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      Alessandro Nivola Put His Foot Down and Won the ‘Many Saints’ Role Anyway

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      When he landed his first major lead in 25 years, he sobbed. “I’d been down that road so many times, and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”The throbbing in the back of Alessandro Nivola’s head was growing more intense.It was fall 2018 when he’d auditioned for the role of Dickie Moltisanti in “The Many Saints of Newark,” the “Sopranos” prequel, and “I felt pretty sure I was onto something,” he said. Though he wasn’t sure what that something was.Then after a lunch with David Chase, creator of the series, and Alan Taylor, the film’s director, the full script arrived and the stakes shot through the roof. Dickie, it turned out, was the film’s protagonist, and Chase had been told he could cast anyone he wanted. And the word was that Chase wanted Nivola, who hadn’t carried a movie of this magnitude in his nearly 25-year film career.That’s when the throbbing kicked in. “I’d been down that road so many times,” Nivola said, “and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”So when a month passed without an offer — the noise in his head by now impossible to ignore — he decided to put an end to his misery. “Call them,” he instructed his agents, “and tell them that if they don’t tell me today I’m out.”Four hours later, in a downstairs bathroom at the Chateau Marmont during a layover in Los Angeles, he learned that Dickie was his. He locked himself in a stall and cried, muffled sobs of relief and release, for 10 minutes.Nivola at the wheel as Dickie Moltisanti with Michela De Rossi next to him and Michael Gandolfini behind him.Warner Bros. “You see, at some point you just have to put your foot down,” he told his people.Only, they hadn’t made the call. It was simply his lucky day.To hear Nivola, 49, tell it, good fortune has been elusive. But on a balmy September afternoon at the Mulberry Street Bar in Little Italy, he gave off the scent of a man swimming in it. Sleek in an unseasonably warm suit he’d worn to a photo shoot (his stylist had driven away with his clothes), he radiated Dickie’s debonair charisma, minus most of his menacing edge. James Gandolfini, the original Tony Soprano, glowered in a poster overhead, but Nivola looked like a boss.“The Many Saints of Newark” has been positioned as Tony’s origin story, with Michael Gandolfini cast as the teenage version of his father’s iconic character. But the movie belongs to Dickie, an explosive, tomcatting mobster — long dead when Tony mythologized him in “The Sopranos” — who somehow managed, despite his best efforts, to twist a basically decent kid into a tormented mafia kingpin.Chase had wanted to make a respectable gangster film. “So, there’s no more Jimmy Gandolfini,” he said in an interview, “but we wanted someone who could, in his own way, be as criminally intelligent and charismatic.”Dickie is more elegant, more handsome, more stylish than Tony. “But he is carrying exactly the same set of tones,” said Taylor, the director, “which is this combination of introspection and complete blindness and rage and regret.”Nivola’s induction into the “Sopranos” family actually began with his sleazy prosecutor in “American Hustle,” which impressed Chase and made him wonder: “Who is this guy and where has he been? I have to keep him in mind.”“So I kept him in mind,” Chase said, “and when this role came up, he seemed to me to be the perfect guy for it.”Nivola ticked off the boxes: Italian American with an immigrant back story — his grandfather a Sardinian sculptor who resettled in Manhattan’s downtown bohemia during the war, his father a Harvard graduate and Brookings Institution fellow — and an innate grasp of the language.“When it came to Italian, curse words or otherwise,” Chase said, “he got the words and the tune.”And Nivola — a Boston-born Yale man who spent his grade-school years mostly in rural Vermont and high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire — was an eyeful. “On ‘The Sopranos,’ I never went that direction but I felt, well, we can’t blame the guy for being handsome,” Chase said. “He’s really good, and I knew he could deliver the right level of sinister.”Taking those “Sopranos” colors, Nivola painted a Jekyll and Hyde, longing to be remembered for doing something noble but dragged down by impulsive violence that horrifies even him.His interpretation was “pitch perfect, every beat of it,” starting with his audition scenes, said Taylor, who had to resist trying to get Nivola to recreate their perfection when they actually started shooting.Nivola has been bringing it since his film breakthrough in 1997 as Pollux Troy, the weirdo brother of Nicolas Cage’s terrorist in “Face/Off.” After which he essentially went undercover.“I always was drawn to roles that allowed me to hide myself and to burrow into some other kind of personality or behavior that felt like a disguise,” he said. “That’s been the blessing and the curse of my whole career up until now.”Nivola adroitly shapeshifted from one character to the next, without an obvious through line — the British frontman who beds a much older record producer in “Laurel Canyon,” the Orthodox Jew drawn into a love triangle in “Disobedience,” the lunatic sensei in “The Art of Self-Defense.”But along the way, disappointment over films that flopped or weren’t even released, and a sense of entitlement at being asked to repeatedly prove himself — hadn’t he already? — gave rise to crippling nerves and depression. Eventually he felt so uncomfortable auditioning in person that he stopped altogether.“My most successful friends are sort of relentlessly positive,” said Nivola, citing his wife, the actor and director Emily Mortimer, and his pal Ethan Hawke. “I’m trying to be more that way but it’s not my nature.”Then came David O. Russell’s “American Hustle.” And after a humbling seven-year break when he stopped auditioning but also stopped getting much-wanted roles, he showed up to compete for the job.Nivola, left, with Bradley Cooper in “American Hustle.”Francois Duhamel/Columbia PicturesNivola had begun to reassess how he wanted to work, choosing great directors over great parts. But Russell’s idiosyncratic style — writing a script and then yelling out alternate lines for the actor to say in the midst of shooting — left Nivola feeling utterly out of control. Thrillingly so.“It was a big turning point for me, where I just completely gave over to him,” he said. “And from that moment on, I really liked that feeling. I wanted to give every director that I worked with that power.”Whatever caused Nivola to hesitate or overthink before, Russell has seen that drop away in favor of “enthusiastic inventiveness,” he wrote in an email. “I think he can do almost anything — he’s fearless. He takes what I’ve written and makes it his own. We trust each other, which allows risk and a hell of a lot of fun.”“American Hustle” was also Nivola’s first film with Robert De Niro, whom he considers a mentor. “I mean, he might not describe himself that way,” he said, laughing, “but I insist.”But it was watching him in motion on “The Wizard of Lies” — De Niro as Bernie Madoff and Nivola as his son Mark — that affected the way Nivola worked more than any other experience. He began learning his dialogue early so that he could untie himself from the words. He started repeating phrases in the middle of scenes, like a reset, until he’d forgotten he was performing.“It’s almost like he’s playing music rather than saying text,” Taylor said — even if it does send the dolly crew dashing when he suddenly takes a scene back to the beginning. The director added, “Frequently what comes out of his third version is the one he was aiming for, and it really, really works.”In September, the day after “The Many Saints of Newark” premiered at the Beacon Theater, Nivola, true to form, was elated if cautious. Critics for IndieWire, CNN and others singled his performance out with phrases like “absolutely brilliant” and “riveting.”“So far, these have been the best reviews I’ve ever had for a performance,” he wrote in an email, adding, “I’m trying not to put too much or too little stock in them.”But back on Mulberry Street, Nivola had intimated that his shining moment hadn’t dropped from out of the blue — not really. “I felt, to be honest, leading up to when this opportunity came, some intangible feeling that something like this was brewing,” he said haltingly.Still, unlike Dickie, he wasn’t willing to wager on his future. “I will never think about this movie as a success,” he added, “until I’m proven otherwise.” 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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      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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      in Movies

