Mike - Hollywood Authentic

September 12, 2026

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

The Australian actor volleys with Greg Williams on the Cipriani tennis court and with journalists on the Lido as he premieres his music documentary, What Love Builds, at the Venice Film Festival.

If there’s one question Russell Crowe wants to stop being asked it’s to define the difference between music – which he’s been creating since he got his first guitar in 1970 – and acting. His documentary, What Love Builds, which charts his musician side during his long career, and had its world premiere out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, aims to answer that query once and for all. ‘The film attempts to explain the two things are completely intertwined for me,’ he told journalists as he arrived to debut the film. ‘Everything comes from the same creative source so hopefully I won’t get asked that question too many times after people have seen the film. Everything that I do as a film actor is informed because I know how to drive an audience, live, even if they’re not in the room. That doesn’t mean that I’m any kind of a slave to the audience, it’s just that I’m aware – and that purely comes out of coming out of rock and roll and theatre.’

Having started out as a teen in the ’80s (as a solo artist under the name of Russ le Roq), Crowe has been in numerous bands over the years, performing in tandem with his growing stature as an actor. ‘Film is great, it’s a cerebral adventure. You construct the performance, go and do your job, and then a year to a year and a half later you see the effect of that, the series of emotional points that you may have planned and whether you’ve taken the audience with you or not. Rock and roll is right there and right then. It’s completely immediate and that’s what is exciting about it.’ His film, which he directed with the help of editor Padraic McKinley, is a celluloid scrapbook of his musical life, culminating in his current role as lead singer with group, Indoor Garden Party. For the last fifteen years he’s been collecting footage, photos, interviews and concert footage which amounted to 18 million feet of film to edit down with the help of McKinley. The band will go on tour next summer throughout Europe but Crowe says that in general – both in music and acting – he does not have a grand design or master plan. ‘The implication that any of this has been a choice is kinda funny. Because I’ve just rolled with opportunities as they’ve come along. I didn’t have a plan, and I still don’t have a plan. I just do what becomes apparent to me, pursue the things that I feel connected to. I wouldn’t want to change anything about the career that I had. Even in its darkest moments, it was incredibly educational.’

Though he didn’t dig into what his darkest artistic moments were, he admitted to an adversarial relationship with Hollywood thanks in part to Antipodean bluntness, self deprecation and sarcasm. ‘I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’ve mismanaged my relationship with Hollywood,’ he laughed. ‘But always to my benefit. I’m not driven by the same things that people who come necessarily from that culture are driven by. And my sense of humour has got me into trouble so many times because we like to call things as we see them where I come from – and that’s not always appreciated.’ Now 62, the actor/director says what motivates him to perform onscreen is feeling a project ‘on his skin’, describing how if the screenplay gets to him he feels ‘compelled’ to serve the work. ‘At the age of 62, to be in demand and working as much as I want to be, it’s incredible. Part of the reason that I am still working is that I do it from a very pure perspective. When I have to get up at 4.30am to go to a film set, I absolutely know why I’m getting up at 4.30am and that motivates me and drives me. I feel very sorry for actors who make decisions to go on films sets where they’re not believing in the subject matter that they’re working on, the character they’re working on, because I don’t know how the hell could you motivate yourself at that time of day if you didn’t have a fundamental love for it.’

Crowe has felt happy about getting up at dawn for a raft of incoming projects which he name-checked, including playing Ramírez in Highlander, returning to Roman times with historical actioner The Last Druid, Ted Kaczynski exploration, Unabomber and Cold War thriller, Billion Dollar Spy. He also considers getting his documentary which he says is ‘about storytelling, performance, artistic integrity, determination and joy’ to the Venice Film Festival something of a wish fulfilled. Despite having invitations from other festivals, Crowe values Venice as the ‘most fun film festival with a depth in the appreciation of the audience’. ‘You ask, do I have a dream in my drawer?’ he smiled. ‘There’s so much for me to accomplish yet – I don’t think I’ve even scratched the surface creatively on things I want to do…’

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER
What Love Builds premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

Dispatches

KIEFER SUTHERLAND

September 10, 2026

Kiefer Sutherland, Al Pacino, Ever Anderson, Luc Besson

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The star of Father Joe tells Hollywood Authentic how his latest actioner made him fall in love with movies again…

This is not the first time Kiefer Sutherland has been to Venice. Though this year is his inaugural visit to the film festival, with his actioner Father Joe, the actor has a long history with the city going back to his late father’s iconic role in Don’t Look Now. When Donald was making the film, toddler Kiefer was with him. ‘The first time I was here, I was four or five years old. Me and my twin sister – there’s a very funny picture of the two of us hanging out of a second-storey window above a canal, with my dad in the background.’ This time there’s no hanging around; Sutherland is making a whistlestop visit as both actor and producer on the Luc Besson-written film which charts the violent means a special forces war veteran-turned-Catholic priest employs to clean his neighbourhood of drug dealers, organ thieves and the mob in ’90s New York. Besson wrote the screenplay with Sutherland in mind – something he’s tickled pink about, especially the badass outfits and weaponry the holy father gets to wear as he blows up drugs labs, peppers wiseguys with bullets and uses his crucifix as a dagger.

