SQUARE PEG NO MORE
Talking with ‘Sex And The City’ star Sarah Jessica Parker
interview by Fred Topel

Sex and the City: The Movie has had millions of fans metaphorically lining up for tickets since the TV series ended. Still, filmmakers want more than just their core fans to enjoy the film. Star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker has been pleased that viewers from all walks of life have complimented her during her promotional tour for the film.

“I’ve spoken to a number of people over the last 48 hours who confessed that they really weren’t fans of the show, or just didn’t really spend their time watching it, and that they were surprised that they could be drawn in and feel certain things,” said Parker. “These were straight men, straight women, gay men, and all sorts of people in-between.”

The film does include many high fashion Easter eggs for the loyal fans. When Carrie Bradshaw goes through her closet, the filmmakers had to secure all the archived ensembles from the show’s six year run. Other items were harder to secure.

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THIS IS HOW HE ROLLS
Talking with the impossibly pretty Ashton Kutcher
Interview by Fred Topel

In romantic comedies like What Happens In Vegas, two mismatched lovers spend the whole movie fighting, only to realize they love each other after all. It makes for a cute story, but star Ashton Kutcher does not believe real life works like that. He credits the success of his marriage to Demi Moore to their similarities.

“I don’t think opposites attract,” Kutcher says. “I think like attracts like. So I don’t think that they do attract, opposites. Only when you’re talking about magnetic poles. I think in order to create affinity with something, you have to be like it. There’s actually a whole lot of neurolinguistic programming stuff that has actually proved that as well, so I would say that that’s the key.”

While his costar, Cameron Diaz, plays a high-powered executive to his commitment phobic slacker, they had more in common behind the scenes. “I mean, to show up to work and have to look at a good looking woman who’s funny and happy to be alive and joyous and nice to people, that’s a nightmare,” he jokes. “We had to deal with it every single day. You know, I don’t think that there’s anybody like her. I think she’s maybe the only, I would say, true comedic leading lady in our business right now, that has really honed that craft. And she’s worked with Jim Carrey, she’s worked with Adam Sandler, she’s worked with Mike Myers. She’s worked with every great comedic actor I can think of, so she’s got a one up on all of us.”

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BY GEORGE, WE THINK HE’S GOT IT
Talking with Leatherheads director and star George Clooney
Interview by Fred Topel

George Clooney is such a handsome guy, he really shouldn’t deprive his fans of seeing him on screen. Fortunately, even when he directs movies, he’s appeared in them. His third film, Leatherheads, actually stars Clooney, where he only played cameos in Good Night, and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

“The truth is, I did it because this was a part that for a long, long, long time I wanted to play and I thought I was the right guy to play it,” said Clooney. “And I also thought, ’I’m 46. If I don’t do it now, I’m done. This is it. This is my last shot at it.’ [Steven] Soderbergh was going to do it in 1998 when we were going to do it and I was very excited about that sort of prospect and things sort of moved on and the script wasn’t in shape. We were sort of in pre-production, but we had an outline. We had two or three scenes that we loved and characters that we loved, but we didn’t have a plot.”

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HE GOT GAME
21 star Jim Sturgess has what counts
Interview by Robert Newton

Music fans will know Jim Sturgess from Julie Taymor’s visually lush Beatles musical, Across The Universe. The arthouse set will recognize him from his recent turn opposite Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman in The Other Boleyn Girl. The rest of America is about to know him in a big way, as he’s all over the casino thriller 21, in theaters now.

In the movie, based on Ben Mezrich’s book Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story Of How 6 M.I.T. Students Took Vegas For Millions, the 26-year-old UK-born Sturgess plays Ben Campbell, a poor Boston boy who needs money to pay for his Ivy League education. Enter mathematics professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), who pimps out his best and brightest as blackjack card counters in Vegas, where they have earned him millions of dollars over the years. Naturally, something goes wrong that needs fixing in a big way.

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MR. HITMAN’S HOLIDAY
Talking with ‘In Bruges’ director Martin McDonagh
by Christopher Sandlin

Many directors go their entire career without winning prestigious awards for their work. British director Martin McDonagh, on the other hand, won an Oscar for his directorial debut with the 2006 short film Six Shooter. Before getting started in film, McDonagh became one of Great Britain’s most celebrated (and tabloid-fodder) contemporary theatre directors. In 1997, at the age of 27, he was the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four productions running simultaneously in London’s West End. His grotesque, blood-filled (yet comedic) plays quickly thrust him into the spotlight as the Quentin Tarantino of England. Oh, and if that’s not interesting enough, did you hear about the time he nearly got into a knockdown with Sean Connery at a London theatre awards show? If you haven’t heard of this rebellious playwright yet, this won’t be the last time.

McDonagh marks another first with In Bruges, his first stab at writing and directing a feature film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. He also scored an impressive list of star talent with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. The film is a clever and inventive twist on the hitman flick, so if you think there’s nothing new to say about hired killers, think again. We recently sat down with the Oscar-winning writer/director and talked about his new film, his experience with Hollywood badboy Colin Farrell, and the cure for boredom in Belgium.

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TRIUMPH OF THE WILLS
Talking with Will Ferrell and Will Arnett of Semi-Pro
By Robert Newton

There is an episode from the tenth season of Mike Judge’s “King of the Hill” in which Texas ‘tweener Bobby Hill learns he has a knack for making people laugh. In order to prevent the boy from cutting up so much in school, his folks enroll him in a clowning class at a local community college. The pretentious instructor proceeds to take all the fun out of what should otherwise be a delightful pursuit. Watching the kid bomb at his graduation performance is painful, and the episode serves as an all-too-familiar reminder to many comedians that staying grounded is key in staying funny.

