“I admire Marlon’s talent, but I don’t envy the pain that created it.” – Anthony Quinn While fully acknowledging his prodigious talent, the prevailing sentiment of the critical community seems to be that Marlon Brando was a remote, tortured man who squandered his prodigious talent for easy money. Some pundits sound downright miffed, as if […]
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provided me with my first experience of the film trade, and in retrospect it was an unusually benign baptism of fire. The director and I got along fine. I enjoyed an amiable relationship with the screenwriter, who as a former instructor in the black arts at a […]
One of the first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979. The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, “Eraserhead” (1977). […]
Bryan Singer, director Chris McQuarrie rang me up after he’d written about 50 pages of the script and said: “What if the villain pulls the whole story off a bulletin board?” And I replied: “Now that’s a reason to make the damned movie!” A lot of the inspiration for Keyser Söze, the villain, came from […]
Outside Bernardo Bertolucci’s apartment in Rome there is a large goods lift. Once it carried supplies and shopping from floor to floor but now the goods it carries are Bertolucci and one of his three wheelchairs. Ten years ago, Bertolucci had what he was told would be routine back surgery on a herniated disc. After […]
Mr. Pacino, how do you deal with weight of your own achievements? I don’t know. You don’t think of it that way. You don’t think of those parts as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because […]
There are two main images that instantly rise to mind when the words “Serbia” and “Cinema” appear together: the controversial “A Serbian Film” by Srdjan Spasojevic and the face of one of the most talented directors that Europe saw born in last decades, Emir Kusturica. For now, let’s just forget the blood and necrophilia of […]
For the past 15 years, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has been one of his country’s most prominent cultural ambassadors, so it’s hardly surprising when he gives his own national traits a touch of hard sell. Sitting in a London hotel lounge just before Christmas, he explains the emotional intensity that characterises his films: “When […]