Sarah Weddington on winning Roe v. Wade

In 1970, fresh out of University of Texas law school, Sarah Weddington began work on Roe v. Wade, the case that three years later went to the United State Supreme Court and won women the right to choose abortion. I interviewed her about the case in 1985 for Third Coast magazine, a now-defunct monthly in Austin, Texas—which is why her telling of the story is so Austin-centric. 

The abortion case—the kernel of it—really started in Austin. There was a whole series of women here who were involved in problem-pregnancy counseling at the YWCA near campus. I had gone to a garage sale one day, and one of the women said to me, “Do you know what’s happening?” I said, “Well, I’m not sure,” and she said, “We’ve got an awful lot oF women from Austin who are going to Mexico for abortions, and some of them are coming back with real problems. And so, she said: “We really want to expand our counseling, tell people where the good places are, what states there are with clinics they could go to, and about any doctors we know who’ll do procedures, and under what conditions. And if we did that, would we be prosecuted?” And so I began to do the research for Roe v. Wade. 

As we got into the case, there were a lot of people here in Austin who were very helpful. There were several members of the faculty of the law school who did moot courts with me, helping me think through what were the questions the Supreme Court might ask and how I would answer them.

I actually was here in Austin when I heard about the decision. I believe that was also the day LBJ died, so there were two big national stories out of Austin that day. I’d just been elected to the Legislature, was at home getting ready to go over to the session, when a friend called and said “Congratulations!” I said “What?” And she said “You won your case!” She’d heard it on the radio that morning.

It was almost like when people on game shows win a million dollars—the same sort of spirit of “Can you believe it?” It was the sheer exhilaration of having spent three years of your life on one issue, one case. And then, of course, I started getting all the press calls—which was a real problem, because I didn’t know what the opinion said. So I had to call quickly up to Washington to get someone to go over to the court and read the opinion and call me back to tell me what it said.

Interview: Jia Zhang-ke on Ash Is Purest White and the Evolution of China

Unshowy yet unshakably self-assured, sincere but with glimpses of a sly sense of humor, and unhesitatingly frank even about touchy topics like the Chinese government’s censorship of his work, Jia Zhang-ke comes off in person just as a fan of his films might expect. Ever since his 1997 feature debut, The Pickpocket, and 2000’s Platform, in which young people struggle to adapt to China’s increasing Westernization, Jia has been creating a kind of unofficial history of his homeland, quietly defying his government’s determination to erase its tracks as it barrels along by doing things like rewiring the economy, rewriting the social contract, and depopulating whole cities and erecting new ones in a matter of months.

Jia’s films operate in metaphorical deep focus, surfacing the ways that these sweeping societal changes affect individual lives and relationships by zeroing in on sensitively detailed portrayals of two lovers, or of a group or pair of friends, while just as clearly portraying the socioeconomic backdrops to their stories. And often at the center of his films is Zhao Tao, his wife and longtime muse. In Jia’s latest, Ash Is Purest White, Zhao reprises the role she played in 2002’s Unknown Pleasures: Qiao Qiao, a strong-willed woman from Jia’s hometown of Fenyang, this time over a span of 17 years that starts when she’s the young lover of a gangster and ends with her in charge of the gambling den he once ran.

In a conversation before Ash Is Purest White’s debut at the New York Film Festival, Jia explained what he likes about digital video, how Zhao Tao helped bring her role to life, and how he deals with his government’s suppression of his work.

Interview: Asghar Farhadi on Everybody Knows

A beautifully acted ensemble piece, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows starts with a hyper-realistic introduction to a cozy world—a bath of golden light, goblets of wine, warm hugs, and festive music as Laura’s (Penélope Cruz) large, loving family gathers for a wedding. But the film’s focus on this family’s day-to-day interactions takes a sharp turn when a crisis puts the main characters, including Paco (Javier Bardem), Laura’s old and dear friend, to the test, throwing everything about their lives into question.

Two years ago, on what turned out to be his last trip to the United States, I spoke with Farhadi in person about The Salesman. (The filmmaker, who has a green card, has stayed away since then, in protest of President Donald Trump’s travel ban.) Earlier this week, we spoke over the phone about Everybody Knows and the subject of the universal human instinct to distrust outsiders, the persistence of the past, and the strong similarities between Spanish and Iranian culture that make Farhadi feel at home in Spain.

There’s a subplot in Everybody Knows about the anti-immigrant prejudice in Spain, which makes people point fingers at foreign grape-pickers the moment something goes wrong. Were you trying to say something about how that kind of poisonous thinking seems to be spreading around the world?
My point I’m making is more general. It was this very universal reflex that we have that when there’s something wrong, suspicion is first directed against not just immigrants but the stranger, the outsider. Whereas problems may actually come from people around us—relatives, friends—and that is the case in this film.

There are a lot of reminders in Everybody Knows, starting with the title, of how hard it is to keep a secret in a small town.
Because I wanted to deal with the notion of secrets, and secrets being related to the past of the characters, I had to choose a society in which people are aware of each other’s pasts. If I had put my story in a big city it wouldn’t have made sense. People don’t know where the others come from; they aren’t aware of each other’s background. I wanted it to be in a small community in which people pretend that they don’t know anything about the others, but in reality they know everything. Read the rest in Slant Magazine.

Best TV Shows of 2018

For me, contributing to Slant Magazine's list of the year's best TV shows is as much about the process as the result: It's the motivation I need to catch up on candidates I missed earlier in the year, and to watch end-of-year debuts that sound interesting. There's so much great TV now, on network and cable and streaming services like Amazon and Hulu and Netflix, that it's not humanly possible to see it all, but I've seen probably more than was healthy. Here are my top 10 picks and my honorable mentions.

