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Tag: directors

  • Bartlett Sher On Theater as a Catalyst for Change

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    The Metropolitan Opera’s season opener brought Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel to the stage with an ambitious new adaptation exploring art, politics and survival. Photo: Evan Zimmerman

    In September, the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Based on the novel by Michael Chabon, with music by Mason Bates, production by Bartlett Sher and libretto by Gene Scheer. Weeks before the opening, Observer visited an early tech rehearsal to observe Bartlett Sher in his element.

    “Noise! Make noise!” Sher hollered at the stage as the cast of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay rehearsed a complex party scene with a huge cast of characters. Unusually for a long tech rehearsal, the energy on stage buzzed between run-throughs. Performers bounced from foot to foot, stretched and practiced stage fighting and falls. They waited for the show’s impressive but temperamental new “irising” system—a curtaining technology that opens and closes around a square “eye”—to figure itself out.

    Leaving his lunch uneaten at the director’s stand, Bartlett Sher was constantly in motion. He moved around the stage like a party host, wisecracking, laughing and answering questions. Chatting with Edward Nelson, who plays the opera’s Tracy Bacon, they practiced a balancing move, each showing a different way to hold his body.

    A portrait of a man with gray hair and glasses wearing a black turtleneck and jacket, looking directly at the camera against a plain background.A portrait of a man with gray hair and glasses wearing a black turtleneck and jacket, looking directly at the camera against a plain background.
    Bartlett Sher. Courtesy Bartlett Sher

    A native Californian who speaks with a slight uptalk—his voice rising at the ends of sentences like an invitation—Sher’s conversational mode comes across as a desire to connect with whoever he’s talking to. Describing himself as an “interpretive artist,” Sher told Observer that he sees his talent as being “good at marshalling, pulling together many points of view.” His approach to direction is exploratory rather than single-minded. “I’m leading the exploration, I’m guiding us, I’m helping make choices that bring out the best in everybody’s work—rather than thinking of my vision being fulfilled.”

    This penchant for weaving together diverse threads seems suited to bringing to the Met’s stage a story as soaringly epic as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon’s novel follows two Jewish cousins—a Czech artist and magician, Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born writer, Sam Clay. Joe escapes Nazi-occupied Prague and arrives in Brooklyn a refugee after being torn away from his beloved younger brother (transformed into a sister, Sarah, in the opera). Together the cousins create The Escapist, a comic book about a superhero who fights fascism through Houdini-esque escape tricks. The book is loosely based on the life of Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America. It covers a wide range of political themes that remain pertinent to our own times, including fascism, homophobia and antisemitism.

    The opera, he said, compresses Chabon’s story into the lives of its principal characters and their relationships, all set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust. Incorporated into the work is the theme of art’s place during times of historical turmoil.

    A stage scene from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay shows two men at a drafting table examining a drawing, with a large illuminated comic-style projection of a superhero figure behind them.A stage scene from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay shows two men at a drafting table examining a drawing, with a large illuminated comic-style projection of a superhero figure behind them.
    Comic book imagery and cinematic set design merge onstage, reflecting the story’s fascination with escape, imagination and transformation. Photo: Evan Zimmerman

    “Layered in with essentially Chabon’s own obsession with how much art can help you make sense of or change life,” Sher explained. “Joe Kavalier goes to comic books as a way of handling his pain and maybe transforming his pain. Whether that works or not is a fascinating question. Whether art can actually help you with these things or not becomes a major obsession of the book.”

    The place of art in the political and the political in art has been woven throughout Sher’s career as a director. He’s often sought out politically charged material—from directing a dramatization of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickeled and Dimed, about the inability to survive on minimum-wage work in America, to politically sensitive revivals of South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

    “I think theatre is a catalyst for change,” Sher said. “I don’t think you make theatre pieces to tell people how to change. We tell stories that express people’s ability to handle ambiguity, deal with problems, see conflicts and make decisions.”

