Posts tagged Interviews
In-Depth Interview With Darren Aronofsky For ‘Black Swan’ – Starring Natalie Portman
Jan 17th
With the release of Black Swan in UK cinemas this Friday, and Natalie Portman securing the best actress award for her role as Nina at last night’s Golden Globes, what better time to unveil this interview with Darren Aronofsky. I’m pretty sure I’ve gushed over this film enough by now. All you need to know is that it’s engrossing, beautifully twisted and wholly fantabulous! Aronofsky’s been the man behind some of my favourite films of the last twelve years in The Wrestler, The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream and Pi. Check out what he had to say about the film below. Natalie Portman interview coming up in the next few days.
When did you first embark on Black Swan? Where did the idea come from?
Darren Aronofsky: My sister was a dancer growing up and she was very into ballet. It wasn’t really anything that I understood. But as I got older, I was thinking about worlds to set films in and I thought ballet could be an interesting world to explore. In addition, I was very interested in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Double’, which is a story about a guy who wakes up and his double is there, and the double starts to replace his life. Then I went to see a production of Swan Lake, which I thought was just a bunch of girls in tutus. I didn’t know what it was. But when I saw that there was a Black Swan and a White Swan, played by one dancer, and it was kind of a Eureka moment, it was like ‘oh wow, a double…’ So then it started to come together…
How long ago?
Darren Aronofsky: I met with Natalie eight or nine years ago. We met in Times Square and had a coffee and I had this idea for something set in the ballet world. It was slowly evolving over the years and it finally came together after The Wrestler. I was working on it with Mark (Heyman, screenwriter) and it was a very hard script to finish because understanding the ballet world was really complicated.
Was your sister hoping to become a professional dancer?
Darren Aronofsky: Well Patti got pretty far and she went to a professional ballet school, all the way through high school. And then once she got out of high school, she stopped. She realised that it wasn’t for her and now she does other stuff.
Did you have complete artistic freedom doing this film?
Darren Aronofsky: Fox Searchlight is very collaborative. They’ll argue with you but they basically trust their directors in general, or at least with me they did and they were very generous. The artistic freedom was controlled by the limitation of money and time.
Chris Hemsworth Talks About Portraying Thor
Jan 13th
In a recent chinwag with SFX Magazine Chris Hemsworth shed some light on his portrayel of Thor. Hemsworth talked about bulking up and creating a fighting style and physical disposition for his depiction of the mighty avenger:
“I had to put on about 20 pounds for the film. and I’ve lost most of that since I stopped shooting. It was such an effort to keep it on. Then, yeah, we did a lot of stunt training about how [Thor] moved and him as a character, and the more you work out physically how he moves helps with your dialogue scenes and vice versa, so it’s an ongoing process. Thor’s movement is closely linked to Mjolnir, his legendary war hammer. He spins it and throws it and it flies and comes back. Working out how to use that as a weapon practically and its advantages and disadvantages, and then developing the style of how he fights and the body positions that he has in the comic books and trying to use some of them. It was great!”
Rapunzel & Flynn Rider Character Interviews For Disney’s ‘Tangled’ – In UK Cinemas January 28th
Jan 11th
In time for the UK release of their thoroughly entertaining animated flick ‘Tangled’, the good folks over at Disney have sent me these two delightful character Q&A’s for the two leads in the film – Flynn Rider and Rapunzel. Tangled is out in UK cinemas January 28th, 2011. Have a butchers below!
FLYNN RIDER is his own biggest fan, and he has long relied on his wit, charm and good looks to get out of even the stickiest situation—and his life just happens to be full of sticky situations. Flynn is a thief looking for the one last, big score that will allow him to finally live the life he’s always dreamed of. He’s never been closer to having it all when he meets Rapunzel, an odd girl with ridiculously long hair. Rapunzel seems to be the only girl in the world immune to Flynn’s moves, and for the first time ever he seems to have met his match.
Rider is currently in an unlikely alliance-slash-epic journey with the girl from the tower. An adventure of a lifetime, it may just help him realize that sometimes you don’t know what you want… until it hits you over the head—literally.
You’ve been described as a “charming” bandit. Are you?
Flynn Rider: Am I charming? [SMILES] Well, you be the judge. [SMILES AGAIN, THIS TIME WITH MEANING] Scratch that. I don’t need another judge—plen-ty of those to contend with already, thank you very much. So… I’m sorry—you want to know if I’m charming. Well, it’s like this. I’m a good guy at heart, you know? I may have borrowed a thing or two from people who have a thousand things or two… thousand. But I mean no harm, really. And if a warm smile or a kind word to them or those they hire to hunt me down makes their day a bit brighter—then so be it: I’m charming.
Aron Ralston Interview – The Man Who’s Story ’127 Hours’ Is Based On
Jan 7th
127 Hours is the affecting and triumphant true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston’s remarkable adventure to save himself after a falling boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah. The movie is about as riveting and gut-wrenching as you could imagine. I haven’t seen a movie in a long time that has captured the strength, love and will of the human condition as triumphantly as 127 Hours has. Check out what the man behind the story had to say about the film and his life below. You can also check out my first interview with Ralston here.
