#I had my 3D Studio period in my teens

[agapi-kalyptei]

I am now a 3D expert, Pixar watch out

(It should be clear now that my only hobby is finding, in detail, all the things I don't know.)

[kingofthewilderwest]

One of the major flaws of HTTYD 3 in comparison to its predecessors is how childish the movie felt. The first two movies had the occasional joke but were still extremely mature in their storytelling. Have you read the article "Dreamworks execs have an incredible reason for why their films are unpopular" ? It came out a year after the second movie, and explains why they dumbed down the third.

It’s an interesting article and I’ve always thought there was some truth in the opinion: to their detriment, DreamWorks’ latest films haven’t focused on the creatively wild, often more mature spark that made things like How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods, Rise of the Guardians, Megamind, or The Prince of Egypt quality films. As the article writer notes:

Animated films, if anything, attract a much broader audience of older children, teens, and adults than they ever did in the Eighties and Nineties. Ironically, DreamWorks’s own films in the 2000s played a significant role in expanding the public’s perception about animated features. Now, DreamWorks is betting against its own history as they try to get back on track.

That said. Many of the earliest DreamWorks productions have a somewhat mature appeal to them, but I feel like DreamWorks has long played the game of wide audience appeal commercialism. For a period of time, they balanced their “artistic” or “venturesome” films against their “safer cash” films. The fluffier Turbo was released just one year before HTTYD2; Kung Fu Panda 3 and The Boss Baby were released a year apart, too. There was a sense of balance, letting the fluffier, probably more kid-appealing films earn money, while allowing them to take risks on more unique ventures. I’m not sure if that was their actual strategy, but regardless: balance of maturity. (And for the record, calling some DreamWorks movies “fluffier” is not intended to be an insult; I myself love their Mr. Peabody & Sherman).

And I think the reason I was so hardcore on board the DreamWorks train is that, whether it was an ill-conceived mistake (Shark Tale) or a big “what the fuck” (Bee Movie) or feeling somewhat adult (Antz), DreamWorks was willing to take those risks. DreamWorks was willing to be quirky. And DreamWorks was willing to put heart into everything; Mr. Peabody & Sherman definitely has heart to it, as does Home, as does Turbo from what I remember (only saw that one once).

I feel like advertisements for Trolls and The Boss Baby is where my friendship circles started to feel less enthused about DreamWorks. At that point, I saw some trust failing for DreamWorks’ creative direction - that DreamWorks was dumbing down their movies for children rather than making fluff family films with heart. The key phrase is “dumbing down.” There’s a huge difference between writing children’s stories and dumbing down for children. And that’s what this article writer was calling out, too.

Ghibli movies are written for children. Disney 2D animated films bring awe to children. How to Train Your Dragon understood that lots of its audience members would be children. But you breathe life into a quality story that children and adults can enjoy! Making a bunch of crappy jokes dumbed down to children is stuff like... at its worst... Norm of the North. When you’re making something shoddier, with half-assed fart jokes, because of an implicit idea children’s media doesn’t have to be as quality... because children allegedly aren’t going to notice quality... that’s where we run into problems.

Now, I’m not going to say whether or not I think DreamWorks has actually begun dumbing down its films. I know that’s the impression in my peer group. I know that’s an impression I’ve felt inside my heart, too. But I haven’t seen Trolls or Trolls World Tour or The Boss Baby so I can’t judge. But I think it’s safe to say there has been a gradual shift over time. And that escalated post-2014, where we got this from DreamWorks execs:

…the company's slate changes are more realistic/in-tune with the evolution in changes in the box office market as the 2012-2014 film challenges were tied to films which skewed older right as the box office began to see changes whereby animation demand was increasingly skewing younger as kids began to age out of the genre earlier. While we view the ability to reduce P&A as more difficult given the need to advertise to two distinct groups (kids and moms), the combination of both cost reductions in production and a younger skewing slate, do position the slate better in our view.

And my impression is it’s escalated lately (but I only have a small sample size of films, so I take what I say with a grain of salt). I remember during the NBCUniversal acquisition in 2016, fans feared DreamWorks would lose its sometimes mature, sometimes quirky heart. That the company would be in a downfall state for quality.

I had hoped that HTTYD3 might be a bastion against efforts to commercialize with cash-easy, not-as-heart-ful “kid” appeals. THW grossing a lot of money could help leadership remember that diverse audiences, not tiny children, can and do watch animated films - 3D animation’s just not a guaranteed success because it’s a more saturated market. It could at least let the tradition of some DreamWorks gutsier creative films perpetuate.

And I do think that THW doesn’t have as many problems as, say, The Boss Baby probably does, when it comes to “kid-specific appeal”. I feel like the tone in THW has a middle ground. THW was never going to be as dark as HTTYD2; DeBlois made that clear since the release of HTTYD2; but I do think there might have been an effort to lighten tone in places (ergo the large number of gag jokes that cluttered the film). There’s absolutely mature ideas inside THW: the concept of parting ways with someone you love because it’s better for both of you... that’s meaty... that’s something that even adults grapple with. Hiccup’s flashbacks with Stoick have the simple but in-depth storytelling mood I know of the How to Train Your Dragon brand. So I would phrase it as it’s not a case of complete dumbing down so much as it is some imperfect tonal choices and plot focuses (too much spotlighting on the Light Fury romance, for instance, and not weeding out an excessive amount of jokes... that again... cluttered the film). The first two HTTYD movies feel like carefully honed storytelling, capturing the essence of what their story needed. The third needed tonal and content reorganization. The presentation of stakes and plot progression weren’t on par with the first two films. The Hiccup-Toothless separation didn’t pack a hard punch to me because the steps we took to get to the end weren’t the tonal footsteps we needed.

There’s a reason I charged to theatres the weekend Abominable released (mind, this was before the map controversy over the film came out). I was hoping Abominable could be a DreamWorks film with art and heart. And you know? I think that Abominable was one draft short of being *INCREDIBLE*. The problem is it was one draft short. It stayed superficial instead of diving into the meat. The plot pacing was slow because we didn’t get into the meat, the characterization felt awkwardly paced and whiplashy because it didn’t get into the meat, and the humor felt childish rather than taking full advantage of things like character relations. But the inside heart - the inside potential - of Abominable is monumental. It’s still not a bad film! If they’d gotten that next draft, Pearl and DreamWorks could have had a piece on par with Megamind and The Croods. I absolutely believe that. If I had time, I would rewrite Abominable in fanfiction and show how much potential this thing had.

DreamWorks is no longer a young studio exploring whatever the crap it wants because it’s the new guy finding his voice or rebelling against the other voice. DreamWorks is an established powerhouse. And with establishment comes a certain degree of safety-playing and standardization of content. I don’t expect we’ll get as many wild tone shifts as Bee Movie (11/2007) to Kung Fu Panda (6/2008) or How to Train Your Dragon 2 (6/2014) to freaking Penguins of Madagascar (11/2014).

That’s not to say DreamWorks does or doesn’t make quality films. I admit I don’t have high hopes on some things like The Boss Baby 2. I do have my fingers crossed for The Wizards of Once; I hoooope that DreamWorks can treat TWOO as they did HTTYD... something with simple, powerful, overflowing, artistic heart.

Who knows. Guess we’ll see.

[turquoisewave]

hey sira ..... about that post with the time periods with sinbad and treasure planet and all that ..... WHAT WAS GOING ON? you said you wouldn't rant about it in the tags so i sent this ....... i need answers ..... TT_TT

Alrighty so the main way I know about it is because I learned about the decline of mainstream 2d animated films in the US so I’m gonna be covering both, partially using a copy/paste of a rant I made months back. All info under the readmore:

HOKAY SO, this isn’t all the factors and it’s not everything it’s just what I remember. I tried to fact check this mess and I think I changed any inaccuracies but I COULD BE WRONG.

So, animation in the 2000s, why it was the way it was and why a lot of films went under-appreciated. One thing you gotta remember is that while animation is a creative field, the companies in charge of them are businesses. And businesses will almost always go for low risk/high reward shit. This means, if there’s something tried and true they’ll stick with it. This is why studios often modeled works after other studios (funny talking animals, white gloves, black eyes with that lil white slit, musical shorts like Silly Symphonies, Happy Harmonies, and Merrie Melodies which yes were all by different studios), or in direct opposition of other studios (don bluth going darker with themes to contrast disney’s cuteness, bugs bunny’s trickster personality to contrast mickey’s nondescript Good personality, etc).

But there’s only so long you can do the same stuff before people get tired of it. Most animated feature length films had the same formula: a retelling of an old tale with musical numbers and cute sidekicks. And they started not doing so good.

However, animation at this time had grown in leaps and bounds. Digital coloring and compositing, merging of 3d effects, big studios run by huge companies, and a track record for being profitable as fuck. At the time the companies didn’t want them to go under so they decided to try to get Innovative. Cause that’s how they’d stayed afloat when things went bad before.

They weren’t going to stray from adapting though, too many unknown factors in original stories (which would also require more workshopping and pre-production). So, they’re still adapting old stories. However, they’re pulling from different sources, and in the case of Disney giving them a twist.

Atlantis was inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth mixed with the myth of Atlantis, Treasure Planet was of course Treasure Island but Pirates in Space (which is one of my favorite nonsensical aesthetics), Dreamworks SKG (their 2d animation dept) went super old school with myths and legends (Sinbad, Prince of Egypt). And both studios went ham on trying to be innovative with the tech at their disposal.

There’s another reason why they went so hard, besides of course being artists. I said before that at the time companies didn’t want their 2d departments to flop, but as time progressed a new alternative began to become prevalent: 3D animation. And this became a huge threat to 2D studios.

Important to note in this regard is the advent of Pixar in the mid 1990s. 3D animation had come a long way from its clunky, surrealist roots. And with the success of movies such as Toy Story and A Bug's Life, it proved itself to be an upcoming profitable medium. It wasn't just the animation though, Pixar had amazing storytellers and directors. And this shit was new, not directly based on an old Grimm Fairy tale or something. In short their whole package was amazing. Dreamworks started being active around this time too and added fuel to the 3D animation fire. Granted Shrek was based on fairy tales, but in a way that was a subversion and became incredibly iconic for it.

