MCN Columnists
Other Voices

Voices By Other Voicesvoices@moviecitynews.com

Only Nic Forgives: Gilchrist Talks Style And The Future With Refn

We sat down with Refn at the recent Los Angeles press day for Only God Forgives to get a snapshot of the budding auteur’s creative process. In addition to talking about his ongoing collaboration with fellow on-the-riser Ryan Gosling, he reveals the intuitive process by which he combines personal experiences, psychological themes and conventional stories to create something entirely unique—and often provocative—but always interesting.

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An interview with WHAT MAISIE KNEW’s Scott McGehee and David Siegel

In her first feature role, Onata Aprile gives a performance of such grace, confidence, and naturalism that she calls to mind other great child actors’ movie debuts, including those of Hayley Mills in J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay and Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon. You’d have to have a heart of obsidian not to fall for this little girl in a big, big way.

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The Gronvall Report: Down Under On Their Way Up With THE SAPPHIRES’ Blair And Mauboy

“When it came time to audition for Aussie Idol at first I didn’t want to do it. But I was really lucky that I had supportive parents and enough confidence to go ahead. I was 16 at the time. Idol has a process: you have to choose from the list of songs the show gives you to perform. I only made it to runner-up, but that opened doors to a record contract.”

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The Gronvall Files: JENNIFER WESTFELDT ON FRIENDS WITH KIDS

What’s a gifted actress to do when Hollywood continues to bypass projects featuring strong roles for women, in favor of cookie-cutter productions kowtowing to that coveted 18-35 male demographic? In the case of Jennifer Westfeldt, you fight back, writing and producing indie vehicles to star in.

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The Gronvall Files: PAUL WEITZ ON BEING FLYNN

“Something that I sometimes worry is a flaw in myself is that I can’t really extricate some sense of humor from a sense of tragedy. Anton Chekhov would write at the front of his plays “a comedy in four acts,” and then Stanislavski would direct them as flat-out tragedies, and Chekhov would be furious that he’s not getting laughs.”

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The Gronvall Files: Asghar Farhadi, writer/director of A Separation

Asghar Farhadi: When I have an image in mind, this image makes me keep returning to my past. I go into my memories, and I start selecting here and there, putting them together. Simultaneously with this process of assembling memories, the characters are being born. And at the same time, the story also starts developing. It’s very difficult for me to describe my process. I’m not really aware of what’s going on, really, as I’m thinking. Many things happen in an unconscious way.

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The Gronvall Files: Tops in His Division: An Interview with Win Win Director Tom McCarthy

By Andrea Gronvall Who says you can’t go home again? Actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy, inspired by his memories as a high school wrestler in his hometown of New Providence, New Jersey, collaborated with his close friend and former wrestling teammate Joe Tiboni, a lawyer and first-time screenwriter, to create the funny and heartwarming new indie feature…

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The Gronvall Files: Richard Press and Philip Gefter: Partners Behind Documentary Bill Cunningham New York

By Andrea Gronvall As a breed, film critics are generally sartorially challenged, but I’ll freely admit to enjoying Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the style coverage in The New York Times–particularly the “On the Street” column that’s photographed, written, and composed by the paper’s long-time fashion chronicler Bill Cunningham. A colorful collage revealing trends Cunningham spots…

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“The Film That Changed My Life”: Richard Kelly On Brazil

Robert K. Elder’s latest book, “The Film that Changed My Life,” came together as he met filmmakers as part of his regular writing assignments, and then got them to expand on one film that changed their lives, and what form that “change” took. Among the thirty equally appealing conversations, Kevin Smith talks Slacker; Danny Boyle,…

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The Gronvall Files: Good Company: A Conversation with The Company Men Director John Wells

As this year’s Sundance Film Festival unfolds, one of the films that made a splash there a year ago, The Company Men, John Wells’s feature directorial debut, is gathering steam in its commercial rollout. The acclaimed writer-producer behind TV hits like ER and The West Wing, as well as Southland (which found a new home…

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A Conversation with Tamara Drewe Director Stephen Frears

Interview by Andrea Gronvall – We shot it late in the year–in September, not in mid-summer. By September the sun was starting to get low in the sky, so that’s when it looks especially beautiful. And this [the story] had to cover all of the seasons, so you wanted a time of the year that gave you the most possibilities.

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The Gronvall Files:Going the Distance from Fact to Fiction with Director Nanette Burstein

Change is good, although it’s not always easy to reinvent oneself. But New York filmmaker Nanette Burstein, a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee for On the Ropes (which she co-directed with Brett Morgen), doesn’t miss a step in her transition from nonfiction film to narrative features.

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The Gronvall Files, An Interview with Lisa Cholodenko, Director of The Kids Are All Right

Family Matters : An Interview with Lisa Cholodenko, Director of The Kids Are All Right We may only be halfway through the year, but one thing you can bet on: come the end of December, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right will score among many 2010 Top Ten lists. The director made a huge…

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Interview with Juan Jose Campanella: The Eyes Have It

This year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film went to an Argentine romantic crime thriller that few people beyond Academy voters and film festival goers were lucky enough to have seen: The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de sus ojos), directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a filmmaker who calls both New York and Argentina home….

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DVD Review: The Mindscape of Alan Moore

One of the biggest creative talents behind Zack Snyder’s new movie Watchmen is absent from the credits: Alan Moore, the author of the original graphic novel on which the film is (by early accounts, faithfully) based. Moore, who also penned V for Vendetta, From Hell andThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,is the visionary often credited with changing the face of…

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Part Ten: 46… 47… 48… -30-

August 2, 1982 Redoing Nick’s side of the conversation on the phone to Elaine. Walter’s lack of interest in certain kinds of inferiority, leads him to have characters repeat themselves.  Of course in the correctly woven fabric repetition can be sublime. Walter friendlier again today. When he lets an actor buddy come on for an…

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Part Nine: Real Men Love Smoke

July 17, 1982 Today, we’re seeing strung together footage of almost what should play as at least half an hour of the movie.  Probably more. The big problem is when does the movie begin…what should Annette’s role be… Some scenes that I classified as “mine” especially scenes between Annette and Nick are gone. (Gross Notes:…

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Part Eight: Lesbians, Lindsay & Leather

July 7, 1982 It’s the costumer Dan Moore’s birthday party thrown by the crew.  He’s a smart, thoroughly Irish guy, so I buy him some Irish whiskey. He got  a graduate degree in literature and did his thesis on Joyce!  The people who stumble into the movie business!  Also I keep pressing him if one day…

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Part Seven: Hotshots

June 25, 1982 L.A. “I stay awaked baffled by the problem of Ric Waite’s car”…this is a comic monologue byJoel Silver… “I keep turning it over in my mind.  The day he didn’t brings his car to location.  In Modesto.  In Modesto.  It was five weeks ago but it perplexes me to this day.  Sometimes I…

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Voices

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon