Latest news with #JoslynBarnes
The Guardian
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July and on Mubi from 8 August.
The Guardian
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July.
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
WGA Awards: ‘Anora' Wins For Original Screenplay
The 77th annual Writers Guild Awards are being handed out tonight over concurrent ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York, and Deadline is posting the winners live as they are announced. See the winners list below. The guild's nominations honoring the year's best in film, TV, new media, news, radio and promotional writing were revealed January 15 after being postponed twice due to the L.A. wildfires. More from Deadline 2025 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Oscars, Spirits, Tonys, Guilds & More Guy Pearce Reveals Talks With Original Creative Team And Cast For 'Priscilla Queen Of The Desert' Sequel As He And Adrien Brody Receive Santa Barbara Film Festival Tribute Artios Awards: 'Wicked', 'Complete Unknown' & 'Emilia Pérez' Among Casting Society Winners At last year's strike-delayed WGA Awards, the top film prizes for Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay to The Holdovers and American Fiction, respectively. The latter already had won the Academy Award for Cord Jefferson, but Justine Triet and Arthur Harari's Anatomy of a Fall beat Alexander Payne's Holdovers for the Original Screenplay Oscar. The Writers Guild top TV winners in 2024 were Succession, The Bear Beef and The Last of Us. RELATED: The WGA West and East also are giving special honors to several folks tonight. David Lynch, who died in January, has been named the recipient of the WGA West's 2025 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan is set for the WGAW's Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement, and Nickel Boys screenwriters RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes will receive its 2025 Paul Selvin Award. WGAE will honor Scott Frank with the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement, Bill Lawrence (Herb Sargent Award for Comedy Excellence) and Kathy McGee (Richard B. Jablow Award). RELATED: The WGA Awards often exclude several top films due to eligibility rules. If a film is produced outside the WGA collective bargaining agreement or written by a non-union member, it is not eligible for the guild's awards. This holds true again this year, which means such awards-season favorites as Golden Globe winner Conclave, Emilia Pérez, I'm Still Here, Inside Out 2, The Room Next Door, Sing Sing and The Wild Robot are out of the Adapted race. Among those ineligible for Original Screenplay are All We Imagine as Light, The Brutalist, Hard Truths, Gotham Awards winner His Three Daughters, I Saw the TV Glow, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, September 5 and The Substance. Joel Kim Booster is hosting the Los Angeles ceremony from the Beverly Hilton, and Roy Wood Jr. is emceeing the New York show at Edison Ballroom in Manhattan. Here are the winners so far at the 2025 Writers Guild Awards: ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Nickel Boys, Screenplay by RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes, Based on the Book The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios Erik Pedersen contributed to this report. Best of Deadline How To Watch The 'SNL50' Anniversary Concert And Three-Hour Special This Weekend Everything We Know About Christopher Nolan's Next Film – 'The Odyssey': Release Date, Cast And More 'Bridgerton' Season 4: Everything We Know So Far
Los Angeles Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
New life for a late Peter Bogdanovich film, plus the week's best movies in L.A.
