The interview everyone’s talked about all this past week is Frank Rich‘s with Chris Rock for New York. Thing is, all week long, Rock just kept right on going, writing a piece for the Hollywood Reporter (“It’s a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is…. I go to the movies almost every week, and I can go a month and not see a black woman having an actual speaking part in a movie. That’s the truth.”), talking to Rembert Browne at Grantland (“No one tells Brad Pitt to ‘Stay white.’ ‘Ben Affleck, stay white.'”) and with Brian Hiatt for Rolling Stone (“I’d rather work with Wes Anderson, but I don’t look like Owen Wilson. I’d love to work with Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater. But they don’t really do those movies with black people that much. So you gotta make your own.”) And all this follows Kelefa Sanneh‘s profile in the New Yorker.
“I don’t even try to teach cinema. What I do every day is tell the young people at Sarajevo Film Academy to be themselves and do what they feel and believe is right.” That’s Béla Tarr, talking to Michael Guarneri in BOMB. And “to find out more about Tarr’s teaching methods, [Guarneri] also contacted two of his close friends and collaborators: cinematographer—and a great filmmaker in his own right—Fred Kelemen, and composer/actor Mihály Víg, who were kind enough to help me sketch a profile of the auteur.”
“On the 75th anniversary of Gone with the Wind’s December premiere at the Loew’s Grand Theatre in Atlanta, when more than 300,000 people lined the streets for a glimpse at its stars,” John Meroney talks with Olivia de Havilland, who turned 98 this summer, for Garden & Gun. Via Farran Smith Nehme.
“You have always said numbers don’t matter, but how does it feel to have completed your 102nd film?” Lee Hyo-won asks Im Kwon-taek in the Hollywood Reporter: “Having made over 100 films doesn’t necessarily make you a better filmmaker. In fact, because you’ve done so many, you’re faced with the dilemma, “What do I do next?” Every time I finish a project, I always feel as if I’ve barely made the cut, like I’ve barely done a pull-up on the monkey bar. I feel breathless.”
Another variation on the theme from John Boorman, talking to Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa: “I’m 81 years old, and so it’s very difficult, physically speaking, to get going again on a new project. But perhaps I will direct one more film in the not-too-distant future.”
With Miss Julie in limited release this weekend (at the Talkhouse Film, Sophia Takal says she’s “struggled to figure out a way to connect to the film”), Liv Ullmann (75) has been making the rounds, talking about working with Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton on her Strindberg adaptation: Diana Drumm (Slant), Emma Myers (Indiewire) and Jose Solís (Film Experience).
The other day, we posted Jonathan Marlow‘s chat with Robert Downey Sr. (a 78-year-old prince), currently being feted all weekend long at Cinefamily in Los Angeles. At Twitch, Zach Gayne talks with him as well.
That whippersnapper Tilda Swinton is GQ’s “Woman of the Year” and Zach Baron is stricken.
“You know you’ve made it when the director of The Exorcist declares your first feature the most terrifying film he’s ever seen,” writes Laura Parker for New York. “Earlier this week, Oscar winner William Friedkin offered to host a screening of Australian horror film The Babadook after observing the film’s limited U.S. release.” And she talks with director Jennifer Kent.
“For a filmmaker who gives such consideration to the inner workings of the mind, it will occasionally happen to Erik Skjoldbjærg that something slips his,” writes Stephen Saito, introducing his interview with the director of the original Insomnia (1997). “In the case of his latest film Pioneer, an engrossing thriller about Norway’s deep sea divers of the 1980s who uncovered the oil that led to the nation’s prosperity to the present day, that something happened to be the fact he’s afraid of water and he’d be spending a good deal of the shoot submerged in it.”
Saito also talks with Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman about their documentary Remote Area Medical, which is currently riding high at Critics Round Up with a score of 90.
Listening (89’23”). Adam Schartoff‘s latest guests on Filmwax Radio are Liv Ullmann, Chuck Workman (Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles) and Göran Hugo Olsson (Concerning Violence).
More listening (28’52”). In the latest episode of DVD Is the New Vinyl, Aaron Hillis talks with Mark Duplass, Melanie Lynskey and Joanna Hogg.
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