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      Pedro Almodóvar Makes a Gay Western With Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke

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      In “Strange Way of Life,” the director’s short western, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal play a lawman and a cowboy looking back on a passionate affair.The gunslinger in green locks eyes with the sheriff.“Don’t look at me like that,” says the sheriff, squinting.“How do you want me to look at you?” replies the gunslinger, flirting.It wouldn’t be a western without a fraught standoff, but when Pedro Almodóvar is behind the camera, the glances are even more loaded than the pistols. In “Strange Way of Life,” a new short film that will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal star as a lawman and a cowboy who reunite 25 years after having a passionate affair. But will their old magic be rekindled, or are both men concealing ulterior motives for the meeting?In many ways, the project is a swerve for Almodóvar: The 73-year-old auteur, typically known for Spanish-language movies about modern women living in beautiful apartments, has cast two English-speaking actors in a short that is set in the dusty Wild West. But Almodóvar, who was courted two decades ago to direct the gay western “Brokeback Mountain” and turned it down, sees his new project on a continuum with that 2005 film, which was ultimately directed by Ang Lee, who went on to win best director.“In ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Jake Gyllenhaal’s character says to Heath Ledger’s character that they should go away and work on a ranch,” Almodóvar said on a video call. “Heath says, ‘What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?’ In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to that.”Pedro Almodóvar, center, working with Hawke and Pascal on set. “In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to” a scene in “Brokeback Mountain,” the director said.Iglesias M/El Deseo and Sony Pictures ClassicsAlmodóvar wrote a few pages of the centerpiece scene three years ago, then put it out of his mind. “Sometimes I just write for the pleasure of writing,” he said. “I didn’t have any purpose for it.” But inspiration struck when Anthony Vaccarello, the creative director of the fashion label Saint Laurent, mentioned that he had just produced a short film for Gaspar Noé. Almodóvar remembered the sequence with the two pistoleros, added a scene-setting prologue and a guns-out aftermath, and offered Vaccarrello the screenplay for the 31-minute “Strange Way of Life.”“Of course, it could have become a feature-length film,” he said. “But I do think it was the perfect duration for the story I want to tell.” And after making the short film “The Human Voice” in 2020 with Tilda Swinton, Almodóvar hoped to continue casting English-speaking stars. “I never wanted to do it in Spanish,” Almodóvar said. “Even though we have our own western type, the spaghetti western, I wanted to make it a classic western.”Almodóvar soon reached out to Pascal, whose star was beginning to rise with the series “The Mandalorian” and “The Last of Us.” The 48-year-old actor was eager to sign on; he had watched his first Almodóvar film, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), with his family as a young teenager.“I remember it feeling like going to a new amusement park,” Pascal said in an email. “An entire world of color and play and a kind of naughty rebelión was introduced to my experience.”His co-star was just as gung-ho. “I felt really honored to be an American actor that was getting to work with him,” Hawke said by phone. “A lot of times when you’re making mainstream American movies, there’s this third entity in the room, which is you want the movie to sell — you just feel it from people behind the monitor. And what’s so wonderful about working with Almodóvar is that you feel there is nobody you need to make happy but Pedro Almodóvar.”The short went into production last summer in Almería, Spain, on the outdoor sets where Sergio Leone once shot his classic 1964-66 trilogy of spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. “The passing of time, 50 years of it, had given authenticity to the place,” Almodóvar said. And in addition to producing the project, Vaccarello doubled as its costume designer, a crucial post on an Almodóvar film.The film was shot in Almería, Spain, on the same outdoor sets where Sergio Leone shot his Man With No Name trilogy.Iglesias M/El Deseo and Sony Pictures Classics“There’s some directors I’ve worked with who are wonderful directors, but they’re just not that interested in costume — it’s just, ‘Yeah, whatever you want to wear is fine,” Hawke said. “Whereas Almodóvar would spend weeks deciding what shade of green the wall is behind you or what color gray your jacket is and what fabric it’s made out of.”Though Almodóvar’s films are also notable for what happens when those clothes come off, “Strange Way of Life” is surprisingly discreet, fading to black when Hawke and Pascal move in for an embrace.“The sexual tension in my film happens around the gazes, so from the very beginning, I decided I wasn’t going to show the entirety of the sexual scene,” Almodóvar said. “They’re way more naked in the conversation they have after.”It’s that conversation that made Almodóvar want to shoot the film in the first place: After making “Pain and Glory” (2019), which starred Antonio Banderas as a thinly veiled version of his director, Almodóvar has found himself increasingly drawn to stories about middle-aged gay men looking back at their lives.“I do think this is partly a reflection of my own age, that I’ve decided to tell stories about older men,” Almodóvar said. “If I had written these stories when I was 25 years old, I probably would have written a story about two 25-year-old cowboys.”The shoot wasn’t easy, Hawke admitted: The production had to battle a record heat wave over 15 days in the desert, “and it’s very difficult to think about nuanced ideas when all your body wants to do is go to sleep or find some air conditioning,” he said. But as the project drew to a close, he was able to step back and take it all in.“All of a sudden I wrapped and realized that I was in the desert in Spain on an old Sergio Leone set, and Almodóvar was hugging me, thanking me, and I just thought about how much I love the movies and what a unique challenge this was and how much I keep wanting to hunt these kinds of experiences out,” Hawke said. “I felt somehow better for having done it, and I don’t know how to say it other than that.” More

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      Cannes 2023: The Films We’ve Excited About Seeing