‘I’ve wanted to work with Luc Besson my whole career,’ Sutherland enthuses as he sits with Hollywood Authentic in a villa overlooking the Adriatic pre-premiere. ‘I think I was doing press for Stand by Me in France when I first saw Subway, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the kind of movie I want to make’. He’s such a creative and versatile filmmaker.’ Besson pitched the script he’d written to Sutherland’s brother, who is also his agent. Sutherland admits to not being initially sold, until he read it. ‘The script was so much better than the pitch. It was very funny. I got it. The sarcasm and very dry humour. I really responded to it, and loved it.’ The actor has producing form having shepherded his long-running TV hit, 24, so jumped on board as producer as well as playing Father Joe, and admits that his enthusiasm for the lower-budget project meant he was bringing his own clothes to the Paris set as possible costumes. ‘I said, ‘I’ve got a great black suit that would be kind of good for the priest’,’ Sutherland chuckles. ‘Then I saw the costume they had made. It was so cool. And it was so much bigger than I had ever possibly imagined it. The frock, the vest with the weapons, the hat… I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It’s a terrible tale, right? After 45 years of working as a professional actor, your expectations have been so diminished that you’re willing to bring your own clothes to work.’ The pleasant surprise in costume was replicated in every other aspect of production, he says. ‘You’re like, “Oh, this is what movies used to be like. I remember that!’ So I just got really, really excited.’

There are different levels of involvement for actors producing their work, but this is no vanity credit for Sutherland, he insists. ‘When actors become producers, it’s usually because they’re getting a good deal, right? And it’s not like I’m in some room with a visor counting receipts and doing regular producing work. But you sign onto one script and an idea. We made 213 episodes of 24, another 100 of Designated Survivor. There’s no insurance on the rest of those scripts. At least if you’re a producer, you have some say. So it’s an insurance policy more than anything.’

It also meant he could help bring Al Pacino into the cast, playing opposite him as a flamboyant mob kingpin. ‘He’s such a hero of mine,’ he says. ‘There are certain actors I watched growing up – Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall – and they just defined for you what was good. That this is what you’re paying to see. So there’s always the fear that when you meet someone like that… what if they don’t talk to you, and they don’t like you, and it’s not a good encounter?’ He does a mean Pacino impression as he tells a story about the actor swearing about the huge fur coat he wears in the film. ‘For me, it was amazing, because not only did I meet this really kind, funny person, but the guy who was in The Godfather and Serpico.’

Working with Besson and director Barthélémy Grossman, Sutherland describes his involvement on Father Joe as building the film from the ground up – and that included bringing in a top stunt team to help him kick bad guy ass. During the course of the film Father Joe shoots out kneecaps, poisons with syringes, strafes goon hideouts and in one memorable scene dispatches a series of henchmen in a descending elevator. It’s a set-piece Sutherland is particularly pleased with. ‘We had done all this training, but a lot of the fight sequences got broken down and shortened. The violence is a real character in the context of this film. It’s a fantasy, and it needs to be really artfully done. And a lot of those sequences, when they got shortened, it was just gunplay. I said, ‘I think we’re short in the actual fighting’. And Luc was like. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ but then he went off and wrote the elevator fight. I think he put it in the elevator so that I would never ask him to do that again! But there was something so organic and tactile about being able to work like that. So it really was an experience that reminded me of how we used to make movies. And I miss it.’

To hear him tell it, it sounds like Sutherland had become disillusioned with movie making, and Father Joe has reinvigorated him. He considers this. ‘I think if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can make things at a price point that are really good. It doesn’t have to be $50 million. When we made Stand by Me, it cost $8 million. At Close Range cost $8 million. The Lost Boys, which was the biggest film I had ever done, cost $14 million. What we’re spending on films now is so past inflation, right? So, yeah, it gave me a lot of enthusiasm about how to go make stuff.’

So now that he is fired up, what does he want to make? ‘I know exactly what I want to go and do. Getting anyone to make it is the hard part. So I’m going to try to figure my way around that because I believe I know how to make something, and if I believe that the story is worth telling, then it probably is. And I should trust that. If the executives that you would normally have to go through to get something like that made, don’t agree with you – what a terrible way to exist, right? You can’t be beholden to that. So I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to raise money to make films.’

