Friday, December 23, 2011
Sunday, September 4, 2011
An interview to Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the promotion of "W.E." in Venice brings us what it seems the first - and super smart - Madonna comment about Gaga in ages.
Here's how it goes:
Le Soir: "Dans W.E., vous filmez la romance de Wallis Simpson à travers le regard contemporain d’une jeune femme admirative, Wally. On pourrait y voir le regard de vos fans sur vous. Voire celui de Lady Gaga? "
Le Soir: "In W.E. you filmes the Wallis Simpson love story through the contemporary eyes of a young woman who admired her, Wally. Could we see in that the way your fans look at you? Or the way Lady Gaga does?"
Madonna: "De mes fans ? Disons que ce qui m’intéresse avec le regard de Wally, c’est d’arriver à percer la vérité sur Wallis Simpson. Et s’apercevoir que rien n’est jamais tout blanc ou tout noir. Vrai ou faux. La vie est de couleur grise. Et on ne peut enfermer personne dans une case. Quant à Lady Gaga, je n’ai pas de commentaire à faire sur ses obsessions ayant trait à moi, parce que je ne sais pas si ça repose sur quelque chose de profond ou de superficiel."
Madonna: "Of my fans ? Let's say that what interests me in Wally's approach is to arrive to percieve the truth about Wallis Simpson. An realize that nothing is completely black or white. Truth or false. Life comes in gray color. And you can't put a human being in a box. Speaking of Lady Gaga, I have no comments about her obsessions related to me, because I don't know if they are based on something profound or superficial."
"I'm out of ways of telling art."
Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh has denied reports that he is retiring from film-making.
"It's less dramatic that it sounds - it's just a sabbatical," the 48-year-old director told reporters at the Venice Film Festival.
In an interview on US radio in March, Soderbergh appeared to suggest that his next two films would be his last.
"When you see those athletes hang on one or two seasons too long, it's kind of sad," he told Studio 360.
However, speaking in Venice, where his latest film Contagion is featured in competition for the Golden Lion, he dismissed rumours that he was giving up film-making to paint, saying he was merely taking a break.
"I feel I need to recalibrate, so I can discover something new," he told The Observer, echoing words he used in a BBC Radio 4 interview in 2009.
"I'm out of ways of telling art."
Cannes breakthrough
Soderbergh became the youngest winner, at the age of 26, of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, starring Andie MacDowell.
Ten years ago, he was nominated for the best director Oscar for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich.
But, speaking in March, he said: "When you reach the point where you're like, 'if I have to get into a van to do another scout I'm just going to shoot myself', it's time to let somebody else who's still excited about getting in the van, get the van."
In Venice on Saturday, Soderbergh gave no indication of how long the sabbatical may be, although reports suggest it could be as long as five years.
The director was joined by actors Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow for the world premiere of his new film Contagion in Venice.
Other highlights from Soderbergh's career include the Ocean's series and his Che Guevara biopic
A thriller, about a global pandemic - widely linked to Sars - and peopled with star names, was given a positive reception at the annual film festival.
The cast also includes Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle.
"It's very helpful to have movie stars playing as many of these roles as you can, because you're throwing so many characters and so much information at the audience it's very helpful for them to get a sort of reference point," he told reporters in Venice.
"There's a reason that movie stars have existed since the beginning of cinema.
"It's good for audiences - they like to have people they can identify with."
Prior to his sabbatical, Soderbergh has at least three films to complete, including a Liberace biopic, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and a film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney.
Haywire, an action thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender, is due to be released in the US in January.
"It's less dramatic that it sounds - it's just a sabbatical," the 48-year-old director told reporters at the Venice Film Festival.
In an interview on US radio in March, Soderbergh appeared to suggest that his next two films would be his last.
"When you see those athletes hang on one or two seasons too long, it's kind of sad," he told Studio 360.
However, speaking in Venice, where his latest film Contagion is featured in competition for the Golden Lion, he dismissed rumours that he was giving up film-making to paint, saying he was merely taking a break.
"I feel I need to recalibrate, so I can discover something new," he told The Observer, echoing words he used in a BBC Radio 4 interview in 2009.
"I'm out of ways of telling art."
Cannes breakthrough
Soderbergh became the youngest winner, at the age of 26, of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, starring Andie MacDowell.
Ten years ago, he was nominated for the best director Oscar for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich.
But, speaking in March, he said: "When you reach the point where you're like, 'if I have to get into a van to do another scout I'm just going to shoot myself', it's time to let somebody else who's still excited about getting in the van, get the van."
In Venice on Saturday, Soderbergh gave no indication of how long the sabbatical may be, although reports suggest it could be as long as five years.
