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Montreal Gazette
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Actor Jay Baruchel only too happy to provide all of the voices for Bread Will Walk
Movies And TV By Jay Baruchel didn't need any arm-twisting to agree to lend his voice to the brand-new National Film Board animated short Bread Will Walk. In fact, he was so into this extraordinary 11-minute film that he agreed to do all 10 voices in the short film! 'Number one, it's just gorgeous and wholly unique,' said the former Montrealer in a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto, explaining why he agreed to jump on board the film created by Montreal director Alex Boya. 'I can't explain its look or tone to anybody, which is a rare thing,' said Baruchel, who has appeared in the films Goon, Knocked Up, BlackBerry and Million Dollar Baby. 'It's like nothing meets nothing. I don't know how I would possibly describe what Bread Will Walk is and in 2025 that's a rare special thing to be treasured. There is not one piece of phoney inside of Alex Boya. There isn't a phoney bone in his body. He's as authentic an artist as I've ever worked with and I felt it watching it. When I saw this f---ed up Grimm's Fairy Tale, it reminded me of the scariest stories my mother would read to me as a kid. Then on top of that I really liked what he had to say about the food industrial complex and the inherent predatory nature of free-market capitalism.' Bread Will Walk is kind of a reverse zombie-apocalypse movie. The zombies are peaceful beings made of bread and it's the hungry living who're trying to eat the zombies! It's not The Walking Dead. It's The Walking Bread! Like in any zombie flick worth its salt, the setting is a world on the verge of collapse with a little social critique thrown in for good measure. It's about hunger, nasty food multinationals and a media world gone mad. The basic story is simple: An older sister is on the run with her younger brother who is indeed made of bread. Bread Will Walk is set to have its world premiere on Thursday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. 'It started off with a dream,' said Boya, on the phone from Cannes. 'I had a dream many many years ago about a man who was faceless, who had a jet turbine on his head instead of a face. In that world you also had a scene where someone pulled my hand, I was trying to get away from this industrial wasteland, and someone held on to my arm and then my whole arm was ripped off. But it wasn't an arm. It was a baguette and there were crumbs everywhere.' It took Boya four years to make the film using paper and 2D animation mixed with digital collages. It's built around 4,000 ink-on-paper hand drawings. Baruchel does 10 different voices in the film, using styles of voice that range from a guy who sounds like an older Louisiana man to someone who sounds like a BBC announcer. He also sings the jazz standard All of Me. 'It appealed to my hubris,' said Baruchel. 'He said: 'Do you want to do the work of 10 people?' And I'm like: 'Yeah! Absolutely I can'.' Doing voice work is old hat for Baruchel. One of his highest-profile roles on the big screen was voicing the character Hiccup Haddock in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, but even that was far from his first experience doing voices in animation. 'I have spent years at a microphone figuring out a way to make my voice suit an animated story,' said Baruchel. 'When I started my career, when I was 12 or 13, I worked at Astral Tech a lot on Ste-Catherine St. near Fort (St.). I would dub French TV shows into English, live action and animated. That was like boot camp for voice recording. So that put me in a good place to do How to Train Your Dragon, which turned into three movies and eight-plus years of a TV series. It is now a place in the world that I am as at home in as anywhere else. 'I'm plus à l'aise in doing a voice because nobody's looking at me and it's devoid of vanity. I'm not worried about my complexion or my hairline or my posture or any of these things. All I'm doing, in a pretty pure way, is just creating with no ego, no sense of personal aesthetics. When you take away a camera, you take away a microscope and any superficiality, which is a necessary evil of being a person who gets makeup put on their face and stands in front of a camera and lights. So it becomes this really pure almost childlike channeling of your imagination.'