At the time Pixar was independent from Disney but working in contract with them. And the success was more than welcomed. As always in capitalism, the question of profitability comes into question. Traditional 2D animation, especially at the high framerate disney was known for, is expensive af to make. Often if directors and producers are not careful, a budget can really run away from you. For example, Toy Story only cost 30 Million USD to make. Treasure Planet cost 140 Million USD. (granted that's because of the combination of 3d and 2d elements. But Lilo and Stitch was almost strictly 2D and still cost more than Toy Story at 80 million USD.) Also, Disney also kinda oversaturated their market. They released a fuckton of straight to dvd sequels (which Disney himself was avidly against) which kinda degraded the overall quality of the Disney 2d animation brand.

There was also competition from other factors. The early 2000s saw the Harry Potter boom, and Lord of the Rings came not soon after. Those of course siphoned off a lot of attention. They were part of pre-established series. The experimental stories that Disney was doing at the time, i.e. AU versions of literary classics, fell flat because the target audience was not familiar with the origin sources, and those that were weren't interested in "kids movies" They had no fucking clue how to market them, and the target audiences didn’t know to look for them.

Lilo and Stitch actually met with success, because 1) they marketed the hell out of it and capitalized on Stitch's mascot-like status and 2) it was more rooted in the kid demographic rather than that awkward kid/teen straddle the other two had. But even Lilo and Stitch couldn't save the Orlando animation studio when Disney finally decided to shut it down. They concentrated the last of their 2D animation studios in Burbank, California. Pixar's contract with Disney ended in 2004, and Disney tried to capitalize on the success of 3D with their own films, Meet the Robinsons and Chicken Little. Both were uh...the Meet the Robinsons wasn't too bad but Chicken Little was like...trying to hard to be a hacky version of a Dreamworks movie Ratatouille was released by pixar independent of Disney which is a neat thing to note. And of course met with success Meanwhile 2D kept falling behind, and whenever it flopped like with Home on the Range it was just another nail in the coffin. Disney renewed its contract with Pixar, and after the release of The Princess and The Frog they switched gears to focus solely on 3D animated feature length films, relegating their 2D staff to tv shows. Granted there's some great shows like Gravity Falls etc but, the fact that they've given up on films is disappointing. But the numbers don't lie. Tangled was its biggest success in a long time. And then Frozen came and blew it out of the water.

tl:dr - People were tired of seeing grim fairy tales stories retold with musical numbers and sometimes talking animals. - Studios tried to use different sources for adaptations and put cool spins on them and incorporate new technology.

But it didn’t end up working in their favor and 2D animation declined because:

- success of studios that were using 3D animation (though credit can also be given to their pre-production staff/writers/storyboarders) - competition from other growing franchises, in some cases Disney cannibalizing its own profits (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean) - Cost effectiveness of 3D vs 2D - Changing of fads and appeal to audience - Inability to market movies properly to target demographics - Studios actively sabotaging their 2d studios to have an excuse to tank them and focus on 3D work.

So yeah, that’s all I got. I’m definitely missing some nuances here though feel free to correct me whoever sees this.

[allianceinternational-blog]

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[todaynewsstories]

Bernardo Bertolucci of Last Tango fame, dies in Rome

ROME (Reuters) – Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose 1972 movie ““Last Tango in Paris” shocked audiences with a notorious sex scene that came back to haunt him in his later years, died on Monday.

FILE PHOTO: Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is interviewed as he arrives for a gala screening of his film “The Last Emperor” in 3D at the AFI Fest 2013 in Hollywood, California, November 10, 2013. REUTERS/Fred Prouser/File photo

Bertolucci, 77, died at his home in Rome after a long illness, his publicist said. He had been in bad health for years and confined to a wheelchair since the early 2000s following a back operation.

“Last Tango”, which starred Marlon Brando, was banned in several countries, including Italy, where it was not released for viewing until early 1987.

It won Bertolucci an Oscar nomination and burnished his international reputation, but his follow-up “1900”, a five-hour historical epic starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster, marked the start of a lengthy period of commercial flops.

He burst back with ““The Last Emperor” in 1987, beautifully shot by his long-time cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, which took all nine Oscars for which it was nominated, reasserting Bertolucci’s position as a filmmaker with a distinct vision.

Born in Parma in central Italy, Bertolucci was the son of poet and film critic Attilio Bertolucci.

He began writing poetry as a child and had his work published in magazines before his teens, winning a national poetry prize as a student in Rome.

GOLDEN CHILDHOOD

“”It was a golden childhood. A big comfortable house, servants, understanding parents and a pursuit of intellectualism,” he said.

“”When I was 10 I would spend Saturdays and holidays at the movies, seeing one at two o’clock, another at four and maybe a third at six.”

At 15 he borrowed a camera to make his first films – 16 mm silent shorts – and in 1961 he dropped out of college to become assistant director to the young Pier Paolo Pasolini on ““Accattone”.

“”From the day I began work with Pasolini, I stopped writing poetry,” he said. “”Poetry was only a means of expressing myself until I could find the real way — making movies.”

His first feature, a thriller called “”The Grim Reaper” (1962) that he made at the age of 22 about the murder of a prostitute, was a commercial flop.

He spent two years preparing his second, “”Before the Revolution”. The romantic exploration of turbulent youth after World War Two was hailed by critics.

But the turning point in his career came in 1970 when he turned out two outstanding films, “”The Spider’s Stratagem” and the intricate, ambivalent adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel “”The Conformist”.

Bertolucci’s early works were certainly far from sensationalist, however, notable for their passionate depictions of the effects of social evils, reflecting the director’s strong left-wing views.

“Last Tango” aroused controversy because of its explicit sex – in particular an anal rape scene – and was condemned in the Italian courts as “”obscene, indecent and catering to the lowest instincts of the libido”.

The rape scene, infamously remembered for Brando’s use of butter to penetrate his co-star, also traumatised its lead actress Maria Schneider, an unknown 19-year-old at the time.

“I felt humiliated and, to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take,” she told Britain’s Daily Mail before her death in 2011.

The controversy resurfaced in 2016 when a video emerged of Bertolucci telling a master class in Paris: “I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on.”

Responding to a wave of outrage, the director said Schneider had known everything about the scene in advance, except the use of butter, which was an idea he had discussed with Marlon just before shooting.

“Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false,” he said.

LOOKING EAST

The period of subsequent flops weighed on the director, who looked east for the theme of ““The Last Emperor” which chronicled the life of Pu Yi, China’s last imperial ruler.

“”I was so frustrated I wanted to go far away,” he said.

The project took four years to film, using 19,000 extras and 9,000 costumes. It was the first Western feature on China, made in China since the 1949 Communist revolution. It was also the first film shot in Beijing’s Forbidden City, the ancient home of China’s rulers.

Bertolucci continued making films as recently as 2012, but never reached such critical and commercial highs again. He was honored with lifetime awards from the Cannes and Venice film festivals.

In an interview with Reuters in 2013, Bertolucci said he was disappointed with the Hollywood that once inspired him and preferred television series such as “Mad Men”, saying they were better casted and better directed than big screen productions.

“My generation had an affair with American culture, there’s no doubt about it. A street lamp and a fire hydrant made me sing in the rain,” he said.

“I saw ‘Stagecoach’ and for me (director) John Ford became Homer,” he said of the classic American Western film made in 1939. “I was in front of a full-length mirror and what I was seeing at 12 wasn’t me, it was John Wayne.”

Slideshow (3 Images)

“But the American films I like now do not come from Hollywood studios but from television series, like ‘Mad Men’, ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘The Americans’,” he said.

In 2012, Bertolucci made his first feature film in nearly a decade with “Me and You,” about an introverted 14-year-old teenager who tells his mother he is going on a ski trip but spends a week in the family basement with his drug addicted half-sister.

Like “Last Tango in Paris,” it was shot mostly indoors.

Reporting By Philip Pullella. Editing by Patrick Johnston

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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[nightmareonfilmstreet]

From Sharp to Dull; The Top 13 FRIDAY THE 13TH Films

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From Sharp to Dull; The Top 13 FRIDAY THE 13TH Films

For nearly 40 years, the Voorhees dynasty has been terrorizing teens from Camp Blood to beyond (Space. I mean in Space). The franchise has spawned over 12 films, a TV series, comic books – and one of the most iconic menaces in Horror. Today, on the day of his birth – we honor Jason Voorhees in the TOP 13 Friday the 13th films!

*Record Scratch*

Wait!? Didn’t I just say 13 films? Why yes, Dear Reader I did. We’ve also included a few surprises along the way…

  #13 – Nick Antosca’s Friday the 13th (TBD)

Friday the 13th by Doaly

Nick Antosca (Channel Zero, Hannibal) was orignally commission to write a draft of the new Friday the 13th before Paramount brought in Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners, Contraband). The project was ultimately scrapped but fans can still read the Friday the 13th that could have been! Nick Antosca’s screenplay plants you right back in the late eighties, on the last day of summer camp. An absolute brilliant approach to a character who’s story has been told (and re-told) many times over, Antosca’s script is everything a lifelong Friday fan has been looking for…including a quick hint to a possible winter-set sequel. You can find a link to the un-produced script and a full summary of the entire screenplay HERE.

  #12 – Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

I’m sure this is someone’s favorite, but I’ve always found it very hard to like to this movie. Jason Goes to Hell is the biggest tease at the prom, and it’s expansion of Jason as an evil entity that come travel from person to person is absurd. A product of it’s time, The Final Friday was born from a period in the 90s when everything had a sci-fi bend with mysterious, Lovecraftian qualities. And yes, this film did lay the groundwork for Freddy vs Jason but ultimately, that’s all anyone remembers about the entire 88 minutes of Jason Goes to Hell. That said, the character design for Jason with his bulbous head growing into his mask is a highlight, and well worth the price of admission.

  #11 – Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood (1988)

Psychic Powers. That’s really all you have to know about Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Oh, and Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie’s) makes an appearance as Dr. Christopher Crews alongside Kane Hodder in his first of four credits as Jason Voorhees. And that’s pretty much it…

  #10 – Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning (1985)

A clever take on a franchise that someone, somewhere thought needed a thorough refresh, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was an…interesting twist on the story-line. We spend a good majority of the film questioning Tommy Jarvis’s sanity and his possible murderous tendencies only to discover that a Jason is in fact, plain old Roy. A New Beginning is proof that a Jason by any other name is still a Jason but it fails to deliver. Still, the film did teach us the importance of controlling our temper, sharing chocolate bars, and how to chop wood.

