With TSOTSI, Gavin Hood has taken the liberty of updating the timeframe of South African writer Athol Fugard’s only novel. In doing so, the politics of apartheid that spurred the story in the book has given way to the tragedy of AIDS. Changing the circumstances of its title character’s orphaning, though, doesn’t affect the nature of… Read More »
Adrien Brody is THE PIANIST, Thomas Kretschmann, his Tormentor
Meeting Adrien Brody and Thomas Kretschmann is like spending time with two old pals who still enjoy joking around with each other even after a difficult shoot in Europe and a grinding publicity tour schedule to promote their extraordinary film, THE PIANIST. Once we began talking about that film, though, they were deadly serious about the subject matter, the… Read More »
Gavin Hood Tells the Story of TSOTSI
Gavin Hood felt that there was more than just an Oscar ™ riding on the success of TSOTSI, based on the novel by Athol Fugard and South Africa’s official entry for the 2005 Best Foreign Film Academy Award ™. It’s one of the many things we talked about when I interviewed him on February 10, 2006. … Read More »
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Observes THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben der Anderen)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had always been fascinated by the Stasi, the East German secret police who took spying on the public to an almost absurd extreme. During his meticulous research about them for THE LIVES OF OTHERS, he became something of an expert on their procedures, consulting not only scholarly experts, but also by including on his… Read More »