Klaus Badelt | Composer

Badelt's Russian Tea Party with Klaus Badelt

For K-19: The Widowmaker, you wrote a very orchestral, traditional score. What was your motivation for doing so?

Well, Harrison Ford as a Russian. That's not very convincing by itself, and so you will need music to help sell it. At the beginning, when I first started working on the movie, it ran about four or five hours long. There was a large introduction to the characters before they launched the boat, with Harrison Ford's character, his wife, his whole history. It was all there. So you had a much bigger emotional buildup for what would eventually happen in the film. And therefore, as a Russian, he was much more believable - at least, compared to what you have now. So the music had an important job at the beginning to make you feel the roots and history of the characters. To tell you where they're from, what they feel, why Captain Vostrikov has issues with his father. Is he really the cold strict military government type? Why is Liam Neeson's character so close to his crew? We just jump right in, so you don't get it. You don't have the 300 years of history and how connected Russian society is to the military, and their special pride, and the feel of it. If you go to Russia, and spend some time there, it's quite different. They're a very proud people......
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Olivier Assayas | Director

Seven Questions for Olivier Assayas

indieWIRE: Does "Irma Vep" belong to an aesthetic tradition?

Olivier Assayas: That's tough to answer because for the first time I've made a film which fit into a genre, which is movies about movies. I knew that I was on ground that had already been covered so that encouraged me to be as radical as I could, to invent my own way of thinking about cinema and not do it like Truffaut when he did "Day For Night". I tried to make something I'm not used to doing, which is comedy, but at the same time I thought this could be a comedy about an ambitious subject-- the creative process. It's like an exercise in film schizophrenia, and in that sense the film tries to move away from looking like anything else.

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Director, Woody Allen

Woody Allen: He's No Dustin Hoffman

Woody Allen

"People think my movies are exact copies of my private life, but they're totally made up," insists Woody Allen. Okay, maybe not totally. Speaking from a swank Manhattan hotel, the writer-director-actor who celebrates his sixty-first birthday today admits that his new comedy, Mighty Aphrodite, was inspired by his real-life adopted daughter Dylan. (Mia Farrow accused Allen of sexually abusing Dylan in 1992, but the charges were dismissed.)
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