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      Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes have works premiering this year at the festival on the French Riviera.Wes Anderson’s films have premiered at a wide variety of festivals, but after “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), “The French Dispatch” (2021) and his upcoming ensemble comedy “Asteroid City,” Cannes is the fest he keeps coming back to. Last week, I asked Anderson what he finds so compelling about a debut on the Croisette.“The reason to go to Cannes, I think, is because they said yes,” he deadpanned. “After that, there isn’t really much to contemplate.”Well, there’s a little more to it than that, Anderson admitted: For cinema lovers, there is no holier pilgrimage to make than to the Cannes Film Festival, where movies are treated with the utmost reverence and routinely given marathon standing ovations.It is a place where great auteurs have been canonized, like Martin Scorsese, who won the Palme d’Or in 1976 for “Taxi Driver” and will return this year with his new feature “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Quentin Tarantino, a Palme winner (for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994) and Cannes habitué who’ll be back at the fest this year for a wide-ranging conversation that may touch on his upcoming final film.“I look at Cannes in relation to the other movies I know showed there, and I feel lucky enough to be included in the program that debuted those films,” Anderson said. “For me, it’s a chance to be involved in this movie history, which I love.”A scene from “Elemental.”Disney/PixarHarrison Ford in a scene from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd.A Cannes launch can be awfully expensive for a studio to bankroll, since the airfare, star entourages and five-star hotels alone all add up. Still, the return on investment can be major. Last year, “Top Gun: Maverick” launched with a fawning Tom Cruise summit and sent fighter jets flying over the south of France, while Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” threw a rock concert on the beach where drones traced Elvis Presley’s silhouette in the sky. Both films leveraged their splashy debuts to become some of the best-performing global hits of the year, and were nominated for the best-picture Oscar, to boot.This year, several star-driven films will attempt to capitalize on a Cannes bow, including “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” which is being billed as Harrison Ford’s final appearance in his most iconic role. Can it overcome the tepid response to the last sequel, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” and the substitution of James Mangold (“Ford v Ferrari”) for Steven Spielberg as director of the series? At least the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in her most high-profile role since “Fleabag,” will add a welcome jolt to the franchise.The director Todd Haynes, who premiered “Carol” at Cannes, returns to the festival with another female-driven two-hander: “May December,” which stars Julianne Moore as a teacher whose scandalous relationship with a former student is scrutinized by a movie star (Natalie Portman) preparing to play the teacher in a film. Other star-heavy films include “The New Boy,” featuring Cate Blanchett as a nun in her first role since “Tár,” and “Firebrand,” with Jude Law as Henry VIII and Alicia Vikander as his last wife, Katherine Parr.And then there are “Asteroid City” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the fest’s two most anticipated premieres. The former takes place at a 1950s retreat for space-obsessed youngsters and stars Anderson staples like Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as new recruit Tom Hanks, about whom Anderson said, “I couldn’t have had a better time working with anybody.” Scorsese’s Apple-backed film charts the mysterious murders of the Osage tribe in the 1920s and will bring stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to the red carpet.Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Apple TV+Natalie Portman in a scene from “May December.”via Cannes Film Festival(Still, weep for what might have been: Greta Gerwig’s candy-colored July release “Barbie” will skip an early premiere at Cannes, depriving us of a red-carpet fantasy to trump all others.)In recent years, the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or award has often gone to a film with breakout-hit potential, like “Parasite” and “Triangle of Sadness.” The director of the latter film, Ruben Ostlund, will preside over this year’s competition jury, a group that includes Brie Larson and Paul Dano, and they’ll be picking their favorite from an auteur-heavy lineup that includes several former Palme winners.Among them are Wim Wenders, who took the Palme for “Paris, Texas” and returns with “Perfect Days,” about a Tokyo toilet cleaner, and Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose new film “Monster” is the first film he has shot in Japan since his Palme winner “Shoplifters.” No director has ever taken the Palme three times, though Ken Loach could this year, if his new working-class drama “The Old Oak” proves as acclaimed as “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” and “I, Daniel Blake.”This year’s Cannes has its fair share of long films — “Occupied City,” Steve McQueen’s documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, runs four hours and six minutes — but not every buzzy premiere will be feature-length. The fest will also premiere shorts directed by Pedro Almodóvar (“A Strange Way of Life”) and the late Jean-Luc Godard (“Phony Wars”), while launching “The Idol,” an already-controversial HBO series from the “Euphoria” mastermind Sam Levinson starring Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye.Eita Nagayama, right, in a scene from “Monster.”via Cannes Film FestivalA scene from “The Zone of Interest.”A24And though the festival will offer G-rated pleasures in the form of Pixar’s new film “Elemental,” it wouldn’t be Cannes without a few envelope-pushers. Keep an eye on Catherine Breillat, whose sexually explicit filmography (“Fat Girl,” “Romance”) gets a new entry with “Last Summer,” about a lawyer who falls for her teenage stepson.Then there’s the film I’m most curious about: “The Zone of Interest,” an Auschwitz-set drama from the director Jonathan Glazer. Rumor has it that Cannes passed on Glazer’s audacious “Under the Skin” back in 2013 and was eager to make up for that mistake. Since Glazer’s films (“Birth” and “Sexy Beast”) are infrequent but stunning, a new project from the director is reason enough to say yes to Cannes — and after that, there isn’t really much to contemplate. More

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      How Chris Messina Forced Matt Damon to Up His Game in ‘Air’

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      The “actor’s actor” ad-libbed so many funny threats that the movie star couldn’t keep a straight face and resorted to improvisation to keep up.Chris Messina has a hard time admitting that he’s funny.Even after his hilarious turn as a silver-tongued sports agent in “Air” and six seasons as a drolly charming doctor on the sitcom “The Mindy Project,” he is surprisingly self-critical when it comes to his comic abilities.“Comedy is so hard,” he said in a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles, adding an expletive for emphasis. “It’s hard to land a joke. So I still struggle with that. I’m best when I either don’t know it’s a comedy or don’t play it as a comedy — then you might find me funny.”This is difficult to believe if you’ve seen “Air.” As Michael Jordan’s outrageous, surly representative David Falk in the story of the creation of the Air Jordan sneaker, Messina is uproarious, screaming and swearing his way through fever-pitch negotiations with voluble panache. In the most memorable exchange, Messina calls the Nike scout and marketer Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to lambaste him for secretly visiting the Jordan family. Messina goes utterly ballistic, hurtling around his office as he barks threats and insults involving various bits of bodily anatomy. The Ringer described him as the film’s “foul-mouthed” M.V.P.