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    ‘A Boy Called Christmas’ Review: Kindling the Holiday Spirit

    Enchanting imagery elevates this Netflix holiday adventure about a boy who journeys to a magic elfin city.Magic abounds in “A Boy Called Christmas,” Netflix’s first prestige holiday movie of the season, but pulsing through this winning adventure tale is something even stronger: the immersive power of storytelling. The movie, at points, recalls the first few “Harry Potter” films — and not just because Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent and Toby Jones play charming eccentrics.Framed by the brusque Aunt Ruth (Smith) telling her grand niece and nephews a story on Christmas Eve, the movie follows Nikolas (Henry Lawfull), a poor but altruistic boy in medieval Finland, who journeys northward to find a mythic city called Elfhelm. Friendly allies accumulate along the way — including the wisecracking mouse Miika (voiced by Stephen Merchant), a chipper pixie (Zoe Margaret Colletti) and an ebullient elf (Jones) — while snide villainesses (Sally Hawkins and Kristen Wiig) test the limits of Nikolas’s giving spirit.At points, the prodigious cast of characters and their quips feel eye-rollingly familiar. (When a partying elf declares, “this is the resistance,” Miika snorts, “to what, sanity?”) But any weak spots are overshadowed by the movie’s joys — particularly its handsome imagery. As Nikolas’s father describes Elfhelm, his tale comes alive in enchanting shadow silhouettes around their cabin. Similarly, whenever the movie pivots between Nikolas’s snowy terrain and Aunt Ruth’s cozy bedroom setting, the director, Gil Kenan, does not cut; he effects a seamless camera pan.It’s an elegant visual decision, highlighting how the best stories — for children and adults alike — are experienced as real, tangible. Whether or not you believe in magic, “A Boy Called Christmas” may be the rare Netflix fare that kindles the holiday spirit.A Boy Called ChristmasRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘8-Bit Christmas’ Review: Now You’re Playing With Power

    Nintendo looms large in this sentimental, 1980s-set holiday comedy.The Power Glove, a short-lived, notoriously crappy peripheral for the Nintendo Entertainment System, was released in North America toward the end of 1989. “8 Bit Christmas” is set, according to its wistful narrator Jake (Neil Patrick Harris), in “1987 or 1988,” but it heavily features a Power Glove, whose awfulness in fact sets the plot in motion. This might sound like a trivial anachronism. But it’s typical of the movie’s attitude toward nostalgia, which relishes references at the expense of inconsistencies. In one moment the adolescent heroes are brandishing a 1989 Billy Ripken Fleer card; in the next they’re navigating the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, which happened in 1983. It’s as if a decade’s blurry reminiscence has been flattened into an indefinite, sentimental mush.When it isn’t fawning over roller rinks, “Goonies” posters, and Casio watches, “8 Bit Christmas” (streaming on HBO Max) is a warm and refreshingly earnest holiday comedy. The director, Michael Dowse, gets good, grounded comic performances out of his child actors (especially Max Malas as a charming perennial fibber named Jeff), as well as a surprisingly rich turn from Steve Zahn, who, between this and “The White Lotus,” is doing some of the best work of his career lately. The dynamic between loving, outdoorsy Zahn and his Nintendo-obsessed son (Winslow Fegley) is the heart of the film, and — when they’re not debating the merits of 8-bit video game consoles — their relationship is poignant, tender and quite affecting. But the film is continually distracted by period hallmarks, and while it might have been compelling, its boomboxes and Trapper Keepers get in the way.8-Bit ChristmasRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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    ‘Keep Sweet’ Review: A Legacy of Polygamy in a Religious Sect

    This documentary by Don Argott looks to the past and future of a community in the American West that made its own rules and lived by them.“Keep Sweet” concerns the conflicts in two towns on opposite sides of a state line. The area of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., was settled by members of a breakaway faction of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that continued to practice polygamy after the church had banned it.The group, known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ran what has been described as the largest polygamous community in the country. The sect’s critics have characterized it as a dangerous cult. In 2011, the group’s leader, Warren S. Jeffs, was sentenced to life in prison for the sexual assault of two girls he maintained were his wives.This documentary, directed by Don Argott, with some interviews filmed as recently as early 2020, charts a rift within the breakaway group. We hear from former members who say they were disturbed by the way Jeffs controlled and isolated the sect, forbidding books and public education for the children. On the other side are those who have stood by Jeffs even after he was convicted and who refuse to believe the charges against him.The loyalists still shun pop culture and defend Jeffs’s practice of exiling dissenters. But “Keep Sweet” is surprisingly vague on which of his dictates the group has retained. In its second half, the movie tries to show some sympathy for Jeffs’s adherents by turning to a knotty dispute over the ownership of the land, which is controlled by a trust.When people who had left the group under Jeffs began returning to the area, the followers who had stayed faced the possibility of eviction when they refused to sign legal agreements required by the trust. While the ethical issues of the property situation add complexity, the film’s efforts to balance the arguments on both sides aren’t convincing.Keep SweetNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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    ‘Moulin Rouge!’ Has a New Satine. She’s Amazed She’s Back on Broadway.

