Feb 6th, 2010
Interview
Product Description
Self-destructive journalist Pierre Peders (Buscemi) is no stranger to violence and inhumanity. Having made his name as a war reporter, he has traveled the world seeing some of the most horrifying sights imaginable. So he feels that his current puff-piece assignment, an interview with pop diva, TV and movie star Katya (Miller), is beneath his dignity. The two meet in a restaurant and, instantly, it’s a collision of two worlds: Pierre’s serious political focus and Katya’s superficial world of celebrity. But perhaps all is not as it appears. When Pierre is slightly injured in a traffic accident inadvertently caused by Katya, she’s the proverbial girl who causes traffic accidents, they end up in Katya’s spacious loft for a long night of talking, drinking, sparring, and coming close to a sort of embattled intimacy. Each is scarred in their own way, aching from deep, hidden pain. But honest revelations give way to punishing deceptions. Their confrontation evolves into a passionate verbal chess game spiked with wit, intrigue and sexual tension, capped with a riveting twist ending.Amazon.com
After directing three films and an Emmy-winning episode of The Sopranos, Steve Buscemi turned to Holland–specifically to the work of Theo van Gogh. Before his 2004 murder by an Islamic extremist, the Dutch filmmaker (and Vincent van Gogh descendent) was planning an English-language version of his 2003 Interview–even considering Madonna for the Katja Schuurman role. In Buscemi’s reconfiguration, the actor plays jaded journalist Pierre. Once a war correspondent, he now takes any gig he can get. When his editor assigns him an interview with tabloid fixture Katya (Sienna Miller, doing her finest work to date), Pierre grudgingly acquiesces. Their first meeting in a restaurant is a bust. But through a chance second encounter, they continue their verbal volly in her roomy Manhattan loft, where Pierre discovers that Katya is sharper than her image suggests, and she learns about his tragic past. They flirt, fight, kiss, and cry. By the end it becomes clear that one of them isn’t being completely honest. As an acting exercise, Interview gets the job done, and Miller’s American accent is especially convincing. As a story, it’s less satisfying, not because of the minimal cast or stage-like setting–My Dinner With André made a virtue out of similar limitations–but because the opponents aren’t evenly matched. They’re also less agreeable than Louis Malle’s dining companions. Interview is first in a trio of van Gogh adaptations, with Stanley Tucci attached to Blind Date and John Turturro to 1-900. –Kathleen C. Fennessy
5 Responses to “Interview”
When I watch a movie, I accept to get something out of it, but after watching interview I feel let down like I have wasted my time. I don’t mind wasting my time being a person who is perpetually lazy, I do, however, regret having watched this movie. I had compassion for the main two characters, a journalist and young female celebrity, for they seemed like real people despite their obvious self-destruction and lack of compassion. Nevertheless, by the end of the movie, I hated not only the two characters featured in this film, I found myself hating humanity a feeling I am not too costumed to because I have been a human for reasonable amount of time, and have found humans most if not almost all to have the capability to love, be emotionally intimate, and grow with interactions of one another. However, the young female celebrity, Katya, proves at the very last few moments in the film interview to not be able to love, be compassionate, or even be human at all. Not only is the character Katya unrealistic, but her final actions scared me to the core. I know that there are sociopaths in the world, but they are rare. I would even hazard a guess that very few of Hollywood’s celebrities are sociopaths. Therefore, this movie is an interesting view into those few humans that can lie without feeling remorse. Be that as it may, I wouldn’t waste my time watching this movie.
Rating: 1 / 5
The DVD jacket is totally misleading in its trying to sell the film as a comedy “with a twist”. In fact, the writing is pretty bad, the directing is worse, and acting is wooden and stereotypical. Sienna tries hard but has little to hold on to.
There is very little of interest here to attract the casual film watcher. The personal dynamics does not work, in fact, Buscemi is awfully irritating in his quasi-journalist role and I kept asking what would the Miller character see in Buscemi’s ineptly played persona.
84 wasted minutes. Caveat emptor is all I can say.
Rating: 1 / 5
Put two completely unlikable characters together and have then talk for a little over an hour, probing to get each ohers secrets that neither one of them (and you) care nothing about and you have a slow moving, hard to watch film. This may have been designed to be an acting tour de force by a couple actors, but it was not. This gave me the impression that it was made as a project for a college acting class. The twist at the end was sooooo lame that I called it as soon as the journalist peeked onto the starlet’s computer. This was a twist I saw coming and kept saying to myself: “Please be wrong. Please be wrong.” Sigh, I wasn’t wrong. Another issue I had was the countless times the writer threatened to leave and did not or the countless times the starlet ordered him out then changed her mind. But what really bothered me about this work, other than the lack of plot, bad dialogue and totally unlikeable characters was the drug and alcohol consumption. Between the two main characters, they drank more wine in 84 minutes than I could consume in a week and, except for about 30 seconds, never got even tipsy and then after that 30 second display of drunkenness, were sober again for the rest of the film. Nobody could drink that much and still be standing, let alone hatching plots. The description on the cover refers to a verbal chess game. No. I gave it two stars for making an effort, but ultimately at some point a film has to deliver on it’s promise and INTERVIEW came up short.
Rating: 2 / 5
While I admire Buscemi for attempting what can be one of the harder things to do on film – basically a two-actor script – I hated this. Yes, it’s riveting – perhaps the film’s deftist feat is its way of hooking the viewer back in every time the two characters threaten to part ways. But by the end I hated the actress and wasn’t terribly fond of the journalist. I felt like I’d been enmeshed in the lives of two people unworthy of my time and attention. Also depressing was the ageist message/resolution. Made me nostalgic for films in which age and experience counts for something durable and respectable. Instead, this just drives home today’s youth-uber-alles viewpoint.
Rating: 2 / 5
Somewhere along the line there had to be a satire about movie stars and reporters. Billy Wilder made it a classic in `Sunset Boulevard’ Sunset Boulevard (Special Collector’s Edition). While Steve Buscemi’s ‘Interview’ isn’t in the same category, his feature brings wit and irony front and center in an admirable fashion.
Political reporter Pierre Peters (Buscemi) and soap opera star, Katya (Sienna Miller) in ‘Sex in the City-esque ‘City Girls,’ spar with one another in what commences as an admirable update of `Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. During the opening scene they’re at a restaurant, each interrupted at key times with cell phone calls. (To sample the lack of subtlety, her cell phone goes off with the sounds of a feisty terrier.) We find out later that he’s intensely irritable for being reassigned from the political beat to interviewing acting celebrities. Early on we also discover that both are forces to be reckoned with as they try to outwit one another.
Recovering from a restaurant debacle, most of the movie occurs at her place. From tempest to tranquility, the film ebbs and flows in manic/depressive cycles. Each time they start to calm down, they discover they have more in common than would have originally imagined. Chemical dependency comes to the surface as she snorts cocaine, and he continues on a typical drinking binge. Their intoxication has a sobering undertow as each tries to expose the other’s vulnerability. Both are formidable players in the tirades that come to roost in her apartment.
In two keys scenes, each tries to unravel the other. She takes her video camera and starts to interview him. Similarly, he gets on her computer and does some investigating of his own. The dirt each finds about the other is enough to undo the other unless someone is clever enough to win their intense sparring match.
Cleverly scripted and devastatingly witty, ‘Interview’ turns the tables on assessments one makes on movies like ‘Conversations with Other Women,’ Conversations with Other Women which seems spurious in comparison to this intense, although sometimes irritating, contest of wills.
Rating: 3 / 5