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Michel Ciment, Eminent French Film Critic, Is Dead at 85
He helped define cinema as high art for generations of moviegoers and filmmakers in France and beyond, even if he irked some of them with his passion for Hollywood.Michel Ciment, a French film critic whose passion for cinema helped define it as serious art for generations of French moviegoers, directors and producers, even while irking some of them with his unabashed love of American film, died on Nov. 13 in Paris. He was 85.His death was confirmed by the film magazine Positif, for which he had long served as editor in chief, and by the Cannes Film Festival, which called him “a free spirit with an insatiable curiosity” and “the embodiment of cinephilia.”Mr. Ciment (pronounced SEE-mah) derived his authority from just that: his unbounded love of movies and an encyclopedic knowledge of film that sprang from it. He was an adept of the uniquely French cult of movies as high art, and of the great director as genius. But that was counterbalanced by an embrace of “all types of cinema,” the Cannes festival said, a passion born in his childhood addiction to American westerns and gangster movies.Mr. Ciment was an unabashed Americanophile in a French cultural environment in which checking the anti-American box is often a prerequisite to being taken seriously. He was sometimes reproached for it, his son Gilles recalled; in later years he became a senior lecturer in American Civilization at the University of Paris.He communicated his enthusiasm for film, beginning with his first critical forays in the early 1960s, in a torrent of books, reviews, interviews and radio broadcasts. (His status in the world of film criticism was such that he was often interviewed by other critics.)Mr. Ciment celebrated the great directors of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in books on Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan and Francesco Rosi, each thick with probing interviews in which critic startles director with his detailed knowledge of their films.These directors trusted him and opened up to him because, he told the Toronto Film Review in 2020, “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”His son recalled: “They would say that an exchange with Michel Ciment was like nothing else. With him, he really knows your film, he remembers the characters’ names. And then he would put your film in relation to the history of cinema.”For his book “Kazan on Kazan” (1973), Mr. Ciment spent 10 days with the director and conducted 40 hours of interviews. That was typical of his methods. He favored those who believed, like him, that “all the arts are found in cinema,” as he put it to an interviewer this year with the radio channel France Culture. For him, the superior film combined visual, aural and literary greatness.A 2009 book by Mr. Ciment compiling interviews he conducted with many movie directors. They opened up to him, he said, because “I asked questions that were about philosophy, about history, about politics.”Berg Publishers“All the great directors I hung out with — whether it was Losey, Kubrick, Kazan — they had a generalized culture,” Mr. Ciment said in the radio interview. “These were people who had read an enormous amount, who listened to music, who had seen lots of paintings.”He criticized contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, who, he said, work in a cruder idiom and have “encouraged the young toward an absence of culture.”The son of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who narrowly escaped being rounded up with other Jews in Paris by Nazi collaborators during World War II, Mr. Ciment traced his pro-American views to childhood memories of the liberation of France in 1944.“At 6, to see the Americans disembark, pitching cans of food, chewing gum — it’s thanks to them we regained our liberty,” he told France Culture.In contrast to the sometimes doctrinaire impulses of that other pole of French film criticism, the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut propagated theories of cinema that they went on to put into practice, Mr. Ciment’s instinct at Positif was free-form.“Always a bit anarchist, libertarian, we couldn’t have cared less about fashions,” he told the Toronto Film Review. “We said what we thought about films, what we loved about films, without preconceptions.”His serious approach to film is evident in his book about the politically oriented realist Italian director Francesco Rosi, who made films about the mafia, corruption, injustice and war. Implicit in the book is the idea that film is as worthy of close analysis as serious literature, a view Mr. Ciment gained from his early studies with two postwar French masters of literary and philosophical criticism, Paul Benichou and Gilles Deleuze.Mr. Ciment praised Mr. Rosi for “hunting down the lie, cornering it in its hide-out,” for a “close engagement with reality in which the smallest false step would have been a betrayal,” and for being “conscious of the impossibility of reaching the truth.”Even in this early book, Mr. Ciment’s attention to detail in film is evident: At one point, referring to Mr. Rosi’s antiwar film “Many Wars Ago” (1970), he asks the director why “the night battle sequence