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      She Knew the Cello. The Acting She Learned With Cate Blanchett.

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      Sophie Kauer was a cellist studying for a degree when a friend urged her to audition for “Tár.” She watched Michael Caine videos on acting and dove right in.Lydia Tár commands with the gravitational pull of a planet: Everyone and everything, including the camera in “Tár,” Todd Field’s epic about a fictional maestro, lives in her shadow. But when Lydia (Cate Blanchett), who has been accused of sexual harassment, sets her sights on Olga, a rising Russian cellist, she is confronted with a foil of sorts. Is the young woman disarmingly naïve or particularly cunning?In reality, Sophie Kauer, who plays Olga, is a British-German cellist who, after responding to a vague open casting call practically on a lark, found herself months later plunked down in front of Blanchett shooting two-hander scenes in Berlin. She was 19 and had never acted in her life.“Sometimes I feel like everything’s happening backwards,” Kauer, now 21, said recently on a video call from a professor’s classroom at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is studying for a classical music performance degree. “I’ve kind of just been dropped into the thick of it, which is both wonderful and so weird at the same time.”Kauer appeared grateful, dazed and remarkably well-adjusted about the film and the attention. She has been meticulous about scheduling classes around press duties to maintain her school’s mandatory 80 percent attendance rate.Born in London, she picked up the cello at 8 and has always been naturally driven — she speaks five languages, and for early auditions developed her Russian accent through YouTube videos. (After she was cast, two dialect coaches took over.)“If I want to do something, then I’ll just do it,” Kauer said, not with arrogance but rather the air of someone who is self-assured about her passions. Music, she emailed after we spoke, “has been my absolute rock through everything. But what I really don’t like is being put in a box and told that classical music is all I am allowed to do or I am not sufficiently serious about my career.”Kauer spoke about the casting process, working with Blanchett, and what she thinks about that Juilliard scene. These are edited excerpts from our interview.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.What has your life been like these past few weeks?I’m still getting the hang of all of this. Every interview I do is completely different and I learn so much from it. I just think it’s so surreal that someone wants to talk to me. [Laughs]How did you become involved in the film?My friend sends me a casting call that has been posted in our school Facebook group, saying, “Look, they’re looking for a young cellist who could do a Russian accent and feels comfortable in front of a camera. I think you should apply for this.” And I was like, “Oh, but I don’t do any acting. I wouldn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh, just apply. It’ll be fun.”I wasn’t really thinking about what size the role was. I had a Zoom audition with [Field] and I was like, “This is so cool. I’m going to tell my grandkids that I did a Zoom audition with Todd Field.” Then I got a call asking if I could send a recording of the piece you hear Olga playing in the film, the Elgar Cello Concerto. I had played it before, but I had to get it back in my fingers in like a day and send it straight away. They were really cryptic the week after. It wasn’t until I actually was put on a Zoom call with Avy Kaufman [a casting director] and Todd that I found out I had got the part. No one had actually explained it to me.Kauer in the film. It’s not clear whether her character is naïve or cunning. “That’s the thing — you are not meant to know,” she said.Focus FeaturesDid you have any acting experience?When the occasional Shakespeare compulsory play came around [in school], I’d play the noble man in the background with the painted-on beard who says “Aye” three times or something like that. [Laughs] That was the extent of it.Michael Caine did these lessons on film acting [available on YouTube]. That was very technical, but I picked up a lot. I kind of figured it out as I went along. When I would have days or hours off, I asked Todd if I would be allowed to watch everyone else act their scenes. I was trying to pick up everything that they were doing,What was it like to go from no acting experience to suddenly working opposite Cate Blanchett?I remember I saw her for the first time she put out her hand and she said, “Hi, I’m Cate.” And you’re just like, “I know!” [Laughs] And then I had to [rehearse with] her after having met her five minutes before.I quickly learned that she’s one of the world’s loveliest people, and she’s so supportive and generous. I would even go as far to say that I learned to act from her and Todd.Olga has a very specific dynamic with Lydia. She seems to be the only one Lydia can’t fully control. Why is that?That’s the thing — you are not meant to know. We have no idea if Olga was just super naïve and very caught up with her life going exactly to plan and her achieving her wildest dreams. Or if she’s super calculating and knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of me would like to think that she’s smart, and the other part of me wants to think that she’s careless and young and kind of free. None of us actually really know the entirety of our characters. I don’t think Todd does either. What do you make of how the film examines notions of power in the world of classical music?The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.It’s perfect that this film is coming out now. I also think the fact that it’s a woman in a position that a man would stereotypically be in is really good, and in a way is slightly less offensive. People kind of just see the problem for what it is, rather than getting offended.The film has been discussed at length within the framework of the culture wars, in particular with the scene at Juilliard when a student expresses discomfort playing music written by straight white men. Lydia has no patience for him. As someone in these classrooms, do you have sympathies for either side in that Juilliard scene?Of course I do. We need to be open to discussing it and including all these new voices that have been unheard for so long — music by women or including more cultures and ethnicities. And we can’t just forget what has gone before because this is what our whole history is based on. I can’t wake up tomorrow and say, sorry, I’m never going to play a piece written by a white male composer again. Because unfortunately that is just how history is, and that is the vast majority of our music.You can’t exclude the majority of music history because you don’t identify with it. But I also do think that the point he makes is very relevant. There is very little representation for a lot of genders and ethnicities and cultures, and classical music may have been a bit slower to evolve. But it is evolving. Every time I watch, my sympathy for each character changes. Sometimes I think Lydia is totally right, and other times I’m like, no, Max, he’s the one who’s totally right.What’s next for you?I am still in the middle of studying for my music degree, so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. But I did enjoy the acting a lot. I’m still very young, so I’m kind of seeing what happens and taking it one thing at a time. I would like to hope that this isn’t my last project. It was really quite something. More

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      How ‘Terrifier 2’ Slashed Its Way to Box Office Success