The director was joined by actors Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow for the world premiere of his new film Contagion in Venice.
Other highlights from Soderbergh's career include the Ocean's series and his Che Guevara biopic
A thriller, about a global pandemic - widely linked to Sars - and peopled with star names, was given a positive reception at the annual film festival.
The cast also includes Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle.
"It's very helpful to have movie stars playing as many of these roles as you can, because you're throwing so many characters and so much information at the audience it's very helpful for them to get a sort of reference point," he told reporters in Venice.
"There's a reason that movie stars have existed since the beginning of cinema.
"It's good for audiences - they like to have people they can identify with."
Prior to his sabbatical, Soderbergh has at least three films to complete, including a Liberace biopic, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and a film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney.
Haywire, an action thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender, is due to be released in the US in January.
telling the unvarnished truth
'Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies,” says Martin Parr. “Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”
Parr, 59 years old and perhaps Britain’s best known photographic chronicler of modern life, is sitting in the kitchen of his beautiful Georgian house in Clifton, Bristol. He has served me tea from a fine china pot and “posh biscuits” bought from the deli up the hill. Susie, his wife of 30 years, is stirring something on the hob. Everything looks rather lovely.
Everything, that is, except the appalled expression on Parr’s face when I suggest that sometimes, regardless of their truthfulness, pictures of things looking their best might be exactly what people want to see. “Of course,” he says, “but what people want…” He hits that last word with the force of a punch, then lapses into silence, as if the very thought of taking a photograph that perpetuates a fantasy disgusts him beyond words.
“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”
A new exhibition, Martin Parr: Bristol and West, opening in the city next week, reminds us quite what a ridiculous, contradictory, dysfunctional and occasionally wonderful place Parr finds the world to be. Focusing on the part of the world that he has called home for the past 25 years, its 60 images, both old and new, suggest that whatever else has changed about photography over the intervening decades – the advent of digital cameras, the death of film – Parr’s gaze remains as acute and unsentimental as ever.
Has anybody ever looked their best in a Martin Parr photograph? Certainly not the mustachioed yacht salesman shot at Bristol regatta in 1989, his face, as he courts a couple of would-be buyers, frozen in a rictus of obsequiousness. Nor the group of girls Parr stumbled upon at Badminton horse trials, as much a product of good breeding and aggressive grooming as the fillies they have gathered to watch.
That picture finds its echo in another shot in the show, taken 20 years later, of a different quartet of girls of a similar age – smoking, teetering on a lamplit pavement on a night out in 2009, off-guard, half-cut, mouths open, eyes closed. Parr’s images frequently raise a smile by exposing the gap between the public faces we wear and the private motives and insecurities that, if you know when and where to point a camera, can be seen seeping out from beneath. But if there is a joke here, nobody has let his subjects in on it.
When he is taking a photograph, Parr says, his prime responsibility isn’t towards the people in shot, but to his viewer and to his own sense of the truth of the scene. “When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don’t take a good picture,’ what they mean is they haven’t come to terms with how they look,” he says. “They take a fine picture, it’s just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.”
I had always wondered how Parr got himself into such intimate proximity with the subjects of his photographs, who so often appear blissfully unaware of the critical lens loitering only inches from their faces. I suppose I’d imagined him to be a flatterer, or else a man of such discretion that people simply forget he is there and let down their guard.
In person, it quickly becomes clear that his chief weapon is not charm but directness. He shoots as he talks, with unflinching certainty and not a hint of self doubt. When I ask if he ever seeks a person’s permission before photographing them, that pained expression reappears. “You would never get anything done if you did that,” he says. “And besides, you still have the legal and moral right in this country to photograph anyone in a public place and do what you like with it.” So there.
Parr, who has been a member of the renowned Magnum picture agency since 1994, estimates he takes “tens upon thousands” of photographs a year. Unusually in this digital age, he prints out “maybe 15,000 of them” and, he adds, “If there are 10 good ones, it would be a good year.” Themes recur – “tourism, consumerism, the Americanisation of the world” – but his scope is dizzyingly broad: “I am interested in people and what they do,” he says, “the foibles of the world.”
As he approaches 60, Parr’s passion for his medium grips him as firmly as it did when his grandfather, an amateur photographer, first gave him a camera as a boy. “I can’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t want to take photos,” he says. “Photography for me is not work, it’s a calling.”
Monday, July 11, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
New Cirque Show
NEW YORK (AP) — Director Francois Girard sits in an orchestra seat in the massive Radio City Music Hall and looks up at the massive challenge facing him.
The stage he has to fill these days is more than 100 feet wide and 66 feet deep. The proscenium arch soars more than 60 feet into the air. It is among the largest indoor theaters in the world.
