"Kirsten Dunst stepped out in LA last night this week for dinner with friends at Iroha Sushi of Tokyo. She's got "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" hitting theaters next month, but apparently Kirsten managed to alienate one person while she was shooting the movie.Toby Young, who wrote the book the film is based on, told The Spectator that Kirsten asked the director to keep Toby off the set after he made what he thought were helpful comments to the director about Kirsten's take on her character. What do you think — was it reasonable for Kirsten to ban someone from her movie set?" Source: popsugar.com
-"Your character Norah in Nick and Norah is really interesting and cool, but she's also awkward in a really real way, like when Nick and Norah are in the car together and trying to make conversation and Norah's like, "Oh, forget it." Do you relate to her at all?
-Yes, I think I relate to her the most of anyone I've ever played, and I wanted to make sure she was really fleshed out, you know, really a complete person with her weird little tics and her insecurities. She's very insecure and vulnerable, and she tries not to be that way because she knows it's pathetic but she can't really get out of it. So she sometimes puts her foot in her mouth, especially around Nick.
-Everyone wants to know what it was like working with Michael Cera.
-The best. The best. It's so laid back with Michael. We would both just hang out and talk, and we would seamlessly start shooting a scene, or we'd be singing between takes or something. He's just, you know, sweet and smart and funny and nice. He's just a really, really nice person, and it makes a movie where you're in every scene together essentially so fun and easy. -I read on your blog that New Yorkers yelled at you and kind of bugged you guys a little bit while filming. What was that like?
-You know, New York at 4 in the morning is really kind of tempestuous. When we were filming, we were doing all night shoots, which means you get up at like 3 pm and then shoot through the night 'til morning, basically, so New Yorkers on the Lower East Side at 4 in the morning are all, they're all soft or they're in a good mood or, you know, [looking] for some mischief and two teenagers in a Yugo is fun for them to make fun of. I don't blame them [laughs]. Oh wait, I wasn't a teenager when we made that. I still think of myself as a teenager; it's sad... People would throw fruit at us, people would call us names, people would scream at us. Yeah, it was a little scary but kind of amazing.
-I don't want to spoil anything for our readers but at the end there's a really sweet love scene, and it's really not one that I've seen a lot, especially in movies for teenagers. Tell me about that a little bit.-We definitely wanted it to be obvious that they have fallen in love and that it's innocent, you know? And they weren't all like tearing each other's clothes off or anything. It's a little bit awkward and sweet. It's just real. It is what would happen to these two people because they've just sort of had their first time to be alone and talk for real, not when they're looking for [Norah's friend] Caroline or, you know, something crazy's happening... They're just having a discussion and it's just very sweet, and it shows just where they're at and how much they love each other and how much promise there is for them as a couple". Source: www.premiere.com
MICHELLE WILLIAMS has an Academy Award nomination, the open adulation of major filmmakers and a résumé that is striking in its worldliness and creative ambition. But if her career has seemed to progress almost inconspicuously, it is partly because of its introspective bent — small movies, subtle performances — and partly because it has lately existed in the shadow of her personal life.Ms. Williams’s maturity and capacity for quietly wrenching pathos were apparent even on the teenage soap “Dawson’s Creek,” on which she played the troubled Jen Lindley. In her film roles she has revealed a gift both for screwball comedy (“Dick,” “The Baxter”) and bruising emotional drama (most memorably in her Oscar-nominated performance as the spurned wife Alma in Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain”). She has repeatedly taken chances on under-the-radar indies (“The Station Agent,” “The Hawk Is Dying”) while catching the attention of auteurs like Wim Wenders (“Land of Plenty”), Todd Haynes (“I’m Not There”) and Martin Scorsese (the forthcoming “Shutter Island”). But Ms. Williams, who turns 28 on Tuesday, has become a very public figure for reasons that have little to do with her work. While shooting “Brokeback Mountain” in 2004 she fell into a much-chronicled romance with her co-star Heath Ledger. Stalked by paparazzi, their every move monitored in the gossip pages, the couple set up house in Brooklyn and had a daughter, Matilda. It has been a difficult year, to say the least, and Ms. Williams acknowledged in a recent interview — her first in eight months, since Mr. Ledger’s death — that she has coped to some extent by throwing herself into her work. She has shot four films in quick succession since last summer, two of which had their premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in May and are due to open this fall.In the anguished, comic head trip “Synecdoche, New York” the directorial debut of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (“Adaptation”), she is part of a vivid ensemble cast orbiting around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s harried theater director. In “Wendy and Lucy,” the independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the acclaimed “Old Joy” she’s in every scene as a young woman living hand to mouth on the road when her car breaks down and her dog goes missing in a blue-collar Oregon nowheresville.
“I thought a lot about what you look like when you think nobody’s looking at you, when you feel completely invisible,” Ms. Williams said of her character Wendy. “Your entire life happens inside because you don’t think anyone notices you. Which is very different from me. Not that I don’t have any inside life, but I feel watched, all the time.”
As she spoke over a long lunch at a restaurant near her home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Ms. Williams occasionally paused and smiled wryly as if to acknowledge the unspoken connections with her off-screen life. “It’s all so personal, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s hard to talk about work without talking about things that are personal. Work is personal. I don’t want to talk about my personal life, but it’s on my mind, and it’s in my work.”
Confessing to being apprehensive and out of practice, she thought long and hard before answering questions, searching for the right words — “I want to actually represent how I feel” she said at one point — but also taking care to avoid unintended disclosures. “It’s a fine line between wanting to be known and understood but also knowing what’s sacred,” she said.
One subject on which she willingly opened up was “Wendy and Lucy” — “probably the smallest film I’ve made” she said, “and I’ve made some pretty small films.” (It is set to open Dec. 10, and will be shown Sept. 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival.) Ms. Reichardt was worried that Ms. Williams would have trouble adapting to the microbudget conditions and to her plain-Jane role. “I feared that she was too pretty for the part sometimes, and I was concerned about asking her to go without makeup and not wash her hair for two weeks,” Ms. Reichardt said. “But I think she found that completely liberating.”
Ms. Williams said she relished the intimate scale. Shooting a tiny film on the outskirts of Portland at a time when she “felt particularly adrift” — she and Mr. Ledger had just broken up — she was grateful to find her character’s anonymity rubbing off on her. “I didn’t stand out in that community,” she said. “It was this perfect safe haven.”
“Making something out of nothing,” she added. “I’ve always liked that phrase, and I feel that way about this movie. We were working with so little in every way.” That minimalism extends to her tamped-down performance. Wendy is allowed one outburst but otherwise endures her downward spiral with stoic resilience.
To convey the character’s stubborn sense of purpose Ms. Reichardt showed Ms. Williams films like Max Ophüls’s “Reckless Moment,” with Joan Bennett as a suburban supermom driven to protect her family at all costs, and “Mouchette,” Robert Bresson’s single-minded portrait of a teenage outcast. “Kelly called me her Mouchelle,” she said.
Ms. Williams related to the self-sufficiency of her character: Wendy, heading north to find a job in the Alaskan fisheries, is something like a pioneer heroine for these depressed and exhausted times. “Maybe I read too much Emerson and Whitman at an impressionable age,” Ms. Williams said, referring to her tendency “to do everything” by herself. Her independent streak dates to her teenage years. After a childhood in rural Montana, she completed a high school correspondence course and moved to Los Angeles at 15, declaring herself legally emancipated from her parents. Mr. Kaufman cast her in “Synecdoche” (Oct. 24) partly because he had fond memories of her oddball turn in “Dick” as a nerdy teenager who lives at the Watergate and develops an improbable crush on Richard M. Nixon. “She can be really funny in really surprising ways,” he said. “I love watching her face change.”