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      The low-budget, ultraviolent, no-stars, killer-clown horror film has been in the Top 10 since it was released theatrically earlier this month.Halloween is still days away. But for the writer-director Damien Leone, Christmas is already here.That’s because his horror film “Terrifier 2” — a low-budget, ultraviolent sequel to his brutal killer-clown film “Terrifier” (2016) — has become an unexpected and unlikely hit.When “Terrifier 2” opened the first weekend in October, it cracked the Top 10, taking in $805,000. This past weekend it came in seventh, pulling in an estimated $1.89 million, according to Box Office Mojo, for a three-week total of $5.2 million.So how did an unrated, almost two-and-a-half-hour slasher film — made for $250,000 and starring nobody you’ve heard of — become the little horror movie that could?“Fun and fearlessness,” Leone said.The film ascended from the horror underground into the mainstream mostly through word of mouth and social media chatter, especially after reports surfaced of people puking and fainting at screenings. Media outlets that normally wouldn’t touch an extreme horror release, like the CBS daytime show “The Talk,” covered the commotion.With all of its can-you-handle-it? chatter, it’s giving big studio movies like “Halloween Ends” and “Smile” underdog competition as the most talked about horror movie this Halloween. Even Stephen King recently tweeted about it.Lauren LaVera with Thornton in “Terrifier 2.”CinedigmDuring a recent interview at a Midtown coffee shop, Leone kept his cool but seemed genuinely floored by his film’s runaway success. For folks taken aback by the violence, he had a reminder: It’s called “Terrifier” for a reason.“I’m not worrying about offending anybody or putting any agendas on,” he said. “It’s coming from the place of being a genuine horror fan.”“Terrifier 2” isn’t the first indie film to come out of left field and find mainstream success; “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity” did too, on far bigger scales. But unlike those films, “Terrifier 2” is aggressively and transgressively violent.The film is so gory, it makes other hit horror movies this year, like “Nope” and “The Black Phone,” look like “Ticket to Paradise.” It picks up where the original left off, as an American suburb is terrorized on Halloween by Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a psychopathic bozo who slaughters his victims in stomach-churning ways, including flaying, scalping and dismemberment — and that’s just in one scene. There are new, mostly young characters, including its protagonist teenager (Lauren LaVera) and her kid brother (Elliott Fullam).The first “Terrifier” (free to watch on several streaming services) won over many horror die-hards when it was released, in large part because of Art the Clown, a character who “threads the needle between being utterly creepy and absolutely hilarious,” said Jonathan DeHaan, who co-hosts the horror movie podcast Nightmare on Film Street. The Art the Clown Appreciation Society on Facebook has almost 12,000 members.But what’s drawing eyeballs to “Terrifier 2” is more than another creepy clown. In details like Art’s harlequin jumper and tiny top-hat fascinator — and in the gruesome nondigital makeup effects Leone crafted himself — what moviegoers are buying is homemade filmmaking.“People are responding to it because it’s an independent movie that feels like it’s made by people and not a giant studio machine,” DeHaan said. “There are actual people on set doing stuff with their hands, and you can feel it.”But what about the shock, walkouts, regurgitation?“We all wish we could see ‘The Exorcist’ on opening weekend and experience people vomiting in the aisles,” DeHaan said. “This is as close as you’ll get to that.”Who makes a movie like this? A guy who was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, in a household led by an Italian American single mother who loved classic movies so much, she named her only son after the child Antichrist in “The Omen.”Leone said his mother introduced him to horror landmarks like “Jaws” but also to the sword-and-sorcery sagas she adored, like “The Beastmaster.”But as she watched “Terrifier 2,” she got a little possessed.“She was beyond repulsed, just screaming at me, cursing me out like a truck driver,” he said.But by the end of the movie “she was very proud,” he said. “It was a badge of honor.”For some viewers it may be their first encounter with fantastically line-crossing gore, the kind with roots in the works of maverick directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Lucio Fulci. Leone knows the violence in his film is outrageous, and he’s buckled in for the backlash. But he wants audiences to understand that watching it comes with a purpose that’s endemic to horror.“Our mortality is so devastating to us that we need ways to accept it,” he said. “An attraction to violent horror,” he added, “is a coping mechanism.”And if people get sick at his film — and Leone said he really hopes nobody does — hey, it’s all part of the sell.“Sometimes you have to embrace the exploitation, especially if you’re trying to get noticed,” he said. “I don’t pretend that we are not exploiting the violence. We are. But those are the kinds of movies I loved, growing up.”The pluses and pitfalls of “Terrifier 2” were on display at a 10:30 showing on a recent Monday night at a Times Square theater. (The 10:45 was sold out.) The 19 people who started watching the film dwindled to 17 when two men took off after Art the Clown cracked a guy’s head in half before the title credits even started. By the end there were 14, after three folks grabbed their popcorn tubs and skedaddled when a character was gruesomely beheaded.Among those who stayed was Michelle Martinez, 22. She and a group of friends traveled from Brooklyn to see the film because, she said, “the ad looked scary.”And her review? “I’m not really into scary movies,” she said. “But this one is nice.” More

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      James Wan Prefers Peter Jackson’s Gory Horror Comedies

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      The director of 21st-century horror blockbusters (and “Aquaman”) on the movies, food and trading cards that get him through the Halloween season (and beyond).From “Saw” to “Insidious” and “The Conjuring,” James Wan has been a director, creator and producer on some of the biggest horror franchises of the last two decades. Even when he’s gearing up for films outside his genre (Wan’s “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” drops next year), he’s never far from the horror conversation. The trailer for the Wan-produced possessed doll film, “M3GAN,” lit up the internet when it was released earlier this month. So, it’s not surprising that Wan takes the Halloween season seriously. To start, there’s the annual pilgrimage to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood.“I get to take a break from work and indulge my horror craving,” he said in a recent video interview. “But I’m not watching it, I’m walking through it and experiencing it in a more tactile way. I like to be scared. But, ultimately, it’s fun. You know the guy chasing you with an ax isn’t actually going to ax you.”And then, of course, there are the films. Wan rotates through some of his favorite horror films in October, like “Chopping Mall” and “Night of the Creeps” — or “The Frighteners,” which he says is full of the director Peter Jackson’s unique sense of humor.“Sadly, most people today know him from his ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, but for hardcore fans we all grew up with ‘Dead Alive,’ ‘Bad Taste,’ and ‘Meet The Feebles,’” he says. “In his gory horror comedies, his horror set pieces are so over the top — blood spraying everywhere — it’s just hilarious. And that’s what I see in ‘The Frighteners,’ a little bit of that cheekiness peppered throughout.”Here, Wan talks about the places, movies and food that he enjoys throughout the year. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Last of Us Part II” During the pandemic, I played “The Last of Us Part II,” like, five times. It feels like I’m actually playing a movie. These games are so in-depth, you spend hours and days and even weeks with the characters and the story, and you get caught up with them emotionally. And that’s what “The Last of Us Part II” did so well: It was exciting, it was scary, but it was ultimately driven by emotion.2. “Mars Attacks” Trading Cards I grew up collecting toys, comic books and trading cards. During the pandemic, I got back into collectibles. I went on eBay and tried to collect all of the “Mars Attacks” cards. Unfortunately, the originals are almost impossible to find, so I had to buy some reissues. I collected a lot of sports cards in my high school days, so now it’s kind of fun to collect non-sports ones, like “Mars Attacks.”3. Home Theater When I was renovating the home that I’m in now, one of the things I really wanted was a really good home theater. I’ve got nice recliners, a big screen, high-end projectors, a great sound system and the room is fully soundproofed. The first full movie I watched in there was “Tenant.” It’s my pride and joy of the house.4. 1978 Rolex “Pepsi” Another thing I like collecting are vintage watches. They don’t have to be big and fancy. I enjoy the idea of so much artistry and engineering going into something that’s so small. The older the watch is, the cooler it is to me. One of my favorites is my red and blue 1978 Rolex GMT-Master 1675 “Pepsi.” I thought it was fun to get a watch that was, basically, as old as me.5. Netherworld Haunted House One of my favorite haunted houses that I’ve been to is called Netherworld, near Atlanta. A group of us went when we were shooting “Furious 7” around Halloween. There are a lot of cinematic ideas that they put into it. It’s really cool to see them pull off a lot of the gags with cool animatronics, great lighting, fog, and other old-school film tricks, which is the stuff I like about old-school horror films.6. My Mother’s Laksa I grew up on a spicy Malaysian noodle dish called Laksa. It’s not an easy dish to get in America and usually when they do make it, it’s not quite like the one I grew up with. Where I was born in East Malaysia, they make Laksa with spicy shrimp paste, while the rest of the world seems to make it with curry paste. And it just has a different flavor. It takes a lot of work and patience to make — which I don’t really have the time for — so, I just wait until my mother visits me from Australia. She brings all the ingredients and she cooks it for me.7. My Courtyard Garden When you see Rob Zombie and then you see his crib, you kind of go, Oh yeah, that makes sense. When people come to my place, they notice that it’s very different from the kind of movies I make. I need a space that’s calm, light filled, and peaceful. I love my courtyard. It’s a peaceful place for me to go out in the middle of the night, pace back and forth and just think.8. “The Cuphead Show!” Late at night, just before bed, my wife and I have been watching “The Cuphead Show!” on Netflix. It’s a cartoon based on a video game, Cuphead. It’s about a pair of cups who are brothers. I love the old-timey cartoon aesthetic. It’s a nice palate cleanser.9. Antique Music Boxes I have a handful of antique music boxes. I love the way they cram such smart engineering into tiny little boxes. I have one on my coffee table that’s about the size of a child’s coffin. I also have an old gramophone that I like to play every now and then. It freaks my wife out because it sounds like something that’s straight out of one of my horror films — you know, that crackly record player that’s playing some old-timey music.10. The Uffizi Gallery I’m a big fan of Italian art and culture, from artists during the Renaissance to Italian horror directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. When we went to Florence a few years ago, I said we had to visit Uffizi Gallery. The place is filled with the most incredible artwork from artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. It was amazing. To see the works of artists I grew up admiring was one of my favorite life experiences. More

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      How George Clooney and Julia Roberts Quietly Became the Tracy-Hepburn of Our Time

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      “Ticket to Paradise” and other team-ups take advantage of their onscreen glamour and stellar chemistry and their offscreen affection for one another.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.They don’t share the screen until 49 minutes into their first film together, and it’s not an amicable conversation. She’s expecting her boyfriend, but the hand on her shoulder belongs to her ex-husband, and her first words to him (“What are you doing here?”) are loaded with a mixture of shock and residual anger. The irritation quickly takes over; there’s fire in her eyes, enough to dampen the twinkle in his. “You’re not wearing your ring,” he notes.“I sold it,” she fires back. “I don’t have a husband, or didn’t you get the papers?”“My last day inside,” he replies.“I told you I’d write.”Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s first scene together, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” runs less than five minutes total, but they’re packed with barbs and pronouncements, insults and callbacks, relitigations of ancient arguments and (for him at least) flashes of longing. Tess (Roberts) is the reason Danny Ocean (Clooney) has assembled the titular crew to rob three high-profile Las Vegas casinos — all of which happen to be owned by Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), Tess’s current beau. (When Danny meets Terry, he fidgets with his wedding ring absent-mindedly. Or perhaps deliberately.) The payday is huge, but it’s incidental to Danny; as he tells her during that strained first conversation, “I came here for you.” So Danny and Tess, and thus Clooney and Roberts, have to generate enough heat and chemistry underneath the snippy surface to justify everything else in the movie. It’s a tall order. They pull it off without breaking a sweat.“Our scenes are really fun,” Clooney explained at the time, “because they’re like an old Howard Hawks film where they’re both going at each other and nobody wins. Which is the way it should be.” Roberts concurred: “The dialogue is so sharp and exacting, it’s like a 1940s movie.”Danny Ocean (Clooney) fiddling with his ring during a run-in with his ex (Roberts) and her new love (Andy Garcia).Warner Bros., via AlamySuch callbacks to old Hollywood were no accident. For years now, Clooney has been described as one of the last movie stars of the old-school mold. As GQ’s Tom Carson put it in 2007, “He’s shrewd, he’s virile, he’s merry, and the camera loves him with the devotion of a headwaiter rushing over to light a billionaire’s cigar.”5 Movies Featuring the Clooney-Roberts DuoCard 1 of 5‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001). More

