Edition #294: Liev Schreiber, Salt
 First broadcast 2010-08-27
or listen with iTunes
Hailed as one of the definitive actors of his generation, Liev Schreiber pursues in his film and theater roles a smörgåsbord of variously contrasting and complementary roles. Salt, his hit summer movie opposite Angelina Jolie, casts Schreiber as a resourceful CIA operative, while a year ago, in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, he was wonderfully convincing as a cross-dressing celebrant during the Summer of Peace and Love (17 minutes).
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Edition #293: Fatih Akin, Soul Kitchen
First broadcast August 27, 2010
or listen with iTunes
Fatih Akin is one of the world’s great directors. His latest film, Soul Kitchen, is an amiable comedy about a Berlin restaurant, two brothers, a crazy chef and tax collectors, and it marks a notable change of pace from his past endeavors. Akin, 37, established his international reputation with Head On, a riveting examination of love's ferocious powers, which won Berlin's Golden Bear in 2004. Akin's 2007 follow-up, The Edge of Heaven, garnered the writer-director the Prix du scénario at the Cannes Film Festival. As he tells us today, Heaven was written expressly for Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla and Soul Kitchen, his most expensive film, was originally conceived as a lark (30 minutes).
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Edition #292: Vincent Cassel, Mesrine
First broadcast August 20, 2010
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Mesrine, a two-part, four hour biography of the notorious French bank robber, jail breaker and killer Jacques Mesrine, has already earned Vincent Cassel the Best Actor César for his mesmerizing portrait of France's one-time Public Enemy No. 1. In a wide-ranging interview, Cassel, the son of '60s and '70s French icon Jean-Pierre Cassel, discusses his beginnings as an acrobat, his initial disdain for French cinema and love of American movies and his frequent collaborations with his wife, Monica Bellucci (18 minutes).
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Edition #291: Patricia Clarkson, Cairo Time
First broadcast August 13, 2010
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At 50, Patricia Clarkson, who has established herself as one of American cinema's most versatile actors, takes her rightful place center stage in Ruba Nadda's sixteenth film, Cairo Time. An Oscar nominee for her role as a dying wife in 2004's Pieces of April, Clarkson's breakthrough was as a Fassbinder-style self-destructive German diva in 1998's High Art. The New Orleans-born and -raised performer, who has worked with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, discusses life, art and staying alive in the Hollywood scheme of things (20 minutes).
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Edition #290: Jackie Weaver & David Michod, Animal Kingdom
First broadcast August 6, 2010
David Michod:
or listen with iTunes (17 minutes)
Jackie Weaver:
or listen with iTunes (20 minutes)
Jacki Weaver's work, primarily on the stage, has made her an icon in her native Australia, and led non-Oceanians to dub her Australia's Meryl Streep. Animal Kingdom, a rousing study of a
Melbourne crime family from first-time filmmaker David Michod, cast
Weaver as Smurf, the seemingly maternal matriarch who will turn homicidal
when crossed. Michod's disturbing portrait of vigilante cops and crooks
works thanks to a first-rate cast that includes Guy Pearce as an earnest
detective, Joel Edgerton as a criminal associate, Ben Mendelsohn as the
troupe's scariest elder and newcomer James Frecheville as the orphan brought
into their unholy midst.
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Edition #289: Samuel Maoz, Lebanon
First broadcast July 30, 2010
or listen with iTunes
Last September, Lebanon became the first Israeli film to ever win the Gold Lion at Venice. It is also the first feature from writer-director Samuel Maoz, whose experience in a tank during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war was basis for this dramatic tour de force. This September, Maoz returns to Venice as a juror on Quentin Tarantino's jury (15 minutes).
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Edition #288: Christian Carion, Farewell
 First broadcast July 23, 2010
or listen with iTunes
After Merry Christmas, his 2005 Oscar-nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, French filmmaker Christian Carion emerges with Farewell, which traces a true World War I story, the 1914 Christmas Day armistice in the trenches, to one of the most important espionage exposes of the 20th century: the case of the KGB officer, code name Farewell, whose leaked documents to the Reagan administration have been cited as one of the pivotal reasons for the eventual collapse of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of Soviet Russia. Carion discusses the case and why he cast two directors, Emir Kusterica (Underground, Time of the Gypsies) and Guillaume Canet (Tell No One), in the leads; he also explains why he couldn't shoot in Moscow and how Diane Kruger took time from Inglourious Basterds to do a cameo (16 minutes).
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Edition #287: Lance Daly, Kisses
First broadcast July 16, 2010
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Making the most of limited budgets and real locations, Dublin auteur Lance Daly's third film, Kisses, is a study of two runaways. Dylan (Shane Curry), flees an abusive father just as his older brother had done two years earlier. Kylie (Kelly O'Neill) lives next door with five siblings and an overworked mother. Directing children can be formidable by itself; casting, as the bearded Daly details here, involved thousands of candidates. But tremendous work has evidently paid off: not only has Kisses just received American distribution, Daly has also just finished a made-in-Hollywood Hitchcock-style thriller with Orlando Bloom (21 minutes).
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Edition #286: Roger Nygard, The Nature of Existence
First broadcast July 9, 2010
or listen with iTunes
Few no could claim that Roger Nygard doesn't try to tackle major issues. In his latest film, The Nature of Existence, this TV and documentary director--best known for his terrific examination of Star Trek enthusiasts in 1999's Trekkies--goes around the world in the service of the Big Questions: What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Happily, he imbues his subjects with a rare empathy and sense of humor--and an uncanny ability to find interesting on-camera subjects for his breezy, tightly edited quests. In The Nature of Existence, they include evolutionary biologist and The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, Ultimate Christian Wrestling rounder Rob Adonis, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling and King Arthur Pendragon--his name is no joke: it's on his license--, Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, string theory co-discover and Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda (26 minutes).
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Edition #285: Tilda Swinton, I Am Love
First broadcast July 2, 2010
or listen with iTunes
Tilda Swinton--Oscar-winning actress, fashion icon, artist, film festival founder
and producer--heats up summer movie-going with two definitive roles. I Am Love presents Scotland's elegant redhead as the Russian-born wife of a
wealthy Milanese industrialist whose carefully ordered world is thrown into
disarray when she dines on a scrumptious meal of prawns. "It's
'prawn-ography,'" Swinton jokes of the dish that prompts this proper
matriarch to run off with a much younger cook whose prawns captivated her.
Then comes the 2010 re-release of Sally Potter's 1993 Orlando, Swinton's first
international hit, in which she embodies the title character Virginia Woolf's seminal novel of a literarily-inclined youth who, over the course of several centuries, transforms from male to female (24 minutes).
To listen to Stephen Schaefer's interview with Luca Guadagnino, the co-writer, producer and director of I Am Love, click here.
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Edition #284: Agnès Jaoui, Let It Rain & Danièle Thompson, Change of Plans
First broadcast June 25, 2010
Agnès Jaoui:
or listen with iTunes (27 minutes)
Danièle Thompson: Audio temporarily unavailable
In this feature on two of contemporary French cinema's most prominent auteurs, filmmaker-actor Agnès Jaoui and filmmaker Danièle Thompson discuss their methods and most recent work. Both begin with the writing, always in person, together. Jaoui, who has collaborated and costarred with Jean-Pierre Bacri in such previous efforts as The Taste of Others and Look at Me, returns with Let It Rain, in which she plays a politician who visits a provincial town and participates in a documentary on "successful women." Thompson segued from screenwriter to writer-director which she writes with her son Christopher Thompson, with 1999's La bûche. Her fourth feature Change of Plans, featuring Dany Boon, Emanuelle Seigner and the younger Thompson, intriguingly presents 10 people at a dinner party, then follows them a year later to see how much--or little--has changed.
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Edition #283: Johan Grimonprez, Double Take
First broadcast June 18, 2010
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Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez--perhaps best known for his video installations--compiles TV commercials, footage of the famous "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev and extensive clips of Alfred Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock Presents to advocate the case he makes in his film-essay, Double Take for a parallel between America's Cold War tensions and Hitchcock films. Using a story by Tom McCarthy as its impetus, Grimonprez further adds to the conspiratorial frenzy with a famous Hitchcock lookalike and interviews of his own creation (28 minutes).
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Edition #282: Joan Rivers, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work & Jamie Kennedy, Finding Bliss
First broadcast June 11, 2010
Joan Rivers:
or listen with iTunes (16 minutes)
Jamie Kennedy:
or listen with iTunes (23 minutes)
Joan Rivers and Jamie Kennedy are both stand-up comics who have gone beyond comedy clubs. Rivers, now 76, opens up about being filmed for a year of her life for the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, while Kennedy, on the eve of his 40th birthday, talks about doing full frontal nudity, TV and discipline as it relates to the Julie Davis-helmed independent comedy, Finding Bliss.
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Edition #281: Noah Miller & Logan Miller, Touching Home
First broadcast June 4, 2010
or listen with iTunes
At 28, twins Noah Miller and Logan Miller made a promise to the memory of their recently deceased father, who had died of a ruptured aorta, alone on the floor of his jail cell: They would make a movie within the next twelve months. Four years later, Touching Home was released, with Ed Harris playing a fictionalized version of their dad and the brothers playing themselves. The Millers wrote, directed and star in the film, the history of which they trace in their book Either You're In or You're in the Way (32 minutes).
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Edition #280: Hrithik Roshan & Barbara Mori, Kites
First broadcast May 28, 2010
or listen with iTunes
Hrithik Roshan, often called the Brad Pitt of India, is a
superstar of Bollywood musicals, as well known for his fabulously defined
physique as for his green eyes and the fantastical roles he takes on. Kites, made in Las
Vegas and the American Southwest in Spanish, English and Hindi, pairs Roshan
with Mexico's Barbara Mori, who together play two hustling
opportunists who fall for each other and flee Vegas gangsters, irate
ex-lovers and the police. The action-filled movie is a departure from the
usual three-to-four hour Bollywood effort in that it's only 130-minutes long, although it's also being released as the 90-minute Bret Rattner Presents Kites: The Remix (17 minutes).
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Edition #278: Mia Hansen-Løve, The Father of My Children
First broadcast May 21, 2010
or listen with iTunes
French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve took inspiration for her second film, The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants), from the 2005 suicide of legendary producer Humbert Balsan, whom she knew as an aspiring filmmaker. Her Father is presented in two halves, the first focusing on embattled producer Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaling) and the second his Italian wife Sylvia (Chiara Caselli). Hansen-Løve’s film has few cinematic equals in its depiction of life in the film industry, and here the wise, young writer/director discusses the aesthetic and personal influences that lent her the canny and knowing wherewithal to create such a singular document (24 minutes).
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Edition #277: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Micmacs
First broadcast May 14, 2010
As one of cinema’s most individual stylists, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is inevitably
grouped with such other iconoclastic filmmakers as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. But this French writer-director has an entirely
unique vision, one that has resulted in movies as diverse as Delicatessen, City of
Lost Children, A Very Long Engagement and, of course, his global box
office charmer, Amélie. Jeunet’s latest offering is Micmacs, a daffy caper
comedy that, while condemning arms-dealing and war, details a romantic tale about a varied
group that Jeunet has compared to the Seven Dwarfs (25 minutes).
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Edition #276: Michael Caine, Harry Brown
First broadcast May 7, 2010
At 77, Michael Caine may be a doting grandfather, but he doesn’t need
juice, coffee--and much less breakfast--as he sits in a booth at the
Regency Hotel with Subtitles and talks about his earlier years, back when
few thought he would have this brilliant career. In his new movie, Harry Brown, he stars as the titular pensioner turned vigilante; he discusses this role and talks about and what, exactly, he thinks of today’s crop of young leading men (22 minutes).
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Edition #275: Jean Dujardin & Michel Hazanavicius, OSS 117: Lost in Rio
First broadcast April 30, 2010
In OSS 117: Lost in Rio, France's Bond-style secret agent OSS 117 is back, bringing with him even more pointed idiocy and slapstick adventure. Jean Dujardin reprises the peerlessly preening, Clouseau-like anti-hero of Michel Hazanavicius' 2006 OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies in a sequel that sees OSS 117 still not quite caught up with the era's dramatic upheavals. The 1967-set escapade finds the bumbling boob pursuing fugitive Nazis while partnered with a beautiful Israeli agent (Louise Monot). Dujardin and Hazanavicius, in French and English, try to seriously discuss the obstacles of sending up a racist, sexist embodiment of French cultural supremacy while still finding laughs (29 minutes).
