Christopher Nolan Interview
There’s nothing sentimental or soft about Gotham City, and that seems to suit Christopher Nolan just fine. The 41-year-old filmmaker fills the screen with grim architecture, hard-luck faces and gun-metal hues; tricks of the mind are his narrative specialty, not affairs of the heart. Still, last Thursday, eating his dinner standing up in a movie theater lobby, Nolan confessed that even he got a bit misty during the final shooting days of “The Dark Knight Rises,” which is (by all appearances) his final visit to the world of Batman.
“I tend not to be too emotional on the set, I find that doesn’t help me do my job,” the writer-director said between bites. “But you definitely get a little lump in your throat thinking that, ‘OK, this is going to be the last time we’re going to be doing this.’ It’s been quite a journey. Hopefully, reflecting that journey — by all of us who made the films — in the three films together will make it so they have a real span to them, some real heft.”
Principal photography on “The Dark Knight Rises” was completed in mid-November after an intense six-month shoot that took Nolan and his veteran crew to India, Scotland and the United States as well as Cardington, England, their home base, where Gotham landmarks are set up inside a massive and moldy, old zeppelin hangar. The movie hits theaters on July 20 but, of course, Nolan is far from finished. He took a break from the editing room last week only to show seven minutes of ”Rises” footage to journalists and bloggers; it’s the same seven-minute preview that, starting this Friday, moviegoers will be able to see as a special trailer before screenings of “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” at select IMAX theaters.
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
By JUSTIN CHANG
Q&A: Steven Spielberg
Q&A: Steven Spielberg
Director, busy as ever, talks ‘War Horse,’ Adventures of Tintin’
Directing “keeps me on my toes,” says Steven Spielberg. And with two films, “The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse,” bowing this month and a third, “Lincoln,” currently shooting, the helmer is certainly hopping. As he nears completion on the latter, Spielberg took a breather to discuss with Variety’s Christy Grosz the detailed battle scenes of “War Horse” and his first use of 3D, on “Tintin”:
David Cronenberg: It’s as if my old movies don’t exist
There are many reasons why David Cronenberg is a beloved interview subject for film journalists, and of course the quality, vitality and breadth of his movies have an awful lot to do with it. Beyond that, though, the Canadian director whose career stretches from near-experimental horror films like “Shivers” (better known in the United States as “They Came From Within”) and “Videodrome” to more recent collaborations like “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” is a genuine intellectual in a realm crowded with poseurs and pretenders. He can talk easily about almost any topic you bring up; if he hadn’t turned out to be one of the premier cinematic visionaries of his generation, it’d be easy to imagine him as a writer or philosopher or historian.
I have no personal relationship with Cronenberg beyond our professional conversations, but he’s become so prolific during his post-’90s resurgence that I wind up seeing him once a year or so, generally over coffee in some anonymous Manhattan hotel suite or other. This year’s Cronenberg movie, of course, is “A Dangerous Method,” a rather restrained production by his standards that explores the ambiguous relationship — an “intellectual ménage à trois,” he calls it — between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his idol and rival Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung’s psychiatric patient, lover and collaborator Sabina Spielrein (a terrific performance by Keira Knightley). I’ve already writtenabout “A Dangerous Method” extensively, so I won’t belabor any of that except to say that if you belong to the class of people who complain about the dearth of intelligent, challenging and accessible movies for grown-ups, rush out and see it immediately. (The film is already playing in New York and Southern California, and will expand soon to many more markets. See below for a list.)