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      Revisiting ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ on Their 30th Anniversary

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      These dramas, both known for distinctive (and salty) dialogue, didn’t make much of a box office impression in 1992. But their influence is still being felt.In October 1992, two startlingly similar indie dramas hit art houses across the country. Both featured all-male casts, sturdy ensembles of well-dressed men spouting tough-guy dialogue. Both would become notorious for their proficiency in profanity (one notched 269 instances of the F-word; the other, a comparatively tame 138). Both offered grim worldviews and 1970s-style bummer endings. And though both were ostensibly about a robbery, each carefully avoided showing the crime itself — to better allow their writers to withhold vital information until the conclusion.Neither “Glengarry Glen Ross” (released on Oct. 2) nor “Reservoir Dogs” (three weeks later) made much of an impression at the box office that fall. But their influence was heavily felt in the ensuing decades — and from this vantage point, 30 years on, they have much to tell us about the state of masculinity in America at the end of the (first) Bush era.Their origins couldn’t have been more different. “Glengarry,” which concerns a quartet of desperate real estate salesman and the theft of a cache of premium sales leads, was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by David Mamet; the agent-turned-producer Jerry Tokofsky spent five years assembling the cast and raising the financing to turn it into a film, persuading such marquee names as Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin to slash their usual fees for the pleasure of mouthing Mamet’s distinctive dialogue.“Reservoir Dogs,” in which a crew of anonymous thieves assembles for a jewelry store robbery that goes badly and bloodily awry, was the debut film of the writer-director Quentin Tarantino. He penned “Dogs” expressly to be made on the cheap, planning to star in it with actor friends. But the script captured the eye of Harvey Keitel, who not only agreed to play the key role of Mr. White, but also to let Tarantino and the producer Lawrence Bender use his participation to attract a cast of up-and-comers, including Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth.From left, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin and Ed Harris in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”Zupnik EnterprisesTarantino, a would-be actor in the 1980s, presumably read “Glengarry” and seemingly learned from it. In addition to the similarities, both scripts pivot on the shocking unmasking of a sympathetic character as a traitor (though the reveal occurs midway through “Dogs” and at the end of “Glengarry”). Both riffed on the moody nihilism of film noir. And both find conflict and drama in putting their characters together in one confined space after the crime (the warehouse in “Dogs,” the real estate office in “Glengarry”) and letting them bounce off each other, roaring accusations and suspicions, bellowing obscenities and insults.As is often the case when tempers flare and stakes are high, such unfiltered interactions give us a peek into the characters’ collective Id, and their common obsession is their own masculinity, the manliness of the work they do and how well they do it. That subtext is made text early in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in its most revered scene (one that Mamet invented anew and added to his screenplay adaptation). Alec Baldwin appears as the viperous Blake, a hot shot from the home office who schleps down to the Sheepshead Bay branch to lead a sales meeting that amounts to eight straight minutes of vicious verbal abuse. “You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them, then go home and tell your wife your troubles,” Blake instructs the cowering sales crew. “Because only one thing matters in this life — get them to sign on the line which is dotted!” As Georgia Brown noted in her Village Voice review, “In the trade’s lexicon, the magic verb is to close. When Aaronow” — the sad-sack salesman — “complains he can’t close ‘em anymore, he’s confessing impotence.”“They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money, are you gonna take it?” Blake taunts the busted-out Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), later in his pep talk. “Are you man enough to take it?” The director James Foley cuts to an agonizing close-up of Lemmon, steaming; his subsequent actions can all be traced to, and perhaps blamed on, that moment of harrowing public humiliation. As if to somehow make the accusation more explicit, Blake concludes his tirade by brandishing a pair of pendulous orbs on a string, announcing, “It takes brass balls to sell real estate,” before tossing them back in his briefcase.Such hazing rituals are par for the course among the performative brutes of “Reservoir Dogs,” which is filled with male bonding rituals: playing the dozens, chewing the fat over coffee or beers, spinning tall tales about crime and sex, and, of course, breaking into dramatic near-fisticuffs at the slightest provocation. Yet the particulars of Tarantino’s men — their identical suits, their color-coded pseudonyms, their hidden identities — underscore the impersonality of their expected behaviors, rendering them interchangeable, and thus impotent, as the salesman of “Glengarry.”When Harvey Keitel, center, joined the cast, his reputation proved a draw to up-and-comers like Madsen, left, and Buscemi.Miramax FilmsBlake also peppers his speech with insults of implied homosexuality, further tying their sales shortfalls to their notions of traditional masculinity. But this vernacular is by no means exclusive to his scene or character; aside from calling their office manager a “secretary” (with all the gender connotations therein), the unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper insults wielded by the sales force include the most verboten four-letter epithet for the female genitalia. Yet the intricacies of male attraction and intimacy aren’t entirely eschewed. Ricky Roma (Pacino), the office’s only success, is seen landing a client with a pitch that sounds less like a sale than a pickup, assuring his mark of such unspoken truths as, “You think you’re queer, lemme tell you something, we’re all queer.”A similar dichotomy exists in “Reservoir Dogs,” where the other F-word is deployed freely, but outside the gaze of the group, an intimacy and even tenderness blossoms between Keitel’s Mr. White and Roth’s Mr. Orange. When the latter is shot in the stomach during their getaway, White holds his hand, wipes his face and gives him permission to “go ahead and be scared, you’ve been brave enough for one day.” And Mr. Orange, terrified for his life but moved by these gestures, asks Mr. White to hold him.Such chasms in thinking (and action) regarding masculinity were clicking through the culture that fall. A month after “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Reservoir Dogs” slipped into theaters, voters would eject the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush — a man branded by his detractors, during his candidacy and administration, as a “wimp.” Bush was so determined to shed that sneering indictment of his blue-blood upbringing that some pundits believed it influenced his decision to invade Iraq.His replacement, Bill Clinton, offered up his own contradictions. A baby boomer vowing kinder, gentler leadership, he promised an administration informed by the participation and influence of his accomplished wife, Hillary — all while dogged by charges of rampant infidelity, ultimately overlooked by voters, with a collective “boys will be boys” shrug. The ’90s would be a strange time for the American male, and the closing lines of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” delivered by Roma, would prove not only dramatically effective but also socially encapsulating. “I swear, it’s not a world of men,” he despairs. “It’s a world of clock-watchers, bureaucrats, office holders … we’re the members of a dying breed.” More

