Posts Tagged ‘Midnight In Paris’

Sony Pictures Classics have confirmed that they will be distributing Woody Allen’s love letter to Paris, Midnight In Paris, on DVD and BluRay to the US market. As yet, there has been no confirmed release date, but I would anticipate it to be soon to cash in on the Christmas market. I will update you all once I have a confirmed date.

If you live in France, you will be one of the first to get your hands on it as you will be able to pick this up on 12th October, distributed by TF1 Vidéo.

UK fans are able to see this in theatres right now, as it was released Friday 7th. Distributed in theatres by Warner Bros, I presume they will also handle the UK BluRay/DVD release, possibly early next year.

According to a UK Film release schedule, Midnight In Paris will be released in the UK by Warner Bros on 7 October 2011

Other future releases around the globe, according to IMDB are:

That is what Kay Shackleton in a recent article for Examiner.com reckons.

Does this mean that it could be a contender for the 2012 Academy Awards (Oscars)? Despite Anchor Bay delivering a relatively limited release, a lot of people seem to think so.  Ropes Of Silicon have it listed as one of their contenders, along with Midnight In Paris.

Midnight In Paris has recently become the highest grossing Woody Allen film to date, much to the delight of distributors Sony Pictures Classic.

For many, this film is seen as a return to form for the veteran director.

The 84th Academy Awards ceremony is still a long way off, due to take place on Sunday, February 26th 2012. At the moment, the Academy are still receiving nominations with the final list is due to be released Tuesday, January 24, 2012 so add this date to your diary.

Article from USA TODAY dated 22 Jun 2011

There’s been a Sheen in the headlines the past few months. And while it may not be Michael Sheen, the Welsh actor is totally cool with his sort of under-the-radar living.

The star of Frost/Nixon, The Queen and last winter’s TRON: Legacy laughs at the idea that some American audiences might think he’s related to Charlie Sheen, that famous purveyor of “winning” and tiger blood.

“Well, I met Martin Sheen (Charlie’s dad) a few times, and he’s the most wonderful man,” Michael Sheen says. “I have such admiration for him. I’m not at all upset about being associated with the family at all.”

The thing is, though, Michael Sheen, 42, is much more concerned with being a good actor than being a tabloid-ready celebrity. He stars in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (in theaters now) as an American tourist in France, and he plays the father of a university school-shooter alongside Maria Bello in the emotional drama Beautiful Boy.

Midnight in Paris gave him a chance to revisit the famous city he’s been to many times, but offered him a different way of working: When he was filming the movie, Allen never gave him the whole script, keeping things mysterious to his cast, including Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.

“You show up and you do your bits and you don’t really know what’s been going on with the other characters, don’t know the whole story of the piece, and you work out little bits and pieces from it,” Sheen says.

“There was actually something quite liberating about it. You can’t really do any preparation,” he adds, laughing.

For Beautiful Boy, however, Sheen had plenty of places for insight. To play the father dealing with the aftermath of what happens when his teenage son opens fire on his college campus, the actor read background material on other school-shooting incidents .

“It’s a combination of preparation and openness,” Sheen says of his performance. “And obviously you have to bring your own experiences to bear as well and try and connect with what the character’s going through, even though you may not have experienced that specific thing yourself.

“You try and find a way to connect to it with what’s happened to you. It’s that leap into the imaginative dark.”

Sheen says he brought a lot of his own feelings about his own child to the role. He has a 12-year-old daughter from his previous relationship with actress Kate Beckinsale. To be closer to Lily, Sheen rents a place in Los Angeles, a city he’s grown more attached to the past nine years.

“It’s a beautiful place, and there’s lots of wonderful things there,” he says. “People have a stereotypical idea of Los Angeles, which has some truth to it I’m sure, but I’m not really part of that scene, really.”

While he’s playing American roles in his two newest films, Sheen sticks close to his European roots with his acting performances. In October, Sheen takes on the title role of Hamlet for the first time on stage at the Young Vic in London.

He’s had memorable roles in the Twilight series as a royal vampire, a werewolf in Underworld and as Tony Blair in The Queen and HBO’s The Special Relationship, and that kind of variety keeps him busy as well as entertained.

“The big stars in our industry are partly big stars because they’re recognizable for doing a particular kind of thing, and I’ve never really been that interested in doing that. It’s the difference in parts that I play that I enjoy the most,” explains Sheen, who appears in November’s Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and the indie comedy Jesus Henry Christ later this year.

“I’m not surprised that people might go, ‘Well, hang on. He’s the guy who plays the politicians.’ Or, ‘No, he’s the guy who does the werewolves and vampires.’ I’m not really looking to become the sort of actor who gets known for doing one thing. I quite like the fact that people don’t know what column to put me in.”

