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Stephen Applebaum

Interviewer

Stephen sadly died after a short illness on 7th Feburary 2024. He is survived by his partner Louise and two children. As review he shot the breeze with everyone from Beyonce to Al Gore, Michael Moore, George Clooney, Bill Murray, Terry Gilliam, Vidal Sassoon and Jesse Eisenberg. He's the author of The Wicker Man: Conversations with Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer & Edward Woodward – and published dozens of interviews on Netribution.

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ASGER LETH: risking everything to make GHOSTS OF CITE SOLEIL

29 September 2007

“We were being chased to the airport by a bunch of chimeres, and people were being shot on the streets. Just at the airport, in front of the terminal, a guy got shot right when we arrived.” I don't know if Denmark’s…

RACHEL WEISZ: Dying for her art

24 January 2007

“I’ve probably been over preoccupied with death. I think about it unhealthily too much. Actually, I think I see it as an ashes-to-ashes grand recycling scheme that when we die our body goes into the soil and a tree grow…

SGT. JOHN MCLOUGHLIN - World Trade Center hero

17 September 2006

When I came out on the stretcher I didn't know the towers were down. I thought it was car bombs that went off. When I got trapped I was in my own little world. So not only didn't I know the towers had come down, I had n…

TOMMY LEE JONES - Testing borders in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

"The desire for belief is a serious concern. It's an important theme here. Faith, the function of faith, and the meaning of belief, believing in belief, is a concern of ours. The mechanics of it, how does it work? An im…

Innocent Voices

The experiences of Oscar Torres, the writer of Innocent Voices, offer a salutary lesson about how even an obscene situation can appear normal to people denied a glimpse of a different reality. Torres based the film…

KEANU REEVES gets animated about A Scanner Darkly

"I've heard Richard Linklater say that in the States certain civil liberties are being taken away under the guise of safety - ‘We have your best interests and your protection [at heart]' - and it's becoming more and mo…

Radicalising the multiplex with V for Vendetta

The critics sniffed snobbishly at V for Vendetta, but it could just be the most subversive political film of the Bush/Blair era. By turns thoughtful and aggressive, Vendetta cuts through neo-con double-speak and inspiri…

KEVIN WILLMOTT - Revealing American history in CSA: The Confederate States of America

"One of the main reasons why I wanted to make the film is because the Civil War's still going on in America. There's still many people that want to hold onto the Confederacy as this great concept that had nothing to do…

BEN COCCIO - Confronting Columbine in Zero Day

"Zero Day could never have been made in Hollywood. Elephant [Gus Van Sant‘s Columbine-inspired film], I don't think, could even have been made in Hollywood. The larger studios would never touch it. Not before. Not afte…

GRETCHEN MOL - Nailing a pin-up in The Notorious Bettie Page

"Bettie's got a cult following in America. She is a pop icon. A lot of people dress like her, they do a burlesque show, and a lot of people will put on the wig and do acts like Bettie Page. And fashion and everything, t…

BRIAN NELSON - Confecting Hard Candy

A common thing that I come to again and again is I’m very drawn to stories where people face what they are capable of. I think that society is a big construct that we’ve erected to keep from too close knowledge of ourse…

DAVID SLADE - Brit director shares Hard Candy

"We made Hard Candy for under a million dollars, we shot it in 18 days, and the reason we did that was because if we hadn't, we would have been forced to change the script and make it a little more lightweight. That wa…

KEN LOACH/PAUL LAVERTY - Ruffling feathers with Palme d'Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley

(KL) "We could have made a whole film of brutal acts and gone on for twenty-four hours. I mean just imagine it: they slit a man's throat, they tie him to a cart, they drag him for a mile and kill him. They beat a man's…

PAUL GREENGRASS - Decoding terror in United 93

"We see these things happen on the television, and of course we’re shocked and momentarily we stop, pay our respects, but then we want to carry on with our lives, untouched, because it’s the World Cup coming, because I’…

SCREENWRITER MILO ADDICA - Darkness reigns in The King

I guess my films are dark, yeah. But I get scared of dark. Because dark connotates (sic), in Los Angeles, as something that won’t sell, that they don’t want to give to an audience, that’s bad. It’s much like they’ve tak…

JEANNE MOREAU - The legendary star of Francois Ozon's Time to Leave

"If you think about the French New Wave, what was the main topic? Young directors wanting to know, how is a real woman? How is she? What is my fantasy? I was very lucky to be at that time because I became part of the fa…

DOMINIC SAVAGE - Romance and racism in Love + Hate

“I think a lot of racism is not a deeply held belief. If there’s a lot of other people who feel that way, it’s easy to feel that way too. So the Adam character in the film, in a way his racism is not deep-seated, becaus…

JOHN HURT and STEPHEN REA - Explosive filmmaking in V for Vendetta

JH: I think, probably, the most interesting area of V for Vendetta is taking a fresh look at what terrorism is and what it stands for. We have been kind of led to believe, in the present situation, that terrorism is utt…

ILLUSTRATOR DAVID LLOYD - Creating anarchy in the UK

"When we originally wrote V for Vendetta it was 1980-81, and Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. She had only just started and the full weight of her influence only came about later with the miner’s strike in ’84…

