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      William Shatner Will Launch to Space on Next Blue Origin Flight

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      It’s only the edge of space, but the man who played the “Star Trek” captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin’s second flight with passengers.He’s boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.William Shatner, known best from his years as the U.S.S. Enterprise’s Captain James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” TV and film series, will launch to the edge of space this month aboard New Shepard. That is the tourist rocket built by Blue Origin, the private space company owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.“So now I can say something. Yes, it’s true; I’m going to be a ‘rocket man!’,” Mr. Shatner wrote on Twitter about the news.So now I can say something. Yes, it’s true; I’m going to be a “rocket man!” 😝🤣 https://t.co/B2jFeXrr6L— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) October 4, 2021
      The news was reported on the website TMZ in September and confirmed on Monday by the company.Mr. Shatner, 90, will become the oldest person to fly to space once he completes the flight.The flight is scheduled for Oct. 12, and Mr. Shatner will be joined by two other paying customers: Chris Boshuizen, a co-founder of the satellite imagery firm Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of the clinical research software Medidata. The mission’s fourth passenger will be Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president.The company launched its first crew of passengers to space in July. The crew for that mission included Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, 82, a pilot who was denied a chance to become an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, and an 18-year-old Dutch student. Ms. Funk, 82, currently holds the record as oldest passenger to space.From Blue Origin’s pad in West Texas, the 16-story-tall rocket will launch to an altitude of roughly 63 miles and release its gumdrop-shaped crew capsule. Passengers experience about four minutes of weightlessness in microgravity. The New Shepard booster will return to Earth for a vertical landing a few miles from where it launched, while the crew capsule will fall back minutes later under a set of parachutes.The flight will not reach orbit, which requires a much more powerful rocket lifting a spacecraft to a much higher altitude.The New Shepard rocket taking off from Launch Site 1 near Van Horn, Texas, in July.Joe Skipper/ReutersBlue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle is the centerpiece of its space tourism business, and Mr. Bezos has said it has over $100 million worth of tickets booked already. The company hasn’t disclosed ticket prices, booking the seats privately instead. Virgin Galactic, the company’s rival in space tourism, sells seats aboard its suborbital space plane starting at $450,000.The mission will come during a hectic time for Blue Origin. Last week, 21 current and former employees said in an essay that the company was rife with sexism and dismissive of employees who spoke up on issues of safety concerning the New Shepard rocket. Blue Origin disputed the allegations, saying the company had an internal hotline for sexual harassment complaints and that New Shepard was the “safest space vehicle ever designed or built.”Mr. de Vries, one of the passengers who will join Mr. Shatner atop New Shepard, said last week that he wasn’t worried about the contents of the essay. “I am confident in Blue Origin’s safety program, spacecraft, and track record, and certainly wouldn’t be flying with them if I wasn’t,” he said last week.The company has other challenges, including sparring with NASA in federal court after losing a major contract to SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, to build a lander to return astronauts to the moon. Development of an engine that will power bigger rockets, including one that was built by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture United Launch Alliance, is roughly a year behind schedule.New Shepard is one of a handful of spacecraft offering rides to space for wealthy passengers in the emerging space tourism industry. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, developed primarily to fly government astronauts to the International Space Station, flew its first private crew of tourists in September and has more private missions lined up for next year. Virgin Galactic, which flew its founder, Richard Branson, and other passengers to space in July, plans to open its commercial space tourism business next year, chipping away at a backlog of some 600 ticket holders. Its next flight, with Italian Air Force officers and researchers aboard, is expected to occur this month. More

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      Clint Eastwood Wins $6.1 Million CBD Lawsuit