    Natalie Mendoza walked away from “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” and figured she would never work on Broadway again.That was 11 years ago, and now the 45-year-old Australian actress is back, starring in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” a title with which she has a singular history: Mendoza, who succeeds Karen Olivo in the role of Satine, had a small part in the 2001 film from which the Tony-winning show is adapted; she is the only member of the film’s cast performing in the stage musical.Born in Hong Kong to a Filipino jazz musician and an Australian dancer and television personality, Mendoza grew up in Sydney and Melbourne, with five artistically inclined siblings, and has led a nomadic life. She has lived in Asia, Europe and America; worked in music, film, television and theater; and has repeatedly left the performing arts for school (most recently, she studied French and French history at the Sorbonne) and spirituality (she has spent time at Vedic and other monasteries).Mendoza as the doomed Parisian chanteuse in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”Matt MurphyAnd as the villainous Arachne in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” She left the ill-fated show before opening night. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2010, she was cast in the ill-fated “Spider-Man” as Arachne, a villainous spider, but left during previews after suffering a concussion and then witnessing an actor injured in a fall. That was not her only difficult experience with the entertainment industry; in 2017 she said that 15 years earlier Harvey Weinstein had groped her while she was working on a film he was producing.But in an interview earlier this month at the apartment tower where she is staying, she said she loves being onstage, and hopes to become a director.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We’re talking in a conference room because, citing Covid, “Moulin Rouge!” won’t let me backstage. So let’s just pretend we’re in your dressing room. What would I see?They have this tradition here where you’re allowed to paint your dressing room. First, I felt a little ridiculous, and then I went for a light violet. I wanted something very peaceful and tranquil. There’s a prayer of St. Francis, to remind me to be a better person every day. And beautiful art. I collect art.“You think you’re enlightened on top of a mountain, and you go back into the city and you’re like, ‘How awake am I in this stressful setting?’”Mark Elzey for The New York TimesAnd do you keep a good-luck charm, or mementos?Not really. I’ve checked out of my career many times. I became a seeker very early. I learned meditation, and on and off I’ve been a monk, so when I say I’ve left, I really left. And so to re-engage with the world is always a little bit of a shock. It’s sort of Larry Darrell in “The Razor’s Edge.” You think you’re enlightened on top of a mountain, and you go back into the city and you’re like, “How awake am I in this stressful setting?”I want to come back to spirituality, but let’s start with “Moulin Rouge!” How did you wind up in the film?Many, many moons ago, when I was still living in Australia, I had been cast as Eponine in “Les Misérables.” Baz [Luhrmann] came to see “Les Miz,” because he was wanting to cast Satine, and I ended up at the final audition at his house in Sydney with his whole crew of creatives and bohemians. And we basically workshopped the role.A couple of weeks later, I heard that the glorious Nicole Kidman got the role, which didn’t surprise me. But Baz kept calling me, and saying, “Listen, we want you involved; we’re going to create a character for you,” and sure enough, that’s what happened. He created China Doll. It set my career in a different direction. All the people I met on that film set helped shape my tastes. This girl from the suburbs of Australia suddenly started dreaming about the streets of Paris, and life in London.You had taken a break from performing when you were cast in the London production of “Here Lies Love,” which is how you met Alex Timbers.Being an Asian actress, I would see other young actresses careers take this very clear trajectory, [but] I would play a really interesting role, and then all of a sudden I’d drop off because there wasn’t another role to continue that upward trajectory. Rather than wait around, I’d just go off to India, or go off and study something, and then I’d pop back in. The National Theater contacted me just when I’d left a monastery that I’d been at for a year. So that was a dream come true. And it was hugely successful, and then I just disappeared again.Mendoza and Aaron Tveit in “Moulin Rouge!” She replaced Karen Olivo, who originated the role of Satine onstage.Matt MurphyNow it’s six years later; Timbers is directing “Moulin Rouge!” and he reached out to you again.It had been so long. I just thought, “Can I do this?” Even when I’m not in a monastery, I still very much live that lifestyle. I’m very quiet. I teach meditation. I don’t speak a whole lot. I certainly don’t sing. But I just threw caution to the wind. And I realized I knew this character, because I was there right at the beginning.Karen Olivo, who originated the role of Satine onstage, left citing abuses in the industry. Did that concern you?I messaged her, before opening night, and I just thanked her, because she’s part of this character. I’m benefiting from a lot of the work that she did. And it’s always wonderful when a woman wants to take a stand based on her principles. I know that she cared deeply about the company and the cast, and she was incredibly gracious in saying that she was happy to leave the show in my hands.You had your own experience speaking up, about Harvey Weinstein.It was actually incredibly clumsy of me. The way it was portrayed in the press was far more heroic than the truth. I was reading an article about an actress [who was describing her] experience, and he sort of had a script, and I had encountered the same script. My initial impulse was to comment [on Facebook], and somehow it got leaked.He affected the arc of your career?I had signed a three-picture deal. But after that first movie, I decided Hollywood’s not for me, because I could see the cost. I never see myself as a victim. The thing is Harvey can only be Harvey because there’s a collective agreement that allows it to happen. We’re now seeing these collective shifts, these waves of a change, which is so beautiful. But at that time, that wasn’t going to happen. And so I just went off and kept being an artist in the way that I knew how. But of course, it affected my career. My career was full of potential at that point — I was young and I had some great opportunities, but I took the quieter road.You’re sort of a child of the world. How do you think about your own identity?I do think of myself as a citizen of the world. Growing up in Australia, I was literally like one of two Asian girls in my school year. So I never identified with being Australian. I couldn’t relate to the culture. I would look in the mirror and I would see an Asian girl. And I was drawn to all things Asian. I then left. I started touring and living all over Asia by the age of 16. I was connecting with the different spiritual traditions. And this is what piqued my interest early and then I just started seeking out my own path.