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.

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.”