December 19, 2004|A man who needs little introduction in American cinema, Morgan Freeman is taller in person than you'd expect (slimmer, too) and gracious to the point of delaying his lunch so that we could finish our conversation. In town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival, Mr. Freeman granted interviews with no specific movie to hump, his long-awaited reunion with director Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, still flying low on the radar at that point. He was there sans agenda, in other words, a rare place to find an interview subject and an invitation–a daunting one–to go over some ground that has already been trampled flat. The challenge of chatting with someone as well-known as Mr. Freeman is always going to be finding something new to discuss: even if you come up with a fresh question, after all, like anyone polished in the apple of the public eye, the super-famous and the oft-dissected have developed a skill for reverting to stock answers and widely-published responses. (As the saying goes, they answer the question they wish they were asked.) It's not affectedness, exactly–it's training. And after a while, that training becomes as helpless a reflex as blinking.

December 5, 2004|"It's just orange juice, no vodka," I said, pointing to my little plastic cup emblazoned with the brand name of a certain Russian beverage that, this autumn morning, was also a sponsor for the ten-day 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival. "Would've been all right with me," Kevin Bacon assured. Spectral in frame and bearing, Mr. Bacon is in town to receive the John Cassavetes Award–an honour that would seem questionable but for the actor's recent output: unfailingly maverick, skirting with dangerous. Handsome in a feral sort of way, he's best known for his iconic turns in guilty Gen-X pleasures like Footloose, Flatliners, Diner, and, at the top of the heap, Tremors, and yet a closer look at Mr. Bacon's career reveals his tendency towards the dark in the middle of the tunnel as a thing a long time in the making. His is a gallery of rogues and misfits stretching from a bit part in JFK (which the actor cites as a breakthrough for his career) to psychopath performances in films like Criminal Law, The River Wild, and Murder in the First. Between his work in last year's criminally dismissed In the Cut and now The Woodsman, a cautious ode to a recovering pederast, it's possible that Bacon will finally stop being a prisoner of his good-guy, middle-American hero image.

October 24, 2004|Wearing a baseball cap and red jacket, Bill Pullman seems like any other sturdy middle-aged guy. He does, that is, until he talks. Like his screen persona, Mr. Pullman chews over his words with careful, delighted concentration–his speech is laced with just a hint of savoury, not the least because of his affection for "hmmm" as a lead-in to his laconic delivery. There's something about this vital sense of Mr. Pullman always being in the process of discovery (of evolving, if you will) that I suspect draws directors as creepily revolutionary as David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Wes Craven, and Thomas Vinterberg into his orbit. Mr. Pullman fights battles with himself in his performances, a sense of tension that's made palpable when he's matched with artists similarly engaged in refereeing the wrestling match between the intimate and the profane. In town for an experimental theatre project with which he's involved at the National Theater Conservatory, Mr. Pullman was joined for a few days at the 27^th Starz Denver International Film Festival by Curtiss Clayton, who directed him in the filmed re-telling of Verdi's Rigoletto, Rick.