    The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay approaches politics in a gently coaxing manner. Gene Scheer’s libretto tells a simple story about a handful of relationships in wartime New York and Europe. The epic breadth of Chabon’s novel is conveyed visually. Its density and richness are mirrored in the opera’s textured and complex set design. Layered screens iris in and out, with designs from 59 Studio projected onto them. Towering above the audience are images of midcentury New York in its gloomy noir glory. We see comic book superheroes gleaming in primary colors or animated as elegantly looping works in progress. Haunting the background like a nightmare are greyscale sketches of Nazi death camps, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

    As a director, Sher uses the entire stage—with all its dimensions and angles—in a cinematic approach to theatre. The vast cast of characters appears on stage with fair frequency, in large groups at parties, battles and crowd scenes. A superhero even flies on a wire. But it’s all conveyed with a subdued elegance, never demanding, always inviting. Sher’s contribution in Kavalier and Clay is conversational: the production’s emotional texture is pliable. He doesn’t tell you how to feel or think.

    Sher’s ever-shifting, multi-perspectival approach feels ideal for our own overwhelming, anxious and information-dense moment. It dances away from ideological definition. “The themes of a kind of creeping fascism and the struggles against art, against the political mind, against who we’ve become, are really critical right now but also very elusive and very hard to figure out how to express themselves.”

    On opening night at the Met, the political charge of our new normal seeped into the opera house. Peter Gelb and Senator Chuck Schumer made speeches on the importance of freedom of expression—the former to cheers, the latter to boos and heckles from frustrated constituents. Even in this historic environment, operating at a political remove now seems impossible.

    “I try to believe that great stories come when you need them most,” Sher concluded. “And it feels to me like we’re lucky that Kavalier and Clay is coming around for us at this time.”

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    Bartlett Sher On Theater as a Catalyst for Change

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    Annie Levin

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  • How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist

    How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist

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    Matthew Dentler, head of features at Apple TV+, appeared to be more personally invested in the picture than your typical movie studio head at a company with a $3.6 trillion market cap. He started discussing the project with McQueen “a couple years ago” and through the process they would text and call each other, bouncing off ideas. Dentler was at McQueen’s opening at Marian Goodman last September in LA. He’s hoping there’s time for a day trip during his next New York visit so he can make it up to Beacon to see Bass.

    “Obviously, we’re proud of the film, it’s been a rewarding experience to work with him and the team on this film—but I think also what’s been fun is getting to become friends with Steve,” Dentler said.

    The first trailer for Blitz dropped the same day that Dia’s Chelsea galleries opened for the season with three McQueen artworks, and there was a party for members that night. McQueen completed Bounty, a new installation of a few dozen photos of flowers in Grenada, quickly. He had gone to the island in July. In the same gallery was something much older: Exodus, which McQueen told me was technically his first film, even if he sat on it and didn’t show it until the late ’90s. I had heard about the piece. Apparently it came about when, during an amble through London carrying a camera, the young McQueen spotted two West Indian men in smart bowler hats carrying potted palm fronds and followed them, losing them only when they got on a double-decker bus. Was that true?

    “Yeah, that’s basically it,” McQueen said, staring at his first video playing on a loop on a ’90s-era block TV. “I just saw these guys and started following them around.”

    Most of the crowd that night gravitated toward Sunshine State, which had debuted in slightly grander form two years earlier at the HangarBicocca. In Chelsea it was a two-channel video installation projected on both sides, starting with two depictions of a smoldering sun that cuts to parallel scenes from The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first film with synchronized sound, about a cantor’s son from the Lower East Side who starts singing jazz and eventually finds Broadway fame. But when Al Jolson’s character starts applying the blackface that he wears onstage, his face disappears, and McQueen’s voice wafts through the room.

    “My father was called Philbert, a very Victorian name, and one of the last things he told before he died was a story…” McQueen says, the plummy disembodied voice hanging over the film.