We’re aware of this exception life-changing event in your life, first from the news stories, then from the book and now from Danny Boyle’s very vivid film. But could you give us some background on your life immediately before April 2003?
Aron Ralston: I was born in the Midwest, not in a place where outdoor sports were really a part of a day-to-day lifestyle, and when my family moved to Colorado, I started compensating for having been pushed out by a lot of my peers. I’d gone through school a lot younger than a lot of my classmates and I was smaller, too, and so I was bullied and ostracised quite frequently. I’d built up a whole lifetime of insecurities and I was seeking some sort of self-esteem. First I found it academically and then through working for Intel as an engineer. And that was kind of fulfilling superficially but not at my core, it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. And so I found myself living out West and identifying with these extreme sports and life or death encounters in the outdoors that was so worth it that I decided to quit my job. I basically retired from engineering at 25 years old – not that I retired wealthy! But I took my leave from that to follow my dreams.
And honestly, by the time I got trapped, I looked back on my life, and if there was one accomplishment that I was truly proud of, it was almost this anti-accomplishment of having quit my job, to live, to truly live for that year, between the time that I had left Intel and when I became trapped, when I thought it was going to die there. I walked into that canyon full of this zest for life, just feeling like this was my purpose, to enjoy myself, and yet (laughs) also I think with a good deal of the arrogance and cockiness and overall arrogance that you see James portraying in the film – a guy who is very quickly humbled by nature in this very shocking incident.
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James Franco, Danny Boyle & Aron Ralston Interview For 127 Hours – Out In UK Cinemas Today!
Jan 5th
In time for the UK release of Danny Boyle’s ‘127 Hours’ today (January 5th), I’ve posted a mishmash of interviews I’ve conducted with the three major players in the film below. You can check out my full interview with Danny Boyle here, James Franco here, and Aron Ralston – who’s real life story 127 Hours is based on – here. The film is about as riveting and gut-wrenching as you could imagine. I haven’t seen a movie in a long time that has captured the strength, love and will of the human condition as triumphantly as 127 Hours has.
Were you surprised by how fast the film is? It’s about a man trapped by a boulder in a canyon and the audience might expect a very confined experience. And yet it’s not that at all.
James Franco: Danny is so good at incorporating all the elements that make a great film. Once he’s edited and the music is in there and everything, he delivers a full experience. But, I think another reason the movie feels so intense is not necessarily because of this amputation scene that a lot of people are focusing on, it’s because of the overall effect of the movie – the way that it’s shot. And I thought about this before we did it and it’s a story told primarily through physical actions and all these little victories and failures and if done right it brings an audience close to a character. He’s not telling you how he’s feeling, he’s showing you, he’s doing it and so the audience really gets on board with the character. And when the character does speak, it’s a very unconventional device where he’s talking directly to his video camera. And that gives the character a justification to talk directly to the audience. Yes, he’s talking to his family and friends but he’s looking right into the lens as if he’s talking right to the audience. So it creates a very intense experience. The first time I watched the film with an audience I felt it was like something I’d never experienced before, watching a movie, in a movie I was in with an audience, where I felt like something really intimate with them, because the camera is so close and the nature of the material and everything. I had to do a Q and A after and for a minute I felt like,’ oh I’m not even going to be able to speak’ it was that weird.
Colin Farrell Interview For Peter Weir’s ‘The Way Back’
Dec 27th
‘The Way Back’ is Peter Weir’s awe-inspiring epic inspired by the true events of a group of escaped prisoners from a Siberian gulag in 1940. The film is based on several sources, most notably the Slavomir Rawicz book ‘The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom’. The book is Rawicz’s account of being captured by the Red Army in 1939 and his journey to freedom with other inmates, who crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas, before finally settling in Tibet and India. The film features a fantastic cast in Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Mark Strong and Saoirse Ronan. Check out what Colin Farrell had to say about the film below.
I read that you didn’t see Valka as the character you necessarily wanted to play. Was it easy to research where this guy came from?
Colin Farrell: From reading the script I saw Valka as a big stretch. It was something that was incredibly disparate to anything I’d approached before. I had no relationship to that time in history, or that country, so I knew it’d be a journey of discovery, and that’s exactly what it proved to be.
To be honest Valka was one of my least favourite characters to play. I felt very sad, he’s a very lonely fella, but he’s also somebody who’s at once a victim of and a huge proponent of the system which formed him. I found that really, really interesting.
The tattoos Valka sports in the film are a big part of his character…
Colin Farrell: There’s an incredible, incredible significance to every single drop of ink that appears on any of these men’s bodies, much more so than the couple of drunk markings I have on my body (laughs). But each single tattoo referenced either a crime committed or an amount of time done. Again, it was just something that was very foreign to me, that was very exotic, as was the accent and the language.