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Telluride Film Festival Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog first attended the Telluride Film Festival at its second annual way back in 1975. He brought with him “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” which would not be released in the US for another two years, and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.” He was also set to receive a [...]
Entries filed in: 'Interviews'
INTERVIEW: ‘Into the Abyss’ director Werner Herzog
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:22 am · September 6th, 2011
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INTERVIEW: ‘The Descendants’ actress Shailene Woodley
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 2:10 pm · September 5th, 2011
Telluride Film Festival If anything or anyone is a break-out, on-the-rise element of this year’s Telluride Film Festival, it’s 19-year-old “The Descendants” star Shailene Woodley. She stars in the film opposite George Clooney as a teenager with the appropriate angst but gives a performance that has captured the attention of many in attendance here. Naturally, [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘Albert Nobbs’ producer, screenwriter and actress Glenn Close
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:15 am · September 3rd, 2011
Telluride Film Festival Actress Glenn Close has known the title character of “Albert Nobbs” for nearly 30 years. Ever since she was first asked to audition for the play “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs” in 1982, which brought her to George Moore’s short story about a woman living as a male waiter in male-dominated [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘Contagion’ screenwriter Scott Z. Burns
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 9:08 am · August 31st, 2011
There’s a scene in 2009′s “The Informant!,” Steven Soderbergh’s tongue-in-cheek look at corporate malfeasance written by Scott Z. Burns, when Matt Damon’s pathological liar Mark Whitacre rants internally about the spread of a virus, spurred by a sneeze from co-star Scott Bakula. By the time the film was complete, Soderbergh had built a solid working [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘A Better Life’ director Chris Weitz
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:11 pm · June 15th, 2011
Filmmaker Chris Weitz has taken a ride on a rather inconsistent career path since making a splash (along with brother Paul) with 1999′s “American Pie.” He followed that raunchy comedy with the critically mauled Chris Rock starrer “Down to Earth” before bouncing back with the beloved intimate romantic comedy “About a Boy.” He then fled [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘The Double Hour’ director Giuseppe Capotondi
Posted by Guy Lodge · 3:33 pm · May 3rd, 2011
With this year’s Cannes circus just a week away, now is as good a time as any to point out the strangely hobbled journey taken by so many festival films to our cinema screens. For all the concentrated media attention and occasional trophies lavished upon arthouse titles at Cannes, Sundance and the like, the festival [...]
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Interviews with the winners
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 1:11 pm · February 28th, 2011
You can check out the 37 interviews we conducted with Oscar nominees this season here, but I thought I’d offer up one more list here at the end of things, the 12 interviews we conducted with those who were lucky enough to walk out of the Kodak with an Oscar in hand last night. The [...]
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Interviews with the nominees
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 8:56 am · February 26th, 2011
I thought I’d bring this around one more time this weekend. We talked to 37 of this year’s Oscar nominees this season. A few more have been added since we first posted this last month: Ethan Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, “True Grit”) Joel Coen (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, [...]
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INTERVIEW: Talking westerns and only westerns with ‘True Grit’ actor Jeff Bridges
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 1:26 pm · February 24th, 2011
Last year was the best opportunity to do the career retrospective thing with Jeff Bridges, right at the starting gun of an Oscar-winning steamroll through the film awards season. This time around, the actor is nominated for his sixth Academy Award, for his work in the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and it seemed a conversation [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: ‘Toy Story 3’ composer and songwriter Randy Newman
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 11:29 am · February 17th, 2011
When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, composer Alan Menken almost tied Randy Newman for third-most nominations among living artists. But Newman inched away, nabbing his own nomination for the song “We Belong Together” (listen) from “Toy Story 3” and thereby maintaining a firm grip on the designation. It was Newman’s 20th nomination to [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘The Fighter’ actress Amy Adams
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 2:30 pm · February 16th, 2011
Amy Adams. You know the girl. Sweet, bright-eyed, purveyor of naive, fresh-faced screen creations. You certainly wouldn’t peg her as an expected fit for Charlene Fleming, boxer Micky Ward’s tough-as-nails bartender girlfriend in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter,” but as it turns out, she delivers perhaps her most accomplished performance to date in that role, [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The makeup of ‘Barney’s Version,’ ‘The Way Back’ and ‘The Wolfman’
Posted by Gerard Kennedy · 11:21 am · February 10th, 2011
As we have noted a number of times, the makeup branch is one of the Academy’s most independently minded. While many people have criticized them in the past for bestowing the moniker “Oscar nominee” on many mediocre (or worse) films, the makeup artists clearly seem to take the work into account regardless of perceived film [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: ‘Salt’ sound re-recording mixer Greg P. Russell and ‘Unstoppable’ supervising sound editor Mark P. Stoeckinger
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 4:13 pm · February 3rd, 2011
When Oscar voters spoke up last Tuesday, two intriguing craft category nominations stuck out, both coming from the same branch: Mark P. Stoeckinger’s third bid to date for the sound editing of “Unstoppable” and Greg P. Russell’s fourteenth — yes, fourteenth — for the sound mixing of “Salt.” The Academy’s sound branch consists of 405 [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The wizardry of ‘TRON Legacy’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 8:48 am · January 13th, 2011
It’s somewhat intriguing to note how far the visual effects side of filmmaking has come in the last three decades. When “TRON” was released in 1982, it’s FX wizardry was disqualified from Academy Award consideration. The reason: the use of computer technology to achieve its look and environment was deemed, believe it or not, “cheating.” [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘The Way Back’ actor Jim Sturgess
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 10:45 am · January 11th, 2011
When Jim Sturgess’s agents set up a meeting with director Peter Weir, who was casting for his new film “The Way Back,” the actor’s brain was in a different place. He was in the middle of filming Philip Ridley’s “Heartless” and portraying a troubled soul character. He had filmed until six in the morning and [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The construction of ‘The Social Network’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 12:28 pm · January 6th, 2011
One of the immediately striking things about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The Social Network” is its assemblage, the manner in which he chose to tell the story with cascading elements of the narrative. And when you bring on a meticulous craftsman like David Fincher to direct a film already detailed in its larval stage, you [...]
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INTERVIEW: ‘Another Year’ actress Lesley Manville
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 1:47 pm · January 3rd, 2011
Failing to turn on your voice recorder is any journalist’s fear when conducting a great interview. So after spending close to a half-hour with “Another Year” star Lesley Manville some weeks back, and having felt like it was one of the more enlightening and engrossing conversations I’ve had with an actor all year, you can [...]
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The design of ‘Alice in Wonderland’
Posted by Gerard Kennedy · 8:53 am · December 30th, 2010
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp may well be poised to go down in film history as one of the famous actor-director duets. Seven collaborations to date have delighted audiences for the past 20 years. They have also earned 11 Oscar nominations and four wins. Their latest, “Alice in Wonderland,” exemplifies how far along they’ve come [...]
Filed in: Interviews · Tech Support
