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BBC News
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'I looked after Sean Connery, David Lynch and Tarantino for work'
With surreal films like Blue Velvet and his mind-bending TV series Twin Peaks, David Lynch often left audiences scratching their the legendary director, who died earlier this year, was left bemused himself on a visit to Glasgow in 2007."He was bewildered by the smoking ban," recalls Angela Freeman, the front of house manager at the GFT cinema that hosted the American filmmaker. "He chain smoked, so I had to walk him and his main personal assistant round the block, past what was C & A at the time, so he could smoke a bit - I was thinking I can't believe I'm walking down the road with David Lynch!" An encounter with Lynch - one of Angela's favourite directors of all time - was just one of many celebrity encounters during a 34 year career at Glasgow's main independent finally stepped down from her role last week, having started at the film house at the tail end of the 1980s. It was three decades that saw massive change to both the city and the cinema itself, as well as an array of A-list names visiting the cinema to promote their it often fell to Angela to look after them when they arrived - even if that meant finding a sandwich for a singing legend."Shirley Bassey came in with Sean Connery once. They'd been involved in a children's film and they came in to watch a test screening together. "That was surreal – my mum absolutely adored her, but I remember someone had to go out and get a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich for her during it!" Then there were the names who arrived as bright young things, before going on to achieve huge fame and fortune in later recalls the GFT scoring a huge hit in 1992 by showing a brash, violent crime thriller, and securing a visit from its director to promote it. The film was Reservoir Dogs and the director was Quentin Tarantino."He was quite young, and just delighted audiences were loving it so much. Several years later he came back, and that was a completely different experience – him coming in to do this red carpet experience, with all this security. "Reservoir Dogs was unique for us. It shocked audiences at the time in a way they hadn't experienced before – it was a real coup, but I know the council got a lot of complaints over us even showing it because of the violence. "It made me feel that every young director we have come in here could go on to be a Tarantino." It wasn't all glamour though. When Angela joined the staff the cinema had only just opened a second screen, and buckets were deployed across parts of the Rose Street building because of water leaking in moved from her native Liverpool to study at Edinburgh College of Art in 1985, and four years later headed west to Glasgow, going on to take a job at the GFT box office."All the ticketing was done manually, so you were stamping up tickets using the old fashioned ticket machines. "I still remember the two ladies training me up with the box office floor just £10 or £20 notes as everyone paid cash - no-one used credit cards then. It was an amazing place." It could be amazing in other ways, given you never quite knew who would walk in off the street."I was once working at the box office and Willem Defoe walked in. He was at the Tramway I think with his theatre group and he just walked in, full-length black coat on and soaking. "He just wanted to see what was on. I was quite respectful, and didn't want him to feel like I was starstruck. But I did acknowledge who he was and said it was amazing to meet them."There was a few like that, Ralph Fiennes and Neil Sedaka both just wandered in. Gillian Anderson came in regularly when filming House of Mirth, and Hugo Weaving was another one." Angela is proud of the cinema's charitable status, and of special screenings for people with dementia and children with autism. The biggest challenge came when managing the expansion of the building, as the famed Cafe Cosmo closed and a third screen was added."It was a big ask to try and remain open during the building phases", she recalls."Every day I had to do a handover with the building manager, walk through it to know where the fire exits were and make sure everything was safe for the public. "At the end of the day we went though it, and came out the other side." She is more circumspect when asked if any guests posed any particular challenges - though one actor, unidentified beyond the clue they starred in a massive 70s blockbuster, did give some headaches."You occasionally get diva behaviour. We had a film festival guest wanting the hotel switched as it was too hot, then he wanted to fly out a day early, which would have cost us something like eight grand."However, most of Angela's memories are of the sweeter kind, while her retirement is being marked with the GFT screening one of her favourite films - Withnail & I - on estimates she helped organise 12 weddings at the cinema over the years, including one with a theme based around the films of quirky director Wes last nuptials she helped organise also proved poignant."There was a couple last year who had a video played on the big screen with various memories of their relationship, and the GFT featured a few times."I was sitting watching it getting emotional. It was lovely to see the impact the cinema has on people - it's still all about bringing a group of individuals together to share in an experience."
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Die, My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence is 'better than ever' in a searing portrait of motherhood
Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Lynne Ramsay's 'surreal' and 'intense' study of postpartum depression that has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of cinema's most searing portraits of a woman who doesn't take to motherhood. And the extraordinary British director's new film is almost an unofficial prequel. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz's acclaimed novel of the same name, Die, My Love is a surreal, intense and sometimes darkly hilarious exploration of postpartum depression – although it does seem for a time as it's going to be a lot more besides. Jennifer Lawrence is better than ever as Grace, an aspiring writer who moves from New York to the countryside with her partner Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson with a similar level of vanity-free gusto. The couple's new life has the potential to be idyllic. They are fiercely in love, as the animalistic sex scenes demonstrate, and their spacious clapboard house is surrounded by woods and meadows, so Grace will have the peace and freedom to write a novel. Still, the skittering of rats' footsteps in the opening scene is a warning that this dream home might become a nightmare, so it's no surprise when, once the couple have a baby boy, and Jackson starts working away from home several days a week, Grace is beset by boredom, loneliness and sexual frustration. Then when Jackson comes home with an untrained, perpetually barking dog, her situation gets even more maddening. Die, My Love should probably be shown to teenagers as a warning of how repetitive, exasperating and alienating it can be to look after a baby. Ramsay makes expert use of countless techniques – detailed sound design, insistent music, mixed-up chronology, bizarre dream sequences – to convey the sense that Grace is becoming blearily adrift from reality: she may be even more unstable than the traumatised protagonist of Ramsay's last film, 2017's You Were Never Really Here. What stops the film becoming too stressful to bear is that Lawrence is always tough and vibrant, even at the character's lowest ebb. She never begs us to sympathise with her. And the script can be sharply funny, too. Jackson sees himself as a supportive partner, but he is the kind of man who won't switch off a noisy rock song during a heart-to-heart conversation because, after all, "it's a classic". And Grace's weariness and resentment prompt her to be deliciously sarcastic to any of the folksy locals who have the temerity to be nice to her. As well as building an unsettling, American-gothic atmosphere, the film's first half contains all sorts of omens that Grace's internal strife could soon be shockingly externalised. Her habit of creeping through the meadow clutching a large kitchen knife hints that Die, My Love might become a slasher movie. The motorcyclist who keeps roaring past the house, his identity hidden by his crash helmet's tinted visor, suggests that a home-invasion thriller is in the offing. The references to the suicide of the house's previous owner implies that the film could be a supernatural chiller about a cursed haunted house. And then there is Jackson's recently widowed mother Pam (Sissy Spacek), who has taken to sleepwalking along the road that leads from her house, not far away, carrying a loaded rifle. The sequences shared by her and Grace make the intriguing case that the experience of adjusting to a birth is mirrored by the experience of adjusting to a death. These sequences also promise that some kind of violent confrontation is only a matter of time. It's disappointing then, that none of these various harbingers of doom develops into a storyline. The film has its share of incidents, but it's essentially a mood piece – one long nervous breakdown – rather than a drama with a plot. And because the later scenes keep reiterating the parenting-is-hell theme that was made so clear in the early ones, Die, My Love gets exhausting well before it drifts to the end credits. Ramsay's film-making flair lights up scene after scene, but as the narrative fragments, and reality and fantasy blur, you're left with the urge to read the novel to find out what's actually happening. The film may have communicated its heroine's boredom and bewilderment a little too effectively. ★★★☆☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
