Idris Elba & George Lucas

Sorry, a bit slack on the blogging front. Idris Elba was the cover story of Sunday Times Culture, May 27, and my George Lucas interview ran June 10. Will post both in due course.

Chris Hemsworth

My Chris Hemsworth interview is in the current edition of Sunday Times Culture (20/5). Finally saw film (Snow White & The Huntsman) last Friday. Am under embargo by Universal so can't write about it!

William Friekdin

What a gent. I love speaking with the Old School Hollywooders. None of the PR controlled bullshit, it's "Sure, come round to my house, how long do you need?" I remember having a great chat with Kirk Douglas at his Beverly Hills home some years ago a day after a nightmare studio-regulated set visit to an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Anyway, "Bill" lives in sumptuous spread up in the Hills. Very genial host and great raconteur. Talked about new film Killer Joe but of course, too, his greatest hits, including The French Connection and Exorcist. If you care for a snapshot of history, Bill was introduced for his 1972 Best Director Oscar by Jack Lemmon, then presented with it by Natalie Wood and Frank Capra.

Idris Elba update

Haven't blogged for so long, have just gone back in to find Google have changed the set-up. Been busy. Last week wrote up Chris Hemsworth piece (interview done in LA, January) for Sunday Times Culture as well as interviewed George Lucas (a phoner).

Currently in LA. Have been in pursuit of Idris Elba. Venue had switched from Atlanta, to New York, then back to Atlanta again (where he lives and is currently shooting), then, at eleventh hour, LA. Twentieth Century Fox arranged (Prometheus out June 1). Finally caught up with the exceptionally easy-going chap at LA's Soho House yesterday.

Flying back this afternoon. Visiting legendary director Mr. William Friedkin (French Connection, The Exorcist) at his Bel Air home this morning to talk about Killer Joe (what with Lucas, that's two godfathers of 70s cinema within days). Swinging via Venice for a catch-up with pal Simon Mathew (who produced and co-directed Melvin Smarty). Having lunch with big-league producer friend of Simon's, very insightful fellow with whom we've been skype-ing re a potential new project.

Film Books For Christmas

Forgot to post this. My round-up from The Sunday Times.

FILM BOOK OF THE YEAR

The Dream Repairman: Adventures in Film Editing by Jim Clark (Landmarc) 311pp

How apt that this book slipped out unnoticed. Editors are the unsung heroes of filmmaking — the weavers of silk purses from sows’ ears, more poetically, the Dream Repairmen.

Veteran editor Jim Clark’s tale of life in the cutting room runs from Ealing Studios to James Bond by way of his long collaboration with director John Schlesinger (it was Clark who slapped Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talking At Me onto Midnight Cowboy).

Though the best bit is when Clark, an Oscar-winner for The Killing Fields, is whisked off to Columbia Pictures as David Puttnam’s right hand man, charged with salvaging the dreadful slate of movies Puttnam inherited.

There are some wonderful anecdotes — Clark spurning an invitation by Noel Coward to “Sit in the Rolls with your old uncle”; Marilyn Monroe paralytic on The Prince And The Showgirl; and the author piecing together Robert De Niro’s dialogue word-by-word on The Mission.

OTHER CHOICES…

The Good The Bad And The Multiplex: What’s Wrong With Modern Movies by Mark Kermode (Random House) 328pp

 Mark Kermode has built up a cult following as a Five Live critic. Hysterical tendencies notwithstanding, he clearly has a profound love for film and the depth of knowledge to go with it. If you want to get the blood pumping with a humorous rant about the inadequacies of 3-D, or how there is “a tenth circle of hell in which Michael Bay’s movies play for all eternity”, this is your baby.

In Glorious Technicolor: A Century Of Films And How It Shaped Us by Francine Stock (Chatto & Windus) 344pp

 The more measured arts broadcaster, Francine Stock, cites wartime censorship and the moral strictures of the Hays Code amongst numerous examples in support of her lofty thesis. Though her book works best as a bright and breezy movie history charting cinema’s evolution from carnival sideshow to CGI monstrosity.

Robert Redford: The Biography by Michael Feeney Callan (Simon & Schuster) 468pp

 Genial Irishman Callan spent sixteen years tailing Robert Redford for one of the most thoroughly-researched showbiz biographies ever penned. His subject still remains something of an enigma — serious artist, creator of Sundance, eschewer of film stardom, but who, according to his long-term collaborator, the late Sidney Pollack, “will always be thirty, blond, perfection.”

Pete Postlethwaite: A Spectacle Of Dust, The Autobiography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 279pp

 Pete Postlethwaite started this memoir but, sadly, didn’t live to complete it, the job finished by writer Andy Richardson. The Warrington-born actor was embraced by Hollywood but never forgot his theatrical roots, preferring a British tour of Macbeth over one starry role in particular. “Steven (Spielberg) offered me Saving Private Ryan,” he notes. “He went ahead with Tom Hanks.” The final chapter, as Postlethwaite succumbs to cancer, is immensely moving.

Tough Without A Gun: The Extraordinary Life Of Humphrey Bogart by Stefan Kanfer (Faber & Faber) 288pp

 “Impersonators don’t do[ital] Tobey Maguire or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale,” reminds the author. The (much misquoted) Humphrey Bogart, on the other hand, has endured as a screen icon, ranked by the American Film Institute as the greatest male legend in cinema history. The actor has been written about endlessly, but there’s a sense of getting up close and personal with “Bogie” — the delinquent scion of East Coast privilege who fell into the movies by accident.

  

Spencer Tracy: A Biography by James Curtis (Hutchinson) £25, 1001pp 

Hepburn chasing Spencer Tracy with a loaded shotgun is one of the highlights of this epic deconstruction of a notorious drunk and womaniser (she had suspected him of carrying on with Ingrid Bergman). Tracy and Hepburn enjoyed a 26-year affair on and off the screen, though the real star here is Louise Treadwell Tracy, the wife who stuck by her husband throughout.

Christopher Hitchens

Alas, another writer-hero shuffles off this mortal coil. An essayist par excellence Hitch was the very reason I've subscribed to Vanity Fair these past sixteen years. And what a dignified exit. Although it seems like old news now, I think his skewering of Bill Clinton, post-Lewinsky, was particularly brilliant (and this from a natural political bedfellow). Slick Willie got away with murder... some would say almost literally. Farewell C.H.

Moneyball

I have a piece about the excellent film Moneyball in the latest edition of Word magazine (Kate Bush cover). Will post when no longer on sale. Have applied the theory to English football. Use it to predict, with absolute certainty, the finishing position of every club in the Premier League. No kidding.