Latest news with #ToddHaynes
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Post your questions for Guy Pearce
It's hard to pick a favourite Guy Pearce role over his nearly 40-year career, but let's try. Perhaps it's drag queen Felicia Jollygoodfellow in his 1994 breakout Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or Detective Exley in 1997's LA Confidential. Maybe you prefer your Pearce going backwards in Christopher Nolan's Memento; time-travelling back to 1899 in an adaptation of HG Wells's The Time Machine; at sea in The Count of Monte Cristo; or all-too-briefly at war in The Hurt Locker. He's also done royal drama (The King's Speech, Mary Queen of Scots) and he's done biopics (Andy Warhol in Factory Girl and Harry Houdini in Death Defying Acts). He's been into space (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) and he's breathed fire (Iron Man 3). He's made two Aussie westerns with John Hillcoat (Lawless, The Proposition) and two yet gnarlier contemporary tales set in his homeland (Animal Kingdom, The Rover). And earlier this year he was Oscar-nominated for his role as a wealthy industrialist in The Brutalist. He didn't win the Academy Award, but he made a lot of new fans with his candour about marriage, Palestine, and his feelings about LA Confidential co-star Kevin Spacey. Pearce also won an Emmy for his role in the Todd Haynes miniseries Mildred Pierce, and was excellent in Mare of Easttown – both opposite Kate Winslet. He released two solo albums in the 2010s, and dresses up as a dishevelled superhero in the video to Razorlight's Before I Fall to Pieces. But, of course, there are some of us who will never get beyond thinking of him as good old Mike from Neighbours – a role to which he returned with winning welly in the finale-that-wasn't-a-finale. Now Pearce returns as a soon-to-be-paroled inmate in hard-hitting prison drama Inside, for which he has excitingly agreed to take the reader interview chair. There's plenty to ask the actor. Was he really second choice behind Christian Bale for Batman? Does he claim to be Australian or English? (Pearce was born in England but moved to Australia when he was three.) Can anyone – let alone he – remember the name of the character he played in Home and Away? Or the name of the No 156 single he released in 1989? Why does he think that he's 'shit' in Memento? And how are his knees these days? Please get your questions in by 6pm this Sunday, 20 July, and we'll print his answers in Film & Music and online on 1 August. Inside is out on digital, DVD and Blu-ray on 11 August
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carter Burwell, Three-Time Oscar Nominee, Elected to Motion Picture Academy's Board of Governors
Carter Burwell, a three-time Oscar nominee for best original score, has been elected to the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He joins two returning governors — Lesley Barber and Richard Gibbs — in representing the music branch. Burwell replaces Charles Fox, who was the third governor representing the music branch. Burwell, 70, has received Oscar nominations for scoring Todd Haynes' Carol (2015) and two films directed by Martin McDonagh: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). More from Billboard Inside the Long-Running Partnership Between Director Todd Haynes and His Favorite Composer Young Singer Wins Over 'AGT' Judges With Ed Sheeran Cover Ozzy Osbourne's DNA Will Be Sold in Limited Edition Liquid Death Cans Burwell, who was born in New York City, has scored most of the films made by Joel and Ethan Coen. He has also scored films by such other directors as Bill Condon, Spike Jonze, James Foley, Brian Helgeland and John Lee Hancock. Burwell received two Primetime Emmy nominations in 2011 for his work on HBO's Mildred Pierce, winning for outstanding music composition for a miniseries, movie or a special (original dramatic score). Burwell is one of four pros who were elected to the board of governors for the first time, along with Peter Kujawski (Executives Branch), Gigi Williams (Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch) and Andrew Roberts (Visual Effects Branch). Ten incumbent governors were reelected to the board: Marlee Matlin (Actors Branch), Marlon West (Animation Branch), Richard Hicks (Casting Directors Branch), Dion Beebe (Cinematographers Branch),Jason Reitman (Directors Branch), Chris Hegedus (Documentary Branch), Nancy Richardson (Film Editors Branch), Jason Blum (Producers Branch), Missy Parker (Production Design Branch) and Peter Devlin (Sound Branch). Three governors are returning to the board after a hiatus: Isis Mussenden (Costume Designers Branch), Christina Kounelias (Marketing and Public Relations Branch) and Larry Karaszewski (Writers Branch). Returning governors, in addition to Barber and Gibbs, are Pam Abdy, Wendy Aylsworth, K.K. Barrett, Rob Bredow, Brooke Breton, Paul Cameron, Patricia Cardoso, Eduardo Castro, David Dinerstein, Ava