Happy Birthday

Turning 31 Today: Taissa Farmiga

festreviews Happy Birthday

[on playing the strong-willed, feisty Violet in American Horror Story (2011)] The horror aspect, the scary parts, are easy for me. I mean I can get into that pretty easy, because I get scared. You have to
invest yourself in these characters.


I was hoping, actually, that being on the other side of the camera in a scary movie, see how it’s filmed and maybe you won’t be as scared next time you watch one… didn’t really work out! Because I know it’s fake, but I just get so into it.

I get scared easily, so I’m not one for just sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and watching horror stories. But, I mean, I’m learning more. Maybe one day I’d like to be able to watch them.

You film a movie and you don’t get to see it until about a year later. When you watch it, you just know that you were a different person then than you are now, and you know that you’ve grown. It’s nice to know that you can take those experiences and learn from them, and incorporate them into the next one.

It’s always a little awkward on your first day on set when you have a making-out scene. You just have to let yourself go.

Turning 65 Today: Sean Penn

festreviews Happy Birthday

I think it’s really important to be able to feel your own life, and I had felt so numbed by what had been a kind of surreal saturation of what was going on in the Middle East and what it was going to mean, particularly relative to my kids’ future and things like that.


Your life is what you bring to any story. This is a life craft. It’s “How do you feel? Who are you? What do you have to say?” The horror of the Academy Awards is what the press does leading up to it, to make it a popular TV show. Where they’ll actually make it like it’s an arm- wrestling event between two actors. That becomes very petty, and that’s something that’s embarrassing to follow up with accepting the invitation to the party.

I’ve always operated under the notion that audiences don’t always know when they’re being lied to, but that they always know when they’re being told the truth. If there are what I think are unsung truths to be talked about in a film, through a character, through a story, and that dominates the piece, that’s the key for me. I think the biggest thing is to not participate in the damaging, lying cinema.

I don’t consider myself specifically political, you know? I think of working as an actor as being a human thing. The concerns I have that fall into politics are human concerns.

Happy Birthday Helen McCrory (1968-2021)

festreviews Happy Birthday

QUOTES:

Theatre is liberating because it only works if it’s truthful, That’s what it requires. That’s not true of film: the camera does lie. You can be moved by a performance on set, but when you see it on screen, it does nothing. Yet there will be someone you simply didn’t notice on set that on screen: bam!


I was lucky to learn early in life that you need money for food and shelter, but there’s no ambition in having money in the bank for the sake of it!

I’m a very positive person. My grandmother taught me that happiness is both a skill and a decision, and you are responsible for the outcome. I feel as though my life is bathed in golden sunlight. And the really
wonderful thing is that I know it.

Turning 63 Today: Steve Carell

festreviews Happy Birthday

You can’t seem to have any sort of inhibition. Or shame. Or absolute horror at your own physical presence. I know I’m not a woman’s fantasy man; I don’t have to uphold this image of male beauty, so that’s kind of a relief in a way.

(2005, on a pre-acting job) I worked the third shift at a convenience store for a few months. At four in the morning most people are looking for cigarettes, porn or one of those shriveled, angry-looking hot dogs from the rotating grill. One night, though, a woman came in during the wee hours. She looked a bit distraught as she paid at the counter. She paused for a moment, looked up at me and asked, “Do you think I’m pretty?” As it turned out, she had just walked in on her boyfriend with another woman. We proceeded to have a lengthy conversation about a person’s self-worth, fidelity, trust and relationships. And then I treated her to a slushy blue frozen drink.

[on his character from The Daily Show (1996)] In my mind, he was a guy who had done national news reporting but had fallen from grace somehow and was now relegated to this terrible cable news show and was very bitter about it and thought he was better, but he wasn’t.

[on his surprise at hearing so much laughter in Foxcatcher (2014)] The way Bennett [Miller] describes the humor is that it’s funny until it’s not anymore, and if this story didn’t have the outcome that it does, it could just be an absurd, ridiculous story. But the fact it ends up where it does, and that there’s this pall that hangs over the entire narrative, changes everything. But some of it so absurd you can’t help but laugh because it seems too strange to be true.

[on male bonding in Foxcatcher (2014)] It’s about offering up yourself to vulnerability. I think Bennett presents all this things in a very open way and allows the viewer to draw their own conclusion. He was finding it, as we were finding it, and I think that’s an extremely exciting aspect of working like this.

Turning 40 Today: Cristin Milioti

festreviews Happy Birthday
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  • [re role in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)] It’s a very fun role and I’m unrecognizable. I have a huge perm, acrylic tips, I’m spray-tanned and have a thick Queens accent. It’s a big role. Or at least I think it is. I constantly live in fear that I will show up to see it and they will have replaced me with Don Cheadle.

Turning 71 Today: James Cameron

festreviews Happy Birthday

…you can read all the books about filmmaking, all the articles in American Cinematographer and that sort of thing, but you have to really see how it works on a day-to-day basis, and how to pace your energy so that you can survive the film, which was a lesson that took me a long time to learn.