Will Ferrell has never taken a course like that, and thank goodness.
The former “SNL” superstar spent all of February on the road, promoting his new basketball comedy Semi-Pro on his FunnyOrDie.com Comedy Tour (with Nick Swardson, Demetri Martin and Zach Galifianakis), stopping at key colleges (and Radio City Music Hall) and selling out every one. The movie is set in the ‘70s, and is about a self-styled one-hit wonder named Jackie Moon (Ferrell), who invests the riches earned from his single “Love Me Sexy” and buys the Flint (Michigan) Tropics, a fictional basketball team in the very real American Basketball Association (ABA). Jackie is also a player coach, and his crazy schemes to put butts in seats amp up when he learns that the NBA is going to absorb the ABA – but only four teams. Thus, the quest for fourth place begins.

While Ferrell, co-star Will Arnett (the doofus magician Gob Bluth on “Arrested Development”) and company were at Boston College for their show at the Conte Forum, a dozen or so college writers assembled – many having their first interview with someone like Ferrell. I, however, who will be 40 on my next birthday, felt like the narc at the NORML rally, the one of these things on “Sesame Street” that is not like the other. I sit back and thaw out from the freezing rain outside and let the kids run the show, quietly hoping that the whole thing doesn’t turn into that Chris Farley sketch where the best he could come up with for questions when interviewing an historic personage was a knob-waxing, “Do you remember that time in that movie when you…?”

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HOLDEN ONTO A HERO
Talking with Charlie Bartlett director Jon Poll
By Robert Newton

“What attracted me to the movie after reading a hundred scripts,” says editor-turned-producer-turned-director Jon Poll, “is that the humor in it is so truth-based; what I love about it is that this odd bird makes choices that are not all perfect, but all come from a place of sincere honesty.”

In Charlie Bartlett, the 40-Year-Old Virgin producer’s first turn calling the shots as director, teen rebel Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) realizes that there is money in selling his behavioral medications to his classmates. Beyond the immediate reward of quick cash, he discovers that he genuinely enjoys helping people, setting up shop in a school bathroom and hearing the woes of the school’s troubled teens.

“We live in a world of a lot of cynical, clever, smart filmmaking – of films that are ‘Tarantinoesque,’ if you will,” he explains, “and here we come with this character not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. Ultimately, people relate to that kind of character and situation. It’s not a bold choice, but it’s a different one in today’s climate.”

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SAVAGE PATCH KIDS
A talk with Oscar-nominated ‘The Savages’ star Laura Linney
by Fred Topel

Ask any actor the generic questions of what attracted them to their latest project, and they’ll give some rehearsed answer about the script or the filmmakers. Laura Linney is aware of this, so was hesitant to give such a response about her latest film, The Savages. However, she has the credibility to back it up.

“You hear that over and over again but when a script is undeniably good, you pay attention,” she said. “It becomes clear to me there’s something to me that something’s going on when I read the script through for the first time and I start working on it before I finish reading it. Your actor brain just turns on. I can’t help it. All of a sudden, ideas start coming and you start hearing the rhythm of things. For a script to be that evolved that early is very rare. It’s happened a few times luckily for me. But it’s not typical.”

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WHO WILL SHAVE YOUR SOUL?
Tonsorial talk with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
Interview by Robert Nesti

At the onset of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, there’s a short clip that highlights the collaboration between director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp. In a series of quick cuts, scenes from Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, The Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory flash across the screen, making viewers aware of the remarkable artistic relationship between these two artists.

Sweeney Todd, though, may be their most challenging project to date. Adapted from Stephen Sondheim’s landmark 1979 Broadway musical, it follows the bloody exploits of a serial killer in Victorian London who dispatches his victims by cutting their throats and, in an unholy alliance with an enterprising baker, turns their remains into meat pies that become the toast of the town. On stage the musical was a shocker – an exercise in Grand Guignol melodrama melded with Sondheim’s highly romantic, cinematic score and Harold Prince’s Brechtian staging. The result was as if “The Threepenny Opera” starred Freddy Krueger. The show was a prestige hit, winning a slew of awards, but losing some 40% of its investment; but has had a considerable life since then – turning up in smaller versions in resident and regional theaters throughout the world. Most recently, it premiered in Iceland; and an innovative British regional theater production (directed by John Doyle) was a hit in London and New York.

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GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE BLOOD
We spend some quality time with scream queen Debbie Rochon
By Robert Newton

Fay Wray from King Kong. Jaime Lee Curtis from Halloween. Linnea Quigley from, well, practically every scary B-movie produced in the 1980’s. Debbie Rochon is among the ranks of a long and storied tradition of “scream queens,” actresses whose association with horror films has made their names synonymous with the genre. With over 100 film credits in the last 20 years, the 39-year-old Canadian-born gal is a marquee name among the scream set, and by having stayed around for so long, she is starting to enjoy success as more than just a pretty face with a nice body, something she proved recently after some rather startling health news.

“I usually weigh around 110 to 115,” Rochon explains, unabashed, “but quite suddenly, my weight went up to 145. I had a slew of other symptoms, and soon found out I had a tumor.”

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