Latest news with #The400Blows
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why School of Rock director Richard Linklater is obsessed with new wave cinema
The year was 1960. Jean-Luc Godard was nearly 30; for at least 10 years, along with his fellow film critics and buffs clustered around the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, he had been champing at the bit to make his own film. His comrade Francois Truffaut had managed to make The 400 Blows, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Godard was poised to make a film – black and white, barely any script, shot from the shoulder – that would be a slap in the face to stolid French film culture. And then, finally, it happened. He made Breathless. Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague recounts how Godard persuaded a producer to back him, then proceeded to spend a lot of time in cafes with actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg and his crew while improvising a film about a petty criminal's love affair with an American student. It manages to be energetic, nostalgic and inspiring all at the same time. Without a doubt, it was also the most fun anyone had at the last Cannes Film Festival, but not just because it was preaching to a receptive choir. It's a story about cinephiles, of course, but these swaggering flaneurs could be doing anything that involves wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking Gitanes. 'I am kind of obsessed with collective art,' says Linklater. 'It's about creativity and expressing yourself and doing something as a group. It's great when people come together and do something. Whatever it is. Get together and rob a bank!' Which, as he points out with a laugh, is absolutely the makings of a movie. 'And it's such an intriguing moment in history: the birth of the personal film, which is still kind of a radical notion.' He told his own cast – including Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Belmondo – to forget the film's iconic status: that came later. At the time of filming, Godard and his team were busy throwing out the rule book. 'It turns out to be the most influential film of its time, but the vibe of it isn't that,' says Linklater. 'It's an origin story. There was always room for the new, the revolution. I can relate. My own first film [ Slacker, 1990] felt that way – and it's important for the artist to feel that way.' The aspiring revolutionaries expected their film to be bad but, somehow, everything came together: the score, the look and feel of it, the spark and freshness of Belmondo and Seberg. Cinema was born in 1895. Breathless, Linklater points out, now marks its halfway point. The filmmakers identified with the New Wave were operating with tiny budgets. Cranes were out of the question; for aerial views, they made do with shooting from third-floor balconies. Dollies (for mounting cameras on wheels) were too expensive; Godard had to make a virtue of a hand-held camera's immediacy, while his famous jump cuts glamorised any awkward joins. Nouvelle Vague is shot in the same way. 'I'm using the syntax of the time,' says Linklater. 'No steadycam, no cranes, no dollies.' He also has a cast of actors who, like Belmondo and Seberg, seem to have walked from nowhere straight into their roles. Marbeck is still wearing Godard's sunglasses, suit and tie in Cannes; he says he had studied Godard's work in film school, but had to work on his Swiss accent, spending days lying on his couch 'like with a psychiatrist' recording and repeating the lines until he mastered each tricky consonant. Dullin says he auditioned when he saw a casting call on Facebook for Belmondo look-alikes. 'When I was young, two or three people told me oh, you look like Belmondo. So I said 'why not?'' Deutch, who swapped her long dark hair for a blonde pixie cut, looks uncannily like Seberg in the film. Loading The film was made in French with a French crew. Linklater is a fan of rehearsal; the script had every line in French and English and they would rehearse in both. 'It made it too easy for him!' snickers Marbeck. 'He didn't have to learn French!' Actually, nobody is sure how much French Linklater speaks; he says himself that he wouldn't want anyone to have to listen to him try. He was an early convert to the New Wave, around the time he realised he would rather make films than write novels. 'I started a film society just to see the movies. And the spring of '88 I showed 17 Godard films! We lost a lot of money but I was doing it for my own education. I thought I had something to learn.' In a way, this film provides further education for a new generation. 'It's not talking down to people who don't know about it,' says Deutch. 'It's saying 'hey, come on, join the party!' Because that's what Rick does. He brings people in. There's nothing pretentious about him, as a person or a filmmaker.' The French are famously chauvinist about their language and culture, but nobody involved seemed to mind a monolingual American telling their story – not this monolingual American, anyway. 'He is very French in a way, because he is very artistic,' says Marbeck. Dullin agrees: 'He is the least 'Texan' Texan guy! I think he loves France so much he understood it. It's not like a foreigner's view of France.' Marbeck had seen some of Linklater's films – Boyhood, School of Rock, Before Midnight – without realising they were by the same director; now he sees the sensibility they shared, both with each other and with the early New Wave. 'He has an approach where the action is more important than his style. It's more about a feeling – and it's the same feeling. So I understand why he would want to make a film about hanging out with French people.' Loading Despite being shot in shades of grey, Nouvelle Vague is a sunny film. Even Marbeck's version of Godard seems much more affable than the man we saw in later life. 'Part of that was me,' he says. 'And part of it is what Jean-Luc was at this time. Because he was hoping for cinema to save him, you know? Can you imagine, he's wanting to make his movie for 10 years. You want, you want, you want and now it's the time! Who wouldn't be happy? Even Godard, I think, would be happy.' Would he be happy with Nouvelle Vague? Probably not, but everyone else is.