He may need to be raising money for a Father Joe sequel given the cheeky open ending of the film. Sutherland smiles. ‘I would certainly love to do it. I think Barthélémy and Luc would love to do it. But those decisions – which is fair and cool – always get made by an audience. I like that, and trust that a lot more than some of the executives I’ve come across over the years. I’ve done a couple of things that I would classify as cinema. I’ve done a lot of films, and I’ve done some movies. And this is a movie. I want people to have fun!’

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Father Joe premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Read our review here

Dispatches

CLAIRE FOY

September 10, 2026

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The Ink actor tells Hollywood Authentic about the art of print, the sexism that women continue to fight and how she surrenders herself to opportunity in film.

Danny Boyle’s Ink, the opening film of Venice Film Festival this year, is very much about boys’ clubs. The elite, London-centric Fleet Street establishment, the male-dominated newsrooms of the ’60s, the way then-fledgling tabloid The Sun newspaper used female flesh to sell copies. In the middle of the story of proprietor Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and gonzo editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) is Jules, a composite character based on a number of female journalists at the time, played by Claire Foy.

‘Obviously lots of the people in the film are based on real, living journalists, and Jules wasn’t,’ Foy tells Hollywood Authentic on her flying visit to the Lido for the red carpet premiere of the film. ‘My job was to draw on experiences of women in editorial positions in 1969 in Fleet Street. So I read lots of accounts like Julie Welch in her book, The Fleet Street Girls, and I spoke to Eve Pollard, and just tried to gather as much information as I possibly could. It was important for me to make sure that I was portraying those women and their experiences, even if they weren’t actually being depicted.’ As Jules, The Sun’s first Women’s Editor, Foy rocks vintage clothes and gives as good as she gets in a bawdy, macho atmosphere where women are either wives or page three girls. ‘Unfortunately, it’s not much of a reach to imagine that scenario,’ Foy says. ‘Roy Greenslade [sub-editor on The Sun in 1969] came in and spoke to us. We really made sure that the environment, the atmosphere, the energy and what appeared on screen was as accurate as it possibly could be. We observed how the printing press worked, learnt about the delineation of the unions and the journalists, and how crucial that was. The artform of what it was to print a newspaper was extraordinary to see.’

The idea of sexism is not confined to an era or an industry, as Venice jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal pointed out in her opening press conference – film itself is still a male-dominated industry. ‘Jules is an incredibly bright, ambitious, capable, brilliant journalist, and she knows she is. She’s just not afforded the opportunity of exhibiting that. But she is able to grab hold of an opportunity and make the most of it. And I think that in lots of different professional spheres, that’s what women have had to do. Women have had to prove themselves ten times over for many of the positions that they’re in, and work ten times harder to feel the justification for why they’re allowed to be there. You have to work within it and tolerate it.’’

The film also asks audiences to consider their complicity in the tabloid-ification of the media world, even reaching to politics, which Foy thinks is an interesting debate to leave the movie theatre with. ‘It’s a conversation that lots of people are having – where the power lies, and whether the people who are dictating what we absorb and read are really understanding what we want. They just take the numbers, and go, ‘That’s what we should be giving’ without considering whether it’s what anyone wants at all.’ In this respect Ink bucks the trend for movies that are known factors. As an original film based on James Graham’s award-winning play, it’s not a franchise, a reboot or a superhero movie. That, says Foy, is down to the creative spirit and vision of Danny Boyle. ‘What I loved about being with Danny in Venice is that he says what he thinks, what he believes and what he stands for. It’s really refreshing to see someone who has the gravitas, the experience, and the authority to be able to be totally himself as a filmmaker. That doesn’t come without having done decades and decades of incredible work, and also challenging himself, and putting himself in different scenarios as a storyteller. We need to support filmmakers like him. This film is funny and entertaining but it’s also a film of our times.’

Foy went straight from the Venice red carpet to starting work on her next project, Lenny Abrahamson’s eight-part adap of David Nicholls’ bestselling book, You Are Here, the story of a midlife romance, co- starring Matthew Macfadyen. She describes herself as ‘very much in the foothills of making it’ but that it is ‘a really beautiful, quiet story’. ‘I just feel really passionate about making things like that, about people who aren’t 20 years old,’ she laughs. ‘Because I’m not anymore.’ She’s also looking to surprise herself with the work she does next. ‘I’m totally surrendered to the industry I’m in. It’s not something I can dictate or control. You just have to go with it, follow your nose and hope that if you go into something with the right intentions, then you’ll have a good time and feel fulfilled. That’s been working well so far…’

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Hair by GARETH BROMMELL
Makeup by KELLY CORNWELL
Styling by JONATHAN HUGUET
Claire wears BOTTEGA VENETA
Jewels by SWAROVSKI
Ink premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Read our review here