DuVernay, Linda Flowers, Jennifer Fox, Jinko Gotoh, Lynette Howell Taylor, Kalina Ivanov, Simon Kilmurry, Laura C. Kim, Ellen Kuras, Hannah Minghella, Andy Nelson, Daniel Orlandi, Lou Diamond Phillips, Gerald Quist, Stephen Rivkin, Howard A. Rodman, Terilyn A. Shropshire, Dana Stevens, Mark P. Stoeckinger, Chris Tashima, Kim Taylor-Coleman, Jean Tsien, Rita Wilson and Debra Zane. The Production and Technology Branch and Short Films Branch did not hold elections. New governors-at-large will be elected and announced later this month. The board of governors sets the academy's strategic vision, preserves the organization's financial health, and assures the fulfillment of its mission. The newly elected 2025-26 board will take office at the first scheduled board meeting of the new term. The academy has 19 branches, each represented by three governors, except for the Animation Branch, represented by two governors; the Short Films Branch, represented by one governor; and the Production and Technology Branch, also represented by one governor. Governors, including the board-elected governors-at-large, may serve up to two three-year terms (consecutive or non-consecutive), followed by a two-year hiatus, after which eligibility renews for up to two additional three-year terms for a lifetime maximum of 12 years. For a list of the current 2024-25 academy governors, visit the the academy's website. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I'm not The Rock, right?' Julianne Moore on action movies, appropriate parenting and twinning with Tilda Swinton
Julianne Moore has played some right mothers in her time. There was Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, whose pornography career and cocaine addiction costs her access to her child. Or Maude, the outre artist – 'My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal' – whose determination to conceive drives much of in The Big Lebowski. Moore was the infernal, domineering mother – the Piper Laurie role – in the 2013 remake of Carrie, and a lesbian cheating on her partner with the sperm donor who fathered their children in The Kids Are All Right. In May December, the most recent of the five pictures she has made with her artistic soulmate, the director Todd Haynes, she became pregnant by a 13-year-old boy, then married and raised a family with him after her release from prison. Shocking, perhaps, but then she had already played a socialite with incestuous designs on her own son (Eddie Redmayne) in Savage Grace. Imagine that lot as a Mother's Day box set. Her latest screen mum is in the jangling new thriller Echo Valley. She has a lot of heavy lifting to do as Kate, a morally compromised rancher whose farm is falling apart, along with her life. Some of that lifting is emotional: Kate left her husband for a woman ('I'm the one who 'ran off with the lesbo ranch hand',' she sighs) who then died. To add to her woes, Kate's daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who has addiction problems, calls on her for help after accidentally throwing away $10,000 worth of drugs belonging to a dealer (Domhnall Gleeson). Some of Moore's heavy lifting in the film, though, is literal: there is a corpse-disposal sequence that does not go off without a hitch. This is all handled expertly by the British film-maker Michael Pearce, who made his debut directing Jessie Buckley in Beast and therefore has form when it comes to putting tenacious redheads in jeopardy. 'Michael and I talked about how we didn't want Kate to be a superwoman,' says Moore, 64, perched on the edge of a sofa and sipping tea in a London hotel room. She is wearing a long-sleeved charcoal-grey dress, burgundy nail varnish and gold tear-drop earrings that swing in and out of her hair, playing peek-a-boo whenever she moves. 'You shouldn't think she's capable of much when you see her. She can barely get out of bed. When she meets Domhnall's character, you're like: 'Oh my God, he's going to destroy her!' Most of us aren't action heroes. I'm not The Rock, right?' Yet Echo Valley does teeter at times on the border between thriller and action movie. 'I didn't see that on the page,' she admits. 'But there are these physical fights, stuff with horses, there's all this water and diving and pulling and carrying. It's exhausting!' We puzzle together over whether she has strayed into action territory before. 'I guess in The Lost World,' she says, citing the Jurassic Park sequel, a mediocre movie with one killer suspense sequence: Moore in an upended Winnebago dangling over the edge of a cliff, a splintered windscreen the only thing standing between her and certain death. And there was the overcooked Hannibal, where she took over as the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. 'Yeah, Clarice is kind of an action hero.' Has she turned down many such parts? 'Because they were too action-y?' she exclaims, laughing up a storm. 