Celebrity

Meryl Streep Berlinale Masterclass: What the Oscar winner finds useless and stupid and un-artistic

February 19, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

meryl in berlin 2 On Sunday, Meryl Streep addressed a select group of actors and filmmakers at the Berlinale and I was fortunate enough to attend as tickets were scarce. While I wrote about her for VF.com, here’s more from the event, and the actress discussing directors Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood:

When asked by the British critic Peter Cowie if acting with a lot of makeup in The Iron Lady inhibited her acting, MERYL responded: “I feel I must disabuse. I was not wearing any make up. There are great things that they can do with lighting or not do. It’s fantastic. You can’t have a long career and really play a lot of different kinds of characters of all different ages and maintain your magazine-cover vanity. You just can’t. It’s useless and stupid and it’s un-artistic and who cares.”

About her preparation to play Thatcher, Streep said: “I prepared wildly. I read five biographies. I read some man who was the Samuel Pepys of his time in 70s London and noted every time she came to dinner — Woodrow Wyatt I listened to her obsessively. I watched film of her. And then I threw it away. We were concerned with her private life. It was on power in decline. After she’s out of power, the confrontation with mortality….when we feel least certain that is when we lash out most vehemently. When we feel attacked and not able to withstand it.”
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Meryl Streep Berlinale Masterclass: on Directors Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood

February 17, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Meryl Streep talents Berlin On Sunday, Meryl Streep addressed a select group of actors and filmmakers at the Berlinale and I was fortunate enough to attend as tickets were scarce. While I wrote about her for VF.com, here’s more from the event, and the actress discussing directors Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood:

MERYL: “Mike Nichols used to say to me each subsequent time that we worked (Postcards from the Edge, Heartburn, Silkwood, The Seagull in the park and Angels in America on TV), each time he would drill me on other directors. I said it’s like asking about other boyfriends: does he do it better than I do?

“The most interesting thing about having a long career is how many different ways you can get to a good result. Each has his own way in, talking to actors. Clint Eastwood only betrayed himself once, I never felt that he was watching me as we were acting together. He never says ‘action’ so as the director [of The Bridges of Madison County] I’d have to divine when he’d start acting. He’d stroll from behind camera and walk into the kitchen and say ‘okay, you can put your knitting down,’ and we can start acting.

“He was sort of seamless; he doesn’t play a wide range of roles. He looks like Clint Eastwood. He was fully committed as an actor and very self-denigrating. He would make a comment after — ‘Well, that was adequate,” about himself. But he would very often shoot the rehearsal and then move on so I have never in my life seen a crew so terrified on the tips of their toes trying to solve all the problems that normally they solve on take four. Everything was ready on the first time we encountered the scene because Clint might just move on. That was a lesson on fascism that I thought was interesting (I’m joking).

“But Clint only betrayed himself once. In one scene we were having a big fight in the kitchen and it was going particularly well speaking for myself. He was watching me and I saw it in his eyes and I said you were watching me you weren’t with me. He said, ‘It won’t happen again’ and it never did. We shot the whole film in 5 weeks.”

Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander talks ‘The Danish Girl’

January 28, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Alicia Vikander is 'The Danish Woman'

Here is what Vikander told me when I interviewed her for The Hollywood Reporter:

It was wonderful to have Gerda’s art, her personality came through. She was successful in her own time, experiencing that struggle any artist undergoes trying to find their own voice and be true to it. Other people will start to appreciate the work once you find your own voice. Gerda started to become very successful when she found her muse in Lily [Eddie Redmayne’s transgender artist]. It’s pivotal in the beginning with Gerda starting to paint Lily — both of them go on the journey of allowing Lily to step forward and see her true self. Gerda goes on a journey, too. With transgender people, and the loved ones or friends of transgender, you realize that every single story is different. People forget that the wife was on a transition as big as her partner. They were a couple going thru a big change together. I was privileged that my emotions, that are my tools, were employed to portray such an extraordinary woman, the pain and tough road that she also travelled. Gerda always knew that the most important thing was that the person she loved became what she wanted. That sort of unconditional love is inspiring.

Best Actor Nominee Bryan Cranston Talks ‘Trumbo’

January 24, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Period Piece: Cranston as blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

Here is what Cranston told me when I interviewed him for The Hollywood Reporter:

“If you’re playing a character who is nonfictional, there is an added responsibility: Lyndon Johnson, say, or Dalton Trumbo.

There is a plethora of source material, and Trumbo’s two daughters, Nikola and Mitzi, are still alive, and even though they were children at the time, I would ask them a bunch of questions.

For instance, an earlier iteration had Trumbo tell his kids to hop in the car, and he takes them for ice cream. Nikola and Mitzi giggled — that was Cleo, their mom, especially during the blacklist years. Cleo clearly was the emotional foundation and kept the fires burning at home.

As much of a vulnerable, noble battle that Trumbo was embroiled in, there was also some selfishness. We had really honest exchanges about how irritable and angry and impatient he could be. It is important to know that the families of these blacklisted writers and directors paid a price and suffered as much as the men themselves.”

Joaquin Phoenix and Director James Gray, the Leo and Scorsese of the Indie World

June 13, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Artistic spouses Gray and Phoenix

This was one of my favorite interviews for Yahoo Movies ever. I was passionately in love with James Gray’s ‘The Immigrant’ and proud that I at least kept Phoenix at the table for most of our interview despite his clear desperation to escape like a kindergartner anticipating recess.

Actor Joaquin Phoenix and director James Gray have one of Hollywood’s most successful codependent relationships. The pair have been collaborating for more than 15 years, first with the city-corruption tale The Yards (2000), then on dramas We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008). Their fourth joint effort, the lush historical tale The Immigrant, opens May 16 [2014] in limited release and features Phoenix as a hustler and pimp in 1920s New York who lures a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant (Marion Cotillard) into his girlie show.

Yahoo Movies sat down with Gray and Phoenix (who next stars in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice) in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel in New York City, so that a mercurial Phoenix — his hair a modified mullet dusted with gray — could inhale American Spirits and exhale asides. Not surprisingly, Gray did a lot of the talking, answering questions with a scholar’s precision and prompting responses from Phoenix that gave a good sense of their long-nurtured creative relationship, one that has become brotherly in every sense of the word.

Did you meet cute?

James Gray: We met at a restaurant [in New York City] called Piadina. Joaquin apparently read the script to The Yards. I had seen To Die For. And I said, “Who is this guy?” And that is when I said we should meet. I liked him instantly.

And, Joaquin, had you seen James’ [1995] debut, Little Odessa?

Gray: He didn’t like it.

Joaquin Phoenix: I didn’t.

I love it.

Gray: Did you hear that? I really do appreciate that.

Phoenix: [Deadpans] I don’t like her taste.

Gray: [Laughs]
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