Latest news with #WillemDafoe
Geek Vibes Nation
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
A24 To Release The Wondrous Family Adventure 'The Legend Of Ochi' On Blu-Ray This July
A24 has just announced that they will be releasing director Isaiah Saxon's lushly handcrafted adventure The Legend of Ochi in a special Blu-Ray Collector's Edition that is expected to ship in July 2025, exclusively from the A24 Shop. The film stars Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Finn Wolfhard, and Emily Watson. The release will come with a Dolby Atmos track and new special features including a commentary track, featurettes, and more. Get more details below! Synopsis: In a remote village on the island of Carpathia, a shy girl is raised to fear an elusive animal species known as ochi. But when she discovers a wounded baby ochi has been left behind, she escapes on a quest to bring him home. Special features: Commentary with Writer-Director Isaiah Saxon 'The Ochi Quest' Behind-the-Scenes Featurette Deleted Scene: Emily Watson's 'Singing Bird' Six Collectible Postcards with Behind-the-Scenes Photography by Alexandru Ionita This is the latest of many Collector's Editions from A24. Which of their films would you like to see get this treatment next? Let us know in the comments or over on Twitter.
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Theatre puts a finger in the wound': Willem Dafoe returns to his first love in Venice
Sitting in his house in Rome, an overstuffed bookcase and a distressed wooden door behind him, Willem Dafoe scrunches his hair as though kneading the thoughts in his head. The 69-year-old, Wisconsin-born actor could pass today for any genial, bristle-moustached handyman in checked shirt and horn-rimmed specs. (Perhaps he even built the bookcase and distressed the door himself.) But it's that hand that is the giveaway: it keeps scrunching as he talks until the hair is standing in jagged forks. As a visualisation of what is happening in his brain, it is second to none. We are speaking in April on the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth (and death), which feels apt given that it is Dafoe's two-year appointment as artistic director of the international theatre festival at the Venice Biennale that has occasioned our video call today. He looks sheepish when I point out the significance of the date, then reverts to his usual wolfish expression. 'Ah, Shakespeare doesn't care,' he says with a wave of the hand. Dafoe has never had much of a relationship with those plays. 'There's a lot of pointing and indicating when people perform them. A lot of leading the audience. Those are things I don't think are very vital. But it's such beautiful writing, and I've become interested in doing Shakespeare in my dotage.' Could there be a Lear on the horizon? 'Why not?' he says with a goofy wobble of the head. There is no Shakespeare in Dafoe's Biennale selection. The accent, in a programme entitled 'Theatre is Body. Body is Poetry', is firmly on the experimental and avant garde. There will be work directed by Thomas Ostermeier and Milo Rau. Davide Iodice will present a version of Pinocchio in which young autistic actors and actors with Down's syndrome will bring to life assorted incarnations of the title character. Dafoe has also included the European premiere of Symphony of Rats by Richard Foreman, the experimental playwright who died in January, and whom he counted as a friend. Nearly 40 years after its first production, the play will be staged by the pioneering New York company the Wooster Group, which Dafoe co-founded. 'Richard told them, 'Do whatever you want with it. But I don't want to recognise it,'' he says admiringly. The actor will take part in Foreman's No Title, during which he and Simonetta Solder will read phrases from cards drawn at random in what sounds like a theatrical cousin of the Burroughsian cut-up technique. 'Richard was a loose thinker,' he explains. 'His responses were always unpredictable.' Dafoe is approaching his Venice tenure with the same sangfroid he witnessed in Foreman. 'Some of these pieces will sail, some won't. What's important is people talking about stuff, feeling that the theatre is alive.' A four-time Oscar nominee, Dafoe has been a transfixing screen presence ever since his Kabuki-like turns in the early 1980s in Kathryn Bigelow's fetishistic biker movie The Loveless and Walter Hill's pulp fantasy Streets of Fire, where he sported black vinyl hip-waders, a ducktail hairdo and cheekbones that could win in a knife fight. He was the sergeant who perishes to the sound of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in Oliver Stone's Platoon, then made the messiah crushingly human in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. More recently he has appeared in films by Wes Anderson, Robert Eggers and Yorgos Lanthimos. In Lars von Trier's Antichrist, he had his penis pulverised by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Well, it's a living. His roots and his heart, however, belong to experimental theatre. Along with his former partner Elizabeth LeCompte, the monologuist Spalding Gray and others, Dafoe created the Wooster Group in the latter half of the 1970s from the ashes of Richard Schechner's Performance Group. For nearly 30 years, Dafoe wrote, acted and helped build sets in the same converted factory in lower Manhattan that remains the group's base today. He only drifted away in 2004 when he left LeCompte – with whom he has an adult son – and married the film-maker Giada Colagrande. Could those of us who have never seen him live on stage truly be said to 'get' who he is as an actor? 'I think I've given up on the idea of anyone getting me,' he admits. 'I probably had it when I was younger. Now I like the idea of every project redefining you.' He pitched up in New York at 22, fresh from another experimental group, Milwaukee's Theatre X. 'I didn't have anything up my sleeve. I was just a kid from the midwest going to the big, bad city. New York was rough then, but I saw these people who were making things outside of any commercial system. They stirred something in me intellectually, emotionally, romantically. That's what I went towards. I made myself available to them and they liked that sense of availability. I started working very modestly, doing small parts and being a carpenter. Then Spalding invited me to work on the creation of a piece called Point Judith.' Nothing short of a time machine could return us to the intoxicating heyday of New York's fringe theatre scene, but there are mouth-watering titbits available online showing Dafoe at work in pieces stretching back to the late 1970s. The clips don't seem too far from his more berserk screen creations, such as the sleazy crook Bobby Peru, rotten of mind and tooth, in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, or the feverish seadog with a Popeye pipe in Eggers' The Lighthouse. A clip from Point Judith, for instance, shows Dafoe standing in the sea dressed as a nun while brandishing a fish. 'Well yeah, that was a small part of it,' he concedes, perhaps eager not to have decades of intrepid theatrical adventures reduced to a trout and a wimple. Skip forward to the group's 1991 show Today I Must Sincerely Congratulate You, and this time he is wearing a suit and a moptop like an early-1960s Beatle, and once again holding a dead fish. What gives? 'I'm in to fish,' he shrugs. 'So there.' The concept of a Wooster Group piece being 'ready' was always elastic. The company would simply rehearse throughout the day and perform whatever they had that evening. The headline to a 2020 Harper's article summed up the philosophy nicely: 'The 40-Year Rehearsal: The Wooster Group's endless work in progress.' Film was often incorporated into the shows, along with prerecorded audio to which the cast would sometimes lip-sync. The material featured unlikely bedfellows: Flaubert and Lenny Bruce, say, or a soap opera version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town coupled with the vaudevillian skits of the African American comic Pigmeat Markham. Acclaim was not universal. Arthur Miller refused to permit the group to perform part of The Crucible in their show LSD, but they carried on anyway until he threatened legal action. The estates of Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams also withdrew permission. Brickbats rained down from critics, Dafoe tells me. 'We were given a hard time. Eventually we found that word-of-mouth was better than a snarky review in the Village Voice, so Liz, in her infinite wisdom, stopped allowing the critics in. Once we started to have some appreciation in Europe, the New York critics began asking to come. This time they were more generous with how they placed us in the landscape.' The Wooster Group's influence today is ubiquitous. Take the use of microphones in Ostermeier's work, including his recent, vital production of The Seagull with Cate Blanchett. 'Yeah, the microphones were a thing we did that I started seeing crop up a lot,' Dafoe agrees. 'We started out working somewhat in isolation. Once we started touring, we'd come back to places and say, 'Wow, that looks familiar.' I don't mean that in a snotty way – it's how things work. People came through as interns and then 10 years later they would be Broadway directors.' Anyone who has seen productions by Complicité will have witnessed the Wooster effect. 'Simon McBurney's a friend, and definitely he saw the work. He's a sponge.' McBurney was also one of the writers on Mr Bean's Holiday, in which Dafoe plays a pretentious arthouse director whose Cannes premiere is hijacked by Rowan Atkinson's slapstick hero. 'Simon directed the film-makers toward me, so I can thank him for that particular experience,' Dafoe laughs. The traffic flows both ways: he in turn suggested McBurney for roles in Abel Ferrara's Siberia and Eggers' recent Nosferatu, neither of them half as much fun as Mr Bean. Dafoe is diplomatic today about whether he prefers acting for theatre or cinema. 'Musicians are musicians – sometimes they play in the studio and sometimes they play live.' But evidently it is the stage that unlocks his deepest passion. 'What you're seeing isn't going to happen again at nine o'clock, eleven o'clock. Something beautiful in the theatre stays with you for ever, because it happened to you. Theatre puts your feet to the fire, it puts your finger in the wound.' The hand has stopped scrunching now. 'And you can't beat that.' The Venice theatre biennale, directed by Willem Dafoe, runs from 31 May to 15 June
