Licorice Pizza - Interviews

Started by itwasgood, November 10, 2021, 10:03:41 AM

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Shughes

Here's the Sight & Sound Interview.

WorldForgot

Dang, hell yeah! Thanks for sharing that.




wilberfan


itwasgood

An interview of Alana and Paul with Rollingstone, nothing we haven't know from previous interview though.

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/licorice-pizza-alana-haim-p-t-anderson-1268796/

wilberfan

Another Q&A from Monday night's (Dec 6th) Village Theatre.

https://youtu.be/IkPBoL2Uak0

pynchonikon


wilberfan

New talk with Bill Simmons.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CSBhbtxgJ31vqkP7H4pXh?si=HAZr3ftHSbGCTWhZziCsTA&nd=1

(Haven't listened yet, but starts around 55:50?   Don't know yet if there are any non-Spotify options. )

[edit]  Maybe ?

itwasgood


wilberfan

Quote from: wilberfan on December 09, 2021, 11:20:17 PM
New talk with Bill Simmons.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CSBhbtxgJ31vqkP7H4pXh?si=HAZr3ftHSbGCTWhZziCsTA&nd=1

(Haven't listened yet, but starts around 55:50?   Don't know yet if there are any non-Spotify options. )

[edit]  Maybe ?

Guys, do NOT miss this interview....

wilberfan


wilberfan

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON ON SAVING MOVIES  -  Deadline

Speaking of contenders, I did a recent Zoom conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson whose latest film Licorice Pizza is making waves in more ways than one. Already it has received Best Picture and Best Director honors from the National Board of Review, taken the Best Screenplay prize for Anderson from the New York Film Critics Circle, and this week was named as one of the ten films on AFI's prestigious list of Top Movies of 2021.

Oscar buzz is getting louder, but Anderson is no stranger to awards and already has 8 Academy Award nominations to his credit including for such disparate films as There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Inherent Vice, Magnolia, and The Phantom Thread.

Licorice Pizza may be his lightest work tonally, but it is no less brilliant. It focuses on the off-the-wall relationship between a 15 year old wunderkind kid and a 20-something girl (NBR breakout stars winners Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim) who becomes the object of his pursuit. It is pretty wild and opens wide on Christmas Day.

Beyond the considerable merits of Licorice Pizza, Anderson is contributing mightily to a cause near and dear to all of us movie theatre lovers who are rooting for the full-fledged return of pure theatrical exhibition and the movie-going experience after the devastating Covid shutdown. After four-walling the historic Village Westwood theatre for three weeks of industry screenings in November, MGM and UAR — which is releasing the film — have platformed it at the single screen iconic Village which in its heyday of the 60's and 70's was the exclusive cinema home for box office sensations that ran and ran for months before going out to citywide releases. (The film also opened on three other screens in NY).

This sort of move was quite common before the industry went all multiplex on us, and especially before streaming became part of the game plan for so many films that seemingly disappear into the "larder" of the algorithm. Proving that you can revisit past practices and apply them to the right kind of movie, Anderson championed the idea. Thus when Licorice Pizza opened its commercial run on November 26th in a good old fashioned 70mm film print (blown up from 35mm) it became the highest grossing film at the Village in a quarter century and set records with numbers certainly not seen for limited releases in the Covid era.


"You have no idea how it warms my heart hearing you talk about it because it has been something we have been talking about in endless meetings, and just how to do this and how to pull this off in this day and age. To see what happened with people really coming out and turning out to support a film in that way at this beautiful, beautiful theatre, you're right, it is innovative, but not even remotely innovative," Anderson told me in explaining it's all part of the industry's lineage and DNA. The filmmaker wasn't born until 1970 but is clearly a student of the lost art of finely tuned motion picture exhibition.

"It is just a huge step backwards. It is really just reaching into the past and asking, 'what if we just had one place where we could really make it work, get people to pay the money, pay the parking and to put on a show and made it really worth their while?' It's been incredible to see the response. I couldn't have hoped for more. I remember looking at old ads for The Exorcist back around '74 and it played in two theaters in Los Angeles for a year — The National and the Fine Arts — and it still grossed a hundred million dollars, one of the highest grossing films of all time. Oh and by the way I saw that at one point the ads said 'it must end soon' at the National because Chinatown was the film that was coming in behind it!"

Anderson is holding the torch for more successes that also champion the classic exclusive theatrical experience.

"The absence right now of the (Hollywood) Arclight and Cinerama Dome and whatever other cities there are in the country, it just speaks to the preservation of our older cinema houses, keeping them alive, keeping them fed with good films and good presentations, because if you do that they will come and they will support it and there's a way to do this that keeps that theatrical experience alive, the proper theatrical experience," he said. "I am not talking about the experience of the 25-Plex. I am talking about single-screen cinema houses that are our history that we must preserve and feed. There is just no question about it. That is what we have to do."

jviness02

The Conway interview was great. Hearing all the old stories.