Movie Interviews

Bruce Dern has been acting for more than 50 years. In Nebraska, he plays a man on a mission to collect $1 million.

Arts

Actor Bruce Dern Gets Up Close And Personal In 'Nebraska'

4:08pm November 14, 2013

by NPR Staff

Dern's new film follows a man named Woody who is starting to show signs of dementia. When Woody falls for one of those junk-mail sweepstakes come-ons, he becomes convinced that he's won $1 million and sets out on foot to collect the cash. Dern tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "[Nebraska] is the most personal movie I've ever done in my career."

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Jake Gyllenhaal plays the stoic Detective Loki in Prisoners, trying to track down two missing girls.

Arts

Jake Gyllenhaal, Going After What's Real

8:08pm November 08, 2013

by NPR Staff

On a visit to the set of Nightcrawler, NPR's Audie Cornish talks to the actor about his changing career and his recent crime drama, Prisoners, where he plays a solemn detective in search of two young missing girls.

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In Dallas Buyers Club, Jared Leto plays Rayon, a transgender woman who is HIV-positive and struggling with a drug habit. "I always saw Rayon as someone who wanted to live ... life as a woman, not just someone who enjoyed putting on women's clothing," Leto

Arts

Jared Leto Was 'Seduced' By Role Of Rayon In 'Buyers Club'

3:25pm October 31, 2013

In Dallas Buyers Club, Leto plays Rayon, a transgender woman who is living with HIV and a drug habit. Rayon becomes an unlikely friend to Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a rodeo cowboy who starts smuggling HIV drugs from Mexico in the 1980s after he's diagnosed as HIV-positive and given just a few weeks to live.

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Tom Hanks stars in Captain Phillips, a film that's recently been subject to a "whisper campaign" of pre-Oscars criticism.

Arts

Word On The Street Is Oscars 'Whisper Campaigns' Have Begun

5:59pm October 27, 2013

by NPR Staff

Leading Oscar contenders are under fire as award season approaches. Journalist Scott Feinberg recently wrote in The Hollywood Reporter about the trash-talking that spreads before the Oscars to take down perceived front-runners. He talks to NPR's Arun Rath about a campaign against Captain Phillips and why such efforts often backfire.

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12 Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, is based on an 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup, a free black man in upstate New York who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841.

Arts

'12 Years A Slave' Was A Film That 'No One Was Making'

3:59pm October 24, 2013

Director Steve McQueen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he wanted to help fill a "huge hole in the canon of cinema." And actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose parents are from Nigeria, says he grew up feeling "a sense of unity amongst African people and people of African heritage."

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Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a free black man in upstate New York who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and won his freedom 12 years later. The film 12 Years a Slave is an adaptation of Northup's 1853 memoir.

Arts

Historian Says '12 Years' Is A Story The Nation Must Remember

3:59pm October 24, 2013

Yale historian David Blight says Americans like to think of themselves as "the country that freed the slaves," but prefer not to dwell on the sobering history that came first. He says the new film 12 Years a Slave is a rare, effective depiction of slavery in the United States.

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Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor play Patsey and Solomon, two slaves on a Louisiana plantation, in 12 Years a Slave.

Arts

'12 Years A Slave': 160 Years Later, A Memoir Becomes A Movie

12:09pm October 18, 2013

by NPR Staff

Solomon Northup was born a free man and lived the life of a respected musician until 1841, when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. British director Steve McQueen's new film, starring British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, brings Northup's memoir to life in excruciating detail.

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Helena Bonham Carter plays Elizabeth Taylor in Burton and Taylor, a BBC America movie that focuses on the famous couple's stint acting together on Broadway in 1983.

Arts

Bonham Carter Takes On Taylor, And She Did Her Homework

6:39pm October 16, 2013

by NPR Staff

The actress spoke with NPR's Robert Siegel about playing the icon in BBC America's Burton and Taylor. The movie follows the preposterously famous '60s and '70s couple as they reunited for a 1983 Broadway production of Private Lives.

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Alan Rickman tells NPR's Arun Rath he wasn't familiar with CBGB or the punk scene until he began working on the film.

Music & Culture

Alan Rickman On 'CBGB' And The Importance Of Listening

6:12pm October 13, 2013

by NPR Staff

In the new film CBGB, Rickman plays Hilly Kristal, the New Yorker who opened the dive bar he hoped would be a space for country, bluegrass and blues. CBGB instead turned into a hub for punk rock in the '70s. Rickman talks about preparing for the role and the challenges of playing a real person.

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Christopher Senyonjo says he was excommunicated from the Anglican church in the early 2000s, but continues his ministry and activism.

World News

'God Loves Uganda': How Religion Fueled An Anti-Gay Movement

9:40pm October 12, 2013

by NPR Staff

In the documentary, director Roger Ross Williams explores the role of American evangelicals in the anti-gay movement there. Williams and Christopher Senyonjo, an excommunicated Anglican bishop, discuss the collision of religion and politics.

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