Top 10
The Handmaid's Tale (my interview with Ann Dowd about The Handmaid's Tale, among other things)
The Americans
Homeland (my review of Season 4)
Atlanta
Bojack Horseman
Fauda
Better Call Saul
The Terror
Killing Eve
Random Acts of Flyness

Honorable Mentions
Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas, Silicon Valley (my recaps of Season 4). The End of the F**cking World, Big Mouth, Jane the Virgin, Ozark (my review of Season 1), Pose, Claws, Dear White People, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (my review of Season 4), Wild Wild Country, The Good Place (my review of Season 2), Barry, Happy!, The Baroness Von Sketch Show, Salt Fat Acid Heat

Interview: Pawel Pawlikowski on Cold War

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, like his Oscar-winning Ida, highlights a traumatic period in Poland’s recent history, and how a brutal political reality warps people’s lives. In the film, Poland’s totalitarian government and the iron curtain that separates the country from the West is hardly the only thing that keeps doomed lovers Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) apart, but it’s certainly the main one. It also interferes with their ability to do good work. Wiktor is the co-founder a troupe that performs Polish folk music and dances. Zula is the star of the troupe, whose initially artistic performances become steadily more maudlin and nationalistic under the heavy hand of Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc), the communist bureaucrat who runs the company.

After the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Pawlikowski talked to me about the echoes of modern politics that Polish audiences detect in Cold War, how the film eluded the grasp of the propagandists who maligned Ida, and why he doesn’t stick too closely to his scripts.

I’ve seen two of your earliest movies, My Summer of Love and your first documentary, about Russian writer and dissident Benedict Yerofeyev. Ida and Cold War felt to me like they’re operating on a whole different, much deeper level. Did they feel different to you too?

It’s age. Age and experience. A mixture of, you know, calming down, maturing, craft. I never went to film school, so I did all my learning on the job. A lot of these early films are just rescue jobs—a good idea, and they generally work, because there’s something about them. I was usually just gripped by a story. Benedict was a writer I really loved, so I had to make a film about him. He was dying, and there was nothing to film. I had to invent a whole film around his book, so I pieced it together any old how, as poetically as possible.

Random Acts of Flyness

In the first episode of his Afrofuturist-ish HBO sketch show, creator, director, and star Terence Nance says Random Acts of Flyness is “about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.” That broad frame allows Nance to download a multiverse of thoughts and ideas, from pointed observations about casual misogyny to a satiric skewering of “white thoughts.” Building on his work in films like An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Nance invents his own kaleidoscopic audiovisual language. Images switch frequently between realistic and surrealistic live action, obscure archival footage, and various styles of animation. Words blossom in myriad forms: as near-subliminal messages, as text exchanges that break into the action to comment on it, as fast-talking monologues or probing conversations.

The Terror

Based on the true story of a failed British expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the mid-19th century, The Terror explores the toxic combination of arrogance and bravery that fuels the exploratory missions launched by great colonial powers. After getting stuck for a year and a half in Artic ice, the men, weakened by lead poisoning and fighting the elements, set off on foot in search of salvation. The Terror brings those awful facts vividly alive—and then goes further, creating a full-blown horror story by introducing a monster called the Tuunbaq, which looks something like a giant polar bear with a human face. The men divide into two factions, battling one another as well as the monster while dying in increasingly baroque ways.

Fauda

Unlike Homeland, which is based on another Israeli TV series, Fauda makes no attempt to cover the political debates or social context behind its constant action. Instead, like its main characters, it keeps its head down and its focus tight. The series follows the fictional members of an elite undercover unit of the Israeli army and whichever Palestinian freedom fighter/terrorist that Doron (Lior Raz), a rogue member of the unit, is obsessed with that season, while occasionally checking in with a handful of other Israelis and Palestinians—-family members, lovers, or commanding officers—-who either affect or are affected by the main characters’ actions. Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”) is particularly good at showing how war, especially one with no end in sight, poisons the lives of everyone—-even civilians.

Pose

This soulful soap operatic drama pays tribute to New York City’s ball culture of the 1980s. Painting in broad, dramatic strokes, the script highlights the factors—racism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, and the wealth gap—that inspired these men and women to create their own world and faux families, where they could show one another the love and respect that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Interview: Nicole Holofcener on The Land of Steady Habits

In films like Lovely and Amazing and Please Give, writer-director Nicole Holofcener's characters talk and talk, taking the temperature of the relationships that both provide them emotional support and serve as yardsticks to measure their personal growth or stagnation. Holofcener's sly observational humor helps make her dialogue feel like conversations with an old friend—honest, engagingly gossipy, and studded with thought-provoking insights—and ensures that, while bad things may happen to her flawed but well-meaning protagonists, her films never slide into mawkishness.

Her latest, The Land of Steady Habits, is in many ways a typical Holofcener film. Anders (Ben Mendelsohn) is a middle-aged family man who finds himself living alone, trying to construct a new life and mend a frayed relationship with his adult son (Thomas Mann) after leaving his wife (Edie Falco) and retiring from his lifelong career. The film is also a departure for the director: the first of her six features that isn't based on an original Holofcener script (she adapted the screenplay from Ted Thompson's novel), the first not to center on female characters, and the first that doesn't feature Catherine Keener, Holofcener's fictional alter ego ever since Walking and Talking. I spoke with Holofcener this week about escaping the “chick flick” ghetto, what Mendelsohn has in common with Keener, and her plea for older actors.

Interview: Andrew Bujalski on Support the Girls

The finely tuned bullshit detector that keeps writer-director Andrew Bujalski's ego in check, nudging him to sprinkle his conversations with self-deprecating demurrals and constant reminders of his own blind spots and vulnerabilities, is part of what makes him such an excellent chronicler of our inner lives and times. The New York Times's A.O. Scott called Bujalski's first feature, Funny Ha Ha, “one of the most influential films of the '00s.” Each of his subsequent films has been very different from the others—and from nearly every film imaginable. His work seems to exist outside genre and screenwriting dogmas, featuring characters who feel like people you'd encounter only in life, and plots so subtle they barely register as such.

