Posts tagged Interviews
Gabby Sidibe Precious Interview
Jan 26th
Gabby Sidibe really hit me with her performance in Precious, it’s definitely one of the hardest hitting films I’ve seen in the last few years, if you want to see explosians, slapstick comedy and spaceships this film is not for you. Gabby plays Claireece “Precious” Jones a sixteen-year-old girl born into a life no one would want. She’s pregnant for the second time by her absent father; at home, she must wait hand and foot on her mother (Mo’Nique who also gives a sensational performance), a poisonously angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is a place of chaos, she’s doing well but she’s living with the secret that she can neither read nor write. Precious is offered the chance to transfer to an alternative school, Each One/Teach One. In the literacy workshop taught by the patient yet firm Ms. Rain (Paula Patton my crush of the month), Precious begins a journey that will lead her from darkness, pain and powerlessness to light, love and self-determination, it’s serious business and hands down one of the most powerful films I’ve seen.
You give terrific performance in Precious, but I understand you had no real aspirations to become actor. You thought it was a dream too far…
Gabby Sidibe: Yes. That makes a lot of sense, a dream too far. I had been told for most of my life that I would never be able to do something like this. Also I got a lot of cues from the media: when it comes to actresses and people the media cares about, you can probably count the girls that look like me on one hand. So I certainly didn’t think I could break any barriers and become an actress.
And even when you got the audition you weren’t convinced?
Gabby Sidibe: No. I wasn’t. I was withholding; on the fence. I thought it was a dumb idea to go in and do the audition because there was no way that I could be an actress. It had never been within my scope and I never auditioned for anything. I wasn’t an actress. I had no training. Nothing. I thought it made more sense that I to go to school. I was a receptionist for a company while I was studying psychology. But somehow or other it ended up with my going to the audition.
Who persuaded you?
Gabby Sidibe: It was partly my mother and also I have a friend, Henry, who is the assistant director in my local theatre. He called me when they were coming to cast and he thought of me, because they were looking for a very specific girl that I look like. After the audition I went straight to work and by the time I got out of the subway, which is literally an hour later, I had the call back.
I heard that you had an amusing phone call when trying to ring them for the call back…
Gabby Sidibe: Yeah, I was still in disbelief, I dialled the wrong number and I got some lawyer office and I was talking to this lawyer and who happened to have the same name as the guy I was meant to be calling. I was like, ‘Can I talk to Billy Hopkins?’ So they put me through to Billy, the lawyer! He was like, ‘What are you looking for?’ And I said, ‘I have just done this audition and I am doing the call back.’ He laughed, and said, ‘I hope they actually gave you the right number!’ I was pretty sure they did, because I was just one number off so he wished me luck. ‘I hope you get it.’ he said. So I called the right number and made an appointment to come in the next day. The callback was the next day and I was called within half an hour of leaving, saying Mr. Daniels wants to see you. He wanted to meet me that day but since I had already gone all the way back home — and I think the office at the time was five blocks away from where the call back was — so they said I made the appointment and went back in the next day and was talking to Lee for about forty five minutes to an hour. The whole time I am waiting to do the audition again because I was told I would have to audition for him, but it never happened. He just gave me the part.
Lee Daniels says that you told him things about the character that he had not considered. Do you remember what?
Gabby Sidibe: Being a fan of the book, anytime they wanted to do something a little different I would get up on a soapbox, saying, ‘No, you can’t do that because they didn’t do that in the book and we can’t change the book.’ I am anal and got very serious about the character. I have probably told him a lot of things just because there are so many layers to Precious and he just thought because she was big and dark skinned that she had to be a certain way. But in meeting me, I am big and I have dark skin but I am certainly better than what he thought of me. He thought I would be not so and certainly I changed his idea of who Precious is, based on the way I am.
What were you thinking during the audition?
Gabby Sidibe: It was the scene where Precious meets Ms Weiss for the first time, the social worker, and I was given about three minutes with it. I hadn’t seen the scene beforehand. For the most part if you have a manager and the manager submits you for the role then they will email you the sides to the audition so you can prepare the night before. But since this was an open casting call I just showed up, no appointment, no nothing. And they had sides available so I was given three minutes with it and I went in and I did it. I remember thinking that it was a complete waste of time. Billy Hopkins was in the room with his assistant director Jessica Kelly and I wasn’t nervous at all, because I was feeling pretty stupid for having cut class and I was wondering about what I was missing. That was pretty much all that was on my mind. I wasn’t nervous at all because I didn’t think I had it all; I thought that I had zero chance of actually getting the part.