#9 – Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D (1982)

While Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D have have taken 9th place on our list, it’s killer synth theme is 1st in our hearts. The film that gave Jason his iconic mask, Part 3 brought us a new dimension of terror. The 3rd Dimension!! Set mostly inside the Higgin’s barn, Jason finds time to pitchfork a few local ruffians and chop some unsuspecting co-eds in half. While perhaps the singularly most important film in the longevity the franchise has enjoyed, Part 3‘s is less menacing than he is oafish.

  #8 – Friday the 13th (2009)

I have a bone to pick with everyone that hates this fantastic remake. Not only does this movie contain the most psychologically researched Jason portrayal since Kane Hodder’s brilliant run, Friday the 13th (2009) contains one of the greatest cold opens of the entire series! Arguably, the first 15 minutes of the film, is another film all on it’s own. Jason is not messing about this time around. The kids has trespassed and they must die- well, everyone except the cute girl that remind me of my mother. Sure, everyone in the cast is gorgeous but don’t forget, Friday the 13th (1980) had Kevin “Freaking” Bacon.

  #7 – Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

I’m of the opinion that you owe Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan a proper re-watch before condemning it forever. Yes, this chapter takes Jason out of Crystal Lake and New Jersey proper. Yes, we spend the first half of the movie on a boat, but I’m telling you, this movie is so much more fun than you remember. They threw everything they had at this flick, including the most entertaining fist fight since They Live (1988) and an incredible interview with Arsenio Hall.

#6 – Friday the 13th Part II (1981)

Marking his first appearance as an adult, Friday The 13th Part II helped to build the mythos and Legend that is Jason Voorhees. As it is written in 1st Cunningham, Chapter 2, Verse 13: “When I was a child, I spoke as child, went to camp as a child, and drowned as a child; but when I become a man, I put away childish things.” There comes a time when we all realize it’s time to take up the pick-axe and blaze our own path. Had Pamela lived long enough to see the man her little boy came back from the grave to be, I’m sure she would have been very proud.

  #5 – Friday the 13th (1980)

The films that started it all. To not include the original Friday the 13th in your countdown is a transgression no horror fan (or crazed-killer) could forgive. Complete with groundbreaking special effects from Tom Savini, Friday the 13th (1980) was the film that changed the landscape of horror forever. Influencing practically all horror films that followed, Sean S. Cunningham’s cult classic belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Horror alongside John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees brought a fresh take on the revenge-driven killer, surprising and terrifying audiences. While some (including screenwriter Victor Miller) scoff at Jason upheaval of the franchise, nothing changes the brilliance of the original Friday the 13th.

  #4 – Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984)

Four Words: Crispin Glover Dance Number. The Final Chapter is (count it) the 2nd attempt to close the book on Jason Voorhees. Believe it or not, there was a time when studios actively tried to end there franchises, once and for all. Originally intended as a trilogy, Part IV was a clever attempt to axe Jason and introduce another villain: Tommy Jarvis. We would eventually see this play out in future installments but Part IV laid the groundwork for a story-line that would be abandoned only 1 film later. Fully graduated into his Hockey Mask attire, Jason spends no time hiding in barns, or poking fresh eye holes in his head-bag. Don’t stand too close to windows, and don’t bother asking where to corkscrews are, Jason is coming for you, and you’d better make the best of the time you have left.

  #3 – Jason X (2001)

Alright, alright, alright- please stop yelling at your phone. Widely considered a low point in the franchise, Jason X took Friday the 13th to places it had never gone before: Space! You’ll find that if you try and laugh at the insanity of the “Lower Register” Friday films, you’ll find you enjoy Jason X quite a lot more than you ever thought possible. And honestly, what’s not to love?! You need one-liners? Oh we’ve got oneliners. You’re looking for off-the-wall lunacy and buckets of blood? You better get ready for a wild ride. There is literally a scene where a space soldier is impaled on a space drill, only to have his space comrades report, “He’s screwed”

  #2 – Freddy vs Jason (2003)

Sure, not technically a Friday the 13th film, but it’s still very much a Jason Voorhees story, and that’s good enough for us! Also, bonus points for the Freddy feature because if there’s one thing every movie needs more of, it’s Freddy Krueger. Fans are still debating who really won this fight but regardless of the outcome, it was an epic battle 30 years in the making. Say what you will about Freddy vs Jason this movie completely delivered.

  #1 – Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

A perfect blend of horror and humor, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is a favorite of many horror fans, as well as the hosts of the Nightmare on Film Street Podcast. With a soundtrack that consists almost entirely of Alice Cooper, Jason Lives is a brilliant example of the franchise tipping it’s hat to the audience. The film is aware of itself and leans hard into the absurdity and ridiculousness of it’s premise. Part VI also contains some of the most outlandish kills of the entire franchise, including the Smiley Face Tree Smash, and the RV Death Mask. In many ways Part VI is a modern retelling of the Frankenstein story but for the most part, it’s just one hell of a good time.

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Salma Hayek: Trump couldn’t build a wall without illegal Mexicans’

Her new film, Beatriz at Dinner, already has Oscar buzz. But on top of the acting, Salma Hayek is also saving animals, running charities and beating the hell out of a Trump piata. Johnny Davis meets Hollywoods busiest firebrand

It was after a neighbour shot her dog that Salma Hayek realised Donald Trump would become president.

I thought it was a crazy thing, that it would never happen but then something really tragic happened to me, she explains. I have a ranch in America and a neighbour of mine killed my dog. Hayek, who owns around 50 animals, including 20 chickens, five parrots, four alpacas, two fish, some cats and a hamster, says that Mozart, the tragic German Shepherd in question, had never attacked anyone. And the authorities in dealing with the neighbour, and what he did How is that legal? [Police have said the neighbour shot her dog after he found it fighting with his dogs in his garage.] Just to understand what was the normality of things. I realised in this moment, Oh my God: hes going to win.

Hayek, a Mexican immigrant to America who identifies as half-Spanish and half- Lebanese, lives in London and is married to a Frenchman who happens to be Franois-Henri Pinault, billionaire CEO of the company that owns Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Gucci is perhaps uniquely placed to have firm views on Trump, Brexit and immigration, and well get to them.

Hayek is primarily here this morning to talk about her new movie, The Hitmans Bodyguard. We are at a press junket for the film. Elsewhere on the first floor of this smart London hotel are Samuel L Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Gary Oldman, answering questions. Junkets can be dispiriting, and rapport can be in short supply. That is, unless youre Salma Hayek, whose personality could light up a funeral. She arrives in a riot of black and red polka dots, tottering shoes and glossy hair, 5ft 2in and somehow 50 years old, although agelessly beautiful. She plonks herself into an armchair, hoists her legs up, and proceeds to tug the small table between us towards her. Do you mind? Theyre bringing me food. I like my food.

Hasnt she had breakfast?

I did but Im still hungry, she grins.

A round of avocado on toast is spirited into the room, accompanied by a mystery shake in a plastic container. (A second round soon follows.) Famous since she was a soap star in Mexico in her 20s and with 40-plus Hollywood films to her name, Hayek has done literally thousands of interviews. What does she make of the publicity circuit?

Im good! she says. I just pretend Im having a conversation with a new friend.

Other half: Hayek and her billionaire husband Franois-Henri Pinault. Photograph: Tony Barson Archive/WireImage

Indeed, Hayek proves impossible not to like. She may be the perfect chat-show guest: various presenters have hooted along as shes shown off pictures of her Donald Trump piata, discussed her experience as a late-developing teen immersing herself in holy water and praying to Jesus for breasts, or confessing she accused Monsieur Pinault of having an affair after discovering text messages from Elena, only to discover Elena was a language-teaching app.

In fact, we have Pinault to thank for Hayeks turn in The Hitmans Bodyguard. The comedy-action caper is basically a mismatched buddy movie for Jackson and Reynolds, hitman and bodyguard respectively. Hayek is only in a few scenes, but as Jacksons imprisoned criminal wife she matches him profanity for profanity.

I think Salma steals the whole movie, says director Patrick Hughes. I challenge anyone not to fall in love with her because (a) shes a polymath and (b) she kicks ass.

I have to tell you: action is not my favouritest [sic] genre of films, Hayek says. But I married a man who really likes them. So I became an expert. So I see them all!

The image of fashions most powerful CEO spending his downtime like this is intriguing. What is his favourite action movie?

Oh, its like Sophies choice for him, I think.

What about Die Hard, I suggest.

Oh, he loves Die Hard. But we love Bourne. She claps her hands. Sometimes he doesnt even like [a film], he says: Oh my God, that was so bad! But he still has to watch the whole thing.

Its a man thing, I say.

Yes! My brother likes that one, my father likes that one and because of that, when we were doing [The Hitmans Bodyguard] I was able to say it was going to work, because it had a lot of the stuff that the good ones have.

Mexican heroine: Hayek playing Frida Kahlo in Frida with Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera.

Similarly, do actors always know when theyre making a turkey?

Oh yeah! Hayek says, crunching through her toast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And unfortunately Ive never been wrong!

Her CV is mixed. The first Mexican actress to break into Hollywood since Dolores del Ro in the pre-sound 20s, shes played a lesbian taco in the kids film Sausage Party and so-so roles in films such as Spy Kids 3D and Wild, Wild West. But she also earned an Oscar nomination for Frida, her 2002 portrait of Frida Kahlo, and The Hollywood Reporter has just tipped her for 2018s awards season for Beatriz At Dinner, in which she plays an immigrant who clashes with a self-made billionaire.

At first, she says, she hated being famous. This was terrifying because in Mexico when you do a soap, at this point she leaps out of her chair and heads for the door Dont worry, Im not escaping Hello? Her security guard appears with a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. My soap was seen by 60% of the country, so its every day, in their house. Do you mind? Do you want one? she says, offering the smokes. So you become very familiar, like youre their cousin or something. Ive never been so famous since. I kind of hated it.

Taking aim: Hayek in The Hitmans Bodyguard. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

If she hated the attention so much, I wonder why she headed for Hollywood. But Hayek is battling with the curtains while she attempts to heave open a sash window so that she can smoke, unlit fag in her mouth. Not relishing the idea of Hayek tumbling on to the streets below, it seems only polite to help. For a few seconds she holds back the curtains, while I struggle to wrench the window.