Bujalski's films also share a slyly comic humanism that finds both pathos and humor—often at once—in everything from the most banal of conversation to the profoundest of emotions. His latest, Support the Girls, is about a Hooters-like sports bar called Double Whammies and the women who work there. And at the center of the film is Regina Hall as Lisa, the harried, insanely competent, and warmly caring manager who protects and defends the waitresses whose prominently showcased breasts are the sports bar's main attraction by making sure it lives up to its promise of being “a family place.” I talked to Bujalski about what places like Double Whammies tell us about American culture, finding the essence of the film in the editing room, and filmmaking as a balancing act between order and chaos.

Interview: Raúl Castillo on We the Animals

After moving in 2002 from his native Texas to New York City, where he soon became a member of the prestigious off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company, playwright and actor Raúl Castillo spent a decade or so playing supporting roles in film and television. Then came HBO's Looking, in which he starred as the boyfriend of the neurotic lead character played by Jonathan Groff. Castillo's soulful performance as Richie brought the actor a new level of attention. This year, the actor made a notable appearance in Steven Soderberg's Unsane, and last fall he finished work on what he calls “the first Latino superhero film,” El Chicano, in which he has his first lead role.

This week, you can see Castillo in director Jeremiah Zagar's We the Animals, a Malickian tale of a loving but volatile family told from the point of view of one of three young boys (played by Evan Rosado, Josiah Gabriel, and Isaiah Kristian). Castillo is magnetically tender and explosive as Paps, the young father of the family and the sun around which his wife, Ma (Sheila Vand), and children revolve, even when he's an absent presence.

I recently spoke with Castillo about working with young nonprofessional actors in We the Animals, finding his character in Looking, and what Groff taught him about being number one on the call sheet.

Interview: Rob Reiner on Shock and Awe and the real source of fake news

Rob Reiner has acted in, written, produced, and directed almost every genre of film and TV show, but his wheelhouse is humane, sharply observational, and subtly unconventional comedy. He was deeply involved in at least three classic comedies: his own This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride and Norman Lear's All in the Family, in which Reiner played Michael “Meathead” Stivic, the liberal son-in-law of Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker.

Another side of Reiner, his commitment to social justice and democratic values, is front and center in his latest directorial effort, Shock and Awe. Reiner also stars in the film as real-life Knight Ridder editor John Walcott. Shock and Awe shows how two of Walcott's reporters, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, exposed the lies behind the Bush administration's rush to war with Iraq after 9/11—and how their stories were drowned out by a tsunami of press coverage that unquestioningly amplified the White House's official story. The film is fierce in telling the history of the leadup to war and at capturing the journalists' irreverent patter and the smug prevarications of the Bush administration's cabinet members. I recently talked to Reiner about the real source of fake news, the surprising new urgency that Shock and Awe took on after the 2016 election, and why he wanted to change his name when he was eight years old.

Interview: Debra Granik on Leave No Trace and tuning into people on the margins

Debra Granik's social-realist films, which are concerned with people living on the margins of mainstream American culture, are full of engrossing and enlightening details. And like her 2014 documentary Stray Dog, about a burly Vietnam vet, Ron Hall, who's all about creating nurturing communities, Granik's three narrative features to date focus on individuals leading hardscrabble lives. The first two, Down to the Bone and Winter's Bone, catapulted Vera Farmiga and Jennifer Lawrence to stardom. Her latest, Leave No Trace, which centers around another veteran, Ben Foster's Will, may just do the same for Thomasin McKenzie

The 17-year-old New Zealand actress plays Tom, the severely traumatized Will's teenage daughter. Both live off the grid outside Portland, Oregon, until authorities arrest Will for squatting illegally in a public park and attempt to re-acclimate him and his daughter to “normal” society.

Last week, I talked with Granik at her publicist's office in New York. Animated, sincere, and intensely committed to her every word, she spoke of the importance of kindness, why her films tend to launch female actors into stardom, and what she, a liberal Northeastern artist, has learned from her work about how to connect with likely Trump voters in America's heartland.

We just accept that films like yours will play at festivals and art houses and won't garner big audiences even when they get great reviews, but sometimes I wonder why. Do you think it's because most people don't want to watch stories about people who are living in poverty or on the margins of society?

I think so. One of the things that's hard to argue with, and I think about this all the time, is that the main way we see the word “movies” is as entertainment, right? If one is going for escape or time out or relaxation, to see social realism is—if you're living it, or even if you're from a very different sort of social class and you've just never felt at ease with the way the economic culture is structured, on top of everything else you deal with, it can be hard to go seek that. It's not really entertainment any more.

Interview: Toni Collette on Hereditary

With a strong-featured, hyper-expressive face whose wide-set eyes don't appear to miss a thing and a joie de vivre that she radiates in person as well as on screen, Toni Collette imbues all her characters with a grounded sense of realism as well as layers of emotional nuance. Ever since she captured international attention as the endearingly open-hearted title character in Muriel's Wedding, she's been in constant demand, playing a wide range of parts—from warmly nurturing, realistically harried moms in films like The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine to The United States of Tara's title character, a woman with dissociative identity disorder who's fighting to keep herself and her family together while coping with an evolving cast of alter egos.

Collette has been exceptionally prolific in the past year or so, appearing in 11 films and two TV series since 2017, with three more films currently in post-production, but her tour-de-force performance in Hereditary stands out even in that tsunami of output. Always intense and increasingly desperate, Collette's Annie is our guide into the bloody heart of darkness that's writer-director Ari Aster's debut feature, a psychological horror film about a mother who keeps losing the people she loves in ever more macabre catastrophes.

I talked with Collette this week at the New York office of A24, Hereditary's U.S. distributor, about the advantages of aging and how she's learned to protect herself from the afflictions her characters endure.

Interview: Jodie Foster on Hotel Artemis

Though she's a two-time Academy Award winner (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs), Jodie Foster has always been a bit of an outlier in Hollywood. As a child actor, her precocious self-assurance, intelligence, and self-described “gruff” voice made her something of an anomaly when she played bright young things in family-friendly TV shows like My Three Sons and films like Napoleon and Samantha. Then, in a run of emotionally complex roles in darker fare, most notably as a 13-year-old prostitute with a riveting mixture of childish innocence and world-weariness in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the actress's knowing gravitas found a worthy showcase.

