Movie Interviews

The Friedkin Connection by William Friedkin.

Books
Arts

Friedkin, Who Pushed Film Forward, Looks Back

1:08pm April 23, 2013

by Susan Stamberg

In his memoir The Friedkin Connection, the legendary director of films like The Exorcist and The French Connection recounts his journey from a poor Chicago neighborhood to the apex of Hollywood success.

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Robert Redford directs and stars as Jim Grant in The Company You Keep, a film about retired radicals living out nervous lives in hiding.

Arts

Redford: An Entertainer Who Looks To Inform

9:52pm April 22, 2013

by NPR Staff

Oscar-winning director and actor Robert Redford is back in theaters with The Company You Keep, a look at aging American counterculture revolutionaries. He spoke with NPR's Robert Siegel about his career, his passion for journalism and how a thoughtful teacher helped encourage him.

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Spc. Tad Donoho exhibits a "pink belly," in which soldiers hit a colleague's stomach until it bruises for his birthday. "[Photographer Tim Hetherington] had this tremendous interest in human beings," Sebastian Junger tells NPR's Renee Montagne. "In some w

World News

In 'Which Way,' A War Photographer In His Element

12:22pm April 18, 2013

by NPR Staff

Writer-director Sebastian Junger remembers his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington, killed in April 2011 by mortar fire in the Libyan city of Misrata.

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Photographer Tim Hetherington during an assignment for Vanity Fair Magazine at the Restrepo outpost.

Sebastian Junger: 'Which Way' To Turn After Hetherington's Death

11:53am April 18, 2013

In a new documentary premiering on HBO, the journalist explores the life of his friend, the war photographer Tim Hetherington. The two collaborated on the 2010 documentary Restrepo, and Junger was profoundly changed after Hetherington was killed by shrapnel in Libya in 2011.

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Best friends Rosa (Alice Englert, left) and Ginger (Elle Fanning) are nearly torn apart by the political and social changes of the 1960s.

Arts

'Ginger And Rosa': A Study Of Women's Relationships

5:42pm April 07, 2013

by Pat Dowell

British filmmaker Sally Potter gained worldwide attention with her 1992 film Orlando. Like all of her movies, it was unconventional in its story and structure. Her new film, Ginger & Rosa, is more realistic and direct.

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Chadwick Boseman plays baseball's trailblazing Jackie Robinson in the upcoming biopic 42.

Arts

In '42,' A Young Star Suits Up For A Hero's Role

11:08am April 07, 2013

by NPR Staff

Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues, is the subject of an upcoming biopic. Chadwick Boseman plays the groundbreaking athlete in 42; he joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about what it felt like to take on a cultural hero.

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The iconic Chicago photographer Art Shay took portraits of presidents, prizefighters, prose poets — and in the person of Roger Ebert, at least one Pulitzer-winning critic.

Arts

Roger Ebert In Review: A 'Fresh Air' Survey

1:10pm April 05, 2013

Fresh Air remembers film critic Roger Ebert, who died Thursday, with a roundup of interviews from our archive — one with Ebert alone, one with him and his late partner Gene Siskel, and two in which Ebert interviews iconic directors. Plus, critic-at-large John Powers discusses Ebert's 2011 memoir Life Itself.

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Director Cristian Mungiu on the set of his new film, Beyond the Hills. As in his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the filmmaker focuses on two young women adrift in the post-Soviet wilderness of Romania.

Arts

Cristian Mungiu: Metaphor Or Not, 'Hills' Has Eyes For Romania's Past

6:28pm March 31, 2013

by Howie Movshovitz

Already the poster child for his country's so-called New Wave of filmmakers, the director takes another realistic dive into the post-Communist Eastern Bloc with Beyond the Hills. Though he hesitates to call it a straight metaphor, the symbolism of the film is uncanny.

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In Robot & Frank, a robot cares for an aging ex-burglar who has dementia. Frank Langella, who plays the burglar, says his character "becomes fond of the robot only because it is a tool for his wicked, wicked ways."

Arts

Frank Langella: A Career 'Like A Chekhov Play'

2:03pm March 29, 2013

In the movie Robot & Frank, the actor plays an aging ex-burglar who learns to take advantage of his robot caretaker. Langella, 74, tells Fresh Air why he was drawn to the role, and discusses the ups and downs of his long career.

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Pam Thatcher and her family ultimately moved into her mother's two-bedroom apartment because they couldn't make rent.

'American Winter' Families Struggle To Survive Fall From Middle Class

9:57am March 26, 2013

by Karen Grigsby Bates

Diedre Melson, John Cox and Pam Thatcher are college-educated parents who once considered themselves part of the middle class. Then the Great Recession hit. A new HBO documentary shows their families desperately trying to make ends meet.

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