| Ridley Scott |
The Blade Runner and Alien film-maker on his run-ins with critics, the space suits he keeps in his cellar in France – and his love of swearing
Reactions continue to emerge in response to Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and xenophobictweets, which were leaked in late January, as well as to her handling of the controversy. The Emilia Pérez star has apologized but maintains that she is the target of a hate campaign to damage her reputation.
| David Lynch |
US director whose wildly unconventional films burrowed into the unsavoury depths of his nation’s psyche
Rayan Gilbey
Friday 17 January 2025
David Lynch, who has died aged 78, was the most original film-maker to emerge in postwar America, as well as the greatest cinematic surrealist since Buñuel. His understanding of desire, fantasy and dread was unparalleled; the Paris Review called him “the Edward Hopper of American film”.
David Lynch, the visionary director who reshaped independent cinema in the United States in the 1980s, has passed away. His death was confirmed by his family on Facebook, with a statement reflecting on Lynch’s legacy as the creator of iconic works like Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and the cult TV series Twin Peaks.
| David Lynch |
He quit in 2022, but smoking was previously an integral part of the film-maker’s life and art
Xan Brooks
17 January 2025
It was a cold autumn day when I interviewed David Lynch inside his Paris art studio. The film-maker sat at an ink-splattered table while I ran through my questions with a sense of mounting desperation. “Well, yes and no,” Lynch would reply with a smile. “No, well, maybe,” he’d say, beaming at the far wall. He lit one cigarette from the butt of another and asked Mindy, his assistant, to keep him supplied with hot coffee. The tobacco smoke mingled with the steam from his mug. It felt as though he were kicking up clouds to hide himself from view.
| David Lynch |
For David Lynch, Coming Back to Twin Peaks Was Like Rolling Off a Log
As Twin Peaks returns to TV, its iconic creator has a few things to say about it. Very few things, it turns out.
Twin Peaks has become a common shorthand description for darkly comic and surreal TV shows. Do you see that influence out there in the world?
No. I don’t see it at all.
| Christopher Nolan |
BY
BACKCHANNEL
JUN 20, 2023 6:00 AM
WHEN WIRED HEARD that Christopher Nolan and his producer—and wife—Emma Thomas were coming out with a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, we were perplexed. At least for a moment. It is hard for WIRED to resist a Nolan–Thomas film. Nolan has a real love of science, just like us. (We know this because, well, it's pretty obvious in some of his movies, but also because Nolan guest-edited an issue of WIRED back in 2014 when his film Interstellar came out and we got him to geek out over physics.) Add to that, the duo like to bend their audience's minds. And their eyeballs. They make superhero movies! It's so much chum for WIRED.
| Abel Ferrara |
Ana Bogdan
Mr. Ferrara, although your independent films have often been described as provocative and controversial, you have always stayed the course. Has it been difficult?
It is difficult, for sure. You have got to learn not to compromise, there's a lot of hard lessons — heartbreaking ones in trying to maintain the honesty and the purity of the film. But I feel like I have no choice in the matter, especially when the road I chose was one of self-expression. It's the gift I have. If I was a good enough musician, would I have been one? If I could paint, would I have been a painter? I don’t know, but this is a gift I have, so I'm not questioning it, I've been doing it since I'm 16.
| Alfred Hitchcock and Oriana Fallaci |
Oriana Fallaci interviewed Alfred Hitchcock in 1963 when his movie The Birds screened in Cannes
Oriana Fallaci interviewed the British suspense master in 1963 when his movie The Birds screened in Cannes, but while she had a good understanding of the cruelty beneath the surface of the filmmaker she so admired, she clearly was hoodwinked by his narrative of being a devoted, even sexless, husband, entitling the piece, “Mr. Chastity.”
***
by Oriana Fallaci
For years I had been wanting to meet Hitchcock. For years I had been to every Hitchcock film, read every article about Hitchcock, basked in contemplation of every photograph of Hitchcock: the one of him hanging by his own tie, the one of him reflected in a pool of blood, the one of him playing with a skull immersed in a bathtub. I liked everything about him: his big, Father Christmas paunch, his twinkling little pig eyes, his blotchy, alcoholic complexion, his mummified corpses, his corpses shut inside wardrobes, his corpses chopped into pieces and shut inside suitcases, his corpses temporarily buried beneath beds of roses, his anguished flights, his crimes, his suspense, those typically English jokes that make even death ridiculous and even vulgarity elegant. I might be wrong, but I cannot help laughing at the story about the two actors in the cemetery watching their friend being lowered into his grave. The first one says to the other, “How old are you, Charlie?” And Charlie answers, “Eighty-nine.” The first one then observes, “Then there’s no point in your going home, Charlie.” …
| Mercedes Barcha, Gabriel García Márquez, Gonzalo and Rodrigo. |
Not a day goes by that I don’t come across a reference to your novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It’s impossible not to speculate about what you would have made of all this.
Gabo,
April 17 was the sixth anniversary of your death, and the world has gone on largely as it always has, with human beings behaving with stunning and creative cruelty, sublime generosity and sacrifice, and everything in between.