That pattern has more or less held throughout Foster's career, as she has alternated between intelligently crafted TV shows and films like Spike Lee's Inside Man and lush melodramas or slick genre movies in which her nuanced, stubbornly realistic performances stood out like an elegant dive into a kiddie pool. Foster is now at the core of an ensemble cast in writer-director Drew Pearce's Hotel Artemis, a dystopian fantasy set in L.A. in a not-too-distant future in which the hotel of the title serves as a secret, members-only hospital reserved for criminals who pay an annual membership fee.

Last week I spoke with Foster, who plays the nurse who tends to the troublesome group of tenants, about Hotel Artemis and other things, including the time she was attacked by a lion, the memorable afternoon she spent with Toni Morrison, and the alternate lives she kicks herself for not having led.

You're quoted on IMDb as having said that you're better suited for independent films as a director and producer, and that you think you're best in mainstream films as an actress because your style of acting is too “linear” for indie films. First of all, did you actually say that?
I think I did, but I'm always cursing myself for the stupid things that I say in print. I don't think it's wrong, but I do think that indies are different now. The theatrical world and our viewing habits have changed so much that, increasingly, real story and narrative is found on cable and streaming.

Interview: Rachel Weisz on Disobedience

Less remarked on than the Me Too movement, but at least as important to the women of Hollywood, the unspoken rule that sidelined generations of actresses after they had reached 40 or so is unraveling fast. A radiant 48, Rachel Weisz is at the forefront of that change, living the kind of life that had traditionally been possible only for male actors. Still building her family with husband Daniel Craig—the baby she's due to have later this year will be the first for the couple, each of whom has a child from a previous relationship—she's starring in films by auteurs like Yorgos Lanthimos and Paolo Sorrentino.

Weisz helps make sure those roles keep piling up by developing scripts like the one for Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience. After deciding she wanted to star opposite another woman, she read all the lesbian literature she could find in search of a love story and eventually discovered Naomi Alderman's 2006 novel Disobedience, which she tried to get made for almost a decade.

At the start of Lelio's film, Weisz's character, Ronit, leaves her bohemian life in New York City for the Orthodox Jewish community in London where she grew up, to attend her rabbi father's funeral. Once there, she encounters Esti (Rachel McAdams), with whom she'd had a passionate affair that scandalized their community. The two women are drawn to each other again, causing both to question the way they're leading their lives. I talked to Weisz earlier this week at a hotel in Tribeca where she was promoting the film, which was about to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Interview: Andrew Haigh on Lean on Pete and the Appeal of Passive Characters

Yorkshire-born writer-director Andrew Haigh specializes in stories about ordinary people experiencing emotional tsunamis that upend their sense of self. His latest, Lean on Pete, is about a lonely 15-year-old, Charley (Charlie Plummer), who sets out on an impulsive road trip after what's left of his already precarious family life evaporates, leaving him alone except for the quarter horse he bonded with while working in a D-level racing circuit. I met with Haigh at the offices of the film's distributor, A24, where we talked about why he prefers passive main characters, the importance of being melancholy, and how Lean on Pete finds a new way of exploring a theme that runs through all of the director's work: our struggle to feel less alone.

Your work is usually about people finding themselves through relationships with other people, but Charley finds himself by relating to a horse. What was it about this story that compelled you to film it?

I think even [in my films about] people finding themselves through other people, it's about people essentially feeling very alone in the world, and they're desperately trying to find a way to not feel alone. If it's in the case of Weekend or 45 Years, it's through relationships, I suppose. But this was dealing with a similar thing, just in a different way. We all exist in a state of aloneness, and we find ways to not be like that, but they can very easily fall apart and we can fall back into aloneness again.

Interview: Laurent Cantet on The Workshop

A latter-day neorealist working in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson, writer-director Laurent Cantet mixes professional actors with nonprofessionals to explore forces like class, race, and gender through fictional narratives. His latest, The Workshop, is set in La Ciotat, a seaside town in southern France whose once-thriving shipyard closed a generation ago, after years of struggle between the owners and the workers. The film gets its title from one of its main activities: a multicultural group of young people from the area, including the angry and alienated Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), participate in a novel-writing workshop taught by a Parisian writer named Olivia (Marina Foïs). As the class progresses and we learn more about the nationalistic, anti-immigrant propaganda Antoine is soaking up online, the violence the students are working into their story threatens to spill over into their lives.

Although he won the 2008 Palme d’Or for The Class, there’s no hint of egotism or self-importance in Cantet, who started our interview by pouring me a cup of coffee. Despite the filmmaker’s frequent frustration at being unable to find the exact word he was searching for in English, he was urgently articulate about his work, which he clearly does as much to educate himself as to encourage his audience to question their own beliefs.

I love the way your films explore social issues through fictional narratives.

I’m always interested in showing the complexity of our world. What’s always difficult is making a film that deals with reality without being too…dialectique?

Interview: Andy Goldsworthy on Leaning Into the Wind

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who documented some of English artist Andy Goldsworthy's work with naturally occurring materials in 2001's Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, explores an even wider range of Goldsworthy's works in Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy. Some are as ephemeral as the “rain shadows” that Goldsworthy often makes, lying down as a light rain starts and then getting up, leaving a crime scene-like shape of a body on the sidewalk—which the rain then fills in. Others are as lasting as the monumental project Sleeping Stones that Goldsworthy created by having huge slabs of stone fitted together and then having an oblong depression just wide enough to hold a human body hollowed out in the middle of the block.

As he pointed out in our interview, Goldsworthy's art crystallizes the intense exploration of the world that artists have always done, taking as its subject something that's usually part of the process. On the phone from his home in Scotland, Goldsworthy spoke easily and generously about Leaning Into the Wind and his work, often laughing or expressing enthusiastic wonder as he talked about the role photography plays in his art, pissing off the security guards at Fox News, and the sculptural nature of farming.