'That's really funny! I have, on occasion, turned things down if it's something that was taking place outside, like, all the time with no shade. 'Guess what? We're shooting at the beach every single day!' That would be tough.' She gestures to her pale skin and copper hair. 'I would incinerate.' Action heroes have been few and far between, but she can't identify any other gaps on her CV. 'I don't think that way. I'm always thinking in terms of story. Hey, I'd like to do a ghost story! I'm fascinated by those because they're about grief. But character for me doesn't exist outside narrative.' Later, I email Wash Westmoreland, who, with his late husband Richard Glatzer, directed Moore as a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice, which won her a best actress Oscar. He points out how she can pivot the tone of a scene with a simple line reading. In Haynes's Far from Heaven, she was a hemmed-in 1950s housewife with a closeted husband and a taboo friendship with her Black gardener. 'To access a character through the acting style of a different era while bringing nuance and emotional truth to it was a tour de force,' he says. Near the end of the movie, when it becomes clear that her husband can't curb his appetites, she adopts a newfound resignation and froideur, telling him: 'I assume, then, you'll be wanting a divorce.' Westmoreland singles out that moment: 'The shift in her voice and demeanour is so dramatic. It's the stuff of great cinema.' For Echo Valley, Moore dwelt on the areas where her character was morally compromised. 'She makes a series of choices that are complicated,' she says. 'You step back and ask: 'Wait, is this appropriate parenting? Are you managing your child's addiction rather than giving them the agency to change?' There's a lack of clarity about Kate's behaviour. Does she do the right thing? I don't know. Is it cinematic? Oh, it's definitely that.' With her husband, Bart Freundlich, whom she met nearly 30 years ago when he directed her in the indie drama The Myth of Fingerprints, Moore has two children: Cal, 27, is a musician who teaches composition; while Liv, 23, is an assistant at a talent agency. Asking herself what she might do as a mother in Kate's position, however, would have done her no good. 'That kind of thought isn't always helpful. Because if it's me, well, I'm not going in a lake. Are you kidding? It's cold! But that doesn't occur to Kate.' When Moore's career exploded in the 1990s, with eye-catching roles in mainstream smashes (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Fugitive) and indie masterpieces (including Robert Altman's Short Cuts and the chilling Safe, her first film with Haynes), she was presumably the greenhorn on set. I wonder how it feels to have gravitated to a possibly maternal position with Sweeney in Echo Valley or Meghann Fahy in the crackling new Netflix comedy Sirens. 'What's fabulous when you're on set with people of a different age is that it's always a peer relationship,' she says. 'You go in at, say, 24 and it's terrifying, but everyone expects you to meet them emotionally.' She experienced it on the set of Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. 'I was 27 and George Gaynes was 72 and I was supposed to be engaging in a romantic relationship with him, which felt crazy. But suddenly you're doing this Chekhov piece and everything dissolves. You're people without any barrier of age or experience.' Perhaps it helped, too, that she was always treated as an adult by her parents. Her mother, who moved from Greenock on the west coast of Scotland to the US as a child, was a psychiatric social worker, her father a military lawyer and later a judge. They discussed openly the intricacies of human behaviour in ways that Moore believes helped cultivate her fascination with character and story. Also vital was her sense of difference. Moore's series of Freckleface Strawberry books for children were recently in the news after being put 'under advisement' by the Trump administration in schools educating the children of US military personnel – presumably because of their message that being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Less well known is another of her autobiographical children's books, My Mother Is a Foreigner But Not to Me. How did she experience her mother's nationality as a child? 'Well, it's very pertinent now given what's going on with immigration in the US,' she says. 'Many of us have parents who were from somewhere else, so that meant your parents had different customs or languages. My mother felt very different from the American mothers I knew. She had an accent. She cooked different things: nothing weird, just roast beef, for instance. We had little kilts. I had my hair braided and American mothers didn't do that.' Her Scottish background gives her a deep connection to Tilda Swinton, her co-star last year in Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door. An earlier Swinton movie, The Deep End, must surely have influenced Echo Valley: both are water-adjacent thrillers concerning mothers who go to extreme lengths to save their children from thugs. 