Steven Soderbergh talks to Terry Gross about making Behind the Candelabra, his new Liberace biopic for HBO:
It’s a very intimate movie. It’s a very emotionally intimate movie and there are scenes between them that are almost uncomfortable in their intimacy and would be if it was a man and a woman involved. … I always felt that if we did our jobs correctly, that halfway through the movie you’d forget that it was Michael and Matt and just feel as though you’re watching a relationship.
Image courtesy of HBO
13th Annual TPR Cinema Tuesdays Series Kicks Off With “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Birds” -
Texas Public Radio’s 13th annual Cinema Tuesdays series is fast approaching. All summer long, movie lovers can enjoy the very best in classic films curated
Hope to see you there!
Sarah Polley, the director of the new documentary Stories We Tell, tells Terry Gross about including footage of retakes in the film:
I think that, for me, it was really important to not leave the construction of the film out because it’s a film about storytelling and how we tell stories and why we tell stories. I thought it was really important to include the process of making this film itself in the film and some of that involves some rather unflattering and ruthless moments for me like directing my dad when he’s … pouring his heart out, basically. And, you know, you do get into this mode, I think, when you’re telling a story — or certainly when you’re making a film — where you can kind of lose your sense or your barometer for what’s human or humane and certainly I think there are a few moments in the film where I’m directing my dad where I don’t come off that well, but I certainly come off as somebody who’s trying to tell a story above all else.
Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions Publicity
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Kevin Whitehead on Bing Crosby’s influence on popular music:
Bing Crosby’s influence on modern singing is so huge, we barely notice it anymore. It spread out through deadpan crooners like Perry Como, folksy colloquialists like Johnny Mercer, and warm sexy baritones like Billy Eckstine. Later singers who effectively undersell a song are indebted too, like Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen.
Image of Bing Crosby reading the sheet music is from a CBS radio recording session in the fall of 1954, at the CBS studio in Hollywood courtesy of HLC Properties Ltd.
Love this photo from the set of Peter Weir’s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Criterion, when will we get a Blu-ray?
(Source: criterioncollection)
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On the show today, we excerpted Martin Scorsese’s 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Jefferson Lecture, titled “Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.” He shares his wide knowledge of film history (including Eadweard Muybridge’s images of animals in motion from the 1870s and 1880s) and speaks movingly and eloquently about falling in love with the movies as a kid:
My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time because I was always sick with asthma since I was 3 years old and I apparently couldn’t do any sports. Or that’s what they told me. But really my mother and father did love the movies. They weren’t in the habit of reading — that didn’t’ really exist where I came from — and so we connected through the movies and, over the years, I know now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images up on the screen gave me something very precious because we were experiencing something fundamental together: We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form. … Sometimes they were expressed in small things — gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. I mean, we experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our own lives, and that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy or make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema.
Image by Eadweard Muybridge
I could listen to Scorsese talk all day. Besides this lecture, I heartily recommend his movie documentaries “My Voyage To Italy” and “A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese.”
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houseoforange said: Great campaign, Nathan!
Thanks!