Sheen’s also found himself a Hollywood girlfriend in McAdams, his Midnight in Paris co-star. He says they met on the French set but didn’t get together romantically until later.

“For actors, you tend to meet people through the work you do,” Sheen says. “I would imagine that’s a lot of people’s experiences. You spend most of your time doing that kind of thing. It’s literally how you meet people.”

Sheen and McAdams returned to France and hit the red carpet for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival in May to promote Midnight in Paris, publicly confirming their romance. Yet for those obsessed with following the social lives of celebrities, Sheen says he’s not going out of his way to be that type of guy.

“People who are into the kind of work that I do know me and are interested in the kind of work I do and look out for it. I don’t think the people who are necessarily interested in what Charlie Sheen is up to are going to be as into what I’m up to,” Sheen says with a laugh. “And that’s fine by me.”

Article from AV Club 8 June 2011

The actor: Versatile Welsh performer Michael Sheen, who’s apparently following in the footsteps of fellow Brits like Michael Caine and Judi Dench by seemingly never turning down a role. He’s taken leading roles in highbrow, awards-bait fare like The Queen and Frost/Nixon, but can also be seen hamming it up as a werewolf leader in the Underworld trilogy, a vampire lord in the Twilight movies, a rakish sybarite in Tron: Legacy, and so forth. At least he always seems to commit to the serious roles, and have a lot of broad fun in the more ridiculous ones. But he’s more about commitment than fun in his latest, Beautiful Boy, a painful, poignant drama in which he and Maria Bello co-star as the struggling parents of a college boy who kills 21 classmates before turning the gun on himself. As always, Sheen gives a terrific, intense performance as a father and husband who’s falling apart.

Frost/Nixon (2008)—“David Frost”
Michael Sheen: The journey, the whole journey of it—starting on a small stage at the Donmar Theatre, doing a workshop reading of the play at a point where David Frost ended the first half singing a song. Ultimately to doing a production at the Donmar, then at the West End, then on Broadway, and then the movie of it, and then being at the Oscars with it—it was an extraordinary journey.

AVC: Was your rendition of David Frost notably different over those changing spaces, in those changing versions?

MS: Yeah—well, hang on. The demands of each were different, even the different-sized theaters, and then theaters in different countries, and that kind of stuff. There was a big adjustment each time, so that was the most extraordinary relationship you end up having with a story, doing it in so many different ways, with different casts as well. I had three casts I worked with over the whole period. It was an extraordinary way of getting intimate with a particular story and character.

AVC: Did you feel like you were refining that role every time, or just transposing it for different media?

MS: No, I think my understanding of it deepened each time. Obviously, when different actors were playing different parts around me, I was still the same character, but I was revealing different parts of the character depending on what I was reacting to all the time. If there are different actors playing different characters around you then you change as well, so it wasn’t just about changing it for the medium. No, you discover parts of the character.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and Breaking Dawn parts 1 and 2  (2011-2012)—“Aro”
MS: That’s a character I just find really, really fascinating. I’m a big fan of vampire movies generally, and that sort of tradition of characters. So being able to have my own take on a character, and being someone who taps into all the things that really frightened me when I was a kid, like Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine, and [Laurence] Olivier’s Richard III on film. All these characters really stayed with me and disturbed me in some way, and yet sort of thrilled me. That’s what I always tend to draw on when I play that character. And also, the level of excitement and passion that the audience has. My own daughter is a big fan of the Twilight stories, the books. So that’s the other thing—it’s the first time I’ve done something my daughter actually actively had an interest in.

AVC: Have you gotten caught up by the fan mania that’s hit some of the people involved in the series? Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have had fairly complicated lives since they started doing those movies.

MS: I guess they have, yeah. I don’t get any of that, probably because the audience for those films, I don’t think on the whole, know other things I’ve done, and certainly wouldn’t recognize me if they saw me walking down the street. So I get away with all that.

AVC: Is it ever strange going back and forth between playing serious, buttoned-down, real-life people and playing outsized fantasy roles in Twilight or Tron: Legacy?

MS: No, that’s why I got into acting in the first place. It’s the variety and the challenge of doing different things and playing different characters. It’s all one big dressing-up box.

The Queen (2006)—“Tony Blair”
MS: [Laughs.] The Queen, that was… no wonder it’s something. You have such a long journey with these films, there’s so many different things. I guess, in a way, what was most important about that was that it was the beginning of my collaboration… Well I did [the TV film] The Deal with [director] Stephen Frears and [writer] Peter Morgan, and that was the first thing I had done with Peter. But The Queen was on another level. So in terms of the first movie, the first cinema film I’ve done as part of the collaboration with Peter Morgan, The Queen cemented my relationship with him. He’s had such a big effect on my career, as has Stephen Frears, who directed that as well. So that was a very exciting collaboration. And that was the first time I had ever been in something that ended up at the Oscars, as well. So being a big part of that whole journey for the first time was very exciting and interesting.