Screening Room

COMPANY

September 10, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

The ‘company’ of the title of Casey Affleck’s latest written-directed film is the people we sit with, socialise with, invite into our homes. That last bit is key and a giveaway to the plot twist that comes a little too late in this slow-burn, handsomely-mounted, era-hopping Russian doll movie. It begins with a young woman (Emily Alyn Lind) dressed out of style arriving at a Christmas party in the ’70s. Though not known to the host, she’s charitably ushered into the house and begins to hold court telling a story of Tom, an elderly man who died in the company of a stranger in a remote cabin in 1953. Tom (Nick Nolte doing grizzled) discovers a young woman (Caylee Cowan) in the snow and brings her into his humble abode where she begins to tell him a story too. In that tale, a turn-of-the-century homesteading couple (Scoot McNairy and Adelaide Clemens) find a young man in the snow (Atticus Affleck), and drag him in front of their hearth to recover.

Casey Affleck, Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, Adalaide Clemons, Scoot McNairy, Atticus Affleck, Emily Alyn Lind, Caylee Cowan — Image Nation Studios/Spooky Pictures

Now, as the stories within stories progress, we look for the common theme. Is it in the otherworldliness of these visitors? Each dresses in black, talks in an olde worlde narrative and seem to have an insolence and poise beyond their years. Is it in the sense of approaching dread as the homesteaders deal with a plague of local murders where hearts are cut from bodies, Tom contemplates his mortality or, in the ’70s, a young man (Indiana Affleck) glowers darkly at the storyteller from across the room? What is the sting in the tale?

To reveal it would be to spoil, but Affleck (co-writing with Ron Hansen) lays clues as characters talk in gothic philosophical terms and move through the painterly vistas. In its use of voiceover and sketching the slow lives of American settlers – and the way that they leave their mark on the world – Company recalls something of Train Dreams. But where Clint Bentley’s film revelled in the simple man and word, Affleck’s narrators get tangled in oblique pondering and references to Persian mystics. It’s difficult to know what anyone is actually trying to say, despite them saying a lot.

The film is a showcase of Affleck’s skill as a director and his family though. Atticus Affleck makes an impression as a mini-me of his dad and pretender to the Chalamet school of precocious, magnetic performance. Affleck senior’s late mother also appears as one of the party guests in the first segment. Meanwhile Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn (as a suspicious Aussie neighbour to the homesteaders) provide a sense of groundedness which keeps the endeavour from floating away on florid ideas of death, life and the meaning of it all. As a genre period piece with an unexpected bite, it’s good looking and stately-paced. But there is a recent existing film (no spoilers) that addresses similar themes to which it will be unfavourable compared.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of IMAGE NATION STUDIOS/SPOOKY PICTURES
Company premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

Dispatches

OASIS

September 10, 2026

Venice Festival ticket Liam and Noel Gallagher

Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

As Greg Williams joins Liam and Noel Gallagher for their first trip to the Venice Film Festival with their documentary, Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger, Hollywood Authentic unpacks what makes this movie an essential film of our times.

When the Gallagher brothers arrived on Venice’s Lido they were greeted with even more red carpet fervour than the usual festival hysteria, and their emotional documentary charting their 2025 reunion tour received an eight-minute standing ovation and Manchester City flag waving post premiere in the Sala Grande. Estranged for 15 years after a bust-up at a Paris gig in 2009, Liam and Noel raised their joined hands aloft in the feted cinema, echoing the reconciliatory move they pulled at each concert in their worldwide tour. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house…

Don’t Look Back in Anger may be the title of one of their hits, but the name of their documentary isn’t just a nod to the reunion of two brothers and artists, it’s a rallying cry to a polarised, beleaguered and warring world. In the film created by Steven Knight and co-directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, the gentle thawing of relations between the siblings which leads to newfound respect, enjoyment of each other and ultimately, forgiveness lies the optimism for any viewer (fan or not) that we are all capable of compassion and redemption. That in our dumpster-fire world which currently values cruelty, division and isolationism, the humanity and brotherly love shown in the documentary, on-stage and off, might be a promise of hope. If two lairy, sweary Manc rock stars can find a common ground, then couldn’t nations, governments, generations?

Mind you, it helps that Noel and ‘our kid’ are also exemplary musicians and showmen (Liam gives up cigarettes and alcohol for the tour, they polish their performance with diligent rehearsing and Liam’s tambourine posturing is undeniably cool by any measure) as well as the creators of anthemic hits that hold social relevance globally. The power of music and art to unite and move is also intrinsic to this film, the reaction of the crowds at the gigs healing the brother’s rift as much as any personal overtures, and giving audiences watching onscreen a front row ticket plus a profound sense of community and communion. Can AI do that?

Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger is not only a superlative concert film (charting the 41 shows the band undertook around the world) it’s a shot of welcome nostalgia, and the film we probably need right now as much as want.

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Grooming by NATHAN JASZTAL
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas now
Read our review here

Dispatches

PARKER POSEY

September 9, 2026

John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The Wild Horse Nine actor tells Hollywood Authentic how her friendship with Sam Rockwell made their on-screen marriage zing.

If it feels like Parker Posey and Sam Rockwell have real, tangible history together in Martin McDonaugh’s Venice-bowing Wild Horse Nine, it’s because they have. ‘I’ve known Sam for like 30 years and have always felt a kinship with him,’ Posey tells Hollywood Authentic at the floating city’s Danieli Hotel. ‘We’d had similar career trajectories, from the independent film scene in the ’90s and having lived and worked in New York. Sam was in Lawn Dogs in the ’90s, and I remember Tom Dichello telling me that if the part had been written for a female that I’d have played it. When we were in Venice, Sam reminded me of an improv bit we did when we were in our twenties, in a movie called Drunks, that took place in an AA meeting, and he’d thought ‘oh, i’d really like to work with her… I’d like to fight with her in something…’ He certainly got his wish in McDonagh’s film. With Rockwell playing an exasperated ’70s CIA agent on assignment with his rogue partner (John Malkovich) on Rapa Nui, Posey appears as his no-BS wife, Marge, on the phone from the US. It’s a feat that the duo paint the story of a marriage via combative telephone conversations and in only a few scenes. ‘Acting is like sparring and there’s such a wit and force to Martin’s writing. He brought a copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when we had a read-through and suggested we read scenes together from it. That never happened, we rehearsed on the phone instead, a few days before I flew to Easter Island.’

Even though her character was on the end of the line in the film, Posey was not about to literally phone it in. She was on-set in person to deliver Rockwell verbal volleys in real time – something she felt vital for the project. ‘It was important that the conversations had as much life as possible to feel present on film,’ she says. ‘“Acting” phone calls are weird because you have to guess how the other actor will perform them, as well as performing yourself. Usually, in these scenes you’re acting with the first AD or the script supervisor – neither of whom are actors – and they tend to call out the lines and project their voices, then the actor has to let all that go and lift it back up into the reality of the story. Phone calls are usually exposition, but in this movie they’re very much a part of the whole.’

Though she’s adept at improv, Posey felt no need to tinker with McDonagh’s scripted words. ‘I didn’t play with my dialogue at all because Martin’s a playwright! I was taught at drama school that the playwright’s words should be respected and the actors’ work is to learn the lines. If there’s room to play, then it’ll come out in the scene — but not until the lines are learned and inhabited — and then you ask the writer. The movies I did with Christopher Guest are a whole different thing, which is that they were entirely improvised on camera, as it’s happening while the camera is rolling. But Sam threw in a line that Martin kept, which was when he called me “a fucking ditz”, ha!’

Marge is the second memorable wife Posey has played recently after her standout performance in White Lotus as snobby Southern belle, Victoria Ratcliff. ‘I hadn’t made the connection to Marge and Victoria, but yes, both husbands have stressful jobs and Marge and Victoria like to lounge. They are both ‘kept women’. I am not a ‘kept woman’ but I do love the costumes of it.’

Little wonder she brought the drama to the Lido with her premiere look then: boating across the lagoon with Greg Williams to the premiere of the film in a pale pink Valentino number with floor length cape which billowed dramatically over the back of the water taxi and rippled in the Lido breeze. Victoria Ratcliff and Marge would surely approve…

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Wild Horse Nine premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Read our review here

Dispatches

PAMELA ANDERSON

September 9, 2026

Taika Waititi, David Wenham, Pamela Anderson

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER

The actor grabs coffee with Greg Williams in Venice and tells Hollywood Authentic about her new film, Place To Be, and how performance has become a life saver.

‘I’ve been to Venice a few times, but never to the film festival, which is the favorite of all the actors I know,’ Pamela Anderson says as she takes a stroll around the Giudecca area of the city with Greg Williams. ‘It’s something to aspire to, so I am very grateful to be here with a film finally.’ The film that has brought the actor here is Kornél Mundruczó’s latest, Place To Be – a cross-generational road trip movie starring Ellen Burstyn, Taika Waititi and a white racing pigeon. Anderson plays Burstyn’s daughter, worried when her elderly mother disappears on a spur-of-the-moment adventure to reunite the lost pigeon with its owner.

‘Kornél Mundruczó is a beautiful and artistic director. His films are poetic and meaningful,’ she says of working with the filmmaker behind White God, Pieces of a Woman and At The Sea. ‘I have a small role but I wanted to be a part of it. And to play Ellen Burstyn’s daughter was something I couldn’t pass up. Just being near her you learn by osmosis. She is the kind of actress I wish to be. She is pure magic on screen and off. She has had the career of a legend. She has worked hard on her craft and it shows – she is my utmost inspiration.’ Burstyn was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at Venice this year, as well as appearing in Place To Be and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short, Flesh Impact, exploring the magnetism of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Flesh Impact was beautiful, I loved it,’ enthuses Anderson of her co-star. ‘Only she could have played the part of Marilyn at the age of 100.’

As she drinks a coffee at the Hotel Cipriani, Anderson explains how she’s been lighting a candle in the church attached to her hotel, Airelles Palladio, each morning while she’s been in Venice. It seems to speak to her feelings of gratitude and excitement for a decades-long career that keeps evolving. ‘I have my own dreams and trajectory,’ she says of picking roles to play. ‘I’m choosing projects that challenge me. I have a few things that scare me in the works – in a good way – so that feels right. It’s a mysterious world and has something to do with angels.’ She worked on four films this year so is taking the rest of the year off to support them. ‘I enjoy this part of it too. I’ve done a lot of healing. This is the reward… doing it… but also sharing your work. That’s what I find most liberating about being an actress; It has given me the vehicle to truly know and explore myself. I surprise myself.’

For Anderson, acting has become much more than simply a job. It has changed in importance as she’s grown as an artist over the years. ‘It’s a life saver. It’s better than therapy,’ she says. ‘It is cathartic – when I’m completely immersed in my work, I have no distractions. I’m in love with creating and playing… it’s alchemy. I can turn all I’ve been through into something else. I’m less worried about superficial things. It has freed me. ‘When you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good’ is a quote I love.’’

She has a diverse number of projects incoming. She recently wrapped on Somedays opposite Billy Bob Thornton, and stars in Michael Cera’s feature directorial debut, Love is not the Answer, as well as Sally Potter’s Alma, alongside Richard E. Grant. ‘Each are very different,’ Anderson says of her roles. You’ll have to wait and see – but I’m very proud of all who worked on these projects. It takes a village. From production to crew to actors and directors, it’s an amazing journey each time. I still feel so new at this, you never stop learning. I feel like a brand new starlet – excited and inspired, at the beginning of her career… It’s hard to get a movie made and the industry has changed. So I’m blessed to have found people who believe enough in each other to take risks and support film makers. Indie films are the final frontier…’

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Styling by JONATHAN ZEILER
Hair by JOHN NOLLET
Pamela wears Prada
Place To Be premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

Dispatches

JACK HUSTON

September 8, 2026

Jack Huston, Sofia Boutella, Bill Pullman, Richard Gere

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The star of Paul Schrader’s latest, The Basics of Philosophy, tells Hollywood Authentic about becoming a ‘man in a room’, his family legacy and stepping behind the camera.

‘I can’t remember the last time I’d read a script and I felt this sort of stone in my stomach, I had to process,’ Jack Huston says of reading the Paul Schrader’s screenplay for his latest film, The Basic of Philosophy, which bowed at this year’s Venice Film Festival. ‘Working with Paul was on my bucket list – I’ve been a huge fan of his for as long as I can remember – and he’s claimed it’s his last ‘man in a room’ films. That’s why it felt like such an honour to be a part of it.’

Huston plays a college philosophy professor, John Jorrisen, whose past comes back to haunt him when his father (Bill Pullman) dies. As a younger man he had been a piano player and teacher, and his relationship with one of his young students had crossed the line as they bowed over the keys. Greg Williams captured Huston with a piano during his festival stay at the San Clemente Palace. Schrader’s movie explores redemption, forgiveness, self-flagellation and guilt as Jorrisen works through how to find a way forward.

Grooming and peadaphilia are tough subjects to wallow in as an actor, Huston considers over an espresso as he sits poolside at the Blue Lounge on the the beach at Venice’s Lido to discuss his work with Hollywood Authentic. ‘Every time you deal with this subject they paint the abuser as a real monster, a bogeyman. This is the first time I’ve read a script where a writer humanises the abuser, which is far more real because it’s the people living to the left and right of us; the people living in plain sight that actually we usually have to worry about. The part I find the most startling and unnerving of a film like this is how relatable John is. I felt like if I was to do a film of this nature, I would only do it with someone of Paul’s stature and intelligence, because I don’t think it’s something to take lightly.’