Interview: Oscar-Nominated Editor Tatiana S. Riegel on I, Tonya

In her 30 years as a film editor, Tatiana S. Riegel has cut five films for director Craig Gillespie, starting with 2007's Lars and the Real Girl. Her work on Gillespie's latest feature, I, Tonya, has earned her an Oscar nomination for best achievement in film editing. Reigel talked to me by phone from Berlin, where she's working on the early footage of director Fede Alvarez's The Girl in the Spider's Web—starring Claire Foy, Vicky Krieps, Claes Bang, and Lakeith Stanfield—as it's being filmed. In a conversation studded with references to intuition and instinct, Reigel talked about how editing a film is like attending a dinner party, what she learned from her years as an assistant to Quentin Tarantino's longtime editor, Sally Menke, and why it's not easy for women to find a place at the editing console.

Interview: Lee Unkrich talks Coco and Dia de Muertos

His 2018 Oscar nomination for Coco, which is up for best animated feature, is far from Lee Unkrich's first time at the awards rodeo. Unkrich joined Pixar more than two decades ago, as the company was transitioning from making just shorts and TV commercials to features. He co-edited Toy Story and went on, as Pixar employees do, to work in various capacities on many more films, including directing Toy Story 3. In Coco, Unkrich roots the story of a young musician whose family hates music in the visually sumptuous and intellectually rich soil of Mexico during a Día de Muertos holiday, creating the most emotionally resonant Pixar film since Toy Story 3. The film incorporates the gorgeous colors of Mexican treasures like Oaxacan alabrijes, the hillside houses of Guanajuato, and the strings of papel picado that festoon so many of the nation's walls and streets. The film also animates resonant Mexican concepts like the belief that we all die three deaths: the first when our hearts stop beating, the second when we are buried or cremated, and the third when there's nobody left on Earth who remembers us.

In a phone interview last week, Unkrich talked about how studying the Día de Muertos helped him deal with the death of his father, the challenges of making a film about Mexico when you're “a white guy from Ohio,” and the tension between family ties and individual freedom.

Interview: Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens talk Permission

Will (Dan Stevens) and Anna (Rebecca Hall) are a seemingly happy couple on the brink of marriage when a drunken comment makes them question the wisdom of pledging monogamy-ever-after to the only person they've ever had sex with. Determined to see what they've been missing, the two embark on parallel yet steadily diverging experiments in dating other people in Permission. Old friends themselves, Hall and Stevens made the film with Hall's husband, Morgan Spector, and another good friend, writer-director Brian Crano. We talked by phone about the persistent pressure to couple up, why Anna and Will are “a disaster,” and the joy of watching Bill Irwin dance.

Rebecca, you got married a couple years ago, so it seems like you were going through pretty much the opposite of what your character in Permission is going through when you were preparing to make this film: settling down in a way that you maybe never have before. Was having just gone through your own thought process about all of that part of what attracted you to this role?

Rebecca Hall: I wish it were as perfect as that. [laughs] Yeah, I see what you're saying, but I don't think it ever occurred to me. Also, I married an actor, so there's nothing sort of settled about the lifestyle of two actors. In the two years that we've been married, we've lived in various sorts of places and been on the move pretty constantly. I imagine that even when we start a family and that chapter sort of starts, it will be the same. I'm not sure there are any kind of neat parallels, if I'm being honest with you.

Interview: Glenn Close and Max Irons on Crooked House

As Edith, the head of a dysfunctional household that almost certainly includes a murderer, Glenn Close twinkles with steadfast self-confidence and mischievous perception in Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Crooked House. In contrast, Max Irons plays it straight as the private detective hired to ferret out the killer, giving each member of an ensemble cast of colorful characters a chance to commandeer the spotlight as he conducts interviews and studies family dynamics. I met with Close and Irons (and Close's dog, Pip, who never strayed far from Close's feet) at the Crosby Street Hotel for an occasionally raucous conversation often punctuated by Close's merry laugh and by teasing banter or quick bursts of dialogue between the two actors, who have known each other since Max was an infant. (Max is the son of Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for Reversal of Fortune, which also starred Close.) We talked about Close's artistic family, how women have been treated in Hollywood and how that's changing, and how it felt for the old family friends to work together in two films in a row (Björn Runge's The Wife is coming out next year).

My sister-in-law, who lives in Wilson, Wyoming, has art by your sister.
Glenn Close: Tina! That's where Tina lives. Oh, how cool. She's really talented.

Is everyone in your family artistic?
Close: Yes, they are. My other sister is a writer, and my brother is an artist with metal. He has a metal shop. He can make anything happen. I love his brain! He lives in Belgrade, Montana, and he says: “I'm like what the blacksmith used to be.” People come in with parts that they can't find any more and he'll make something to replace what they lost, or he'll invent something. He's gotten people out of big trouble by just inventing things.

Interview: Bill Pullman on The Ballad of Lefty Brown

As the star of writer-director Jared Moshe's western The Ballad of Lefty Brown, Bill Pullman plays a sidekick turned leading man after his boss (played by Peter Fonda) is murdered and he sets out to find the killer. Pullman said he based Lefty partly on a friend from Montana who was “a third wheel” to the actor and his then-girlfriend, and now wife, Tamara when they were all in their 20s—although his pal, he added with typically self-deprecating humor, didn't look up to him the way Lefty looks up to his friend and mentor. In an interview at his publicist's Manhattan office, the affable Pullman talked about playing a self-doubting beta male, stood up for Jack Kramer, his character in The Battle of the Sexes, and joked about the awards he doesn't have.

You've played comic roles and straight roles. Lefty seems to me to be a little of each. How did you think of it when you were playing it?

It was more the perception of characters around him, that he was a fool.

Best Movies of the Year

Here's Slant's list of the best films of 2017, which I contributed to.