I went from driving a truck to becoming a movie director, with a little time working with Roger Corman in between. When I wrote The Terminator (1984), I sold the rights at that time – that was my shot to get the film made. So I’ve never owned the rights in the time that the franchise has been developed. I was fortunate enough to get a chance to direct the second film and do so on my own creative terms, which was good. But that was in 1991 and I’ve felt like it was time to move on. The primary reason for making a third one was financial, and that didn’t strike me as organic enough a reason to be making a film.

[Talking about the appeal of the Terminator]: “It’s fun to fantasize being a guy who can do whatever he wants. This Terminator guy is indestructible. He can be as rude as he wants. He can walk through a door, go through a plate-glass window and just get up, brush off impacts from bullets. It’s like the dark side of Superman, in a sense. I think it has a great cathartic value to people who wish they could just splinter open the door to their boss’s office, walk in, break his desk in half, grab him by the throat and throw him out the window and get away with it. Everybody has that little demon that wants to be able to do whatever it wants, the bad kid that never gets punished.”

As much as I love Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) and as much as it’s really revolutionized the imaging business, it went off the rails in the sense that science fiction, historically, was a science fiction of ideas. It was thematic fiction. It stopped being that and became just pure eye candy and pure entertainment. And I miss that. With Alita: Battle Angel (2019). I’m going to flirt with that darker, dystopian message as much as I can, without making it an art film.

I guess Titanic (1997) because it made the most money. No, I’m kidding. I don’t really have a favourite. Maybe The Terminator (1984) because that was the film that was the first one back when I was essentially a truck driver. – [about his favourite movie he directed]

Turning 67 Today: Angela Bassett 

festreviews Happy Birthday

I would have to say honestly I was very pleased to be in a film whether it was good or bad with De Niro, Norton and Brando even if I don’t have any scenes with them, I thought it was pretty good company to keep.

This is a career about images. It’s celluloid; they last for ever. I’m a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we’re free on paper and in law, I’m not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see.

I really believe that what I do as an actress is my God-given talent. This is my calling, not my career.

My mom was always pretty supportive. She saw me do plays and she’d always act out the parts I did. My aunt, who played a big part in my life, was a little bit more reserved, because if they don’t see you on TV every week they think you must be starving.

[about making Vampire in Brooklyn] It was an interesting experience. When we made the film, we didn’t really know what it was going to become. But Eddie [Murphy] was great, and it was this strange mix of comedy, horror, and drama. It was definitely a different kind of film.

Turning 51 Today: Natasha Henstridge

festreviews Happy Birthday

[on being raised in a small northern Canadian town] When I look back now, it was a wonderful place to grow up in terms of having freedom. It was one of those childhoods where you hopped on your bike and came home at dark. You walked to school, walked home, hung out with your friends. When I look at that now and the difference between that and how I’m raising my children, I’m really thrilled that I got to have that experience. I think 25 below zero was when they let us stay in for recess or lunch. One of the beauties of that is I’m a tough cookie. I can roll with the punches.

[Do you smoke?] No. I smoke when I’m not pregnant occasionally. [Do you drink?] Not when I’m pregnant, nothing. [So you’re a good mom.] Oh yeah. I would never smoke or drink, wouldn’t think of it, not for a second. But when I’m not pregnant I love to have a little cigarette and a glass of wine in the evening.

Turning 53 Today: Ben Affleck

festreviews Happy Birthday

[on tabloid coverage of his life] It feels like being in a soap opera that you were unwittingly cast in and you have no choice about it. I get to watch my life like everyone else and think. “I can’t believe they did that”. And, for whatever reason, you become less special for movie audiences. It cheapens the brand if you want to look at it in a really crass sense. But I figure it has to go away at some point. Eventually someone will come along and have a sex tape or someone will play grab-ass with some kids and I’ll be off page one.

God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you’ll know I’ve lost all my money.

[on his career path and choice of movies] I have definitely noticed that I care less about certain things. Other actors are like, “You can’t do that”, or “You can’t do this. This will position you in the wrong way.” That’s not my thing. And obviously so, because you can see I don’t craft or cultivate my career.

I remember back when I was a kid there was a comic strip called Plastic Man. His body was elastic and he could make his extremities as long as he wanted. As a youngster I didn’t fully appreciate. But I’m now thinking Plastic Man was probably pretty popular with the ladies.

[on turning down the offer to direct Superman: Man of Steel (2013)] – The one benefit of having done all kinds of movies as an actor is, you learn the pros and cons of being tempted to do a really big movie because it costs a lot of money.

[on “Argo” and the relationship between Hollywood and the government] There is a symbiotic relationship. People make movies about military. When you go on a tour with the military all these guys are movie buffs. Movies are a big part of our culture. The military, the movies, and our intelligence services are inventing things. For movies, it’s for art and entertainment. For intelligence services, it’s for God knows what. That’s one of the themes of this story: the power of storytelling, whether it’s political theater, relating to our children, or trying to get people out of danger. Telling stories is incredibly powerful. There’s a shot I really like where there’s this firing squad, then you go to this read through, and then there’s a firearm, a rifle, and a camera. Hopefully this is subtle, but that suggests the camera is more powerful than the gun. I think that’s been really worn out with the Youtube era.