Film Interviews
theartsdesk Q&A: musician Warren Ellis recalls how jungle horror and healing broke him openTuesday, 07 October 2025
Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s wild-maned Bad Seeds right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist. Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects meanwhile exist on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Idris Elba on playing a US President faced with a missile crisis in 'A House of Dynamite'Tuesday, 07 October 2025
Idris Elba has only just appeared as the British Prime Minister in the action comedy Heads of State (2025) – now he's portraying the American President in Kathryn Bigelow's tense political thriller A House of Dynamite. Read more... |
Robert Redford: remembering All the President’s MenWednesday, 17 September 2025
In the summer of 2005, Robert Redford, who died this week, attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, to collect a life achievement award. And his appearance in front of the media coincided with a startling news story that was rippling around the world. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Sam Riley on playing a washed-up loner in the thriller 'Islands'Friday, 12 September 2025
You won't find Sam Riley lying at the pool in a holiday resort – unless it's for work. "I'd rather stay home to be honest", says the Berlin-based Yorkshireman, who plays a washed-up tennis player turned coach living on the Canary island of Fuerteventura in Jan-Ole Gerster's slow-burning psychological thriller Islands. "I'm sure it's great to drop the kids off for a while and enjoy some peace and quiet. But my idea of relaxation is quite different." Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Leonie Benesch on playing an overburdened nurse in the Swiss drama 'Late Shift'Tuesday, 12 August 2025
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud on sex, love, and confusion in the modern worldWednesday, 06 August 2025
"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Lars Eidinger on 'Dying' and loving the second half of lifeThursday, 31 July 2025
To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her brooding new film 'Harvest'Thursday, 24 July 2025
Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: actor Emma Mackey on 'Hot Milk' and life educationTuesday, 08 July 2025
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director Andreas Dresen on his anti-Nazi resistance drama 'From Hilde, with Love'Saturday, 28 June 2025
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart. Read more... |
Bleak landscapes and banjos: composer Bernard Hughes discusses his score for 'Chicken Town'Thursday, 26 June 2025
Composer Bernard Hughes first met director Richard Bracewell when working on the film Bill, a 2015 Horrible Histories take on the life of Shakespeare for which he provided some of the score. The pair were keen to collaborate again but the pandemic put paid to their plans. The new black comedy Chicken Town sees the pair reunited. GRAHAM RICKSON: This is a film made on a small budget. How do the economics of a production affect how you work? Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Gary Oldman on playing John Cheever in 'Parthenope' and beating the boozeThursday, 08 May 2025
Gary Oldman has always lived life to the fullest, on screen and off. Maybe that's why he is often at his best in his pitch-perfect portraits of real-life personae such as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and Herman J Mankiewicz in Mank. He now stars as the bibulous middle-aged American author John Cheever in Parthenope, Paolo Sorrentino's latest lush homage to Italy's recent past. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: film director Déa Kulumbegashvili on her startling second feature, 'April'Sunday, 04 May 2025
One of the most exciting new voices in Eastern European film, Déa Kulumbegashvili is not concerned with conventional shot lengths. She has been described as a director of "slow cinema", which she regards as a compliment. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: director Leonardo Van Dijl discusses his sexual abuse drama 'Julie Keeps Quiet'Wednesday, 30 April 2025
"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose psychological drama Julie Keeps Quiet has little to do with its sports milieu per se. "Uncovering systemic abuse often starts by listening to the silence and paying attention to the people who don't speak out." Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Miguel Gomes on his latest exotic opus, 'Grand Tour'Wednesday, 23 April 2025
It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his cinema is mysterious ways, allowing the Portuguese director to tackle the themes that interest him: great love, colonialism, chance, destiny, death, and a dreary Portuguese world that is by no means willing to let anyone take away its history – or its stories. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on his apocalyptic musical 'The End'Tuesday, 01 April 2025
Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea. Read more... |
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