"You can see how a human body could get lost in this space," Girard says.
That's an obvious issue for the writer and director of "Zarkana," the latest Cirque du Soleil show that opens later this month. So mammoth is the stage that it threatens to swallow up a $50 million production of 11 acts and 75 performers.
Girard insists he's more challenged than frightened by a space he acknowledges is "a monster." In fact, he says he and his team have been inspired by the arena's ghosts and Radio City has become a central character in the show.
"I feel at home right now," he says.
Girard has taken a break to sit among the 6,000 seats he hopes to fill each night when the show opens June 29. From the corner of his eye, he keeps tabs on a juggler practicing on one side of the stage, a group of trapeze acrobats on the other and new projections of clouds scudding along the back wall.
"A show like this is a place where so many disciplines are meeting," he says. "It comes from everywhere and has so many layers to it, which keeps me interested. There's not a boring day at the office for me."
One of the more quiet yet profoundly beautiful acts is performed by Erika Chen, who using only her fingers and nails swirls dark blue sand into striking images projected onto a screen at the top of Act 2. Self-taught, the 27-year-old Singapore native used to work at Deutsche Bank in asset management until she discovered sand painting on YouTube and fell in love. Cirque made her its first sand painter.
"It still feels surreal. I can't believe it's happening," she says after rehearsing to ensure her six-minute act is smooth and dynamic. "I'm just thankful. It feels like a dream."
Four years in the making, the rock-opera circus "Zarkana" is slated for a four-month ride in New York, followed by stints in Madrid, Spain, and Moscow. The hope is that it will return to Radio City next summer — and maybe every summer.
This isn't the first time Cirque du Soleil has tried to tame the Big Apple. Last year, its variety show "Banana Shpeel" — featuring a visually brilliant but disappointingly spotty program of acrobatics, juggling, dance and mostly tiresome slapstick — flopped at the Beacon Theatre.
This time around, the creative team is careful to be humble and respectful of the city. Girard calls New York "a mecca of theater" along with London, and knows there's plenty here to attract summer tourists other than whimsical circus acts.
"It's a highly saturated world, where if you want to be heard you'd better be clear and loud. That makes it both very exciting and challenging," says Girard, who directed the films "Silk" and "The Red Violin."
The other thing making Cirque executives soft-spoken is another rock opera with crazy stunts — the $75 million "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." Girard has gotten no vicarious thrill by watching that musical's troubled birth. "When a show runs into difficulties and technical problems, it is sad. But I wish them well," he says. "It's so hard to make a show. We should be supportive of their efforts."
This is Girard's second Cirque — he also put together "Zed," the Tokyo resident show — and he began with an attempt to assemble as many cool circus acts as possible. Then he wrote a story trying to incorporate all the elements, settling on creating a magician named Zark, who has lost his love and his powers. At the opening of the show, he wanders an abandoned theater and later the show makes nods to its famous home, including to the Ziegfeld Follies.
"Zarkana" — or the land of Zark — will have plenty of clowns, acrobats and a Wheel of Death. One high wire act features a father and his three sons, while another has a father, mother and daughter performing on ladders. There are seven musicians, hundreds of costumes and one trapeze act has a spider theme that would make Julie Taymor shudder.
Canadian singer Garou plays Zark and the music for the spectacle was created especially for the show by Nick Littlemore, an Australian musician and producer who has worked with Elton John.
Work on the show began in Montreal — headquarters of Cirque — but moved temporarily to Orlando, Fla., because creators needed a stage big enough to practice the show from top to bottom. That was found at Amway Arena, the former home of the Orlando Magic that is slated to be torn down, and Cirque took it over for a few months.
Back at Radio City, Stephane Roy sits in the balcony and surveys his hard work. As the set and props designer, Roy's job has been to make the Art Deco monster place look smaller. Of course, since it is a protected city landmark, he could not alter the stage or the building.
"This is a cathedral," he says.
Roy, doing his fifth Cirque show, used a series of three differently sized arches — decorated with snakes, branches and flowers — to make the stage more intimate. The back wall is also studded with LEDs for videos and the stage itself is hand painted.
"This is, for me, the biggest project that I've ever done," he says.
The latest move into New York is part of an expansion of the Cirque du Soleil empire. By October, the hyperactive circus company will have 22 live shows around the globe, including the new $57 million "Michael Jackson, The Immortal World Tour."
Chen, the sand painter, is asked if she'll go back to the lucrative — if duller — world of international finance if "Zarkana" doesn't excite enough New Yorkers or tourists.
"No," she says firmly. "This is my dream. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."
