Tatiana Siegel, "The Hollywood Reporter," film reporter: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(RETURN TO PART 1)


ANDELMAN: I guess the other really big movie this summer will be Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Any doubt from anybody that that will perform as expected?

SIEGEL: I think that that’s definitely as sure a thing as you can have. They just do every one of those movies with real quality. They’ve used different film makers on many of them. Alfonso Cuarón did one, Mike Newell and just, they’re always visually very exciting films, and the books are fantastic sellers, so I think that there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t do well.

ANDELMAN: What do you hear about other movies this summer, some that maybe we haven’t heard as much about? Anything we should be expecting to kind of break out of the pack?

SIEGEL: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry probably will be a fun comedy. That’s with Adam Sandler and Kevin James and Jessica Biel. That’s Universal. The Bourne Ultimatum with Matt Damon, that’s another third shot at a sequel franchise that the first two were really good, really well reviewed, so I would expect that to be another winner at the box office. I’m really looking forward to The Simpsons Movie. It could be great, it could be disastrous. We’ll see, but as a fan of the show, I’m looking forward to it. That’s from 20th Century Fox. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer will be another one for the comic book type crowd. Ocean’s Thirteen, with its all-star cast, is probably something that looks good. A movie that’s not getting a whole lot of buzz yet but I think will do very well is Surf’s Up. That’s an animated one from Sony Pictures Animation. It’s the voices of Shia LaBeouf and Zooey Deschanel and Jeff Bridges, and it’s penguins that surf, and I’ve already seen it. It’s very cute, and I think it’s a good option for kids, parents to take their kids to.



ANDELMAN: Tell me about the Cannes Film Festival this year. Was there any theme that came out of it for you or any commonality?

SIEGEL: I was covering both the festival and the marketplace where movies are bought and sold. As a festival, the one thing that sort of stood out to me is that men still make all the movies. I would go to panels, and it would be an entire panel of male directors, or it feels funny that, God, this industry still just seems to really be only employing men as directors, at least in the kind of art house type of films that are embraced by the festival’s jury.

ANDELMAN: Why do you suppose that’s still the case? And where is Betty Thomas this year? Doesn’t she have a movie? Why is that still happening?

SIEGEL: I am not sure. I think the numbers are dropping every year as far as women directing movies. Every year it goes down a little bit. The year before, they had Sofia Coppola making a big splash with Marie Antoinette, but the film was roundly booed by the critics at the press screening. There’s a dearth of female directors and I am not sure why.

ANDELMAN: We’ve had women running studios. Have they not provided a helping hand to women directors?

SIEGEL: I would say definitely not. Every studio seems to have one woman in a high and prominent position, but I don’t think it’s done anything to increase the employability as a director for women out there working. And there’s also a problem with female action stars. There have been several movies that have tried to go with, Catwoman and Elektra, and my colleague, Boris Kitt recently did a column on what’s going on with the female action movie, but that’s an interesting sort of sub-category of what’s going on with that. There’s really only been to my memory one very successful one, and that was Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider, the very first one. They just don’t really translate well to audiences.

ANDELMAN: Where are the opportunities? This is a little off where I thought we’d go, but where are the opportunities for women in film other than being the girlfriend, the mom, or the hooker? I mean that in all sincerity. Where are their opportunities?



SIEGEL: The women that win Best Actress every year, they tend to be hookers or nuns.

ANDELMAN: Or victims, we should add. There is a lot of victimization.

SIEGEL: Yeah. So I think Reese Witherspoon’s Walk the Line portrayal was refreshing because it was a character that was neither a hooker or a nun, and she sang. That was sort of encouraging to me as a woman watching the type of roles that women get lauded for, and I think that was a good sign, and I think Reese Witherspoon also picks very good movies, so she’ll be in more movies. She will demand more scripts that have sort of good characters, so at least there are certain actresses that can kind of command that power.

ANDELMAN: You cover the agency side of things. On the business side of Hollywood, are you seeing more women agents?

SIEGEL: At CAA, you could swing a cat and not hit a woman. There is not a lot of women working at the agencies, especially CAA, the number one agency, so that might be the reason why it trickles down. I don’t know.

ANDELMAN: I’m really glad we got into that for a minute, but I do want to come back to this Cannes Film Festival. What will people be talking about either in terms of titles that came out of the festival that emerged or on the business side? Was there anything different about the business of Hollywood in Cannes this year?