“It’s always those devastating blows that propel you, if you allow them to,” Mendoza said.Mark Elzey for The New York TimesSpeaking of your path, I looked through your Instagram and you mention Transcendental Meditation, Christ, the Divine Mother, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Ram Dass, Rumi, a Hindu god, Saint Francis of Assisi. What’s going on?I really honor the essence that permeates all the great faiths, including the faith of quantum mechanics. The intelligence that allows a flower to bloom. That invisible essence that connects and permeates all. We see the crema on top of every great faith. There’s just this commonality that they all share, which is love and peace and compassion. I’m a fan of all of them and a devotee of all of them.Your last Broadway appearance was “Spider-Man.” You left after a concussion. Tell me what your thinking was about coming back.I realized there’s some unfinished business here, because it brought up some strange feelings, like, “Do I want to revisit that?” And I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to perform on Broadway again, because sometimes when things like that happen, you become untouchable. “Oh, you know, she was part of that production.” And so the opportunity to be given this chance, and to change the narrative, because I’m certainly not a quitter — it is the last thing I would ever have expected, but it’s incredibly beautiful to be doing this.How do you view “Spider-Man” in the rearview mirror?It’s its own Greek myth, isn’t it? It was a really powerful turning point for me. To get that close, and to suddenly not be doing it, was a pretty devastating blow. And at the same time, it’s always those devastating blows that propel you, if you allow them to, in a direction spiritually that can be the greatest gift of your life, and certainly that’s what happened. I am so thankful to have gone through that experience, and also to carry so many of the lessons from that experience into this experience. It’s all beautiful.When I heard you got this role, the first thing that occurred to me is that Satine flies. Did that freak you out?Not at all. People thought I left that show because I was scared, and I wasn’t. I was making a stand. People’s safety is important, and it wasn’t my safety I was concerned about. I’m a rock climber. I’m not scared of heights. I’m not afraid. I don’t think any show is worth putting anybody’s life at risk, particularly these dancers that have spent their entire lives training to be up on that stage. You have to treat those bodies with so much respect, because that’s their livelihood. I would never want stardom so much that I would compromise my own integrity. And I have no problem taking a stand for anybody. More

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    Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell

    Hayao Miyazaki photographed outside his atelier near Studio Ghibli in Tokyo on Oct. 4, 2021.Takahiro KaneyamaHayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last SpellNo artist has explored the contradictions of humanity as sympathetically and critically as the Japanese animation legend. Now, at 80, he’s coming out of retirement with another movie.Nov. 23, 2021THE SCREEN IS black, and then comes the first frame: Hayao Miyazaki, the greatest animated filmmaker since the advent of the form in the early 20th century and one of the greatest filmmakers of any genre, is seated in front of a cast-iron stove with a pipe running up toward the ceiling, flanked by windows propped half open. Sun burns through the branches of the trees outside. Three little apples perch on a red brick ledge behind the stove. He wears an off-white apron whose narrow strap hooks around the neck and attaches with a single button on the left side — the same style of apron he has worn for years as a work and public uniform, a reminder that he is at once artist and artisan, ever on guard against daubs of paint — over a crisp white collared shirt, his white mustache and beard neat and trim, and his white hair blurring into a near halo as he gazes calmly at me through owlish black glasses, across the 6,700 miles from Tokyo to New York.I have one hour to ask questions. It is a rare gift, as Miyazaki has long preferred not to speak to the press except when absolutely necessary (which is to say, when he’s prodded into promoting a film), and has not granted an interview to an English-language outlet since 2014. Our conversation has been brokered by the newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which mounted the first North American retrospective of his work in September, with Studio Ghibli’s cautious assent; Jessica Niebel, an exhibitions curator, cites him as an exemplar of an auteur who “has managed to stay true to himself” while making movies that are “approachable to people everywhere.” I know I am lucky to have this time, and yet it feels wrong to meet Miyazaki this way, at a distance (due to Covid-19 travel restrictions) and through a computer, a machine he has so famously shunned.To accompany T’s story on Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli provided rarely seen watercolor imageboards drawn by the animator himself during the development of his films. Here, a sketch of the warrior Ashitaka from “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDFor, in an age of ever-advancing technology, his animated films are radical in their repudiation of it. From “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), with its vision of gentle friendship between two children and an enormous growling forest creature whom only they can see, to the ecological epic “Princess Mononoke” (1997), whose title character, a human raised by wolves, first appears sucking blood out of a wound in her wolf mother’s side (the hero, an exiled prince, takes one look at her blood-smeared face and falls in love), to the phantasmagorical fable “Spirited Away” (2001), in which a timid girl must learn pluck and save her foolish parents (who’ve been transformed into pigs) by working at a bathhouse that caters to a raucous array of gods, Miyazaki renders the wildest reaches of imagination and the maddest swirls of motion — the stormy waves that turn into eel-like pursuers in “Ponyo” (2008), the houses rippling and bucking with the force of an earthquake in “The Wind Rises” (2013) — almost entirely by hand. And unlike Walt Disney, the only figure of comparable stature in animation, Miyazaki, who is now 80, has never retreated to the role of a corporate impresario, dictating from on high: At Studio Ghibli, the animation company he founded with the filmmaker Isao Takahata and the producer Toshio Suzuki in 1985, he’s always worked in the trenches, as part of a team of around a hundred employees devoted just to production, including key animators and background, cleanup and in-between artists, whose desks he used to make the rounds of daily for decades. (His own desk is hardly bigger than theirs.) He still draws the majority of the frames in each film, numbering in the tens of thousands, himself. Only occasionally has he resorted to computer-generated imagery, and in some films not at all.“I believe that the tool of an animator is the pencil,” he tells me. (We speak through an interpreter, Yuriko Banno.) Japanese pencils are particularly good, he notes: The graphite is delicate and responsive — in the 2013 documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness,” directed by Mami Sunada, he mocks himself for having to rely on a soft 5B or even softer 6B as he gets older — and encased in sugi (Japanese cedar), although, he muses, “I don’t see that many quality wood trees left in Japan anymore.” He adds, “That’s a true story,” then laughs, leaning in to the screen, and I think of the ancient, moss-cloaked trees in “Princess Mononoke,” cut down to fuel Lady Eboshi’s ironworks, and of their counterparts in the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine on the island of Yakushima in the south, which Miyazaki visited while location scouting for the film. The oldest cedar there, 83 feet tall and nearly 54 feet in circumference, is believed to be more than 2,600 years old, making it one of the oldest trees on earth. (The forest of the film does not exactly correspond to the ravine, Miyazaki has said: “Rather, it is a depiction of the forest that has existed within the hearts of Japanese from ancient times.”)A watercolor imageboard from Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” (1997).Hayao