Some actors-turned-directors prefer not to wear both hats in a single film, but Tommy Lee Jones says he doesn’t mind the extra work. “They’re two different jobs,” he says plainly. “I don’t have much trouble doing both of them at the same time.” He certainly didn’t seem strained in The ... More

When Ralph Fiennes first considered a part in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, he knew the role of the eccentric concierge M. Gustave was for him. “Wes said, ‘Tell me which part you’d like to play,’” Fiennes recalls, “which was quite funny because there’s really only one great part.” Gustave ... More

The role of Maziar Bahari in Rosewater was appealing to Gael García Bernal for a number of reasons: One was that Bahari’s story—he’s an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was jailed in Tehran while covering the 2009 presidential elections—made for a compelling, inspiring tale. Another was that the film marks ... More

If someone tells you to watch a film called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it is likely that within seconds you will have envisioned an egregious queue of horrors set to befall the girl in question. But the feature-length directorial debut of Ana Lily Amirpour is nothing if not ... More

Louis Zamperini knew a thing or two about waiting. The Olympic runner turned U.S. airman spent 47 deadly days living on a raft after a 1943 plane crash and subsequently survived two years as a Japanese prisoner of war. Still, when he sold Universal Pictures his life story in 1957, ... More

When it came time to film their debut directorial effort, Bad Turn Worse, brothers Zeke and Simon Hawkins didn’t just conjure up a South Texas landscape, they actually moved there. The movie, which is based on a story by Dutch Southern and Justin Duprie, takes place in a Texas town where three ... More

Initially, Robert Duvall says, the jury was out when it came to The Judge. “It didn’t appeal to me,” he recalls. “I really needed time to think about it.” Nevertheless, he came to love his role (opposite Robert Downey Jr.) as tough-as-nails Judge Joseph Palmer. The part required Duvall ... More

Chris Lowell is used to being in front of the camera; he’s appeared in everything from Grey’s Anatomy to The Help and Veronica Mars. But when it comes to working behind the scenes, he’s still a novice. Or he was before Beside Still Waters, a new film that Lowell not only wrote (alongside his writing ... More

Amy Albany’s memoir Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood charts her life with a talented, tormented jazz musician father. In the recent film adaptation, Albany is played by Elle Fanning, her father by John Hawkes and her young boyfriend Cole—also, of course, a musician—by Caleb ... More

Sometimes, it seems, the acting in a film can be almost too real. Or at least that was the case on the Manhattan set of The Heart Machine, where a fight scene made onlookers more than a little uncomfortable. "There was one scene where I'm trying to sneak into this apartment building, ... More