is predominantly blue in color.”Mr. Ciment, second from left, with fellow members of the jury for the 1978 International Film Festival in Cannes, France. The American director Alan J. Pakula is third from left, and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann is next to him. Jean Jacques Levy/Associated PressMichel Jean Ciment was born on May 26, 1938, in Paris to Alexander and Helene Cziment. His father “Frenchified” the name after the war, Gilles Ciment said. Michel’s father, who had immigrated from Hungary in the early 1920s, was a tailor for the great French fashion houses, and his wife worked with him.One morning in July 1942, the police came by the house to warn Helene that her husband had best not come home that evening: It was the eve of the great roundup of Paris Jews known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, named after the stadium where they were taken. Some 13,000 Jews were seized and subsequently sent to the death camp at Auschwitz.The elder Mr. Ciment escaped to Normandy and was hidden by peasants there for the duration of the war. His son followed him there, and his wife went back and forth from Paris.The family regrouped in Paris after the Liberation, and Michel Ciment went on to study at two prestigious secondary schools, the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and the Lycée Condorcet. It was as a student that he discovered, in the intense Paris film culture of the day, the great silent films of Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.He later studied at the Sorbonne and received a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1960s, allowing him to study at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “It was American education that completely confirmed me in my tastes,” Mr. Ciment told France Culture.He made his debut as a critic with a defense of Orson Welles in Positif in 1963. He later joined its staff and went on to become editor in chief.From the 1970s on he published a stream of books. Besides the ones on Kazan and Rosi, there were others on American cinema, Losey, Stanley Kubrick and Theo Angelopoulos as well as “Passport to Hollywood,” a book of interviews with directors, including Roman Polanski, Milos Forman and Wim Wenders.In addition to his son, he is survived by his second wife, Evelyne Hazan-Ciment. His first wife, Jeannine Ciment, who worked with him at Positif, died in 1986.Mr. Ciment’s passion for film never flagged. As Jérôme Garcin, his colleague on the popular French public radio cultural review “Le Masque et La Plume,” said of him in the French magazine L’Obs, “At 85, he remained, when the lights went out and the magic lantern began to dispense onscreen its dream-colors, a child in wonderment.” More
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Watch Jeffrey Wright Grapple With Stereotypes in ‘American Fiction’
The screenwriter and director Cord Jefferson narrates a sequence from his film.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.A conventional Black novel comes to life, with both comedic and dramatic results, in this scene from “American Fiction.”The film, written and directed by Cord Jefferson, who adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, “Erasure,” follows the writer Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who goes by Monk, through his frustrations with the kinds of stories he thinks Black writers are allowed to tell.After one of his more academic books has poor sales, a frustrated Monk decides to pen a more stereotypically Black story under a pseudonym. That book’s title is “My Pafology.” In this scene, as Monk begins to write, his clichéd creations come alive before him: Willy the Wonker and Van Go, played by Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan.Narrating the scene, Jefferson said that this sequence doesn’t appear in the novel; rather, the book recreates the entirety of “My Pafology” within its pages. To make Monk’s writing cinematic, Jefferson chose to stage it with Monk at the desk writing, his characters acting out his dialogue around him.While humor is the intention of the scene, Jefferson said, “Ok and Keith David are such great actors that you have this inclination to take them seriously.” He said that nuance, and the desire to not play the scene too broadly, only makes the scene better.Read the “American Fiction” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More
- in Theater
Readers on the Best Movies, TV, Music and Theater of 2023
When our critics shared their top film, TV, pop music and theater picks, readers suggested “Billions,” “The Holdovers,” “Sabbath’s Theater” and others.Every year, our critics review numerous movies, television shows, musicals, plays, operas, dance performances, music and more. And come December, they whittle down their favorites to a list of 10.But what are best-of lists if not an invitation to critique?Here’s a look at readers’ comments across several popular categories.Television | Movies | Theater | Pop MusicCharlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor) in Season 2 of “Heartstopper.”NetflixBest TVIn a year when the television industry was turned upside down by strikes, and when corporate fantasies of unlimited growth seemed to find some kind of ceiling, there was still