La Vie En Rose

Photograph: Emil Cadoo/PR


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM945FbjDOE

From the film...

Journalist: Hello, they said you were on the beach. Thank you for granting this interview.
Edith Piaf: My pleasure.
Journalist: It’s odd to see you so far from Paris.
Edith Piaf: I’m never far from Paris.
Journalist: I’ve a list of questions. Answer whatever comes to mind. Well…what’s you favorite color?
Edith Piaf: Blue
Journalist: What’s your favorite dish?
Edith Piaf: Pot Roast.
American Journalist: Would you agree to live a sensible life?
Edith Piaf: It is already the case
American Journalist: Who are your most faithful friends?
Edith Piaf: My true friends are my most faithful.
American Journalist: If you could no longer sing…?
Edith Piaf: …I could no longer live.
American Journalist: Are you afraid of death?
Edith Piaf: Less than solitude.
American Journalist: Do you pray?
Edith Piaf: Yes, because I believe in love.
American Journalist: What is your fondest career memory?
Edith Piaf: Every time the curtain goes up
American Journalist: Your fondest memory as a woman?
Edith Piaf: The first kiss
American Journalist: Do you like night time?
Edith Piaf: Yes, with lots of light.
American Journalist: Dawn?
Edith Piaf: With a piano and friends.
American Journalist: The evening?
Edith Piaf: For us, it’s dawn.
American Journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
Edith Piaf: Love
American Journalist: To a young girl?
Edith Piaf: Love
American Journalist: To a child?
Edith Piaf: Love.
American Journalist: Who are you knitting for?
Edith Piaf: Whoever will wear my sweater.

Directed/Screenplay by Olivier Dahan
(excerpts from Ion Cinema interview)

Q: Did you map out how you wanted to structure it?
OD: No, no I wrote straight from the first page to the last. I didn’t have any plan, I just wrote. The structure came naturally. The first ten pages I wrote in Los Angeles over two years ago. I really didn’t want to write the film myself, I wanted the producer to hire a scriptwriter, but he wanted me to do it and I just wrote the first ten pages and went from there.

Q: Why Edith Piaf?
OD: At first it was a photograph, a not well-known photograph so I don’t think you’ll know what I’m talking about. I often go into bookstore just to flip through books, I’m not an avid reader but I keep buying books. I was just looking through this photography book and I just fell on this special photo of Edith in her early years. She was about seventeen and looked like a punk rocker! It was so different then this iconic image most people have of her. The next page had a more traditional picture of her in a black dress and everything. It was the mix of the two pictures that really struck me as powerful.

Q: You say you don’t like to rehearse, how do you prepare for shooting?
OD: I don’t prepare really because I trust my intuition for a lot of things and I don’t have the actors rehearse because I don’t like to use the actors minds before we film. I don’t know, when I’m on the set I don’t have a sense of abstraction, I point the camera and its either right or wrong. I don’t use any storyboards for that reason, I don’t think about what I’m going to shoot the day before. When everything comes together, it just works.

Q: What interests you the most about filmmaking?
OD: I don’t think it’s an interest in one thing or another. It’s my way of talking; it’s just a question of communication. I don’t like to talk so much in life, I’m more comfortable with pictures. When I’m on the set I don’t feel like I’m working, I just feel natural.

Marion Cotillard
(The New York Times)

Darren Aronofsky

Interview - Darren Aronofsky

STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

...on The Fountain
"The Film is more of an experience than it is a movie. [...] It's about one man's search for eternal life and to hold on to eternal love."

"When you make a movie you can make a cohesive universe, its own world."

"I always describe what I do as I'm very much a tapestry maker in the sense that I take all these ideas from different places that I think are interesting and cool and I kinda weave them together into its own new thing."

Q: Your films really evoke strong emotions for the viewer, how do you get inspired to instill this?
A: ...That's why we go to the movies, it's to feel...

"In Hollywood, anytime you try to do something different, it's very difficult. We were persistent, we stuck with it, it took a long time, and we're all proud."

Re: the aesthetics of The Fountain
"The entire film, when you watch it, you'll see it's an entire movement from darkness into light and for us that was a movement from fear into acceptance. And so everything is positioned that way, so visually it was a very very specific film and we made...every shot was just framed and lit with a lot of care."

Tarsem Singh & Eiko Ishioka

The Cell
Director: Tarsem Singh
Costume Design: Eiko Ishioka
Cinematography: Paul Laufer


Eiko Ishioka Interview

What kind of design research is involved in preparing to design for a film like The Cell?

A: When I began designing these costumes, I did not consult a single visual reference. I let my mind roam free and after a repeated process of trial and error, came up with some basic ideas.

Is there any project that you wish to do or particular person you wish to work with?

A. If the request is from a director with the talent and courage to experiment and take risks with visual expression–people like Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader and Tarsem–I’d like to continue doing production design and costume design. I’ve always been careful about choosing projects, and have only accepted ones that I truly wanted to do. In the future, I’d love to be able to strike a 50/50 balance between projects that I’m asked to do and those that I initiate myself. If I had the opportunity to direct and design films like "The Red Shoes" and "Kwaidan," I’d be very interested.

(source: Fata Morgana-communitylivejournal.com)

tribute to "after-school"

DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, DJ Cam

rounded w. a sleep

(image source: rosalieee.files.wordpress.com)

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Shakespeare's The Tempest
Act 4, scene 1, 148–158


In his book Religion and Science, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wrote: "Individual existence impresses man as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole." To Einstein this mysterious, "cosmic religious feeling" was "[t]he most beautiful experience we can have. ... It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."