New European
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Jerzy Kosiński, the writer whose last act was to plagiarise himself
Chance the Gardener, aka Chauncey Gardiner, was the naif whose love of horticulture and television spirited him to the White House in Kosiński's latest novel Being There, which in the summer of 1971 had just become a New York Times bestseller. 'So I rang,' recalled Kosiński, 'and Peter Sellers answered'. Jerzy Kosiński had never received fan mail like it. The telegram contained six words ('Available my garden or outside it') and a telephone number. The sender was listed as C Gardiner, who Kosiński knew quite well because he had created him. And so the strangeness began. 'Peter said that I had invaded his life,' Kosiński said. 'For the next seven and a half years, Peter Sellers became Chauncey Gardiner. The name on his calling card was Chauncey Gardiner, the name on his stationery was Chauncey Gardiner. 'I thought he was joking – here was an actor going after a novelist to try to get a movie made of a novel he liked. Then, one day, he stopped by my house and said: 'You don't understand. I AM Chauncey Gardiner!'' What Peter Sellers certainly wasn't in the early 1970s was a movie star big enough to get a film of Being There off the ground. There was some irony in the fact that, to play one moron, the actor was obliged to re-embrace another, Inspector Clouseau. A string of smash-hit Pink Panther sequels made Sellers bankable again by the decade's end. And all the while, the dialogue with Jerzy Kosiński continued, much to the author's consternation. 'Peter was a simplified man, almost a reductive man. No one knew anything about him. People assumed he was a brilliant actor who was also an intellectual. Well, he was a brilliant actor but he was extremely reductive.' Then, as Hal Ashby bellowed 'action!' on the first day of filming, the truth dawned on Jerzy Kosiński. 'During the shooting of Being There, Peter Sellers – for the first time in his life – became himself. Being There was his spiritual portrait. For once, he did not have to pretend.' By the time Being There reached cinemas – to decent box-office and considerable acclaim – Jerzy Kosiński had been 'married' to Peter Sellers for almost eight years. As relationships go, it was longer than all but the first of the actor's marriages. And like those unions, it ended in acrimony, with Kosiński forced to fight for a screen credit and the former Goon furious that the writer spilled the beans about his recent facelift. A fractured relationship, a credit dispute, a wealth of lies and insults, but a beautiful end result – for all Peter Sellers might have insisted that Being There was a commentary on his life, it's impossible to ignore the frightening resemblance between the making of the movie and the life of Jerzy Kosiński… He was born Józef Lewinkopf in Łódź in 1933, adopting the name under which he'd become famous while living in rural Poland and posing as a Catholic while his parents prayed the townsfolk wouldn't dob them in to the Nazis. Kosiński's undeniably fraught childhood was the inspiration for his breakthrough novel, The Painted Bird (1965), in which the six-year-old protagonist is witness to and victim of acts of unspeakable cruelty. It brought him huge fame (he already had fortune, thanks to his marriage to socialite heiress Mary Hayward Weir). But the reality of his childhood was not quite as traumatic as the novel suggested, and the film's release brought the first wave of allegations against the writer. These would grow and come to encompass claims that he had fabricated a sponsorship to get a US visa (true), that his works had been written by someone else (false, but Kosiński did work with uncredited editors), that The Painted Bird had been written by Kosiński in Polish and then translated by another anonymous collaborator (true), that it and Being There had lifted some plot points from obscure Polish novels (possible), that his earlier non-fiction works had been sponsored by the CIA (false) and that he had lied about a near-miss with Charles Manson's Family at Sharon Tate's house (Kosiński had been invited, but was mistaken about the night when the murders took place). The writer and his supporters claimed that, whatever white lies or co-opted stories might be contained within The Painted Bird, the novel as a whole deals with a truth as immense as it is incomprehensible. They have a point, and so did the reviewer of a biography of Kosiński who wrote: 'Nice people who don't tell lies are not likely to write great novels… The pain of using more directly the material he really knew may have been too great for him to bear.' What is also undeniable is that however his works might have been assembled and whatever dissembling he did when talking about his life, Jerzy Kosiński was a master storyteller. He was also a celebrity who relished his status, and his friendships with the likes of George Harrison, Henry Kissinger, Tony Bennett and Warren Beatty, who cast him as the Stalinist Grigory Zinoviev in Reds. His fame was fuelled by a willingness to go on The Tonight Show or David Letterman to discuss his work, or his loathing for Poland's communist regime, or talk about his other enthusiasms – among them polo, alpine skiing, photography and sadomasochism. 