Talk of the town.

By Alison Willmore on 08/09/2006

We gave Oliver Stone his own interview roundup on Monday (though more have popped up since then) — here are highlights from other interesting interviews that have turned up in the past few days:

Kelly-Anne Suarez interviews "Little Miss Sunshine" little miss Abigail Breslin in the LA Times:

When conversation turned to speculation that she is "the next Dakota Fanning," Abbie grew uncomfortable. The girls became friends when Spencer worked on "The Cat in the Hat" with Dakota. Her mother came to her rescue.

"We love Dakota," [Kim] Breslin said.

"Yeah, we love Dakota," Abbie said, relaxing. "She's really nice."

"She'll take it as a compliment," Breslin said. Next question.

Her co-star Steve Carell talks "Little Miss Sunshine" and comedy with Hugh Hart at the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Peter Sellers never let on that anything he was doing was hysterically funny," he says. "There was never a wink to the camera. You watch Sellers or John Cleese, or somebody like Fred Willard, you wonder, does he even realize how funny he is? Of course he does, but he never shows it. Even when something's extremely broad, if you can be so committed to the character that we totally buy the fact that Clouseau is a real person -- to me, that's a real gift, and that's because the actor is not commenting on how funny he thinks the character is."

At Salon, Scott Lamb talks to Tommy Chong about his 2003 arrest as part of a nationwide DEA sting called Operation Pipe Dreams aimed at bong manufacturers, the subject of his new book "The I Chong: Meditations From The Joint" (hyuck) as well as recent doc "A/k/a Tommy Chong":

The documentary about your trial, "A/k/a Tommy Chong" was just in New York, and it did really well at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

It just killed. Unfortunately, I'm not really getting along with the director and the creator. That world's a little nutty -- they're nuttier than a fruitcake, when you come right down to it. But I'm very proud of what he did. He hit a home run with that one.

At the Guardian, Terry Gilliam does an audio chat with Mitch Cullin, who wrote the novel on which his film "Tideland" is based, here (MP3). "Tideland," which got a mixed-to-dismal critical reception when it premiered at Toronto last year, opens in the UK this Thursday, and will finally open in New York this October.

Philippa Hawker talks with Hong Kong's Tsui Hark about his new anthology project ("Jigsaw," which he's making with two other HK directors, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To) at The Age:

The three go back a long way, when they all worked in television. "At that time, we didn't really think we would make films, so we talked a lot - about what we thought was good and what we thought we would like to make." Just recently, Tsui says, he got in touch with Lam and said, "Let's share that experience again."

Their first meeting lasted for six hours in a restaurant. They were still talking as the staff turned the lights off. Tsui says: "We couldn't agree on anything. But we still said, 'let's do it. And let's keep the disagreements'. That's the fun of the movie. If we all agreed, then we'd only need one director."

Emine Saner interviews Bollywood superstar Shahrukh "King" Khan at the Guardian:

"I keep hearing that our films are escapist and unreal but I find our films the most real in the world," says Khan. "We don't have people going up in a rocket and single-handedly blowing up a meteor. We don't have a president on Air Force One saving the world or things coming out of people's stomachs. Our fantasies and escapism are real. It's just people singing and dancing in the street. If England had won the World Cup you would have seen people singing and dancing like that."

A jittery Keanu Reeves talks "A Scanner Darkly" with Dominic Wells at the London Times:

But when I ask him if he has changed his attitude to drugs, he becomes truculent and blankly stares right through me. “You seem very drug-orientated today,” he comments. “Why? What are you looking for? Why the questions about drugs?” Perhaps, given that Reeves’s father served two years of a ten-year prison sentence for cocaine possession, his reticence is understandable. In the past he has implied that he has experimented (“I’m so glad I have hallucinated in my life”) without ever getting specific.

Steven Soderbergh does a long and atypical interview with Scott Indrisek at The Believer (via Greencine Daily) — in his intro, Indrisek writes that "This interview began with an email exchange in which Soderbergh outlined the various topics he’d be most interested in talking about. The short list included pornography, Chris Rock, how the Olympics relates to the killer instinct, and the cost of panda bears as compared to the cost of getting off (in the legal sense).":

BLVR: When you shot Bubble, how much did the camera cost?

SS: It’s like four thousand dollars. You could do the whole thing for ten thousand dollars.

BLVR: How much did Bubble cost altogether?

SS: One point six million. Because I paid people. There’s a tipping point. If you’re going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right now for ten grand, if you have an idea. That’s the trick. I was watching Alphaville this weekend, and I’d love to do like a ten-minute version of Alphaville here in Manhattan. It’s so easy now. I don’t know what the ultimate result of that will be—whether you’ll see a sort of a film version of iTunes, where you can access things that have been made independently by people.

Robin Williams chats with the Toronto Star's Peter Howell about "The Night Listener" and fame:

"Television just goes directly into you. It's not even like movies, where people have to go someplace to see you. You're in their memory banks (with TV). You're just there in the background subliminally or even directly, but it still goes like that. I still have people calling me Mork, no matter what I've done. I've met Nobel Prize physicists say, `You are Mork!' And I say, `Yes, I am, thank you.'"

+ Ray of 'Sunshine' (LA Times)
+ A PLACE IN THE SUN (SF Chronicle)
+ The joint and I (Salon)
+ We've spawned a monster (Guardian)
+ The man who didn't need to know (The Age)
+ King of Bollywood (Guardian)
+ Slacker king takes the future lying down (London Times)
+ "EVERYTHING IS THE DIRECTOR’S FAULT." (The Believer)
+ Looking for Robin Williams (Toronto Star)