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, an Iranian Exile, Channels Trauma in ‘Holy Spider’

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who had to flee Iran after an intimate tape was leaked, has been transfixed by the protests erupting there as her film “Holy Spider” is released in the U.S.“I know that fear, I know that humiliation,” Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, said in a recent interview. “I know how men in Iran use their power to keep you quiet.”Ebrahimi is an Iranian exile who, in 2008, decided she had to flee after being subjected to a smear campaign based on her love life. Now, that experience and her role in the film “Holy Spider,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Oct. 28, have intersected with disarming intensity, as women in Iran burn their head scarves to protest the oppression of the Islamic Republic.The story of Rahimi, the fictional investigative journalist at the heart of “Holy Spider,” is one of female defiance in the face of male violence. Based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a religious center, the movie traces with unflinching, sometimes harrowing, intimacy Rahimi’s efforts to penetrate the world of men obfuscating Hanaei’s crimes.“We need to finish this story,” Ebrahimi said, her pale eyes burning, during the 75-minute interview in Paris. “This Islamic Republic has to end. Women today know their rights. They know what life and freedom of expression are. It will take time and blood, but there is no other way.”It took time and flexibility to make “Holy Spider,” which is directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian exile based in Copenhagen. Filming was impossible in Iran, given the government’s hostility to the project, and months of preparation in Turkey came to nothing when the Turkish authorities, apparently under pressure from Tehran, blocked the production. The young Iranian actress who was set to play Rahimi withdrew, abruptly overcome by fear of reprisal, just as filming was about to start in Jordan, according to Ebrahimi.“I got so angry with her,” said Ebrahimi, who was then the casting director for the movie. “And I think that night when I got so crazy, I’m pretty sure that Ali saw something in me.”So, in extremis, Ebrahimi, 41, who found fame in the early 2000s as a star of the Iranian TV soap opera “Narges,” took on the lead role. Given all of these obstacles, it is, Ebrahimi told me, “a miracle that we have it to screen.”In “Holy Spider,” Ebrahimi plays a journalist investigating a serial killer.UtopiaThe killer, played by Mehdi Bajestani, is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei.UtopiaAbbasi, the film’s director, said he wanted to challenge the image of “the Islamic Republic and its leaders as some sort of theocratic, dry people who are very conservative.” At a deeper level, he suggested, “these people are obsessed with sexuality.” Iran is a country, he said, where the authorities “get some sort of pleasure out of humiliating women.”For the director, who visited Mashhad as part of his preparations for the movie, “there is a Lynchian undercurrent of fetishized suppressed sexuality in every aspect of the Islamic Republic.”His words brought to mind a meeting I had in the holy Iranian city of Qum in 2009. A mullah sat on a raised dais as he explained in measured terms the rationale of the Islamic Republic. Then the subject turned to women. How could any man not lose control, he suddenly frothed, if women’s hair and the curves of their bodies were allowed to be seen in public? This was the gateway to hell, he shouted.Ebrahimi’s life as an actor in Iran had fallen apart a few years before that meeting, when a video of lovemaking she said she had made with her boyfriend at the time was leaked by a friend, another actor, who somehow stole it when at their apartment. It became known as the “sex tape case,” and the hounding of Ebrahimi knew no bounds.“All these people were watching my naked body and just kept copying the video and selling it in the street,” she said. “And I had to lie every day and just say it was not me, and I can’t tell you how painful it all was. Not because I was ashamed of what I did, but because of the betrayal from my colleagues and this whole society.”The government set about finding every man with whom she had shaken hands, or been photographed, she said; every man she had ever kissed on the cheek. It was clear her career in Iran was over. She was about to confront her various accusers in court, facing a prison sentence and 97 lashes on the charge of having sexual relationships outside wedlock, when she decided to flee.Ebrahimi flew to Azerbaijan, she said, and later from there to Paris, where she has since built a life. She has not returned to Iran, where most of her family still lives, and became a French citizen in 2017.After fleeing Iran, Ebrahimi settled in Paris. She said she had not returned.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn recent weeks, as antigovernment protests have spread across Iran and more than 200 people have been killed, Ebrahimi has been transfixed. Watching a new generation resisting arrest and shouting, “I don’t want this hijab, what’s your problem with my hair?” has given her hope.“I saw these images of three actresses throwing away their hijabs, saying we don’t want to lie anymore, we don’t want to hide ourselves,” Ebrahimi said, “and I figure if they arrived at this point, the whole of society is kind of there.”At the same time, she says she knows that the guardians of the Islamic Republic will resist to the end. “The last foundation they have for the regime is women and imposing the hijab,” Ebrahimi said. “They believe if the hijab comes off, everything will be destroyed — the Islamic Republic will tumble down.”Ebrahimi said she felt a lot of emotion that her film was arriving in American theaters at the same time as the protests; it feels like “all these things are happening in the same direction,” she said.“We can’t be controlled by them anymore,” Ebrahimi said. “We can’t hide ourselves and play this game. We grew up learning how to lie. There are 84 million people in Iran, and they are 84 million actors. Lying, existing inside and outside. Lying inside to our parents that we didn’t meet someone outside, lying outside that we don’t party inside.”In making the film, Ebrahimi drew on these experiences of being humiliated by an oppressive government. Her trauma became a source of inspiration and resolve.Rahimi, determined to find the murderer who keeps dumping strangled women on the outskirts of town, and driven by the memory of how an overbearing male editor had abused her, encounters forms of male contempt and evasion.She meets a mullah who assures her that every effort is being made to solve the crimes, even as he hints that it may be God’s will that these female sinners be eliminated. She encounters various men who form a protective shield around the killer, admired in his community as a husband, father and war veteran. She confronts a police officer who comes to her hotel room and tries to seduce her, dangling the possibility of information for sex.“We worked on that scene with the policeman for two hours, and I saw that I could link my personal experience of life to this journalist,” Ebrahimi said. “She was living inside me, and you know, improvisation is an important part of Ali’s work. I came up with the idea of the memory of harassment by a colleague and editor as the motivating force for the journalist.”The film is about female defiance in the face of male violence. “Women today know their rights,” Ebrahimi said about Iran, where protests have erupted recently. “They know what life and freedom of expression are.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesEbrahimi, who received threats from the Islamic Republic soon after she won the award at Cannes, including an allusion by the culture ministry to the fate of the author Salman Rushdie, said that the impact of living in Iran “affects men, too. If they drink or not, if they read something or not — there is this continuous pressure to deceive.”Hanaei’s crimes were called the “spider killings” by local news media because of how he carried them out. He confessed to killing 16 women, and was executed in 2002. In “Holy Spider,” the character is played with psychological intricacy by Mehdi Bajestani. He is desperate to believe that he is doing God’s will, and that of the Islamic Republic, by killing prostitutes. The pressure on him grows. He snaps at his wife. He feels suspicion growing.“I think he’s kind of a victim of the whole society, of the whole mind-set,” Ebrahimi said.At one point, his wife surprises him at home after a murder. He hurriedly wraps the corpse in a carpet. His wife finds him tense and impenetrable; she coaxes him to have sex. On top of his wife, sweating, thrusting, he sees the foot of the strangled prostitute sticking out from the carpet.“He has something of what I call Travis Bickle syndrome,” Abbasi said, a reference to the hero of “Taxi Driver.” “Back from a war, in an existential black hole, missing the violence. And in that scene, sexual pleasure and violence juxtapose each other.”“It’s a movie about a serial killer,” Ebrahimi said, “but also about a serial-killer society. I know, because at some point, I got killed actually by each person in that society, except perhaps 10 percent who still had my back.”She continued: “I sometimes think, for an actress, I’m happy to have this much pain in my life, to have experienced this sex tape story. I put everything into the movie, all my life.”When at last Rahimi finds the killer by impersonating a prostitute, he asks her name.“Zahra,” she says, falsely.“This was pure improvisation,” Ebrahimi said. “It was not in the script. I said ‘Zahra,’ which is my real name, even if I don’t use it anymore.” More

