Interviews: The Good Time Gang and More
With Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time in theaters, the Los Angeles Times’Justin Chang talks with Robert Pattinson about his cinephilia, which took root when he was a teen. “Godard’s Prénom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen) was a massive one for me in terms of tone and performance,” he says. “I love genre shifts, and I just think for that to start off as a kind of farce and then to develop into one of the most moving relationship stories, unrequited love stories, that I’ve ever seen—that really stuck out.”
Reviewing Good Time for Artforum,Amy Taubin finds that “Pattinson seems to have checked his superego before each shot and let his id wreak havoc. Pattinson’s Connie is on a bad trip, and so is the movie—except that it’s so kinetic and exciting to look at and listen to that you just go with it without worrying that you’ll be wrecked in the morning.”
For Interview,Julia Yepes talks with Good Time cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who’s also shot Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime, opening Friday; Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street, out next month; and Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits, rolling out later this year. Among the topics covered are Albert Maysles (“there was something there that was like mentorship”) and: “My favorite movie that I shot is one you can’t really see. It was shot in Okinawa in 2009. It’s called Kuichisan. I don’t even have a copy. [Director Maiko Endo] is one of my best friends in the world, but she likes that you can’t see it, I think. It’s a beautiful movie.”
On the WTF Podcast (71’12”), Marc Maron talks with Jennifer Jason Leigh about Good Time but also about her entire career, stretching back to her breakthrough in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
From the New Yorker’s Richard Brody: “Just as the stylization of Hawks’s Scarface is an emblem of the Depression, just as the stylization of Bonnie and Clyde is an emblem of the Vietnam War era, so the stylization of Good Time is, and will remain, an exemplary and brilliant artistic distillation of the age of Trump.”
More Interviews
“Jacques Demy and I used to have 16 mm projector at home,” Agnès Varda tells Chandler Levack at the TIFF Review, adding that “we would screen Pickpocket every three months. We’d watch Children of Paradise, Fellini’s work, and such films all the time. We were very impressed by Fellini, Bresson, and Bergman. Nobody speaks about him now, but at that time, he was so important.”
“I never had the desire to be a film critic,” Olivier Assayas tells 4:3’s Jeremy Elphick and E. Nina Rothe of the Huffington Post. “I never envisioned myself as a film critic, but I did that at a period of my life when I thought I kind of needed to understand things about cinema, understand things about film theory, understand the world map of cinema, and writing about movies gave me that, and also the opportunity to meet filmmakers I admired. To me, it was the best possible film school.”
Nicole Kidman tells Joe Utichi at Deadline about the time, when she was fourteen, she skipped class to see Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). “I remember being startled. . . . I wasn’t yet a massive Kubrick fan or anything. I was a Vivien Leigh fan, and a Marlon Brando fan, and I’d go and see European films like Betty Blue; off-beat French films that were embraced in Australia. But the way [Kubrick] was able to grasp ideas and images and music . . . that’s when I went, ‘Oh, so this is what a director does.’”
For Slant, Chuck Bowen calls up Geena Davis to talk about “certain parallels that may exist between Marjorie Prime and The Fly, as well as her continuing activism as founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media.”
Listening
Andréa R. Vaucher interviewed the late Jeanne Moreau for the March/April 1990 issue of Film Comment and revisits the conversation in FC’s latest podcast (36’20”).
The TIFF Review has posted two conversations from last year, Theresa Scandiffio’s with Richard Linklater (60’11”) and Geoff McNaughton and Rob Kraszewski’s with Paul Schrader (34’02”).
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Close-Up presents a 2011 conversation with Wim Wenders (76’59”).
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