Mr. Wenders, who wrote “Land of Plenty” with her in mind, spoke of her honesty, which “transcends any beauty and turns it into goodness, for lack of any other expression.” There has been no shortage of fulfilling work, especially since her widely praised performance in “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel that also stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, is due to open next year, and two other films are awaiting United States distribution: “Mammoth,” directed by the Swedish provocateur Lukas Moodysson, and Sharon Maguire’s drama “Incendiary,” which had its premiere at Sundance.
Ms. Williams would seem to be entering her professional prime, but she is reluctant to capitalize on her recent successes. “I’m going to take a year off,” she said. “I think I stopped feeling creative a while ago, and I’m just realizing it now.” She admitted to feeling the strain of being a working single mom. She reads bedtime stories to Matilda, now nearly 3, in whatever accent she’s practicing — East London for “Incendiary,” Boston for “Shutter Island” — but has had a hard time balancing the immersive demands of acting and the consuming duties of motherhood. “I used to have all the time in the world to daydream and even just to dream and let your unconscious do some of the work for you,” she said. “Now I’m up at 5 in the morning, and I don’t remember what I dreamed about.”
The bleakness of some of the roles has also taken a toll. In “Incendiary” she plays a wife and mother who loses her family in a terrorist attack; while preparing for “Shutter Island” she read case studies on infanticide. “When I work again maybe it should be a comedy,” she said. “I’ve always had a tendency for darker, more lifelike material. I think I had this sense that important things are heavy things. I don’t know if that’s true any more.”
In person Ms. Williams seems like nothing so much as your average 20-something Brooklyn hipster, which should perhaps be no surprise since she has been a New Yorker all her adult life. While making “Dawson’s Creek” she split her time between Wilmington, N.C., where the series was shot, and New York, where she found “wonderful friends who were all orphans in some way, not just actors but writers and musicians and painters.”
She is a little resentful but mostly rueful that she can no longer experience the city the way she used to. “I feel like that’s been taken away from me,” she said. “I’m worried what people are saying or thinking, or if they’re going to follow me, or if someone is going to pop out of a bush with a camera. I’ve started to shut down, but I also know I can’t let it dictate my life.”
She still finds herself reacting to the tabloid intrusions with bewilderment. (In recent months the talk has turned to a rumored relationship with the filmmaker Spike Jonze.) “It feels so surreal,” she said. “How is this my life? When did it get so out of control?”
To be a celebrity is to negotiate a gulf between private self and public image. “It’s a bit of an isolating problem to have,” Ms. Williams said, and so she was gratified to find that this was among the themes of Milan Kundera’s novel “Immortality,” which she read on the plane to Cannes, though she said she wasn’t sure she agreed with the book’s conclusion, “that the self people perceive is just as real because it exists.”
She is an avid reader who favors poetry over novels while filming so she’s not distracted by competing narratives. Looking ahead to her year off she said that she wanted to pick up a skill, some kind of handicraft. “I want to humble myself in front of a task like embroidery,” she said. “I like how physical work can really free your mind.” At a low point last year she signed up for night classes in bookbinding and calligraphy. “I was prouder of my little foldout book than of some movies that I’ve made,” she said.
Despite her claims of burnout, she still talks about acting with a kind of reverential awe. “I’m a Virgo, and I want everything to be fair and equal and clear, and acting just isn’t,” she said. “It’s kind of an incantation or a rain dance.” She loves the research process but is less thrilled about watching the end results (and often doesn’t). “If only the damned things never came out,” she said. “I get far too self-critical when I watch myself.” Source: www.nytimes.com
TORONTO - SEPTEMBER 04: Actors Michael Cera and Kat Dennings visit MuchOnDemand to promote their new film 'Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist' on September 4, 2008 in Toronto, Canada.
