Interviews

“Unlike other kids my age,” recalls Bretten Hannam, “I didn’t play with many toys. I would rather draw, paint and tell stories.

It was very clear to Gaby Chiappe that the lead character in AMC’s The Beast Must Die would have to be a woman. The screenwriter, who was about to adapt Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel into a TV thriller series, felt that the story about a parent who loses a child to a traffic accident would be easier for her to relate to if the character were a woman.

Justine Bateman, former child star of 80s sitcom Family Ties, makes her feature film directorial debut with the thought-provoking drama, Violet, at the Toronto Film Festival. The success of the film rests on the shoulders of Olivia Munn, playing a successful Hollywood executive, Violet, who battles multiple insecurities exacerbated by the voice in her head (otherwise known as ‘the committee’) voiced by Justin Theroux, who takes her to task at every opportunity.

When the end credits started to roll after the first press screening of Dune at the Venice Film Festival, enthusiastic applause filled the Sala Grande screening theater. Director Denis Villeneuve’s bold adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic science fiction novel divides the 412-page book into two sections, with Dune: Part One (the movie’s full moniker) introducing audiences to the dangerous desert planet of Arrakis, colossal sandworms and a young heir named Paul Atreides (played by Golden Globe-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet).

She's back in Stockholm after spending a few days at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where she presented her first feature, Pleasure, in front of a live audience. Her name is Ninja Thyberg and in the eyes of Hollywood, she is the next big thing.

Sergey Fetisov might have been just another footnote in human history had his memoir The Story of Roman not fallen into the creative hands of writer-director Peeter Rebane and writer-star Tom Prior (The Theory of Everything). His chronicle of serving in the Russian military in Estonia during the height of the 1970s Cold War and falling into a love triangle with fighter pilot Roman Medveyev (Oleg Zagorodnii) and best friend Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) serves as the backdrop to a provocative study of love, self-acceptance, betrayal and social mores.

Jeffrey Schwarz, like most cinephiles, has a special love for the film Sunset Boulevard. While the award-winning documentarian thought he knew everything about Billy Wilder’s 1950 Hollywood masterpiece, which introduced the world to Norma Desmond, an aging actress brilliantly played by Golden Globe-winning Best Actress Gloria Swanson, he was surprised to discover a unique afterlife to the cinematic classic.

Oliver Stone’s latest project JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, is a documentary which explores the factual side of the events he dramatized in JFK (1991), which earned him a Golden Globe exactly 30 years ago. JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, narrated by Donald Sutherland and Whoopi Goldberg, premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on July 11, while JFK will be screened on the giant Plage screen.

His amazing portrayal of Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya in Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit was one of the keys to the success of the Israeli film, which won three awards at the Un Certain Regard section in the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. That led to winning the Best Actor at the European Film Awards and the Jerusalem Film Festival, among many others, in the same year.

Joshua Coates directed, co-wrote and produced Ageless Love, a true love story about a Jewish couple, Yale Schwartz & Nina Lemisch, living in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. It’s an against-the-odds story of how their relationship began, she was a 38-year-old widow raising five children, and he, a 24-year-old college graduate.