“Phone calls are usually just a bore,” Messina said thoughtfully, displaying an open and eager friendliness, pleased to be discussing the details of a craft he clearly loves. “There’s no one on the other line — sometimes there’s a script supervisor reading the lines off-camera.”Messina in “Air.” His scene partner, Matt Damon, was laughing so much that there were no usable takes of the character straight-faced in that sequence.Ana Carballosa/Amazon StudiosBut for “Air,” the director Ben Affleck had the idea to shoot both sides of the conversation simultaneously. He set up Damon and Messina in offices down the hall from each other, and had two sets of cameras rolling at the same time. “It felt more alive,” Messina said. “Matt and I could talk over each other, then we could improvise, then we could come together and say, ‘How about we change this to this?’ And then go back to our offices and keep going.”As Affleck told me in a recent phone interview, “All of the great lines in that scene are Chris’s improvisation.” And those improvisations, he said, had a particularly strong impact on Damon. “Matt could not keep a straight face. I had to use Matt laughing because there wasn’t a take of him playing it straight. He tried to play it straight, and he just couldn’t.”Damon explained that “it was already really funny on the page.” But when Messina came up with threats, “it dictated how I had to play the scene,” Damon said. “I had to start ad-libbing. I started talking to the background artists next to me, going, ‘It’s David Falk on the phone, sorry,’ and I just started laughing.”“Air” is Messina’s third appearance in an Affleck-directed film, after the Oscar-winning drama “Argo” and the period crime tale “Live by Night.” Affleck said, “I always look for work for Chris because he’s always so good. Every time he’s had the opportunity, he’s always done more than I envisioned or imagined.”Though “Live by Night” was not a commercial success, Affleck said he was “particularly proud” of Messina’s performance, for which he gained 40 pounds. “I said he could wear a body suit. He said no, it wouldn’t be the same,” Affleck said. “I can’t say enough good things about him.”Damon echoed the sentiment, describing his co-star as an actor’s actor, the kind “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Messina’s career started on the stage. A “tried and true New York theater actor” from Long Island, as he put it, he plied his trade “mostly Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway, and sometimes Off Off Off Broadway, in the Bronx and in Queens and on the Lower East Side.” He speaks of those scrappy early days with a nostalgic air, reminiscing about plays “where the actors outnumbered the audience, or where, when it rained, it would leak on the stage,” he said. In short, he loved it.For a long time, Messina yearned to find glory the romantic way. “I really thought, stupidly, that Mike Nichols would discover me in a play and put me in ‘The Graduate 2,’ you know? I had read about Dustin Hoffman. But that never happened.”Instead, Messina transitioned to the screen. After a couple of small, forgettable parts in films like “Rounders” (with Damon) and “The Siege,” he landed his breakout role, on the final season of the funeral-home drama “Six Feet Under,” playing the amiable, strait-laced lawyer Ted Fairwell, the love interest of Lauren Ambrose’s Claire. On the strength of his work on that HBO drama, he began landing high-profile films, including Sam Mendes’s “Away We Go” and Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” as well as recurring parts on the cable dramas “Damages” and “The Newsroom.”Matt Damon said Messina was the kind of actor “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Amanda Hakan for The New York TimesMost viewers, though, probably know Messina best for his work on “The Mindy Project,” starring as the sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes charismatic Danny Castellano opposite the series creator, Mindy Kaling. When casting began in 2011, Kaling was specifically seeking actors she “hadn’t seen do a lot of comedy” or, if they were experienced, “weren’t the usual suspects they always send you,” she said in a recent interview.She knew he was perfect straight away. Describing him as one of the most comical actors she’s worked with, she said Messina was “so rooted in the truth of his character that he can’t help but be funny.”She attributes that expressly to the fact that he is not a traditional comedian. “Your average sitcom actor wants to hit their moments, make the day, and go home. Chris isn’t like that,” she said. “It’s almost exhausting, the level of honesty and truth he brings to every scene. He was really listening to my character and reacting if the character did something funny or absurd. He made me a better actor. I was listening better when I was with Chris, because he set the bar so high.”Although Messina proved well suited for the role, he originally didn’t even want to do it, turning down the part multiple times before relenting. (“Mindy wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he explained.) He was, he said, “very worried about every aspect of it,” including the commitment to a network comedy with 20-plus episodes per season, potentially for many years — perhaps making it more difficult for him to do the kind of serious work he dreamed of as a performer.“I wanted to do ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ I wanted to do ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” he said. Though he liked the role and Kaling, “I was afraid of it running forever.” And, of course, he was afraid of something else: the genre. “I was afraid of not being able to keep up with them comedically,” he said. “I am afraid of jokes.”On the other hand, being afraid is what Messina wants. “Being scared of a role, of an opportunity, being challenged, that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s corny or too actorly, but I do like finding closed doors inside of me.” More

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      Making a Michael J. Fox Movie With Michael J. Fox’s Movies

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      How the documentary “Still” uses footage from its subject’s films and TV shows to tell its story.When Davis Guggenheim approached Michael J. Fox three years ago in the hopes of making a film about his life, the director had a few things going for him, besides his previous success with documentaries about other luminaries including Al Gore (the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth”) and the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (“He Named Me Malala”). Guggenheim’s wife, the actress Elisabeth Shue, had worked with Fox before, starring as his girlfriend in the second and third installments of the “Back to the Future” series. And Guggenheim had directed “It Might Get Loud,” a documentary about Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge, a fact that endeared him to Fox, a longtime electric guitar player.Even so, Fox initially balked at the idea of a movie, particularly one centered on tales he had already written about in four best-selling memoirs. “I told him, my story’s pretty self-explanatory,” Fox recalled. “I don’t know how many times you can tell it.”But Guggenheim persevered. He didn’t want to do a film version of Fox’s own memoirs, which detail the actor’s life and career and struggles with Parkinson’s, as good as he thought they were. And he didn’t want to make your standard documentary, the sort with talking heads and somber narration. Guggenheim wanted to make a movie with as much life and humor as its subject, a fun, fast-paced effort not unlike, say, a movie starring Michael J. Fox.