More stories

  • in

    Interview: Helen Fielding on ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ and Her Reading Life

    With “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” streaming, the novelist talked in an email interview about what moviemakers keep cutting from adaptations of her best sellers. SCOTT HELLERDescribe your ideal reading experience.I love a vacation binge-read — I read all 800 pages of “The Goldfinch” in Greece (that’s Greece, not Greek). I also love it when you’re waiting for a novel to come out and can’t put it down when it does. It was like that with “Atonement.” I managed to escape and hide when it arrived and read it all at one sitting.What kind of reader were you as a child?I was crazy for novels as a child and teenager. I read several a week, never distinguishing between heavy and light. Enid Blyton, Jane Austen, Jackie Collins, Thomas Hardy — I loved them all. Ironically, the joy was dampened when I went to university to read English. I’d worked as an au pair in France all summer and somehow failed to tackle the reading list. I ended up trying to read the entire works of Dickens in three days. I lost my reading mojo for some years.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?I’ve got into trouble for not reading a book: “Bleak House.”What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?“Bleak House.” And I’ve got into terrible trouble for giving quotes for book covers. My quote once got a bad review: “There is only one thing wrong with this novel — the cover quote from Helen Fielding. Whilst it is true, it is also trite.”What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?“Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” It’s a brilliant collection of quotes about writing from his letters. I don’t know what I’d do without it.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    The Next Hot Playwright? They Prefer the Ones Who Cooled Off.

    In the decades when he was running the widely influential Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford would not have been the one driving to New Jersey to see a man about a tree.But his new theater company, a scrappy, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, is a more hands-on operation. So one day last month, he hopped into his S.U.V. and headed across the Hudson River to bring back a freshly felled tree — he couldn’t tell you what kind — to be used in the set of a Len Jenkin play he is producing, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”Such is the job that Sanford, 71, made for himself when he and his wife, Aimée Hayes, the former producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, founded the Tent Theater Company. Advocacy is intrinsic to its mission. Having exited Playwrights Horizons in 2021, after 25 years as its artistic director, Sanford has taken up the banner of a group of artists he sees as sidelined by an industry that thrives on discovering the latest hot playwrights, yet isn’t exactly diligent about sustaining them over their lifetimes of creativity.Kate Arrington and Fred Weller during a rehearsal for Len Jenkin’s new play, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThere is, Sanford said, a feeling afoot that older playwrights should simply make way: “That kind of, you know, ‘The baby boomers had their time. Let them all go into the ash pits.’”To him, though, age is an overlooked element of diversity — one that comes with accumulated knowledge of the human experience, and for which there is, and must be, room. It is a matter, too, of respecting these artists, whom the Tent calls elders.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

    The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Interview: S.E. Hinton on ‘The Outsiders’ and Her Reading Life

    What books are on your night stand?I am currently rereading “Middlemarch” (it takes rereading), and “The Last of the Wine,” by Mary Renault. Socrates is a character in that book. So is Plato. To have them appear casually in a novel, yet be very faithful to what we know of them, is great.How do you organize your books?I have a beautiful library, organized by subjects: History (early to late), Author Biographies, Exploring, Women’s Studies, Journalism, Entertainment, English Fiction, American Fiction and Children’s Books. The Paranormal books are organized by Ghosts and Hauntings, Reincarnation, Coincidences, Strange but True.Why so many books on the paranormal?I have had many strange things happen in my life.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).Any time, on the sofa, with good lighting, my cat and a small glass of wine.What’s the last great book you read?“Demon Copperhead.” I don’t know a whole lot of Dickens but I know “David Copperfield” inside and out. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver followed some of the plot. Also, Demon is a great narrator — talking the way you can imagine him talking, thinking the way you can imagine him thinking.What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?I wish I knew more Shakespeare.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    ‘The Interview’: Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word with Trump About His Mother