'Oh Tilda, my Tilda!' she cries, clamping a hand to her chest. 'I love her.' She reels off the similarities between them with a level of excitement that suggests they are only now dawning on her: 'She's Scottish and I'm Scottish-American. We both have red hair. Our children – her twins and my oldest – are the same age. And both of our sons have red beards. Isn't that funny?' At that moment, she starts waving at someone behind me. 'Michael, come on in!' she calls out to Pearce, who sits down beside her for the final 10 minutes of the interview. They are both in matching greys. 'You got the memo,' she jokes. Throughout our conversation, Moore has been friendly, but always precise: at the end of each answer, she pulls up sharp, smiling tightly in a way that signals she has completed her thought. In Pearce's presence, she loosens up a little, pinging ideas back and forth and even urging me on when I ask him something – 'Good question!' – in a way that makes me feel I have been awarded a gold star. It's no mystery why he cast Moore in Echo Valley. 'She plays these everyday people – someone beside you at the checkout or on the train – but they're going through these momentous crises,' he says. 'Still Alice, Short Cuts, Magnolia: there's never anything generic in what she does. It's always the most specific and memorable version of that crisis.' This is what was needed for Echo Valley. 'It lives or dies on the performances. We can't only rely on the plot mechanics. You need to be a bit heartbroken by this film. And because 'Julianne's done so many movies, she has this intuition for what works. When it came to the heaviness of the film – the grief, the addiction – she said: 'Some of this can be done with a light touch.' We didn't need to show all the crying.' Moore is thinking about The Rock again. 'When you see him, say, hanging from a helicopter, you're like: 'I can't do that. That's not going to happen.' But when you see these people in domestic situations dealing with desperation and violence and grief, you think: 'I recognise this. It exists all around us.'' Echo Valley is on Apple TV+
Gizmodo
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
30 Years Later, the Terrors of ‘Safe' Are Just as Alarming
Todd Haynes' exploration of ecological and existential horrors features a stellar early-career performance by Julianne Moore. The eco-horror genre can often take a high-energy, high-action approach. We've seen animals and/or insects transformed by an environmental shift that makes them want to attack every human in their midst. We've seen nature twisted into spawning vicious monsters both giant and microscopic. We've also seen the weather go haywire and spiral into an ice age in act three after ripping Los Angeles with tornados in act one. But not every eco-horror film speaks in such a loud voice. In 2011, Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter explored the fragmenting domestic life of a construction worker whose apocalyptic visions soon become an obsession; as he prepares for doom, his increasingly exasperated loved ones assume he's completely nuts. In 2021, Ben Wheatley's In the Earth investigated a story obliquely about the covid-19 pandemic, set in a forest where the plants have launched an offensive against all human invaders. Even earlier, Todd Haynes' Safe—released in theaters 30 years ago this month after debuting at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival—dug into maybe the eeriest sort of eco-horror of all. You can't see it, hear it, or even feel it, unless you're Safe's main character: Carol White, a housewife played by then-emerging star Julianne Moore. Safe takes place in 1987 in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where Carol, clad in pastels and pearls, spends her days running errands, ordering her housekeeper around, and attending aerobics classes. It's a comfortable yet dull life; what passes for drama is a new couch being delivered in the wrong color, or a friend suggesting they try out a faddish all-fruit diet. Carol doesn't smoke or drink—she describes herself as a 'milkaholic'—and her personality is quite passive. She doesn't seem to have much of an interior life. Her lack of expressiveness matches perfectly with the style Haynes uses to tell his story: it's very reserved, almost to the point of feeling airless and sterile. We're peering in on Carol almost like she's a figure in a diorama that tells her story. But if Carol seems like someone who must have a rebellion bubbling within, Safe–released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a crisis it references both overtly and symbolically—turns that idea on its head. While in some senses it is a feminist comment on how stifling gender roles can be, Safe is also a movie about a woman whose body begins to break down in response to