Oh my God, that was so easy, she says. I really did want to be an actress, not just be famous. Its a different thing. Because I was famous on a soap! That doesnt make you a great actress. So I went to America to start all over again.

This was the 90s. She played extras and enrolled in the Stella Adler Academy Of Acting in LA, alma mater to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. And this is how old I am, she [Adler] was still alive! She was 90 and she was still teaching and flirting with the young boys. She was a tough cookie but she was brilliant.

Hayek could barely speak the language – My English sucked worse, there werent any parts. Mexican women played maids or gangsters wives. And thats if you got lucky.

Hayek threatened legal action against one director.

I was screen-testing for the lead in a film and they said that it was not written Latin, but they wouldnt mind changing it. I learned the script but when they sent me the pages [for the audition] there was none of the things I had learned, it was another role. So my agent called them and they said, Are you crazy? Shes Mexican. We can change [the race of] the bimbo, but not the lead.

Fashionista: at Stella McCartney, spring/summer 2016, Paris fashion week. Photograph: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images

She got her agent to call back. Would they please just give her five minutes to audition for the part shed learned?

And they said, Absolutely under no circumstances. So I said, OK, you tell them that they either see me, or Im going to sue them. And they said, Theres no point in her coming, even if she had been the best audition she would have never gotten the part but now we hate her. Does she want to come knowing that we detest her? They kept her waiting for five hours. They wondered why would she do this to herself.

Ive never said this to anyone, the name of the director, but it was Ivan Reitman. And I said, Well, I thought that the director that could see Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as twins [1988s Twins], and Arnold Schwarzenegger giving birth to a child [1994s Junior] maybe could see a Mexican as a fashion editor. I thought I owed it to the new generation of Mexicans. That if I got this right, maybe something will shift.

Years later, she bumped into Reitman and he apologised. We had such a lovely conversation, he was so elegant, Hayek says. He said, I was wrong.

All of this pales next to the hill she climbed for Frida.

I was obsessed, Hayek says. I was endeavouring to do a film about an artist in a time when all the films about artists had failed. Already [the studios] were going, Oh no. Then Id say, Its a period piece about Mexicans! And theyre communists! Its a love story between an overweight man and a woman that limps and has a moustache!

Committed: Hayek campaigning for womens empowerment with Guccis Frida Giannini and Beyonc. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty

One studio did eventually take it on, Edward Norton (her partner at the time) rewrote the script for free and Hayek called in favours from co-stars including Ashley Judd, then one of Hollywoods most bankable faces. It opened in two cinemas. Its success, I suggest, must have been all the sweeter.

Yes, she says. Because [the studio] dismissed it. I didnt even have a poster!

It may not surprise you to learn that Hayek is a committed activist: her list of charitable endeavours is too long to go into here, but it includes her own foundation helping women and children in Mexico, and the feminist charity Chime For Change, founded with Beyonc. Its so massive I dont even know what to tell you. I dont just do awareness, I actually do strategy. Im on the board. It takes a lot, a lot, a lot of time.

Other projects receiving the full force of the Hayek commitment include her range of nutritional juices, and a beauty line which she created herself. She also has her own production company, which helped turn the TV show Ugly Betty based on a Colombian telenovela into a worldwide hit. I ask where this drive comes from.

Its been there since Ive been a child. A sense of justice and responsibility for the human race. How can we be better? Because a lot of people dont think that way. They think: How can I pay less tax? And so when I see things that make me think we are degrading and degenerating mentally it makes me want to do something.

She has been hugely successful. Shes married to one of the worlds richest men. (Their daughter, Valentina, attends school in London.) She could just put her feet up. Of course, its a cheap question we already know the answer.

Why would anybody want to sit around and do nothing?

Hayek says that she made it clear she would always remain financially independent from her husband, whose net worth is around $17.3bn. Which may explain money-job films like Sausage Party.

Mirror mirror: Hayek guest stars in Ugly Betty with America Ferrera. Photograph: Danny Feld/ABC

At the time I met him, I had already decided I didnt want one of those [ie a husband], she says. I had set myself up for a completely different life. I was ready to live on my ranch that is a sanctuary for abused animals. I would come to LA and work a little bit. I was not planning on spending. I had no interest in jewellery or clothes or cars. I had everything I wanted. Maybe I had a guy here or there. I also thought I couldnt have children. Then he [Pinault] came along, swept me off my feet, changed my entire universe and knocked me up.

Can she remember what they first liked about one another?

Yes. I asked him, if he had not been doing what he was doing, what would have been his dream? And he said an astronaut and that was my dream! Then we started talking about different theories of physics, which is my secret passion. And soccer! Im a huge soccer fan [she supports Arsenal]. Just random things that nobody knows I like. It was just magical.

As a global citizen at a time when the world seems to be closing in on itself, is Hayek optimistic for the future?

Very optimistic. I have to look for the positive about everything.

Hayek campaigned for Clinton. Hows it going to end for Trump?

I can promise you hes not going to build the wall. You cannot build it without the Mexicans that are illegally in the country. That is what makes the economy so strong because they are paid less than half, with no benefit. Its just not going to happen!

Hayek is banging her fist on the table.

His days are numbered! Even if he becomes a dictator and rewrites the constitution and now the presidents can stay 12 years! Still his days are numbered!

Salma Hayek: activist, actor, producer, juicer, businesswoman, friend to the animals and all-round proper laugh. You wouldnt mess.

The Hitmans Bodyguard is in cinemas on 17 August

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Athar Jaber

A conversation with a sculptor about his work and curiosity for violence.

Nederlandstalige versie

Date of interview: March 5, 2017

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Athar Jaber (° 1982), the Iraqi sculptor, was born in Rome in the artistic nest of two painters from the Iraqi diaspora. At age six, he and his mother settled in Florence, where he bloomed as a teenager, driven by the splendor of the city and its classical treasures. After drawing the many hundreds of old marble sculptures Florence has to offer, it is not surprising his work manifests in white Carrara marble. His work Opus 4, which consists of four enormous marble statues, with which he graduated from the Academy of Antwerp heralds a harmonious picture of a body trapped in stone. With surgical precision the young sculptor composed a surreal birth in this work. Where oddly placed limbs seem to predict the later recurring theme of entropy. "I can not just make beautiful sculptures," Athar warns.

The weather was gloomy the day we planned our visit. It’s a drizzly Sunday early March, but the light is graceful and almost pretty in its glow. Photographer (Tom Peeters) and I met Athar in his home in the north of Antwerp. There we drank coffee and talked about the artist's book and art collection. Facing the window, in the middle of the living area is an impressive matt-brown grand piano. The coffee is somewhat too intense for our delicate Sunday stomachs and so we, resounding with caffeine, find ourselves in our car following Athar as he drives towards his studio in the west of Antwerp. Athar leads us, as he hosted us, and indeed as he seems to do everything: distinguished, courteous, controlled.

We talk with the artist about the alienation he felt as a young child, the homeland of his parents, his heroes, violence, artificial intelligence, and his quest for freedom.

Both your uncle, your mother and your father are known painters. Growing up in Florence in the midst of such an artistic family seems romantic. Was that so?

No (laughs). Although not terrible, it was quite difficult to be a second generation child. Not like the terrible images of refugees that confront us now, but there was a certain alienation that has shaped me. Italian was my first language and I was born in Italy, but you have a strange name and ‘otherness’ that makes you a target for negative attention. As a teenager, it was romantic. From my early teens onwards I visited daily the numerous museums and simply hung around the city to draw marble statues. I grew up with painters and artists around me, so drawing was easy.

After your parents left Iraq for studies, three successive waves of war flooded the country of your origin and your parents could never return to it as a result. How was that growing up?

When they left, they said goodbye to their family and environment for a short period. Then the war broke out. The Iraqi diaspora, a whole generation of artists, musicians, directors, writers who left to study in the 70s, have all been forced to leave their homeland behind. Those who were homesick enough to return haven’t survived. Some have been tortured and were able to flee. Some of them got a better situation, some worse.

Although not terrible, it was quite difficult to be a second generation child. Not like the terrible images of refugees that confront us now, but there was a certain alienation that has shaped me.

When they (my parents) left, they said goodbye to their family and environment for a short period. Then the war broke out.

Did you grow up with that sadness?

Yes. Even if you listen to older Iraqi music, you feel much sadness and melancholy. It is inherent to the culture. If you wake up in Italy as a child, with full knowledge of the facts and consequences of a war in the country where the rest of your family still lives, you simply have a different view of the world than your peers.

Your work has a bright, beautiful and light side. In your material, the anatomical beauty, the refinement of the result, I see examples of that lightness. But as a spectator you also catch a darker side. Is that derived from your past?

Content wise, my work settles closer to the dark side of life. The bodies and heads are unclear, ambiguous, distorted and broken. An identity crisis is at play. Who you are and where you belong are problems that concern me.

The bodies and heads are unclear, ambiguous, distorted and broken. An identity crisis is at play. 

You mentioned earlier in interviews that your national identity no longer affects your current identity, but you are mostly raised by an Iraqi woman who could never return to her homeland. I'm genuinely wondering how and where that distance starts and ends truthfully.

I obviously hate to see what is happening in Iraq. But by now, no more than when I see destruction, war or injustice elsewhere in the world. Syria, Tibet, South America, Africa. After a while you see universal connections and boundaries start blurring. The national parochialism doesn’t fit this time anymore. The world exhibitions, biennales and sports competitions, arisen to affirm boundaries in a healthy way, are also changed and the world has opened up. There are Algerians who represent Germany at biennials, people of African descent to play in European football teams. I really try to think beyond borders and time. In my work you will therefor find few references to time. No clothes, no objects, only the naked body.

The national parochialism doesn’t fit this time anymore.

You have previously studied piano. As a twenty year old you moved to Antwerp to study sculpture and have moved away from music. Why?

With pain in my heart I chose to become an artist. I felt I did not have enough talent to be the pianist I wanted to be. Because of my background I had more talent for visual arts than for music. It has taken me years to make that decision.

With pain in my heart I chose to become an artist. I felt I did not have enough talent to be the pianist I wanted to be. 

You refer to music in your titles. Your first four sculpting began with the title Opus 4, after which each respective image was given a number from 1 to 4. Does music remains to be a great inspirator for you?