    Unexpected, even uncanny, connections sometimes arise in this job. An interviewee might, for example, raise an idea that chimes with something I’ve long been thinking about. Or I’ll find while doing research that someone’s work illuminates a problem I’d been dealing with. Two such surprises occurred with this week’s subject, the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both shaped my feeling about the ensuing conversation, though in very different ways.Listen to the Interview With Tilda SwintonThe Academy Award-winning actress discusses her lifelong quest for connection, humanity’s innate goodness and the point of being alive.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppThe first: In a book of sketches and musings by the British writer John Berger called “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one drawing has always mesmerized me. It’s of an androgynous face with almond-shaped, almost alien eyes, and it exudes a deeply human compassion. That sketch is labeled, simply, “Tilda,” and I hadn’t much thought about upon whom it was based. Until, that is, when in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co-directed about Berger. In it, she mentions “Bento’s Sketchbook” — and a lightbulb went on. I’d long admired that sketch and Swinton’s daring, shape-shifting acting — in her avant-garde films with her mentor and friend Derek Jarman, her indie collaborations with directors like Bong Joon Ho and Wes Anderson and her Hollywood triumphs like “Michael Clayton” and the “Chronicles of Narnia” trilogy — but I’d never put together that I’d been entranced by the same person, the same presence, the whole time. I couldn’t help taking that as a good omen for the interview.The second connection was harder to interpret. Readers of this column may remember that my last Q&A was with a doctor about medical aid in dying — a subject with which I’ve had recent personal experience. Swinton’s upcoming film, “The Room Next Door,” directed by the great Pedro Almodóvar and opening in select theaters on Dec. 20, is about — and I swear I didn’t know this ahead of time — a distressingly similar topic. In the movie, Swinton plays a woman named Martha, who asks her friend Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, to support her decision to die by suicide after becoming terminally ill. I would have felt disingenuous not to be open about this coincidence with Swinton, but I also wasn’t exactly eager to explore it. She, as it turns out, felt otherwise.“The Room Next Door” is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, “What Are You Going Through,” which takes its title from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through?” So what are you going through? I’m enjoying right now the attention to that question, and the fact that our film puts that question into the air. The idea of bearing witness, and the question of what is friendship, but even more than friendship, what is it to coexist? What is it to not look away? I think of it actually as a political film.I have questions about that, but I want to preface them by sharing what I hope is a morbidly humorous anecdote. Sounds good! More

  • in

    Falling in Love With Nora Ephron

    Ilana Kaplan’s new coffee table book pays tribute to the godmother of the modern rom-com.“I’ll have what she’s having.”There are few writers whose voices have been so indelibly stamped on our psyches that they can be conjured up with just one line. Nora Ephron, the godmother of the modern rom-com, is one of them (even if she didn’t take credit for the line in question).Her spiky heroines, epistolary romances, cable knit sweaters and explorations of intimacy and heartbreak transformed American cinema, giving rise to a generation of screenwriters and directors who have striven to follow in her oxford-clad footsteps (not to mention the swarms of fans for whom films like “You’ve Got Mail” and “When Harry Met Sally” are annual viewing traditions, bookending that sepia-tinged, pencil-shaving-scented season known as “Nora Ephron Fall”).Meg Ryan in a climactic scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” one of Ephron’s many films that took women — their neuroses and their desires — seriously.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionRyan and Rosie O’Donnell in “Sleepless in Seattle.” The movie is as much a celebration of their characters’ friendship as of romantic love.TriStar PicturesIlana Kaplan explores this legacy in NORA EPHRON AT THE MOVIES (Abrams, $50) — a tribute, despite its title, not just to Ephron’s screen work but also to her essays, plays and searingly autobiographical novel, “Heartburn.”Each of them gets a chapter here, as do the fastidious enthusiasms that illuminate them all: Ephron’s love of language, her eye for fashion and her devotion to food. This is a woman, Kaplan explains, who turned ordering a piece of pie into an art form and whose version of a postcoital cigarette, in “Heartburn,” was an in-bed bowl of homemade spaghetti carbonara.Ephron’s passions — for language, fashion, food — infused her work.Katherine Wolkoff/Trunk ArchiveShe also drew on her personal heartbreaks, particularly in her novel, “Heartburn,” and its subsequent film adaptation, which starred Meryl Streep as an Ephron-esque food writer.Paramount, via Everett CollectionStanley Tucci and Meryl Streep in “Julie and Julia,” Ephron’s final film.Jonathan WenkEphron’s clarity of voice gave her work a steely backbone, bolstered by a screwball wit. She did not invent the meet-cute, the swoony set piece or the friends-to-lovers trope, but she made them so thoroughly her own that you’d be forgiven for thinking she did. Above all else, she took women seriously — their desires and neuroses, their careers, their friendships, their great beating hearts.Whatever she wrote about, we wanted what she was having. More