HUGO WEAVING - The man behind the mask

"What a lot of people want to talk about is this whole idea of is V a terrorist or is he a freedom fighter? From his point of view he is trying to wake people up and force them to take responsibility for their own lives…

JULIEN TEMPLE - Putting Glastonbury on screen

We are in danger of becoming extinct. We worry about the rhino and the blue copper butterfly or whatever, but we are on our way to becoming a different thing, a half-computerised species. I think there is something abou…

DIRECTOR ROBERT GREENWALD - Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

I knew very little about Wal-Mart, I was incredibly ignorant, so it was a huge learning experience for me. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t know much but it’s also what made making this film so amazing for me, because I’…

TIMOTHY SPALL - Noose work in Pierrepoint

We can all sit in judgement on huge things - the death penalty, terrorism, war - but until you have to make that decision or you're involved in it, you can't speak. When I was ill, one of the things that struck me was…

NATALIE PORTMAN - Burning questions

I think being Israeli definitely influenced my desire to do V for Vendetta because being from Israel, terrorism and violence is a part of daily life. It might be a new thing for Americans in the past few years, but as a…

SUSAN SARANDON - Sex, song and cigarettes

Life has so much more of an imagination to do things than I do. I think one of the reasons that my life - once I got past the really difficult, difficult part of it, like all my identity crises and everything in my twen…

JOHN TURTURRO - Unleashing Kate Winslet

The first person I asked to play Tula was Kate [Winslet], and the reason was I saw her in Holy Smoke and I thought she was very uninhibited, and I wanted someone who could really play a wild character like that but also…

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IMRE KERTESZ - Fateless

There are some people who suffer from this "[Auschwitz] disease" for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to…

DIRECTOR JAMES MCTEIGUE - Political warfare in V for Vendetta

Rather than just come out and call V a terrorist, I think you have to look behind the veil and see what creates people like that. Then if you take that line, is it right to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist? Is it right t…

OSCAR WINNER RACHEL WEISZ - Weisz words

The idea, I think, that most appealed to me about The Constant Gardener was that I think in our parents' generation they felt more idealistic and I think they felt more that one person can make a difference. I think stu…

OSCAR NOMINATED DIRECTOR BENNETT MILLER -- Capote

“This is the moment where Truman Capote got everything he ever wanted in life. And the moment he had it, and he celebrated himself with his black and white ball at the Plaza, that’s the epitome; the rest is a spiralling…

OSCAR WINNER NICK PARK - Wallace, Gromit and Me

Since I made Grand Day Out, I’ve thought how similar Wallace is to my father, because my father used to make things a lot. He wasn’t an inventor but he was always in the shed making things. In Grand D…

NICOLE KIDMAN - Birth and life

09 February 2006

[Acting] is very dangerous. It’s like putting a boxer in the ring and you say, ‘I want you to box, I want you to box really hard, and I want you to kill someone, almost. But then when you step out of the ring, don’t use…

ANDREW ADAMSON - Imagining Narnia

02 February 2006

"From your childhood, you just kind of go, ‘I love the book. I love the book.’ And then you read it again as an adult, and you go, ‘It’s a lot smaller than I remember it.’ It’s like visiting a house that you lived in as…

DON CHEADLE - Playing Paul Rusesabaginia

29 January 2006

"What they choose to greenlight or not to greenlight is based on the tastes of the studio. And the tastes of the studio are largely about what they think is going to make money. It’s commerce. The sort of cyclical self-…

TERRY GEORGE - Framing Rwanda

29 January 2006

“In this case, the strangest thing is the bulk of this film, Paul says it’s 90%, I don’t know how you put a thing on it, is true. But events that we show, particularly in the hotel, are exactly how they went. That was t…

JOE DANTE - They're coming to get you, Dubya!

27 January 2006

When Gremlins director Joe Dante was given carte blanche to make an hour-long film for the made-for-cable series Masters of Horror, he and Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm chose to make a political statement about the Iraq…

EUGENE HUTZ - Dancing to his own tune

26 January 2006

Is there anything Eugene Hutz cannot do? The Ukrainian emigre survived Chernobyl and, inspired by his love of music, founded the riotously wonderful, New York-based gypsy punk band, Gogol Bordello. Althou…

HELENA BONHAM CARTER - Poetry in stop motion

23 January 2006

I like dressing up. Because, like, Mrs Bucket [in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory], I was the one who asked for teeth. They’re not my real teeth, although Tim keeps thinking they are. I know, but I think there’s some…

KEVIN COSTNER - Going West

23 January 2006

"You’re a writer, right? You love to write. What if somebody was going to take that away from you? When you realise someone’s going to take away something you love, a way of life, however you feed your family, you’re co…

TIM BURTON - Smiling in the face of death

23 January 2006

The culture I grew up in, death was always looked upon as dark and forbidden and not discussed. And, you know, living close to Mexico where you were very aware of like the Day of the Dead ceremony where they use humour…

LEXI ALEXANDER - Up Green Street with the pack

23 January 2006

"I think every time, to me, not to talk bad about filmmakers who do these male films, but usually when a man does a fight film or a violent film, there’s no vulnerability in the character, it’s very macho-macho. I think…