    The story he tells is this: When he was a young man, Philbert McQueen traveled from Grenada to Florida on a job picking oranges, and one night after work McQueen’s father went to a bar with two other workers. When they walked in, everyone froze. The bartender told them he didn’t serve Black men. He didn’t use that phrase. One of the orange workers hit the bartender over the head with a bottle, and they fled into the night as the patrons chased after. McQueen’s father hid in a ditch, heard two gunshots, and stayed until morning, terrified, when he returned to work by himself.

    Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen on the set of Shame, 2011.From Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

    “He never spoke to me about it before, until when he was going to pass,” McQueen had told me back at the Crosby Street Hotel.

    In the gallery, Matthew Barney listened, mouth agape. Louise Lawler sat with the gallery director Philipp Kaiser, who works at Marian Goodman, and Swofford, McQueen’s agent at CAA, was standing with Stigter as Joan Jonas stared deep into the monitor. After a few loops of the film, it was time to leave for dinner, and in the next room, McQueen was surrounded by the flowers of Bounty. The night before, there was a dinner too. The next day he had to fly to Milan, and in two weeks he’d be in London for the premiere—and in New York the next day for the film festival, and Los Angeles the day after that.

    Eventually, I found McQueen staring at the minute-long Exodus. “I love work, I just don’t love all the promotion,” he said.

    He turned away from the monitor to look at me.

    “As I told you, I’m not good with small talk,” he said. “All I have is my work, my family, a few friends you can count on one hand. I’m not good with small talk. All this small talk, you just have to cut it off.”

    For details, go to VF.com/credits.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • George Miller on How ‘Furiosa’ Provides a Template to Survive the Apocalypse

    George Miller on How ‘Furiosa’ Provides a Template to Survive the Apocalypse

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    They also follow the same ecological through line that informed the first movie. The oil crisis of the 1970s hit the Australian city of Melbourne particularly hard, Miller recalls. Eventually, only one gas station in the city remained open for business. As lines to fill up grew longer and tensions continued to mount, “it took 10 days for the first shot to be fired,” Miller says.

    “It wasn’t fired at anybody,” he hastens to add, saying, “We don’t have a gun culture in Australia.” But still, the ostensibly nonviolent incident stuck with him. If it only took 10 days for gas-related gunfire to break out, “what would happen in a hundred days?” he says he thought. “What would happen in a thousand days?” The Mad Max movies attempt to answer that question.

    Man’s eternal struggle to secure and protect resources provided the seed for the original 1979 film, with the great, roving hordes of Hannibal and Genghis Khan inspiring some of its most indelible images—mobile groups that “consumed everything before them.” But because Miller’s hordes are enabled by fossil fuels instead of elephants or horses, we’re back to that issue of scarcity. (Electric cars don’t work in the Mad Max universe, as “you can’t charge them anymore.”)

    While Miller’s most recent Mad Max films share the DNA of the first film, 1981’s The Road Warrior, and the Tina Turner–starring Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the director acknowledges one major development that happened between the third film’s 1985 release and 2015, when Fury Road debuted to global acclaim. “The biggest shift in cinema after sound was the digital dispensation,” Miller says, citing Jurassic Park as the film that ushered in the digital-effects era.

    Miller dipped his toes into those waters with the porcine fairy tale Babe, which he cowrote and produced, and then dove in with Happy Feet, the 2006 penguin saga that netted Miller his first Academy Award, for best animated feature. “Almost at the same time, I was thinking, Wow, these tools…we could apply [them] to action films or stories like Mad Max,” Miller says. “We can do things that we can never dream of doing in the past.”

    An indelible image from Buster Keaton’s 1926 action comedy, The General, informed a memorable shot in Beyond Thunderdome. Technological advances allowed Miller to take the moment to its logical conclusion in Fury Road, which was impossible to safely shoot before the advent of digital. “Cinema, like all arts or all human endeavors—there’s a kind of cultural evolution. One thing builds on another,” he says.

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    Eve Batey

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  • Where Does Hayao Miyazaki Rank Among the Most Beloved Directors Ever?

    Where Does Hayao Miyazaki Rank Among the Most Beloved Directors Ever?

