Episode #25 - Sheila O'Malley (Opening Night)

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"You listen to great actors talk...and they always talk about the story. 'My role here is to do this part so this story can be told,' which is a wonderful attitude."

If you want to tell a story on film, you most likely are going to require actors, and hopefully great ones. But how does one talk about how actors do? Sheila O'Malley has more than enough experience in acting, and has become one of the most prolific bloggers of how to discuss the craft, so Peter invites her own to share her experiences and ideas about the profession. Sheila talks about her first acting love (James Dean) and her experience in The Actors Studio, before deciding to take the conversations of her friends and turn them into blog posts. The two also discuss many great iconic performances - Cary Grant in Notorious, Sissy Spacek in Badlands, Alain Delon in Le Samourai - and the way the different actors can approach different roles. Finally, the two work through a truly towering film, John Cassavetes's Opening Night, and examine how it both celebrates the world of acting as well as captures its most terrifying anxieties. 

0:00-1:01 Opening 

2:08-8:21 Establishing Shots - Short Term 12 / Trivia Round

9:06-1:03:33 Deep Focus - Sheila O'Malley

1:05:32-1:29:57 Double Exposure - Opening Night (John Cassavetes)

1:30:00-1:31:41 Close

Visit Sheila's blog, as well as her work on RogerEbert.Com, Capital New York, The House Next Door and Fandor.

Follow Sheila on Twitter.

Episode #17 - Vadim Rizov (Le Cercle Rouge)

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"When people are not sympathetic to a filmmaker, they will fall into a stance...I don't want to act like I'm saying things that are obvious to me and therefore they should be obvious to everyone else."

Strongly opinionated but never dogmatically so, the prolific Vadim Rizov ranks among the best of the new generation of cinephiles in Peter's opnion. So the young writer joins him to discuss his unique voice in the critical community. Vadim discusses his early forays into cinema at a young age, and how his frustrations with Austin's film scene led him to New York (only to more frustrations at NYU). The two then get into his fascinating writing style and how it stands against the majority of contemporary film writing, his interest in the evolving contemporary cinema, and why he goes back again and again to the True/False Film Festival. The two then dive into Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge, a type of closed circuit movie that might be out of style with many cinephiles today, but is full of wondrous pleasures for those that pry its pieces apart.

0:00-1:05 Opening 

1:55 -5:50 Establishing Shots - Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy / Trivia Round

6:34-56:56 Deep Focus - Vadim Rizov

57:49-1:20:04 Double Exposure - Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville)

1:20:06-1:22:22 Close

Read Vadim Rizov at Letterboxd, Filmmaker Magazine, The AV Club, Green Screen Daily, Little White Lies, Film.Com, L Magazine, The Village Voice, Time Out, IFC.Com, and The House Next Door. (Sight and Sound is not online). More reviews via Rotten Tomatoes.

Follow Vadim on Twitter.