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While at Sundance, Vulture talked to Spike Lee about the recent Oscar-diversity controversy. Here is but one sample:
It’s very presumptuous for my man Alejandro [Iñarritú] to tell anyone, especially black people, what to do. We know what to do. Also, if it wasn’t for [#OscarsSoWhite creator] April Reign, myself, my wife, Jada [Pinkett Smith] and Will [Smith], he wouldn’t even be talking about this. So him and them guys, they should chill. You had many opportunities to talk about this before, you chose to be quiet, Alejandro. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I ain’t heard him talk about diversity ever before.
For The New York Times, Son of Saul helmer László Nemes analyzes a scene from his film:
The folks at Reverse Shot have released their “2015: Two Cents,” a selection of awards-of-sorts that include categories such as “Jaume Collet-Serra Award for Achievement in Films Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra,” “Worst Eating Habits” (that goes to Spotlight‘s ensemble), and “Paul Giamatti Award for Overacting.”
Bone Tomahawk writer-director S. Craig Zahler, in an interview with Deadline, talked about the year’s other westerns:
I think [The Revenant] is probably the single worst movie I’ve seen in the last five years and just totally empty and terrible and didactic. And it’s just awful—lacking humor and characterization, and anything I ever want to see in a movie. But that movie got made because there are two powerhouses there.
I’m a fan of Tarantino’s stuff in general. I’ve seen The Hateful Eight, but it’s far from my favorite picture of his. I just thought, in general, a lot of the performances were too theatrical for my taste, but the atmosphere was good and I enjoyed some of the plotting. There’s no way for parallels not to be drawn because of the Kurt Russell thing and the western movie at a similar time, but obviously with Bone Tomahawk, I tried to do, in some ways, a western that embraced a lot of the classic elements of westerns, in terms of adventure on the landscape and all these characters that develop and get to know one another, whereas there’s a strong mystery component with something like Hateful Eight, and in a way, a lot of what you think you’ve learned about these characters, you haven’t learned, and it becomes a lot more about the machinations. They’re pretty different. I certainly prefer Kurt’s work in my movie over his work in Hateful Eight by a gigantic margin, but I tend to like subtler, more contained things. My favorite other Kurt Russell performance is probably Dark Blue. Actually, I liked him more in Death Proof than I did in Hateful Eight. I thought it was really big.
Watch an extended interview with Spotlight director Tom McCarthy: