Less than a day after taking the stage for their official opening night at the Dolby Theatre, The Band's Visit First National Cast members Janet Dacal, Sasson Gabay, Joe Joseph, and Coby Getzug discussed the multiple Tony Award-winning musical in a special event held for media this morning, Wednesday, December 1, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Joining them for the event taking place diagonally across Hollywood Boulevard from their stage home for the next few weeks were the non-actor members of the titular band, Roger Kashou, Wick Simmons, Yoni Avi Battat, Kane Mathis, and Brian Krock, who treated the assembled audience to two live musical performances while in full costume. Video of the entire panel and performances are below.
The first national tour of The Band's Visit is now playing at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood through Sunday, December 19; the national tour then moves on to other cities across North America through 2022, including a return to the Southern California area at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa from Tuesday, March 22 through Sunday, April 3, 2022.
In the last couple of years, Will Smith has further grown his already massive, long lasting, global celebrity in the arena of social media, so it's fitting that the venue for the press conference promoting his latest "day job" project, the science fiction action thriller Gemini Man, would be at YouTube Space in Playa Vista. But the film itself is an appropriate fit for a tech-minded site, what with director Ang Lee once again pushing the visual effects envelope after his celebrated, Academy Award-winning work in Life of Pi. On that note, joining Smith and Lee for the discussion (below) were visual effects supervisors Bill Westenhofer and Guy Williams, along with blockbuster director Jerry Bruckheimer.
The hotly anticipated Star Wars universe spin-off/prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story had its most splashy debut on the world cinema stage earlier today with a gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival, but director Ron Howard and cast members Alden Ehrenreich (Han Solo), Donald Glover (Lando Calrissian), Emilia Clarke (Qi'ra), Woody Harrelson (Tobias Beckett), Thandie Newton (Val), Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Paul Bettany (Dryden Vos), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (L3-37); and screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Jonathan Kasdan first faced the international media this past weekend at the Pasadena Convention Center, site of the film's global press conference. Below is complete video of the entire spirited event, as cast and crew candidly shared their reflections on the film's production and their thoughts on the ageless and ever-expanding long ago galaxy far, far away.
Solo: A Star Wars Story opens on Friday, May 25, with special preview showings the evening of Thursday, May 24, in cinemas nationwide from Walt Disney Studios.
In a typically crowded summer movie season that has already seen a big-budget blockbuster shatter global box office records, those behind more underdog (bad pun intended) wide releases such as the talking dog comedy Show Dogs cannot be blamed for trying some more offbeat promotional tactics to help get a leg up from the rest of the pack. And so on the morning of Saturday, May 5, Global Road Entertainment made the atypical move of holding the film's traditional press conference right before its big red carpet world premiere screening event, right at cinema itself, the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. But even more unusual was the angle of the press conference, which encouraged the accompanying children of attending journalists to ask stars Will Arnett, Natasha Lyonne, and Gabriel Iglesias the questions themselves--and kids being their honest, innocently unfiltered selves, paired with a game, good-humored trio such as these three actors, resulted in a press conference that was indeed far more entertaining and memorable than its promotional ritual ilk. Words fail to do justice to the experience, so watch below as Arnett, Lyonne, Iglesias, and director Raja Gosnell brave the comic unpredictability of the inquisitive youth.
director Raja Gosnell, producer Deepak Nayar,
Natasha Lyonne, Will Arnett, Gabriel Iglesias
with the press conference moderators
(photo by Michael Dequina)
Stuart Hazeldine's adaptation of William Paul Young's bestselling novel The Shack is, by textbook definition, a Christian film, centering around the crisis of faith of one Mack Phillips (Sam Worthington) after he loses one of his children--and himself--in an unspeakable tragedy. But as seen in Young's novel and now Hazeldine's film, Mack's journey to greater spiritual understanding and enlightenment is unlike most depictions of such stories and explorations of such themes, for it comes by way of a weekend trip to the secluded shack of the title, where no less than God Himself--or, rather, Herself, in the very female form of Octavia Spencer, going by the name of "Papa"--resides with Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush) and the Holy Spirit (Sumire). Young and Spencer discussed that atypical approach along with the overarching universal themes and intent of its story at a press day last month in Beverly Hills.
Divine Inspiration
"I've always been a writer, but like anybody you write stuff for your friends and family, poetry, short stories. [My wife] had been saying for about four years, "Someday, as a gift for our children, just write something that puts in one place how you think because you think outside the box." And I really didn't feel healthy enough until the year I turned 50. I was working three jobs, and I had 40 minutes on the train, and I had nothing for Christmas. We were at a very great place of contentedness in not having anything, which was a huge journey in itself. I wrote [the novel] mostly on the train and got it done, made my 15 copies at Office Depot as a gift for Christmas. I'm not a trained writer. I learned to write by reading; that's where I learned. I've never taken the classes. I never intended to be a published author. So when I wrote this, it was simply a way to say--because my kids love story, because I think everybody loves story--let me tell you about the God who showed up and filled my heart, and not the religious God I grew up with." --William Paul Young
Building the Shack, Literally and Metaphorically
"We camped with the kids. I wrote it for them, so I used all kinds of places they're familiar with. We'd run into this thing in the woods, some hunter's cabin or whatever. So I started [writing the novel] with the conversations, all of the questions that I had, and this dialogue between me and God about loss and forgiveness, and those conversations became living. But then it became time [to figure out] who's asking and why, and that's where Mackenzie, who embodies my own losses, came about. So what's the setting? And in thinking about the setting, the shack suddenly made perfect sense. It's a place where you get stuck; it's our house on the inside; it's our broken soul. It's a place where I believe God has inhabited the entire time because God dwells with us. And what we do is we want to avoid the place of our darkness, where we hide our secrets, where we store our addictions. We don't want to deal with it. Our unforgiveness is there. Our shame is there. It's this broken down place we never want to go back into. But for our healing--we have to go back into that place. It is your soul, and that's what God loves, who God loves. He does not love our presentation of our best performance somewhere outside. We have to go back in here and co-create some healing, so that you can be free to be comfortable inside your own skin and at home inside your own soul." --William Paul Young
Papa Does Preach
"For me, it was a huge undertaking, and I actually had to try to figure out a way into the character. So what I did was basically boil it down to the relationship between Mack and Papa, and it felt very parental to me. So I basically did the work as if I were his foster mom who failed him, and then it was about building those bridges so that he could trust me again." --Octavia Spencer
"I cannot even imagine Papa not being Octavia. She embodies what I was wanting: this embrace but still in-your-face. It's the true understanding of what a parent's love is all about, that will constantly pursue you and won't stop even though you're pushing back, and filling up all the holes of the things we've lost along the way in maybe our own relationships with our own parents. Octavia is fantastic." --William Paul Young
"I have no second thoughts or regrets about any of the choices that were made, and I thought [they] just come across so powerfully. They really put their hearts into it. Tim McGraw [as Mack's best friend], Sam Worthington, Radha Mitchell [as Mack's wife], Sumire as the Holy Spirit, Aviv Alush--we have a Jew playing Jesus; who'd have thought, you know? [laughs] " --William Paul Young
"I'm very glad that they cast an Israeli as Jesus, and the thing about Aviv is that he has this beautiful personality. If you believe that Jesus is the light of the world, Aviv is definitely the man you want to play him because he has just this everyman light, and when you're around him he just fills the room with joy. He's devout. He's just a beautiful, beautiful person. I'm glad that I got to meet him and work together, and he was a lot of fun to work with, he and Sumire. It was wonderful working with Sam. He was a brand new father when we were doing this. I think the baby was only about six to eight weeks old; tiny. [The baby] being so young, he was exhausted because he wasn't really on a sleep schedule. And he was very vulnerable, which is what the character had to be. He was a sweetheart and very open to finding the truth in the scenes--and that's what you want in a scene partner: a person who's ready to go everywhere to get to the truth." --Octavia Spencer
The Guiding Spirit of Director Stuart Hazeldine
"Stuart is a great collaborator. We didn't have a lot of rehearsal time because we were all coming from different sets and different periods, so there was not a lot of rehearsal time prior to shooting. But while we were there, we took our time and worked on the scenes that required it. He was very collaborative and allowed us to find our footing in the scenes." --Octavia Spencer
A Story for Everyone
"I wouldn't be doing the movie if I didn't believe in the messages of it. I think we all face challenges, and I think agnostics can approach this film and learn from it as well. You realize that we all face challenges, and Mack has a huge challenge that he's facing: the loss of a child. I'm not a parent, but for my friends and family that are, their nightmare is to lose a child. So you have a man who suffers this tremendous loss; he had such a tumultuous childhood; and he loses a child, and so he loses faith. He loses faith in himself. He loses faith in God. And by doing that, he basically becomes paralyzed in his own life and shuts down. And so his family suffers from that; his daughter also shuts down. So it's about learning to forgive yourself and also learning that if you are ever a person who ever questions God, there's also a way to be able to forgive God. I don't think you necessarily have to be a religious person to understand the message about grief and guilt being a paralytic. If you don't correct that course, you will stay in a state of distress and be unable to grow. And I think that is something anybody can identify with." --Octavia Spencer
The Last Word
"Everything that matters to me--identity, work, value, significance, security, meaning, purpose, destiny, community, love--those were all in place before I wrote the book. The book didn't give me those things, for which I am so grateful because I can see what a black hole that can be. But what it did give me is it gave me an invitation into the holy ground of other people's stories. I tell people I think that's why we're born barefoot. We're designed to be inside the story of the other, and that invitation and ripples of it--I am so grateful [for that]. It is a kindness and a generosity to me that is too beautiful for words." --William Paul Young
The warm yet straight-shooting style that made Iyanla Vanzant both a best-selling self-help author and a television favorite dating back to mid-'90s guest appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show made her media meet and greet for the upcoming fifth season of her OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network reality series Iyanla: Fix My Life go far beyond the typical promotional press conference. While the new season of the show, in particular the sure-to-be-controversial opening three-part installment revolving around a trio of closeted gay ministers in the African-American church, were addressed during the 40-minute session, it was only a small part of a wide-ranging group discussion that encompassed Vanzant's personal background and philosophies--and even how the latter has affected, inspired, influenced, and even changed the lives of those covering the event.
