Interviews of The Year (2012)

“There’s a lot of the true believer to Adams, with her big, blue eyes, and bushy-tailed manner. That she was once a greeter at The Gap makes perfect sense. Her best performances  — the motor-mouthed Ashley in Junebug (2005), the princess in Enchanted (2007) — have mined the comedy and pathos of the pathologically optimistic: sweet Pollyanas hoisting their beliefs aloft a rising tide of reality. The fifth of seven children, she was raised a Mormon until the age of 12, when her parents separated and left the church, her father moving to Arizona, Amy and her mom to Atlanta.  If her early work came lit up with the infectious inner glow of the one-time believer, her more recent roles—in 2008’s Doubt and The Master — have flipped that faith on its back like a beetle. Under the watchful eye of the right directors—David O Russell in The Fighter, Anderson in The Master, Spike Jonze in a forthcoming film, as yet untitled — Adams has revealed real steel in those baby blues."   

— Amy Adams for New York magazine

"His career has been a papier-mache mash-up of People headlines. First there was Indie Boy, the down-at-heel star of such films as Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy, squaring off against Tom Hanks on the cover of the New York Times for a story about the two Hollywoods. He was King of the Indies. Then came roles in Michael Bay films like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor; and  engagement to Jennifer Lopez, brandishing her 6-carat pink diamond ring like a hunting trophy — the very image of Hollywood Bling.  This was followed by a troika of flops — Daredevil, Gigli, and the unfortunately named Paycheck — which left him in Movie Jail before he found his Third-Act Redemption in the arms of the Right Woman and a career as director.  Sipping coffee in a big, cuboid but comfy-looking chair, he is wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, trainers — Superstar Lite. Affleck is a big man, 6 foot 2, with a with a big lantern jaw and the slightly loping air of a man who has been blown up from a slightly smaller size only this morning and is still getting used to his enlarged dimensions." 

— Ben Affleck for The Daily Telegraph 

"A youthful-looking 70-year-old with a white beard, rimless spectacles, and a full head of silvery hair, Haneke is dressed entirely in black — a style once described as “haute couture Gandalf.” He cuts an elegant figure, legs crossed, translator scribbling by his side, in a beige room deep in the bowels of the Lincoln centre.  Haneke’s interview technique owes more than a passing resemblance to Federer’s drop-shot: killing the speed on any question, refusing its underlying premise and gently rolling it back to your feet with a smile. He takes questions the same way he makes movies: by jamming expectations, if not waging all-out war on them. His 1997 film Funny Games  — an ultra-violent objection to American movie violence —brutalized its audience far more than the films to which it was objecting. That was the point. Haneke wanted people to walk out. “Very often anger is my motor to do something,” he says. “Funny Games came from real anger. I wanted to slap the audience in the face.”   

— Michael Haneke for New York magazine 

"Dressed in all-black — pencil-thin trousers, camisole, a dainty silver necklace, silver nails, minimal make-up, her hair still growing out from the shoot of Les Miserables — Hathaway cuts an elfin, boyish figure, although any impression of frailty is soon dispelled by the gales of good humor she summons to pounce on anything that resembles ego or presumption in herself. She’s like a cross between a fawn and Bette Midler, or Audrey Hepburn if she’d been raised in a large, rowdy family of boys. It takes a few minutes to acclimatize to her beauty, which is almost ideographic, registering at 30 paces. Up close, her face is a Rolls-Royce of expressiveness, those plush outsized features telegraphing emotion instantaneously, every smile a kilowatt smile, the slightest furrow of those eyes registering sadness, or sympathy, as surely as a clown’s." 

— Anne Hathaway for Harper's Bazaar

"With her mane of red hair and lily-white skin, Chastain comes across like a California-bred Botticelli, mixing the freckled au naturel charms of a Spacek with the big-boned acting chops of a  Blanchett.  Curled up on the sofa at the Regency in upper Manhattan, wearing in a beautiful check Helmut Lang picnic-check dress and Christian Louboutin shoes, her fluffy white rescue dog Chaplin foraging in the corner of the room somewhere, Chastain couldn’t cut a more immaculate contrast with her obsessive, cargo-pant-clad character. To get into the CIA mindset, Chastain plastered the walls of her hotel in Chandigarh, India, where they were shooting, with mug-shots of terrorists, so they would be what greeted her when she returned from work.  “She’s a computer. She is her work. She becomes its servant,” she says. “No matter how I love my work, I’ll never allow myself to get lost in it. But I do understand that passion, and to be honest I also understand becoming a servant to it, not lose myself but you know almost to say  ‘use me’ to the director.”  

— Jessica Chastain for The Sunday Times  

"Now 66, Spielberg’s hair is grey and in retreat, but his demeanor is as effusive and boyish as ever. He still give every impression of having got dressed in five minutes flat, or dressed by his wife, who did her best to make his hair lie flat as he walked out the door, munching cornflakes. He talks with a slight lisp reminiscent of Sylvester the Cat, embarking on long sentences that plunge and swoop like a roller-coaster ride, powered by great gulps of enthusiasm that have him coming up for air, as if he must remind himself to breath, before plucking some mot juste from the air at the last minute, like Indiana Jones retrieving his whip from under a descending door. “You don't mind if I just talk do you,” he asks and off he goes, on long riffs through the historical research he did for Lincoln —the 13^th president’s voice, or eating habits, or thinking habits, or melancholia. It’s all still in his system.  He didn’t direct a method actor in the role so much as method-direct the entire film."  

— Steven Spielberg for The Sunday Times