There are many of Schrader’s ‘men in rooms’ who have gone before Huston, not least Richard Gere, who cameos in the film as John’s college president. The actor admits to initially watching many of them when he took on this role. ‘I rewatched First Reformed, and I just remember this sort of starkness. I felt: ‘I’m in such good hands’ with Schrader.’ He also took a dive into the philosophy that his character teaches and wrestles with, specifically Spinoza who John is writing a book about. ‘There’s a great question that Spinoza asks: are we capable of change? That’s a lifelong question. This film is such an exploration of that question, which isn’t answered. It’s posed. Schrader said that he believed the last scene of any film should be the conversation that ensues as the audience leaves the theatre. This film will spark that.’

Schrader’s film also explores the nature of legacy – how we want to be remembered, what we leave behind. Huston comes from two families that have their fair share of heritage; he counts John Huston and the first prime minister of Great Britain among his forebears. ‘Legacy is such an interesting thing, isn’t it?’ he muses. ‘Because it’s not real. The idea is purely optics a lot of the time. It’s not actually who we are. So, on one side, I feel a heck of a lot of duty. I’m duty-bound to hold up a certain appearance or standard. But you can become a prisoner to it.’

In the movie Jorrisen meets his philosophical hero, taking a stroll with Spinoza as they debate the theory of change. Is there a hero Huston would like to meet and pick the brains of? He replies without hesitation. ‘My grandfather [John Huston]. I’d love it. I was five when he died. I’ve been lucky enough to have such a supportive family, and my uncle Danny, and my aunt Anjelica, and people who have really passed on pearls of wisdom that he passed onto them. But I’d love to talk to him myself. And his advice has already been helpful early in my career. I did a film that’s to be forgotten, but there was a review… My uncle said that my great-grandfather said to my grandfather that you can either believe the good reviews or the bad reviews. You can’t believe both. So what a great way of looking at those things: you can believe what they say that’s bad about you, or you can believe what they say that’s good about you. It’s your choice. How do you see yourself? I thought that was such an interesting switch that made me stop caring about the negatives, and focus on the positives. And then the positive reinforcement that goes from that.’ He pauses. ‘And also don’t read your fucking reviews!’

Huston says he’s learnt a great deal in his career, especially from the mistakes he’s made along the way. ‘Now I have a lot more confidence in myself as an actor, because I was given the opportunity to play characters, which is always where I felt far more comfortable. Delving into the character is what makes this job so endlessly fascinating, that we’re able to live these other lives – sometimes lives that we would never go near with a 10ft pole. But being able to explore different people in different parts of life that we wouldn’t usually have that opportunity to do, has opened up a world of intrigue and fascination. That’s the most beautiful part.’

His next big learning curve– and change – is in directing a passion project which he’s written and will direct. Joseph Merrick will track the life of the so-called ‘Elephant Man’ either side of the portion of his life covered by David Lynch’s seismic film starring John Hurt. ‘I would never do something that would step on the toes – or even the toenail – of Lynch’s The Elephant Man, which is probably one of the top five films ever made, and changed my life, and made me want to be in this business in any capacity. But I found a way to tell a part of Joseph’s life that has not been widely told. It’s his childhood, and it’s the last few months of his life where he left London and went to Fawsley Hall to live in nature. It lives ‘arm in arm’ with The Elephant Man and I’ve cast a disabled actor playing Joseph, who we will be announcing soon.’ Huston also has a personal link the Lynch’s film in his off-screen relationship with the late John Hurt. ‘John was my mentor. My nearest and dearest. I loved him dearly. Before he died, he said the sweetest thing; ‘I hope I don’t die before you get the opportunity to direct me’.’ He smiles. ‘He always knew that that’s where my love really lay, on the other side of the camera.’

Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
The Basics of Philosophy premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Read our review here

Screening Room

BUNKER

September 8, 2026

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Miguel and Sofia Mereno (Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz) seem to have it all. He’s an award winning architect, she’s an editor at a publishing house; they live in an expensive, beautiful house in London with their two children and pedigree cat. And when we first meet them Miguel is telling a table of friends at a high end restaurant the story of their romance. Over their first dinner he had wept as she talked and, moved by his sensitivity, she had kissed him. While the table sighs over this, Miguel quickly qualifies the story; she had cats, he was allergic, the tears were not real.

Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Paul Dano, Mark Gatiss, Florian Zeller — Blue Morning Pictures/Mod Producciones/Pathé Films

When the couple look into each other’s eyes after this confession there is another conversation that is going on – one that takes further shape as he accepts a commission to design a survival bunker for a tech billionaire (Paul Dano channeling Musk). The idea of building fortresses that only the rich can access is immoral to Sofia whose dissatisfaction with her career and marriage becomes a chasm as Miguel says of most things ‘in the end it all comes down to money’.

Money, and wealth disparity, are at the heart of Florian Zeller’s latest drama which explores the way rich people use their resources to control and insulate, that the more they have the more they fear losing. Miguel negotiates with his working class neighbour, Toby (an excellent Stephen Graham) using the lure of cash to smooth over a dispute about a window in a way that prompts Toby to drop the c-bomb under his breath. A massive payday is the sticking point between the spouses, and the spectre of robbery and economic revolution hangs over everything as the tech bro predicts social collapse and a security engineer insists on high-tech alarms in the family home.