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. Because of Sundance, I don't think I ever mentioned the Oscar nominations here. (They happened.) On the day of the announcement, I spoke to Yura Borisov, the Russian actor nominated for his work in 'Anora.' This week we released another episode of The Envelope podcast. I spoke to RaMell Ross, director and co-writer of 'Nickel Boys,' which was nominated for adapted screenplay and best picture. Ross spoke about how he and co-writer Joslyn Barnes approached adapting Colson Whitehead's novel, saying, 'I think the more powerful the book, the more concise, the more economical the book, the more its mythology is rendered in every sentence, the more difficult it is to adapt it to cinema, because you can't do everything. And if you take things out, you're losing the power of the gestalt, essentially, of the larger gesture that they made. And so, yeah, Joslyn Barnes and I tried to figure out how to get to the spirit or the essence and then sort of leave the book alone and say Colson did his thing.' In the same podcast episode, Yvonne Villarreal spoke to Arianne Phillips, nominated for her costume design on 'A Complete Unknown.' And both Glenn Whipp and Mary McNamara looked into the apparent collapse of the awards campaign for 'Emilia Pérez' following an utter PR disaster from star Karla Sofía Gascón. On Saturday at the Egyptian Theatre, the American Cinematheque will present the first screening of the newly restored director's cut of Peter Bogdanovich's final fiction feature. Released in 2015 as 'She's Funny That Way,' the film is now going by its original, intended title of 'Squirrels to the Nuts,' a reference to Ernst Lubitsch's 1946 movie 'Cluny Brown.' Actor Kathryn Hahn and other guests to be announced will be at the Egyptian for a Q&A moderated by Colleen Camp. The origins of the director's cut are complex — a saga unto itself. In 2020, James Kenney, an English professor in New York, discovered a curious videotape on EBay of 'She's Funny' that turned out to actually contain a largely finished version of Bogdanovich's original cut. He reached out to Bogdanovich and was able to return it to the director. 'It's crazy because nobody was supposed to have it,' said Oren Segal, who was Bogdanovich's manager from 2008 until the director's death in 2022. 'It supposedly didn't exist.' 'Obviously it would be impossible to think, as a huge Bogdanovich fan, that one day he'd be calling my house and thanking me profusely,' said Kenney. 'And then we'd grow a friendship and somehow I'd be integral to the release of his last film[, which] , I would argue, supports the theory that he hadn't lost his touch.' In the film Owen Wilson plays Arnold Albertson, a Broadway director who has a habit of sleeping with escorts and then staking them money to do something else with their lives. After his encounter with Izzy Patterson (Imogen Poots, with a broad Brooklyn accent that now reads as shades of 'Anora'), he enables her to pursue her dream of being an actor. Izzy ends up cast in Albert's latest production, alongside the director's wife (Hahn), plus a star with whom she is having an affair (Rhys Ifans). Jennifer Aniston plays a bawdy therapist and the cast also includes Will Forte, Debi Mazar, Richard Lewis, Michael Shannon and Bogdanovich veterans Camp, Austin Pendleton, George Morfogen, Tatum O'Neal and Cybill Shepherd. Once the director's cut had been returned to him, Bogdanovich set to work on restoring his vision of the movie. After his death, Segal and Louise Stratton, Bogdanovich's ex-wife and the film's co-writer, took it upon themselves to see the project through, enlisting help from producer Frank Marshall, Adria Petty with the Tom Petty estate and music supervisor George Drakoulias, who was also a credited producer on the original release of the film. The story of how 'Squirrels to the Nuts' became 'She's Funny That Way' is perhaps a more conventional one: Following a poorly received test screening, producers on the film had Bogdanovich recut it and change the music, also adding a framing device involving Illeana Douglas and a finale cameo from Quentin Tarantino as himself. 'The producers asked for something and he delivered what they asked for,' sad Segal. 'But he had a director's cut, and the director's cut is what he really wanted to go out into the world. And so this was truly his last effort, honestly, his dying wish, what he wanted before his passing, and something that we worked nonstop on to deliver this for him. And it was a lot of work.' The team had to reverse-engineer the movie. After discovering that the postproduction house from which the tape originated still had the original files for the film, they then worked to put together the deliverables to give the film a final polish. Lionsgate contributed some funds to the project, with Petty and Marshall putting in money as well. The new version of 'Squirrels to the Nuts' will be available on VOD later this month. 'It's everything that Peter wanted,' said Segal. 