Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rebuffed an invitation from Oliver Stone to be the subject of his next documentary. "It is right that this person [ Stone] is considered part of the opposition in the US, but opposition in the US is part of the Great Satan," the president's media adviser told the Fars news agency.
Stone, who has previously made documentaries about Fidel Castro and the Middle East conflict, responded this week with a statement: "I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."
Movie director takes to the stage (1)
Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Michael Haneke and Anthony Minghella have all directed operas for the stage, and Woody Allen and David Cronenberg are each about to have a go. Now it's the turn of Serbian director and two-time Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica, who has been receiving standing ovations at the Bastille Opera in Paris with an adaptation of his haunting tragicomic 1988 movie, Time of the Gypsies.
"The opera is going to be how Monty Python could have imagined opera," Kusturica commented while in rehearsals. "Sometimes it is a parody of opera, sometimes it is a self-parody."
While the 100-minute, one-act opera tells the ill-fated love story between two teen gypsies, the stage is filled with dwarfs, jugglers, acrobats and musicians along with a tractor, caravans, village huts that lift off the ground, three stuffed turkeys and a reportedly well-behaved flock of geese. Kusturica's 10-man punk/techno band, No Smoking Orchestra, perform the score with the Garbage Serbian Philharmonia, who use classical instruments. And clips are shown from Time of the Gypsies, Taxi Driver and Kusturica's new documentary on Diego Maradona.
Movie director takes to the stage (2)
Spike Lee, who has never directed for the stage, is going in at the deep end - on Broadway - with a new production of the POW comedy-drama Stalag 17. Billy Wilder's 1953 film version starred William Holden, who won an Oscar for his performance.
"I just don't want to do the old okey-doke thing, dust off some old piece and make a revival," Lee says. "If I'm going to make this venture, this debut to the stage, I have to try to come up with some things that are going to make it interesting for me." He wants the cast to be multi-racial, to have more profanity in the script to make it more authentic, and to address how relationships between prisoners could be intimate at times.
"We have to deal with that stuff," Lee said, adding, "We're not casting rappers. 50 Cent is not going to be in this."
'Once' retains piece of box-office pie
Although blockbusters once again dominate US cinema screens for the summer, John Carney's micro-budget Dublin musical Once continues to power away at the box-office there, having taken more than $4 million after seven weeks on very limited release. It's now playing on 128 screens, less than any other film on this week's US top 20, whereas the summer sequels are showing on thousands of screens. Reel News recently tipped Once as a contender for an Oscar nomination in the best original song category next spring, and Variety this week echoed that view.
Hawke takes his fang work seriously
Ethan Hawke is growing his hair before flying to Australia and co-starring with Willem Dafoe
as duelling vampires in Daybreakers. This, Hawke insists, is not your average common or garden neck-biting horror movie, but a meaningful allegory on the way we live today.
"It's set way in the future where everyone is a vampire and we're all eating our own resources, so we're trying to get off on foreign humans," Hawke says. "We're trying to get off of trying to create blood substitutes. It's a big analogy about what's going on now. It's really dark and weird and everybody's sucking each other's blood."