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    In The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, the 2013 documentary about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary director questions his vocation’s value. “How do we know movies are even worthwhile?” Miyazaki muses. “If you really think about it, is this not just some grand hobby? Maybe there was a time when you could make films that mattered, but now? Most of our world is rubbish.”

    I’m not as anti–21st century as the almost-83-year-old director, but I’ll concede that there is (and always has been) plenty of rubbish around. Not enough to taint Miyazaki’s movies, though, or to prevent people from appreciating them. In fact, if there’s one thing on which audiences and critics can consistently agree, it’s that Miyazaki matters. If we quantify how often and how wholeheartedly professional and public reviewers have found his films worthwhile, relative to those of other prolific directors, then by some metrics, at least, the verdict is clear: Miyazaki’s films are the furthest thing from rubbish.

    On Friday, Miyazaki’s 12th feature film, The Boy and the Heron, was released in the U.S., following its debut in Japan in July. The semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale is alternately touching and tragic, amusing and unsettling, true to life and fantastical. And yes, it’s pretty, too. The possible swan song has gotten great reviews, boasting the fifth-highest Metascore of any film released this year. But then, that’s no surprise. It’s a Miyazaki movie.

    With any other director, a 10-year gap between films on the heels of repeated “retirements” would’ve been cause for concern about whether the old guy’s still got it. But it’s hard to harbor doubts about someone who “expects perfection”—as Ghibli producer and president Toshio Suzuki put it in the 2013 doc—when he so rarely falls far short of his goal. On a House of R hype draft of anticipated 2023 titles back in January, I selected Miyazaki’s upcoming movie despite scant information on what it was about. I knew all I needed to: Miyazaki made it, and the man has never missed.

    To see where Miyazaki stands among the most acclaimed directors of all time, we searched IMDb for all directors whose filmographies include a minimum of 10 features with at least 1,000 user ratings. For the resulting pool of hundreds of directors, we collected data from three sources: user ratings from IMDb and Letterboxd and Metacritic critic scores. Miyazaki might prefer that we focus on the former: In a conversation with French artist Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) in 2004, Miyazaki said, “I never read reviews. I’m not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators.” Of course, reviewers are spectators too, and everybody’s a critic, but we’ll start by looking at Letterboxd user ratings, which conveniently anoint Miyazaki as the most revered director ever.

    The table below shows the highest average Letterboxd ratings (which employ a five-point scale) for features among the directors in our sample:

    Top 20 Directors, Average Rating on Letterboxd

    Name Rating
    Name Rating
    Hayao Miyazaki 4.16
    Theodoros Angelopoulos 4.03
    Fritz Lang 3.98
    Martin Scorsese 3.98
    Michael Haneke 3.96
    Christopher Nolan 3.94
    Paul Thomas Anderson 3.93
    Kore-eda Hirokazu 3.91
    David Fincher 3.90
    Agnès Varda 3.90
    Akira Kurosawa 3.89
    David Lynch 3.88
    Abbas Kiarostami 3.87
    Krzysztof Kieślowski 3.87
    Hsiao-Hsien Hou 3.86
    Mike Leigh 3.84
    Ettore Scola 3.82
    Wes Anderson 3.81
    Giuseppe Tornatore 3.80
    Rainer Werner Fassbinder 3.80

    Not only does Miyazaki top the leaderboard, but he has a sizable lead. And if we sort by percentage of reviews that are five stars, he really laps the field:

    Ringer head of content Sean Fennessey, who hosts The Big Picture and cohosts The Rewatchables, has been dubbed “The Lord of Letterboxd” for his heavy usage of the site. Based on that chart, though, Miyazaki may have a slightly stronger claim to the title.