“I wanted to take the audience on a wild ride,” Guggenheim said.In the end, Fox relented, albeit with one request: no violins. “No maudlin treatment of a guy with a terrible diagnosis,” Guggenheim said.“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” (streaming on Apple TV+) interweaves scripted re-enactments, archival behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with Fox, and copious clips from Fox’s four-decade-long career, including his breakthrough roles in “Back to the Future” and on “Family Ties,” which established Fox as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.The result is a genre-defying hybrid that uses Fox’s own film and TV work to creatively illustrate key moments of his life (more on that later), and even reveal long-held secrets — for example, how Fox managed to hide his Parkinson’s for years, even while starring on the ABC comedy series “Spin City.”The film explores Fox’s career from its earliest beginnings, when the actor was 16, but playing 12, in the Canadian sitcom “Leo and Me.” In a video interview from his office in New York, Fox criticized his work in those early gigs. “I eventually figured out how to act,” he said, “but early on, I had no clue.”Davis Guggenheim, right, directing on the set of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.”Apple TVInitially, Guggenheim wanted to tell Fox’s story largely through re-enactments, with actors playing Fox at various stages of his life. The film’s editor, Michael Harte (“Three Identical Strangers”), was against the idea. “The problem is, you can’t show the actor’s face,” he said. “What’s brilliant about Michael is he’s so engaging, he’s got this superstar quality.” Using a double of someone as immediately recognizable as Fox, he thought, “would push the audience out of the movie.”Instead, Harte thought they could use movie and TV clips of the actor to tell Fox’s story, which set up a “battle” (Guggenheim’s word) of creative wills between the director and the editor.One day, on a whim, Harte combined a scene from “Bright Lights, Big City,” in which Fox flips through an article he’s been assigned to fact-check, with an audio clip of Fox describing the first time he read the script for “Back to the Future.” Guggenheim loved the mash-up, and encouraged Harte to find more. It wasn’t difficult. As Guggenheim noted, there were a lot of movies and episodes to pull from.In the end, the two settled on an imaginative compromise, mixing scripted shots of Fox’s double, shot from behind so his face couldn’t be seen, and shots of the real Fox, either from the actor’s films and shows, or in behind-the-scenes clips culled from 92 VHS cassettes of “Family Ties” footage.To find all those scenes, Harte spent eight weeks watching every film and TV show Fox had ever been in. “The TV shows were the Everest,” Harte said. He painstakingly flagged every scene he thought might be useful: Michael drinks coffee. Michael walks down a hallway.It helped that Harte has been a mad Fox fan from childhood. The first movie he saw in a theater as a young boy growing up in Ireland was “Back to the Future Part II” (“a game changer”); his all-time favorite film, even now, is “Back to the Future.”Guggenheim, on the other hand, wasn’t as huge a fan of Fox or his films growing up.“I don’t think Davis had seen the ‘Back to the Future’ films before this,” Harte said, “and his wife is in them.”“I was watching different things,” Guggenheim said.The filmmakers also pored through hours of “Spin City” episodes to find footage of how Fox had kept his Parkinson’s hidden from the show’s cast, crew and audience, a fact Fox wrote about in his first memoir, “Lucky Man.” In one montage, we see Fox twiddling pens, holding phones, checking his watch, rolling up his sleeves, anything to mask the shaking in his left hand. “We were taking stuff that was scripted and using it as archive,” Guggenheim said.As Harte was sifting through the thousands of clips for material, Guggenheim set about casting actors for the re-enactments, which included stand-ins for Woody Harrelson, a longtime friend and one-time co-star; Fox’s no-nonsense but ultimately supportive dad; and, of course, Fox himself. To find someone who could match Fox’s lithe physicality, the creators had actors jump up and slide across a car hood — or try to. The one actor who could do it, Danny Irizarry, got the job. “I loved the actors that played me,” Fox said.When the first rough cut was complete, the filmmakers screened it for Fox. “It was utterly terrifying,” Harte said. “Here’s someone I grew up watching and adoring, and the first time I meet him, we’re not having a few drinks in a bar, I’m presenting what I see is 90 minutes of his life. Here’s what I think is relevant, and here’s what I think isn’t relevant, so I cut that out.”Fox was pleased with the finished project. “I think they did a beautiful job,” he said.Fox with his wife, Tracy Pollan.Apple TV+Not that moments from his life story weren’t painful to watch, particularly many moments about Tracy Pollan, Fox’s wife of 35 years, whom he first met on the set of “Family Ties.” “I married this girl who had a nascent career, doing well, and then she married me and was like this single mother,” he said. “I was off doing movies and she was home with a baby, and I made jokes about it on talk shows.” Using colorful language, Fox bemoaned the horrible thing he did to her.“And she came through for me when she could have slipped out,” he continued. “She could have said, ‘Parkinson’s, that’s not for me.’ But she didn’t, she stuck around. Getting to see that in the film was such a privilege.” More

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      Matthew Barney, Back in the Game

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      The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football. Then, just as quickly, people moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized.The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. It was also addictive.“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”Barney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.Football served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.Ted Johnson, left, and Wally Cardona in “Secondary.”via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesBut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) films. (Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.)With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a country, because football is quintessentially American — that may or may not have changed. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation.“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue — his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility.Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. When I visited, the principal performers — including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence.“I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment,” said David Thomson, left, who plays the former Patriots receiver in “Secondary,” while Barney, right, plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThere were weird things going on, too. Additional performers around the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders fans, walking around like camp horror figures; some were actors, but others were members of the Raiders’ New York City fan club. Some were being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio floor, exposing pipes, dirt and water.An artist’s studio, Barney said, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he said, adding: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”Digging the trench, he said, revealed decaying pipes and how the tide floods and recedes under the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he said.For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers to the back line of defenders on the football field, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the wide receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and moral core.Stingley, right, was left paralyzed after Tatum hit him in a 1978 game.Ron Riesterer/Sporting News, via Getty ImagesIt is rich and also tragic material. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wanted an apology that never came. Tatum argued that the hit was just part of the job, even if he also boasted that his style of play pushed the line. Since then a flood of research has confirmed the sport’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney plays in “Secondary,” contributed to this knowledge posthumously when his brain was found to show advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.I asked if Barney, the former quarterback, had come to worry about his own health. “Honestly, yeah,” he said. He was glad, he added, that he stopped playing when he did.“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead device shows one video channel on three screens, while four other channels run on monitors around the studio. The hit is evoked early, but much of the subsequent action returns to buildup — players warming up, fans getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the final third.“Secondary” was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, and it is now on view to the public there.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesThe point was never a literal treatment, said Thomson, the movement director and Barney’s close collaborator on the project. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he said. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”Still, Thomson said, from studying the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that informed how he worked with the actors who portray them. Stingley, he said, was earnest. Tatum, angry. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he said, became “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”In their research, Barney and Thomson read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football highlights and practice reels. Video of the hit — which came in a preseason game, with no competitive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The camera follows the ball past Stingley’s outstretched arms, so that the hit takes place at the edge of the frame. There were not dozens of camera angles available like today.David Thomson holds Ted Johnson aloft in a scene from “Secondary.” Play sequences make up roughly the final third of the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesIn their research, Barney and David Thomson, the project’s movement director, read Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of football footage.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta CervantesThis opened space for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the players negotiate. (Barney has always stated he is a sculptor first and plans for these works to be shown in future exhibitions.)Xavier, the dancer who plays Tatum, had to contend with a pile of wet clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he said. “But the clay was alive.” It forced him, he said, to locate vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a character that he remembered from his own childhood as an aggressive, even mean, football player.Indeed, the core players in “Secondary” are middle-aged men negotiating the memory of the culture they grew up in — and of their own bodies. Even stylized, the football movements involved in the piece are not instinctive or easy ones for men in their 50s and 60s.Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson said. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”But “Secondary” enfolds other perspectives as it gestures toward a broader, contemporary American social landscape. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an extremely deconstructed version of the national anthem.Jacquelyn Deshchidn, center, is featured in “Secondary,” flanked by, from left, Jeffrey Gavett, Kyoko Kitamura and Isabel Crespo Pardo, who play referees in the video.via Matthew Barney and Gladstone Gallery; Photo by Julieta Cervantes“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn said. They became drawn, too, to the work’s environmental aspect, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”Barney is an art-world celebrity (whose fame only grew during his more than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), but he prefers a low profile. On set, he cut a workaday presence with his close-shaven look under a cap. Performers in “Secondary” said his work ethic was intense but his manner open. While some people on the project are his longtime collaborators, like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.There is a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is turning a page — certainly with the studio move, after some 15 years at that site, but in some private way, too. When I asked if he was feeling his age — our age, as we are contemporaries — he said yes.“Letting go of being a young person is a big relief,” Barney said.Camila Falquez for The New York Times“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”Compared with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a more concise and collaborative note. “It’s more connected to the world,” he said. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”“Secondary” may take its cue from 1978 and invite its players into a kind of memory work through their bodies — but the work’s structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energizes it with premonition.It ends in an elegiac vein, the final shots widening to the city. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney said. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.” More

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      Pema Tseden, Pioneering Tibetan Filmmaker, Is Dead at 53