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      ‘The African Desperate’ Expands the Movies’ Narrow View of the Art World

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      Most films set adjacent to studios and galleries lampoon unfathomable pretension, but Martine Syms takes a more nuanced approached in her look at art schools.Martine Syms’s “The African Desperate” begins on the last day of art school for a Master of Fine Arts student named Palace. She’s facing the final critique from a committee of four instructors who sit in her studio, lobbing comments about her work — some earnest, some passive-aggressive, altogether a bit bewildering.“It’s been interesting having you in the sculpture department.” “Where are you going to go with this?” “You’re afraid of your own appetite. It’s all a bit polite, isn’t it?” “Where’d you grow up? West Side Chicago?”Palace — played by the artist Diamond Stingily, with bright orange hair and a deadly deadpan — holds her own. She calls out problematic questions, quoting Saidiya Hartman and others. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary moment, it’s all over: She passed.“That’s it?” Palace asks quietly. “You’re free,” one examiner says, meaning well. But the comment also implies that art school wasn’t always liberating.“The African Desperate” stakes out new terrain in the rarefied niche of movies featuring art schools. Unlike many films set adjacent to the art world, it focuses on a Black protagonist and avoids the cliché of “making it big” amid unfathomable pretension — a satirical staple of movies like “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Pecker” and “The Square.”Stingily, right, opposite Erin Leland in “The African Desperate,” which draws on the director’s time as a Bard College student.Dominica, Inc.Syms, a thriving artist who currently has multiple shows on, drew upon her time as an M.F.A. student at Bard College and years of teaching in universities and other settings. Syms remembers both feeling invisible and sticking out in white-dominated professional spaces at the upstate institution.“It’s not even impostor syndrome, because you’re doing the stuff and you’re there,” she said in an interview. “But even now I get people I went to school with who were like, ‘You weren’t even making art when we were in school.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was literally in film class with you!’ So I wanted to capture this feeling of not being seen sometimes,” Syms said last month, in advance of the film’s streaming release Friday on Mubi.Her portrayal of art school pulses with the energy and humor of Palace and her friends, but it’s also a story of emotional survival.“It’s a brilliant lampooning of art schools, but it also felt like a catharsis in a way,” David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, told me. “Some of the greatest art is someone who’s working through something they experienced that they have contradictory feelings about it.”Syms, who co-wrote “The African Desperate” with Rocket Caleshu, created the part with Stingily in mind. The two connected at a Chicago bookstore and arts space Syms was running called Golden Age, and the director has cast the performer in other works. Syms, Stingily and Caleshu all drew on their experiences navigating professional spaces, and Palace, like Stingily at the time, also has the family responsibility of an ailing mother.Syms and Stingily would talk and laugh about how they would respond to situations.“She was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I would have done in that program!’ Because some of the things that I experienced were really out of pocket,” Syms said.Instead of a traditional dramatic arc, “The African Desperate” exists in the moment with Palace. She’s ready to leave, but people keep coaxing her into hanging out. Her closest friend drives her to a lake to decompress; another friend buzzes with anticipation for the big graduation party; and there are last-chance flirtations with a guy who hasn’t made a move all summer.The film’s style zigs and zags with Palace’s conversations. It captures her very funny shorthand with friends and colleagues, using pop-up memes and head-on shots for phone dialogues. Syms said she had wanted to show “how talkie talkie talkie everything is” in art school. Max Minghella in “Art School Confidential” (2006), which leans into satire.Suzanne Hanover/United Artists and Sony Pictures ClassicsIt’s a sharp contrast with the style of “Art School Confidential,” the 2006 feature directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”). Clowes adapted the story of a starry-eyed art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), from a 1991 comic, loosely based on experiences at the Pratt Institute. The film is set on a cruddy, crime-ridden urban campus where a killer is on the loose.Zwigoff and Clowes’s acerbic satire leans into caricature: a horn-dog roommate, a pretentious instructor (John Malkovich) who draws only triangles (“I was one of the first”), an overbearing wannabe director with a “Film Threat” T-shirt. There’s a simmering skepticism about idolizing anyone, from a once-great alcoholic recluse (Jim Broadbent) to an arrogant art-star (Adam Scott).“Art School Confidential” was partly shot at Pasadena City College, which Syms attended. She liked the comic — and remembers getting caught in middle school reading Clowes’s books — but the movie “is not my favorite.”“I think it’s in the canon,” Syms said. “But it’s also about a white guy, which almost every art movie is about.” In her own time at art school, Syms said she saw precious little work by Black artists and filmmakers, like Edward Owens. “I remember really leaving school feeling — and not in any dejected way, just as a fact — I just don’t think I’m an artist,” Syms said.“The African Desperate” centers on Palace’s experience and subjectivity. The title comes from a verbal slip in conversation with Syms when Stingily meant to say “the African diaspora.” Syms remembered the accidental phrase and found it “evocative of the mood and what it feels like sometimes to be part of the diaspora in those spaces.”Palace does go to the party everyone’s talking about. It’s a happily spacey affair in a cavernous half-empty studio space. It might not look like much, but that’s also part of Syms’s realism. (“That was one scene I really didn’t want to be movie-fied, because it’s not a cool party! You’re upstate and there’s maybe 10 people you hang out with.”) Palace’s studio in the opening scene, for example, is a collage of life and art in progress, populated with books and Tarot cards and art materials (including long locks of hair she works with).Perhaps because it’s Diamond’s last day on campus, we see fewer artists at work than in another film featuring an art school: Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” which recently screened at the New York Film Festival.Michelle Williams as a ceramist who works at an arts college in “Showing Up.”A24Michelle Williams plays a Portland ceramist, Lizzy, who is finishing a collection for her imminent show at a gallery in town. The camera traces her gaze as she considers the pieces in her home studio. We also see the hive of student activity at the arts college, where she works as an administrator.“I was watching next to a friend of mine I went to RISD with, and we talked about how authentic the scenes felt to us,” Cynthia Lahti, the Portland artist who made Lizzy’s works, said, referring to the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way studio work flowed into the hallway. The painting class, the person throwing on the wheel, the fabric people wringing out cloth and hanging it up.”Syms’s film shares this embrace of the many creative energies in flux at an art school. The “African Desperate” cast includes a number of practicing artists, and the effect is effervescent without feeling gratuitously eccentric.“It’s not portraying this already joke-fied version of the art world,” Velasco said. “‘The African Desperate’ is portraying art school, but it’s doing it as an artwork itself.”Syms’s film doesn’t pretend that Palace emerges unscathed from her experience. “I mean, people out here really want me to get mad,” the character says early on, evoking a whole history of aggravation before the film’s 24 hours. “And it’s like, I don’t want to fight you.”But if the movie doesn’t offer a blandly happy ending, it affirms that a story has begun that only Palace can truly tell. More

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      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Barrels Into Awards Season

