Aamir Khan by © Avinash Gowarikar
At our first meeting, when I got up, ready to pack up my recording device after the interview and bid Aamir Khan adieu, the Indian mega star insisted “no please, have a seat. I would like to ask you a couple of questions. Do you have the time?” Of course I did, for the greatest star in the firmament of Indian cinema! And so for the next fifteen minutes, Khan unassumingly asked about my background, my love for Arab cinema and my passion for India.
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Claes Bang in a still from 'The Square' directed by Ruben Östlund
I meet Danish actor Claes Bang at the Dubai International Film Festival, at the height of the sexual harassment tidal wave of scandals that has engulfed the entertainment industry since early October 2017. Major Hollywood players keep falling around us, left and right and in fact, not even a week after my interview with Bang, another filmmaker whose film is featured at the festival, Morgan Spurlock, comes out with his own confession of wrongdoings, on Twitter.
Yet Bang seems unaffected by the hoopla, his soave behavior unchanged as he gazes deep into my eyes and with an almost unrelenting stare. He also sits quite close to me and doesn't care about crossing into my personal space often, during our interview. I don't mind one bit, it's actually refreshing to talk without reservations about sex with a spellbinding man I'll probably never meet again. I won't even have to go out with him, or have to sit through a glass of wine together, while I struggle to keep quiet and "let the man talk" -- as my BFF has often admonished me -- while sitting on my hands to avoid moving them around too much.
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Jason Momoa and Suki Waterhouse in 'The Bad Batch'
When the line-up for the 73rd Venice International Film Festival was announced, in late July, there was one film that immediately jumped off the page at me, and I knew coming into this edition of the oldest film festival in the world, I just had to watch it. I craved to watch it, in fact, as one craves a good meal or the perfect glass of wine.
In fact, “craving to watch it” is the perfect way to describe the desire that accompanies a film like The Bad Batch, which according to producer Eddy Moretti, was initially pitched by its filmmaker as “a cannibal falls in love with his next meal.”
And right I was to be ravenous about watching Ana Lily Amirpour’s follow up to her modern cult classic (yes, it’s already a classic, in case you were wondering) A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Watching The Bad Batch turned out to be so spectacular for me, so infinitely ahead of the majority of filmmakers’ visions and critics’ perception that I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else was still unraveling their brains, as I am two days later, to fully comprehend it. I won’t use broad statements like Amirpour is a genius, because for such a young and talented filmmaker where would she go from there if I did — but she comes awfully close.
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A still from 'Ryuichi Sakamoto CODA' by Stephen Nomura Schible
At this year's Berlinale, the iconically sophisticated Ryuichi Sakamoto serves double duty.
He is part of the official 2018 Competition Jury, and is the subject of Stephen Nomura Schible’s 'RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: async AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY', the companion piece, the B side if you will, to 'RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA', a film which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2017.
When I met Sakamoto in person, inside the Casinò in Venice, I was awe struck. His shiny, perfectly straight silver hair, those tortoise shell eyeglasses and the stylish black suit all made for an image that is so naturally fashionable, hard to forget. Yet Sakamoto is so much more profound than just how he looks, his meticulously styled, outward persona.
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PHOTO BY ©Thierry Van Biesen
In 2009, Cherien Dabis’ first feature ‘Amreeka’ created the perfect buzz at the Sundance film festival where it premiered. The Hollywood Reporter touted it as a film that re-energized the immigrant stories genre with “refreshing wit, honest emotions, incisive observations and a perfect cast she [Dabis] literally flew around the world to find.”
Fast forward to 2017 when Dabis has become a name to be reckoned with in Arab cinema, of course but also, and perhaps more importantly, in Hollywood. The Palestinian-American Dabis is currently a producer-slash-director-slash-writer on ‘Empire’, has written and produced various episodes of ‘Quantico’, ditto for ‘The L Word’ and this is all after writing, directing, producing and starring in her second feature ‘May in the Summer’which also world premiered at Sundance in 2013.