The stage he has to fill these days is more than 100 feet wide and 66 feet deep. The proscenium arch soars more than 60 feet into the air. It is among the largest indoor theaters in the world.
"You can see how a human body could get lost in this space," Girard says.
That's an obvious issue for the writer and director of "Zarkana," the latest Cirque du Soleil show that opens later this month. So mammoth is the stage that it threatens to swallow up a $50 million production of 11 acts and 75 performers.
Girard insists he's more challenged than frightened by a space he acknowledges is "a monster." In fact, he says he and his team have been inspired by the arena's ghosts and Radio City has become a central character in the show.
"I feel at home right now," he says.
Girard has taken a break to sit among the 6,000 seats he hopes to fill each night when the show opens June 29. From the corner of his eye, he keeps tabs on a juggler practicing on one side of the stage, a group of trapeze acrobats on the other and new projections of clouds scudding along the back wall.
"A show like this is a place where so many disciplines are meeting," he says. "It comes from everywhere and has so many layers to it, which keeps me interested. There's not a boring day at the office for me."
One of the more quiet yet profoundly beautiful acts is performed by Erika Chen, who using only her fingers and nails swirls dark blue sand into striking images projected onto a screen at the top of Act 2. Self-taught, the 27-year-old Singapore native used to work at Deutsche Bank in asset management until she discovered sand painting on YouTube and fell in love. Cirque made her its first sand painter.
"It still feels surreal. I can't believe it's happening," she says after rehearsing to ensure her six-minute act is smooth and dynamic. "I'm just thankful. It feels like a dream."
Four years in the making, the rock-opera circus "Zarkana" is slated for a four-month ride in New York, followed by stints in Madrid, Spain, and Moscow. The hope is that it will return to Radio City next summer — and maybe every summer.
This isn't the first time Cirque du Soleil has tried to tame the Big Apple. Last year, its variety show "Banana Shpeel" — featuring a visually brilliant but disappointingly spotty program of acrobatics, juggling, dance and mostly tiresome slapstick — flopped at the Beacon Theatre.
This time around, the creative team is careful to be humble and respectful of the city. Girard calls New York "a mecca of theater" along with London, and knows there's plenty here to attract summer tourists other than whimsical circus acts.
"It's a highly saturated world, where if you want to be heard you'd better be clear and loud. That makes it both very exciting and challenging," says Girard, who directed the films "Silk" and "The Red Violin."
The other thing making Cirque executives soft-spoken is another rock opera with crazy stunts — the $75 million "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." Girard has gotten no vicarious thrill by watching that musical's troubled birth. "When a show runs into difficulties and technical problems, it is sad. But I wish them well," he says. "It's so hard to make a show. We should be supportive of their efforts."
This is Girard's second Cirque — he also put together "Zed," the Tokyo resident show — and he began with an attempt to assemble as many cool circus acts as possible. Then he wrote a story trying to incorporate all the elements, settling on creating a magician named Zark, who has lost his love and his powers. At the opening of the show, he wanders an abandoned theater and later the show makes nods to its famous home, including to the Ziegfeld Follies.
"Zarkana" — or the land of Zark — will have plenty of clowns, acrobats and a Wheel of Death. One high wire act features a father and his three sons, while another has a father, mother and daughter performing on ladders. There are seven musicians, hundreds of costumes and one trapeze act has a spider theme that would make Julie Taymor shudder.
Canadian singer Garou plays Zark and the music for the spectacle was created especially for the show by Nick Littlemore, an Australian musician and producer who has worked with Elton John.
Work on the show began in Montreal — headquarters of Cirque — but moved temporarily to Orlando, Fla., because creators needed a stage big enough to practice the show from top to bottom. That was found at Amway Arena, the former home of the Orlando Magic that is slated to be torn down, and Cirque took it over for a few months.
Back at Radio City, Stephane Roy sits in the balcony and surveys his hard work. As the set and props designer, Roy's job has been to make the Art Deco monster place look smaller. Of course, since it is a protected city landmark, he could not alter the stage or the building.
"This is a cathedral," he says.
Roy, doing his fifth Cirque show, used a series of three differently sized arches — decorated with snakes, branches and flowers — to make the stage more intimate. The back wall is also studded with LEDs for videos and the stage itself is hand painted.
"This is, for me, the biggest project that I've ever done," he says.
The latest move into New York is part of an expansion of the Cirque du Soleil empire. By October, the hyperactive circus company will have 22 live shows around the globe, including the new $57 million "Michael Jackson, The Immortal World Tour."
Chen, the sand painter, is asked if she'll go back to the lucrative — if duller — world of international finance if "Zarkana" doesn't excite enough New Yorkers or tourists.
"No," she says firmly. "This is my dream. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."
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