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      The Academy Award-winning director accused a Lithuanian company of falsely claiming that he had endorsed CBD products.The actor Clint Eastwood and Garrapata, the company that owns the rights to his likeness, were awarded $6.1 million on Friday in a lawsuit they had filed against a Lithuanian company that was accused of using Mr. Eastwood’s image and likeness to make it appear as though he was endorsing their products.Last year, Mr. Eastwood filed two lawsuits in federal court in Los Angeles against three CBD manufacturers and marketers whose products were featured in an online article falsely claiming that he endorsed CBD products, as well as 10 online retailers who he accused of manipulating search results through meta tags. (CBD is cannabidiol, a nonintoxicating compound in the cannabis sativa plant.)According to the first lawsuit, the online article contained a fake interview with an outlet meant to resemble the “Today” show. It included a photo of Mr. Eastwood from an actual appearance on “Today,” as well as links to buy the items.“Mr. Eastwood has no connection of any kind whatsoever to any CBD products and never gave such an interview,” the court documents said.The judge, R. Gary Klausner of United States District Court for the Central District of California, entered a default judgment after Mediatonas UAB, the company that published a fabricated interview with Mr. Eastwood, failed to respond to a summons in March. Mr. Eastwood and Garrapata were then awarded $6 million based on the company’s unauthorized use of his name and likeness, along with about $95,000 in attorneys’ fees and a permanent injunction that blocks future use of his name and likeness.“In pursuing this case, and obtaining this judgment, Mr. Eastwood has again demonstrated a willingness to confront wrongdoing and hold accountable those who try to illegally profit off his name, likeness, and goodwill,” said Jordan Susman, a lawyer for Mr. Eastwood, in a statement.Mediatonas UAB could not be reached for comment.Mr. Eastwood, 91, who recently starred in and directed “Cry Macho,” has enjoyed a lengthy Hollywood career that has ranged from inhabiting tough-guy roles (“Dirty Harry”) to directing dramas like “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), which won best picture at the 2005 Academy Awards.The original complaint, filed in July 2020, named as defendants the companies whose products were being advertised in the article. In February, Mr. Eastwood’s lawyers filed an amended complaint against Mediatonas UAB, the company that owns the websites where the false stories appear.While the court agreed that Mr. Eastwood and Garrapata were entitled to damages for the unauthorized use of his name and likeness, it declined to grant their full request, which also accounted for defamation claims.“It requires additional context to understand what CBD products are and why a person like Clint Eastwood would not endorse a marijuana-based product,” the judge wrote, adding that the language used “was not libelous on its face.” More

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      Their Film Is One of the Weirdest Prizewinners of the Year. Deal With It.

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      “Titane” may follow a female killer who has sex with a car and impersonates a man’s son, but the director and star say it’s really about love.It’s when Alexia’s breasts start leaking motor oil that there’s no mistaking the father of her baby was the tricked-out Cadillac she had rough sex with after the erotic car show, the night she killed a guy by stabbing him in the ear.That’s before she goes on a killing spree, breaks her nose and disguises herself as the missing son of a fire chief on steroids who agrees: she is his child.That is just a glimpse of the harrowing happenings in “Titane,” Julia Ducournau’s audacious splatter-drama that opened Friday. The film is winning prizes and critical acclaim for its comic carnage and upending of gender — and for a raw performance by the newcomer Agathe Rousselle as Alexia, who’s carnally attracted to cars.“Titane” is also generating dropped jaws and screams from filmgoers scandalized by its gory, outré approach to the story of a woman who, as Ducournau put it, “is driven by her impulses and desires for the dead material that is metal” but who “starts getting in touch with her humanity step by step.” One reviewer called it “the most shocking film of 2021.”A scene from the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at Canne.Carole Bethuel/NeonSitting at a French-enough bistro the day before “Titane” had its first screening at the New York Film Festival, the word Ducournau used most often wasn’t “berserk” or any other scary-sounding adjective reviewers have used. The word was “love.”“The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically, she said. “So I decided to do it as a challenge and ask: can you do that with love?”Rousselle, too, used the word to describe the movie in a separate interview: “You have this beautiful love story between my character, who has never been in love before, and a father who doesn’t think he can ever love again and they find out what loving means and what love means,” she said. “Love is the movie.”At 37, after just two feature films, Ducournau, a Paris native, has already become a genre film sensation. In the view of Alexandra West, the author of “Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity,” Ducournau’s work is “extreme and absurd but also human” and “part of the driving force behind what’s to come for cinema.”