The Globe and Mail - Johanna Schneller Columns

The director's dilemma: let's talk about trust

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00 EDT

It's a tricky dilemma, a delicate little dance. You're a documentary filmmaker whose work depends on getting deep inside the personalities of your subjects. You spend weeks or months with them, shadowing them in situations public and private. You probe their psyches, hoping for answers that are revealing, emotional, honest. It's essential that they trust you. But it's also essential that you remain objective - distanced enough to ask them tough questions, and to show their flaws and foibles to the world.

The director's dilemma: let's talk about trust

Fri, 15 May 2009 11:48 EDT

How do you get your subject to talk about sensitive topics?

Angry + crazy + violent = all the rage

Sat, 9 May 2009 00:00 EDT

jschneller@globeandmail.comWOLVERINE:We're running at one another again? This is the third time!SHARON: You think you're crazy, I'll show you crazy!SHAWN: Shut up and

Angry + crazy + violent = all the rage

Fri, 8 May 2009 14:47 EDT

Who cares if a film has any plot or makes any sense? As long as someone's mad as hell, Hollywood's happy

Surprisingly, on this set, the camera does not lie

Sat, 2 May 2009 00:00 EDT

jschneller@globeandmail.comThe evening emanated oddness. On a drizzly night in October, 2007, Atom Egoyan's new film, Adoration, was being shot in a non-descript neighbourhood in northern Toronto: bungalows with garages for front doors, no sidewalks, lawns fading from green to brown. The filmmakers had dressed the street for Christmas. Fake foam snow covered the grass, and strings of lights hung from the eaves or blinked from the doorframes of nearly every house on the street, including the one that the crew was sure was a marijuana grow-up. ''They're co-operative, but really paranoid,'' someone said. Only one house was totally dark, and its owner stood at the foot of his driveway, surveying the scene.

The Wire gives a lift to many gifted black actors

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:28 EDT

Idris Elba's not the only one making waves in the talent pool

Kind of weirdly great herself

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

jschneller@globeandmail.comAlison Pill knows that actors don't get many days like the one she had last October. She was in San Francisco, staying at the Ritz-Carlton, getting her makeup done for the premiere of Milk (she played campaign manager Anne Kronenberg), when her agent called with not one, but two job offers: to co-star with Michael Cera in the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on a popular graphic novel; and to play April, an overachieving architecture student who focuses on her autistic brother rather than her own cancer diagnosis, on the new season of HBO's hit series In Treatment. ''We popped some champers that day,'' Pill said, perched on the couch in her rental apartment in Toronto, where she's shooting Scott Pilgrim until August. ''That was a weird, great day.''

Kind of weirdly great herself

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:18 EDT

Toronto-born Alison Pill landed a Michael Cera movie and a hit HBO series the same day � life, as they say, is good

Out of touch is just where he likes to be

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

It's hard to get a handle on actor Peter Sarsgaard, and he likes it that way. I first noticed him in Boys Don't Cry, where his rough-edged character proved even more ambiguous than Hilary Swank's transgendered one. In subsequent roles - generally smaller-budget dramas with smart scripts, including Kinsey, Shattered Glass, Garden State and The Dying Gaul - he's continued to discomfit and impress. I love how his boyish face is at odds with his silky, insinuating voice, and the way his characters are never what they first seem to be. In a phone interview this week from Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, he was also funnier than I thought he'd be, and more genial.