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Why School of Rock director Richard Linklater is obsessed with new wave cinema
The year was 1960. Jean-Luc Godard was nearly 30; for at least 10 years, along with his fellow film critics and buffs clustered around the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, he had been champing at the bit to make his own film. His comrade Francois Truffaut had managed to make The 400 Blows, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Godard was poised to make a film – black and white, barely any script, shot from the shoulder – that would be a slap in the face to stolid French film culture. And then, finally, it happened. He made Breathless. Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague recounts how Godard persuaded a producer to back him, then proceeded to spend a lot of time in cafes with actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg and his crew while improvising a film about a petty criminal's love affair with an American student. It manages to be energetic, nostalgic and inspiring all at the same time. Without a doubt, it was also the most fun anyone had at the last Cannes Film Festival, but not just because it was preaching to a receptive choir. It's a story about cinephiles, of course, but these swaggering flaneurs could be doing anything that involves wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking Gitanes. 'I am kind of obsessed with collective art,' says Linklater. 'It's about creativity and expressing yourself and doing something as a group. It's great when people come together and do something. Whatever it is. Get together and rob a bank!' Which, as he points out with a laugh, is absolutely the makings of a movie. 'And it's such an intriguing moment in history: the birth of the personal film, which is still kind of a radical notion.' He told his own cast – including Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Belmondo – to forget the film's iconic status: that came later. At the time of filming, Godard and his team were busy throwing out the rule book. 'It turns out to be the most influential film of its time, but the vibe of it isn't that,' says Linklater. 'It's an origin story. There was always room for the new, the revolution. I can relate. My own first film [ Slacker, 1990] felt that way – and it's important for the artist to feel that way.' The aspiring revolutionaries expected their film to be bad but, somehow, everything came together: the score, the look and feel of it, the spark and freshness of Belmondo and Seberg. Cinema was born in 1895. Breathless, Linklater points out, now marks its halfway point. The filmmakers identified with the New Wave were operating with tiny budgets. Cranes were out of the question; for aerial views, they made do with shooting from third-floor balconies. Dollies (for mounting cameras on wheels) were too expensive; Godard had to make a virtue of a hand-held camera's immediacy, while his famous jump cuts glamorised any awkward joins. Nouvelle Vague is shot in the same way. 'I'm using the syntax of the time,' says Linklater. 'No steadycam, no cranes, no dollies.' He also has a cast of actors who, like Belmondo and Seberg, seem to have walked from nowhere straight into their roles. Marbeck is still wearing Godard's sunglasses, suit and tie in Cannes; he says he had studied Godard's work in film school, but had to work on his Swiss accent, spending days lying on his couch 'like with a psychiatrist' recording and repeating the lines until he mastered each tricky consonant. Dullin says he auditioned when he saw a casting call on Facebook for Belmondo look-alikes. 'When I was young, two or three people told me oh, you look like Belmondo. So I said 'why not?'' Deutch, who swapped her long dark hair for a blonde pixie cut, looks uncannily like Seberg in the film. Loading The film was made in French with a French crew. Linklater is a fan of rehearsal; the script had every line in French and English and they would rehearse in both. 'It made it too easy for him!' snickers Marbeck. 'He didn't have to learn French!' Actually, nobody is sure how much French Linklater speaks; he says himself that he wouldn't want anyone to have to listen to him try. He was an early convert to the New Wave, around the time he realised he would rather make films than write novels. 'I started a film society just to see the movies. And the spring of '88 I showed 17 Godard films! We lost a lot of money but I was doing it for my own education. I thought I had something to learn.' In a way, this film provides further education for a new generation. 'It's not talking down to people who don't know about it,' says Deutch. 'It's saying 'hey, come on, join the party!' Because that's what Rick does. He brings people in. There's nothing pretentious about him, as a person or a filmmaker.' The French are famously chauvinist about their language and culture, but nobody involved seemed to mind a monolingual American telling their story – not this monolingual American, anyway. 'He is very French in a way, because he is very artistic,' says Marbeck. Dullin agrees: 'He is the least 'Texan' Texan guy! I think he loves France so much he understood it. It's not like a foreigner's view of France.' Marbeck had seen some of Linklater's films – Boyhood, School of Rock, Before Midnight – without realising they were by the same director; now he sees the sensibility they shared, both with each other and with the early New Wave. 'He has an approach where the action is more important than his style. It's more about a feeling – and it's the same feeling. So I understand why he would want to make a film about hanging out with French people.' Loading Despite being shot in shades of grey, Nouvelle Vague is a sunny film. Even Marbeck's version of Godard seems much more affable than the man we saw in later life. 'Part of that was me,' he says. 'And part of it is what Jean-Luc was at this time. Because he was hoping for cinema to save him, you know? Can you imagine, he's wanting to make his movie for 10 years. You want, you want, you want and now it's the time! Who wouldn't be happy? Even Godard, I think, would be happy.' Would he be happy with Nouvelle Vague? Probably not, but everyone else is.