“She’s challenging audiences and getting audiences to react to cinema and to talk to each other,” West said. “That’s exciting.”Ducournau said, “The whole point with my film is to make you feel what the characters feel, but it’s hard to make you feel love, to physically feel it” cinematically. Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesThe director M. Night Shyamalan took notice: Ducournau directed two episodes of the macabre AppleTV+ series “Servant,” for which he’s an executive producer. “Julia Ducournau killed it. Brooding, shocking & cinematic,” he tweeted.Reviews of “Titane” have been mostly celebratory (Entertainment Weekly called it “outrageously good”) while still mindful of its grisly bravado (“the work of a demented visionary.” IndieWire wrote). Others wondered: to what end? In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott wrote: “For all its reckless style and velocity, ‘Titane’ doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.”In July, “Titane” was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first time a woman had won the award since Jane Campion in 1993 for “The Piano.” Ducournau said she was in disbelief until she hugged Sharon Stone and wouldn’t let go. Then the actress asked how she was feeling.“I said, I’m not sure yet, but it feels like history?” Ducournau said. “She started laughing, only the way Sharon Stone can laugh, with no stress and no tension and super radiant, and she said, honey, it is history.”Ducournau was caught off guard at the beginning of the ceremony when Spike Lee, president of the jury, was asked to name the first prizewinner but instead accidentally revealed “Titane” was the first-prize winner. He later said he “messed up,” and apologized to festival organizers.“At the moment it was hard to find the humor in it,” Ducournau said. “But in retrospect, I find it very much.”Ducournau said she knew she wanted a nonprofessional to play Alexia. After her casting director found Rousselle on Instagram, Ducournau said, she made Rousselle return several times over six months before giving her the job, and they worked together for a year before shooting.To prepare for a physically demanding role involving extreme transformations, Rousselle studied dance and boxing, and learned wrenching monologues from other films and shows, like the “Twin Peaks” graveyard speech delivered by Laura Palmer’s best friend.Rousselle also spent up to eight hours a day getting in and out of makeup and prosthetics that gave her larger breasts, expanded belly shapes and three different noses (for a look-if-you-dare nose-breaking scene). It helped that she had worked as a model favored for her androgyny.“Gender was never relevant to me,” said Rousselle. “When I worked in fashion I would take off my clothes for a fitting and they would say, you have boobs? I would say yes, deal with it.”Beneath the gore is a film that’s affectionate in its scrutiny of love and family, made by a director who cares deeply about family, identity and, most tenderly, the lives of women.Rousselle studied dance and boxing for her physically demanding role.Jeanette Spicer for The New York TimesWomen in transformation, actually. That’s what Ducournau explored in her short film “Junior” (2011), about a teenager whose body seeps goo as she evolves from tomboy to girly-girl. She explored transformations again in her debut feature, “Raw” (2017), a blood-soaked coming-of-age story about a young woman who gruesomely converts from vegetarian to carnivore to cannibal.She does it again in “Titane” with Alexia, a woman whose pregnancy (thanks to that Cadillac) and whose propensity to kill at random are connected to the titanium plate doctors put in her head after a car crash she survived as a girl. (“Titane” is French for “titanium.”)Ducournau, left, and Rousselle, who said the movie has been repeat viewing for some French teenagers.Jeanette Spicer for The New York Times“Titane” opened in France in July, and Rousselle said she had been heartened by the response from “the nerdy crowd of high school kids who play video games and have blue hair.” Some have seen the film multiple times, she said.Rousselle thought the movie could be important to teenagers “because it goes through the questions of how you want to be and who you can be and how you can escape where you’re from and how much control you can have in your life,” she said. “It’s freeing for them.”Ducournau said that as she mulls her next project, she found inspiration in the work of the photographer Nan Goldin and the directors Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini and especially David Cronenberg. In his movies — like “Crash,” about people turned on by car accidents — she said that “everything that people find repulsive could be shown as human.”“A vision that transcends expectations inspires me very much,” she said. More

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      Ann Dowd Sails Around New York Harbor