And here are my top 10 picks and honorable mentions.

My Top 10 
Get Out
Graduation
The Phantom Thread
A Quiet Passion
Faces Places
I Am Not Your Negro
Dunkirk
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Lady Bird (my interview with Laurie Metcalf)
4 Days in France

My Honorable Mentions
For Ahkeem, Tempestad, BPM, Harmonium, Whose Streets?, The Florida Project, Intent to Destroy, Rat Film, Donald Cried, Get Me Roger Stone

Best TV Shows of 2017

Here's Slant Magazine's list of the year's top 25 TV shows, which I contributed to. And here's my 10 top list, plus a bunch of honorable mentions--lots, since there were so many good ones again this year.

My Top 10
The Leftovers (my interview with Ann Dowd)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Big Little Lies
One Mississippi
The Good Place
Homeland
The Americans (my review of Season 4)
Master of None
The Handmaid's Tale  (my interview with Ann Dowd)
Chewing Gum

My Honorable Mentions
Bojack Horseman, Narcos, Blackish, People of Earth, Rick and Morty, The Black Mirror, Alias Grace, Insecure, Episodes, Veep, Ozark, Better Things, Girls, Jane the Virgin, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mindhunter, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Silicon Valley, You’re the Worst, Crashing

Get Out

Get Out's central conceit, about a Stepford Wives-ish plot by blithely entitled suburban whites to colonize black people's bodies, is a trenchant metaphor for white supremacy. The timing, character development, and gift for social satire that writer-director Jordan Peele honed as a sketch comedian all translate effortlessly to horror, allowing the first-time filmmaker to entrance his audience as deftly as Catherine Keener's Missy mesmerizes Daniel Kaluuya's Chris with that tapping teaspoon. The Sunken Place where Missy maroons Chris is the film's most indelible image, a stomach-churning representation of how it feels to be stripped of your autonomy and personhood by a dominant culture that remains cruelly blind and deaf to your plight. In a world where almost no one is what they initially appear to be, Get Out anatomizes the evil lurking in the relatively benign-seeming prejudice that plays out as fetishization or envy, a form of racism that doesn't see itself as racist at all. Written for Slant Magazine

I Am Not Your Negro

Except for some questions he's asked by interviewers and a few puny would-be rebuttals by smug debaters, whom he swats away like so many intellectual gnats, James Baldwin's diamantine words—sometimes spoken by the writer himself on video and sometimes read by a subdued Samuel L. Jackson—are the only ones heard in I Am Not Your Negro. Fueled by a perpetually simmering cauldron of grief and rage yet unfailingly compassionate and open-minded, the elegantly world-weary Baldwin traces the thick vein of racism that runs through the heart of U.S. history and culture, identifying it as the original sin the nation must come to terms with if it is ever going to become what it claims to be. “What white people have to do is find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he says, just before uttering the phrase that gives the film its title—though he doesn't use the word “negro.” Raoul Peck borrows his film's structure from an unfinished work in which Baldwin had planned to compare the lives of three black civil rights leaders who were assassinated: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. The film sketches out the differing approaches adopted by the three leaders only broadly, but Baldwin's analysis shines through with brilliant clarity. While Jackson reads from both published and unpublished texts, archival video bleeds into recent news footage about travesties like the Trayon Martin killing, making it clear how distressingly urgent Baldwin's words still are. Written for Slant Magazine

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Season 4

Daily Show alum John Oliver has surpassed his former boss as the nation’s premier journalist/advocate disguised as a comedian. Jon Stewart’s near-nightly monologues sometimes skittered along the surface of a subject or fell into step with the rest of the stampeding media herd, but Oliver dives deep every week into a single topic, and he always chooses subjects whose bones have not been picked dry by cable news or other late-night commentators. Whether he’s discussing the true face of coal mining, the threat to local news posed by Sinclair Broadcast Group, or the many dubious products peddled by Alex Jones, he lays out facts with deadly precision, nailing what is being done and why it matters while pointing out underlying motivations and patterns. In his final show of the season, which summarized the first year since Trump’s election, he identified the three methods the president is using to undermine our democracy: delegitimizing the media, “what about-ism,” and trolling. Perhaps most impressively, he makes it fun to learn all these dry and/or depressing facts. His research and analysis may be solidly journalistic, but his delivery is acerbically comic, combining explosively expressive profanity and cheerful self-mockery with a classically British mix of verbal adroitness, instinctive distrust of authority, and an outraged contempt for hypocrisy. Written for Slant Magazine

The Good Place, Season 2

The Good Place is to a lot of its fans what its resident philosopher, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), is to bad-girl-trying-to-make-good Eleanor (Kristen Bell). At first, Eleanor’s afterlife adventure felt like a familiar enough twist on standard sitcom tropes that we took it a bit for granted even as we started falling for the series’ heart, its smarts, and how good it always left us feeling—not to mention that brilliant twist at the end of season one. Then this season tossed all our assumptions about the characters, the relationships between them, and the world they live in into the air like so many mylar balloons, and there was no denying it any more: We are in love. An exploration of what it means to be a good person, The Good Place is so buoyantly silly that you might be surprised it earns the approval of a Fordham bioethicist. And, like Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation, two other shows by writer-producer Michael Schur, it has a generosity of spirit and a belief in the power of community that feels particularly necessary these days. Written for Slant Magazine

Master of None, Season 2

The first season of Master of None focused mainly on food-obsessed metrosexual Dev’s (Aziz Ansari) prototypically millennial attempts to attain a solid footing in his love and work lives, though his attempts to make it in show biz were sometimes complicated by his Indian-American ethnicity. This season, Dev’s career and love life more often retreated into the background to make room for other issues—and other points of view. “New York City, I Love You” shifted between a series of characters, like doormen and cab drivers, who generally appear only in passing in Dev’s travels through the city, and Dev was just a supporting character in “Thanksgiving,” a delicately told tale of how his friend Denise (Lena Waithe) came out as gay, first to him and then to her mother and grandmother. Those two standout episodes, plus bits in others like Dev’s decision to out himself as a pork eater to his Muslim parents, transformed Master of None from a very good rom-com about late adolescence in urban America to a rallying cry for the soul of the nation. Written for Slant Magazine

One Mississippi, Season Two

Tig Notaro’s traumedy is a dryly comic, deeply moving reimagining of the time in her life when she moved back home to Biloxi while recovering from two profoundly challenging events: the death of her mother and her own breast cancer diagnosis. Season 2 maintains the first season’s fine-tuned sensitivity to the characters’ feelings and relationships while upping the moral and emotional antes.