'Every song, all the shots, just everything. I wanted him to have this moment. I know he would be so happy.' Kenney described the difference between the two films as 'night and day,' adding that the new version is 'a graceful film made by a major filmmaker where the other one was this sort of cut-up choppy thing made under duress.' Kenney, who has hosted a series of screenings of the version of the film he discovered, added, 'It might be nice for some people to sit back and watch a movie where they can just laugh. I wouldn't call it an art film. It's a knockabout screwball comedy, but I think it's definitely a work of art.' Petty had gotten to know Bogdanovich while he was making 'Runnin' Down a Dream,' the 2007 documentary on her father, musician Tom Petty, and remained in touch after the project was done. (She and her dad, both movie buffs, shared many of Bogdanovich's books on filmmaking.) Bogdanovich would call her regularly as he was working on the 'Squirrels' project in the time before his death. 'It's a romantic comedy of the highest order,' Petty said of the filmmaker's vision of the film. 'Everything that he studied from [Billy] Wilder and [Ernst] Lubitsch is in there. And even though some moments fall flatter than others, it's pretty great to see some of the greatest actors of that time when the film was being made execute something that harkens back to that kind of storytelling.' For everyone involved in bringing 'Squirrels to the Nuts' back to life, this has been a final gift to a cherished, departed friend. 'I feel in some way he's going to know it got finished,' said Petty. Bogdanovich's final film, a 2018 documentary on Buster Keaton, 'The Great Buster: A Celebration,' is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. The New Beverly Cinema will be screening two more Bogdanovich films, 1972's 'What's Up, Doc?' and 1992's 'Noises Off,' Feb. 14-16. The film 'Dinner in America,' written and directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier, has become one of the more curious case studies of recent years. After premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and being self-released in 2022, the movie has a fandom that's only grown over the years, largely catapulted by social media. The film follows a punk rocker named Simon (Kyle Gallner) as he crosses paths with a shy young woman named Patty (Emily Skeggs), becoming an offbeat story of acceptance. Though it's currently available for streaming on Hulu, a series of pop-up screening events around the country have been drawing crowds. 'Dinner in America' is going to play at a number of Laemmle theaters this week, with Rehmeier, Skeggs and Gallner at some screenings. (A few have already sold out.) 'Altered States' in 35mm Ken Russell's 1980 film 'Altered States,' starring William Hurt, Blair Brown and Bob Balaban, will be screening tonight in 35mm at Brain Dead Studios. Based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, the film follows a scientist (Hurt) who begins doing experiments with sensory deprivation. 'Altered States' features wildly terrifying psychedelic imagery, often teetering on the brink of madness. In a review of the film Charles Champlin wrote, ''Altered States' is a science fiction that moves from the not-impossible to the wholly preposterous (and the camp, the unworkable and the extravagantly nonsensical) in Guinness-record time. Disbelief does not so much have to be suspended as put down in a choke-hold. … Actually, as a piece of material, 'Altered States' seems cut closer to Ken Russell's special gifts for visual enrichment (not to say conceptual outrage) than anything he has had in some time.' 'Kansas City' vs. 'Philadelphia' I have long felt that Super Bowl Sunday is one of the best days for going to the movies, because the theaters are usually pretty empty. The good people of the American Cinematheque had a similar idea when they programmed a double feature inspired by the two teams in this year's big game, playing Robert Altman's 1996 'Kansas City' along with Jonathan Demme's 1993 'Philadelphia.' Those directors also happen to be two essential touchstone filmmakers around here, so the pairing seems particularly inspired. 'Kansas City' returns Altman to his hometown for a story of a kidnapping gone awry set against the backdrop of the town's lively jazz scene. The cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Dermot Mulroney, Steve Buscemi and Harry Belafonte. In an interview with Don Heckman, who was then The Times' jazz writer, Altman said, 'It's where I was born and grew up. And almost every character in every situation, except for the main story, was truthful. Not quite factual but truthful.' As Kevin Thomas wrote in his review, 'Altman, after all, is arguably our greatest still-active senior director — one whose work constitutes a distinct and stylish comment on American life. You just wish 'Kansas City' was more satisfying, especially since it comes so close to being successful.' 'Philadelphia' is a legal drama starring Tom Hanks as a closeted gay man who sues the law firm he used to work at, claiming he was fired because he has AIDS. Denzel Washington plays the lawyer who takes on his case. Reviewing the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, 'The air of do-goodism hangs like a pall over 'Philadelphia,' and nothing is so fatal to effective drama. The first major studio release to deal with AIDS, it is all too conscious of time past and opportunities lost, of being years behind the crisis. But one film cannot make up for an industry-wide history of timidity, and in attempting to this one inevitably hampers its own impact.' The paper covered the film extensively, including a long profile of Hanks by Kristine McKenna and an essay by activist Larry Kramer titled 'Why I Hate 'Philadelphia.''