Miyazaki © 1997 Studio Ghibli – NDMiyazaki lives with his wife, Akemi, a former fellow animator — they met as colleagues at Toei Animation nearly 60 years ago on the movie “Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon,” and married in 1965; she stopped working to raise their two sons, at his request, and, he has said in the past, “hasn’t forgiven” him — in Tokorozawa, northwest of Tokyo, where the Totoro Fund (supported in part by donations from the Miyazakis) has purchased more than 10 wooded hectares, dense with oak and camphor trees, for conservation. But today he is speaking to me from the Tokyo suburb of Koganei, from a small building a short walk away from the headquarters of Studio Ghibli that he uses as a private atelier. He sometimes affectionately calls it Buta-ya, Japanese for “pig house.” (He is fond of pigs, and often sketches himself as one.) Out front he parks his cloud-gray Citroën 2CV, with a tiny two-horsepower engine and a rollback roof that leaks when it rains (the model was discontinued in 1990); a wine-colored version of it appears in the careening cliffside chase scene in his directorial debut, “Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro” (1979). Every December, he puts cuddly stuffed goats, mementos of his work on the “Heidi: A Girl of the Alps” TV series in the ’70s, in the kitchen window to greet passing children. When the Academy Museum requested a goat to display in its exhibition, he demurred: The children would miss them.Buta-ya was meant to be a retirement office, where Miyazaki could pursue personal projects. He built it in 1998, after announcing that he would make no more feature films, then returned to Studio Ghibli the next year with the story idea that would become “Spirited Away,” the highest-grossing movie in Japanese history until last fall’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” (an extension of a popular manga franchise and part of a different strain of Japanese anime, focused on action and vengeance, with a video-game-like feel). “Spirited Away” won the 2002 Academy Award for best animated feature, the only film from outside the West to ever do so. In 2013, he said again that he was done with film, and that time, having directed 11 features in 34 years, he was taken seriously: Studio Ghibli shut down its production department.Yet here he is now, making a new film. “Because I wanted to,” he says, and grins, like a grizzled thief come back for one last heist.GORGEOUS, PROFOUND, BORDERLESS in possibility — yes, yes, but above all, Miyazaki’s films are thrilling. He is a master of suspense, whether sending a fugitive girl skittering down a rickety pipe that pops off the wall as she runs (“Spirited Away”), or swooping after a novice witch reeling on a broomstick because she’s forgotten how to fly and must quickly relearn so she can rescue her friend, a boy who’s dangling from a dirigible and about to crash into a clock tower (the 1989 “Kiki’s Delivery Service”). His visual style is at once commanding and intimate, a mix of fluid, loose lines and an accumulation of detail — in contrast to more mainstream anime’s labor-saving preference for caricature and clipped movement — that enables him to invoke the immediacy of life without being beholden to its precise contours. He deploys a palette of saturated colors, bright but never gaudy, standing out against cool grays and dun tones, and pays attention to quicksilver adjustments of light and shade, especially the shadows within shadows that give featheriness and depth to the night. He is equally expressive in close-up and panorama, and virtuosic in his open skies, creating clouds that are almost characters unto themselves, whether high-heaped loomers, broad swaths of rubble or voluptuous whorls like the heavy heads of flowers, stained by sunset or the deepening blues of day. (The Academy Museum’s retrospective includes a green-carpeted knoll where visitors may rest and gaze up at a video of passing clouds.)A self-portrait in marker made exclusively for T by Miyazaki on shikishi board, upon which it’s customary in Japan to draw or write a message in order to express gratitude (the characters below the drawing are his signature).Hayao MiyazakiAnd how easily Miyazaki slips from one register to the next, from hushed to clamorous, often in the same scene, as in the exquisitely timed comedy of towering Totoro, with his giant claws, standing beside two little girls at a bus stop in the dark. It’s raining; one girl offers him an umbrella, an instrument he has never encountered before. A toad stares at him from across the road, as if equally perplexed. We squint up at the trees to see a few particularly fat raindrops falling from a branch. They plonk down on the umbrella, loud, and Totoro startles. More drops come, a scattering of drumbeats, and his eyes widen. He heaves his body up in the air and lands with a boom, and all the drops caught in the trees come crashing down, his own personal storm. And then — because of course there’s more — the bus arrives, only it’s a scampering cat with headlight eyes and a door that opens in its side to whisk Totoro away.But Miyazaki is a realist, too. Toward the end of his 2004 film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which is mostly devoted to magic — a girl is transformed by a witch into an elderly woman, a wizard shape-shifts into a dark man-bird, a castle uproots itself and clanks around on clawed feet — a great-bellied airship looms into view and starts dropping bombs on a cobblestone town. Black clouds and flames surge over houses; the sky hangs red. No war takes place in the source material, a 1986 novel by the British writer Diana Wynne Jones. This is Miyazaki’s memory.He was born in 1941, the same year that Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, and he was 4 years old when American planes attacked the city of Utsunomiya, where his family had been evacuated from Tokyo. He recounts in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” how he saw a glow at the window and hid under a bridge, his legs in a ditch. With the incendiaries still falling, his father carried him up the riverbank and to a small truck so they could escape. As Miyazaki and his father settled into the vehicle’s bed, a woman with a child asked if they could come, too, but they were left behind. “We left them behind,” Miyazaki says. A month later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. More humiliations followed: the emperor’s renunciation of divinity, the dismantlement of the country’s armed forces and a formal abjuring of war, enshrined in the Constitution.A still from “Castle in the Sky” (1986).Hayao Miyazaki © 1986 Studio GhibliA still from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Hayao Miyazaki © 1988 Studio GhibliAlthough Miyazaki was too young to comprehend the magnitude of what was taking place, that time remains a cornerstone of his work, as it was and has been for many Japanese artists who came of age during the war or in its aftermath. The late antiwar painter Tatsuo Ikeda, who was born in 1928 and conscripted as a teenager to become a kamikaze pilot — the country’s defeat saved him — started out making portraits for American soldiers from snapshots of their girlfriends or wives, and went on to create eerie black-and-white tableaus that bristle with malformed animals and punishing machines. Haruki Murakami, born in 1949 in Kyoto, the former seat of the imperial court, writes novels of deadpan humor that surreally interrogate the legacy and persistence of Japanese nationalism.And perhaps the most harrowing Japanese war film ever made is Studio Ghibli’s 1988 “Grave of the Fireflies,” adapted by Takahata from a 1967 short story by Akiyuki Nosaka about two children left homeless in the wake of an air raid. It bears the freight of Takahata’s own memories of fleeing a firebombing as a 9-year-old — he was born in 1935 — as his feet