There are many layers to character and some very harrowing scenes to film…
Gabby Sidibe: I tend to disappear when I am acting as Precious. I am blank, completely, I am just feeling every emotion as Precious would feel it and how she should feel it. I leave my body and I take on this character. It is such a weird thing to describe because at first you do a certain amount of takes for every scene, sometimes more than others and for each time it is all brand new information and it a real revelation. It never grows cold or dead to me.
Precious dreams about the red carpet in the movie. How are you finding it yourself?
Gabby Sidibe: Red carpets are more fun in the film. Photoshoots are more fun in life. That’s the way you split that. Red carpets. They don’t suck but they are actually more fun to film than to actually do. Photoshoots are really awesome because sometimes they give you the clothes you are wearing. They give you free shoes and stuff like that!
PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL “PUSH” BY SAPPHIRE is released in cinemas across the UK on 29th January 2010
Exclusive Joel Silver Interview For Ninja Assassin
Jan 18th
Check out my interview with Joel Silver below. Silver is one of the most successful movie producers of the last 3 decades, he’s produced the likes of Commando, Sherlock Holmes, V For Vendetta, the Matrix trilogy, the Lethal Weapon series and Predator. His latest film Ninja Assassins is in Cinemas Friday 22nd January.
Ninja Assassin follows Raizo (Rain), one of the deadliest assassins in the world. Taken from the streets as a child, he was transformed into a trained killer by the Ozunu Clan, a secret society whose very existence is considered a myth. But haunted by the merciless execution of his friend by the Clan, Raizo breaks free from them and vanishes. Now he waits, preparing to exact his revenge.
In Berlin, Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) has stumbled upon a money trail linking several political murders to an underground network of untraceable assassins from the Far East. Defying the orders of her superior, Ryan Maslow (Ben Miles), Mika digs into top secret agency files to learn the truth behind the murders. Her investigation makes her a target, and the Ozunu Clan sends a team of killers, led by the lethal Takeshi (Rick Yune), to silence her forever. Raizo saves Mika from her attackers, but he knows that the Clan will not rest until they are both eliminated. Now, entangled in a deadly game of cat and mouse through the streets of Europe, Raizo and Mika must trust one another if they hope to survive and finally bring down the elusive Ozunu Clan.
Jason Reitman Interview Part 2 Director Of Up In The Air
Jan 15th
Here’s part 2 of my interview with Jason Reitman director of Up In The Air, Juno and Thank You For Smoking. If you missed part 1 check it out here. Up In The Air is in cinemas now!
Over the 7 years you were working on this how did you have to change the screenplay after the financial problems of the last year or so?
Jason Reitman: When I started writing the screenplay 7 years ago the economy in America was obviously very different, we were basically at the end of a corporate boom. So I wanted to write a corporate satire about a man who fires people for a living. I wrote comedic scenes in which people lost their job, but by the time we started shooting the film it wasn’t funny any more, I couldn’t shoot these scenes as they were written. We did have to change things
How many of those people interviewed in the film were real people?
Jason Reitman: Well we were scouting St Louis and Detroit, with the idea of shooting real people, we put out an advert saying we’re shooting a documentary on job loss, we are looking for real people who would go on camera and talk about there experiences. We had an overwhelming response, we brought in a 100 people, 25 of those are in the film, so outside of the people you recognise like JK Simmons everyone else who loses there job in this movie is a real person. They came in and sat down with an interviewer for 10 minutes answered questions on what it’s like to lose your job in an economy where there is really nothing available, then after that we would fire them on camera and asked them to respond the way they did when they lost there job or if they prefer say what you wish you said. This would turn into improv scenes where they would pelt our interviewer with all sorts of questions that he did not know the answer too, about severance, why they lost there job instead of Jeff, it just went on and on, some people got emotional, some people were really funny, some people got angry, I’m so grateful for there participation in the film, I could never have written some of the things they said.
You’ve got a history of writing strong female characters do you think there is a shortage of them in Hollywood?