almost too much good stuff to keep up with. Luckily, we have three critics who do that for a living — and luckier still, they offered three different prisms through which to view the year in TV, at home and abroad.Of course, there is no world in which “Succession” and “Reservation Dogs” weren’t each going to appear twice, and our readers seemed OK with that. As for other reader favorites like “Only Murders in the Building” and “The Gilded Age,” maybe next year. (Sorry, “Billions,” your time is up.)Here’s a look at what some of our readers said.Michel Forest of Montreal, Quebec:No love for “Billions”? Come on! Sure, it was cartoonish at times, but it was such a fun show to watch, with great acting and some of the best dialogue on TV. Anyway, I’ll watch anything with Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis, they are such great actors!Jodi Schorb of Gainesville, Fla.:I thought Season Two of “Heartstopper” was honest and adorable. One can only take so many murder-mysteries and moody thrillers. It’s hard to make an earnest comedy, let alone one that treats gay, transgender, straight and (a surprise) asexual protagonists with such tenderness. If we are going to add one rom-com on the list, “Heartstopper” deserves some love.Richard Laible of Winnetka, Ill.:Great list EXCEPT you left off the best show of the year, “Lessons in Chemistry”! You should really send out an edited list … and maybe an apology (j/k).Barry Keoghan stars in “Saltburn.”Amazon StudiosBest Movies“Barbenheimer” signaled a great year for movies, and our critics recognized the “Oppenheimer” half of the phenomenon, along with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” “Past Lives” and others. Readers, on the other hand, questioned the merits of “Asteroid City” and “Oppenheimer,” and named “The Holdovers,” “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Barbie” as favorites.Peter Malbin of New York City:I just saw “Saltburn,” and it was outstanding. Well-acted and original film set in Oxford and an English manor house. The story is entertaining and sexy. Barry Keoghan is brilliant! He was also in “Banshees of Inisherin.” “Saltburn” should be at the top of the lists!Beth Samuelson of Oakland, Calif.:Where is “Maestro” on these lists? A terrific film that should not be missed. And the reviews have been excellent!Charise M. Hoge of Bethesda, Md.:The exclusion of “Barbie” from this list is like putting her back in the box … that powerful (yes, powerful) film deserves recognition.Jill Krupnik of Brooklyn, N.Y.:I am a little surprised that my personal favorite — the wondrous “The Boy and the Heron” — didn’t make even an honorable mention, but here we are.Perhaps Brian Seifert of Cincinnati summed it up best:Critics see a lot of junk, so they like the intense, quality-issue movies that come along. Average people deal with a lot of junk, so they like lighter entertainment to escape and relax. The two groups have never been farther apart.From left, Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley in the musical “Shucked.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest Theater“Purlie Victorious,” “A Doll’s House” and “Just for Us” were among Jesse Green’s picks for the year’s best theater. Many of the plays and musicals that resonated in 2023 deftly married elements of drama and comedy. Our readers pointed out some of the shows that — despite being fan favorites or being beautifully performed — didn’t make our list.Eric Bogosian, the New York actor and playwright, praised “Sabbath’s Theater,” as did several other commenters. “What are you afraid of? Great performances by three of our greatest actors and actresses? Please …,” he wrote.Marcia W. Orange of Fort Lee, N.J.:“Shucked” deserved more love and attention. It was the most original and laugh-out-loud-funny show I have seen in years … even better than “Book of Mormon.” What a pity more people haven’t seen it.Joseph LaFalce of South Orange, N.J.:How can any roundup of the best of 2023 not include the phenomenal “Parade,” including the unique staging and heartbreaking performances by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond?Raissa Lim of New York City:RIP to the magnificent “Here Lies Love” by David Byrne. It was the best Broadway show I saw this year, and the best theater experience of my life. Never again will Broadway see that same confluence of superb talents come together to create an extraordinary and indescribable experience. It was a brand-new kind of art form, not the standard narrative theater audiences have come to expect, so perhaps the wrong standards were sometimes applied when assessing it. Its minor narrative weaknesses were more than offset by other elements such as video artistry, lighting, set design, music, choreography — making for an overall spectacular whole. I’m sorry for those obstinate souls who didn’t see it for their own obscure reasons. They missed a once-in-a-lifetime experience (that does NOT glorify the Marcoses but instead pays tribute to a true hero). Indeed, perhaps bovine audiences get what they deserve when flying cars and dancing lions beat out truly groundbreaking artistic excellence at the box office.Caroline Polachek at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July.Valentin Flauraud/Keystone, via Associated