were burned by melting asphalt, and wandering without food for two days. “No one gave him anything, not even potato vines,” Miyazaki recalls in “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.” (Astonishingly, in its first release, “Grave of the Fireflies” was paired with “My Neighbor Totoro” as a double bill: anguish and solace.)Arguably, the rise of Japanese animation itself, in both its monster/superhero and more lyrical veins, was a direct response to the shock of defeat and anxiety over atomic fallout and the threat of genetic mutations. The monster Godzilla first appeared in a live-action 1954 film as a dinosaur, roused from the bottom of the ocean by an American hydrogen bomb test, who spews radiation over Tokyo in a visceral re-enactment of an air raid. (Miyazaki tells me that he remembers watching the movie and being reminded of American warplanes “dropping bombs from high above, out of reach.”) If Godzilla was fear and rage incarnate, Astro Boy — known in Japanese as the Mighty Atom, and introduced by the animation pioneer Osamu Tezuka in a 1951 manga, followed by an animated TV series starting in 1963 — sublimated anxiety into heroism: A boy robot whose body is powered by nuclear energy gets abandoned by his maker (giving him kinship with the war’s many orphans), but learns to use his abilities to fight for peace.Miyazaki’s movies, with their warplanes and intrusions of Western décor and dress, keep circling back to the traumatic moment when Japan, which until the mid-19th century had kept itself closed off to the outside world, was forced to embrace the West and Western values. The devastated population complied in confused haste, as if to erase the shame of recent history and their own complicity in a war waged by a nationalist government out of a belief in Japan’s cultural superiority. (Some saw this as a capitulation to the West and a fatal loss of dignity; in 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima died by ritual suicide in protest, after shouting, “Long live the emperor!”) Niebel, of the Academy Museum, suggests that Japanese audiences are drawn to Miyazaki’s work because it’s essentially nostalgic. There’s a yearning, faintly mournful, for an older Japan, one free of both imperialistic hubris and Western materialism.A woven wool blanket — featuring Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away” (2001) — designed by Loewe’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, as part of a series in which T commissioned four artists deeply influenced by Studio Ghibli to create original works that accompany this story. “Their poetic films have the ability to connect with adults just as powerfully as with children, creating a sense of nostalgia,” Anderson says. “Loewe’s connection to the studio is in our mutual love of crafts and artisanal techniques, expressed in our respective languages.”Photo by Florent TanetBut part of his films’ greatness is that they can also be loved by viewers who never sense the dark current below. In “Porco Rosso” (1992), the hero may be an embittered war veteran, but he’s also, literally and delightfully, a pig flying a plane, and is spectacularly good at it.MIYAZAKI’S FATHER WAS not a bystander in the war. He ran a munitions factory that produced wings for the military’s fearsomely acrobatic Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter planes, which in the last months of the war were converted for kamikaze missions. In a 1995 newspaper essay in The Asahi Shimbun, Miyazaki describes his father as something of a grifter, bribing officials to accept defective parts. After Japan’s surrender, when there were no more planes to furnish, his father used leftover duralumin, an aluminum alloy that had helped keep the Zero lightweight and dangerous, to make flimsy spoons, which he pawned off on impoverished customers desperate for household goods. Later, he briefly turned the factory into a dance hall, before bringing the family — Miyazaki is the second of four sons — back to Tokyo.Although Miyazaki never set foot in his father’s factory, which was off limits as a military site, he was entranced by airplanes and the liberation of flight from an early age. (Ghibli is both the hot, dusty wind that sweeps through the Libyan Desert and the name of an airplane, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli, a World War II Italian reconnaissance bomber.) This obsession has manifested in almost every film, in humans who turn into flying creatures or simply walk on air; in fanciful machines like the flaptors in “Castle in the Sky” (1986), propelled by four translucent wings; and in reproductions of real-world aircraft, as in “Porco Rosso,” in which the hero’s wrecked seaplane, inspired by the 1920s-era Italian racer Macchi M.33, is rebuilt by an all-female crew to ready it for a climactic dogfight, and in “The Wind Rises,” which tells the (not entirely) true story of the designer of the Zero, Jiro Horikoshi, who in the film as in life opposed the war and whom Miyazaki portrays as reluctant to see the beautiful machines he’s created deployed as emissaries of death — a stand-in for Miyazaki’s father, or the man he might have been.As Miyazaki grew older, he found fault with his father both for profiting off the war and for never expressing any shame or guilt. (He shares this troubled inheritance with the writers W.G. Sebald, born in 1944 in the Bavarian Alps, who had to grapple with his father’s past as a soldier in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and the Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, born in the suburbs of Paris in 1945 not long after V-E Day, whose own father kept company with collaborators and profiteers.) And yet, Miyazaki wrote in 1995, “I am like him” — a man of contradictions: a filmmaker who condemns the proliferation of images even as he contributes to it; an artist who has devoted his career to children but was rarely home to take care of his own; an environmentalist who can’t bear to give up his cigarettes or wheezing car; a professed Luddite who revels in the mechanics of modern vehicles but tries “not to draw them in a fashion that further feeds an infatuation with power,” as he has written; a pacifist who loves warplanes; a brooder with a dark view of how civilization has squandered the gifts of the planet, who nevertheless makes films that affirm the urgency of human life.“Untitled” (2021), by Elliott Robbins. “Miyazaki’s films were some of my earliest exposure to foreign cinema,” the artist says. “Because so much of his interest is to look to his own culture for inspiration, as an outsider, I feel that Miyazaki’s films create space for a viewer to compare the differences in the nuances of their own lived experience, as well as to connect to what is universal in his stories.