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Edition #273: Luca Guadagnino, I Am Love
First broadcast April 23, 2010
Luca Guadagnino, the Italian co-writer, producer and director of the acclaimed drama I Am Love, discusses his collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who stars as the wife of a Milanese industrialist, and the salience of her costumes, which were designed by the actress and Raf Simons for Jil Sander, as well as why the food, supervised by Milan's Michelin-rated chef Carlo Cracco, is so important to the film. Guadagnino, who speaks lightly-accented English, is reluctant to reveal what the implications of his story are, leaving that to the viewer, but he acknowledges casting Marisa Berenson as the family's matriarch for her association with Visconti's Death in Venice, and concedes that Swinton's French bun is a nod to Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo. WARNING: Spoilers about the plot are discussed (29 minutes).
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Edition #272: Chloë Grace Moretz & Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kick-Ass
First broadcast April 16, 2010
Kick-Ass traces the adventures of a geeky high schooler who develops a superhero altar ego in order to combat the evils that plague every adolescent, before descending into the dark and truly evil underworld of local crime syndicates and drug-peddling. Stephen Schaefer speaks first with Christopher Mintz-Plasse, whose film debut as McLovin in Superbad has reached nearly iconic status in the canon of cinematic nerdhood. Mintz-Plasse changes gears here as a gangster’s son eager for dad’s approval. Then comes Chloë Grace Moretz, now 13 but 11 during filming, whose performance as vigilante crime-fighter Hit-Girl has been swept up into a swirl of controversy about the appropriateness of a child actor using crude adult slang and being extremely violent. Comparisons to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman in The Professional are inevitable. So is the eminence of Moretz’s career: she just completed the American remake of Swedish vampire sensation Let the Right One In and is signed to star in Martin Scorsese’s next movie (31 minutes).
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Edition #271: Nash Edgerton, The Square
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listen with RealPlayer
First broadcast April 9, 2010
Nash Edgerton and his younger brother, Joel, are the dynamic duo behind the
acclaimed Australian import The Square. Written by Joel, who recently won
raves onstage opposite Cate Blanchett in the Sydney Theater Production of A
Streetcar Named Desire, and
directed and edited by Nash, The Square is a nastily involving noir
involving an adulterous couple, a construction site, an arsonist, his much
younger girlfriend and two dogs. As a calling card, this debut feature is
doing what was intended: making their careers. Nash sat down with
Subtitles to discuss their sibling relationship, why he wanted unknowns,
how Joel got to play the arsonist and why he is bearded with burn-scarred
skin. Named not for the American automobile but Graham Nash of Crosby,
Still & Nash, Nash recalls the Sydney hometown premiere and its attendant jitters, and admits to a now-firm aversion to ever hiring dogs for a low-budget movie again (25 minutes).
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Edition #270: Ciarán Hinds & Conor McPherson, The Eclipse
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listen with RealPlayer
First broadcast March 26, 2010
An Irish ghost story, The Eclipse is written and directed by Olivier Award-winning playwright Conor McPherson (The Seafarer) and stars Ciarán Hinds as a widower with two children who comes to doubt alternately his sanity and the sanctity of his household as, come the town's annual literary festival, his house seems to become the focus of some quite unnerving specters. Aidan Quinn and Iben Hjejle costar as writers whose presence adds to the menace, mystery and romance (40 minutes).
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Edition #269: Niels Arden Oplev & Noomi Rapace, The Girl With Dragon Tattoo
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First broadcast March 19, 2010
The first in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a crime novel set in Larsson's native Sweden, one teeming with neo-Nazis, serial killers and an astounding punk heroine named Lisbeth Salander, she of the dragon tattoo.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been made into the most successful Swedish film of all time, beating the inevitable Hollywood version to the punch. Stephen Schaefer speaks with the film's Danish director Niels Arden Oplev and Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, whose star-making performance as Lisbeth is being compared to Vivien Leigh and Scarlett O'Hara (28 minutes).