    “All my films are all my children,” Miyazaki has said. And he hasn’t had reason to disown any of them because the lowest rated of the bunch, his 1979 debut feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, carries a robust 4.0 rating. Some of Miyazaki’s movies have high ceilings—Spirited Away, which won an unprecedented Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2003, is one of the 30 highest-rated features on Letterboxd—but his lofty floor as a filmmaker is even more remarkable. Virtually every other director, even the most beloved and accomplished, has had an off film or two (or four or five). But Miyazaki just hasn’t produced any duds.

    Granted, Miyazaki isn’t a volume shooter—he picks his spots and takes his time. And because he worked as an animator for many years at the start of his career, often in support of fellow Ghibli cofounder and director Isao Takahata, Miyazaki’s juvenilia don’t include any feature films from before he fully honed his skills, which could have dragged his average rating down. (He was 38 when The Castle of Cagliostro came out, whereas Martin Scorsese, for instance, had just turned 25 when his first film hit theaters.) Even so, Miyazaki’s unfailingly highly rated releases are extraordinary. The standard deviation of his Letterboxd ratings is among the 10 lowest in our sample, reflecting the lack of fluctuation from film to film. Releasing films that get graded somewhere between 4.0 and 4.5 is just another manifestation of his famously rigid routine. And apart from his pace, he hasn’t slipped significantly with age.

    In average IMDb user rating, Miyazaki trails only Christopher Nolan and Turkish director Ertem Eğilmez. And on Metacritic, he leads all directors who have more than 10 films with average critic ratings (a cutoff that tends to exclude non-English-language directors and inflate the ratings of Western directors from earlier eras, who are represented only by their better work).

    Highest Average Metacritic Rating (Min. 10-Plus Rated Movies)

    Name Rating
    Name Rating
    Hayao Miyazaki 84.0
    Paul Thomas Anderson 83.8
    George Cukor 82.1
    Alfred Hitchcock 81.2
    Mike Leigh 81.1
    John Ford 80.8
    Martin Scorsese 80.3
    Wes Anderson 77.4
    Christopher Nolan 76.5
    Noah Baumbach 76.3
    Claire Denis 75.4
    Richard Linklater 75.3
    Michael Curtiz 74.8
    Michael Haneke 74.5
    Robert Altman 74.1

    Miyazaki stands out from the company he keeps on these leaderboards in more than one way, but the most salient quality that sets him apart (aside from the animated medium he works in) may be that he makes movies for kids—or, at least, movies that kids can enjoy. Yet he’s transcended any biases against animation, kid-friendly content, and foreign-language films—in the case of the language barrier, partly by prioritizing good English dubs—to attain the highest approval rating of any director in more than one metric. These ratings and rankings underscore what we already knew: Miyazaki movies are a cinematic lingua franca, able to bridge gaps in age, taste, and nationality. As my colleague Justin Charity wrote, he’s “an unlikely hero to so many different corners of culture—cinephiles, middle schoolers, weebs.”

    Miyazaki has long made movies in a fashion that’s stressful for himself and his colleagues, relying on pressure and desperation to produce inspiration. But for fans of his work, nothing could cause less anxiety than a trip to the theater to take in his latest feature because few creators across culture can be counted on to deliver like Miyazaki decade after decade, time after time. In The Boy and the Heron, an older character offers a younger one the chance to escape from our rubbish-filled reality into an artificially orderly one. But the younger character declines, choosing to return to an imperfect place. Can you blame him? Our world is often ugly, but it can be beautiful, too. For half a century or so, Miyazaki has made sure of that.

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    Ben Lindbergh

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  • How ‘Practical Magic’ Pissed Off a Real-Life Witch

    How ‘Practical Magic’ Pissed Off a Real-Life Witch

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    Practical Magic, a heady blend of ’90s romantic comedy, domestic violence horror, and supernatural trickery, is perhaps best encapsulated by a single moment: “You have the worst taste in men,” Sandra Bullock’s Sally groans as she helps her sister, Gillian (Nicole Kidman), bury the evil ex they’ve killed in the backyard of their magical mansion.

