Movies

The Kill Bill director said the next two films after his latest release may well be his last

Quentin Tarantino revealed this week that he plans to call it quits after making his 10th film.

“It’s not etched in stone, but that is the plan,” the director of cult classics such as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill told an audience at the American Film Market conference in Santa Monica, according to Deadline. “If I get to the 10th, do a good job and don’t screw it up, well that sounds like a good way to end the old career.”

The filmmaker was at a session with the cast-members of his latest release, a Western called The Hateful Eight. The film, which centers around a group of outlaws stranded in a blizzard, also happens to be his eighth. “I like that I will leave a 10-film filmography,” he said, “and so I’ve got two more to go after this.”

Read more at Deadline

"Chris and I work as a sort of breathless, constant sprint because we are just trying to keep up with our own ideas"

Answer by Hans Zimmer, Interstellar composer, on Quora.

I think one of the things that is really great about working with Chris is that he doesn’t, in any way, get in the way of my imagination. In fact, he works very hard at not having me confined by the mechanics of filmmaking. So, our process is usually starting long conversations just riffing on ideas. Then slowly I start writing and experimenting, coming up with sounds, etc., all the while keeping in constant conversation with Chris.

In Interstellar, for instance, there’re so many themes, so many pieces, which always got to a certain point during the writing process but never had an ending, because Chris and I would get to a certain point with an idea and then abandon it because we got excited about the next idea. You have to think of how Chris and I work as a sort of breathless, constant sprint because we are just trying to keep up with our own ideas. The ideas are so plentiful when Chris and I get together, but the execution always takes more time and it can be so frustrating. It’s sometimes very frustrating for him as well because he’s trying to make a movie and he’s waiting on the music.

When it comes to the music for Interstellar, I can honestly say that in one way or another, the music is our music, not just my music. It’s entirely our music, and that’s a testament to how much I let Chris into my world. The great thing is that as a composer, you can only write from the heart and from your innermost place. So, you have to trust your director. And that’s the thing — there’s a great sense of trust and a great sense of balance that Chris brings to the composing process. Because Chris cuts his movies in his garage, (giving his films a sort of a homemade quality), he never makes me feel that I have the enormous weight of the canvas on my shoulders. His editing process is really helpful for my composing process. The work and the story is always brought back to the personal and the intimate, and that’s perfect for how I work.

This question originally appeared on Quora: What is it like working with Christopher Nolan?

An eyewitness at the theater says the woman "flipped out" when he tapped her on the shoulder

A man at a California movie theater who asked a woman to switch off her cellphone got far more than he bargained for after she sprayed mace in his eyes, Mashable reports.

The incident, according to an eyewitness who was sitting nearby, took place at a Monday night screening of the recently released film Mr. Turner.

The film had just begun at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theater when a man sitting in the back row began requesting the woman in front of him to switch off her glowing phone.

When he tapped her on the shoulder after being ignored a few times, the witness said she “flipped out,” accused the man of hitting her and threatened to call the police. Without warning, she then uncapped a bottle of mace and sprayed the man.

Mashable reports that the woman sat back down and watched 20 minutes of the movie before security came and escorted her out.

[Mashable]

Bruce Campbell will play Ash Williams again

Evil Dead is finding new life on the small screen.

On Monday, the cable network Starz announced a new series, Ash vs. Evil Dead, a spin-off of the Sam Raimi movie series that will find actor Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash Williams, the New York Times reports.

The 10-episode series is expected next year.

Raimi, who went on to direct the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, will direct the first episode of the series, which he wrote with his brother, Ivan Raimi. The first Evil Dead movie, considered a cult classic, dates back to 1981.

[NYT]

Backers confirm the casting choice

Producers confirmed Monday that Joseph Gordon-Levitt will play Edward Snowden in the Oliver Stone movie set to start shooting in Munich in January.

The casting choice has been rumored since September, but was finally confirmed today, just two months before the film is set to begin filming, the Guardian reports.

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay based on two books about Snowden and NSA surveillance (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena) and reportedly sought out independent production companies Open Road and Endgame in order to protect the production from political pressures.

Wait until the Golden Globes (seriously!) for an awards ceremony with a point

For the first time ever, the “Hollywood Film Awards” will be broadcast live on TV(this Friday on CBS), though the prize has a history of sorts. Advertisements on CBS are pushing the ceremony’s predictive capabilities by noting that last year, Dallas Buyers Club stars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won prizes at last year’s untelevised ceremony, on their way to picking up their respective Oscars.

But the Hollywood Film Awards, produced by the late Dick Clark’s production company with winners chosen by “a top-secret committee of 12 industry insiders,” are less an influential force upon awards season than a barometer of buzz. They’re among the many, many precursor awards that make the march to the Oscars, in late February, feel more and more laborious.

The Hollywood Film Awards market themselves as a primer of the performers likeliest to win awards — and there are no losers, just people the secret panel chooses to studiously ignore. This makes them particularly useless, because they don’t reflect any person or any group of people’s taste, just an attempt to predict other people’s tastes while ensuring that enough constituencies are flattered as possible. They’re only “awards” because a plain old cocktail party wouldn’t lure many celebrities. It doesn’t really count as predicting the Oscar results when the Academy honors four actors a year and, last year, the Hollywood Film Awards honored nine, not counting a lifetime achievement award winner and the best ensemble prize winner, August: Osage County.

That film ended up winning zero Oscars and getting tepid reviews, but pre-release it was perceived as having potential to win Oscars for Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, so it was important to include. It’s become a truism that the Oscars are more about hype than quality, but at least there’s a pretense of judging art on its merits. Ceremonies like the Hollywood Film Awards or the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which just announced that The Theory of Everything would be winning its “Desert Palm Achievement Award,” are way stations to Oscar; “Focus Features made a point of going after this award,” wrote Deadline of Theory star Eddie Redmayne’s Palm Desert prize, “as it is perfectly timed.” Timed for Oscar voting, that is; those Oscar voters already paying attention may well be charmed by Redmayne’s speech in the desert. But how many of them weighing personal charm this heavily over performance can there be? And if your production company works behind-the-scenes to ensure you win a prize just so that you’ll win another prize, how meaningful is the honor?

That’s needlessly naive, of course: Studios pursue Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards not merely for their own sakes but for the potential Oscar boost. And yet those are, still, the only precursor awards worth watching. The SAGs reflect the thinking of actual Hollywood professionals who will go on to vote for the Oscars, too, and so correlate with the biggest prize due to shared passion rather than “Hollywood insiders” practicing strategic gamesmanship. The Golden Globes are voted on by perhaps the least reputable folks of all — a group of foreign correspondents based in Hollywood who largely want to throw a fun party — but are unafraid to go their own way.

Jennifer Lawrence beat eventual Oscar victor Lupita Nyong’o at last year’s Golden Globes, and Mickey Rourke took the prize over Milk star Sean Penn in 2009. Most famously, perhaps, the Golden Globes handed several nominations to The Tourist, a box-office bomb with zero chance to win an Oscar. They were decisions with which people could definitely disagree, but they reflected a set of ideas about what is worth honoring (in the Globes’ case, stardom and oddity over historicism and seriousness) that went beyond trying to predict Oscar voters’ decisions. An award given on the basis of the buzz behind a person potentially winning another award opens up a befuddling hall of mirrors; just wait until the Golden Globes, when the endless cycle of “buzz” finally merges with a sensibility.

Watch as Katniss meets Cressida and her crew for the first time