-Adrien Brody sci-fi-horror freakout Splice is arguably the most discussed of its peers. Director Vincenzo Natali's film features Polley and Brody as Elsa and Clive, a couple who share a bed, a laboratory and a passion for cutting-edge genetic engineering. Confronted by front-office pressures that threaten to squelch their research, the pair goes for broke with a human-animal hybrid that not only thrives, but also acquires an independence that turns against its ersatz parents in decidedly unpredictable, horrific and shocking ways. Both a single-minded, cutthroat scientist and a doting maternal presence, Elsa represents a fairly radical departure for the 31-year-old Canadian star -- one she spoke to Movieline about before the film's recent Sundance premiere.
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After six days slogging through a snowy Sundance, a special kind of exhaustion sets in -- but the brilliant, taboo-busting mind of comedian Louis C.K. was the perfect prescription to shake me out of my stupor. In his first concert film, Hilarious (an ironically boastful title referring to a bit on how the language of hyperbole has lost all of its significance), Louis performs a 90-minute set covering everything from life as a newly divorced dad to our spoiled generation to a -- yes, hilarious -- recounting of a verbal confrontation with his 3-year-old daughter. Comedy Central paid the $200,000 it cost to make the film for the broadcast rights, but hopefully you'll have an opportunity to enjoy it uncut and with an audience. I honestly can't remember the last time I experienced such a long run of sustained, belly-clutching laughter.
Movieline had the honor of being the first to talk to Louis after the screening, still on a high from the raucous response. We covered everything from his grueling training regimen to his favorite comedy topic (gay sex) to his new show, Louie, on FX later this year. And oh yeah -- we got him to open up about Dane Cook and that whole plagiarism brouhaha from a few years back.
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One of the more intriguing, entertaining documentaries of this year's Sundance Film Festival, Smash His Camera tracks the life's work of self-described "paparazzo superstar" Ron Galella. Perhaps best known for relentlessly hunting Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her family (until a judge issued a restraining order that stands against Galella to this day) and once incurring a Marlon Brando knuckle sandwich that knocked out five of his teeth, Galella was also a dedicated tracker of Sundance founder Robert Redford. The film features a certain level of détente between Galella and Redford -- enough so that the shutterbug actually gets close enough to hand Redford his latest book -- but it definitely wasn't always that way. Click through for Redford's somewhat lengthy, wholly fascinating story about the lengths Galella used to go to to get his shot -- and the lengths Redford went to to dodge him. Also: Galella's exclusive response to Movieline!
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In April, when David O. Russell signed on to direct Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg in the boxer biopic The Fighter, Hollywood did a bit of a double take. Russell and Bale were both coming off of leaked, angry tirades that had become YouTube sensations, and Russell's last film, the Jake Gyllenhaal/Jessica Biel comedy Nailed, fell apart without having been completed. How would all these talented hotheads get along?
Yesterday, Movieline spoke to Melissa Leo (who plays the mother of Bale and Wahlberg) at Sundance, and she opened up about the difficult shoot.
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