PressBest Pop MusicOne of the albums that had the biggest impact in 2023 actually came out at the tail end of 2022: SZA’s “SOS.” Between their albums and song lists, our three pop music critics agreed “SOS” was one of the year’s best, along with LPs from Olivia Rodrigo and 100 gecs. Beyond that, their tastes widely diverged from one another — and, it turns out, from our readers’. (Michael Hasse, a reader in Paris, created this helpful Spotify playlist with albums recommended in the comments.)Roddy P Glass of London:I will add my vote to “Now and Then,” though secretly, in the quiet of my heart, I know it comes nowhere near the standard the Beatles have always given us: perfection.”Penny Beach of Boise, Idaho:Where is Noah Kahan? Definitely should be on this list.Charles Grissom of Raleigh, N.C.:I know these lists are about pop music, and that is driven by 20-somethings. But Jimmy Buffett’s posthumous 2023 album “Equal Strain on All Parts” is wonderful music and storytelling, and the song “Portugal or PEI” is an absolute gem.Patrick Tierney of Louisville, Ky.:I love these lists but [Lindsay] Zoladz’s in particular. Rodrigo, Polachek, and Debby Friday all made my top 10 and show how much the present and future of pop/rock/dance music is led by creative young women. I’d add to the group three very different artists — yeule, Die Spitz, Avalon Emerson — that made this a great year for new music.Scott McGlasson of Minneapolis, Minn.:None of my faves of the year were even mentioned: Tim Hecker, the Necks, the National, Blonde Redhead, PJ Harvey. I know, I’m old and not a music critic…John Franz of East Bangor, Pa.:I was shocked to see some songs and performers I’ve actually heard of. Peter Gabriel’s album is brilliant. Not sure if the new Stones album is their best work. I found Dolly’s album hilarious; she’s a gem who I never listened to much before this new album. That’s about it. Seems to me that any song from the Tedeschi Trucks album should be on the list. Kenny Wayne Shepherd. And how about Jason Isbell’s great new album.Dan Cain of Washington, D.C.:I vote for Yo La Tengo’s “This Stupid World.” Best album in a while from one of the founding bands of indie rock. Just listen to the first 30 seconds of the opening track, ideally at a very loud volume. It’s great.Paul Kevin Smith of Austin, Texas:I don’t know why she doesn’t get more attention, but Jessie Ware’s “Begin Again” was a perfect pop/disco song released this year.And we’ll leave the last words to John Weston of Chicago:So many comments here seem to rest on the idea that musical progress ended when John Bonham died, Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed, the Beatles broke up, the Big Bopper died, or Chuck Berry or Bessie Smith (let’s be honest, none of y’all would have cared when she died … like most of the world at the time), when “The Rite of Spring” was first performed, when Beethoven finished his Ninth Symphony or with Liszt’s use of the tritone in “Dante Sonata” (how dare he!).To all of those such commenters and thinkers, I shall quote the one and only Bob Dylan (referenced by many on this thread):Mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don’t criticize what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly aging/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand/For the times they are a changin’. More
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The Best Movies of 2023 by Genre
We look at the finest in science fiction, horror, action and international films, all available to stream.Science FictionEnvironmental disaster and artificial intelligence run amok have emerged as the major science-fiction concerns of our time. Compared to those, gray, almond-eyed aliens in flying saucers, hellbent on destroying humanity, feel like a throwback to simpler times. But “No One Will Save You,” Brian Duffield’s genre exercise, is deceptive.Kaitlyn Dever plays Brynn, a demure semi-recluse who turns out to be surprisingly adept at fighting back the murderous visitors. The movie uses the suspenseful logistics of physical survival to grab viewers; Duffield has a terrific command of economical action filmmaking. But that is not the reason I’ve been mulling over this nearly dialogue-free movie since it premiered on Hulu in September: The story is actually about psychological survival.An outcast in her small town, Brynn is haunted by a traumatic event in her past, and when she fights for her life, her battle plays like an extreme version of a coping mechanism. I’ve read several theories about the ending, but the entire movie is coded, with the aliens’ retro appearance being a major clue. Under its straightforward exterior, “No One Will Save You” is a melancholic look at what Brynn does not just to live, but to live with herself. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLIStream “No One Will Save You” on Hulu.HorrorA scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmMy two favorite horror movies this year took apples-and-oranges paths to clock me in the face and rip out my heart.