Tig and her brother (Noah Harpster) grapple with the guilt and trauma they carry as a result of the sexual abuse that she suffered and he witnessed when they were children. That memory surfaces after Kate (Notaro’s real-life wife, Stephanie Allynne), the producer of Tig’s conversational/confessional radio show, is sexually assaulted by a colleague. And falling for an African-American colleague forces Tig’s socially awkward stepfather (John Rothman) to come to terms with the legacy of racism in America in general, and in the South in particular. Meanwhile Tig and Kate finally become a couple after a long, one-sided courtship during which Kate, who thinks of herself as straight, sorts out her feelings for Tig. Their love feels authentic and hard won, like everything else in this show—which is beginning to feel as much like a chronicle of present-day America as it is of Notaro’s recent past. Written for Slant Magazine

Chewing Gum, Season 2

An extravagant beauty who delights in playing the fool, Michaela Coel plays Chewing Gum’s main character, Tracey, with a near-irresistible combination of wide-eyed gusto and coltish naivete. Add in a hormonal young woman’s determination to escape the Puritanical constraints of her fundamentalist upbringing by having as much sex as possible and you have the perfect heroine for a surprisingly wholesome and endearing comedy about sex and other stupid human tricks—but mostly sex—in and around a British public housing project. This season, which Coel has said is the series’ last, makes excellent use of the actress’ gift for physical comedy, her elastic face, and her ability to telegraph buoyant vulnerability. Swiping on clownish makeup in a botched attempt to impress an ex or striking exaggeratedly alluring poses at a sex club only to face repeated rejection, Tracey is laughable and loveable, a glorious, openhearted self-directed experiment.

Interview: Michael Stuhlbarg on Call Me By Your Name and The Shape of Water

Michael Stuhlbarg was already beloved by fans and critics of New York theater, especially for his role as the childlike, mentally disabled younger brother in playwright Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, when he rose a few rungs on the ladder of fame by playing the title role in A Serious Man. Joel and Ethan Coen's masterful tragicomedy got much of its soul from Stuhlbarg's performance as a middle-class, middle-aged Midwesterner whose comfortable life is upended by a baffling onslaught of calamities large, small and ridiculous. Since then, Stuhlbarg has disappeared into roles ranging from quietly terrifying gangster Arnold Rothstein on HBO's Boardwalk Empire to loyal sidekick Sy Feltz on season three of Noah Hawley's FX series Fargo to brilliant but schlubby Andy Hertzfeld in Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs.

The increasingly in-demand actor met with me at his publicist's Midtown office to discuss two of his latest films, Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name and Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water. Stuhlbarg speaks softly and deliberately, often pausing to think about what he wants to say, yet he's no tortured artist. Smiling or laughing frequently, he often used the word “joy” as he talked about studying with Marcel Marceau, growing up as “the luckiest kid in the world,” and whether he would want to play a character he hated.

Interview: Joe Berlinger on Pushing the Documentary Envelope and Intent to Destroy

After a five-year apprenticeship as a producer for the pioneering documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, Joe Berlinger launched his directorial career with Brother's Keeper. Made in tandem with another Maysles employee, Bruce Sinofsky, the documentary did something near-revolutionary for the time: It used fiction-film techniques to tell the true story of two isolated rural brothers, one of whom was being tried for the other's death. In the 25 years since that influential debut, Berlinger has continued to make waves with films like the Paradise Lost trilogy, which covered the trials of three young men in West Memphis, Arkansas accused of the ritual killings of three boys and uncovered evidence that led to their release from prison.

I recently spoke to Berlinger at his Radical Media production company in downtown Manhattan about Intent to Destroy, a documentary about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Turkish government's century-long campaign to deny that it happened. Self-assured and voluble, Berlinger talked about the new wave of documentary filmmakers that he has been part of, what Turkey's denial of the genocide has in common with President Donald Trump's “alternative facts,” and why audiences have responded much better to Intent to Destroy than distributors have.

Interview: Laurie Metcalf on the Mother-Daughter Duet in Lady Bird

Laurie Metcalf is a powerfully empathetic actress whose often comic and always ferocious intensity inspires an equally intense empathy in audiences, encouraging us to love our fellow humans not so much despite their flaws as because of them. She invites her viewers to relate to a kaleidoscopic range of sometimes absurd or regrettable emotions and behaviors, not just from one part to the next, but within nearly every character she plays.

A charter member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, Metcalf still prefers live theater, and she recently won a Tony for her role as Nora in the Broadway production of Lucas Hnath's A Doll's House, Part Two. But she has created indelible characters for TV and film as well, including Roseanne Connor's endearingly klutzy sister Jackie on Roseanne and the big-hearted but harried mother of Saoirse Ronan's main character in Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird, a coming-of-age story that is, at its core, a mother-daughter duet.

In an interview to promote the film, Metcalf talked about her aversion to working with cameras, why she runs through all her lines before every performance of a play, and how being shy helped her as a young actor.

Interview: Sean Baker on The Florida Project

Writer-director Sean Baker’s brand of neo-neorealism focuses on people, like Tangerine‘s fierce transsexual prostitute or Prince of Broadway‘s immigrant hustler, who’re ordinarily seen only in the background of films and TV shows—if at all. His latest, The Florida Project, offers a non-judgmental, child’s-eye view of life in the Magic Castle, one of the seedy but fabulous motels in the outer orbit of Orlando’s Disney World that function as temporary housing for people one step ahead of homelessness.