Jason Reitman: Yeah to be honest that’s why I think I write them, I like to write original films, many men’s story’s have been told but so many women’s stories haven’t. I’ve fallen in love with really smart women over my life, the most recent being and presumably the last last (laughs) my wife. I enjoy spending time with my wife. The best scene I’ve ever written, which I wrote half of, is a scene in this movie when Vera and Anna talk about what they look for in a man, at each of there ages. The only way I could have wrote that was by asking my wife to have a conversation with herself at 18 about what she looked for in a man, so everything they say is true to her, but it breaks her heart every time she sees it with an audience, because they basically laugh at her for 5 minutes. I enjoy writing for women and working with great actresses, I’ve made 3 movies now and through all of them I’ve been surrounded by great women actresses, I hope I can work with more as my career moves along.
You mentioned you started the script 7 years ago earlier, how did the time line work? You made Juno and Thank You For Smoking in that time.
Jason Reitman: The time line was that no one wanted to make Thank You For Smoking so I started to look for something else to write and direct. So I found this book and fell in love with it. I started writing it, then out of nowhere a millionaire, one of the creators of Paypal, who had sold Paypal to Ebay for $1.5 billion with his partners decided he wanted to make movies, he read my script, he got it from a friend and called my agent and said hey I’d love to make this movie, so he wrote a cheque for $6.5 million and we made Thank You For Smoking, all of a sudden I wasn’t writing Up In The Air any more, so I made Thank You For Smoking then went back to Up In The Air and Juno came in to my life, which was this irresistible screenplay that I knew if I didn’t make I’d regret it the rest of my life. Then I basically finished the screenplay after Juno. 5 years later after never going back over what I had been writing, as I read from start to finish I watched myself grow up, in that time I had become a professional director, I bought a house, I got married, I became a father and I watched myself in the first act be a cynical guy in his twenties who really is just a satirist but over the 6 years I became a bit more sophisticated as a writer and understood more what was more important in my own life, that really changed Ryan’s journey
Jacques Audiard Interview – Director Of A Prophet
Jan 15th
I’ve made it no secret how much I loved A Prophet. It is hands down one of my favourite films of the last few years. The film fully deserves all the praise it’s been getting. Check out a Q & A with the acclaimed Director of A Prophet Jacques Audiard. A Prophet is released in cinemas January 22nd go check it out, it’s worth it!
At the Cannes press conference you spoke a little about the irony in the title of A PROPHET.
Because this dimension is real but apparently it isn’t evident. The film could be called LITTLE BIG MAN for example. The title acts as a sort of injunction, obliging someone to understand something which isn’t necessarily developed in the film, namely, that we’re dealing with a little prophet, a new prototype of guy. Originally I wanted to find a French equivalent of “You Gotta Serve Somebody” a Bob Dylan song that says that we are always in the service of someone. I liked the fatalism and the moral dimension of this title but I simply never found a satisfying translation, so it stayed A PROPHET.
How did you come to tell the story?
What interested both myself and my co-writer Thomas Bidegain was to ask how we could begin with the subject by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit and create a pertinent cinematic story. We had to find a manner to make A Prophet resonate in a contemporary way. We wanted to create heroes from people that we didn’t know, that didn’t already have an iconic representation in cinema, like the Arabs for example. In France the tendency in cinema is to put them in representations that are naturalistic or sociological. So we wanted to do a pure genre film, a little in the manner of a western that spotlights people we don’t know and transforms them into heroes.
Through the character of Malik, the film conveys the idea that the knowledge and know how give access to power.
Yes, and it’s this that I find the most interesting. This type of person breaks the mould, he’s not your usual hooligan. Following Malik, we see his mind at work, a mind that shows phenomenal adaptability, that this character will use for any opportunistic possibility, at first to save his skin, then to survive and improve his lot, and finally to reach another level of power.
Malik seems to have a detached and opportunist rapport with his identity.
The Corsicans consider him an Arab and the Arabs as a Corsican. He is permanently between the two camps. However he will naturally lean towards his community. It’s here that he will discover something he has been ignoring. The same as he’s a particular kind of hooligan he’s also a particular kind of believer.
Can you talk to us about the ghost that accompanies Malik and that inspires his mystical visions?
The film does have fantastical moments but it’s not because of an intention to be mystical. Reyeb’s ghost comes from the scriptwriters as a way of helping us into the possibilities, a way of to passing into a level of imagination that helps us free what has already been told. It’s also thanks to him that we also invoke the ideas of Sufism and the Dervishes and allows the screenplay to take on another dimension.
There is a trend in current cinema for darker, more damaged heroes. In A Prophet you take someone who is damaged yet lead them toward a kind of redemption.