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      His films captured contemporary Tibetan life as Tibetans saw it, devoid of the stereotypes long associated with their homeland.Pema Tseden, a filmmaker and author who presented an honest look at contemporary Tibetan life despite intense scrutiny from Chinese censors, died on Monday in Tibet. He was 53.His death was announced in a statement by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he was a professor. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.Tibet and its people have often been misrepresented with clichés. For the West, it was utopia, a fantasy based on the depiction of Shangri-La in the British author James Hilton’s 1933 novel, “Lost Horizon.” For the Communist Party of China, Tibetans were serfs or barbarians in need of rescue and rehabilitation, with propaganda films portraying Han cadres as liberators. Pema Tseden (pronounced WA-ma TSAY-ten in his native dialect), who like most Tibetans had no family name and went instead by his two given names, said that as a child, he had longed for accurate representations of his home, people and culture that existing Hollywood and Chinese films didn’t provide.“Whether it was the clothes, the customs, the manners, every element, even the smallest, was inaccurate,” he said in a 2019 interview. “Because of that, at the time, I thought that later on, if someone made films with even a little knowledge of the language of my people, the culture, the traditions of my people, it would be completely different.”In his films, Pema Tseden rarely depicted Tibet’s Chinese population, which swelled after the Red Army seized Tibet in 1951. To elude Chinese censors, he eschewed references to the Dalai Lama, who has been seen in China as supporting Tibetan independence. This allowed him to avoid overtly political critiques while still tackling broader themes, like the loss of traditions and identity in the face of modernization.Genden Phuntsok, left, and J. Jinpa in a scene from “Jinpa,” Pema Tseden’s film about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker.Icarus FilmsHe was the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature film entirely in the Tibetan language. He was also the first Tibetan director to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, which cultivated the country’s leading directors. But like all artists in China exploring ethnic minorities and religion, he was subject to additional vetting from state censors and required to submit scripts in Chinese for review.“His challenge, of course, was to make films that would reflect a Tibetan sense of identity, a Tibetan cultural sensibility, while not upsetting the Chinese authorities,” Tenzing Sonam, a Tibetan filmmaker and writer living in Dharamshala, India, said by phone. “Pema Tseden navigated that fine line incredibly well.”In “The Silent Holy Stones” (2005), he depicted everyday Tibetan experiences: monks becoming engrossed with television, villagers rehearsing for a New Year’s opera performance. And in “Old Dog” (2011), images of barbed-wire fences stretching across the Tibetan grasslands examined the power of the state and the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Pema Tseden’s “Old Dog” (2011) examined the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Icarus FilmsHis movies were “not just about Tibet,” Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian and scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said in an interview. “This is about China and people who are left behind by China’s economic miracle.”As Pema Tseden’s clout grew, China’s film industry and its audiences began to accept Tibetan as a language used on the big screen. And by combining Tibetan traditions of oral storytelling and song with modern filmmaking formats, his movies gave rise to an entirely new genre that some called the Tibetan New Wave.“The stories his films contained — which are always meticulously framed and exquisitely modulated — speak powerful truths in the gentlest of voices,” said Shelly Kraicer, a Chinese cinema curator and researcher who wrote subtitles for some of Pema Tseden’s work. “He’s a key world filmmaker.”He sought to build a tight-knit network of Tibetan filmmakers, including Sonthar Gyal, Dukar Tserang, Lhapal Gyal and Pema Tseden’s, son, Jigme Trinley, who went on to direct their own films. Drivers, assistants and other members of the crew sometimes juggled more than one role, appearing as extras and coaching actors in regional dialects.“He created from scratch an embryonic Tibetan film circle, film industry,” Françoise Robin, a professor of Tibetan language and literature at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris who knew Pema Tseden for over two decades, said by phone. “He’s very faithful in friendship. Some people worked with him for 10 years.”“Tharlo” (2015), the story of a shepherd who travels outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival.Tsemdo/Icarus FilmsPema Tseden was born on Dec. 3, 1969, in Qinghai Province, part of a northeastern region of Tibet traditionally known as Amdo. His parents were farmers and herders.He was raised by his grandfather, who asked him to copy out Buddhist scriptures by hand after school, a practice that instilled in him an early appreciation for Tibetan language and culture. He worked as a teacher for four years before studying Tibetan literature and translation at the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou. He then worked for several years as a civil servant in his home province.Starting in 1991, he published short stories set in Tibet, written in both Tibetan and Chinese, about individuals confronted with sweeping changes. They underscored the importance of forging a connection with nature and animals, showing “the complexity of life in the simplest language,” said Jessica Yeung, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University who knew Pema Tseden for a decade and translated his work. He later adapted some of his stories into films.After attending the Beijing Film Academy in the early 2000s, he released “The Silent Holy Stones” to critical acclaim, as well as several other films. A decade later, “Tharlo” (2015), about the journey of a shepherd who must travel outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It won numerous awards, including a Golden Horse Award for best adapted screenplay in Taiwan. Among Tibetans, it also became a seminal work for aspiring filmmakers within a few years.“A Tibetan film should show Tibetan life,” Pema Tseden said in an undated interview that was recently released by Kangba TV, a Tibetan-language broadcaster. “In my case, from my first film onward, I wanted my movies to absolutely include characters who are Tibetan, who would all speak Tibetan, and whose behavior and way of thinking were Tibetan. This is what makes Tibetan films different.”Pema Tseden’s subsequent films benefited from his higher profile. “Jinpa” (2018), about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker, was produced by the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Jet Tone Films and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti Award for best screenplay. “Balloon” (2019), about a family coping with an unexpected pregnancy amid China’s family planning laws, also premiered in Venice. A forthcoming film, “Snow Leopard,” about the tense relationship between humans and predatory animals, is currently in postproduction. At his death, he was working on another film.Information on survivors in addition to his son was not immediately available.Li You More

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      ‘Hypnotic’ Review: A Twisty Thriller Sends Ben Affleck on the Run

