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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

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      The Married Couple Behind the Dreamy Feminist Action Film ‘Mayday’

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      The writer and director Karen Cinorre and the cinematographer Sam Levy met in a college film class over 20 years ago. More recently, they collaborated on Cinorre’s first feature.When the cinematographer Sam Levy and the writer and director Karen Cinorre, who are now married forty-somethings, first met — in a film class as undergrads at Brown — he was struck by the fact that “she’d read all these interesting texts about magic, mediums and optical tricks you could play with the camera,” he says. “She was very studious and disciplined about it, and I loved that about her.”The couple’s living room is decorated with art made by friends, and with vintage wallpaper that Cinorre hand-painted.Blaine Davis“I was a really curious seeker,” confirms Cinorre, who primarily studied semiotics, physics and dance, but who ultimately landed in film. “I realized,” she says, “that the palette for filmmaking had so much of what I love — the science, the optics, the movement, the sound,” which together can enact an alchemy all their own. Not that she’s actively thinking about all of these elements as she goes. “For me, you just do it — I’m trying to express something almost in the subconscious,” she says. “It’s like having a divining rod, seeking a way to express the thing you’re feeling.”Levy prints his photos at home, laying them out on the floor to see patterns. Pictured here are 17-by-22-inch images on Fibre Rag paper, and the accordion of portrait images is from his favorite photo book, “Mesdames les Bodhisattva à Tokyo” (2013), by the photographer Papa-Chat Yokokawa.Blaine DavisLevy, she says, who took to the camera in high school, has a different and more deliberate approach — “he strips film to its most essential and powerful parts” — something that was apparent, and fascinating to her, from the start. The pair kept in touch after that first class together, which was taught by the avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton, and their romance bloomed shortly after they graduated and moved to New York. They married in 2000, just as they were beginning to build their respective careers. Cinorre edited and produced for Thornton; produced and curated multimedia installations; created films for opera productions; and worked as a set decorator and as a stylist, most notably for Isabella Rossellini’s experimental “Green Porno” short film series (2008), in which Cinorre also appears as an amorous snail. All the while, she was writing and directing her own shorts. One of them, “Plume” (2010), centers on a young boy lost in a sandstorm who is saved by an ostrich, which leaves him caught between the human and animal realms. “My artistic inclinations are to mysterious things — I’m interested in the territory of the sublime,” she says.Another view of the couple’s studio, where Cinorre wrote and edited “Mayday.”Blaine DavisAt the same time, Levy was making a name for himself. He shot music videos for Beck and Vampire Weekend and became a frequent collaborator of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, serving as the director of photography on Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” (2012), shot entirely in black and white, and “While We’re Young” (2015) and, later, for Gerwig’s Oscar-winning “Lady Bird” (2017). His lean, naturalistic approach belies a meticulous attention to detail that gives the films he works on a rich, lived-in aesthetic. Levy also shot nearly all of Cinorre’s shorts, and the couple would occasionally end up on the same set for other productions (as was the case with “Green Porno”). “We learned we really loved being on set together, spending 15 hours a day together making things,” says Levy. “When I would get a feature for someone else and leave home, it just reinforced the idea that we should be doing this together.”The shot list for “Mayday” — Cinorre and Levy worked together to break down every scripted scene into individual shots.Blaine DavisIn 2018, after an idea of Cinorre’s that had been percolating for over a decade took shape — “Sam, who’d seen the script in progress, was the one to point out that it should be a feature,” says Cinorre — they got their chance. The story — of what would become “Mayday,” which stars Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu and Juliette Lewis and hits theaters and all major video-on-demand platforms Friday — follows Ana (Van Patten), a put-upon young waitress who is transported to a lush and sparsely populated island in a dreamy other world. A war is on, but she finds refuge with a band of young women led by the seemingly unflappable Marsha (Goth). Soon, Ana learns, the women are bent on vengeance against all men, whom they lure to their deaths, often by impersonating damsels in distress via radio transmissions. In time, though, the feminist revenge fantasy gives way to something else, as Ana comes to see herself and her previous life in a different light.Levy and Cinorre on the set of “Mayday” in Croatia.Tjaša KalkanCinorre cites “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and the ancient myth of the sirens as reference points for the story, which, she says, “felt like a bit of a fugue.” To figure out the film’s overall aesthetic, which has an appropriately gauzy, hypnotic quality, the couple searched for visual inspiration together. They went to live dance performances, including those done by the Belgian troupe Rosas and the Israeli company Batsheva, to help achieve a sense of grace and kineticism in the film (which has a darkly playful musical number in which Ana dances with a cadre of spry soldiers). The couple also browsed the shelves at Manhattan’s Dashwood Books, looking for images of women in action, which proved hard to find. Still, “a lot of Japanese photographers, like Rinko Kawauchi, spoke to us — something about the mystery and the color,” says Levy, who says his aim for “Mayday” was to “defy gravity.”A still from the film, which follows a band of women living on a strange island.Tjaša Kalkan/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. “It’s a big movie for a first feature — it needed a lot of muscle to get off the ground, and it was reassuring to have someone so encouraging,” Cinorre says of working with Levy, which turned out to be as natural as they both expected. “The thing I’m always trying to develop with a director is this shorthand for communicating and a visual language,” says Levy. “You kind of have to become the same person — your brains have to meld and you finish each other’s sentences.” This was something he and Cinorre could already do, though the two are careful about maintaining at least some boundaries between work and life. “We take what we do so seriously that we have to not take ourselves too seriously,” says Levy. “We’re playful and silly and ridiculous with each other, so then we can bring that energy to set, which makes the process of filmmaking a real joy.”Hair by Corey Tuttle for Exclusive Artists. Makeup by Pearl Xu More

