They say that in the specific you find the universal, and Sophie Okonedo can relate. The actress was raised in such a very unique household, having been born in London's East End to a Nigerian and an Ashkenazi Jew, yet from those particular roots, Okonedo's found herself able to play cultural realities that are very far afield from her, whether it's a Tutsi wife (her Oscar-nominated role) in Hotel Rwanda, a genetically modified super-agent in Aeon Flux, or even Winnie Mandela in the upcoming film Mrs. Mandela.
Okonedo's current film is Anthony Fabian's Skin, the devastating true story of Sandra Laing (Okonedo), born to two white Afrikaner parents in Apartheid-era South Africa yet torn asunder by a legal system that couldn't fathom such a possibility. It's a meaty role for Okonedo, and one I tried to convince the reticent actress to open up about.
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Throughout her career in visual effects -- starting with 1995's Die Hard With a Vengeance and most recently with 2007's The Golden Compass -- Susan MacLeod has been around the blockbuster more a few times, but never as a visual effects supervisor, and likely never on a project surrounded by as much anticipation as this month's New Moon. Having served as Chris Weitz's VFX producer on the Oscar-winning Compass, MacLeod was one of the first colleagues the director called after taking on the sequel to Twilight. She eventually came aboard as the film's VFX supervisor, battling wolves, vampires, apparitions and more in her and her crew's race to realize novelist Stephenie Meyer's bestseller on a wild 10-month schedule. MacLeod spoke with Movieline today about getting creative, working fast, and a few hints at what fans can expect from New Moon.
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Kirsten Prout starred in the popular ABC Family series Kyle XY for its entire three-season run, but she's already garnering attention for a movie that won't see release for another eight months. Twilight: Eclipse is the third installment in the vampire series, and though only just finished shooting, Prout talks to Movieline about the film's already-noticeable effects on her everyday life.
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In a great year for breakthroughs, Gabourey Sidibe may have the story to beat. Her film may not rake in $85 million like Paranormal Activity, nor announce a new It Girl a la An Education. But Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is an even more intriguing commodity: A searing, don't-look-back screen debut featuring Sidibe as an illiterate Harlem high schooler pregnant with her second child by her own father and trapped in a brutally abusive home with her mother Mary (played with predatory venom by Mo'Nique). Shipped off to a special educational program for high-risk teens, she comes into her own even as tragedy pursues her from all sides. It's as raw, tender and unprecedented a character as any this year, and Sidibe owns it as such -- her early, lumbering inelegance giving way to grace, her defiance alive with hope.
And the awards hunt is on: I met Sidibe for a chat earlier this month in New York, minutes after she and director Lee Daniels had concluded a screening of Precious for the National Board of Review.
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Sofia Vassilieva may face off against exclusively modern-day problems on the big and small screen -- like a parental lawsuit in this summer's My Sister's Keeper and a psychic mother on CBS's Medium -- but in real life she claims to be old-fashioned. The 17-year-old star put aside her A.P. U.S. History homework and talked to Movieline about her favorite film scene, one that she says reflects a long-missed era.
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With one masterful movie in which imaginary, holiday-manufacturing villages collide, The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick single-handedly ignited the stop-motion renaissance. His most recent film, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's book Coraline, was no less ghoulish a tale, centering on a little girl with neglectful parents who discovers a mirror world of button-eyed doppelgangers living through a secret passageway. Movieline spoke with Selick today about Jack Skellington's favorite day, the direction stop-motion is taking, and the grunt work of making an enduring animated classic.
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As the hornier, less-sensitive half of New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo, Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement has earned legions of loyal fans. He also happens to be the best thing about Gentlemen Broncos -- the latest love letter to adolescent social retardation from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess. In it he plays science fiction author and lecturer Dr. Ronald Chevalier, a deliciously self-regarding buffoon who wears a Bluetooth earpiece, high-waisted jeans, and answers the phone, "CheVAAHlier." Movieline spoke to Jemaine about his own nightmare mentors, the status of FotC's third season, his love/hate relationship with L.A., and his predilection for wearing really, really short shorts.
