Interview: Affonso Gonçalves and the Art of Editing Great Actresses

Affonso Gonçalves with this ACE win for editing True Detective (2014)Affonso Gonçalves is a man that every actress lover ought to both thank and envy. Over the course of his career in TV and film he has been privvy to a consisently vivid series of strong and sometimes downright iconic performances by several of our greatest actress. He's helped shape the way we see them, too.

His career began in earnest with as an assisant editor on Todd Solondz's cult hit about a nerdy teenager Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and soon thereafter he was editing multiple films for Ira Sachs and other independent minded directors. In the 20 years since his debut he's edited performances by Tilda Swinton (Only Lovers Left Alive), Kate Winslet (Mildred Pierce), Kerry Washington (Night Catches Us), Michelle Williams (The Hawk is Dying), Kim Basinger (The Door in the Floor), and  Patricia Clarkson (Married Life). More famously he's edited two star-making young performances that went on to be Oscar nominated for Best Actress in Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone (2010) and Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Next week he'll likely be able to add two more Oscar nominated performances to his editing triumphs with Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara's duet in Carol.

I had the pleasure recently of grilling him about watching and shaping these Best Actress performances in Winter's Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Carol. Here's our conversation (edited for length and clarity) with very mild Carol spoilers if you haven't yet seen it. The film opens in additional theaters this weekend. More after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Costume Designer's Guild Nods: Sandy Powell x 2. And More...

It's Guild Week. The week when many artists get their hopes up for nominations since the guilds have so many categories for their particular craft unlike Oscar's mere 5 for the altogether. But since we love costumes, the more the merrier. Congratulations to the nominees who we'll discuss after the jump...

Click to read more ...

HBO’s LGBT History: Six by Sondheim (2013)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

Last week we looked at the utterly forgettable doc The Out List which mistakes sometimes compelling interviews spliced together as enough of a premise for an entire film. While that film celebrated the visibility of coming out, implicitly praising those who wear their sexuality on their sleeves, presenting them as necessary for political activism, we focus today on a towering figure of the American musical stage whose sexuality is both an acknowledged fact but also rarely a rallying point.

You’d never refer to Stephen Sondheim as a “gay songwriter and lyricist” both because in many ways he predates that type of taxonomy but also because he exceeds it. Not that his sexuality hasn’t informed his work. He has, after all, written some of the most complex characters of the American musical theater tradition, all of whom wrestle with their own vexing and at times explicitly transgressive desires.

James Lapine’s Six By Sondheim is structured as a close study of six of the composer’s most famed songs, and only addresses his sexuality when they discuss Company a show that has long felt like a melancholy queer anthem. Perhaps that’s what one reviewer caught when he first saw the show: “As it stands now, it’s for ladies’ matinees, homos and misogynists,” wrote Variety. What emerges in Lapine’s documentary is a celebration of Sondheim — so many interviews with the composer over the years show he’s perhaps the most eloquent commentator of musical theater of the past century — but also a rather touching portrait of an older gay man looking back on his life, his relationship with his mother, and even his failed desire to be a father (“Art is the other way of having children,” he muses).

more...

Click to read more ...

Interview: Phyllis Nagy on Patricia Highsmith, Sunset Blvd, and "Carol"

Phyllis Nagy in Palm Springs with Cate BlanchettMonday night through Tuesday evening was a special 24 hours in the lives of Team Experience. At the NYFCC awards gala, Alec Baldwin, presenting the Best Director prize to Todd Haynes (Carol), quoted a Film Comment piece by our dear friend and podcast mate Nick Davis. That same night Phyllis Nagy was honored for Best Screenplay by the Pulitzer winning playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Lincoln) himself. Though I was not in attendance for the Carol-heavy NYFCC gala on Monday night where the film also took Best Cinematography and Best Film), I had the opportunity to congratulate Nagy the next evening on her fine work adapting the year's best film from the original 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt." The occassion was a cocktail event for the movie hosted by former and future Todd Haynes muse Julianne Moore (here are a few photos of that reunion.)

It was our second chat with the sharp and talented Phyllis Nagy, who up until Carol had been best known for her stage plays and the HBO film Mrs Harris (2006) which she wrote and directed.

Here's our original conversation which we hope you'll enjoy...

NATHANIEL: So Phyllis I started this  as kind of a joke to myself but then decided to commit to it and have literally asked every person I interviewed from Carol ... How come you're such a genius? 

PHYLLIS NAGY: Well, practice. [Laughs] In this case, yeah, practice, many years of it. Which ultimately aided it, it didn’t hurt it, it may have felt like that from time to time...

NATHANIEL: You mean the long gestation period?

PHYLLIS NAGY: Yeah, when no one wants to [make a film], it gives you the opportunity to obsessively go over it again and again on your own time, at least make it a document that you’re proud of. So, luckily...

[Patricia Highsmith's interiority, great actors, and tough rewrites after the jump...]

Click to read more ...

15 Great Moments Inside Movie Theaters in '15

Confession: I am extremely terrible about keeping a calendar, or even a letterboxd list which I update sporadically from time to time before forgetting again. In short the only "diary" of any sort I have is this ode to movies you're visiting now... The Film Experience. Nevertheless in reviewing the film year I realized that I haven't been frequenting NYC's wonderful repertory theaters as much as in past years. Must fix.  And I really have to do a better of keeping track of what I'm seeing in general lest I actually forget I saw something and it's missing from LISTS. *gasp*

But I  ♥ going to the movies. And if you're reading this it's safe to assume that you do too. So it's list time. Please share your favorite moments of moviegoing this year in the comments. 

15 Favorite Moments Inside Movie Theaters in '15
because it's the best place to be!
 

15 The Incredible Hulk (2008) 
April 29th: That moment when my best friend and I suddenly realized that we could leave anytime during the Marvel Movie Marathon (preceding the premiere of The Age of Ultron) and still get the same seat. What a relief. I mean... nobody should have to sit through Iron Man 2 ever again!

14 Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
April 6th: Sitting down for a special invite-only screening of Clouds of Sils Maria and seeing so many actors I loved in the audience (Diane Lane, Parker Posey, Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin). Turner was surprisingly willing to make conversation afterwards, her voice miraculously even lower than onscreen in person; she kindly ignored my fairly obvious terror at finally meeting one of my all time favorite goddesses.

13 Hateful Eight (2015) - INTERMISSION ONLY!
Dec: Though I've admired Teo Bugbee as a writer for over a year (and she's written for the site on rare occasion) we finally met recently and every time we managed to sync up our schedules (lunch, drinks at a bar, a screening of Hateful Eight) it somehow become an extra imaginary screening of Carol we talked about the movie so much. Basically Teo is the only way I made it through Hateful Eight. 

Carol, Chi-Raq, two older classics and more after the jump...

Click to read more ...