If you walked out of The Muppets feeling like you were on top of the world, Bret McKenzie was a big reason. The actor/singer/songwriter, best known for his HBO series Flight of the Conchords, was hired by director James Bobin to write many of the brand new songs for characters like Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo and others to sing in the Muppets triumphant return to the screen. And to that aim, McKenzie was a success. He was rewarded for his work with an Oscar-nomination for Best Original Song for “Man or Muppet,” which features Jason Segel’s character Gary and his brother, Walter the Muppet, signing about their true identities. It’s funny, clever, catchy and has a 50/50 shot at gold since only two songs are nominated.
We sat down to talk to McKenzie about the honor, his process integrating songs in the film, the song not being performed at the Oscars, as well as his upcoming role in a tiny film called The Hobbit and more. Watch the video interview after the jump. Read More »
.
Please Recommend /Film on Facebook
While on the Utah set of John Carter, a group of journalists (including myself) has the opportunity to interview to the cast and crew. On the following pages, you can read the interviews we conducted on set, transcribed in full:
Read More »
January movies are usually terrible. It’s a time studios generally reserve for films that are either not good enough to compete during awards seasons or not exciting enough to play during the summer. Every once in a while, though, a really great one slips through the cracks and that happens this month with Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey. In a way, though, it does fit the January mold though because it’s not quite an awards film, but too heady for the summer. Plus it’ll make you feel really cold.
The Grey follows Liam Neeson and a group of blue collar workers whose plane crashes over Alaska. They’re then forced to survive in the freezing wilderness along with a pack of vicious wolves. The film blends elements of action, horror, drama and even romance in an all-together satisfying and bad-ass package. I mean, did you not see the trailer with Neeson fighting wolves with broken bottles on his hands?
/Film spoke to the film’s writer/director Joe Carnahan about the origins of that scene (hint: Wolverine) as well as parallels between the film and Neeson’s real-life tragedy, working with a small, up and coming distributor and how online media is changing the way filmmakers make movies. Read about it all after the jump. Read More »
Amongst bloggers, Sundance interviews can be a controversial topic. On one hand, you’re given unprecedented access to the stars and filmmakers behind what are potentially some of the biggest films of the year. Doing so, however, means seeing fewer movies, because huge chunks of time must be devoted to traveling to and from interview locations, which are often remote and incredibly loud.
Generally, we here at /Film let the movies do the talking when it comes to Sundance. But as a huge fan of the comedy duo known as Tim and Eric, I knew I’d probably never, ever get the chance to speak to them one on one ever again. So I did. And I filmed it.
After the jump, watch a ten minute video interview with not only Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim but their friend Will Forte too. We discuss Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, which hits video on demand January 27 and theaters on March 2 (watch the review here), as well as their sense of humor, process, the likelihood they’ll return to television and more. Read More »
Posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 by David Chen
Director Errol Morris has made a career out of solving mysteries, which comes as no surprise since the man used to be a private detective. Whether he was exonerating Randall Dale Adams in The Thin Blue Line or unraveling a sordid sex tale in Tabloid, Morris has deftly used his subjects to provide gripping accounts of situations that have been wrapped in intrigue and ambiguity.
In his book, Believing is Seeing, Morris turns his attention to the art of photography. In a series of photographic whodunnits, Morris explores the truth-telling capacity of photos. His conclusion? “Photographs don’t have truth value.”
I had a chance to sit down with Morris in his Cambridge, MA office during his recent book tour and chat extensively with him about the nature of photography, the plausibility of re-enactments, and Joyce McKinney’s controversial reaction to Tabloid. After the break, read highlights of my discussion with Morris. Below, you can also download and listen to the entire hour-long interview I had with him. You can buy his book at Amazon or in bookstores. Tabloid is now also for sale on DVD.
Download or Play Now in your Browser:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Subscribe to the /Filmcast:
Read More »
Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol is Brad Bird‘s first live-action movie. Think about that for a second. In the film community he’s easily one of the most exciting and respected directors out there but he’s never released a movie with a flesh and blood person in it. It’s fairly mind-boggling. Then you watch The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille and realize the characters in those are way more human than humans are in most movies.
The fact of the matter is Brad Bird was simply born to tell entertaining, exciting stories and he’s finally doing it with humans with Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, which opened last week in IMAX and opens everywhere else today. Tom Cruise returns as IMF agent Ethan Hunt whose team, including Simon Pegg, Paula Patton and Jeremy Renner, are disavowed and must fight to save the world.
In October, /Film spoke to Bird at a Beverly Hills hotel about his first foray into live action, shooting for IMAX, its early release, the then-rumor of The Dark Knight Rises prologue being in front of his movie and the latest on his long discussed disaster film 1906. Read the interview after the jump. Read More »
We’ve posted the directors, actors, actresses, writers and now it’s time for the people who bring them all together. Every year during awards season, The Hollywood Reporter organizes the schedules of basically every single actor, actress, writer and director of the year’s best films to sit down and discuss them. This, in itself, is pretty spectacular. What’s even better is they release the videos of the full conversations so we can watch. For the 2011 Producers’ Roundtable, they’ve brought together Midnight in Paris producer Letty Aronson, Moneyball producer Michael De Luca, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy producer Tim Bevan, War Horse producer Kathleen Kennedy, The Tree of Life producer Bill Pohlad, The Descendants producer Jim Burke and The Help producer Chris Columbus to discuss their own, and each others’, films, all of which have a good shot at multiple award nominations. Check out the video after the jump. Read More »
Posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 by Angie Han
Unknown Brit actor Jeremy Irvine got the kind of big-screen debut you generally only see on, well, the big screen when Steven Spielberg plucked him out of hundreds of applicants to lead the cast of his sweeping epic War Horse. But it’s plain hard work that’s already allowed the young star to spin that high-profile start into an enviable career.
Though War Horse won’t hit theaters until later this month, Irvine’s already wrapped the cancer drama Now is Good with Dakota Fanning and is now playing literary icon Pip in Mike Newell’s Great Expectations, opposite the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter. Once that’s finished, he’s set to play a younger version of Colin Firth in The Railway Man, about a World War II POW. Not too shabby for a guy who, as he himself puts it, “literally had to learn everything from scratch” while shooting War Horse last year.
In a recent interview with /Film, Irvine talked about the best thing to come out of his War Horse experience, the actors he admires most, and the dream role he wants to play a few years down the line. Read the full transcript after the jump.
Read More »