'I like to watch' – it's a line that crops up almost as often in Being There as it does in Jerzy's interviews. He was a regular visitor to the sex clubs of Manhattan, though Kosiński's second wife Kiki was always quick to point out that he did so with her blessing. In fact, she described one of Kosiński's 'companions' – 'Cynthia' – as 'wonderful'. 'I really go there to write,' he told a baffled David Letterman, who promptly asked him where he kept his pencil. These kinds of exchanges kept Kosiński in the spotlight, which made it easier for his opponents – including the Polish government and fellow travellers – to hand out the rocks to be thrown at him. One gets the impression Kosiński threw himself at life to avoid being pinned down or being overwhelmed by the events of his past. Little wonder too that he became exhausted. With his health, his reputation, even sexual appetite slipping from his grasp, it's tempting to suggest that his suicide in May 1991 as an act of submission in the face of diminishing returns. As the note he addressed to Kiki demonstrates all too clearly, Jerzy Kosiński's gift for writing remained with him until his last breath: 'Kiki… you are the prime victim of my decrepitude and you are the very last person I would want to hurt now or ever… Embrace our friends and remember that, no matter what ever crossed your mind at times, you and only you mattered as much to me as did my life.' That line – that last line – bears a close resemblance to words Kosiński wrote in Being There. A man who had to face down various accusations of plagiarism, his last act was to plagiarise himself – a final two-fingered salute to a world that never understood how Jerzy Kosiński understood the world.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Goonies' Cast Debunks the Biggest Rumor About the Film as They Reunite Ahead of Its 40th Anniversary — Can You Guess What It Is?
Washington, D.C., got a visit from the Goon(ies) squad! The Goonies stars Sean Astin, Corey Feldman, Martha Plimpton, Kerri Green, Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano reunited in the nation's capital for Awesome Con on Saturday, April 5, ahead of the beloved 1985 film's 40th anniversary in June. During the 'Hey You Guys! The Goonies Reunion' panel discussion and fan Q&A, which was moderated by PEOPLE's Breanne L. Heldman, Astin, 54, debunked the long-standing rumor that the child stars saw One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship for the first time while filming, and that their reactions captured on film were them reacting in real life. "I was sort of offended that they had that idea, that they wouldn't let the kids see the pirate ship, so that they could capture their real reaction. Like, what? We don't know how to do real? We did real reactions all the time," he said. "But I remember wanting to perform in such a way, because I had had a sneak peek of it," Astin continued. "So I wanted to perform in a way that really made them think that they had captured the honest reactions, so they would for 40 years be like, 'Oh, we got these kids to do this thing!' " Related: 'The Goonies' Cast: Where Are They Now? Plimpton, 54, chimed in, adding, however, "I hadn't seen it. My performance was honest." As Pantoliano, 73, asked The Real O'Neals star, "How many takes of your reaction did they do?" she responded, "One. [That's] all they needed, baby." Feldman, 53, meanwhile, recalled "the coolest thing" about filming the memorable scenes: "the pool." "The water that we were in, all the way from the ship to the waterslide — get this — was heated," he explained. "It was a heated pool. That was badass." Feldman, Astin and Green, 58, have seen a lot of each other and their fellow Goonies recently. Feldman and Green joined Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen and the film's screenwriter, Chris Columbus, for Ke Huy Quan's hand and footprint ceremony in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on Feb. 3. The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now! Later that evening, Feldman, Cohen, 50, and Green were back at the venue for the premiere of Astin and Quan's movie Love Hurts. On the red carpet, both Feldman and Quan, 53, stated they're still interested in a long-awaited Goonies sequel — and the cast reiterated their hopes to be a part of it at Awesome Con. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Related: Josh Brolin Had to Audition for 1985's The Goonies 6 Times Because of 'That Nepotistic Thing' "We love that Steven Spielberg is engaged and back in the Goonies mindset, so that's exciting for all of us, and whatever happens, we hope that it's worth it," Feldman said. "We hope that everybody has a great adventure. Keep the adventure alive," he continued, as Plimpton added, "I think [fans are] going to see The Goonies 2, whether we're in it or not. I think that's pretty obvious. At least, I hope [they] will." Read the original article on People