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      At a screening filled with Oscar voters, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and the directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.LOS ANGELES — You make a movie because you hope people will respond to it, but no one involved with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” expected all of this, the cast and crew kept telling me in the reception area of a luxe Westwood theater on Tuesday night. The “this” in question was a tastemaker party with Oscar voters and industry veterans meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender. But the bigger “this,” the one that really boggled them, was the fact that they were embarking on a monthslong awards campaign to begin with.“We did press all through the summer, and then took a break and thought, ‘This will all die down. The feelings will die down, the excitement will die down,’” said Daniel Kwan, who co-directed the film with Daniel Scheinert. “And then we came back and somehow it’s gotten even stronger. At one of the screenings, someone came up to me and said, ‘This is my 14th time watching the movie!’”Passion counts for a lot during awards season, and “Everything Everywhere” has plenty of it: This sci-fi comedy about a Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) who becomes the multiverse’s last hope earned stellar reviews in its March release, played for several months in theaters, and made more than $100 million worldwide on a $14.3 million budget. In doing so, it became A24’s highest-grossing title and reinvigorated a specialty-film market that has been ailing since the pandemic began.When the film was released and an awards campaign was suggested, Scheinert said, “I full-on thought it was a joke.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFrom right, Yeoh, Kwan and Quan. The director said one fan had told him about seeing the movie 14 times.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThough I expect the film will be nominated in several categories at the Oscars, including best picture, it hasn’t taken a traditional path toward that goal. Instead of debuting at a prestigious fall film festival, “Everything Everywhere” chose a raucous spring premiere at South by Southwest, and it was released in theaters on March 25, a time when awards attention was trained exclusively on the Oscar ceremony held that weekend.The film will also have to win over older voters, who may prove more resistant to its wacky charms, since “Everything Everywhere” is laden with sight gags and traffics heavily in down-market genres like sci-fi, action and gross-out comedy. Could it surmount all of those hurdles and become the first significant Oscar contender to feature a dildo fight scene? (If “Frost/Nixon” happened to have one, please write in to remind me.)“I full-on thought it was a joke when this was coming out and they said, ‘What if it’s awards-y?’” Scheinert said. “It was an ode to ‘Jackass’ and Stephen Chow movies!”Still, there is a potent emotional core to the film that has moved audiences: As Yeoh’s Evelyn explores the multiverse, she comes to better understand the people who used to get on her nerves, including her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and even her tax auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). And that empathy extends off the screen, to the movie’s stars: Quan, the first actor to show up at the party, was mobbed by well-wishers eager to praise his sensitive performance. “I was so famished for a role like this,” the 51-year-old Quan told me. “Famished!”After breakout child-star parts in the 1980s as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies,” Quan’s good fortune quickly evaporated. “I was faced with a horrible reality and I had to step away because the phone stopped ringing,” he said. “Hollywood didn’t write roles for Asian actors.”In 2000, a disillusioned Quan moved behind the camera to work in stunt choreography, though he continued to pay his Screen Actors Guild dues every month without question: “Maybe subconsciously, I was thinking, just be patient.”“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this?” Quan asked.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter watching “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2018, he was inspired to return to acting and called an agent friend to represent him; two weeks later, that agent sent him “Everything Everywhere,” which let him play a character who was underestimated, sweet-natured, fierce and romantic all at once.“To have this as my comeback movie and to get this recognition and warm embrace? I’ve cried so much in the last six months from reading the comments or from people coming up to me,” Quan said.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Aiming for the Oscars: At a screening meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender, actors and directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.The most meaningful interaction came in September at Disney’s starry D23 convention, where Quan went to promote his role in the coming season of the Marvel series “Loki.” Harrison Ford was there touting the fifth “Indiana Jones” film, due next year, and though Quan worried his old co-star wouldn’t recognize him, the actor turned, pointed and said, “Are you Short Round?”