her otherwise unremarkable environment, imperiling both her physical and mental health. If you watch Safe already knowing where Carol is headed, it's easy to pick out the clues. The first thing we hear from her is a sneeze—a gentle harbinger of the coughing fits, vomiting, nosebleeds, hyperventilation, skin eruptions, and seizures that eventually come along. Her McMansion existence, untaxing as it seems, is full of toxic triggers and pollutants: wall-to-wall carpet that's constantly being vacuumed, kitchen cabinets that must be re-varnished, car exhaust from LA's perpetual traffic jams, planes flying overhead, humming appliances, phones ringing, TVs and radios blaring, and looming electrical towers. We see Carol visit the dry cleaner on multiple occasions, including a disastrous attempt to pick up clothes while the place is being fumigated, and at one point she decides to add a perm and a manicure to her beauty salon routine. But everyone else in her life who dwells in this San Fernando Valley bubble is seemingly fine. It's just Carol who starts having violent reactions, and the initial response—particularly from her husband, who's continuously disbelieving though he does become somewhat more supportive—is that it's all in her head. She's just 'overexerted.' 'A little run down.' 'I really don't see anything wrong with you,' her regular physician scolds, while advising her to stay off dairy and forget the fruit diet, too. A litany of allergy tests prove inconclusive. A psychiatrist, perched behind a massive desk, looks at her quizzically, asking 'What's going on in you?' As Carol downshifts from delicate to fragile to frail, her illness becomes her entire identity, and she finally finds—not answers, but a community of people suffering from similar symptoms. (She finds them through a flyer posted on her health club's bulletin board that very pointedly asks: 'Are you allergic to the 20th century?') Treatment requires moving to a communal-living retreat in the desert, which takes Carol away from a life it seems she'll hardly miss, despite at least one emotional outburst as she's settling in. Exactly how Carol has fallen victim to this debilitating condition is something we never learn. The way Haynes frames her weakening existence is extremely effective, implying that it's an ambient ailment that could seep into anyone, anywhere, even in cushy surroundings. Safe is also remarkable in the way that it takes Carol's illness very seriously—the audience believes her, even if other characters don't—while also satirizing a New Age industry eagerly profiting off its patients. Carol and her fellow residents are wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for residential treatment, but naive enough not to question why the program's founder lives in a mansion that looms over the property. The most chilling part of Safe, though, is its ambiguous ending. Even amid her new home's isolated location, where everyone observes rules about chemicals, eats organic food, and undergoes regular therapy, Carol doesn't recover. Eventually she moves from a rustic cabin to an igloo-like structure that completely encloses a 'safe room,' free from contaminants as long as Carol is the only one who goes inside. Even then, and despite continuing to insist that she's feeling so much better, Carol is clearly deteriorating. Steadily. As Safe concludes, the audience is openly invited to wonder if she will ever get better—and if the choice she's made, to live in isolation in a place completely structured around environmental illness, was even worth it. After 30 years, the answers still don't come easily. Most haunting of all, environmental illnesses still lurk among us—as quietly insidious, inviting of skepticism, and enigmatic as ever.
South China Morning Post
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Berlin 2025: 10 of the festival's best films, from The Light to Dreams and Islands
Right from the off, there was heavy snow on the streets and a chill wind blowing through the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. Advertisement Politics has often dominated this particular cinematic gathering, and this year was no different. On the opening night, jury head Todd Haynes bashed US President Donlad Trump and honorary Golden Bear winner Tilda Swinton warned that 'the inhumane is being perpetrated on our watch'. The spectre of global conflict also loomed large in the selection of films by artistic director Tricia Tuttle. While the jury's choice of Norwegian film Dreams (Sex Love) as the Golden Bear winner was not politically motivated, the Berlinale reminded us that festivals are prime platforms to inspire debate. Producers Yngve Saether (left) and Hege Hauff Hvattum and director and screenwriter Dag Johan Haugerud (centre) with the Golden Bear for best film for Dreams (Sex Love) at the Berlin film festival. Photo: AFP Here are 10 of the best films screened at this year's festival. 1. Queerpanorama