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      The Emmy-winning actress stars in an indie film, “Mass,” which opens this week.The actress Ann Dowd stood straight-backed at the helm, hands gripping the wheel, eyes fixed on the green-gray-blue river spread before her like a rumpled blanket. The Statue of Liberty beckoned just beyond.“Everyone looks awesome behind the wheel of a sailboat,” Jonathan Horvath, the captain, said. “But some people look more awesome than others.”Ms. Dowd, 65, perhaps best known for playing Aunt Lydia, a brutal enforcer of the theocracy on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” grew up boating. She and her six siblings spent summers at Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, piloting motorboats and a Sunfish. They still gather there on weekends, though she insists that her siblings are all better sailors.“This sister,” Ms. Dowd said, pointing to herself. “I don’t know what happened there.”Ms. Dowd, who lives in an apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, thought it was time to improve, so on a recent Thursday morning, she ventured down to TriBeCa for a lesson with Mr. Horvath and Eric Emerick, instructors at Atlantic Yachting.Heather Sten for The New York TimesShe had dressed for a calmer day, in a nautically striped, white-and-navy-blue dress with sequin details. But that morning, winds whipped down Pier 25 and thunderstorms threatened.Mr. Horvath and Mr. Emerick led Ms. Dowd to the boat, a 38-foot single-mast sloop named the Vitamin Sea. Used mostly for pleasure-cruising the Bahamas, it sleeps four — six if you put some cushions on the dining table. The dock rocked in the wind. The boat, as Ms. Dowd clambered on, rocked, too.Mr. Emerick loosened the stern line and the bowline, then leapt aboard as Mr. Horvath steered into the river. Military helicopters churned overhead, probably because the United Nations General Assembly was in session upriver.Under Mr. Horvath’s direction, Ms. Dowd raised the luffing sail, using a winch to pull the line tight and then secure it. “Beautiful,” Mr. Horvath said, encouraging her. “Well done.” She asked why they hadn’t raised the sail all the way. It was because the wind, which sometimes gusted to 30 knots, was too strong. But if there’s a woman who can stare down a storm, it’s Ms. Dowd.A longtime veteran of the Chicago stage, Ms. Dowd began booking larger roles in her 50s, as a credulous fast food manager in “Compliance,” as a cult leader in “The Leftovers,” and as Aunt Lydia, the role which brought Ms. Dowd her first Emmy.A compulsively kind women, she specializes in characters who do cruel and terrible things — terrorizing women with cattle prods (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), conjuring demons (“Hereditary”). She doesn’t understand why casting directors call on her to play these terrifying women, why they never see her for nice moms, fun grandmas, skilled surgeons.“But I know I enjoy playing them,” she said of her wicked characters. “It is make-believe, and I can’t get to it fast enough.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesHer latest tortured role is in “Mass,” an independent film that premieres on Oct. 8, in which she plays a gentler character, Linda, a church mouse of a woman reckoning with the harm her son has caused and what responsibility she bears. She spends the movie mostly listening, eyes sunken, mouth a wound.As soon as she read the script, she knew she wanted to play the role. But she hesitated, which was unusual for her. “How will I live in this level of grief?” she wondered.So she did what she often does: she offered a kind of prayer to the character. And Linda answered. “It was as though she had said to me, I got this,” Ms. Dowd said. “There’s something about that experience that was sacred.”Winning the Emmy four years ago has changed the arc of her career somewhat. She is now offered roles, like the one in “Mass,” rather than having to audition. But she still lives in the same Chelsea apartment where she raised her children, and her concern is still for the work rather than the trappings of celebrity.“My desire is to keep it very simple. Because the work is always the work,” she said. “And that’s where the focus should be.”As the boat passed the Financial District, Mr. Horvath invited her up to the helm where she spun the wheel with a practiced hand. With the motor switched off, the boat cruised at 7 or 8 knots, heading out into the bay and toward the Statue of Liberty. But once the boat cleared Manhattan’s southern tip, the wind became stronger and the boat listed to a startling degree. “Well, I’m going to make someone seasick,” she said.The sailors prepared Ms. Dowd to change course. “Do you remember the name for turning into the wind?” Mr. Horvath asked her.“No, honey,” she said.It was tacking, he told her. Hand over hand she turned the wheel and the boat tacked, straightening in the water. Ms. Dowd sailed for the next hour, back and forth, carving a wake through New York Harbor, the downtown skyline behind her. The water made her feel, she said, “Entirely relaxed and interested.”Still the wind kept gusting, rising every time the boat passed Manhattan and navigated the more open waters of the Upper Bay.“Yeah, there she is,” Mr. Horvath said as a strong breeze slammed into the stern.Heather Sten for The New York Times“There she is,” Mr. Emerick agreed.“Why is it always she?” Ms. Dowd asked.“Because of the patriarchy, I’m sure,” Mr. Horvath said. “Sailors talk about the wind as she. They talk about the boats as she, almost like romantic relationships.”The gusts never rattled Ms. Dowd, though she did worry when the occasional water taxi neared her. But she held her course, even through what Mr. Horvath called “varsity-level wind,” which sent her skirt flapping like a second sail.When it was time to head back for the dock, Mr. Horvath had her steer behind a garbage barge, zigzagging back and forth until she returned the boat to its moorings.“Prepare to tack,” Ms. Dowd said as though she’d been saying it all of her life. “We’re now tacking.” She had embraced the role of sailor fully. “Someone takes direction really well,” Mr. Horvath said. More