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      Review: In ‘Never Let Go,’ a Solo Performer’s Heart Goes On

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      Michael Kinnan’s sendup of “Titanic” explores the liminal space between tribute and affectionate satire.Michael Kinnan’s “Never Let Go” is a one-man stage version of “Titanic.” That would be enough to persuade a lot of people to head to the Brick Theater, the adventurous Williamsburg black box where the show opened this week. Just as many might shrug in reflexive disdain.Kinnan is aware of those potential responses. The program for his show, in which he plays all the parts, claims that his “theatrical realization” of the movie was “created for lovers, fans and even skeptics.” Improbably, all three groups may well come away happy: This heart does go on, and for only an hour instead of three and a half.“Never Let Go” is a feat of ingenuity that works regardless of whether you have seen the movie. It’s easy to follow the story and identify the characters, even though there is no ocean liner and only minimal costume alterations. Kinnan embodies a dashing androgyny: lipstick and fake eyelashes, a shaved head, tight black pants, a white shirt emerging from a laced corset.And he needs just a few sound effects and props, including a step ladder and that famous necklace, to drive along the plot. One of the movie’s best scenes is the first meeting between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack and Kate Winslet’s Rose, when he talks her out of jumping into the sea from the ship’s stern. Recreating it, Kinnan seamlessly toggles between the two characters, and even nails the moment in which Jack catches Rose when she trips and almost falls into the ocean. As for the sex scene: This may be sacrilegious to say, but it’s better here.While he adeptly reproduces DiCaprio’s youthful cockiness, Kinnan raises his game to another level with Winslet’s role. He captures her coquettish coyness without caricaturing it. It’s hard not to laugh in delight at his resourcefulness and skill — the commotion following the collision with the iceberg is effectively rendered, complete with a hilariously tiny splash zone — which is quite a different reaction from snickering in superiority.Kinnan is not blind to the bombastic cheesiness of “Titanic,” yet appears to hold a genuine place in his heart for it, which gives the show winning élan, even heartfelt sincerity. By the time Rose told Jack “there’s a boat” then piteously pleaded “come back, come back,” I was so caught up in the drama that I’d forgotten the original scenes and was feeling for Kinnan’s version of the characters.In 2009, Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper’s “Rambo Solo” turned the famous Sylvester Stallone into a one-person show that Charles Isherwood of The New York Times described as “a winking shard of low-concept theater for downtown hipsters.” This is not what Kinnan aims for, or even accidentally achieves.What he does is explore the liminal space between tribute and affectionate satire, which is well illustrated by the way he combines a can’t-help-it fondness for Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” with a playful awareness of its schmaltz. If there is one drawback to the show, it’s that it will send you back into the night with that earworm firmly lodged in your head, all over again.Never Let GoThrough Oct. 10 at the Brick Theater, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      New Paramount chairman continues to clean house, showing another executive the door.

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      Regime change at Hollywood studios is almost always bloody. A new king or queen arrives and those loyal to the previous court lose their jobs.But the guillotine has been dropping at Paramount Pictures with surprising speed, creating something of a panic inside the 109-year-old film company.ViacomCBS, which owns Paramount, ousted Paramount’s chairman, James N. Gianopulos, on Sept. 13 and replaced him with Brian Robbins, a children’s television executive. By Sept. 17, Chris Petrikin, the studio’s respected executive vice president of global communications and corporate branding, had been shown the door. Emma Watts, president of the Paramount Motion Picture Group, was dismissed last week. And on Thursday, Paramount parted with its animation president, Mireille Soria.Paramount declined to comment on the departures.The speed with which Mr. Robbins is making changes reflects his personal style — forward charge! — and the vulnerable position in which Paramount and its corporate parent find themselves.Paramount was once the most powerful studio in Hollywood, delivering culture-defining films like “The Godfather,” “Grease,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Forrest Gump” and “Beverly Hills Cop.” But severe mismanagement in the 2010s left it on life support. Mr. Gianopulos pulled it back from the brink, but the studio remains an also-ran, with many analysts viewing it as unequipped to compete with franchise-rich competitors like Disney and Universal.Similarly, ViacomCBS ranks as a small player in the streaming business that has come to dominate the media industry. Mr. Robbins, who has online entertainment experience on his résumé and little attachment to calcified Hollywood business models, was installed at Paramount because ViacomCBS wants the studio to prioritize streaming distribution for films — in particular, feeding content to Paramount+, the conglomerate’s nascent streaming service. More