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      Alice Braga plays a psychic and Affleck a cop in this action-packed Robert Rodriguez picture that gets a little overly ambitious.Seasoned moviegoers complain these days that blockbuster franchises and formulaic streaming fare have all but squeezed out the midbudget character-driven drama. But it’s worse than that. The state of the biz isn’t doing wonders for tight, low-budget, midlength action thrillers with sci-fi or supernatural plot hooks, either. So on learning that, after almost a decade working primarily in television or on movies with a strong Y.A. slant, the dynamic director Robert Rodriguez has a Ben Affleck-led suspense thriller called “Hypnotic” in theaters, even a casual genre hound might cock an intrigued eyebrow.Affleck plays Donald Rourke, a detective in Austin, Texas, who is traumatized by the kidnapping of his small daughter several years back. On a stakeout one day, he and his crew surveil a chilly-voiced older man (William Fichtner) whose cryptic words mesmerize several hapless bystanders and compel them to carry out a bloody bank job. Beating Fichtner’s character to the safe deposit box he is after, Rourke finds a Polaroid of his own daughter, with an enigmatic message scrawled beneath.A phone message leads him to the psychic Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), who explains the existence of “hypnotics,” powerful beings who can control others with their words and thoughts. Conveniently, Affleck has a psychic block that prevents him from being affected. His partner doesn’t, though. After a grisly scene in which Rourke’s partner, now hypnotized, tries to sever his own wrist from a handcuff in order to kill them, Rourke and Diana have to flee to Mexico.If the movie were just these two going from action set piece to action set piece with Braga’s character pulling Jedi mind tricks along the way, it would have been satisfactory. Rodriguez, after all, has always been a way-above-average camera director and action choreographer. But he’s going for something more ambitious here. When Rourke starts seeing a Mexican street extending into the air and curving, you grok that the director — who has his own studio in Austin, where this was shot — is going for a homegrown Christopher Nolan variant.This is, arguably, biting off more than “Hypnotic” can comfortably chew, both conceptually and for the production. When Affleck is confronted by a posse of psychics wearing crimson sports jackets, for instance, you wonder if maybe he’s wandered into a convention of Red Lobster senior managers. As the scenario veers into familial-sentimentality-with-shootouts territory, the goofiness quotient increases. But the movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.HypnoticRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      James Gunn on Ending Guardians of the Galaxy

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      In a spoiler-filled interview, the writer-director discusses the characters’ surprising end points and his relief at bringing the trilogy to a close.When a film is billed as the last installment of a trilogy, fans can’t help but speculate: Who’s going to die? A blockbuster franchise rarely wraps without a few significant casualties, each noble sacrifice underscoring the definitive end to come.But with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the writer-director James Gunn wanted to finish the trilogy on his own terms, even if that meant circumventing fan expectations. (Major spoilers follow.)The most surprising thing about the conclusion of this long-running Marvel series is that all of the main characters survive and even thrive. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) returns to Earth, the home planet he had avoided since childhood, and passes leadership of the Guardians to Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), who forms a new team featuring Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and their reformed antagonist Adam Warlock (Will Poulter). Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Drax (Dave Bautista) stay behind to help the citizen settlers who’ve moved into the bustling space-base Knowhere, while Mantis (Pom Klementieff) departs on a solo journey to better understand herself.And Gamora (Zoe Saldaña)? Well, her path through the Marvel universe has been complicated: The Gamora we originally knew was murdered by her father, Thanos, back in “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), then supplanted by a time-traveling variant who had no history with the Guardians. That new version gets roped into assisting the Guardians in “Vol. 3,” and though she comes to understand what the other Gamora might have felt for a still lovestruck Quill, she can’t get there herself and bids the group a bittersweet goodbye.The endings all feel more like new beginnings, and that’s a reflection of the deep affection Gunn feels for his ensemble: He wants the best for these characters, particularly Rocket, whom he admits to a “strange connection” with. He’s even had many of these outcomes in mind since he wrote the first “Guardians” (2014), though there was a time when he wondered if he’d get to see them through: As preproduction began on “Vol. 3,” he was briefly fired over a controversy involving his old tweets.Though Disney eventually rehired Gunn, making the movie had to wait. He had already been poached by Warner Bros. and DC Comics to direct “The Suicide Squad,” and that budding relationship proved so fruitful that Gunn will now oversee a total rehaul of DC’s slate, which will begin with a new take on Superman that he will direct. That means “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is not just the end of a trilogy but the culmination of Gunn’s decade at Marvel.How does he feel now that it’s all come to a close? “Sad and proud,” he said by phone earlier this week, as he prepared to discuss the ending of “Vol. 3” in depth. “But I feel like we did what we set out to do and I don’t think we could have done it much better than how we did it.”Clockwise from center, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, the Vin Diesel-voiced Groot, Dave Bautista and Karen Gillan in “Vol. 3.” All of their characters survive at the end.Marvel Studios/Marvel Studios-Disney, via Associated PressAll of the Guardians of the Galaxy survive the film and head out on new paths. Were you ever tempted to bring any of these characters to a more final end?Gamora was going to die originally in “Vol. 2” [2017], and then we talked about it happening in “Infinity War” and that worked better for the story. But the rest of them, I always knew where they were going. I knew that the whole trilogy is about Rocket, who we think of as a supporting character, becoming the captain of the Guardians.The arc with Peter Quill, in some ways, you can look at as that of many people who have experienced childhood trauma. He was by his mother’s bedside when she died, and he ran away and went into outer space — which, for other people, could be shutting off from the world — and stayed there for a long time until he came to the realization as an adult that he needed to go back to Earth. That, for me, was always his journey.Nebula becomes a leader, but a different sort of leader from where she was. Mantis goes off on her own and takes care of herself because she lived by others’ rules her entire life. Drax realizes that he’s a father and that’s what he’s really good at — he’s not a destroyer. All those things, some more clearly than others, were in my mind from the first movie.Few Marvel series were as affected by the events of “Infinity War” and “Endgame” as “Guardians of the Galaxy.” How did you feel about having a lot of major plot points happen outside the films of your own trilogy?A lot? I think there was only one.Well, Gamora’s death is the big one, but even her first kiss with Quill comes in “Infinity War” after the first two “Guardians” movies appear to be building to it.I begged them to have that kiss in the