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      Karen Dalton, a Musical Mystery That Doesn’t Need to Be Solved

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      A new documentary about the blues-folk singer, who died in 1993, works to make her known without unraveling all of her riddles.The hauntingly soulful blues-folk singer Karen Dalton once described her dream concert: “She’d be in her living room with friends and playing music,” her friend and fellow musician Peter Stampfel recalls in the new documentary “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time.” “And then somehow the living room would be put on a huge stage, which would be surrounded by a massive audience who would be watching in rapt attention while she ignored them totally and just did whatever she wanted to do.”Born into postwar poverty and raised in Oklahoma, Dalton had a warm voice that was as creaky and lived-in as a beloved rocking chair. She sang “like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed,” as Bob Dylan put it in 2004 in the first volume of his autobiography, “Chronicles” — easily the most-quoted thing anyone’s ever said about Dalton. (Dylan accompanied her on harmonica for a handful of gigs on the early ’60s Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit; he has also called her his “favorite singer” of that whole scene.)But as that living-room-as-live-stage suggests, Dalton was not nearly as comfortable in the spotlight as many of her better-remembered peers. She was indifferent to fame, and her career sputtered because of a combination of hard luck and self-sabotage. She recorded just two albums in her lifetime, suffered prolonged drug and alcohol addictions and succumbed to an AIDS-related illness in 1993, at age 55.That name-drop in Dylan’s memoir and the rise of the so-called “freak folk” movement of the early aughts brought revival interest in Dalton’s oeuvre; both of her studio albums — the aching “It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best” (1969) and the cult classic “In My Own Time” (1971) — were then reissued, and several compilations of her home recordings were released. Dalton was at last applauded as one of ’60s and ’70s folk music’s most skilled and idiosyncratic interpreters. The unique, unhurried phrasing heard in her renditions of “Reason to Believe” and “When a Man Loves a Woman,” for example, make these familiar songs seem as though they’re being sung for the very first time.Plenty of posthumous appreciations of Dalton have been written in the past 15 years, and thanks to her untimely death and the crackling pain palpable in her voice, their headlines all seem to describe her with the same word: “tragic.”A first-time directorial effort by the filmmakers Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete, “In My Own Time,” refreshingly, adds a few more adjectives to Dalton’s story and personality.“She was charismatic, and the center of attention when she was in the room,” Yapkowitz said in a phone interview. (Neither of the filmmakers met Dalton, but they conducted enough interviews and research to speak about her with an easy familiarity.) He insisted that her drug use shouldn’t overshadow the other aspects of her life: “She just seemed fun, like a person that I would want to hang out with.”Peete and Yapkowitz became friends while working together in the art department of several independent films. Their mutual love of Dalton’s music first came up more than a decade ago on the Branson, Mo., set of Debra Granik’s brooding, woodsy drama “Winter’s Bone”: “It was the perfect movie to rekindle our interest in Karen,” Peete said with a laugh.Moving restlessly from Oklahoma to New York City to Colorado, Dalton lived a nomadic life, which presented a challenge for the filmmakers. “Archival materials, and the folks we interviewed — everything’s sort of scattered across the United States,” Yapkowitz said. “Some people didn’t even know they had them in their closets until we asked them to look,” he said of the many new photographs featured in the film.When they first had the idea to make a movie about Dalton — while hanging out at a bar one night and noticing that, in Peete’s words, “all of her peers were on the jukebox except for Karen” — they thought they could do it in less than a year. “That was almost seven years ago,” he said.From left: Bob Dylan, Dalton and Fred Neil. Dylan called Dalton his favorite singer of the early ’60s Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene.Greenwich EntertainmentBut making a film about the retiring Dalton posed a larger predicament, too: Mystery and a sense of elusiveness are inherent parts of her music’s appeal. Dalton resisted the industry’s