"Holy truck you guys, George Michael Bluth (you may know him as Michael Cera) is going to be on MOD in an hour. Someone will have to hold me back from screaming "it's Mr. Manager!!" when he's answering a half serious question". Update!! Omg, he's so skinneh! What a cutie pie. He was here with Kat Dennings to promote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist... Source: blog.muchmusic.com
"Comedy's current wunderkind, Michael Cera, stars in another super-smart teen comedy with the cool-factor of an indie-rock music mix. Cera plays the perennially hapless Nick, hopelessly in love with his ex-girlfriend and anaesthetized when it comes to the idea of finding anyone else. His special talent is making killer mix CDs, the entire series of which has been dedicated to his unrequited love. When his bandmates secure their struggling indie-rock group a gig in the city, he is vaguely excited. A legendary band is playing a secret show on the same night, and the chance to see them is a good argument for getting out of the house. But he lucks out when, after his gig, he meets Norah (Kat Dennings), who is cute, hassled and equally dissatisfied with the world of relationships. Nick and Norah embark on a wild chase through New York City as they endeavour to track down the secret show, find Norah's walkabout friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) and placate Nick's over-excited mates.These young protagonists are middle-class and music-obsessed. The wry, smartly written script and savvy pop-culture references make this a great companion piece to the 2007 Festival hit Juno, while Nick and Norah's apathetic shtick recalls the hip ennui of Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World.
Cera's comic timing is impeccable. His delivery is as meek and mawkish as his George Michael Bluth days, and his chemistry with charming newcomer Dennings simply crackles with the awkwardness of adolescence. Sollett's underground eye gives New York City a beating heart, and his choice of music – and musical cameos – will have you trainspotting the indie-rock playlist". Source: tiff08.ca
TORONTO - A constellation of Hollywood's biggest stars will materialize as the Toronto International Film Festival, North America's largest, unspools 249 features beginning tomorrow.
Some of the mostly hotly anticipated titles, all world or North American premieres, include:
* "Burn After Reading" - Joel and Ethan Coen's follow-up to the Oscar-winning "No Country for Old Men" is a spy comedy starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand.
* "Religulous" - Scaldingly funny documentary about organized religion, which Bill Maher treats with the same respect that Michael Moore showed for President Bush in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Directed by Larry Charles ("Borat").
* "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" - Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in a title-described comedy from Kevin Smith.
* "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" - Michael Cera, who became a Canuck sex symbol in Toronto with "Juno" a year ago, returns in a quirky romantic comedy with the up-and-coming Kat Dennings.
* "Miracle at St. Anna" - Spike Lee's answer to "Flags of Our Fathers" is a World War II drama set in Italy starring Derek Luke.
* "Rachel Getting Married" -Jonathan Demme directs a dark comedy about a woman (played by Anne Hathaway) who leaves rehab for the nuptials of her sister.
* "The Duchess" - Keira Knightley dons period garb again as the extravagant 18th century Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with Ralph Fiennes as the philandering duke.
* "The Secret Life of Bees" -Dakota Fanning as a 14-year-old in 1964 North Carolina who finds solace in beekeeping after the death of her mother.
* "Pride and Glory" - NYPD family saga stars Colin Farrell and Edward Norton as brothers-in-law caught up in a corruption scandal.
* "New York, I Love You" - 12-part film whose directors include Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Brett Ratner. Among the stars: Shia LaBeouf, Ethan Hawke, Julie Christie, Kevin Bacon and Orlando Bloom.
* "The Lucky Ones" - Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena as Iraq war vets on a road trip across America.
* "Flash of Genius" - Greg Kinnear as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper who battled Detroit for years. Source: www.nypost.com
"Kirsten Dunst stepped out in LA last night this week for dinner with friends at Iroha Sushi of Tokyo. She's got "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" hitting theaters next month, but apparently Kirsten managed to alienate one person while she was shooting the movie.
Toby Young, who wrote the book the film is based on, told The Spectator that Kirsten asked the director to keep Toby off the set after he made what he thought were helpful comments to the director about Kirsten's take on her character. What do you think — was it reasonable for Kirsten to ban someone from her movie set?"