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottThis embrace of contradictions may be why Miyazaki’s movies, although beloved in the West (if not as wildly successful as in Japan, where his last five films combined took in close to 100 billion yen in their first release, or around $873 million), in some ways thwart the Western mind. Absent are the dominating themes of monotheism — a fall from an original state of grace, followed by redemption — and a clear dichotomy of good and evil. “I’m not a god who decides on what is good and bad,” Miyazaki tells me. “We as humans make mistakes.” In his world, there are few outright villains or even truly bad characters, only characters who do bad things. Lady Eboshi wreaks havoc on the forest in “Princess Mononoke” but also gives sanctuary to brothel workers and those afflicted with leprosy. No-Face, the gliding black shroud who eats people in “Spirited Away,” turns out to be simply lonely and, when soothed, spits out his victims. Even the mutant stampeding army of trilobite-like behemoths from the toxic jungle in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” (1984), who kill the heroine by flinging her into the air and trampling her underfoot, end up restoring her to life with the touch of their golden antennae.So Disney was never an influence. (Miyazaki has gone so far as to say, in a 1988 lecture, that he hated Disney’s movies and their easy sentimentality: “To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.”) Instead, Miyazaki looked to works like the French animator Paul Grimault’s “The King and the Mockingbird” (released in different forms in 1952 and 1980), in which a chimney sweep and a shepherdess flee from a vain and despised tyrant king through a cavernous 296-story castle while a coterie of animals mounts a revolution, and the Armenian animator Lev Atamanov’s “The Snow Queen” (1957), whose heroine self-effacingly sacrifices her shoes to a river to beg for help in finding her lost friend, and whose gleefully amoral, knife-wielding Robber Girl — who captures the heroine and steals her bonnet and muff, then is horrified and furious to find herself moved to tears by her victim’s tale of woe — is a forerunner to the wolf girl of “Princess Mononoke.”Curiously, considering the limitations on women’s professional progress in Japan (which makes the country an outlier among developed nations), Miyazaki’s heroines outnumber his heroes. Within the world of anime, these characters are called shojo, girls of an in-between age, no longer quite children and not yet women; but where shojo were typically passive figures subject to romance narratives, Miyazaki’s girls display formidable know-how and independence. They take on jobs, organize households, fight battles and rescue boys from near death — all matter-of-factly, without ever trumpeting notions of girl power. Although some are princesses, they resist the trappings of fairy tales: Princess Mononoke doesn’t live in a palace. Chihiro, in “Spirited Away,” is awkward and lacks the big eyes that traditionally signify beauty and vulnerability in anime, while Sophie, the mousy milliner in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” spends most of the movie in the guise of a stooped old woman. Even when the spell is broken and her youth returns, her hair remains gray. It’s a reminder that something has been forever lost; that, even with the most powerful magic, there can be no reset, no starting over.Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli’s producer, photographed at the company’s Tokyo offices on Oct. 4, 2021, alongside plush versions of, from left, the characters Totoro and Catbus from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988).Takahiro KaneyamaAmerican animated films of today, by contrast, still tend to culminate in a happily ever after, or at least a vanquishing of foes. (“We have a desire for closure,” Niebel says.) Miyazaki offers something more nebulous and even unsettling. The resurrection in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” is a stark exception, for elsewhere in his oeuvre, death is not defeated, only at best delayed. Prince Ashitaka in “Princess Mononoke,” whose body has been progressively consumed by the dark stain of a curse, is never completely cured; a shadow remains on his arm, and he is separated from the girl he loves by a sense of duty — he to the humans of Iron Town, she to the wolves of the forest — although they promise to visit each other. Cruelty, too, is not so much punished as neutralized, as when the youthful-appearing Witch of the Waste in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is reinstated to her true age and revealed to be a doddering old lady, whom Sophie spoon-feeds without complaint, despite still suffering from the witch’s curse. Recovery may be possible, but not full restitution.In a 1991 directorial memo for “Porco Rosso,” a farce that includes a preening American pilot eyeing a career as a Hollywood star and a snarling gang of sky pirates who prove helpless when confronted with a gaggle of schoolgirls, Miyazaki cautions, “We must treat every character respectfully. We must love their foolishness. … One common mistake — the belief that to draw a cartoon is to draw someone sillier than oneself — must be avoided at all costs.” At the heart of the film is a hard-bitten bounty hunter who takes on the guise of a pig out of a sense of guilt at having survived World War I while his fellow pilots died. (Miyazaki describes the film to me as “a boy’s dream.”) The woman he loves but doesn’t believe he deserves laments this “curse,” but only he can free himself from it, by no longer condemning that part of himself.“In the town that I live in, I have precious friends, but I also have people I detest,” Miyazaki tells me. “That is what human society is all about.” Even his friends are flawed, and not just them. He says, “It’s a mirror of who I am.”IT IS TEMPTING to read Miyazaki’s protestations as simple humility, and to cast him, against his will, as a sort of secular saint. In many ways he fits the part: the benevolent neighborhood uncle who brings joy to children through his work, picks up trash from the river on his days off and, over the past two and a half decades, has made quiet pilgrimages to a sanitarium near his home for patients with leprosy who, for much of the 20th century, faced segregation by law in such facilities. One patient became a friend, and Miyazaki held his hand when he was dying.“(New) Spirits Away” (2021) by James Yaya Hough, who says, “As an African American artist, I have been influenced by decades of great anime from Japan but deeply impacted by my own social and cultural experiences of race, mass incarceration and American history/culture. It’s through this lens that I connect with some of the strongest themes in Miyazaki’s body of animation: the struggle of the human spirit, self-discovery and love.”Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Joshua ScottBut Takahata, Miyazaki’s mentor at Toei Animation in the ’60s and ’70s and, eventually, his greatest rival, dismisses this hagiography in the afterword to “Starting Point” (1996), a collection of Miyazaki’s early interviews, lectures and essays, writing, “Hayao Miyazaki is a man who struggles. … He weeps, is playful, loves people, expects too much of their talents, howls at his broken dreams, becomes enraged.” The brilliant and notoriously perfectionist Takahata, who once took eight years to finish a film, died in 2018, but he still casts a shadow; Miyazaki spent 15 years working with Takahata before becoming a director himself, and even though his movies at Studio Ghibli consistently outperformed Takahata’s at the box office, he still craved his mentor’s approval. (Suzuki, in a 2014 memoir, insists that Takahata is the only viewer whom Miyazaki has ever wanted to please.)Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘West Side Story’ Star Ariana DeBose Is Always Ready for Her Next Role