“The Outwaters” starts as a lighthearted found-footage account of four friends on a trip to the desert. But almost an hour into the film, a silhouetted figure appears in the dark distance, and that’s when the writer-director Robbie Banfitch shifts into gut-punching high gear with a frenzied maelstrom of screams, grunts, creatures and guts. The result is an experimental fever dream, a sustained and visually stunning sensory assault — I could smell fear — that’s singularly thrilling. Turn up the volume for a true razor’s edge experience.Paul Owens’s low-fi “LandLocked” delivers equally brutal blows but with softer gloves. It’s about a young man (Mason Owens, the director’s brother) who finds a VHS-era camera in his family’s old home that lets him glimpse his past wherever he points the lens. (Owens used his real-life family’s tapes as footage.) Even in empty rooms, demons long thought to be buried instead lurk, and in the film’s most terrifying passage, one monstrously emerges. It’s an assured, understated and deeply creepy slow-burn study of memory, loss and, most meaningfully, fatherhood. — ERIK PIEPENBURGStream both “The Outwaters” and “LandLocked” on Tubi.ActionJorma Tommila in “Sisu.”Antti Rastivo/Freezing Point Oy/LionsgateAt first glance, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the silent, bruising figure in the Finnish World War II exploitation film “Sisu,” wouldn’t strike you as an activist. After all, he is a stoic prospector who, at the outset of the writer-director Jalmari Helander’s film, discovers a mother lode of gold. But the action genre is often where bold political statements are made through simple symbolic figures. So when the vicious SS tank commander Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) learns of Korpi’s riches, what arises is a Finnish anti-imperialist story with elements of female empowerment.Helander interweaves these themes through common action tropes. There is the cadre of Finnish female prisoners of war held by the Nazis who will eventually become the kind of army familiar to the exploitation genre, ultimately, winning their bodily freedom. The retired Korpi is also an unstoppable killing machine so feared by the Russian army, it nicknamed him the Immortal. Helldorf throws everything at Korpi: tank shells, bullets and a minefield. Korpi remains unbowed. His repeated return from near-death scenarios is a wonderful gag that marries comical violence with thematic heft, turning “Sisu” into this year’s sharpest resistance film. — ROBERT DANIELSRent or buy “Sisu” on major platforms.InternationalPaula Beer in “Afire.”Sideshow/JanusFor me, this year in international cinema is defined by two images: one of red fumes filling the skies above a German forest in “Afire,” and the other of blindingly blue waves towering over a Tahitian beach in “Pacifiction.”“Afire” is a horror-inflected summer comedy about vulnerable masculinity and bemusing desire from Christian Petzold, known for his postmodern period melodramas (“Transit,” “Phoenix”). “Pacifiction” is a woozy thriller about modern-day colonialism from Albert Serra, the Catalan filmmaker with an acclaimed oeuvre of formally stringent, often historically perverse films (“Liberté,” “The Death of Louis XIV”). Both movies move away from their directors’ usual obsessions with the past. They are animated, instead, by a trembling anxiety about the apocalyptic stakes of the present.In “Afire,” forest fires spurred by climate change spell doom for a group of four young lovers. In “Pacifiction,” a nuclear threat lurks in the ocean, the dark waters barely concealing the machinations of imperialist powers. If the elements rise dramatically to the heavens in both, it’s less to inspire awe than caution — a warning that the forces we have knowingly, venally wreaked upon the world and on one another may just consume us all. — DEVIKA GIRISHStream “Afire” on the Criterion Channel and “Pacifiction” on Mubi. More
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Studios Are Loosening Their Reluctance to Send Old Shows Back to Netflix
When building their own streaming companies, many entertainment studios ended lucrative licensing deals with Netflix. But they missed the money too much.For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies.But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.Then the harsh realities of streaming began to emerge.Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives, said at an investor conference last week that the “availability to license has opened up a lot more than it was in the past,” arguing that the studios’ earlier decision to hold back content was “unnatural.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? More
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Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’