Mary Reilly (1996)—“Bradshaw”
AVC: Was Othello your first film role?

MS: The first one I ever did was with Stephen Frears, a film called Mary Reilly. Stephen directed, and Julia Roberts and John Malkovich are in it.

AVC: Ah, that came out the year after Othello, but was filmed earlier. What was that first experience like?

MS: It was fascinating. I discovered much later that it was quite a difficult shoot for everybody, for various reasons. But because it was the first time I was seeing all that happening, seeing just how a film got made, I was just fascinated by it all. Although, I was very nervous whenever I had to actually do anything in the film, because I just felt so much pressure, you know, to get it right and not mess it up. So it was quite a nerve-wracking experience, as was being around Julia Roberts, who was lovely, but you know, a huge star. It was all so new and exciting and interesting.

Wilde (1997)—“Robbie Ross”
MS: That allowed me to spend a bit more time in front of the camera, so I started to relax a bit more, and I felt a bit more involved. So I really enjoyed that. There were a lot of actors in that who went on to do better, or great things: Jude Law and Orlando Bloom were in that. There was a great company of actors, and working with Stephen Fry, who played Oscar, who I then went on to be directed by [in Bright Young Things]. A really fascinating man with a fascinating life and story. It gave me the opportunity to get a bit more experience working in front of the camera, so I felt a bit more relaxed doing that.

Midnight In Paris (2011)—“Paul”
MS: Well, to be able to work… I always find working in a city is the best way to discover it, really. It makes you feel like you’re not a tourist anymore. So I had the opportunity to do a play in Paris quite a few years ago, but to film in Paris with Woody Allen was fantastic. It’s such a beautiful city, you know? The sort of access we had, we would turn up every day to a different location, and there would be some sort of amazing work of art in front of us that we could have all to ourselves. Whether it was the Rodin sculpture garden, or Monet’s water lilies—actually, the one thing I’ll always remember is being at Giverny, where Monet lived, and standing on the Japanese bridge, and looking at the actual water lilies he depicted, that we had been in front of a few days before. So that was just stunning, beautiful, just thinking, “Normally, there would be hundreds of tourists here, but I get it all to myself because we’re filming.”

AVC: To the degree that Midnight In Paris has a villain, you’re playing him. Woody Allen has used that intellectual blowhard character before, and he seems to authentically hate the type. How did he ask you to play that role? Did he encourage you to play it up?

MS: No, he got me to play it down, if anything. He said, “You know, I think this character is sort of the ultimate peasant, and I think you might have some fun with him.” But in the actual playing of it, he wanted to not make too big a deal of it, just to be very simple with it, not to go too over-the-top, make him very real. Other than that, he sort of left me to it.

Underworld (2003), Underworld: Evolution (2006), Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans (2009)—“Lucian”
MS: Given that he died at the end of the first film, to be able to go back and play the character again was great. Especially because he started out as a villain, and one of the things I enjoyed most about playing that character for the first time was to try and find a way for the audience to sympathize with him. By the time I got to do the third film, and to tell his story, it was really interesting to see how he turned into what he turned into. It’s a really enjoyable exercise to know where you have to end up, and to try and tell a surprising story about a character so you reveal aspects of it that people weren’t aware of before. I enjoy that too. As a general thing, I’ve always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath. I’ve always enjoyed that, the challenge of taking characters who seem fairly villainous or monstrous, and finding a way to empathize with them.

AVC: Given a choice on an average day between seeing a popcorn-y action film like Underworld or something more serious and involved like Frost/Nixon, which do you think you’d pick?

MS: I think the films I’m in are a pretty good reflection of my taste, which is very varied. I only tend to really want to be in things if I’d want to go see them myself. My tastes are fairly wide-ranging, and the things I do are a reflection of that. I’m not someone who just sees one genre of film or one type of film; I enjoy going to see all kinds of different things. It’s very rare that there’s a mixture of the things I like all in one film, but I would point to—well, my favorite film of all time is a film called A Matter Of Life And Death, which was called Stairway To Heaven in America, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; that’s a film that combines sort of the real world with the more fantastical world. And a film in more modern times, like Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, [is] very much anchored in reality, but also has an element of the fantastic. Those are the things I’m most drawn to on the whole, but I’m as happy going to see something that is very much in the real world, or something that’s in a more fantastical world as well.