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COURTESY OF THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL ASAC
For me, James Toback’s ‘The Private Life of a Modern Woman’ — which he shot in just nine days and is only 70 minutes long — is the perfect film. Because it not only combines the talent of actress Sienna Miller with the filmmaker’s wonderful visual sense, but it also offers a view into what it’s like to be a woman in today’s America, and even more specifically in NYC. Those smug stares and taunting looks men bestow upon us on a daily basis to undo us from within, and the subtle violence we face in everyday life, coming at us from all directions, no male reviewer has caught it in their writing. But we women, we know. We feel it and now Toback filmed it, for all to see. If cinema is a way to decode the world around us, perhaps this is a step towards the genuine emancipation of the modern woman — because trust me, we still got a long long way to go to be truly free, to be exactly who we want to be. Even in our good ol’ U.S. of A.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL/ASAC
On a recent sunny afternoon in Venice, I sat in the company of Jim Carrey in a corner of a shaded garden and found before me a human being who is both wise and charming, as well as a handsome fifty-something man who captured my imagination and filled my thoughts for days thereafter. Part spiritual guru, part Saint Francis — yes, there was a bee buzzing around him the entire time, the animal clearly enamored with his scent and the actor unaffected by the imminent danger — Carrey appeared like the romantic hero with a sense of humor I had come across so many years ago. In ‘Once Bitten’ what is probably one of his first and most forgettable films, when I was in my teens and he, well, super young too.
But a few days after our tranquil interview, when we talked to Carrey about his latest project ‘Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond’, a Vice production premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the actor pulled a red carpet prank at NY Fashion Week and all was hilariously-Jim-Carrey-right-with-the-world once more. I imagined Carrey giggling to himself after our talk, thinking “I got that journalist, I really got her good, now she thinks I’m a smooth, great looking mystic and will write the most beautiful piece about me.”
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Photo by Ben Rothstein © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Ratpac-Dune Entertainment Llc
Ladies, get a hold of some waterproof mascara, ‘cause you’ll need it!
In Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special, actor Michael Shannon gives everyone a daddy complex, by being the best father we all wished for in our youth, or that fantasy baby daddy we’ve dreamed about in the thick of the night. And the tears, well those are a fabulous byproduct of this charismatic actor’s latest, cathartic performance.
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Stephen Dorff, photo by Eitan Riklis
Stephen Dorff has come a long way, from his early stint as a teenage heartthrob on TV sitcoms and playing through the darker side of characters, in sometimes forgettable films.
These days Dorff is navigating us comfortably through his own intoxicating brand of understated sensuality, in roles that span from his turn as discontented superstar Johnny Marco in Sofia Coppola’s touching 'Somewhere', to captured Israeli fighter pilot Yoni who becomes unlikely ally to a reluctant Palestinian teenager in Eran Riklis‘ latest masterpiece 'Zaytoun'. He is, easily, the modern thinking woman’s sex symbol.
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COURTESY OF THE LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL
Irrfan Khan in a still from Anup Singh’s ‘The Song of Scorpions’
The last time I met Rajasthani-born superstar Irrfan Khan was in Abu Dhabi, and as we spoke, sitting in a busy hallway inside the grandiose Emirates Palace, waiters and chefs from India and Pakistan working for the hotel would approach him constantly, to ask for an autograph and get their picture taken alongside their idol. The actor indulged them every time, with grace and class.
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COURTESY OF THE LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL
Apart from Olivier Assayas being one of the most perfectly articulate persons I’ve ever met, indulging each and every question without any sign of haughtiness or “I know better than thou” attitude — which of course is the case because I’m convinced the man knows everything! — personally, I’m a huge fan of his cinema. Assayas’ films are cinematic human mysteries, to be enjoyed on the big screen of course, yet to be re-watched, relished time and time again so that their magic can truly be absorbed. At the moment, I am obsessed with watching ‘Personal Shopper’ starring Kristen Stewart over and over again, each time discovering new images and uncovering new, pardon the pun, personal truths within it.
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Photo courtesy of the Venice International Film Festival
This coming March, Cruz will receive an honorary prize from France’s Academy of Arts and Techniques of Cinema during the 43nd Cesar Awards ceremony, the country's equivalent to the Oscars. And she deserves that and more, in my book. So here are three questions with a woman who represents the spirit of "duende" that je-ne-sais-quoi only genuine Spanish women possess.
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Photo courtesy of the Venice International Film Festival
There is something perfectly magnetic about Liev Schreiber. He's tall, strong and handsome, with clear as aquamarines blue eyes. But it goes beyond that. When he sat down in the chair next to mine in Venice, I gasped.
And now I can't wait to watch him... eh hum.... hear him play a dog in Wes Anderson's 'Isle of Dogs'.
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