    After dancing in ‘Hamilton’ and playing Anita in Steven Spielberg’s new musical adaptation, the actress has her sights on a part entirely her own.On a recent fall evening, the actress Ariana DeBose was ordering soup at a cafe near her apartment in New York’s Upper East Side, the lower half of her face covered by a commemorative mask from the reopening of the Broadway show “Six.” DeBose, 30, has no professional relationship to the musical — a poppy reimagining of the lives of Henry VIII’s wives with an emphasis on female empowerment — but her boldly displayed endorsement of the production set a perfect tone for our conversation that night about the women, artists and opportunities that have contributed to making her one of the most sought-after musical theater actresses of her generation. Few performers are shy when it comes to discussing their influences and obsessions, but in DeBose’s telling, it’s impossible to separate any step of her career from the people who helped her get there.She has indeed been in good company. Growing up in Raleigh, N.C., DeBose began dancing competitively at age 7 — she says she “started with the whole ‘ballet, tap, jazz’ of it all” — and dreamed of becoming a backup dancer for Madonna. Soon after finishing high school, she was a finalist on the reality TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.” And over the past decade, she has starred in six back-to-back Broadway musicals and booked two stage-to-screen adaptations, the most recent of which, Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” comes out next month. But while her list of collaborators includes greats like Lin-Manuel Miranda — she played a supporting role in the original production of “Bring It On: The Musical” in 2011 and the Bullet in “Hamilton” from 2015 to 2016 — as well as Robert De Niro (“A Bronx Tale”), Adrienne Warren (“Bring It On”), Diane Paulus (“Pippin”), LaChanze (“Summer: The Donna Summer Musical”) and the entire starry cast of Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom” (2020), it’s her offstage relationships especially that would make any up-and-comer swoon.While still in high school, she joined the actors Charlotte d’Amboise and Terrence Mann’s musical theater summer intensive, Triple Arts, at Western Carolina University, and the legendary stage couple took DeBose under their wing, coaching her for auditions and encouraging her to skip college and go straight to Broadway. Following that advice paid off — “I had the benefit of learning in real time,” DeBose says — and she was soon cast in “Bring It On.” When the cheerleading acrobatics that that show required began to take a toll, DeBose’s mother suggested she rush a different show to cheer herself up, and she caught a performance of the 2011 revival of “Follies.” She was so mesmerized by the veteran actress Jan Maxwell’s turn as former showgirl Phyllis Rogers Stone that she left a note for her at the stage door afterward. Months later, DeBose received a call from a friend who was starring alongside Maxwell; apparently, Maxwell, having related to the professional doubts DeBose had expressed in her note, had taped it to her dressing room mirror for inspiration. The two women struck up a friendship that lasted until the older actress’s death in 2018.Proenza Schouler coat, $7,500, proenzaschouler.com; and Panconesi earrings.Photograph by Cheril Sanchez. Styled by Yohana LebasiSuch a charmed arrival onto the New York theater scene is almost unheard of and, aware that her current wealth of opportunities is rare, DeBose is determined to prove herself worthy of them. “I don’t ever want anybody to look at my work and think, ‘Why does she have that when they could’ve hired someone else?’” she says. “I don’t ever want to ask myself, ‘Did I do enough?’” It’s not impostor syndrome, she assures me, but rather a perfectionist impulse — one that led her, for example, to brush up on her little-used tap skills last year for her role as an old-timey schoolmarm in Apple TV’s musical series “Schmigadoon!” (2021); in between shooting in Vancouver she would take Zoom classes and watch YouTube tutorials in her hotel room.In other ways, too, there is something distinctly 21st century about DeBose’s career. Besides being an openly queer woman of Afro Latinx descent, she has bounced from role to role — often with little time to prepare — in a way that is reflective of our current gig economy. In the 1960s and ’70s, a performer with her skill set might have been cast in a single musical and ridden the wave of its success for years, touring with the production around the world and resting on the laureled association. But DeBose’s ability to move quickly through roles has reaped its own rewards: She has earned a Tony nomination and won a Chita Rivera Award — both for her most recent Broadway appearance, as Disco Donna, one of the leads in “Summer” — among other accolades. Her dancing in that show, as in each of her performances, had the precision and dynamism of a lifelong performing arts kid who stopped formal training just before conservatory programs could overwrite her natural inclination toward wild abandon. And so she can put her mark on choreographic work whether it is more exacting, as in “Hamilton,” or looser, as in “Bring It On.” She credits her versatility, too, to her knack for meeting directors and choreographers where they are. “Most creators are very intense, and each has their own brand of intensity, their own language,” she explains. “I think part of the reason I’ve been able to continue to book jobs is because I chose to learn how to speak other people’s artistic languages quickly.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Touchy Feely,’ ‘Maggie’ and Other Streaming Gems

    A look at off-the-radar recommendations for home viewing, including indie comedy-dramas, genre hybrids and informative documentaries about influential outsiders.As the temperature drops and the couch again beckons, it’s time to go exploring in the libraries of the subscription streaming services. This month’s recommendations include indie comedy-dramas, genre hybrids and informative documentaries about influential outsiders.‘Touchy Feely’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.When the writer and director Lynn Shelton died unexpectedly last year, she left behind a small but distinctive group of films — wise and insightful comedy-dramas, modest in their scope but endless in their emotion. This Sundance selection is one of her most moving, an ensemble family story focusing on siblings (Rosemarie DeWitt and Josh Pais) in personal and spiritual crisis, attempting to open up their minds and hearts to the inexplicable forces around them. Allison Janney, Elliot Page and Scoot McNairy round out the cast.‘Begin Again’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.John Carney followed up the success of the micro-budgeted “Once” on a far grander scale, with such marquee names as Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley and Catherine Keener in major roles. But his sensibility remained intact; this is another bittersweet musical comedy-drama, its songs baked into a story about the people who make music, and why they do it. Ruffalo stars (and charms) as a dissatisfied record executive on the hunt for not only talent but authenticity; he thinks he finds both in Knightley’s uncertain singer-songwriter.‘Adult Beginners’ (2015)Stream it on HBO Max.Sketch artist and stand-up comic Nick Kroll shows his thespian range in this low-key but engaging indie. The narrative strokes are familiar: a young hot shot gets cut down to size, so he moves back home and does some living and learning and growing up. Yet Kroll’s emotional evolution is convincing, as is his relationship with his suburban sister, played with equal parts warmth and exasperation by Rose Byrne; her real-life partner Bobby Cannavale is in top form as her husband.‘The Year of Spectacular Men’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon.When the “Back to the Future” star Lea Thompson took the turn from acting to feature filmmaking, she made it a family affair. Her daughters Madelyn Deutch and Zoey Deutch co-star as sisters, Madelyn writes the script and Thompson appears, in a brief but juicy supporting role, as their mother. But this is no vanity project; the screenplay is witty and perceptive, portraying 20s ennui with lacerating self-reflection, the sisterly byplay is unsurprisingly credible and Madelyn has a winning screen presence. Additionally, “Succession” fans will delight at the sight of Cousin Greg himself, Nicholas Braun, as a romantic leading man.‘Don Jon’ (2013)Stream it on Netflix.When Joseph Gordon-Levitt took the leap from actor to filmmaker, he went in the opposite direction of Lea Thompson, creating a character and situation miles from his own. He stars as the title character, a goofy musclehead with a thick Jersey accent and an omnipresent leather jacket. Jon is addicted to sex and all of its accouterments, and Gordon-Levitt’s stylish direction homes in on the routines and rhythms of his single-minded pursuit. It’s like “Shame” with a sense of humor, a mixture that shouldn’t land, but somehow does.‘First Date’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.The filmmaking team of Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp write and direct this cheerfully overstuffed homage to the “one crazy night” action-comedies of the 1980s. Tyson Brown stars as Mike, a shy high school kid who unexpectedly lands a date with his dream girl Kelsey (Shelby Duclos) and, stuck without a car, ends up buying a cheap clunker. But the vehicle is a bargain for a reason, putting him in the sights of trigger-happy drug dealers, killers and cops. There’s a lot going on, but the young stars keep it grounded; he’s endlessly likable, she’s a star in the making (her fight scene is a jaw-dropper), and their vibe and chemistry create genuine stakes amid the lunacy.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Paul Thomas Anderson on “Licorice Pizza” and Age Difference

