I haven’t done a round-up of Oscar news in some time so let’s clean up a few things.
First, Marion Cotillard will be honored with a career tribute at the 22nd Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards on Monday, November 26. Cotillard stars in Rust and Bone, in which she is magnificent and will surely be competing for a spot in the Best Actress race. The film begins hitting theaters on November 23 and you can read my Cannes review here.
There are a pair of interviews out there worth reading, first is Ben Affleck at Details who talks about his new movie Argo as well as the Bennifer days.
Then, over at Interview Magazine, Guy Ritchie interviews Killing Them Softly star Brad Pitt where he says of the film:
Well, what [director] Andrew [Dominik] wanted to do with this film was interesting: He wanted to talk about America–and America as a business–but he wanted to hide it within this low-end crime drama. We in America have some grand ideals–and some very strong ideals—but a lot of times, those ideals are used for marketing.
Get the full interview here.
When you’re done there, click on over to the New York Times for a piece written by Quentin Tarantino talking about the major influence for his new film Django Unchained. That influence, the spaghetti westerns of the Italian director Sergio Corbucci who directed the 1966 film Django among many others:
Corbucci dealt with racism all the time; in his Django, the bad guys aren’t the Ku Klux Klan, but a surreal stand-in for them. They’re killing Mexicans, but it’s a secret organization where they wear red hoods — it’s all about their racism toward the Mexican people in this town. In Navajo Joe, the scalp hunters who are killing the Indians for their scalps are as savage as the Manson Family. It’s one of the great revenge movies of all time: Burt Reynolds as the Navajo Joe character is a one-man-tornado onslaught. The way he uses his knife and bum-rushes the villains, rough-and-tumbling through the rocks and the dirt, is magnificent. I heard he almost broke his neck doing the movie, and it looks it. Before The Wild Bunch was released, Navajo Joe was the most violent movie that ever carried a Hollywood studio logo.
As I was working on an essay about how Corbucci’s archetypes worked, I started thinking, I don’t really know if Corbucci was thinking any of these things when he was making these movies. But I know I’m thinking them now. And if I did a western, I could put them into practice. When I actually put pen to paper for the script, I thought, What will push the characters to their extremes? I thought the closest equivalent to Corbucci’s brutal landscapes would be the antebellum South. When you learn of the rules and practices of slavery, it was as violent as anything I could do — and absurd and bizarre. You can’t believe it’s happening, which is the nature of true surrealism.
You can read the full piece right here and, if you missed it last night, a new trailer for Django can be seen here.
Oh, and you might also find this Django Unchained primer at Furious Cinema fascinating.
Finally, and I can’t believe I’m saying this because these kinds of Q&As are typically miserable, but last night director Steven Spielberg and star Daniel Day-Lewis took part in a Q&A to promote their new film Lincoln and it is actually quite good. The one thing I’m sure most will key in on is Lewis’ answer as to the voice he chose for Lincoln. Give all 42 minutes of it a watch below or just hit play and have it on in the background.