SIEGEL: Well, the hot titles, the Michael Moore’s Sicko was probably the most talked about title just because it sort of has a little bit of controversy built in. It’s a documentary about the health care industry, and there is a part of the movie where he takes some of the people who can’t get health care in the United States. He takes them to Cuba to get health care, so it has a little bit of controversy, but the French love him. He a couple years ago won the Best Film award, Palme d'Or, for Fahrenheit 911, so they really like him there, and his movie was really the talk of the featival. And then there was also the movie that won the Best Film, the Palme d'Or, this year was titled 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile), and it was a film that dealt with abortion. It was a Romanian film, so also a little bit of controversy with it. But I think that the movie that seemed to be very much embraced there was the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. That was a movie that the critics seemed to universally like, and then from a business perspective, the big sale, was James Gray’s We Own the Night, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg and Eva Mendez. That film was bought by Sony, and they paid roughly $11.5 million to acquire the North American rights, so that was kind of the big business story, but ironically, that film was actually booed by the audiences.

ANDELMAN: Really?

SIEGEL: Yes. And I actually thought it was quite an enjoyable movie, but the critics there, at least the English language critics really were sort of put off by it.

ANDELMAN: One of the interesting things that seems to have emerged post-Cannes this year is that, and I don’t know if this is a big story or not, but Frank Miller was there coming off of 300 and announced going forward on the adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, but what seemed to happen after he left is that word got around that Sin City 2 got postponed. Is that a big deal?

SIEGEL: I think that he’s going to concentrate on The Spirit right now. I actually interviewed him there at Cannes, and I think he wants to move forward with The Spirit. It’s his first directorial project that’s solo. He did Sin City with Robert Rodriguez, he’s already in negotiations with Samuel L. Jackson to play the villain in The Spirit, and he’s looking to find the right actor to play the Spirit, so I would suspect that’s the project that he is going to move forward with first.



ANDELMAN: Do you think that Sin City 2 getting pushed back, is that in response to Grindhouse not delivering?

SIEGEL: Possibly. I mean, The Weinstein Company would never admit it, but I think there was a need for that film to do well at the box office, and it didn’t do well because they’re a new company. But the Weinstein Company and Dimension Films, which is run by Harvey and Bob Weinstein, they insist that their company is healthy and whatnot. Sin City did do well in terms of box office versus budget, so there’s no reason to suspect that a sequel wouldn’t do well. Grindhouse may have been yet another, “I don’t feel like watching a three-hour movie,” part of that phenomenon. I think it’s almost like arrogance with these filmmakers that people think that people want to watch three-hour movies, and I don’t think they do.

ANDELMAN: It was a long double feature. The payoff just wasn’t there, and twice. It was entertaining, but I think I would have enjoyed it more sitting at home, being able to pause it at some point, get up and leave the couch for a few minutes.

SIEGEL: Right, right, right. Yeah, I think that if you look at the movies that sort of, I think that the three-hour movies are problematic.

ANDELMAN: Well, Tatiana, one more subject I just have to ask you about before we let you do. You’ve been very gracious with your time. Do you think that Vincent Chase’s film, Medellin, will make it big?

SIEGEL: You know, it’s that art imitating life… I have no idea, on but my flight back from Cannes, the entire cast of “Entourage” was onboard both flights of my plane. That was kind of funny to see… We forget sometimes that that’s not real. But yeah, I’ll be watching like everyone to see how it does.

ANDELMAN: Now, you cover the agencies, so I wonder, it seems like a year ago the show was really blowing up, and we were hearing all about everyone just following the show religiously and talking about it. It’s now going into its fourth season. Is there still the buzz? Does anyone care what Ari Gold does at this point?

SIEGEL: Within Hollywood they do, and I think it had its best rating. I’m not a TV reporter, but I think that it did very well ratings-wise this year. It might have been its best year yet, but the buzz I was hearing was that the episodes were not as strong and not as compelling as they’ve been in years past, so you know, I think that it might no longer be like water cooler talk, everyone discussing last night’s episode, but I think that it’s branched out beyond Hollywood, and people in the rest of the country are enjoying it, so that’s probably more important for the makers of the show.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.