    The auteur explains why he cast Alana Haim, and why he thinks the age difference in the film’s central relationship shouldn’t matter.Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson brought the fog with him. The 51-year-old director had just returned from a trip to London, where his last film, “Phantom Thread,” was set, and now the sky above his native San Fernando Valley was choked by dark, portentous clouds.“I like it like this,” Anderson said as we sat outside a vegan Mexican restaurant in the Studio City neighborhood. “You never get the fog cover here. Take it while you can!”Anderson is the auteur who made the sky rain frogs in “Magnolia”; in front of his camera, even Southern California’s normally placid weather has the potential for grandeur. The movies he has set here, including “Boogie Nights,” have an engaging sprawl not unlike the Valley itself, and Anderson has returned to his home turf for his ninth feature, “Licorice Pizza,” opening Friday.The 1970s-set movie stars Cooper Hoffman, son of Anderson’s onetime muse, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as a smooth-talking high schooler named Gary, who flirts shamelessly with Alana (Alana Haim), a 20-something girl helping to take class pictures. She rebuffs his advances, but there’s still something about this guileless hustler that intrigues her, and they become friends, business partners and eventually something more.Hoffman is sweet and appealing, but the revelation of “Licorice Pizza” is Haim, a marvelously spiky screen presence. Though she had never led a movie before, Anderson has directed several music videos she appeared in with her sisters Danielle and Este, who together form the rock band Haim. “It’s funny, because she’s not the best musician in the band, but she’s the best actress,” Anderson said.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did you get into the orbit of Haim and meet Alana Haim in the first place?That story is wild. I first heard their music on the radio in about 2012, the song “Forever.” Then I heard it again and again and I started to think, “This song is following me around.” I read a little bit about them, realized they were from Studio City. We invited them to our house for dinner, and then they revealed to me that their mother was a woman named Donna Rose, who was my elementary-school art teacher.You had no idea?None. I’m the father of three girls, and you can imagine and hope that your daughters would turn out to be this miraculous. But there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on, some unexplainable feeling that I had, so when they told me that their mother had been my teacher, everything made sense. Like, why did I have this weird obsession with these three girls playing music?And their mother was a huge influence on me. I went to a school with, like, white-haired ladies who were rough, and there was one lady with long, beautiful, flowing brown hair — who looked exactly like Alana, by the way. I was in love with her as a young boy, absolutely smitten. She would sing songs during class, and she was the exact opposite of every other teacher. So that cemented the relationship in a pretty serious way. Our collaboration was more than just directing their music videos — our families became intertwined.And when did you zero in on Alana as the lead in “Licorice Pizza”?The music videos generally focus on [her older sister] Danielle, because she’s the lead singer. But when I thought about this story that I had, it fit Alana.Why?I’ve seen Alana’s ferociousness. She may look like a Jewish girl from the Valley, but she’s sort of a ’30s throwback, fast-talking, very funny, very sharp. You do not want to challenge her in a fight with words, because she will win.Did the studio want you to cast an established actress instead of Alana?It was no battle. MGM trusted my track record, I suppose. By the way, I wouldn’t want to think about having to convince another actress to not wear makeup and drop that level of vanity that seems to surround a lot of young actresses. It takes somebody with some guts to say, “It’s impossible to justify wearing makeup in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, therefore I won’t do it.” It sounds like not that big a deal, but it’s a big deal for a lot of people.Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.”MGMYou wrote the film with Alana in mind. Did you also think of Cooper while writing it?No. Halfway through, he popped into my mind, but I quickly put the lid back on that thought.Why?I’ve been asking myself why. It’s probably because I was protective, thinking, “Hang on a second, there’s a traditional way to do this, and there are many young actors out there.” But I wasn’t finding anybody that seemed to have the same soulfulness I knew he had. Everybody seemed precocious, perhaps too trained at too young an age.It was odd, the way everything started to line up. This was a very homegrown film where I’m casting from a pool of my life, not just a collection of actors that I’ve auditioned. How am I going to enter into this with the lead actor being somebody that I don’t know personally and intimately? But as a matter of fact, I didn’t really tell him what I was thinking. I said, “Just look at this script, and maybe you can help me read it out loud so I can hear something.”You’re secretly auditioning the people in your life all the time, aren’t you?Exactly. Of course, it didn’t work at all. He saw right through it.When you’re casting somebody like Cooper Hoffman, who has never led a movie before, what are you thinking about how the fame from this will change his life?You think about locking the door and throwing away the key and protecting them. Or, more realistically, holding their hand and guiding them through a creative endeavor, and showing them that the reason you do it is for the collaboration and the experience. But it’s a good question. Another way to phrase the question is, “Have you ever thought about why you’re trying to ruin this person’s life?” [Laughs.]Does it surprise you how some people are reacting to the age difference between Alana and Gary?There’s no line that’s crossed, and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there. That’s not the story that we made, in any kind of way. There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.There’s at least one provocative bone in this film’s body. I’m thinking of the scenes with a white restaurateur, played by John Michael Higgins, where he talks to his Japanese wife in an accent so offensive that my audience actually gasped.Well, that’s different. I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time. Not that it wouldn’t happen right now, by the way. My mother-in-law’s Japanese and my father-in-law is white, so seeing people speak English to her with a Japanese accent is something that happens all the time. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More