    Twenty-five years after the film’s release, its synopsis remains spellbindingly dense. Bullock and Kidman play sisters bound by a curse that befalls any man who falls in love with a woman in their family. After their father perishes and their mother dies of a broken heart, the sisters are raised in an enviable cliffside estate by their wonderfully wicked aunts (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest, in roles originally envisioned for Vanessa Redgrave and Julie Christie). Sally vows to never fall in love, while Gillian flings herself toward romance.

    The sisters spend several years apart—Sally marries and has two children (Evan Rachel Wood and Alexandra Artrip) with a man (Mark Feuerstein) whose demise arrives as predicted, and Gillian gets entangled with her abusive boyfriend, Jimmy (Goran Visnjic). The pair kill Jimmy after he attempts to kidnap them, but his spirit lingers, requiring a full-on exorcism. Oh, and things are further complicated by the investigation into Jimmy’s murder by Aidan Quinn’s Gary Hallet, whom Sally discovers she’s falling in love with.

    Suffice it to say, the movie is a lot. “I remember Bob Daly, who was co-CEO of Warner Brothers—at our premiere, he sat one row in front [of me],” the film’s director, Griffin Dunne, tells Vanity Fair. “After a very lighthearted scene with girls giggling and being hilarious, [we were] having them dig up a body from a rose bush and stick needles in its eyes. He turned to the person next to him and went, ‘I wish the kid would just pick a tone.’”

    Critics tended to agree. Despite opening at number one, the film, adapted from Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel with a screenplay by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks, was deemed “too scary for children and too childish for adults,” by the likes of Roger Ebert. Entertainment Weekly called it “a witch comedy so slapdash, plodding, and muddled it seems to have had a hex put on it.”

    Dunne, son of longtime VF contributor Dominick Dunne and an actor best known for 1985’s After Hours, never helmed another studio film. But in the decades since its release, Practical Magic has morphed into a cult classic, beloved particularly by women for its enviable soundtrack (Faith Hill’s “This Kiss”! Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,”! Two original Stevie Nicks tracks!) and themes of sisterhood. “Dealing with several different tones in the same film is not that unusual anymore,” says Dunne. “When I did American Werewolf in London, it was the same reaction. People were really upset that there were laughs in a horror movie. Now you can’t make a horror movie without getting laughs.”

    Fervor around the film gets particularly heightened around Halloween, Dunne says. “A little name-drop here, just two nights ago I was in my local restaurant in the Hudson Valley. Paul Rudd is one of my neighbors, and he came over and said, ‘My son’s girlfriend is obsessed with the movie. Can I bring her over? She wants to just talk to you about it.’ She joined our table and asked me the same questions you’re asking—just devoured every tiny detail about it. That was enormously satisfying.”

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • The Film That Returned William Friedkin to Critical Acclaim

    The Film That Returned William Friedkin to Critical Acclaim

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    Shortly before his death, the director William Friedkin expressed a few regrets. Among them was that, in his opinion, he never created a film as critically acclaimed as some of Hollywood’s masterpieces, like Citizen Kane. The man who embodied New Hollywood for many, and who died on August 7 at the age of 87, was perhaps forgetting that he was behind the best thriller of the 1980s, To Live and Die in LA.

    Released in 1985, the plot of this 116-minute feature centers around a Secret Service agent’s relentless pursuit of a brilliant forger. The cop is a handsome adrenaline junkie, while the counterfeiter is a criminal with the smooth talents of a social climber. The film was Friedkin’s return to the detective genre, the source of his fame in the movie industry (The French Connection, his first success, won him an Oscar for Best Director in 1971). He also, however, produced some duds in the same genre. In 1980, the director released Cruising, a thriller starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop immersed in New York’s homosexual community. The film, which some critics pointed out was latently homophobic, was later disowned by Pacino. It put some dents in Friedkin’s reputation as a minor genius, and in 1983 he took another tumble with Deal of the Century. Critically and publicly panned, the comedy barely turned a profit.

    By the mid-1980s, the filmmaker’s young promise felt like a distant memory, based on movies released in the previous past decade. At the age of 50, he had no choice. If he were to continue directing, he had to create another great film.