While helicopters take off in the background, like emissaries from another planet, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her friends, Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), roam happily through the motel and the surrounding area, exploring their turf like a pack of wild dogs under the indulgent but protective eye of the motel’s manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe). Meanwhile, Moonee’s very young and rebellious mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite), while hustling hard to support them, creates an environment risky enough to trigger an investigation by the Department of Children and Families.

Baker called me from a train from New York to Philadelphia, where the film was about to have a gala preview at the Philadelphia Film Festival. We talked about how he works with first-time actors, why it’s hard to make character studies for American audiences, and the many factors that make it hard for people like Moonee and her mother to form stable, long-term relationships.

Ozark

Ozark delights in toying with our expectations. Its first big reveal is that the central characters, financial advisor Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman, whose natural trustworthiness nicely complicates the man’s buttoned-down efficiency) and his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), aren’t the porn-addicted shyster and clueless, cheery wife and mother that they initially appear to be. More stereotypes are subverted when, in a desperate ploy to save himself and his family after skimming cash from a drug-lord client, Marty spirits Wendy and their two kids to the Ozarks, expecting to find a safe hiding place and plenty of easy marks for a scheme that will allow him to pay back the drug lord. Instead, through a rapid series of downward-spiraling twists, Marty gets stuck between the rock of a south-of-the-border drug cartel and the hard place of an equally vicious hillbilly one. His family, his business associates, and the other people he encounters almost never just go along with Marty’s plan, their own agendas getting in the way of his and further complicating the fast-moving plot. But not all of his surprises are bad ones. Adversity knits together his beloved family, and they find at least one friend in the Ozarks, Julia Garner’s Ruth, who’s becoming a powerful, though conflicted, ally. Written for Slant Magazine

Making a Murderer

The fact that Making a Murderer was the most engrossing true crime story of 2015 no doubt helped build its enormous buzz, the need to know what happens next pulling viewers through marathon binge-watching sessions. But the show’s true greatness lies in its anatomizing of one infuriating example of the abuse of power and scapegoating of the poor that often happens in our legal system but is rarely reported in such detail. After spending months embedded in Steven Avery’s community and years researching his tortured journey through the legal and penitentiary systems, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi tell the story of Avery’s first, 17-year imprisonment for a crime he never committed and his second trial and conviction for another that he may well have been framed for as well. With the help of footage of his second trial, interviews with family, friends, and lawyers, the filmmakers elucidate various aspects of the story, from widespread contempt of Avery as “white trash” to arcane legal arguments raised by the trial, with admirable clarity. And, as the police and prosecutors of Manitowoc County keep trying to prove Avery guilty of some heinous crime, the series finds them guilty of gross miscarriages of justice. Written for Slant Magazine

The Crown

Once again, The Queen’s Peter Morgan combines extensive research with a highly empathetic understanding of human nature to create a fascinating exploration of the capabilities and limitations of Britain’s monarchy in the 20th century, the enormous personal sacrifices that monarchy required of Elizabeth II, and the strains it exerted on her family. The Crown opens with Elizabeth’s (Claire Foy) beloved father, king George (Jared Harris), another reluctant monarch who inherited the role only after his older brother renounced it. It then follows the young queen as, forced to give up her cherished private life after her father’s demise, she grows into the role of queen—and into a form of greatness distinguished by genuine humility and common-sense values. A feminist tale of a patronized, undereducated, and perpetually underestimated young woman who learns to rely on her native intelligence and good sense to help lead a besieged country through perilous times, The Crown makes the case that the best rulers may be those who never wanted the role.

Lady Dynamite

Her endearing eagerness to please, extreme social awkwardness, and hopeless inability to camouflage her feelings makes the semi-fictionalized version of her bipolar self that actor-writer-comedian Maria Bamford plays in Lady Dynamite a kind of human emoji factory, her unguarded face expressing a kaleidoscope of comically intense emotions. Her bafflement and improvised solutions to uncomfortable situations make things we have all struggled with, like dating, feel as freshly and insightfully witnessed as her wide-eyed adventures in Hollywood. Though she’s anything but a stone face, Bamford has more than a little Buster Keaton in her, her cosmic befuddlement and heroic efforts to navigate even the simplest situation highlighting the absurdity in just about everything. Written for Slant Magazine

The 20 Best Original Netflix Shows

Read our list of the 20 best shows created for Netflix so far--including my write-ups of Lady Dynamite, The Crown, Making a Murderer and Ozark--on Slant Magazine.

Interview: Lakeith Stanfield

Lakeith Stanfield has been racking up standout performances in some of the most buzzed-about films of the past decade: as the guarded but sensitive resident of a group home for teens in Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12; murdered civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson in Ava DuVernay's Selma; Snoop Dogg in F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton; and the bodysnatched Brooklyn hipster in Jordan Peele's Get Out. He's also a standout in Donald Glover's Atlanta on FX, in which he plays the perpetually stoned and free-associative Darius.

His latest film is writer-director Matt Ruskin's harrowing but unsensationalized Crown Heights, the based-on-a-true-story tale of Colin Warner. Warner was framed as a teenager for a crime he didn't commit and spent 21 years in prison before getting out, thanks to his own efforts and the unfailing support and advocacy of a friend on the outside. In the film, Stanfield gives a powerful but understated performance, richly capturing Warner's warmth, strength of character, and philosophical nature.

In New York this week to promote the film, Stanfield spoke with me about why acting in Get Out was an out-of-body experience, how the internet nurtures creativity, and whether racial justice has made any progress in the United States in the half century-plus since the march on Selma.

Right from the start, you've played interesting roles in movies that got a lot of buzz. Do you just have really good taste, or do you get good advice?

Yeah, well, I'm a member of the Illuminati. [Laughs] I think it's a combination. I have a really hard-working agency behind me.