The Advertiser
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Stephen King, the master of doom, leaves room for light and joy
Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, "Steve has a movie camera in his head." So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment. Open up any of those books at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. The Wizard of Oz. Singin' in the Rain. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is. "I love anything from The 400 Blows to something with that guy Jason Statham," King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. "The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon." Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. "My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut," he says. The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which King famously called "a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside". But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. In The Life of Chuck, there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland "like old wallpaper". And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. The Life of Chuck, the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy. "We understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy," says King. "Existential dread and grief ... are part of the human experience, but so is joy." It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom mark his work, The Life of Chuck is a prime example of King, the humanist. "An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy," says Mike Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King (Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game) and is in the midst of making a Carrie series for Amazon. "You forget that It isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. "The Stand isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat." King, 77, has written about 80 books, including the just released Never Flinch. The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in If It Bleeds. It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her. Never Flinch is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin. "I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much," King says, chuckling. "I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books." Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately. The kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, King says, often dominates his anxieties. "We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere," King says. "That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money." The original germ for The Life of Chuck had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat. King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched on to a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching. It's a funny irony that many of the best King adaptations, like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. The Life of Chuck, which won the People's Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit. The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of Welcome to Derry and The Institute and a film of The Long Walk. King, himself, just finished a draft of Talisman 3. "There are some days where I sit down and I think, 'This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all," says King. "Then other days I sit down and think to myself, 'I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get." Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, "Steve has a movie camera in his head." So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment. Open up any of those books at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. The Wizard of Oz. Singin' in the Rain. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is. "I love anything from The 400 Blows to something with that guy Jason Statham," King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. "The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon." Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. "My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut," he says. The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which King famously called "a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside". But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. In The Life of Chuck, there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland "like old wallpaper". And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. The Life of Chuck, the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy. "We understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy," says King. "Existential dread and grief ... are part of the human experience, but so is joy." It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom mark his work, The Life of Chuck is a prime example of King, the humanist. "An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy," says Mike Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King (Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game) and is in the midst of making a Carrie series for Amazon. "You forget that It isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. "The Stand isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat." King, 77, has written about 80 books, including the just released Never Flinch. The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in If It Bleeds. It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her. Never Flinch is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin. "I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much," King says, chuckling. "I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books." Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately. The kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, King says, often dominates his anxieties. "We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere," King says. "That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money." The original germ for The Life of Chuck had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat. King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched on to a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching. It's a funny irony that many of the best King adaptations, like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. The Life of Chuck, which won the People's Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit. The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of Welcome to Derry and The Institute and a film of The Long Walk. King, himself, just finished a draft of Talisman 3. "There are some days where I sit down and I think, 'This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all," says King. "Then other days I sit down and think to myself, 'I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get." Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, "Steve has a movie camera in his head." So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment. Open up any of those books at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. The Wizard of Oz. Singin' in the Rain. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is. "I love anything from The 400 Blows to something with that guy Jason Statham," King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. "The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon." Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. "My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut," he says. The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which King famously called "a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside". But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. In The Life of Chuck, there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland "like old wallpaper". And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. The Life of Chuck, the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy. "We understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy," says King. "Existential dread and grief ... are part of the human experience, but so is joy." It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom mark his work, The Life of Chuck is a prime example of King, the humanist. "An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy," says Mike Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King (Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game) and is in the midst of making a Carrie series for Amazon. "You forget that It isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. "The Stand isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat." King, 77, has written about 80 books, including the just released Never Flinch. The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in If It Bleeds. It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her. Never Flinch is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin. "I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much," King says, chuckling. "I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books." Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately. The kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, King says, often dominates his anxieties. "We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere," King says. "That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money." The original germ for The Life of Chuck had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat. King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched on to a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching. It's a funny irony that many of the best King adaptations, like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. The Life of Chuck, which won the People's Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit. The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of Welcome to Derry and The Institute and a film of The Long Walk. King, himself, just finished a draft of Talisman 3. "There are some days where I sit down and I think, 'This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all," says King. "Then other days I sit down and think to myself, 'I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get." Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, "Steve has a movie camera in his head." So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment. Open up any of those books at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. The Wizard of Oz. Singin' in the Rain. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is. "I love anything from The 400 Blows to something with that guy Jason Statham," King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. "The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon." Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. "My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut," he says. The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which King famously called "a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside". But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. In The Life of Chuck, there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland "like old wallpaper". And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. The Life of Chuck, the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy. "We understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy," says King. "Existential dread and grief ... are part of the human experience, but so is joy." It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom mark his work, The Life of Chuck is a prime example of King, the humanist. "An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy," says Mike Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King (Doctor Sleep, Gerald's Game) and is in the midst of making a Carrie series for Amazon. "You forget that It isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. "The Stand isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat." King, 77, has written about 80 books, including the just released Never Flinch. The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in If It Bleeds. It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her. Never Flinch is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin. "I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much," King says, chuckling. "I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books." Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately. The kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, King says, often dominates his anxieties. "We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere," King says. "That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money." The original germ for The Life of Chuck had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat. King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched on to a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching. It's a funny irony that many of the best King adaptations, like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. The Life of Chuck, which won the People's Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit. The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of Welcome to Derry and The Institute and a film of The Long Walk. King, himself, just finished a draft of Talisman 3. "There are some days where I sit down and I think, 'This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all," says King. "Then other days I sit down and think to myself, 'I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get."
Hindustan Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Author Stephen King, ahead of The Life of Chuck film's release: I'm a chipper guy, I get rid of all dark stuff in books
So vividly drawn is writer Stephen King's fiction that it has already been the basis for over 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film Carrie, Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare, and sheer entertainment. As the adaptation of his 2020 doomsday novella gears up for a cinematic release, the author says, 'In The Life of Chuck, we understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy... Existential dread and grief and things are part of the human experience, but so is joy.' The 77-year-old has penned around 80 books, which have often been fodder for the movies and the author is a self-confessed moviegoer. 'I love anything from The 400 Blows (1959) to something with that guy Jason Statham,' King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine (United States). He adds, 'The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon. The only movie I ever walked out on was Transformers (2007). At a certain point I said, 'This is just ridiculous'.' Adding how he's always happy writing, King adds, 'I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books.' Dark stuff, such as the kind of climate change disaster found in The Life of Chuck, which King says often dominates his anxieties. 'We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere. That's crazy. Certain right-wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money,' he opines.
Time Out
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Nouvelle Vague
If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It's a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave classic Breathless – 'À Bout de Souffle' to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek. You'll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard's 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut's Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville's classic noir Bob le Flambeur too. But chronology is king here. When he's introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else's money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines. But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Breathless, of course, features both gun and girl: newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo's hard-bitten but boyish outlaw has the former; pixie-cropped Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg is the effervescent American newspaper vendor he sweeps up in his wake. It'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll Linklater cleverly homages Godard's style with handheld cameras, unsynced sound, choppy editing and scratchy celluloid, all framed in the same boxy 1:37 aspect ratio as Breathless. His cast of first-timers is impressive, too. Aubry Dullin is fabulous as Belmondo, the angelic ex-boxer whose guilelessness lends his bandit a disarming quality. And like Godard, Linklater casts a more established actor, Zoey Deutch (Everybody Wants Some!!), in the Seberg role. It may be a facsimile of the original stars' on-screen chemistry, but there's real spark as the pair try to cope with their director's abstractions and loathing of scripted dialogue. There is, of course, a script behind all this – a warm and witty one by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo – as well as filming permits and financing and all the things that Godard was railing against when he made Breathless. Maybe that's why Nouveau Vague lacks the same anarchic urgency as the film it's homaging, and why in Linklater's filmography, Boyhood might be the film with more 'Godard' in it. But for devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that'll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.
