Featured

A Buffy-style kicking for torture porn 14

Could Joss Whedon be Hollywood’s unluckiest man? The 47-year-old creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, reinvented television and created a cultural phenomenon with his tale of a high school student forced to battle demons both literal and metaphorical. But as subsequent work continues to draw critical praise and committed fans, Whedon’s ability to keep it on the air has been frequently tested.

Featured

The Coen Brothers interview – True Grit 0

Thirteen years ago, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen wrote, produced and directed The Big Lebowski and cast Jeff Bridges as The Dude, a character since permanently inked into the pages of pop culture history. True Grit, out in UK cinemas on 11th February, marks their first collaboration with the actor since that cult classic, and comes a year after Bridges’s Oscar-winning turn in the critically-acclaimed film Crazy Heart.

Featured

That old Black magic 0

In the dying months of 2010, on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios, the boy who was Harry Potter is in the process of proving he has more to offer. There are two sides to Daniel Radcliffe on the set of this new film. The first is in front of the camera: pensive, still, silent. Radcliffe’s Arthur is a desperate man, still beside himself with grief at the loss of his wife, adrift in a creepy village itself all too familiar with death. Off screen, he is alive; high on the atmosphere of the set, to be found gossiping with the crew or reading aloud from a copy of The Timewaster Letters, Robert Popper’s zany correspondence with ever-patient department stores and industry associations. For Radcliffe, the attitude is as important as the acting. “I’ve seen film sets where the actors are playing up and they’re miserable,” he says. “I think you have a responsibility, as a lead actor, to be leading with energy as much as you can. I love my job and, generally speaking, I’m always happy on set.”

From the archives: Le Donk’s favourite films

Paddy Considine stars as Le Donk, picking his ten favourite films in an exclusive short directed by Shane Meadows. Produced by Joe Utichi for Rotten Tomatoes.

Featured

Chronicle set visit 0

What would you do if you woke up tomorrow with telekinetic powers? “The answer isn’t that you’d make yourself a suit and swing from building to building saving the world,” says Dane DeHaan, the teenage star of Chronicle, a film asking just that question. “If a group of teens in real life actually got superpowers they would mess around, see how much fun they could have with it, and eventually it would probably all spin out of control.”

Featured

A peek into Potter world 0

It was designed to look as if it hadn’t been dusted for centuries, but, like all movie sets, the Great Hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was built in the expect­ation that it would be torn down in less than a year. Warner Bros had a good idea that Harry Potter might be a winner when it pressed ahead with plans to turn the first of JK Rowling’s family adventure stories, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, into a film. Even so, few could have expected that the sound stages of Leavesden Studios, near Watford, would be kept busy with the Potter series for the decade that followed. The Great Hall set remained standing on C Stage as eight films, by four directors, grossing a combined $7.7 billion, were shot.

Featured

Julie Delpy interview – Le Skylab 0

News reports about the UARS satellite falling to Earth came just a few days too late for the San Sebastián film festival world premiere of Julie Delpy’s fourth directing project. That was a shame – it’d have been quite the PR stunt for Le Skylab, her family comedy set around the falling of the titular space station in 1979, which won the special jury prize at the Spanish event on Sunday. The preoccupation with where it might land caused something of a media circus at the time – a San Francisco newspaper offered $10,000 for the first piece of the wreckage to be delivered to its offices – and it clearly played on the mind of the then 10-year-old Delpy.

Featured

Kevin Smith interview – Red State 0

Kevin Smith has imploded. It’s January 2011, he’s just premiered new movie Red State at Sundance, and after luring a theatre full of potential buyers through the door with the promise of a post-screening auction, he’s just announced he’s selling the flick to himself. He’ll take it out on the road and sit people down in front of it – fuck multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, he declares – and if you miss the tour you can catch it in cinemas once he’s done. The fans in the room are loving it, but has he committed career suicide? Has he lost it?

Featured

Lone Scherfig interview – One Day 0

Danish director Lone Scherfig may not be the most obvious choice to adapt David Nicholls’s very-British and very successful novel One Day for the screen. But the helmer – who made the critically-acclaimed films Italian for Beginners and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself – already had Brit hit An Education in the bag, a film that nabbed a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. She sits down with Fotogramas to discuss her approach.

Back to top