Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills
| 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.
| Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Úrsula Corberó in Kill the Jockey. |
Venice film festival
Luis Ortega’s film veers off the racetrack as jockey Remo drifts around the city streets, pursued by a pregnant girlfriend who wants him back and a gangster who wants him dead
Xan Brooks
29 August 2024
People ride horses for all sorts of reasons, explains the jockey hero of Luis Ortega’s offbeat and stylish Argentinian crime drama. They ride to arrive at their destination more quickly, or to wage war more effectively. Mostly, he says, they ride to escape. This jockey is familiar with the nagging urge to take flight. He is a study in motion, a figure in flux. Show him a fence and he will promptly jump it – or die trying.
The cinematic legend died the way he lived – in a blaze of inscrutable, impossible film-making. We meet the team who helped shoot the final scene of his swansong just before his death by assisted suicide
Xan Brooks
Monday 20 May 2024
In Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.
Somerset Maugham appears as a flawed actor in a colonial morality play inspired by his classic short story
Xan Brooks
Thursday 11 May 2023
O
The Proudlock scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, that pitiless chronicler of so much human frailty. It now provides the prompt for Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, an ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions that beats back to the humid heyday of empire and instals the bestselling author as a flawed player in the drama. “We will be remembered through our stories,” Maugham declares at one point. He speaks with the bland self-assurance of a man who invariably writes the final draft.
This simmering 70s-set domestic drama is warm, expansive and funny – a pure pleasure to read
The times are a-changing in solid, respectable New Prospect, Illinois, where Christmas 1971 arrives in a whirl of sex, drugs and folk music, while the Vietnam war grinds on off stage. Inside the First Reformed church, the worshippers are attempting to ride out the storm, casting about for something rock solid and true. This might be God or family or a fresh myth to believe in, a 20th-century pursuit-of-happiness tale, self-authored if need be.
New Prospect is in a state of flux but Jonathan Franzen remains reliably, defiantly Franzen-esque, tending to his faltering flock in fair weather or foul, and whatever the ructions in the country at large. Crossroads, his splendid sixth novel, comes billed as the first part of a proposed trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, named after Edward Casaubon’s absurd, unfinished tract in Middlemarch. But, in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big midwestern family.
Places you’d be desperate to avoid in real life provide a magnetic lure in books by authors from Dickens to Du Maurier and even Richard Adams
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At some point when writing the story, I realised I was naively blundering into a long and noble tradition of books about terrible houses, much as I’ve naively blundered into many awkward, unfamiliar houses down the years. Maybe I love these places in fiction because I hate and fear them in real life.
Below is a list of good books that fetch up at bad houses. These houses are variously frightening, unsettling or funny – but they all tap into the mounting panic and inadequacy that we (or possibly just me) feel on arriving at an unfamiliar place and realising within seconds that we don’t fit in, that we will never fit in, and that the best that can be hoped for is to avoid some awful faux pas. These are the houses where the flush doesn’t work and the doorknob comes off in your hand and where you say the wrong thing and the host decides that, on balance, he hates you.
Apologies to Sartre, but I think he had it slightly wrong. Hell is not other people; it is other people’s houses.
8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s novel peaks early, with Pip’s visits to spooky Satis House (apparently named after a real mansion in Rochester, Kent). This is the home of Miss Havisham, still wrapped in her wedding dress, who keeps an uneaten tiered cake mouldering on the table and ensures all the clock hands point to twenty-to-nine. Dickens, of course, wrote great ghost stories in his time. But I don’t think he ever conjured a phantom quite as tragic and creepy as this.
Stumble upon this novel at an impressionable age and the experience is like walking into the middle of a firework display; dazzling and colourful and a little scary, too. Fowles rustles up a gripping tale of seduction and betrayal as cocky Nicholas Urfe falls under the spell of a puckish Greek recluse. The island estate is a laboratory, which leaves Nicholas Urfe as the rat. In playing tricks on his hero, Fowles plays beautiful tricks on us, too.
| Robert Aickman |
The plainness of this story's setting is not so much a background for horror as its very source
Xan Brooks
Monday 29 October 2012
Robert Aickman, like many of the finest British horror writers, was a respectable Jekyll who indulged his Hyde on the side. By day he was co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association and chairman of the London opera society. By night he penned a series of self-styled "strange stories" about haunted houses, mysterious visitors and antique dolls that come alive when the door is closed. The Hospice, written six years before the author's death in 1981, is one of the best.
| Sophia Loren, photographed by her son Edoardo Ponti, in her house in Geneva in 2020. Photograph: Edoardo Ponti |
The CGI lioness that materialises at intervals in the Netflix drama The Life Ahead is a sad and sorry-looking thing. It has a glossy gold coat and a twitching gold tail and brings a dose of magic realism to an otherwise gritty 21st-century tale. But it is too skimpy and tame. It lacks exoticism and menace. It pales when compared to the movie’s other big beast.
| Sophia Loren |
Ostensibly, The Life Ahead spins the story of Madame Rosa, a fiery samaritan and former sex worker on the coast of southern Italy. But in essence, at heart, it is a luxurious showcase for the 86-year-old Sophia Loren, who strides through the action with her grey hair untethered and her hoop earrings swinging; a Mother Courage for the ages, bruised but unbowed. Directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, the film mines the actor’s back catalogue, riffs off her colourful life story and stirs memories of the combative characters she played in her heyday, in films such as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). “Things don’t change too much,” she says. “The body changes. The mind does not.”
Werner Herzog: ‘My older brother thinks every film I’ve made is lousy and boring.’ |
At 77 and holed up in lockdown, the veteran director and latterday actor shows no signs of slowing down or accepting any limitations
by Xan Brookshe digital world, what a fabulous place, Wener Herzog declares from his home in Los Angeles. Fraught with danger. Filled with possibility. It is thanks to digital that he can stream his films to audiences in Africa and Asia, despite the fact that the theatres are closed. It is thanks to digital that he can receive an email from a student in Missoula, Montana and respond to her question in less than a minute. It is thanks to digital that we are able to converse over Skype, peering into each other’s houses from a 5,000-mile distance. “So this is wonderful,” he cries. “Wonderful, wonderful!” Then the connection cuts out and I have to dial his number again.