“Maxim”izing our time with the star and director of Junebug

August 7, 2005|Colorado girl–and freshly-minted Sundance sensation (just don’t hold it against her)–Amy Adams, flying out that evening for a job in New York, was joined for a cup of coffee on this rare overcast summer day in the bowels of Denver’s chichi Hotel Monaco by her Junebug director Phil Morrison. I tend to prepare between five and ten questions for an interview scheduled to last this long (45 minutes-an hour), confident that the conversation will go where it goes and, more, that if there’s no vein to be mined, we can both cut our losses before I start tossing off the “What was it like to work with?”s and “What were the challenges of making?”s. But for Ms. Adams and Mr. Morrison, I came armed with a single question–I felt only one thing was the key to understanding the film in a larger perspective. That this lone inquiry led to a discussion punctuated by passionate declarations and fast retreats (more “off the records” in this one than in the previous five combined, I confess) is testament to Ms. Adams’s and Mr. Morrison’s closely-held opinions–and their desire to save movies from themselves, one Junebug at a time.

Heights director Chris Terrio isn't afraid of Virginia Woolf

July 10, 2005|Dressed in a New York uniform of black-on-black and in town for a cup of coffee to discuss his feature debut, the Big Apple roundelay Heights, Chris Terrio is slight and slightly nervous. Modeled loosely after Shakespeare's "Macbeth", the film is defiantly literary in its approach to metaphors and doppelgängers–something that makes sense when one considers Mr. Terrio's background as a Harvard and Cambridge-bred English scholar who turned his attentions away from academia's air-conditioned Ivory Tower to toil in the boiler room of cinema and its attendant indignities of PR tours and ink-stained wretches. When I met Mr. Terrio, I was so exhausted I had prepared mainly by watching his film a second time an hour before getting in the car and hunting down a stray, orphan quote attributed to a "Chris Terrio" commenting on Cambridge by way of Harvard. I wasn't at all certain that they were one and the same person, but deadlines and borderline depression being what they are, I was ready to make an ass of myself. The happy discovery, of course, is that Mr. Terrio is delightful: self-effacing, smart, and still-vital in the way of a young filmmaker not yet soured on his profession and his peers–who hasn't learned that it's become all but verboten in the modern mediascape to admit to loving Lars von Trier and hating the low bestial tingle-moments that lace crap like Cinderella Man, and to have something passionate to say about culture, such as it is fresh into the twenty-first century.