But it’s also a study of a fractured marriage, fissuring under the pressure of unspoken discussion. Miguel and Sofia may seem to enjoy one another (they’re funny and light together as they attend a friend’s art gallery and are bemused by some of the pieces) but Sofia’s sadness in viewing a painting of intimacy, her reaction to a young author (Patrick Schwarzenegger) discussing the need to live in the moment, and even the way she folds herself into her duvet at night tell a different story. It’s like that meet-cute Miguel recounts – the reality is less romantic.

Though Zeller’s stagey screenplay and direction are handsome and hold interest, the material is elevated by the pairing of real-life couple Cruz and Bardem. Their genuine history informs every look and gesture, and it’s their humanity and warmth that nudges the final reel over the line as a rather too neat characterisation bait-and-switch is executed. As a conversation about class and economics, Bunker is slippery. As a depiction of mid-life marriage, it’s intriguing. But it’s most compelling as a portrait of the screen presence of Cruz and Bardem, and the tangible connection between them.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of BLUE MORNING PICTURES/MOD PRODUCCIONES/PATHÉ FILMS
Bunker premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

Dispatches

SUZANNE LINDON

September 8, 2026

Kim Gordon, Suzanne Lindon, Celeste Jiuge Leboucq, Claire Denis

VENICE DISPATCH
Photographs by LAUREN CARNELL
Interview by JANE CROWTHER

The star of Miu Miu’s #32 Women’s Tales short, Avec Kim, tells Hollywood Authentic about working with the iconic Claire Denis and learning to drive for her role.

Each year fashion house Miu Miu commissions one of the most profound and original female directors working today to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century; this year the 32nd collaborative study is from writer-director, Claire Denis and writer-director-actor Suzanne Lindon (Mona Fastvold’s Discipline is #31). In Avec Kim, Lindon stars as a Parisian woman who mends her retro car before taking it onto the streets of the City of Lights for a series of poetic encounters to meet ‘Kim’ (played by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). With a soundtrack from Gordon and clothing from Miu Miu’s latest collection, it’s a film bursting with feminine creativity which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Lindon, the daughter of acclaimed French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, is a filmmaker herself (she wrote, directed and starred in Spring Blossom in 2020 and just wrapped filming on her second feature) and has worked with Denis for some time before their collaboration for Miu Miu. The duo co-wrote feature film, The Fence, together previously. ‘It was magical to work with her,’ Lindon says of working with Denis when we catch up with her at the Baglioli Luna Hotel on Venice’s Grand Canal. ‘We started working together by writing the script for The Fence together but getting to work with her on this felt completely different, because I get to see Claire on set, her natural habitat. I’d seen her at home, because we were writing in her kitchen for a year, but I discovered that she was so free on set, so unafraid of trying things, of filming in different ways than what I would expect her to do.’

When Denis first pitched Lindon the idea she had no idea she would need to drive a car, let alone a vintage stick-shift. ‘I didn’t drive, and I didn’t have my license,’ she laughs. ‘And I said, “OK, give me two weeks. In two weeks, I can drive”’. Lindon learnt to drive, passed her test and was ready behind the wheel on day one of shooting. Denis was fluid with her direction, giving the actor space to invent, working towards the denouement when the driver picks up ‘Kim’ and the two share a moment that celebrates intergenerational relationships together in the car. ‘Claire is one of my closest friends now,’ Lindon smiles, ‘and I felt that I would find in Kim something that I found in Claire. I wanted to meet Kim, because I want to meet people that Claire loves – they have to be great if she sees something in them.’

The lure of the project was also its trailblazing nature for Lindon. ‘I think Miu Miu are ahead of their time, because this is an idea that Mrs Prada and her team had before it was fashionable to celebrate women. As a young actress and filmmaker, it felt so important to be a part of this project, also with Kim and Claire, who come from another generation. But I look up to them so much that I felt very privileged.’ Denis, she says, has been her ‘queen’ since she was 15 years old. ‘I’ve always been so struck by her freedom and her independence at a time when a female director was not very listened to. Claire didn’t care. She worked with Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and she always managed to have her own space and her own voice. And to me, she is part of a generation of women in cinema that have helped us to start changing things.’

Photographs by LAUREN CARNELL
Interview by JANE CROWTHER
Hair by THIBAUD SALDUCCI
Makeup by CAMILLE ARNAUD
Suzanne wears Miu Miu (from the Fall-Winter 2026 runway collection)
Avec Kim is available on Miu Miu digital channel and on MUBI

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