    Then the director heard about a book written by a former Secret Service agent, Gerald Petrievich. The son of a California cop, Petrievich was assigned to fight counterfeiting operations. The novel To Live and Die in LA, published in 1984, was directly inspired by his experience as an agent.

    To make his film, Friedkin had to work with a $6 million budget ($4 million less than the budget for Deal of the Century). He soon realized that he wouldn’t be able to cast any of the big stars of the day. He called in his old friend Bob Weiner, the casting director who had worked miracles on The French Connection. His mission would be to find young actors capable of carrying a big movie. It was easy for Weiner: the lead role went to William Petersen, a complete unknown at the time. As for the counterfeiter, it was the angular face of young Willem Dafoe that caught the producer’s attention. The supporting roles were played by actors who would go on to successful careers in Hollywood: John Turturro, Darlanne Fluegel, Dean Stockwell, and John Pankow.

    William Petersen on the set of To Live And Die In L.A., 1985.

    Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

    Miami Vice Style in a West Coast Setting

    Among the remarkable aspects of the film is how Friedkin used music to anchor it in its time. He has some firsthand knowledge of ’80s pop music. In 1984, he directed the video for “Self Control,” performed by Laura Branigan, and a year later, he fell in love with the group Wang Chung. The film’s soundtrack was entrusted to the British band, which “adds real depth to the film’s universe,” Friedkin said at the time.

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    Maxime Jacob

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  • Venice Film Festival Director Defends Invites to Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Luc Besson

    Venice Film Festival Director Defends Invites to Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Luc Besson

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    Despite ongoing strikes in Hollywood that led to the exodus of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers from its opening slot last week, the Venice Film Festival will proceed—but not without a wave of early backlash.

    When the prestigious festival unveiled its lineup on Tuesday, alongside films from Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Ava DuVernay, and Bradley Cooper were works from a trio of men accused of sexual misconduct. Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance and Roman Polanski’s The Palace each scored out-of-competition slots, while Luc Besson will debut his new feature, DogMan, in competition at the fest.

    “Luc Besson has been recently fully cleared of any accusations. Woody Allen went under legal scrutiny twice at the end of the ’90s and was absolved. With them, I don’t see where the issue is,” Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera told Variety in defense of their inclusion in the lineup.

    Allen, whose next film is his first entirely in French, has been accused of sexual abuse against his adopted daughter in 1992, allegations for which he was never charged and which he has denied. Since 2018, multiple women have alleged sexual misconduct against Besson, who denies any wrongdoing and was cleared of rape accusations by a French court last month.

    Polanski is the lone filmmaker in this group to be criminally charged for a sex crime. In 1977, he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. He’s been living mostly in France since 1978, when he fled the United States on the eve of receiving his sentence because he believed the judge was going to send him to prison. He has since been accused of sexual abuse in 2010, 2017, and 2019, totaling six allegations altogether. Polanski denies all the claims and even reportedly threatened to sue his most recent accuser.

    “In Polanski’s case, it’s paradoxical,” Barbera argued. “It’s been 60 years. Polanski has admitted his responsibility. He’s asked to be forgiven. He’s been forgiven by the victim. The victim has asked for the issue to be put to rest. I think that to keep beating on Polanski means seeking a scapegoat for other situations that would deserve more attention,” he continued, adding, “I am on the side of those who say you have to distinguish between the responsibilities of the individual and that of the artist.”

    Polanski will not be attending the festival, which runs from August 30 to September 9. Barbera is “not sure” that Allen “will be doing press,” but “he is coming to the film’s premiere for sure.”

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • FSIB firms up Panel for ED appointments in Public Sector Banks

    FSIB firms up Panel for ED appointments in Public Sector Banks

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    Financial Services Institutions Bureau (FSIB), a single autonomous professional body, has recommended the names of as many as 16 candidates to form part of the Panel for FY24 from which executive directors’ vacancies will be filled in public sector banks (PSBs).