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Caitríona Balfe lands first post-Outlander movie role alongside Tom Hiddleston
Caitríona Balfe has landed her first movie role since wrapping production on Outlander. The actor, who will bow out as Claire Fraser in the hit Starz drama's eighth and final season later this year, is teaming up with Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe for a new Apple Original Films feature titled Tenzing. The upcoming movie will chart the life of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and his summit of Mount Everest in 1953 with Edmund Hillary. According to Deadline, Balfe will play Jill Henderson, a friend of Tenzing who helped organise trips up Mount Everest. It was previously confirmed that Loki star Hiddleston will play Hillary, while Dafoe has been cast as expedition leader Colonel John Hunt. The role of Tenzing himself is yet to be cast. Related: Best film and TV tours for 2025 An official logline for Tenzing reads: "Tibetan-born Tenzing Norgay, alongside New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary, both outsiders on a British Expedition, defied insurmountable odds to achieve what was once thought impossible, reaching the summit of the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest. "After six previous attempts, Tenzing risked everything for one final venture. He had to navigate treacherous politics and perilous weather as he embarked on the most significant climb of his life. "Through it all, he did so with humour, warmth, and generosity towards his fellow climbers, but also deep reverence and respect for the sacred Mother Goddess of his Mountain, Chomolungma." Related: Tenzing will be directed by Jennifer Peedom, who previously helmed the award-winning documentaries Solo, Sherpa, Mountain and River. When the project was first announced last year, Peedom said she'd been "working towards this film my whole career". "Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are two of the most generous and talented actors in the business, so pairing them with our brilliant Himalayan cast is going to be electric," she added. "I have no doubt this film will resonate widely. We all have our own mountains to climb, and this film shows us what human beings are truly capable of." Digital Spy's first print magazine is here! Buy British Comedy Legends in newsagents or online now, priced at £7.99. at at Audible£49.99 at at £99.00 at Amazon at EE£328.00 at at £18.99 at at EE at £54.98 at at at at at at Amazon at at at at at at Game at at EE at Pandora at at at at Sky Mobile at at Game at Pandora at at at at at at Three£259.99 at at at at at AO at at at at at at £39.99 at at Fitbit$15.00 at at at at at John Lewis£119.00 at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at John Lewis & Partners at at John Lewis at at at Amazon£44.99 at at Three£32.99 at Amazon at at Amazon at at John Lewis & Partners£6.62 at at at at Fitbit£119.99 at at at at at Three at at at Apple£699.00 at at at at at at at Amazon at at at EE at at at at at at at at at John Lewis at at at Audible at at at at Amazon at at John Lewis at at at at Apple at EE£379.00 at at at Microsoft£229.00 at John Lewis at at Three at at Apple at at at Samsung at at crunchyroll£449.00 at John Lewis at at Amazon£79.00 at Samsung£1199.00 at AO at at at at at John Lewis & Partners at at at Microsoft£92.98 at at Microsoft£79.98 at at at at at at John Lewis£39.99 at Amazon at at at now at at John Lewis & Partners at at at at at Microsoft£399.00 at John Lewis at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at You Might Also Like PS5 consoles for sale – PlayStation 5 stock and restocks: Where to buy PS5 today? IS MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 THE BEST IN THE SERIES? OUR REVIEW AEW game is a modern mix of No Mercy and SmackDown
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The catastrophic extent of Britain's river problem: ‘Undrinkable, unswimmable, and now untouchable', says nature expert ROBERT MACFARLANE
As a child, Robert Macfarlane would spend long stretches of his summer holidays floating, face down, in the River Avon in Scotland. 'It ran along the edge of my grandparents' field in the northern Cairngorms. The water was cold and totally clear. I remember wearing a snorkel mask and seeing the shadows of salmon, these torpedo-like shadows, reorganising themselves in the water or just holding steady against the flow.' Macfarlane, 48 and from Nottinghamshire, has written 12 books about the natural world. He has also scripted two documentaries (one about mountains, one about rivers, both narrated by actor Willem Dafoe); been nominated for the Wainwright Prize – the UK's top nature-writing award – four times and won once; and been described by The Wall Street Journal as 'the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation'. We meet in Cambridge, where he lives with his wife and three children and is a professor at the University, to go for a two-hour walk along a chalk stream and discuss Is A River Alive?, his new book about waterbodies. Every so often our conversation stops for him to point out a wren building a nest on the edge of the stream, a collection of cowslips, or – most excitingly – a water vole. The latter has reflective eyes and a thick coat that dries as soon as it comes out of the water. 