Breaking the Line

Isabella Rossellini: "My Agent Said, 'If You Work With Guy Maddin, I'll Slit My Wrists.'"

I'm well aware that making Grantland's Humblebrag honor roll is a dubious honor at best, but when Isabella Rossellini's name pops up on the CallerID, it's hard to suppress the urge to crow. (Even my wife, who's long since used to interview subjects calling the house, was moved to a "Shut up!" when I told her about it.) But enough about me — read the article instead. It's one of the A.V. Club's "Random Roles," which allowed me to talk not only about Rossellini's two new movies, Late Bloomers and Keyhole, but to go all the way back to Blue Velvet and Tough Guys Don't Dance, as well as her utterly beguiling tribute to her father, the great Roberto Rossellini, in My Dad Is 100 Years Old.

Richard Lester: From Swinging London to Superman

With Mad Men entering the Swinging Sixties — as in "to swing" — it seemed like a good time to survey the career of one Richard Lester, whose movies Petulia and The Knack... and How to Get It embody the spirit of the time better than any others. As I point out in the A.V. Club's "Gateways to Geekery," that's scratching the surface of a long and varied (and sometimes patchy) career that owes as much to Jacques Tati and Ernie Kovacs as it does to the Beatles, who put Lester on the map as the starts of A Hard Day's Night. More in the article, of course, but the short version is this: Watch Robin and Marian at your earliest opportunity, and Superman III is nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests.

 

Don Hertzfeldt: "I Feel Like a LIve-Action Filmmaker Who Just Happens to Draw"

One of the myriad joys of writing for the A.V. Club is that there's an audience for pieces that might meet with a shrug elsewhere. Case in point: my interview with animator Don Hertzfeldt, who's currently touring the country with his hilarious and unsettling short films. I lucked into Hertzfeldt's shorts early on — my review of Billy's Balloon was blurbed on his site, which thrilled me at the time — at still remember the shock I felt watching Rejected, which began in by-now familiar territory and somehow managed by the end to tap into a profound sense of existential terror, which I feel safe to say was the first time I was genuinely moved by a piece whose protagonists were exclusively stick figures. He's built up a well-deserved following over the years, recently selling out four shows at New York's IFC Center, and it was a delight to connect with him to discuss, among other things, the completion of the "Bill trilogy": Everything Will Be OK, I am so proud of you and It's such a beautiful day. See him if you can, and check out the DVDs at his site if you can't.

 

Keyhole's Guy Maddin on Sucker Punch, The Phantom of the Paradise and Watching Movies With Luis Buñuel

As you might imagine, an interview with Guy Maddin can cover a lot of ground, and so it was when we sat down for the A.V. Club on the occasion of his new film, Keyhole. We dutifully covered the new release, of course, but before long he was off and running (with a little help from me), covering subjects ranging from the new Mission Impossible movie — he likes it, and is pretty sure Luis Buñuel would, too — to The Odyssey. If you're at all familiar with films like The Saddest Music in the World and Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, you've got a sense of Maddin's unique wit, but it's quite something to see at it work in its natural state. 

From the archives: Our 2003 interview on the occasion of Dracula's Philadelphia release.