Everest director Baltasar Kormakur and stars Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson, John Hawkes, and Jake Gyllenhaal reunited far from the film's Himalayan setting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, August 28, 2015 to discuss the film with the international press. While this setting was far more amenable, to put it mildly, than either what the film's real life subjects endured or what they themselves experienced during the film's production, the vivid memories of the experience and passionate thoughts about the real life 1996 tragedy that inspired the film came out strongly in their comments.
Why Everest?
"I think the story is very real and it's hard to come by. It also has a huge scope, the humanity. It's not about a storm hitting people on a mountain; it's a lot of things that happen before that. And it's also about getting down a mountain, not getting up a mountain. It was a no-brainer to me." --Baltasar Kormakatur
"For me, by the time I jumped on board, there was already a lot of people attached, all of these actors that I very much look up to and respect. So to have the opportunity to work with them, that was the story itself. It's an incredibly compelling story, and to try to tell that story and to be a part of that was just a huge honor for me." --Michael Kelly
"I knew the story. I knew the book. I had a massive reaction to the book, and then I had also, before I had met Balt [Kormakatur], had a director come over to my office to sell a film to me that said, 'We're going to do a film, and it isn't going to be any of that Hollywood bullshit. It's going to be real.' And I thought, 'Who is this kook?' And then Baltasar came into the meeting after that, and I thought, 'Oh, I need to work with this guy,' because there was none of that. It was him; it was real; it was 100% organic. And I thought he was perfect to direct something as powerful as this and as sensitive as this. I needed to work with him, and it turned out well." --Josh Brolin
"I was always haunted by the fact that this man was on top of the world couldn't get home to his pregnant wife. That really haunted me. He was sitting up there; his wife was pregnant; and he couldn't get home. And then the more you dive into it, the richer, more complicated [it got]. It was like a detective story with what happened. Jon Krakauer wrote this extraordinary book about it, and then you follow this extraordinary trail. It was just a massive journey of people dying and wanting to live, just wanting to live in extraordinarily inhospitable places, and understanding what it is to want to live [like that]. " --Jason Clarke
"I had a strange and bizarre connection to the story. I wasn't connected myself to the story, but this event happened on the very day my first film [Breaking the Waves] premiered in Cannes. And I was having the most intense moment and bizarre moment of my life. It's a little bit disappearing my own backside, to be honest, just for the hype of it all, to have a movie in Cannes. And I just remember reading in the paper this story, just hearing about this guy was on the mountain, and he couldn't get down, and he was dying, and he called his wife. And as I'm hearing the story unfold, I'm being transported away from my own sense of importance for a few minutes to this unbelievable event. And when I read the script, and I met Balt, I felt a connection to it. But it also really fascinated me that someone like this who's a bystander--I thought that was an interesting thing to do, to be a bystander when somebody else's incredibly intense emotional story and being helpless to serve it." --Emily Watson
"I'd gotten the script in January of 2013 and sat down with Balt a month later. And for me, it was Balt. I just had a feeling that this would be the guy to make this movie and somebody I would really enjoy getting to know and work with, and so it all turned out to be true." --John Hawkes
"I love the book. I was aware of the situation when it happened in reality, but I think to me what was so moving was the idea of the inevitable in the movie, which felt like reality to me in a massive entertaining movie where Mother Nature wins. In the end, the inevitable happens that hese characters are ultimately, particularly with Rob and Scott, not necessarily afraid of. They ventured into the idea of life and death and walked the precipice of that all the time, and I liked that idea. I liked a movie that I felt was dealing with something that was very honest. I think also a tangent of that is the experience was like that too. Like Josh said, Balt promised us that we were going to be in the elements, that we would make a movie where we would legitimately be cold and legitimately be scared. And I think that's fun for someone like me. I speak for almost all of us, I think, when I say that's what we're looking for. We get to learn something about our lives as well as do the work that we love." --Jake Gyllenhaal
Transporting cinema audiences to Everest... and with the people
"One of things we wanted to do was to make 99.99% of the human race able to, if they want, see and feel Everest because most of them will never go or shouldn't go. We wanted to create a visceral feeling. Part of me telling this story is part of me experiencing the story. I can't experience what it is like to be on top of Everest. But you want to get as close to it as you possibly can. And that's the way I chose to make the film, to not make it easy on ourselves--try to find it, and find it in the elements. I was really pleased when I was watching the movie, not only seeing the mountain, but seeing the acting in IMAX. This kind of acting was not about making a big character that has a big arc but being there as real as possible. It actually plays brilliantly for me on a big screen because everything is true, and the little moments become huge."