movie, because it was necessary to really cement their relationship. I had a kiss in “Vol. 2” that I cut — it was awesome, but it came in a weird time. At the end of “Vol. 2,” you establish the fact that they have feelings for each other pretty distinctly, but in “Infinity War,” we needed to establish that they were now boyfriend-girlfriend and this was a normal thing for them. It wasn’t really about the kiss, it was about showing that they were now a couple.Was there ever an idea that Gamora would not come back in any form in “Vol. 3,” and Quill would have to deal with her absence?That was a possibility, yes. He would be dealing with her loss, but she wouldn’t come back and confront him in this different way. I toyed with it a lot as I was writing the script.In another sort of movie, the new Gamora would have fallen in love with Quill, too. Instead, Quill gets to know her and eventually realizes he has to let his love go.It’s something we do a lot in relationships anyway: We expect someone who reminds us of somebody from the past to be that somebody from the past. Especially with women, Peter Quill defines people around him to suit his own needs as opposed to really looking and seeing who they actually are as human beings. And Gamora is just not the same Gamora. She’s a different person.Zoe Saldaña as Gamora. The actress was clear that she didn’t want to return for more installments.Marvel Studios/DisneyThere are a few moments where it feels like you’re testing the chemistry between Quill and Nebula, which is intriguingly spiky. Did you ever think of going there with them?I never thought about fully going there, but do I think that Nebula, emotionally, is sort of that mean schoolgirl who’s not going to show her feelings to anybody. Karen thinks that Nebula has a little bit of a crush on Quill that she doesn’t quite know how to put together, and it makes sense because as we come to them in “Vol. 3,” we realize that they are the two leaders of the Guardians. I think it’s very normal in any close friendship to have some sort of occasional romantic or crush-like feelings.When you’re crafting all these character endings, how much do you have to factor in the actor’s willingness to continue in the role? For instance, Dave Bautista has been pretty vocal about saying he’s finished. Does that affect the way you wrap up Drax’s story as opposed to Quill’s, since Chris Pratt is open to continuing?Yeah, a little bit. Both Zoe and Dave have been very clear they’re not going to continue — likewise, me, actually. Chris is open to doing more stuff, although I think he has to be convinced. It does change some things: Like, I wouldn’t have had Dave in the post-credits scene. But I’m not sure if much would have changed beyond that.At what point in conceiving all of this did you know that you wanted to end this trilogy with a dance sequence set to “Dog Days Are Over” from Florence + the Machine? It’s a lot of responsibility to be the last music cue of such a song-laden franchise.I’ve known it for a few years. I’ve known it far before I started writing the script, since I was writing “Vol. 2.” I’ve been a fan of that album and that song since it came out, and it’s pretty cool because I just got an email from Florence Welch, who posted herself watching the movie and crying on TikTok yesterday. I think it’s probably the greatest pop song of the 21st century.In previous movies, you did the motion-capture dancing for Groot yourself. Did you also do it in the “Dog Days Are Over” scene?Yeah, and it was a high point in my life, really. My brother Sean is dancing for Rocket, and in the moment we were shooting the wide shot and dancing toward each other, it was surreal and beautiful and wonderful. We’ve been goofing around and playing with Fisher-Price characters since we were kids in our parents’ basement, and now we’re on the biggest set I’ve ever been on with gigantic Tinker Toys instead of smaller ones, but with that same purity and imagination we had as kids. Everybody was crying as it was happening. It was a really powerful moment.You directed all three films of this trilogy, which is a rarity at Marvel. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to be at the helm throughout?Yes. Everyone knows I was gone for a while, then I came back, and the reason I came back — because, frankly, I might not have otherwise — is I needed to tell Rocket’s story. I couldn’t have that stuff inside of me and not express it. I have a strange connection to that character where I feel like he deserves everything. This is a story about a character who goes from being a little smuggling thief to becoming the leader of the greatest team the universe has ever known. And his back story, the pain of where he came from, all the seeds that I dropped from “Vol. 1” when Peter Quill sees the injuries on his back, all of those things were leading to something, and it just felt stunted to cut it off there. It felt like I was setting all of that up and not finishing it. That was a hard pill for me to swallow.Rocket Raccoon, voiced by Bradley Cooper, became the heart of the story in “Vol. 3.” “I have a strange connection to that character where I feel like he deserves everything,” Gunn said.Marvel Studios/DisneyMost of these characters started the trilogy in a more selfish place, but few of them had further to go than Rocket.I was very, very careful through all the movies, including the “Avengers” movies and “Thor” and everything, that Rocket never does one single action that is for anyone other than himself or his friends. He’s not a hero like the rest of them. Morally, he’s much more stunted than Nebula is by the end of the “Avengers” series. He has just cut himself off completely from feeling for people, and at the end of “Vol. 3,” in that moment where he accepts himself by taking those raccoons and then starts looking around the cages, that’s the moment to me where he sees, “Oh my God, everything is me. We’re all a part of this universe, and every life has purpose, meaning, and is worthy of respect.” That’s who he is now: He’s not a bad guy, he’s strictly a good guy.So what does it mean to you that Rocket is the one in charge when this film ends, just as you’re coming into your own as the one in charge at DC? Did you have to go through your own journey to get to a place where you’d feel comfortable with that kind of responsibility?Oh, there’s no doubt that my journey is similar to Rocket’s. When it comes to those things I used to push other people away, accepting myself as I am, and accepting other people’s love, it’s been something that I’ve struggled with over the years and come to terms with much more than I have in the past.Now that you’ve managed to tell that story, what’s the overriding feeling? Is it satisfaction? Is it relief?Satisfaction, relief and just a real gentle pat on my back going, “OK, now we’ve got the next phase to work on, and I’m comfortable doing that.” Whatever Marvel does with those characters, I can’t wait. I hope they use them. I can’t wait to see another filmmaker take on the Guardians, and I hope that they do it in a way that they take ownership of the characters. But I feel good, I feel happy. Making the friendships that I made on this film series and having people in my life who are my closest allies — I mean, I’ve been to five weddings of the Guardians. I was at Chris’s wedding, Chris spoke at my wedding. Pom was one of Karen’s bridesmaids. It’s a great little group of people and I am really, really lucky. More