And with tools that wouldn’t be recommendable. There is always a default way of making anti-heroes. This doesn’t interest me so much. Me, I like my heroes to learn something, to put it to use. I find that Cinema has that function: it looks at the real to teach us how to use it. Perhaps the lesson which strikes Malik is paradoxical, but it’s this which interests me.
In any case it says that you have to learn…
To learn, to be attentive, to not open one’s mouth all the time, to be reserved and most of all to not make the same mistake twice because the third time you’ll be dead.
Is A Prophet, according to you, a moral film ?
Yes, what would have been immoral would have been to create a character without conscience. However he is conscious of both good and evil precisely because evil has been done to him.
How do you explain Malikʼs mysterious smile at the moment of the shooting?
Malik suddenly has the feeling of being in a film and has the feeling of invulnerability, like a fictional character whereas the others are reaching a stalemate in the events which are unfolding. Malik is a person who, instead of getting heavier under the weight of things he lives through, he gets lighter, and will free himself, little by little.
Is the prison a metaphor ?
Evidently, genre films always present themselves as metaphor. The character was incarcerated for a long sentence. The intention was that he would understand within himself that which would serve him later, on the outside, therefore arriving at a parallel between the two universes.
The ending of the film suggests there could be a sequel.
Indeed. It does induce us to question Malik’s destiny with this woman, this child and his life stretched out before him. Especially since Malik is a hooligan that hates hooligans, finding them unreliable, stupid and dangerous. He is someone with a very critical viewpoint. He wouldn’t tolerate bling or outward signs of hooliganism.
If there was a sequel, what would it be about ?
I would like to see Malik continue to develop his skills and watch him learn. A little like in The Beat That My Heart Skipped. That through trying to become a concert pianist the hero becomes really competent. He’s like Malik, we leave everything just formed and we sense that he has an interesting future…
Were you conscious while making A Prophet that you were making a film that was anchored in popular culture?
This is what I wanted to do. For as much, we wanted to make an anti SCARFACE. For me neurotics are pure cretins and simply cant be objects for identification. The rise to power of an absolute crazy person doest interest me at all. On the other hand a film like LA HAINE by Matthieu Kassovitz touches on something that I’m sensitive to. It’s no co-incidence that A Prophet occasionally inhabits the same terrain. These two films a looking to denounce that there is something missing in cinema.
John Hillcoat Interview, Director Of The Road
Jan 8th
I caught up with the director of The Road (my favourite film of the year), while he was in London for the London Film Festival a few months ago, check out the results below. If you missed out on my Viggo Mortensen interview, check it out here. The Road is in cinemas now
The look of this film is very different to The Proposition, yet while I was watching it I was struck by some of the similarity’s, what drew you to the material?
John Hillcoat: Yeah they’re polar opposites but they’re both extreme worlds, I have always been interested in extreme environments and the way they impact on people. The performers in our amazing cast reacted off the environment in that it helped to add a reality. As Kodi (The Boy) said, it’s easier to be a bit cold, than to act a bit cold on top of all the emotional stuff, also for the crew I think it helps everyone. Working in a green screen studio is a much harder leap.
The addition of extended scenes with the mother worked out well for me, I was sceptical hearing about that at first. In the book she’s not featured heavily at all.
John Hillcoat: I think the haunted loss for the man and having to hide that from the boy in his way of protecting raises the stakes, I thought it was an incredibly tricky thing to manoeuvre for Viggo to have that loss without talking about it with his son, on occasions they bring it up but he has to carry that all the way through and build on that, to remind us how precious those things where.
How did you approach some of the more harrowing scenes with Kodi (The Boy)
John Hillcoat: That was my single greatest fear, I loved the material, when I read the book it floored me, but then I thought how the hell are we gonna find this kid and how are we gonna protect this kid, I was thinking of shooting it in a way the kid would not actually see half of the stuff we were shooting, I started from a very protective point of view. Viggo and I discussed it at length about how we are gonna work with this situation. But what happened is that Kodi comes from a very special family, a very close knit family, half of them are actors including his father and it was quite late in the day, friends had mentioned I’ve got to check out this kid in Australia. They sent this audition piece, that I never even asked them to do, I actually asked all the kids to do something quite neutral, they included scenes where Kodi’s father was playing the father for real and teaching him about putting a gun in his mouth, that was his message to me, to say my kid can handle this, or they were completely insane (laughs).