'That's the first water vole I've ever seen on this stream. That is amazing.' Macfarlane started writing about rivers in 2020, travelling for research. In Canada, he spent 14 days kayaking along the 290km Mutehekau Shipu; in India, he found ponds that had been polluted with radioactive fly ash from nearby power stations. The ash settled on the water and turned its surface into a sort of jelly. Macfarlane saw children bouncing on it, as if it were a trampoline. He hadn't realised, though, that in the four years it would take him to write the book, 'rivers would move so decisively to the centre of the conversation in the UK'. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 13 different meanings for the word river; the BBC says a river is a large 'moving body of water' that flows across land into 'another body of water'. Macfarlane calls a river 'a gathering that seeks the sea'. Either way, there are around 1,500 in the UK. Of those in England and Wales, none is in 'good chemical health'. Recently, Macfarlane saw a sign for the Kent, Hampshire and Sussex water operator, Southern Water, attached to some railings by a river. 'It read: 'Please try not to come into contact with the water. If you do, we recommend washing your hands thoroughly before preparing food.'' Above the text sat Southern Water's slogan: 'Water for life'. There are lots more of these sorts of examples. Last year, three rowers from the University of Oxford contracted stomach bugs while training for the boat race, because the water from the Thames – which had splashed from their oars on to their skin – contained high levels of E. coli. This year, the charity River Action reported that the Thames still failed basic safety standards; water tests found E. coli levels were triple the Environment Agency's threshold for 'poor' bathing waters. Meanwhile, Macfarlane, a patron of The Outdoor Swimming Society since 2006, says he would no longer swim in his local waterway, the River Cam. It is simply not clean. 'We live in a country where many of the rivers have become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, and now untouchable.' The question, then, is how? And the first answer is sewage: 'the mega-villain of river death in this country'. Most of the UK's sewage network operates using a Victorian 'combined system', which means sewage and rainwater are collected in the same pipes, before travelling to treatment works. During heavy rainfall, these pipes can't hold all the sewage and the rain, so they overflow. Water companies are allowed to discharge untreated sewage into rivers in these exceptional circumstances, but they've also started dumping sewage illegally – when the rain is not that heavy, or even when the weather is dry. According to the Environment Agency, untreated sewage was discharged for a collective, and record-breaking, 3.62 million hours last year. It is, says Macfarlane, a failure of the companies, which have underinvested in improving our creaky systems, 'sweated the assets they were handed', and meanwhile given enormous dividends to shareholders. (Between 1991 and March 2023, the 16 water monopolies in England paid out more than £78 billion in dividends and, despite being privatised with zero debt, they've borrowed more than £64 billion. Consequently, Thames Water, for instance, increased its 16 million customers' bills by 35 per cent this year.) And it is a failure of the regulator, Ofwat, which has not enforced meaningful enough fines to discourage this sort of behaviour. The other major problem for British rivers involves agricultural practises – particularly the disposal of slurry. This happens if farmers spread excess animal waste over their land; when it rains the waste runs into rivers. 'The government finding ways to financially reward farmers for better slurry management will reduce the amount of…' Macfarlane is about to say 'waste' – I think – but he sees a bird. 'Oh look, skylark!' What is amazing, however, is how quickly rivers can heal. In 2024, the Klamath River in Oregon underwent the largest dam removal in US history. Within two weeks, salmon, which had not swum in the waters for a century, returned upstream. Or consider Switzerland. In the 1960s, the country had some of the foulest rivers in Europe. After improvements to sewage infrastructure, they are now some of the cleanest. Damage is often reversible. There's hope in the UK, too, according to Macfarlane. 