Celebrity – Page 2

A little bacon, a little rose with Killer Films’ Christine Vachon at Le Petit Lardon

June 3, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Christine Vachon became the queen of Cannes with the success of ‘Carol’

Up a narrow pedestrian walkway off the Croisette at 3 Rue Bateguier sits the unassuming Le Petit Lardon, or “the little bacon.” The restaurant seats twenty and serves traditional French fare as delicious as it is unassuming, while offering a friendly service uncommon in Cannes. This culinary gem is where you are likely to find Killer Films co-founder Christine Vachon, returning to the festival with Todd Haynes’ competition film, Carol, a lesbian romance starring Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett.

Vachon, a brilliant woman as bold as she is intimidating, will likely be drinking rose and holding forth on the challenges and joys of producing. Only last year she and partner Pamela Koffler celebrated the 20th anniversary of their fiercely independent company. Whether it’s food or film, you can depending on Vachon’s expertise in getting value for her money.

“It’s tiny,” Vachon says of Le Petit Lardon via phone before dashing to attend Variety‘s Power of Women in New York luncheon, “It’s where we went to celebrate after Velvet Goldmine won a special jury prize almost 18 years ago. We left the Palais after the ceremony – Todd, Toni Collette, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and the producers. I think we stayed until about six AM.”

“Todd’s movies haven’t been in competition for a while. This is almost a homecoming,” Vachon says. “”We’re really proud of Carol,” which she co-produced with Elizabeth Karlsen.

Vachon continues: “Todd and I have had the great good fortune to have a collaboration that works for both of us based on trust. We enjoy each other. We went to Brown together but afterwards our relationship began in earnest. When I worked on his short feature Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and saw how funny it was, how provocative, and ultimately how emotional, I thought, wow, I want to make sure he never makes another movie without my name on it. And, so far, he hasn’t.”

Coming to Cannes represents both an artistic and personal homecoming for Vachon, who has dual citizenship. Her late mother, Francoise Fourestier, was French, while her father was the American photographer John Vachon. According to the Manhattan native, “My fluency leaves much to be desired. I have a lot of family in France that I’m very close to. I enjoy they’re being able to celebrate with me while I’m there.”

Dinner table conversation at Le Petit Lardon will likely touch on two Killer Films projects that are about to start shooting: Goat starring Nick Jonas and Ben Schnetzer, and Todd Solondz’s Weiner-Dog with Annapurna Pictures. Haynes’ next film, the Peggy Lee biopic for Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard, is still in development.

“The last time we had a film in competition was Velvet Goldmine,” concludes Vachon. “I was a lot younger. An early night was going to bed at 4 AM. Times have changed…a little.”

(This article was originally written for Variety‘s Cannes daily before Carol premiered and before co-star Rooney Mara eventually shared the Best Actress prize. )

Interview Prep: Mark Ruffalo

June 1, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Infinitely Mark Ruffalo

I had a wonderful Sunday crowd-sourcing questions from my social media coven yesterday. I threw out the first ball: I’m interviewing Mark Ruffalo Monday morning for his movie Infinitely Polar Bear. He has become the thinking woman’s stud muffin — who reals/reels us in with his bruised charm and keeps us awake with his political activism and emotional engagement. Questions? Thoughts?

Writer Sheila Weller, who just published an amazing article on the Black Dahlia murder case for DuJour Magazine, chimed in immediately and wrote, in part, “I am in the Older Woman Who Have the Hots for Mark Ruffalo club. I love his voice — it is utterly distinctive and has a kind of…slow, shhh-for-sss earnestness…for lack of a better word…that tantalizingly complicates his gritty sexiness. Does he know that? An d `use` it?”

I’m curious about Ruffalo playing a bipolar father in this current movie, and his character Bruce Banner/The Hulk is arguably a bipolar superhero in the Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde mold. There is both huge charm and huge vulnerability and darkness to this man — and is that what modern women are seeking? (Or not?)

There is an eight-minute CBS interview with Ruffalo during the Foxcatcher Oscar campaign that netted him a second nomination for Best Supporting Actor but the link is wonky. So, instead, I’m adding two lighter moments from Ruffalo on the Graham Norton Show, including one where he gets a smooch from Meryl Streep:

Waters, Dr. John Waters

May 31, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Waters doctored up at RISD

“I didn’t change; society did,” John Waters told the graduating class of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) yesterday at the Rhode Island Convention Center. John aka The People’s Pervert aka The Prince of Puke got an honorary doctorate — but not tenure — as he told the 667 graduates assembled and their families the secrets to his success and exhorted the students to ” “Remember, you must participate in the creative world you want to become part of…. Keep up with what’s causing chaos in your own field…. Read, read, read. Spy, be nosy, eavesdrop!”

Here’s a portion of his speech:

In a recently published interview I conducted for Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Waters discussed how the culture has changed since he made Pink Flamingos:

“That’s the whole point of my films: what parent would be liberal enough to be thrilled for her son in drag eating dog shit [like Divine did]? That was the whole reason Pink Flamingos was successful. Can you imagine if my parents saw this?….Now people bring their children to see Pink Flamingos. It’s amazing how things have changed even though I haven’t, really. My last film got an NC 17 rating. I try to keep up with the times. Carsick and Role Models were both on the New York Times bestseller list. I could have gone to jail for those books in the ’50s. Lenny Bruce went to jail for saying “fuck.” “Howl” was a huge case. It’s amazing what is on cable TV now that makes [Bruce and Allen Ginsberg] look pale.”