star-making machinery at nearly every turn, so in some sense the incomplete nature of her body of work represents a conscious act of defiance against the music industry’s commercial imperatives. To romanticize her slippery nature would be a mistake, but to fill in the blanks too completely would be to dishonor her unruly spirit. Peete and Yapkowitz knew they had to strike a balance between presenting the facts of Dalton’s life and allowing for parts of her to remain unknowable.The author and Dalton fan Rick Moody articulates this tension at the beginning of the documentary, and Peete said they took his words as a kind of mantra: “Some of the incompleteness and the gaps in Karen’s output may have been decisive and part of who she was and how she expressed herself. The thing I don’t want to do is excessively imagine that you can interpret the fragments. I want to be with the songs that are actually there and to try and delight in the legacy of what’s actually there.”Still, their documentation of Dalton’s fragments became more meaningful than they even realized. Shortly after digitizing a collection of Dalton’s journals, doodles and poetry that she had left in the care of her friend Peter Walker, these papers were all destroyed in a fire. (In the film, the musician Angel Olsen reads from these journals and beautifully conjures the combination of playfulness and emotional intensity that characterized Dalton’s voice.)Though Dalton has audibly influenced artists like Joanna Newsom, Jessica Pratt and Nick Cave, “In My Own Time” is not the sort of music documentary overstuffed with critics and celebrities expounding on the canonical importance of her work. Most of the time, watching it feels like hanging on a porch with some of Dalton’s closest confidants and surviving family members, trading stories about her favorite horses, her humorously botched recording sessions or her homey hospitality. (“Karen made the best beans in the whole world,” we learn from one of her Colorado friends.) As a result, if only in fleeting glimpses, this long-lost musician comes vividly to life.In some sense, Dalton seemed to exist in the wrong time period for her talents to be fully appreciated, and this is part of her continued mystique. Dalton was something of a proto-indie artist, seeking out a more modest alternative to the mainstream before such well-trod pathways existed. When I heard Stampfel describe Dalton’s ideal performing space as a kind of amplified living room, I realized that last year I’d seen the film’s narrator, Olsen, do something quite similar, broadcasting an intimate solo livestream from the comfort of her own home.Maybe that is the tragedy of Karen Dalton: the fact that she was making music in the wrong era. “We’re definitely in a time now when artists can have more control over their own careers and public image,” Yapkowitz said. “If we could say ‘would have, should have, could have,’ the industry has changed and Karen would have been more comfortable in it, to say the least.” More

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      Meet a Young Tony Soprano in ‘The Many Saints of Newark’

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      The director Alan Taylor discusses a scene featuring William Ludwig as the young Tony, and Alessandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.While the “Sopranos” movie prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” (in theaters and on HBO Max) contains plenty of action, betrayals and all that you would expect from a mob drama based on the HBO series, a no-frills scene involving a bedroom conversation is a favorite of the film’s director, Alan Taylor.That interlude takes place in the room of a young Tony Soprano (here played by William Ludwig), who has been suspended for running a numbers game at school. His mother has sent his (sort of) uncle, Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), up to have a chat with him and try to set him on the right path.“I try to be good,” Tony says.“I don’t think so. Try harder,” Dickie responds.Narrating the scene, Taylor, says that the moment isn’t just a typical domestic chat.“It’s two guys sitting on a bed talking,” he says, “but it really contains the entire relationship and the entire destiny of Tony’s character.”Read the “Many Saints of Newark” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Daniel Craig après 007

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      The New York Times traduit en français une sélection de ses meilleurs articles. Retrouvez-les ici.Il y a environ un an et demi, j’avais rendez-vous avec Daniel Craig au Musée d’Art Moderne de New York pour discuter de son dernier James Bond “No Time to Die” (“Mourir peut attendre”) et dire adieu à l’espion séducteur qu’il incarne depuis 2006.Avant de s’assoir à table, dans une salon privé du restaurant du musée, Craig m’a tendu le flacon de gel hydroalcoolique qu’il avait sur lui. “C’est de l’or en barre, ce truc”, m’a-t-il lancé avec désinvolture. “C’est un truc de dingue — les gens vendent ça quelque chose comme 25 dollars la dose.”Ce moment s’avèrera sans doute le plus marquant de l’interview. La suite, qui a duré une heure, s’est passée à converser poliment du tournage de “Mourir peut attendre” (dont la sortie était prévue