--Baltasar Kormakatur
The Final Word
"I'm a true believer that in the elements, that's where you find it. You can prep all you want at home, and that's great. But the reality of it is going to happen in the moment. And if you can maintain the sponaneity and the reality of it, and find it there and trust the moment--to be able to do that, and you have to have great actors and have great people with you, so they actually can deliver in that moment. And that's when the magic happens for me. It's not in the rehearsal room." --Baltasar Kormakatur
Everest opens exclusively on IMAX 3D and large format screens nationwide today, Friday, September 18, expanding into general, all-format (Real D, digital 3D, and 2D) nationwide cinema release next Friday, September 25, from Universal Pictures.
On just the quickest of glances, it would be easy, and perhaps more than a little understandable, to just as swiftly write off the new stars of the freshly rebooted The Transporter film franchise, as just another couple of pretty faces. But there's far more than meets the eye with the multitalented leads of The Transporter Refueled, Ed Skrein (taking over from Jason Statham as badass courier/driver Frank Martin) and Loan Chabanol (as femme fatale Anna). As more deeply detailed in a couple of exclusive sit-down interviews at the Forum in Inglewood on Wednesday, August 26, the pair are not only deeply committed rising stars in the acting realm, but they are also gifted and accomplished artists in other areas--Skrein in the world music, Chabanol in writing and painting. Watch the two discuss those passions and their work in Camille Delamarre's high-octane action-adventure below.
The Transporter Refueled opens in cinemas nationwide today, Friday, September 4, from EuropaCorp.
Chris Evans is a veteran of so many films from indie to studio, to small-budget to very, very big, that one would think that making his directorial debut with the very modest, mostly two-character, largely walking-and-talking romantic comedy Before We Go would be fairly easy for the budding hyphenate. But as he, co-star Alice Eve, and producer Mark Kassen discussed in a roundtable interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, September 2, no amount of cinematic superheroism completely prepared him for the task of uber-indie, almost guerrilla-style filmmaking--and he would have it no other way.
Before We Go is now available nationwide on demand and opens in limited release in cinemas tomorrow, Friday, September 4, from Radius TWC.
As with many original series in the ABC Family stable, the McG-produced and -directed comedy Kevin from Work was given a pre-premiere screening and discussion event hosted by OK! Magazine at the Real D Theater in Beverly Hills on Thursday, August 6. Following a viewing of the series' first episode, the "Kevin" of the title of this witty workplace rom-com, Noah Reid, was joined by co-stars Paige Spara (who plays Kevin's office cubicle mate and object of his unrequited affection, Audrey), Matt Murray (Brian, Kevin's best friend), Punam Patel (Patti, Audrey's flirtatious roommate), Jordan Hinson (Roxie, Kevin's younger sister), and Jason Rogel (Ricky, Kevin and Audrey's gossipy co-worker) for a lively discussion that showed off their crackling comic chemistry that shines through even off the set. Enjoy the wisecracks and antics in twoparts below:
Ever since waving his wand as wizard Harry Potter for the final time in 2011, Daniel Radcliffe has never completely shied away from the fantasy genre, but the film projects he's tackled with such a bent have been as far removed tonally from that star-making blockbuster franchise as can be. First he ventured into the darker side of the fantastic with 2012's Hammer-style horror yarn The Woman in Black, and now he swerves into an even more tonally different direction with writer-director Alexandre Aja's adaptation of Joe Hill's novelHorns, often darkly comic supernatural mystery-thriller in which he plays Iggy, a murder suspect who mysteriously grows the titular demonic feature overnight--and with them developing a number of equally mysterious magical powers. Alongside co-star Juno Temple, who plays Iggy's lost love Merrin, whom he is suspected of killing; and author Hill, Radcliffe sat for a press conference in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, October 29, where the trio fielded questions about the film and various issues about navigating the more-treacherous-than-the-supernatural waters of Hollywood.