'In the past three or four years, there's been an extraordinary rising up and organisation of communities. Charities like River Action, which is taking water companies to court, citizen science activist groups, swimmers, anglers, kayakers and everyday river lovers are driving change.' Macfarlane also mentions the River Rescue Kit, from River Action, which explains how to test your local waters for sewage; and online maps that report sewage dumps live. He rates the one on the website of Surfers Against Sewage. But not all of our waters are dirty. Thanks to 'coalitions of the loving' and 'some landowners who have pursued very enlightened policies', rivers including the Nar in Norfolk remain clean. Scotland – and specifically the Highlands – has generally better water quality than England, too. The Avon, where Macfarlane floated as a child, would still look clear, he says. (In general, Macfarlane's wild-swimming rules are as follows: don't swim after heavy rain; try not to swallow water unnecessarily; cover up cuts; and check the maps. 'There's still lots of happy, healthy fun to be had.') There is also 'daylighting' – the process of restoring rivers that have been otherwise buried. This February, a stretch of Sheffield's River Sheaf was uncovered. Before then, it had been underground for 100 years. The main theory of Macfarlane's book is that rivers are alive, not just alive in the sense of being an ecosystem, a place where other animals and plants live, but alive themselves: their own vast, complex, living entities. I was not entirely sure, to be honest, that I understood it as an idea. But, looking at the photographs of the Sheaf seeing daylight for the first time in a century, it becomes clear that the river is, absolutely, alive. Last month, Macfarlane travelled to the Highlands for a holiday. He swam in rivers, watching 'your skin turning that sort of amazing, coppery bronze'. What did it feel like to be in clean water? 'Certain powers in this country have made the mistake of coming to regard rivers entirely as resources, not as life forces. But in a river, you feel life flowing into you. It feels like enlivenment.' Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £25) is available now. To order a copy for £21.25 until 25 May, go to or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. 200,000km collective length of rivers in the UK 14% rivers in England and Wales in 'good overall health' 3.62 million collective hours that sewage was discharged into British rivers in 2024 354km length of the Severn, Britain's longest river 200 tonnes amount of plastic removed from the Thames each year 1,500 rivers in the UK 20 rivers buried under London's streets 2 years time that water company bosses can now spend in prison for illegal sewage spills
Geek Tyrant
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Willem Dafoe Stars in Surreal Dark Comedy THE SOUFFLEUR - a Hotel, a Soufflé, and One Man's Meltdown — GeekTyrant
Willem Dafoe has found his next film project, and he's waging war over soufflés and modern architecture. In The Souffleur , a dark comedy from Argentinian filmmaker Gastón Solnicki, Dafoe plays the longtime maître d' of Vienna's InterContinental Hotel who spirals into chaos when he learns that his beloved establishment is being sold to an Argentine developer. The buyer's plan is to tear it down and rebuild. Dafoe's character responds the only way a hotelier on the verge of a breakdown might: by slipping into paranoia, watching his world literally fall apart… soufflés and all. The synopsis teases a poetic unraveling: 'Spiraling into absurd paranoia, his profound unraveling begins to manifest in his surroundings — the hotel pipes become blocked, the clocks go haywire and his trademark soufflés refuse to rise.' Dafoe isn't alone in this surrealist descent. He's joined by Solnicki himself, newcomer Lilly Senn, Stephanie Argerich, and Claus Philipp. The film was shot entirely at the InterContinental in Vienna. Producer Austin Kennedy said in a statement: ' The Souffleur is an inventive and entertaining film featuring a lively cast of characters led by Willem Dafoe, who plays the souffleur himself. 'The story blends humor with timely themes of social and class structure, change and modernity, resulting in a wholly original work that is both charming and delightfully comedic. This marks Solnicki's most ambitious film to date, a richly layered work that pushes his storytelling into bold new territory.' Solnicki told Variety, the the concept for the fil all started with a culinary misfire in Buenos Aires. 'The idea for the film stemmed from a 'curious, failed experience' at a restaurant, when a soufflé was 'forced on me in a very sad fashion.'' As someone who trained in what he describes as 'a very military French tradition,' Solnicki said the soufflé metaphor became irresistible. 'It's not something that you just follow a recipe, and it happens,' he explained. 'It's really an act of love and an act of faith.' The film borrows from Luis Buñuel's absurdist playbook, using humor and surrealism to explore ideas of collapse, both structural and psychological. 'A building that is about to be [demolished] and a dessert that is no longer [able to rise],' as Solnicki puts it. When talking about working with Dafoe, he said: 'Willem and I dragged each other to the mud. We thrived after a fertile wrestle — our worlds complemented each other in unexpected and exciting ways. Together we crafted a film that feels both personal and profoundly alive.' The Souffleur is currently in post-production and set to be shopped at the Cannes Film Market by Magnify.