I had to check him out, by the time we had got it down to 4 kids, the critical thing was the relationship, so Viggo came in and worked with each individual kid at that point and Kodi had already read the entire book, so my strategy went out the window because this kid was incredibly grounded and mature beyond his years. It was that kind of maturity that he was still a kid, yet he had this instinctual understanding of what story telling is.
What were thought on how the story ends?
John Hillcoat: Cormac’s amazing at being unflinching with how we can slip into our base nature, I think the whole world is just a backdrop, it’s the projection of our fears, it’s every parents worst fear and every humans worst, I think the point at the end, is that as you see the story progress, even though the boy is born into this world and the man is trying to protect him, but by this way of protecting him he’s closing down through fear other possibility’s. I think it’s as simple as that, there are other people in that predicament but they can’t connect, in the end the boy basically stands up to the man and opens up the new possibility’s and takes a leap of faith and in doing that his instincts are correct, it’s the one thing we have to cherish and not get blinded by fear.
Cormac said the book is about human goodness, Blood Meridian was about human evil. The whole point is that we have to face our own mortality and there’s a whole nother generation coming along, I think the whole setting of the apocalypse was purely a metaphor to highlight that, a moment of hope, the greater the darkness, the more special that is.
Sherlock Holmes Interview Part 2 (Guy Ritchie, Jude Law & Robert Downey Jnr)
Dec 28th
I’ve had a very lazy Christmas break, I was meant to put this up on Boxing in time for the UK release date, but I was too busy chillaxing and lazing about for once! If you missed part 1 of the interview you can check it out here. It’s good to hear the film is doing so well in the states, it made $65 million over the weekend (big chee$e) and is being recieved very well critically.
What was your devotion to martial arts like, according to the production notes you’ve been doing it for 6 years and also how did you prepare for the bare knuckle boxing scene?
Robert Downey Jnr: There was a choreographed version of it, I went in and got all pissed about it, Guy came in and we worked on it, so I think your seeing probably version 6.0 by the time we shot it, Guy is a jiu jitsu fella we managed to get along some how!
It was so fun though, by the time we had finished shooting that scene I felt like we really had a handle on the movie and not because I took my top off and showed my rippling abs and self important garbage but because this was Guys idea and it was really a bold thing and it could have gone really poorly, in which case the rest of the movie is trying to recover from the bad Guy Ritchie scene we went out and shot but it was literally perfect, it set the tone, it was really his take. We had to trust each other and get each others approval. I’m crazy about fighting, I love it (laughs)
Why do you love filming in Britain and Jude what’s it like filming in your hometown?
Robert Downey Jnr: I was here 20 years ago and the food SUCKED, and I wasn’t particularly happy when I was here, I was doing a film called Air America, I renamed it Air Generica and we were at Pinewood Studios, then I came back and did Chaplin but I think there is something about the work ethic here, the people, the culture, as Americans we sometimes have an abrupt attitude, there’s a much more civilized way to operate over here. For me the film was a huge experience, it was the proper way to do things and I’ve taken everything forth.
Jude Law: The production designer done an amazing job, we’d turn up everyday amazed, they had been preparing for days, there was so much detail, it was exquisite, it’s always fun to be out and about and film, rather than in a studio, I like getting my boots dirty, it was fun, it’s always fun working in the UK.
Guy are we gonna lose you to Hollywood or are you gonna still make the smaller Independent films?
Guy Ritchie: I don’t know, I really just make the films I want to make, the interesting thing about this experience was that it wasn’t the cliché experience between film-maker and studio, I argued for the studio, I wanted to make an assessable, broad film and they wanted the Guy Ritchie’isms so I was arguing for the studio and they were arguing for me, it was like two people going to the bar and both insisting the other should pay, so all the arguments between the studio and myself were coming from a positive place. I think studios have changed as well with there approach to film-makers, I had a tremendous experience from beginning to end, there was no us and them.
Why Sherlock Holmes out of all the iconic characters?
Guy Ritchie: Partly because I was invested in him as a child, I had a really strong visual sense about who I thought Sherlock Holmes should be, not only that but I had not seen any other productions, unlike most people I had no visual reference other than what I had knocked up in my mind. Warners came up to me with the idea and as soon as they mentioned it, I was fascinated.
What were the re-shoots about, there was a lot of talk about that earlier this year?
Guy Ritchie: In every film I’ve ever done we always leave a contingency for a week because you never know what’s gonna surface during the editing process, so we always leave a week and we left a week. The films the film we all intended to make. On the DVD there are no deleted scenes, there was no fat.