      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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      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

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      ‘Titane’ Review: Auto Erotic

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      Julia Ducournau’s new film, a prizewinner at Cannes, is a grisly, philosophical thriller that puts the pedal to the metal.Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby — her compulsion, her kink, her vocation — is murder. As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before.Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum.Maybe we should back up for a moment. “Titane” is Julia Ducournau’s second feature. The first, “Raw,” which also included a character named Alexia (and one named Adrien), was a gruesome, witty, insistently thoughtful quasi-horror movie about sex, cannibalism and the varieties of hunger. Awarded the top prize in Cannes this year, “Titane” consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. Violence is often played for comedy. Cruelty collides with tenderness. Eroticism keeps company with disgust. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines.Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) may be a little of both. As a child, she survived — and caused — a car crash that left her with a titanium plate in her skull. That explains the title of the movie, though not the character’s fascination with motors, which predated the accident, or the bloodthirstiness that drives her adult self. Titanically alluring, she seduces men and women before attacking them with a metal shank that doubles as a hairpin. After driving it through one guy’s ear, she wipes it clean as if she had just checked the oil in a car’s engine.There is slapstick as well as dread in the way Ducournau stages Alexia’s crimes. “How many of you are there?” she asks as a quiet evening of one-on-one homicide threatens to turn into a mass casualty event. “I’m exhausted,” she complains to one of her victims, who actually seems to feel sorry for her.Rousselle, a model making her film debut, has a sullen magnetism. Her iciness is edged with melancholy. Once Alexia becomes Adrien, moving in with Vincent (Vincent Lindon) and joining his crew, she seems less like a predator than a vulnerable, isolated misfit. Lindon, an avatar of weary, blue-collar masculinity, seems at first to be too obvious a foil for Rousselle. But Vincent turns out to have kinks and complications of his own. He fights aging with heavy doses of steroids, and seems willfully to overlook signs of his supposed son’s real identity.His firehouse is a cauldron of unchecked virility and barely suppressed homoeroticism. He insists that Adrien/Alexia will be one of the boys, with some special privileges. “To you, I’m God,” he tells the men, adding that his son is therefore Jesus — but also, the audience knows, a kind of Madonna figure, carrying a miraculously conceived child. This is what I mean by high thematic ambition: “Titane” is a movie concerned with gender politics, metaphysics, the nature of love and a great deal more.It’s no wonder that those concerns don’t entirely cohere, given Ducournau’s furious sensationalism. The hectic, brutal intensity that drives the first part of the movie, before Alexia becomes Adrien, dissipates in the middle, as the narrative engine sputters. The pregnancy supplies some suspense, of course, but the situation becomes curiously static, and the provocations increasingly mechanical. For all its reckless style and velocity, “Titane” doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.TitaneRated R for sex and violence, in and with cars. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More