    Between July 1-15, FSIB had interfaced with as many as 72 candidates from various PSBs.

    Also read: FSIB recommends MDs for Bank of Baroda and Bank of India

    The names recommended in the order of merit are Sanjay Rudra, Lal Singh, Bindu Prasad Mahapatra, Shiv Bajrang Singh, Ravi Mehra, Rajiv Mishra, Balwinder Kumar, Brijesh Kumar Singh, Rohit Rishi, Mahendra Dohare, S.K. Majumdar, Dhanraj T, Vijay Kumar Nivrutti Kamble, Pankaj Dwivedi, Mukul N Dandge, and Amit Kumar Srivastava.

    It may be recalled that FSIB was set up as a single autonomous professional body tasked to search and recommend high-calibre persons for appointment as Wholetime directors (WTDs) and non-executive Chairpersons in public sector banks, public sector insurers, and financial institutions. FSIB had subsumed the Banks Board Bureau, which now ceases to exist.

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  • Jennifer Lawrence Spills on Director Bryan Singer’s “Hissy Fits” On Set

    Jennifer Lawrence Spills on Director Bryan Singer’s “Hissy Fits” On Set

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    Jennifer Lawrence, known and beloved for sharing her unfiltered thoughts, didn’t hold back when asked about working with female filmmakers, including Causeway director Lila Neugebauer. In fact, she used the opportunity to call out negative experiences she’s had working with male directors. Namely, Bryan Singer. 

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    During The Hollywood Reporter’s Actress Roundtable, Lawrence said, “it was just so interesting to be on a female-led movie. My producing partner and I were the lead producers. We had a female director. The schedule made sense. There were no huge fights. If an actor had a personal thing and wanted to leave early, instead of going, ‘Oh! Well, we’d all love to leave early!’ we’d put our heads together and go, ‘Okay. How can we figure this out?’ We disagreed, and we listened to each other. Sometimes I was wrong and would learn that I was wrong, and sometimes I was right.”

    The Oscar winner then addressed the hypocrisy in labeling female directors as “so emotional” in the workplace. “It was incredible to not be around toxic masculinity,” Lawrence continued. “To get a little break from it. And it did always just make us laugh about how we ended up with, ‘Women shouldn’t be in roles like this because we’re so emotional.’ I mean, I’ve worked with Bryan Singer. I’ve seen emotional men. I’ve seen the biggest hissy fits thrown on set. [Neugebauer’s] my third female director, and they are the calmest, best decision-makers I’ve ever worked with. I absolutely love working with female directors.”

    Lawrence starred in three of Singer’s X-Men films, 2011’s First Class, 2014’s Days of Future Past, and 2016’s Apocalypse. Simon Kinberg took the reins for Lawrence’s latest outing as Mystique in 2019’s Dark Phoenix, when it became “clear” Singer wouldn’t continue with the franchise. “It was the actors that approached me about directing the next of the X-Men movies. Jennifer especially,” Kinberg told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “Jen said she wouldn’t come back for another movie unless I directed it. So, I had a lot of support from them.”

    Other actors have spoken about the difficulties of working with Singer. Halle Berry, who starred in the original X-Men films, previously told Variety: “Bryan’s not the easiest dude to work with.… I would sometimes be very angry with him. I got into a few fights with him, said a few cuss words out of sheer frustration…but at the same time, I have a lot of compassion for people who are struggling with whatever they’re struggling with, and Bryan struggles.” Rami Malek, star of Bohemian Rhapsody (which Singer was fired from late in the production), said his experience working with Singer was “not pleasant, not at all.” Sophie Turner, who appeared in Apocalypse, told Rolling Stone of the filmmaker: “Our time together was, like Rami said, unpleasant.”

    Singer hasn’t made a film since Bohemian Rhapsody, after he was accused of sexually assaulting multiple underage boys in a 2019 Atlantic report, which he referred to as a “homophobic smear piece,” further describing his accusers as “a disreputable cast of individuals willing to lie for money or attention.”

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    Savannah Walsh

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