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As hard as this might be to believe, Peter Graves has no star on the Walk of Fame. That unforgivable transgression will at last be corrected tomorrow, however, when the Mission: Impossible mastermind and enduring standard bearer of gravitas and cool finally earns his rightful place on Hollywood Blvd. The following week, he receives an equally deserved Lifetime Achievement Award at the Ojai-Ventura International Film Festival. He'll be there, answering your questions following a special screening of Airplane! -- the disaster spoof that opened him up to a new generation of fans, who to this day still pester him to, "Ask me if I've ever been to a Turkish prison!" Movieline talked to Graves about some of his classic early roles, his badge as geek totem to sci-fi B-movie fans everywhere, and his response to J.J. Abrams' invitation to return to the spy franchise from which he long ago parted ways. The incredible Mr. Graves, after the jump.
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As rags-to-riches stories go, Troy Duffy's is tough to beat: A former bouncer and bartender from Boston, he sold his violent vigilante crime-thriller script to Harvey Weinstein and Miramax in 1997. That script, The Boondock Saints, eventually was developed into one of the most wildly successful cult classics in a generation -- but not by Harvey, whose relationship with Duffy soured prodigiously in the months after their deal was made. The project landed in turnaround, which was really just the beginning of Duffy's tobacco-streaked, booze-fueled, angst-ridden, massively hubristic legend that finally willed The Boondock Saints to the screen in 1999. (That journey is chronicled in the documentary Overnight, a fascinating, cringe-inducing romp that Duffy understandably disavows.) The rest is home-video history -- or at least it is until Friday, when The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day arrives in theaters with the original cast, crew and Duffy in charge.
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Dan Byrd has spent the past decade maturing on camera, often playing an intuitive adolescent who has difficulty fitting in with his peers. While bouncing between his hometown of Marietta, GA. and Hollywood, Byrd has starred in the CW's Aliens in America, CBS's Clubhouse, as well as features A Cinderella Story and The Hills Have Eyes. Now firmly rooted in Los Angeles and co-starring in ABC's Cougar Town, Byrd showcases his comedic talents as the unfortunate son of the show's resident cougar (Courteney Cox).
We caught up with Dan Byrd yesterday to discuss the perks of being the youngest actor on set and the possibility of his own on-screen cougar dalliances. Really, isn't that what we're all after?
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You've got to hand it to Jared and Jerusha Hess, the Utah filmmaker couple (Jerusha writes, Jared writes and directs) who hit comedy paydirt with 2004's Napoleon Dynamite: Regardless of whether or not they're your thing, they could never be accused of pandering to the mainstream. And never has that been more apparent than in Gentlemen Broncos, their third film together, and first featuring Sam Rockwell as an interstellar cowboy whose testicles have been removed for nefarious, if not entirely illuminated, space-research purposes. We spoke recently to the disarmingly polite and normal-seeming duo -- seen posing here in front of one of Broncos' lethal Battle Stags -- about the warped childhoods that inspired their worlds of weird.
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When we sat down with him recently to get the skinny on his performance as an incontinent-albino-snake wrangler in Gentlemen Broncos, oddball auteur and all-around nice guy Mike White was good enough to submit himself to Movieline's favorite celebrity parlor game. What is White's favorite movie scene of all time? It's after the jump.
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Over the past five weeks, Paranormal Activity's besieged couple Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat have gone from being virtually anonymous actors in a micro-budgeted horror movie to the stars of the top-grossing film in the country. Having found its cast via writer-director Oren Peli's cryptic Craigslist notices, the terrifying film works as well as it does thanks to the strength of their devilishly convincing and completely improvised performances. We spoke to the pair on Friday afternoon, just as Activity's snowball effect was about to turn Featherston and Sloat into the biggest movie stars in America. [Warning: Spoilers follow.]
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The word "superproducer" doesn't quite suit Lawrence Bender, as Quentin Tarantino's cinematic wingman just doesn't possess the bluster and braggadocio of some of his higher-profile contemporaries. But with the staggering blockbuster success of Inglourious Basterds -- closing in on $300 million worldwide -- he might have to start getting used to hearing it. Movieline talked to Bender about how he delivered the great American auteur's decade's-end masterpiece on a breakneck schedule that would have annihilated lesser men.
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Sony yesterday screened 12 minutes of footage from Michael Jackson's This Is It, the late pop legend's accidental valedictory and probably the most hyped documentary ever made. While I'm forbidden from revealing anything about the footage until after the film's 18,000-screen bow next Wednesday, Movieline did catch up with the more loose-lipped filmmaker (and longtime Jackson concert director) Kenny Ortega as he met the press Thursday in New York. Ortega spilled the beans about a few key moments, how he found a story in 80 hours of raw rehearsal footage, Jackson's 24-hour work week and his goals for This Is It.
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