The Emmy-winning writer and former journalist drew on personal experience for his feature debut, a layered sendup of race and hypocrisy in the book and film worlds.Before he read “Erasure,” Percival Everett’s satirical novel about Black representation in the publishing industry, Cord Jefferson had never really thought of himself as a movie director. He had hoped to direct for television — his writing credits include several episodes of “Master of None,” “The Good Place” and HBO’s “Watchmen,” for which he shared an Emmy in 2020 — but even that seemed like a stretch.“I thought they might let me direct something that I helped write or create,” he said in a recent interview. “And even then it would be like Episode 4 of 10, not the pilot or the finale.”Things changed in December 2020, when Jefferson, 41, picked up “Erasure” and became enchanted. The book, published in 2001, is the story of Thelonius Ellison, known as Monk, a disillusioned Black intellectual whose mocking attempt at writing a stereotypical “ghetto novel” becomes a straightforward best seller.“Twenty pages in, I knew I had to write a film adaptation,” Jefferson said. “By the time I finished the book, I knew I had to direct it.” “American Fiction,” his take on the novel — and feature film debut as both a writer and director — is in theaters Friday. It stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, Issa Rae as a rival novelist and Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s siblings. In September, it won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, a precursor for an Academy Awards nomination for best picture for the past 11 years.Over lunch in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, Jefferson, a former journalist and editor at Gawker, discussed his personal connection to Everett’s story, his adoration of the writer-director Nicole Holofcener and shedding tears in a pitch meeting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it about the book that spoke to you?There was so much. The most obvious is just the conversation that it’s having about the expectations of a Black artist in this country, what people want or think that Black art should be. That was a huge part of my life when I was still working in journalism. I wrote this article called “The Racism Beat,” which is very much about the expectation that Black journalists are just there to write about the bad things that happen to Black people and racism and violence.But besides that, there are three siblings in the book, and I have two older siblings. And there’s an ailing parent in the book, and my mother passed of cancer in 2016, after two years of struggling. One of the siblings in the book is charged with caring for the parent because the other two are off doing their own thing, and that was the dynamic with us. My oldest brother shouldered that responsibility. He went about it stoically and never complained or anything, but I had this residual guilt over not being there.From big things to small things, there was just all of this stuff that felt like it was speaking to me directly. I went to a college in Virginia called William & Mary, and there’s a reference to William & Mary in the novel. Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture! It just felt like somebody had written a gift specifically for me, like, “I made this for you.”The parts about the expectations facing Black artists, did they match your own experience when you arrived in Hollywood?Oh, definitely. I thought I was going to get there and it would be like, “Oh yeah, there’s a world of opportunity and we’re just going to write about whatever. The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.” But there’s genres for “prestige Black projects”: slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.I’ll tell you a true story of something that happened to a friend that exemplifies this perfectly. She went into a meeting at this production company and they’re like, “What are you interested in writing?” She says, “I’m interested in romantic comedies, like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ classic, generational, Nora Ephron comedies. I would also love to write a ’90s-style erotic thriller.” They’re like, “All right, great. We’ll come back to you later with some ideas.” About three hours later, they call her and say, “We’ve got this story about a blind slave who, thanks to a wealthy white benefactor, learns to play the piano and becomes a piano prodigy. Are you interested in this?”Wow.They see a Black person and they can’t see past that. I think there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, why would we hire you to write a rom-com? Why would we hire you to write an erotic thriller?” There’s an inability to think of us as having our own passions and our own complex existence outside of this very limited window of what they allow us to say about our lives. These are things that people of color have been talking about for a very long time. To me, the real spiritual ancestor for this project would be “Hollywood Shuffle” [Robert Townsend’s satire of Black representation in Hollywood, released in 1987].That was a real foundational text for me when I was a kid. I loved that movie. I probably saw it before I was 10. It opened my eyes to this idea that you can talk about these things that are very serious but also have fun with them, that not only is it OK to laugh, you need to laugh because otherwise you’ll just be miserable all the time. It blew my mind wide open.From left, Sterling K. Brown, Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander in “American Fiction.” The movie won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.Claire Folger/Orion PicturesIt’s funny because the two references I kept thinking about while watching your movie were “Hollywood Shuffle” and Nicole Holofcener, which is a cool combination.Dude, love Nicole Holofcener. She’s a genius. I’m so happy you said that. To me, that’s the greatest compliment. I