I practically named those works, but with a wink to my previous study. People need names, but I do not want to force the spectators to see all things like me. I could have given numbers or codes as scientists do with stars.

But indeed, music may still be one of my biggest influences to date. When listening to certain music, feelings just overwhelm you. Listening to John Coltrane's later recordings gives you absolute freedom for instance! With my work, I of course want to appeal to those feelings. Important feelings, such as prostration, anger and freedom.

Now that you mention a certain 'search for freedom', your first sculptings come to mind. The four works of  Opus 4, to me, seem ‘caught’.

Every material has its spatial limitations. I chose to work exclusively with marble. In a later stage of my production, as in my main series (Opus 5), I learned to take more of an acquired freedom. This translates into technique as well as concept: drill holes, chisel tracks and broken fragments remained. Now I dare to let things go: put a sculpture in acid or shoot at it with bullets. I no longer  chain myself to traditional sculpture techniques.

When I chose to study art, I instinctively chose this discipline. I didn’t doubt it for a second.

Why marble then?

I think it's rooted in my teenage Italian walks. Then and there a bond with sculpting emerged. You have a more direct and intimate contact with a sculpture than with, for example a painting. When I chose to study art, I instinctively chose this discipline. I didn’t doubt it for a second. Much later, I could explain this rationally: a sculpture takes up our dimensional space and threatens our freedom. It takes away space.

I produce my works directly in marble, they are improvisations. Most sculptors first build up something in clay or plaster and then put that image in marble. I am inspired by what is happening around us. A book, the light, the stone, my state of mind at the moment. It also becomes more personal this way.

I am inspired by what is happening around us. A book, the light, the stone, my state of mind at the moment.

Why do you still work according to the craft’s old techniques in a time of 3D printers and robots?

Exactly because of what I just stated! Many artists work with marble because it fits a certain classical tradition and it is prestigious. Therefore, if you have the economic ability to make it happen, it can, indeed, be done by machines as well. But these artists are no sculptors. What I do is different. I myself work with the material and this action, which today is more and more rare, adds something to the work. It gives it another, almost metaphysical, dimension.

The reproducibility of the sculpture in these times has created enormous freedom for sculptors. Thanks to the technological developments, I can now express my emotion and thoughts in a more abstract way. I can be guided by my state of mind. How I feel at one point affects how I work on another. It is comparable to the moment in history that photography took over the task of painting. This resulted in the creation of abstract art, Dadaism, Expressionism and Surrealism, just to name a few.

The reproducibility of the sculpture in these times has created enormous freedom for sculptors. 

So you believe in the aura of an artwork. What does that look like to you?

What impact does the way you make something have for the perception of an image? Creating a sculpture with your bare hands, hammer and chisel, calls for a different interpretation than when it was shot at with firearms and bullets. I sometimes feel a like a torturer. Hammering, chiselling, knocking and removing material with brutal violence while making something beautiful: it is a contradiction. Withall I have experimented with other materials recently, trying to introduce the idea of patinating again. I only use "pigments" that carry a lot of meaning: wine, blood, crude oil, gold. But this is a new project and I don’t want to tell too much about it yet.

Withall I have experimented with other materials recently, trying to introduce the idea of patinating again.

Hammering, chiselling, knocking and removing material with brutal violence while making something beautiful: it is a contradiction.

What is it about art that attracts you as an observer?

I am often more moved by music. As an observer I approach art more intuitively and it is difficult to accurately identify what plays then. Last week I visited an exhibition of Cy Twombly. From books I never had a good idea of his work. Actually if you want to talk about the aura of an artwork, he might be a good artist to discuss. His work really touched me. It must have been years since I was so impressed. In front of certain pieces, I was literally ‘resonating’. Probably because of what interests me at the moment. It was about violence. Mainly the series about Achilles and Patroclus and those about Commodus really moved me.

Last week I visited an exhibition of Cy Twombly. (...) It must have been years since I was so impressed. 

You told me that you want to get rid of the 'marble block’ in a search for freedom. That, and some other things you told me, reminds me of a book by Hermann Hesse, about the encounter between the intellectual Narziss and the artistic Goldmund, also a sculptor. How do you see yourself in that regard?

I believe I've read that book at the right age. Of course, we always have both characters in us, but maybe sometimes one takes over. On the one hand, I create something that comes from inside, but there is also another side. I'm here for hours, sometimes working for months on one slab of stone. There are days that I don’t say a word. Certainly in my performative works, where the aim is to reach a kind of meditative, transcendental state, I am much more the monk than the emotional artist.

Certainly in my performative works, where the aim is to reach a kind of meditative, transcendental state, I am much more the monk than the emotional artist.

Do you have a fixed rhythm?

I do not like busy places and in my limited free time I like to be at home. Reading, drawing, playing or listening to music. I would rather be in my studio day and night actually, but sometimes I have to rest. It's physically heavy work. In addition, I have to divide my time between my other activities. I teach at the Academy of Antwerp, recently started a doctorate in the arts, am a member of the Young Academy in Brussels, and I often have to travel abroad for my exhibitions and projects. Those things must happen and it keeps you going steady as an artist, but first of all I'm sculptor. I prefer being in my studio.

Being an artist is not a pastime, it is a luxurious but serious activity that carries responsibilities. It has to be taken seriously.

What are you trying to teach your students?

At the academy I teach ‘portraits' and ‘stone sculpting'. Especially that last course comes down to hard work. I can teach them relatively little. In the end students have to do it themselves. I can only show them and give small tips. As a teacher I set the bar high. Whatever you do, you have to work hard. Being an artist is not a pastime, it is a luxurious but serious activity that carries responsibilities. It has to be taken seriously. I do not want to discriminate between expressions, anything is possible. It is important that young artists take their freedoms and develop their own language and not be influenced by the teachers too much. Many times I speak with curators and directors of museums and they often contradict each other. Ultimately, you have to decide what you want to do and go for it.

What will your doctorate be about?

It’s a "Doctorate in the Arts" that will develop over the next four years. It is practice-oriented so my artistic research will be emphasised and the PhD will also be mainly conducted in that language. It gives me the chance to be in the studio.

As a sculptor you show the same violence as a torturer.

My doctorate will deal with violence and beauty and the tension between the two. Removing material as a concept is already violent. If I take something from you, it's violent. Taking stone away from a block of marble through hammering is quite a violent action. As a sculptor you show the same violence as a torturer. During the doctorate, I will develop and apply new techniques to remove material. Techniques that refer to other realities.

When I saw how Isis broke sculptures, I was appalled. In consequence, I decided to start using their methods for creating images instead of destructing them. For example, I want to drag a block of marble behind a car and see what that causes. It leaves behind traces on the marble and at the same time, I keep adhering to the classic definition of sculpture: to create by removing (material). Such and other similar actions will be developed and documented to investigate the relationship between violence, destruction and creativity.

When I saw how Isis broke sculptures, I was appalled. In consequence, I decided to start using their methods for creating images instead of destructing them. 

A recurring idea in your work is that the world automatically tends to disorder or entropy. What are your thoughts about this today?

I can explain that best with music. An injury or deformation is similar to me to a dissonance. A dissonance occurs when two elements that don’t belong together are put side by side. A dissonance in music arises when notes do not belong together. It creates tension. You need moments of pauze to recreate harmony. Harmony is a utopian ideal. However, as music history progresses, those dissonances have become more and more important and have prevailed. Music has become more abstract, and  many loose their affinity or starting point with contemporary classical music. I consider this to be a metaphor for the concept of entropy. Like the stars in the universe always accelerating to further disassemblage. In my work that translates, for example, in strange physical combinations, like ears beside a mouth, an arm ending in a foot, strange deformities, disorder, tension, blurriness, abstraction. Marble is relatively eternal, but we know that it also will eventually be pulverised. I want to prove that nothing is wrong with that. Learn to accept our finality and appreciate it.

So is working with an 'eternal' material an attempt to let go of your existential ‘angst’ of dying?

Disorder or the metamorphosis to another state is natural. We do not give ourselves over when we say that's okay. Death is coming anyway. That realisation confronts me during the creating process. I try to gradually accept it and do something with it. Ultimately, it is the driving force that engages us all. I work with a material that stays "forever", while I am aware that also the heritage of ancient civilisations is doomed to disappear. Isis or not. That confronts our existential life questions. History shows that murders and war are part of our nature. We shouldn’t welcome that but accept it as a hard truth and yet aim for a better harmony. Even though it is hopeless. To show this issue, I'm doing it myself, on marble, without too much impact on our world. Marble allows me to do so.

I work with a material that stays "forever", while I am aware that also the heritage of ancient civilisations is doomed to disappear. Isis or not. 

Are you a violent person?

We are all violent. But there are ways to channel this. If I take off material with a hammer and a chisel for hours and hours, I come across a kind of trance, and I enjoy it. That raises questions. Why does a human being do things like that? Sculpting is extremely physically heavy. In winter it's freezing cold in here, my body and my hands hurt, it's dusty and dirty, yet I enjoy every moment. I'm not just doing this for the result, I also enjoy the action. My body and my brain are addicted to it. Otherwise, you can not keep doing it. I can’t just make beautiful statues. Leave that to some other artists and the machines. The question you asked about the new technologies and aura in art leads us to talk about the action and the human motive. Why do you do it?

I can’t just make beautiful statues. Leave that to some other artists and the machines.

In your production you choose for slowness, so that you can incorporate personal emotions into the stone. That's your conceptual choice. A next step in artificial intelligence however is to create a being that will be able to imitate that more and more. Have you seen the "Westworld" series?

Yes. Have you seen the 1970's film on which the series is based? It is darker, and simpler. You know there are already robots making art in an intuitive way? But A.I. can not think independently yet. If that ever can, those will be other thoughts than ours. Now more than ever we must keep our humanity.