le mois suivant) et de sa satisfaction à la fois de son travail et du fait d’avoir terminé sa mission.Nous nous sommes quittés et, deux jours plus tard, la MGM et les producteurs de la franchise James Bond annonçaient qu’ils reportaient à novembre la sortie de “Mourir peut attendre”, citant leurs “appréciation attentive et examen approfondi du marché global du cinéma”. (“C’est une décision purement économique que nous pouvons comprendre et qui n’est pas liée à la montée des craintes suscitées par le coronavirus,” écrivait à l’époque, peu convaincante, la revue spécialisée Deadline.)Sans film à promouvoir, Craig a tout de même participé ce week-end-là au show télévisé “Saturday Night Live”. Au programme, un sketch joyeusement loufoque sur l’effet du coronavirus sur les feuilletons, et la présentation par Craig de l’invité musical, le chanteur canadien the Weeknd, sur un ton d’une délectation inattendue. Le lendemain, il quittait New York en famille avec sa femme, la comédienne Rachel Weisz — et le pays plongeait tête la première dans la pandémie.Les frivolités sans lendemain se sont faites rare dans les mois qui ont suivi. Mais en dépit des incertitudes quant au devenir de la pandémie et du caractère imprévisible du box-office d’une semaine à l’autre, la MGM — après deux reports supplémentaires de la sortie du film — a finalement résolu de sortir “No Time to Die” le 8 octobre aux USA (le 6 octobre en France).Une scène de “Mourir peut attendre”, dont la sortie a été retardée plusieurs fois en raison de la pandémie. “J’ai tellement hâte que les gens puissent voir ce film, et j’espère qu’il leur plaira,” dit l’acteur. Nicola Dove/MGMDes adieux pénibles et interminables, en fin de compte, pour Craig, qui a 53 ans. Dès le moment où il a été choisi pour succéder à Pierce Brosnan dans le rôle de 007, il n’était pas une incarnation évidente ou élégante du personnage. Son allure, trop fruste; son CV cinématographique, trop mince ; ses cheveux, trop blonds.Craig m’a raconté lors de cette première rencontre qu’il était persuadé qu’on l’avait invité à auditionner comme chair à canon, pour faciliter le choix d’un autre acteur pour le rôle. “J’étais un acteur parmi beaucoup d’autres — quelqu’un à éliminer,” estimait-il alors. Il pensait, au mieux, décrocher un rôle secondaire de vilain: “Tiens, joue le méchant”.Au lieu de cela, après ses débuts dans “Casino Royale”, Craig a continué en 2008 avec “Quantum of Solace” avant d’enchaîner les suites épiques de “Skyfall » (2012) et de “Spectre” (2015). Ses James Bond ont engrangé plus de 3 milliards de dollars au niveau mondial, de plus en plus ambitieux en termes d’échelle et vertigineux en termes de durée de vie à l’écran.Malgré quelques signes de lassitude — lorsque Time Out lui a demandé s’il s’imaginait continuer, il a répondu : “je préférerais casser ce verre et m’ouvrir le poignet” — et pas mal de blessures, Craig convient qu’il avait envie de jouer une dernière fois ce Bond morose et impassible, histoire de terminer l’histoire commencée avec “Casino Royale”.“Je voulais y mettre de la cohérence”, me dit-il, avant d’ajoutant en riant : “Peut-être qu’on se souviendra de moi comme du Bond Bougon. Je n’en sais rien. C’est mon Bond à moi et je dois l’assumer, ça a été mon Bond. Mais ça me convient tout à fait.””Je ne me dévoile peut-être pas autant que les gens le souhaiteraient, mais c’est mon choix,” dit Daniel Craig. “Ça m’a sans doute valu des ennuis.”Devin Oktar Yalkin pour The New York TimesLe tournage de “Mourir peut attendre”, même en 2018 et 2019, les années insouciantes d’‘avant’, n’a pas été simple pour Craig, qui en était coproducteur comme pour “Spectre”. Danny Boyle a accepté le poste de réalisateur avant de se rétracter, citant des différends sur la création. C’est finalement Cary Joji Fukunaga qui réalisera le film. Craig s’est blessé à la cheville pendant le tournage, nécessitant une petite opération.L’acteur qui, la pandémie aidant, aura incarné Bond plus longtemps qu’aucun de ses prédecesseurs , a dû ensuite patienter 18 mois avant de pouvoir dévoiler le film de 2 heures et 43 minutes qui le libère enfin de ses obligations envers les Services Secrets de Sa Majesté. Dans l’intérim, il a déjà tourné une suite à “Knives Out” (“À couteaux tirés”), le thriller de Rian Johnson de 2019. Il y retrouve son rôle de Benoit Blanc, le détective-gentleman dont la fantaisie cultivée en dit peut-être beaucoup sur tout ce que Craig ne pouvait se permettre en tant que James Bond.Quand nous nous sommes reparlé au téléphone en septembre, Craig était à la fois aussi réservé qu’à l’accoutumée et un peu plus détendu. Le fait de savoir que “Mourir peut attendre” se concrétisait enfin lui donnait la liberté de réfléchir à ce que son expérience de James Bond signifiait pour lui — toutes proportions gardées. Sur la question de l’évolution possible de la franchise James Bond— comme par exemple du plan d’Amazon d’acheter MGM — son laconisme en disait long.Et bien sûr, la star peu loquace avait un autre secret dans sa manche : on a appris ce mercredi que Craig est à l’affiche d’une nouvelle production de “Macbeth” à Broadway, dans le rôle-titre du noble écossais assoiffé de pouvoir. Ruth Negga sera Lady Macbeth à ses côtés. (Cette production mise en scène par Sam Gold débutera en avant-première au Lyceum Theater à Broadway le 29 mars, avant une sortie le 28 avril.)Craig l’a dit plus d’une fois au cours de nos conversations: il n’est qu’un comédien à ne pas confondre avec son futur ex-alter ego.