“Yes, Indy,” Quan replied. And as they embraced, memories came flooding back from the beginning of Quan’s career, which has now regained its initial promise.“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this? How often do actors get a second act?” Quan asked. “I really hope that if people are reading my story, it gives them hope, it gives them courage to give voice to that dream they once had. It’s so difficult to be an actor in this business, and I want those people who are doubting themselves or have dreams fading away because they think it’s not going to happen …”Quan grew too emotional to finish his thought and swallowed, collecting himself. “Anyway,” he said.Recent awards-season events for the film have often ended in tears, according to Scheinert: “In a weird way, we’re finally getting to debrief with our cast and crew about what this really meant to us.” It all began with a viral GQ video when Yeoh cried as she discussed reading the “Everything Everywhere” script, which asked her to play so many more modes than she was used to. “To be funny, to be real, to be sad — finally, somebody understood that I could do those things,” she said in the clip.That touched her directors and also took them by surprise, since on set Yeoh was more likely to affectionately razz them than to confess her innermost feelings. “Some of the stuff she said in interviews, she had never said to us,” Kwan said. “Michelle’s a very guarded woman, and she has to be.”The costume designer Shirley Kurata was among the crew members at the screening.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOne academy voter paid tribute to the film’s hot dog fingers.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRight on cue, Yeoh finally arrived, a vision in yellow Gucci. “I’m the canary, nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. The very busy actress, who will soon be seen in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese,” had hotfooted it to the party from the nearby premiere of “The School for Good and Evil,” a Netflix fantasy film where she plays one of the teachers at an enchanted boarding school. That red carpet had been packed with ingénues and TikTok stars, and Yeoh was surprised when a young girl recognized her and passed her an appreciative note.“I thought, ‘I’m out of my league here, nobody’s going to know who you are,’” Yeoh said.“Michelle, you are huge,” Kwan replied. He recalled a San Francisco screening of “Everything Everywhere” where the heavily Asian crowd, which had revered Yeoh since her start in Hong Kong action movies, cheered so loudly that the actress was afraid to go onstage, lest she become too emotional in public.“For a long time, they would say, ‘You have to tell everybody about your experiences,’ and I couldn’t, because it would overwhelm me,” Yeoh said, turning to Kwan and Scheinert. “And the one time I listened to you — the one time — I did an interview and I was blubbering! Oh, I was so embarrassed.”Was she referring to that GQ clip? “Yes,” said a mortified Yeoh, burying her face in Kwan’s shoulder. “See, everyone knows!”Yeoh told me the reason she has trouble articulating what “Everything Everywhere” means to her “is because when you really talk about it, suddenly it comes crashing in that you have waited for so many years for something like this. And as the years go by, you see it slipping away from your fingers, and you can’t get it back because you are aging. But even though I’m 60, I can still do a lot! Don’t put me in a box.”Yeoh seen through a chandelier at the theater. She said she had a hard time talking about the film’s success because each time she is reminded that she “waited for so many years for something like this.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRecent supporting roles in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Crazy Rich Asians” were meaningful, Yeoh said, but on “Everything Everywhere,” being listed first on the call sheet gave her a sense of ownership she’d never really felt before. She hopes that Hollywood will continue to consider her for lead roles, though she’s well-aware of whom those parts are traditionally written for.“I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”Yeoh excused herself to greet Roger Spottiswoode, who directed “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the 1997 James Bond film that help introduced her to American audiences; meanwhile, the “Star Trek Into Darkness” screenwriter Roberto Orci greeted Quan with a deferential bow. Later, as the cast and directors gathered in a theater to introduce the film — alongside a huge cohort that included its fight choreographers, composers, visual effects artists and costumers — a man from the audience yelled, “You rock!”This sort of unalloyed success is a new sensation for Kwan and Scheinert, who recently signed a lucrative five-year pact with Universal but got their start making odder fare like face-melting music videos and a debut feature, “Swiss Army Man” (2016), that involved Paul Dano riding a dead Daniel Radcliffe like a jet ski powered by flatulence. How does it feel when their avowedly left-of-center sensibility happens to score a cultural bull’s-eye?“It’s unsettling,” Scheinert said.“It makes us feel like we messed up somewhere,” Kwan joked. “The whole world likes it? What did we do wrong?” More