Interview: Merel Daemen

Revision English text: Gary Leddington

Photography: Tom Peeters

[kwcsoundcultures2017]

JUST DESERTS

1 STOCKHAUSEN: “Kontakte” (1959-60) stereo version with piano and percussion played by David Tudor and Christoph Caskel (WERGO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhdEUbj0mgQ   I had this on LP and I found it thanks to my high school art teacher who played to me once the LP of the electronic part alone. So I have listened to this piece for more than 30 years and I know it by heart, possibly better than any other piece of music. It took until September 2001 for me to hear it live in 4 channels and in real space. It remains for me the perfect masterpiece of 20th century electronic music and the version with live musicians making “contact” with alien transmissions appealed to me immediately as the two sonic strata are so beautifully related and distinct. The way that so much of the piece puts the completely familiar (piano) against sometimes completely unearthly timbres possibly suggested to me a way of conceiving music as incomprehensible dialogue with non-human sources. Stockhausen analysed the spectra of especially percussion sounds in order to imitate them electronically and to gain harmonic structures from them. These pitch structures seem to my ear at least to be strongly supported by the piano part sometimes even though the latter is also obviously equal tempered and serial in character. The spectralist strand in music so important to me now is sometimes polemically regarded as an "anti-serial" impulse but spectralism also clearly connects to the early Stockhausen of the 1950s at the conceptual and often the sonic levels as well. Many of the more complex timbres were constructed from purely rhythmic sequences of blank impulses edited together, multitracked and sped up so that rhythms become more or less complex sounds with more or less discernible pitch. The rhythms of these micro-sequences are in some cases identical to the rhythms they are later used to “play”. I find its exploration of a self-similarity between different temporal strata of the work deeply interesting. This is a fully serial but not dogmatically applied synthesis technique and this piece is the only implementation I know of in this form, given the nature of the studio of the time. He never used this laborious and unique synthesis method again but I have derived great inspiration from it. Once Stockhausen discovered synthesisers I find his work a great deal less interesting (I sat all the way through the silliness of a live performance "Sirius" just so I could hear the rotations at the very opening and ending which are the only parts of the piece that interest me). My interest in granular synthesis, polyrhythms related by ratios by analogy with the proportions of the harmonic series, and the spatial movement of sound; all these also come I believe from Kontakte, Gruppen and other works of the 50s. It was this piece that repeatedly drummed into me the fact that all elements of sound (except for amplitude and spatial location) are resolvable into temporal structures: rhythm, harmony, timbre and form are all different ways of experiencing/manipulating sensations in and as time. This makes sense given that what we perceive as “sound” is the more or less periodic fluctuations in local air pressure, compressions and rarefactions of air in waves through time: a “noise” is random fluctuations (which is why white noise can be a source of random fluctuations) and, at the opposite end, the sine wave is a perfectly periodic, simple harmonic motion realised as regular changes in the air.

Time beats silently at the heart of sound: all sound is the way the air behaves in time, it is the rhythm of that behaviour, its choreography.

Rhythm therefore colours a sound on the spectrum between noise and the sine tone: the latter would be a simple regular beating whereas the former would imply complete aperiodicity. In Kontakte (Contacts) Stockhausen is clearly working with a kind of continuum between white noise and the pure frequency of the sine tone and this implies a scale of temporal levels as well, expressed here as a conceptual identity between the large scale “phraseological” time-stratum and the “nano-temporality” of the individual timbres conceived as the “deposit” of strata at different speeds corresponding to partials, a technique he applied to notated material in "Gruppen" from earlier in the 50s. This “temporal reductionism” is also a way of thinking about how to construct sound at the microscopic level and this has dominated all of my subsequent musical thinking and probably accounts for habit of determining the timing of events and scale of a piece right from the start. The treatment of rhythm and the timing of large forms is an area of intense theoretical and practical research for me still and nearly everything I’ve ever done, including my visual work, could be traced back to the 13 year old kid from the western suburbs being taken on this alien journey. 2 GAGAKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKP-o-cXak I discovered this music again in my teen years. I would spend hours nearly every Saturday morning poring through second hand LPs at the various stores in Sydney in the 80s. Ashwoods had a huge selection of classical music from non-western sources. Gagaku immediately attracted me as it was an obvious source of inspiration for composers like Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen ("Der Jahreslauf" is basically ersatz gagaku) and Messiaen. In gagaku the instruments rub up, grind against one another, few if any notes are left “straight”: it is a music of deviations and nuances in pitch, timing and timbre that I still find very beautiful. This is a world-obliterating sound: not at all a delicate “orientalist” fantasy music but raw, implacable, intense and rough. I still find it influences me, especially the sense of timing, I like the long slow builds of its piercing high chords on reeds and pipes which sound like FM synthesis, or a harmonica, or high harmonics in strings in orchestral works by Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis, Haas, Cerha and the spectralist composers generally. You could create an orchestral genealogy of this figure of the “screaming high register string texture” throughout much of the 20th century and compare it to how earlier composers like Beethoven, Mahler, Ravel, Debussy or Wagner represented the spaciousness and timelessness of nature with slow high violin lines, as if comparing the vertical polar space of the frequency spectrum with 3d effects of depth and height and breadth. And then ask yourself what happened? Auschwitz and Hiroshima is what I would respond with. Of course what strikes us as “ugly” and therefore expressive means something very different to the mediaeval Japanese connoisseurs of this music: it would be interesting to know what it sounded like to its audience centuries ago. But I always think of the effect that such a truly “other” music to us here in the 21st century can still have as a goal to strive for: this music still makes sense in a gestural and ritualistic way, where it seems the act of playing is as important as what results, even if we don’t recognise all the resonances, nuances or the harmonies. We hear that something serious is being said even if we cannot understand it fully: along with recordings and scores of John Cage, Sylvano Busotti, Pierre Boulez and others where one never feels fully confident one could ever fully “understand” this sense of joy in confusion or excess is something I aim for. The parts of my own works that I enjoy best are those that appear grotesque, monstrous or even campily excessive in either notational complexity, texture or, increasingly the case, (de)tuning. For me the avant-garde of the post war era, which also I think helped me open my ears also drew me towards music from Asia and Africa and albums of Japanese music or especially african drumming and Balinese gamelan were a big influence on my aural taste. 3 SOLAGE - “FUMEUX FUME” performed by the Early Music Consort of London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba3oy2cD-ok Solage is one of the oddest things on this list but hugely important to me at a technical level. Little is known about him, his entire surviving output doesn’t even add up to an hour and few articles are written about this late 14th century music, which I discovered on the David Munrow set “The Art of Courtly Love” again when I was a teenager. I encountered this field of music because Paul Griffiths writing about the late 20th century generation of Boulez and Stockhausen said that the late 14th century court around Avignon cultivated rhythms so bizarre they made “Le Marteau” look normal. So naturally I had to look that up as I loved the Boulez piece (which could have been a 6th on this list). I read what I could find about these composers, who developed the capacity of notation at the time to use multiple simultaneous metres and divisions of a variable unit, to develop things like the effect of three simultaneous, barely related tempi in Perugia’s “Le Greygnour Bien” or the Stravinskyan syncopations of this rondeau. There’s three bass voices which sometimes are all sung but I like best this version with a solo singer and two medieval instruments in the bass. It has a rhythmic precision and quirkiness of timbre which I think suits the frankly camp aspect of the work. I love the outlandish in music. I have decadent tastes for the extreme which I see in much of the music I love: if it is an example of something it is the most forced or exaggerated one, perhaps because those works can be the most memorable for me. I also have a taste for “camp”, I’m not afraid of the obviously unnatural, the stilted, the grotesque or vulgar and I see “unnecessary” intricacy in music as amusing and interesting as well as an expressive necessity: and, let’s face it, if your “brand” at high school is teacher’s pet slash town freak, being able to sing a stupid song in mediaeval French about smoking hashish from the famously decadent and faintly ridiculous papal court in 14th century Avignon is a good look. 4 NANCARROW: PIANO STUDY No. 37 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFz2lCEkjFk Nancarrow is someone I found out about because of my love of Ligeti and he has become an important example for me of finding technical solutions to compositional questions: he imagined and wanted to hear almost un-notatable rhythms in a polymetrical texture that humans could not fully realise so he turned to mechanical instruments, specifically the player piano. In the same way I have made a similar move towards mechanical performance and digital or virtual realisation of musical works even when there is some “live” or “performed” component. The wit and humour, the air of parody (even self-parody) in his work attracts me as well, there the love of intricate design of the smallest details extends in particular to a special kind of comic timing. Rhythmic precision and a delight in surprise come together: in many ways these are like perfectly executed circus tricks. I also love these kinds of canonic textures in much music: medieval and renaissance music of course is full of them (there are works by Ockeghem et al. that are basically Reich’s “phase” works in nuce), as is Ligeti, Reich, Simeon ten Holt, Andriessen, Webern, Stravinsky, Brahms and of course Bach. Canons are elegant and audible ways to build up complex textures from simple elements. Nancarrow invented several new types of canon, many of which I’ve adapted to use at times in my work and some of the new types of canonic imitation (such as the truncation canon) that I have come up with over the years have themselves been highly influenced by those of Nancarrow. My constant use of prime numbers is because of Nancarrow demonstrating how they lead to almost constant subtle variation if used to form the timing of a polyphonic texture. I also love how clear his pieces are. I personally go for a very sustained, harmonically focused texture in my own “player piano” works done with MIDI files and physical modelling software but Nancarrow is always on my mind and in tribute to him nearly every one of my works features a moment where lines moving at different speeds converge ultimately on something very simple and obvious. It also intrigues me that much of Nancarrow's basic material is banal riffs from boogie-woogie or salon-room "jazz", standard triadic chords, short themes without much character or expression and this is a strategy that allows the canonic textures and play with rhythm to come to the forefront of the work, precisely because the melodic/harmonic aspect is negligible: the final composition is a tightly wound knotting together of divergent forces only held in place by technique and texture. 5 BEETHOVEN: DIABELLI VARIATIONS (performanced by Piotr Anderszewski, one of the few good performances of the piece I know of) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp59KCg_DCY This work is important to me for a simple reason: not only is the “classical tradition” a big part of my history but also because what one learns from Beethoven is a determination to wrest every last drop from the slightest aspects of his material. In a sense Beethoven is the first composer to write a truly “critical” music, which takes almost nothing for granted and certainly is not simply about the stimulation of affect in the listener (although it also does that!). This is a quality rare in any previous music: late Beethoven features many works that criticise themselves, that criticise their contemporaries and which take a somewhat ironic, but also historically informed attitude to musical material. There is a wonderful story of Beethoven in a salon piano recital reducing audience members to tears then laughing at them as if to say how easily manipulated they were made them worthy of contempt. Even if false the story captures something about what an ironic/critical standpoint about composition might be. Beethoven pulverises the material to make it his own, making reference to music of the past, inscribing himself in the tradition of Mozart, Handel, the Bach family and of course Haydn. This is a kind of granular composition: the material is atomised and he composes with the dusty ruins. There’s a kind of comic negativity to these works to which I warmly respond and which I've always connected to those strange late paintings by Picasso that offer variations on famous paintings by Delacroix and Velasquez in a similarly violating spirit.   The genius of this work is that the ridiculous is turned into the sublime by means of scale and technical manipulation. Even in his own time the concept of the “sublime” - the (perhaps necessarily failed?) presentation of the unpresentable - has been applied to much late Beethoven and I think it applies here but it is not free of a kind of immanent critique of the means of its production. Adorno rightly points out how Beethoven develops in his later years a critical attitude to music itself, exemplified well by the entrance of the bass soloist in the 9th symphony who enters saying “oh friends not these sounds”. This is as far as I know one of the first instances of a musical work explicitly commenting on its progress, effectively saying ignore what you’ve heard for the last forty five minutes. Beethoven wrote sets of variations for piano throughout his life. Some, like the variations on various national anthems, are hilariously funny given the distortions they enact on the usually banal and stupid material you find in music designed for nationalistic usage, memorisation and consumption (it’s a nice coincidence therefore that to this day one may buy annual albums of “dance anthems”). This idea of critical composition informs nearly all subsequent music that I admire: Brahms, Mahler, the 2nd Viennese School through to the late 20th Century music of Lachenmann, Nono and later still the “New Complexity” of Richard Barrett, Liza Lim, James Dillon and Brian Ferneyhough. These last three composers are contemporary models for me of the tradition originating in these late Beethoven works. Critical composition is stylistically "innovative" but often cites and distorts historical materials, including the materials deposited by a century of modernism: it is a materialist conception of music, understanding it not as virtually telepathic "spiritual communication" but as a kind of ironic re-enchantment of nature through aesthetic framing, which is to say, musical techniques and notation, both understood in turn as “extendible”. If art is made from nature transformed through technique, art which reflects on this process openly and consciously engages the means of its own production is qualitatively different from art which does not: Beethoven takes material from an other and displays how it can be transformed at the same time as actually transforming it, in real time, before your ears. This has been of tremendous importance to my listening and composition but I'm only now discovering just how deeply marked I am by this idea.