Outtakes: Julianne Moore on Doing ‘The Hunger Games’ — Thanks to her Kids

May 27, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore looking into the future: it isn’t pretty but they are.

De-cluttering the cutting-room floor — this time from my interview with Julianne Moore in the New York Observer that ended up concentrating on her race to the Best Actress Oscar.

Ms. Moore’s drive to be attached to quality material extends beyond the Oscar circuit. Regarding being cast in the box office hit The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, Ms. Moore confessed: “which I did call about.” She credited her children for the discovery five years ago. “I’m like here, Caleb, here’s the third volume in the series you like (because you always want 12-year-old boys to read.) And then a few years later my daughter, who’s now 12, was reading The Hunger Games. We were on vacation and I had nothing to read. I picked it up. I was like ‘this is great.’ I downloaded the other two and I read them really fast. Then in the last book there’s this character Alma Coin and I’m, like, go for that part. She was the only character I could play. And that’s how that happened. I met the director, Francis Lawrence. That was one of those projects I pursued because it was interesting.”

In the case of Mockingjay, the material was more attractive than the actual part of the severe President of District 13, a powerful figure that does not carry the narrative thread like Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. The book interested Ms. Moore because “it’s political allegory with adolescent overtones whereas a lot of things that you read in YA are simply adolescent. There’s nothing wrong with that… but what the author Suzanne Collins did is she really wrote about political systems and ideology and rebellion turning into revolution and civil disobedience and what class systems do to people and what totalitarianism does. I read it and I was like, Jesus! And the character of Alma Coin is thin in the book. She’s not fully fleshed out in the movies either because the movie’s not about Alma Coin but she’s an interesting character with an interesting evolution.”

The Manson Family, Mommy Porn and Love Maps: Still Waters Runs Deep

May 26, 2015 By Thelma 4 Comments

John Waters

(This interview first appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.)

The holy grail of the interviewer is ferreting out the nugget, the defining truth, the revelation that we have, like big game hunters, captured our prey (on paper or video). For me, the best interviews are nosy and messy and reveal a curiosity about the human condition and a generosity of spirit. These qualities define artist John Waters’ work as a filmmaker, author, television personality, raconteur – and interviewer.

On stage last June at Waters’ annual “Filmmaker on the Edge” interview at the Provincetown International Film Festival, the 68-year-old Baltimore native asked Naked Lunch Director David Cronenberg if he’d done drugs with the source material’s author, William Burroughs. “No,” the Oscar-nominated Canadian replied, “I think at that time, he was just doing methadone.” Waters confessed, “I smoked pot with him.” Whereupon Cronenberg genially one-upped his interrogator, saying he’d accompanied Burroughs to Tangier, Morocco and witnessed the beat writer’s reunion with writer/composer/subject Paul Bowles after 17 years apart. Talk about a collision of hipster culture: That was an interview!

What is most impressive about Waters, besides the fact that he could charm a crack stash from a Baltimore junkie straight out of The Wire, is how he seamlessly mixes high and low culture, from tea-bagging to the mainstream, popular singer Johnny Mathis. And, for those who just know him as the director of outsider art Pink Flamingos and mainstreamed Hairspray, the hyper-organized multi-hyphenate is a voracious reader, his annual top ten films list appears in highbrow Artforum and his last two books, Carsick and Role Models, were New York Times Bestsellers.

Every winter Waters takes his pencil mustache and trademark Comme Des Garcon jackets on the road with “A John Waters Christmas,” an outrageous holiday stand-up act. It even played in Poughkeepsie, where I had the out-of-body experience of being at the absolute epicenter of cool in that upstate town. After the show, I went backstage to congratulate Waters in the claustrophobic institutional green room and encountered Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig, who had come backstage to praise Waters’ show – and share Baltimore stories. James Bond and “The Pope of Trash,” together in 144 square feet of space . . . . You don’t need hallucinogens to find the life circling John psychedelic, a mix of high and low, old world courtesy and trash talk and bold-faced names.

When Waters picks up the phone, having apologized for being fifteen minutes late, he says: “I’m having a bad day but I won’t take it out on you.”

Columbia Journal: Anything big?

John Waters: Nothing I will remember in a week.

Recently I was discussing Birdman with Alejandro G. Inarritu and the Oscar-winning writer-director said, “The definition of intelligence is the capacity to have two completely opposite ideas living at the same time and at the same time to be capable of functioning, the battle with a double nature.” Could you describe yourself in those terms?

Having two completely different ideas is the only thing that ever interests me. Everything I ever write about I don’t understand. To me I wrote about things that I can never fully understand. Even [Manson “Family” member] Leslie Van Houten: It’s a different thing to make a movie about murdering than doing the deed. It’s difficult to have the huge success Johnny Mathis did without racism and never going off deep end. I’m always interested in people that have more extreme lives than I have, good or bad, and things that are not easy, or why they acted the way they did. That’s the human condition. [Read more…]