“Tout ce que je souhaitais au fond, c’était d’en vivre,” dit-il de la profession d’acteur. “Je voulais ne pas avoir à servir les tables, ce que je faisais depuis l’âge de 16 ans. Je me suis dit que si je pouvais faire ça et qua payait mon loyer, alors j’aurais réussi.”“Croyez-moi, je ne suis qu’un simple mortel,” conclut-il.Craig a également évoqué la longue attente de la sortie de “Mourir peut attendre” et partagé — pour l’heure — ses dernières pensées sur James Bond. Voici les extraits édités de deux conversations ultérieures.Comment avez-vous vécu l’année et demi écoulée ? Comment ça va, d’une façon générale ?Ça va, autant que faire se peut. J’ai la chance incroyable d’avoir une famille merveilleuse et d’avoir un lieu en dehors de la ville où on a pu s’installer loin de cette espèce de folie. On a quitté la ville le 8 mars. La veille au soir, j’avais fait le “Saturday Night Live”, c’était vraiment surréaliste. Ça a été une année difficile pour tout le monde, et il s’est passé des choses pas très agréables, mais c’est comme ça.Il n’est pas impliqué dans la recherche du prochain 007. “Quelle que soit la personne choisie, je lui souhaite bonne chance.” Devin Oktar Yalkin pour The New York TimesEst-ce que c’est une leçon d’humilité, de jouer des personnages définis par leur aptitude et leur ingéniosité, puis de vivre une expérience dans la vraie vie qui vous rappelle que nous sommes tous à la merci de forces supérieures ?Bon, de toute façon c’est pas comme ça que je me sens. Je me sens comme un être humain normal la plupart du temps. J’ai aucune connexion avec les personnages que je joue. Je veux dire, vraiment aucune. C’est tout ce qu’ils sont. Tellement de choses ont été relativisées. C’est difficile de ne pas simplement voir le monde d’une manière différente. Je suis sûr que c’est pareil pour tout le monde.Il y a une vidéo qui circule d’un discours à vos collègues et votre équipe à la fin du tournage de “Mourir peut attendre”. Vous avez terminé les larmes aux yeux, et ça m’a rassuré que vous montriez vos émotions — que vous puissiez être vulnérable comme ça.Je ne me dévoile peut-être pas autant que les gens le souhaiteraient, mais c’est mon choix. Ça m’a sans doute valu des ennuis et les gens se sont fait leur propre opinion sur moi. Mais je suis un être humain incroyablement émotif. Je suis un acteur. Enfin, c’est mon métier. Et la vidéo dont vous parlez, c’est le point final de 15 années de ma vie dans lesquelles j’ai mis tout ce que je pouvais mettre. Je serais une espèce de sociopathe si je n’avais pas un peu la gorge nouée après tout ça. Heureusement, je ne suis pas un sociopathe.Si tout s’était passé comme prévu il y a un an et demi, vous auriez eu droit à un tour de piste un peu plus flamboyant. Tout ceci vous semble-t-il assez discret, au final ?Rajoutez Covid à la fin de chaque phrase. Je suis optimiste sur tout ça. Je suis simplement heureux qu’on ait pu en arriver là parce que Dieu sait qu’il y a un an et demi, rien de tout ça n’avait de sens ou ne semblait même dans le domaine du possible. Je suis incroyablement heureux qu’on soit au point de permettre au public d’aller le voir. J’ai tellement hâte que les gens puissent voire ce film, et j’espère qu’il leur plaira.Combien de projets prennent 15 ans dans une vie ? C’est le temps qu’il faut normalement pour obtenir un doctorat ou une chaire d’université à son nom.C’est vrai. [Rire] Je n’ai ni l’un ni l’autre, loin de là. Mais c’est très gentil à vous de le poser en ces termes.Qu’est-ce qui va vous manquer de James Bond ?Ce qui va me manquer, c’est l’immense effort d’équipe que ça demande. On a commencé le projet il y a presque cinq ans, aussi frustrant et anxiogène que ça puisse être. Parfois, j’ai l’impression que ça ne va pas se faire, mais c’est un processus incroyablement créatif, et ça va me manquer. J’ai d’autres projets en cours, et ils seront valorisants, mais rien ne vaut un film de James Bond.Quelque chose de spécifique à propos du personnage lui-même ?Je l’ai joué. Je lui ai donné tout ce que je pouvais. Il est aussi accompli pour moi que j’ai pu y arriver. Enfin, qui sait ? Je n’ai pas de réponse claire à cela.Daniel Craig dans son premier James Bond, “Casino Royale” (2006).Jay Maidment/MGM and Columbia PicturesEn 2008 dans “Quantum of Solace”, son deuxième Bond, avec Olga Kurylenko.Karen Ballard/MGM and Columbia PicturesWe haven’t seen Craig as Bond since “Spectre” (2015).Jonathan Olley/MGM and Columbia PicturesLa franchise est devenue de plus en plus ambitieuse, comme le montre “Skyfall” (2012).Francois Duhamel/MGM and Columbia PicturesVous êtes parent. Pensez-vous que James Bond signifiera quelque chose pour vos enfants et leur génération ?Si vous comprenez aussi bien les enfants, je dirais que c’est vous qui méritez une chaire. Je ne les comprends pas très bien. Ils sont une énigme pour moi, et si ces films leur apportent quelque chose plus tard, ce sera leur voyage, pas le mien.Êtes-vous impliqué d’une quelconque manière dans la recherche de votre successeur, quel qu’il soit ?Daniel Craig’s History as James BondCard 1 of 715 years of Bond: More