[nightmareonfilmstreet]

From Sharp to Dull; The Top 13 FRIDAY THE 13TH Films

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From Sharp to Dull; The Top 13 FRIDAY THE 13TH Films

For nearly 40 years, the Voorhees dynasty has been terrorizing teens from Camp Blood to beyond (Space. I mean in Space). The franchise has spawned over 12 films, a TV series, comic books – and one of the most iconic menaces in Horror. Today, on the day of his birth – we honor Jason Voorhees in the TOP 13 Friday the 13th films!

*Record Scratch*

Wait!? Didn’t I just say 13 films? Why yes, Dear Reader I did. We’ve also included a few surprises along the way…

  #13 – Nick Antosca’s Friday the 13th (TBD)

Friday the 13th by Doaly

Nick Antosca (Channel Zero, Hannibal) was orignally commission to write a draft of the new Friday the 13th before Paramount brought in Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners, Contraband). The project was ultimately scrapped but fans can still read the Friday the 13th that could have been! Nick Antosca’s screenplay plants you right back in the late eighties, on the last day of summer camp. An absolute brilliant approach to a character who’s story has been told (and re-told) many times over, Antosca’s script is everything a lifelong Friday fan has been looking for…including a quick hint to a possible winter-set sequel. You can find a link to the un-produced script and a full summary of the entire screenplay HERE.

  #12 – Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

I’m sure this is someone’s favorite, but I’ve always found it very hard to like to this movie. Jason Goes to Hell is the biggest tease at the prom, and it’s expansion of Jason as an evil entity that come travel from person to person is absurd. A product of it’s time, The Final Friday was born from a period in the 90s when everything had a sci-fi bend with mysterious, Lovecraftian qualities. And yes, this film did lay the groundwork for Freddy vs Jason but ultimately, that’s all anyone remembers about the entire 88 minutes of Jason Goes to Hell. That said, the character design for Jason with his bulbous head growing into his mask is a highlight, and well worth the price of admission.

  #11 – Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood (1988)

Psychic Powers. That’s really all you have to know about Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Oh, and Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie’s) makes an appearance as Dr. Christopher Crews alongside Kane Hodder in his first of four credits as Jason Voorhees. And that’s pretty much it…

  #10 – Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning (1985)

A clever take on a franchise that someone, somewhere thought needed a thorough refresh, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was an…interesting twist on the story-line. We spend a good majority of the film questioning Tommy Jarvis’s sanity and his possible murderous tendencies only to discover that a Jason is in fact, plain old Roy. A New Beginning is proof that a Jason by any other name is still a Jason but it fails to deliver. Still, the film did teach us the importance of controlling our temper, sharing chocolate bars, and how to chop wood.

#9 – Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D (1982)

While Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D have have taken 9th place on our list, it’s killer synth theme is 1st in our hearts. The film that gave Jason his iconic mask, Part 3 brought us a new dimension of terror. The 3rd Dimension!! Set mostly inside the Higgin’s barn, Jason finds time to pitchfork a few local ruffians and chop some unsuspecting co-eds in half. While perhaps the singularly most important film in the longevity the franchise has enjoyed, Part 3‘s is less menacing than he is oafish.

  #8 – Friday the 13th (2009)

I have a bone to pick with everyone that hates this fantastic remake. Not only does this movie contain the most psychologically researched Jason portrayal since Kane Hodder’s brilliant run, Friday the 13th (2009) contains one of the greatest cold opens of the entire series! Arguably, the first 15 minutes of the film, is another film all on it’s own. Jason is not messing about this time around. The kids has trespassed and they must die- well, everyone except the cute girl that remind me of my mother. Sure, everyone in the cast is gorgeous but don’t forget, Friday the 13th (1980) had Kevin “Freaking” Bacon.

  #7 – Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

I’m of the opinion that you owe Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan a proper re-watch before condemning it forever. Yes, this chapter takes Jason out of Crystal Lake and New Jersey proper. Yes, we spend the first half of the movie on a boat, but I’m telling you, this movie is so much more fun than you remember. They threw everything they had at this flick, including the most entertaining fist fight since They Live (1988) and an incredible interview with Arsenio Hall.

#6 – Friday the 13th Part II (1981)

Marking his first appearance as an adult, Friday The 13th Part II helped to build the mythos and Legend that is Jason Voorhees. As it is written in 1st Cunningham, Chapter 2, Verse 13: “When I was a child, I spoke as child, went to camp as a child, and drowned as a child; but when I become a man, I put away childish things.” There comes a time when we all realize it’s time to take up the pick-axe and blaze our own path. Had Pamela lived long enough to see the man her little boy came back from the grave to be, I’m sure she would have been very proud.

  #5 – Friday the 13th (1980)

The films that started it all. To not include the original Friday the 13th in your countdown is a transgression no horror fan (or crazed-killer) could forgive. Complete with groundbreaking special effects from Tom Savini, Friday the 13th (1980) was the film that changed the landscape of horror forever. Influencing practically all horror films that followed, Sean S. Cunningham’s cult classic belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Horror alongside John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees brought a fresh take on the revenge-driven killer, surprising and terrifying audiences. While some (including screenwriter Victor Miller) scoff at Jason upheaval of the franchise, nothing changes the brilliance of the original Friday the 13th.

  #4 – Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984)

Four Words: Crispin Glover Dance Number. The Final Chapter is (count it) the 2nd attempt to close the book on Jason Voorhees. Believe it or not, there was a time when studios actively tried to end there franchises, once and for all. Originally intended as a trilogy, Part IV was a clever attempt to axe Jason and introduce another villain: Tommy Jarvis. We would eventually see this play out in future installments but Part IV laid the groundwork for a story-line that would be abandoned only 1 film later. Fully graduated into his Hockey Mask attire, Jason spends no time hiding in barns, or poking fresh eye holes in his head-bag. Don’t stand too close to windows, and don’t bother asking where to corkscrews are, Jason is coming for you, and you’d better make the best of the time you have left.

  #3 – Jason X (2001)

Alright, alright, alright- please stop yelling at your phone. Widely considered a low point in the franchise, Jason X took Friday the 13th to places it had never gone before: Space! You’ll find that if you try and laugh at the insanity of the “Lower Register” Friday films, you’ll find you enjoy Jason X quite a lot more than you ever thought possible. And honestly, what’s not to love?! You need one-liners? Oh we’ve got oneliners. You’re looking for off-the-wall lunacy and buckets of blood? You better get ready for a wild ride. There is literally a scene where a space soldier is impaled on a space drill, only to have his space comrades report, “He’s screwed”

  #2 – Freddy vs Jason (2003)

Sure, not technically a Friday the 13th film, but it’s still very much a Jason Voorhees story, and that’s good enough for us! Also, bonus points for the Freddy feature because if there’s one thing every movie needs more of, it’s Freddy Krueger. Fans are still debating who really won this fight but regardless of the outcome, it was an epic battle 30 years in the making. Say what you will about Freddy vs Jason this movie completely delivered.

  #1 – Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

A perfect blend of horror and humor, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is a favorite of many horror fans, as well as the hosts of the Nightmare on Film Street Podcast. With a soundtrack that consists almost entirely of Alice Cooper, Jason Lives is a brilliant example of the franchise tipping it’s hat to the audience. The film is aware of itself and leans hard into the absurdity and ridiculousness of it’s premise. Part VI also contains some of the most outlandish kills of the entire franchise, including the Smiley Face Tree Smash, and the RV Death Mask. In many ways Part VI is a modern retelling of the Frankenstein story but for the most part, it’s just one hell of a good time.

[trendingnewsb]

Salma Hayek: Trump couldn’t build a wall without illegal Mexicans’

Her new film, Beatriz at Dinner, already has Oscar buzz. But on top of the acting, Salma Hayek is also saving animals, running charities and beating the hell out of a Trump piata. Johnny Davis meets Hollywoods busiest firebrand

It was after a neighbour shot her dog that Salma Hayek realised Donald Trump would become president.

I thought it was a crazy thing, that it would never happen but then something really tragic happened to me, she explains. I have a ranch in America and a neighbour of mine killed my dog. Hayek, who owns around 50 animals, including 20 chickens, five parrots, four alpacas, two fish, some cats and a hamster, says that Mozart, the tragic German Shepherd in question, had never attacked anyone. And the authorities in dealing with the neighbour, and what he did How is that legal? [Police have said the neighbour shot her dog after he found it fighting with his dogs in his garage.] Just to understand what was the normality of things. I realised in this moment, Oh my God: hes going to win.

Hayek, a Mexican immigrant to America who identifies as half-Spanish and half- Lebanese, lives in London and is married to a Frenchman who happens to be Franois-Henri Pinault, billionaire CEO of the company that owns Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Gucci is perhaps uniquely placed to have firm views on Trump, Brexit and immigration, and well get to them.

Hayek is primarily here this morning to talk about her new movie, The Hitmans Bodyguard. We are at a press junket for the film. Elsewhere on the first floor of this smart London hotel are Samuel L Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Gary Oldman, answering questions. Junkets can be dispiriting, and rapport can be in short supply. That is, unless youre Salma Hayek, whose personality could light up a funeral. She arrives in a riot of black and red polka dots, tottering shoes and glossy hair, 5ft 2in and somehow 50 years old, although agelessly beautiful. She plonks herself into an armchair, hoists her legs up, and proceeds to tug the small table between us towards her. Do you mind? Theyre bringing me food. I like my food.

Hasnt she had breakfast?

I did but Im still hungry, she grins.

A round of avocado on toast is spirited into the room, accompanied by a mystery shake in a plastic container. (A second round soon follows.) Famous since she was a soap star in Mexico in her 20s and with 40-plus Hollywood films to her name, Hayek has done literally thousands of interviews. What does she make of the publicity circuit?

Im good! she says. I just pretend Im having a conversation with a new friend.

Other half: Hayek and her billionaire husband Franois-Henri Pinault. Photograph: Tony Barson Archive/WireImage

Indeed, Hayek proves impossible not to like. She may be the perfect chat-show guest: various presenters have hooted along as shes shown off pictures of her Donald Trump piata, discussed her experience as a late-developing teen immersing herself in holy water and praying to Jesus for breasts, or confessing she accused Monsieur Pinault of having an affair after discovering text messages from Elena, only to discover Elena was a language-teaching app.

In fact, we have Pinault to thank for Hayeks turn in The Hitmans Bodyguard. The comedy-action caper is basically a mismatched buddy movie for Jackson and Reynolds, hitman and bodyguard respectively. Hayek is only in a few scenes, but as Jacksons imprisoned criminal wife she matches him profanity for profanity.

I think Salma steals the whole movie, says director Patrick Hughes. I challenge anyone not to fall in love with her because (a) shes a polymath and (b) she kicks ass.

I have to tell you: action is not my favouritest [sic] genre of films, Hayek says. But I married a man who really likes them. So I became an expert. So I see them all!

The image of fashions most powerful CEO spending his downtime like this is intriguing. What is his favourite action movie?

Oh, its like Sophies choice for him, I think.

What about Die Hard, I suggest.

Oh, he loves Die Hard. But we love Bourne. She claps her hands. Sometimes he doesnt even like [a film], he says: Oh my God, that was so bad! But he still has to watch the whole thing.

Its a man thing, I say.

Yes! My brother likes that one, my father likes that one and because of that, when we were doing [The Hitmans Bodyguard] I was able to say it was going to work, because it had a lot of the stuff that the good ones have.

Mexican heroine: Hayek playing Frida Kahlo in Frida with Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera.

Similarly, do actors always know when theyre making a turkey?

Oh yeah! Hayek says, crunching through her toast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And unfortunately Ive never been wrong!

Her CV is mixed. The first Mexican actress to break into Hollywood since Dolores del Ro in the pre-sound 20s, shes played a lesbian taco in the kids film Sausage Party and so-so roles in films such as Spy Kids 3D and Wild, Wild West. But she also earned an Oscar nomination for Frida, her 2002 portrait of Frida Kahlo, and The Hollywood Reporter has just tipped her for 2018s awards season for Beatriz At Dinner, in which she plays an immigrant who clashes with a self-made billionaire.

At first, she says, she hated being famous. This was terrifying because in Mexico when you do a soap, at this point she leaps out of her chair and heads for the door Dont worry, Im not escaping Hello? Her security guard appears with a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. My soap was seen by 60% of the country, so its every day, in their house. Do you mind? Do you want one? she says, offering the smokes. So you become very familiar, like youre their cousin or something. Ive never been so famous since. I kind of hated it.

Taking aim: Hayek in The Hitmans Bodyguard. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

If she hated the attention so much, I wonder why she headed for Hollywood. But Hayek is battling with the curtains while she attempts to heave open a sash window so that she can smoke, unlit fag in her mouth. Not relishing the idea of Hayek tumbling on to the streets below, it seems only polite to help. For a few seconds she holds back the curtains, while I struggle to wrench the window.

Oh my God, that was so easy, she says. I really did want to be an actress, not just be famous. Its a different thing. Because I was famous on a soap! That doesnt make you a great actress. So I went to America to start all over again.

This was the 90s. She played extras and enrolled in the Stella Adler Academy Of Acting in LA, alma mater to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. And this is how old I am, she [Adler] was still alive! She was 90 and she was still teaching and flirting with the young boys. She was a tough cookie but she was brilliant.

Hayek could barely speak the language – My English sucked worse, there werent any parts. Mexican women played maids or gangsters wives. And thats if you got lucky.

Hayek threatened legal action against one director.

I was screen-testing for the lead in a film and they said that it was not written Latin, but they wouldnt mind changing it. I learned the script but when they sent me the pages [for the audition] there was none of the things I had learned, it was another role. So my agent called them and they said, Are you crazy? Shes Mexican. We can change [the race of] the bimbo, but not the lead.

Fashionista: at Stella McCartney, spring/summer 2016, Paris fashion week. Photograph: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images

She got her agent to call back. Would they please just give her five minutes to audition for the part shed learned?

And they said, Absolutely under no circumstances. So I said, OK, you tell them that they either see me, or Im going to sue them. And they said, Theres no point in her coming, even if she had been the best audition she would have never gotten the part but now we hate her. Does she want to come knowing that we detest her? They kept her waiting for five hours. They wondered why would she do this to herself.

Ive never said this to anyone, the name of the director, but it was Ivan Reitman. And I said, Well, I thought that the director that could see Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as twins [1988s Twins], and Arnold Schwarzenegger giving birth to a child [1994s Junior] maybe could see a Mexican as a fashion editor. I thought I owed it to the new generation of Mexicans. That if I got this right, maybe something will shift.

Years later, she bumped into Reitman and he apologised. We had such a lovely conversation, he was so elegant, Hayek says. He said, I was wrong.

All of this pales next to the hill she climbed for Frida.

I was obsessed, Hayek says. I was endeavouring to do a film about an artist in a time when all the films about artists had failed. Already [the studios] were going, Oh no. Then Id say, Its a period piece about Mexicans! And theyre communists! Its a love story between an overweight man and a woman that limps and has a moustache!

Committed: Hayek campaigning for womens empowerment with Guccis Frida Giannini and Beyonc. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty

One studio did eventually take it on, Edward Norton (her partner at the time) rewrote the script for free and Hayek called in favours from co-stars including Ashley Judd, then one of Hollywoods most bankable faces. It opened in two cinemas. Its success, I suggest, must have been all the sweeter.

Yes, she says. Because [the studio] dismissed it. I didnt even have a poster!

It may not surprise you to learn that Hayek is a committed activist: her list of charitable endeavours is too long to go into here, but it includes her own foundation helping women and children in Mexico, and the feminist charity Chime For Change, founded with Beyonc. Its so massive I dont even know what to tell you. I dont just do awareness, I actually do strategy. Im on the board. It takes a lot, a lot, a lot of time.

Other projects receiving the full force of the Hayek commitment include her range of nutritional juices, and a beauty line which she created herself. She also has her own production company, which helped turn the TV show Ugly Betty based on a Colombian telenovela into a worldwide hit. I ask where this drive comes from.

Its been there since Ive been a child. A sense of justice and responsibility for the human race. How can we be better? Because a lot of people dont think that way. They think: How can I pay less tax? And so when I see things that make me think we are degrading and degenerating mentally it makes me want to do something.

She has been hugely successful. Shes married to one of the worlds richest men. (Their daughter, Valentina, attends school in London.) She could just put her feet up. Of course, its a cheap question we already know the answer.

Why would anybody want to sit around and do nothing?

Hayek says that she made it clear she would always remain financially independent from her husband, whose net worth is around $17.3bn. Which may explain money-job films like Sausage Party.

Mirror mirror: Hayek guest stars in Ugly Betty with America Ferrera. Photograph: Danny Feld/ABC

At the time I met him, I had already decided I didnt want one of those [ie a husband], she says. I had set myself up for a completely different life. I was ready to live on my ranch that is a sanctuary for abused animals. I would come to LA and work a little bit. I was not planning on spending. I had no interest in jewellery or clothes or cars. I had everything I wanted. Maybe I had a guy here or there. I also thought I couldnt have children. Then he [Pinault] came along, swept me off my feet, changed my entire universe and knocked me up.

Can she remember what they first liked about one another?

Yes. I asked him, if he had not been doing what he was doing, what would have been his dream? And he said an astronaut and that was my dream! Then we started talking about different theories of physics, which is my secret passion. And soccer! Im a huge soccer fan [she supports Arsenal]. Just random things that nobody knows I like. It was just magical.

As a global citizen at a time when the world seems to be closing in on itself, is Hayek optimistic for the future?

Very optimistic. I have to look for the positive about everything.

Hayek campaigned for Clinton. Hows it going to end for Trump?

I can promise you hes not going to build the wall. You cannot build it without the Mexicans that are illegally in the country. That is what makes the economy so strong because they are paid less than half, with no benefit. Its just not going to happen!

Hayek is banging her fist on the table.

His days are numbered! Even if he becomes a dictator and rewrites the constitution and now the presidents can stay 12 years! Still his days are numbered!

Salma Hayek: activist, actor, producer, juicer, businesswoman, friend to the animals and all-round proper laugh. You wouldnt mess.

The Hitmans Bodyguard is in cinemas on 17 August

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