There was much more than just the usual giddy delight about their work to be found in Webster Colcord and Corey Rosen. These special effects masters from the San Francisco F/X house The Orphanage have an unabashed respect for their colleagues that they aren’t shy about sharing when discussing their collective work on Korean writer/director Bong Joon Ho’s iconoclastic… Read More »
Dean DeBlois & Clark Spencer & LILO AND STITCH
Dean DeBlois and Clark Spencer, co-director and producer respectively of LILO AND STITCH are, like so many Disney folk, big kids masquerading as grown-ups. Stitch, the alien of the title, is like nothing so much as Buster Keaton’s evil alter ego, and Lilo, the little girl who adopts him, is more like the typical Disney nemesis, not heroine.… Read More »
Hal Hartley & Parker Posey Revive FAY GRIM
The only room to be found in the shared suite was the cramped bedroom, and so Hartley, Posey, and I stretched out amid my recording equipment on the bed to chat about art, politics, and the effect of eye contact on and off the screen.
Richard Berge & Bonni Cohen Recount THE RAPE OF EUROPA
Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen spent years translating Lynn H. Nicholas’ book of the same name into a documentary. Hence, when I spoke with them on May 14, 2007, they had a wealth of stories to tell about both the subject matter, the Nazi plan to loot Europe of its art treasures and to destroy those… Read More »
YOU KILL ME Say Tea Leoni & John Dahl
It’s only right that the interview in support of an offbeat, quirky film should also qualify as both offbeat and quirky. John Dahl and Tea Leoni were in rare form when we talked on June 15, 2007, waxing eloquent on such topics as acting as a virtual tennis match, the invigorating qualities of coffee, and… Read More »
Fredi M. Murer on VITUS
Fredi Murer, a courtly gentleman given to performing deft sleight-of-hand for his interviewers, tapped his own childhood when he created VITUS, both the film and the character. Murer himself was not a genius in the classroom, as he tells it, but he did have a creative streak that landed him in all sorts of usual scrapes. When we talked… Read More »
INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS Courtesy of Brenda Blethyn and Cherie Nowlan
The battle of the sexes takes a decidedly different turn in INTRODUCING THE DWIGHTS, and so when I talked with its star, Brenda Blethyn, and its director, Cherie Nowlan on June 25, 2007, how men and women react to the film was top of my list of things to ask them. Along the way, Blethyn bragged… Read More »
Sandra Nettlebeck Cooks Up MOSTLY MARTHA
Inevitably, food was going to come up while talking with Sandra Nettlebeck, and when it did, she helped me to understand the different religions, as she put it, of French and Italian cooking when we chatted about MOSTLY MARTHA in 2002. Being in charge, identifying blind spots, and the separating herself from her characters were… Read More »
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright are Cool as HOT FUZZ
It was the end of a grueling day for Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright when I talked to them on April 3, 2007. Fatigue notwithstanding, these guys were primed for a chat filled with banter and philosophy as they trekked from the heights of filmmaking in theory and in practice, to the silliness,… Read More »
Jeffrey Blitz and Reece Daniel Thomspon Explain ROCKET SCIENCE
When I spoke to Jeffrey Blitz and Reece Daniel Thompson on May 4, 2007, the buzz about ROCKET SCIENCE had just begun. In town for a screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, they had just completed a sword-buying trip to Chinatown before our scheduled appointment and worries had set in about how the swords… Read More »