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Edition #268: 60th Berlin Film Festival: James Rasin, Beautiful Darling
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First broadcast February 26, 2010
Beautiful Darling, James Rasin's revealing, affectionate documentary on Candy Darling, the Warhol superstar who modeled herself on Hollywood's iconic blondes Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe, boasts archival footage with Candy--born James Slattery--as well as Warhol, Tennessee Williams and Dennis Hopper. It was Lou Reed who toasted her in his Walk on the Wild Side. Darling was 29 when she died in 1974, with a deathbed scene that evoked Novak's in The Eddy Duchin Story, the 1956 movie that inspired a young boy to grow up and become someone fabulous (27 minutes).
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Edition #267: Mitchell Lichtenstein, Happy Tears
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First broadcast March 12, 2010
For Happy Tears, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows his mischievously literal 2007 debut Teeth with a comedy drama of two sisters, played by Parker Posey and Demi Moore, tending to their aging father (Rip Torn), his crack-addicted girlfriend (Ellen Barkin) and, in Posey's case, a husband (Christian Camargo) who must tend to his famous artist father's considerable estate. Lichtenstein discusses what it's like directing two leads from such different cinematic backgrounds--one very indie and the other very Hollywood. He also addresses the screenplay's shifting tones, the film's ingenious special effects and what world premiering this film at last year's Berlin Film Festival felt like (28 minutes).
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Edition #266: 60th Berlin Film Festival: Bobby Sheehan, Arias with a Twist: The Docufantasy
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First broadcast March 5, 2010
In Berlin for the world premiere of Arias with a Twist: The Docufantasy, his cinematic salute to the great downtown drag star Joey Arias and the extraordinarily inventive puppeteer Basil Twist, Bobby Sheehan tells of his travels around the States and Europe in order to interview over 50 people for his documentary, including the Garbo-like Thierry Mugler. This intimate profile records for posterity Aria and Twist's fantastic theatrical collaboration Arias with a Twist, which played for seven months in Manhattan before touring around the world. Sheehan, interviewed at the hub of the Berlinale in the Hyatt Lounge, which is also known as Press Central, speaks of growing up on the Lower East Side, being part of the downtown '70s scene before he became a successful commercial and video director and the experience of watching a young Arias transform into the mesmerizing, disciplined artist we now know (36 minutes).
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Edition #265: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain and Tahar Rahim, Un Prophète
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First broadcast February 12, 2010
Acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart
Skipped) wanted to do something different for his fifth film, so he
teamed with screenwriter Thomas Bidegain to write a prison movie
inspired by America's classic gangster films. The result is the epic Un Prophète, which was the runner-up prize winner at last
May's Cannes film festival and received a 2010 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. During the bustle of the Regency Hotel's daily "power
breakfast," Stephen Schaefer spoke with Audiard, Bidegain and the young Tahar Rahim, who
plays the titular character whose sentence transforms him from an
ignorant youth to a mob boss (23 minutes).
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Edition #264: Ernst Aebi, Barefoot to Timbuktu
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First broadcast February 5, 2010
A fascinating portrait of a modern day adventurer, Barefoot to Timbuktu vividly chronicles the amazing life and travels of Swiss-born Ernst Aebi, who began his adult life as an artist and emerged as a unique social activist. Aebi left home to travel the world in 1960; in the 1970s he established himself in New York as an artist, after he began renovating lofts in Soho with a partner. A decade later, wealthy but eager for new projects, he found a calling in Sahara's desert in the nearly defunct oasis Araouane, seven days by camel from Timbuktu. With solar panels, seeds and hard work, Aebi worked with the villagers to plant to trees and cultivate a sustainable garden. That is only part of his remarkable story (27 minutes).
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Edition #263: James Marsh, Red Riding
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First broadcast January 29, 2010
The acclaimed director behind the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man on Wire--about which Marsh spoke in a previous Subtitles, available here--is back as the middle man in Channel 4's riveting, disturbing three-part series Red Riding. Set against the backdrop of the notorious Yorkshire Ripper serial killer of the 1970s and 80s, who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered women and girls, the trilogy was adapted by Tony Grisoni from David Peace's quartet of novels and first aired in March 2009. It's divided into three separate films, each with a different director. Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, the 2008 cinematic iteration of Brideshead Revisited) helmed 1974, Marsh's 1980 continues the saga and Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) concludes it with 1983 (26 minutes).
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