  • in

    Book Review: ‘Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film,’ by Julie Gilbert

    In “Giant Love,” the novelist’s great-niece chronicles the Texas saga’s divisive reception and the epic film adaptation that’s now better known than the book.GIANT LOVE: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie GilbertAs if to defy her adult height of 5-foot-1, the writer Edna Ferber lived large, traveled widely and typed long and often.Her dozen-odd novels were Dagwood sandwiches of intergenerational drama, hotly seasoned with social commentary. “So Big,” about a female farmer and her son in a Dutch community outside Chicago, sauntered off with the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. “Show Boat,” set along the Mississippi River, inspired an oft-revived musical and three movies. And then there was her penultimate epic, in some ways her ultimate, published in 1952: “Giant,” about a Texas cattle rancher’s evolution throughout his long marriage to a more progressive Easterner, and much else besides.Its depiction of discrimination against Mexicans and the mores of the nouveau riche made many Texans very, very angry. (A woman who read an excerpt in Ladies’ Home Journal detected Ferber “trying to weave in the race prejudice you Northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about,” and declined to buy the book.) In one of her memoirs, “A Kind of Magic,” Ferber likened the general response to being publicly hanged and dropped through a sheet of glass: “cut into hamburgers.”The 1956 film version, directed by George Stevens in panoramic 35 millimeter and starring Rock Hudson as the rancher Bick Benedict, Elizabeth Taylor as his wife and James Dean as a ranch hand turned oil tycoon, was better received, won Stevens an Oscar and helped inspire the blockbuster television series “Dallas.”Ferber’s great-niece, Julie Gilbert, who wrote an excellent biography of her published in 1976 and is a novelist and playwright herself, has now gone back to focus on the development of this one work. Replete with interviews old and new and the comma-challenged, sometimes UPPERCASE notes and correspondence of its strong-willed subject, “Giant Love” is a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    The Friendship Behind ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Manhattan’

    In a Q&A, Woody Allen describes the years spent collaborating with his friend Marshall Brickman on beloved movies. Mr. Brickman died on Friday.In the mid-1970s, the writer and director Woody Allen was known for farcical movies about subjects like the search for the world’s best egg salad, but by then he felt he was done “just clowning around,” as he later told the film critic Stig Björkman.As he headed in a new artistic direction, he took a friend along for the ride: a folk musician-turned-humorist named Marshall Brickman.Together they worked on “Annie Hall” (1977), a comic but wistful remembrance of a failed relationship, and “Manhattan” (1979), which focused on characters struggling to find themselves in work and romance. The films came to be widely considered the two essential Woody Allen movies.Reviewers noticed that Mr. Allen had worked out a new style. In his review of “Manhattan,” the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Allen’s progress as one of our major filmmakers is proceeding so rapidly that we who watch him have to pause occasionally to catch our breath.”He didn’t achieve that progress by himself. After Mr. Brickman died on Friday, Mr. Allen spoke with The New York Times about their collaboration — a rare moment in his life, he said, when writing was not lonesome but rather comradely, pleasurable. A Q&A, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More