love her so much. I saw “Friends With Money” [2006] when it first came out, and I was just blown away. She’s a huge influence on me. She has such a subtle, deft hand with class dynamics. And I love her character work. I’m forgetting the one with Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus …“Enough Said.”Yeah. I just feel like she has an attention to detail when it comes to how human beings actually interact and live their lives. What I set out to make with this movie was something that felt a little bit like life. To me, even in the most miserable times, I’ve always found ways to laugh and enjoy myself and time with my family and friends. There are all these things that buoy your spirits. I think it’s a disservice to the human experience to not reflect that. And that’s something Nicole Holofcener does really well. I think Noah Baumbach does, also. Spike Lee, Bong Joon Ho. All people who’ve inspired me over the years.I wanted to ask you about something that happens toward the end of the film, which is this really interesting conversation between Monk and Sintara (Issa Rae) that raises the question of whether his distaste for her novel masks a distaste for a certain kind of Black person. In your mind, what do you think Monk’s relationship is with other Black people?Something Jeffrey and I talked about the first time we met and that we agreed on instantly was we didn’t want this movie to be some Talented Tenth, respectability politics [expletive]. We didn’t want it to feel like we were finger wagging and saying, “This is the right way to be Black, and all you other people are doing it wrong.” Both of us knew the movie could not be that. So that scene was important because we didn’t want people to come away being like, “Oh, well, she’s the villain and he’s the hero.” There are no villains or heroes.What I really like about that scene is I don’t really know who I agree with, ultimately. They both make interesting points. But I will say that when she says that line, “Potential is what people see when they think what’s in front of them isn’t good enough,” I think it’s the first time we see Monk confronted with the idea that he might be a little self-loathing, that he might have an internal problem with his Blackness. It’s one of the first times that we see him really get clammed up.Do you think it’s directing now for you? Or will you go back to writing television?I’m working on four different movies right now and I want to keep writing and directing movies, but I also want to do TV. I published a short story last year, and I’d love to do more of that. I’m about 60 percent done with a stage play. I just want to keep making stuff. When T Street [a producer of “American Fiction”] told me that they were greenlighting the movie, I started crying in the meeting. I had been told no for so long. I’d worked on all these things that just sort of went nowhere. It starts to break your heart eventually. You wonder, “Is this ever going to happen for me? Or is this just going to be a thing that I wanted to do my whole life?” The fact that I was able to crack the door a little bit to make this. … I feel incredibly honored. More
- in Theater
Ice Spice, Brian Jordan Alvarez and More Breakout Stars of 2023
These eight performers and artists broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.Gutsy and offbeat, with an abundance of heart. The stars who rose to the top in 2023 shared a similar mentality: do it their own way and go full tilt without sacrificing emotion or authenticity. Here are eight artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans.TelevisionBella RamseyAs the TV landscape continues to fracture, one new show emerged as a bona fide phenomenon: “The Last of Us,” HBO’s stunningly heartfelt zombie apocalypse thriller. Given that its source material was a beloved, acclaimed 2013 video game that has sold over 20 million copies, the bar was extraordinarily high. The show’s debut season delivered, in large part because of the synergy between the duo at its center: Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two characters who find themselves on a cross-country quest, dodging reanimated corpses to (hopefully) save the world.Ramsey, 20, who was born and raised in central England, offered a layered, tenacious, haunting performance as a teenager who is coming-of-age while being humanity’s possible last hope. They have been a working actor since they signed on to “Game of Thrones” at age 11, as the scene-stealing giant slayer Lyanna Mormont, and went on to have celebrated turns in the BBC/HBO adaptation of “His Dark Materials” and Lena Dunham’s 2022 period comedy, “Catherine Called Birdy.”For “The Last of Us,” Ramsey nailed a specific combination of contradictions — funny and quirky, but violent and rough — that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, its creators, were looking for. “There are few people better between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Mazin told The New York Times.Ramsey’s performance earned them an Emmy nomination, for outstanding lead actress in a drama, joining the likes of established stars such as Keri Russell and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor,” Ramsey told us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? More