The Damned United (2009)—“Brian Clough”
MS: I suppose it was the first, and pretty much the only, time where the two great obsessions in my life came together, which was then soccer and acting. Before I got very involved in acting, I always wanted to be a soccer player. Being able to combine the two was fantastic. And such an extraordinary character as well; he was someone I grew up with as a child in the ’70s. He’s a huge figure in Britain, not just in the world of sports, but also in the world of entertainment as well. He was an extraordinary character, so to be able to actually get to be him for a short time was really exciting.

30 Rock (2010)—“Wesley”
MS: I loved doing that. It was great. It’s quite nerve-wracking to do out-and-out comedy. I’ve always enjoyed looking for the humor in the things I’ve done, but it’s very rare that I’ve got to do something that is pure comedy. Especially working alongside someone like Tina [Fey], who is so, so brilliant at it, and so smart, and so quick, and so sharp. It could have been quite intimidating, but actually, everyone was so generous and lovely to work with that it put me at my ease. It was really enjoyable to play a character who, the more I played that character, the more Tina wrote it more around what I was doing. That was a lovely thing, to see a character develop because the person you’re acting with is also the person who’s writing it.

Beautiful Boy (2011)—“Bill”
MS: It’s exciting to work with an actor who you really connect with, and feel like the only thing important to this person is doing the best job you can do and working together, and there’s no ego involved. You can really cover huge amounts of ground when you feel as trusting and safe with someone as I did with Maria [Bello] on this. The level of honesty and connection and trust that we had in working on it was quite remarkable, and exhilarating, and special. So that will be the thing I will always remember.

AVC: In our interview with her, she said she doesn’t like rehearsals, and she also doesn’t do much research for a role; she wants to find the character in the moment. Is that simpatico with your style?

MS: Not necessarily—I wouldn’t say I have a particular style, really. It depends on each project, and the requirements and needs as I see them on each thing. Some things are really great with a lot of rehearsal, and some things aren’t. Sometimes I do a lot of research—with the characters I’ve played who are real-life people, I’ve spent anything up to six months researching and rehearsing and working on them. And there are other things I haven’t done any research or rehearsal on in particular, so it really depends on each project. I plan and work out what’s appropriate and what fits, and the needs of each thing as it comes along.

AVC: How do you determine that? Is it more in the script, or from interacting with other people who are going to be in the movie?

MS: With something like Beautiful Boy, I didn’t feel the need to do a huge amount of research. I felt like the most important thing, looking at the script, in terms of what would help tell the story the best, it seemed like the best thing to concentrate on working on the right sort of relationship with me and Maria, given that we were going to spend so much time together on such intense material. It would just be the two of us, and we had a very short shoot—it was only 30 days, so we needed to have a really good working relationship. And for us to really bed ourselves into who these people are, and what’s this relationship like, and what’s the dynamics, and what’s the backstory. And then the aspect that I suppose we could have done more research about, which would be about looking into the experiences of people who had gone through something similar.

Actually, in this case, I felt like the strongest element was that these characters have no idea what they were doing, or what the rules are, or what they should be thinking or feeling, or what’s the next step. So I felt like not knowing anything about it was probably more appropriate. So in this case, it was more to do with backstory, and me and Maria getting together and working things through, but on something else, it might be completely different.

Article from LA Times 4 June 2011

These days, Michael Sheen seems likely to turn up anywhere — and everywhere.

The actor who gained attention and acclaim with a string of roles drawn from real-life characters in films such as The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United also has demonstrated a fondness for turning more commercial films on their heads — delivering joyously odd performances in vampire franchises such as Underworld and Twilight and sci-fi outings such as Tron: Legacy.

“I suppose it reflects my taste as an audience member,” said Sheen, 42, regarding his seemingly unlikely range of roles. “I’m as likely when I’m deciding what film I want to watch to go to the small art-house cinema as I am to go to the big multiplex. And I don’t see why my acting career shouldn’t reflect my taste as well. I do things that I would like to go see ultimately. They’re all things that I’d like to watch myself, and therefore I should like to be in them.”

Sheen’s latest round of projects is particularly eclectic. He had a recurring role on the sitcom “30 Rock” as Wesley Snipes, a mismatched love interest to Tina Fey . In April, he appeared in a 72-hour-long performance of “The Passion” in the small town in Wales where he grew up. And Sheen appears as a blowhard academic in Woody Allen’s new “Midnight in Paris,” turning in a bone-dry comedic performance as a know-it-all intellectual and romantic rival to Owen Wilson’s unmoored Gil.

“He’s a stock character in Woody’s films, someone who the Woody Allen character can feel both superior to and inferior to and complain about,” said Sheen, who’s been making a cameo appearance in the gossip pages thanks to his relationship with his “Midnight” costar Rachel McAdams. “If I’d ever thought about doing a Woody Allen film, I would have thought it would be in New York, not Paris. It was a surprising experience in a lot of ways.”

Then there is his powerful turn in “Beautiful Boy,” which opened in limited release on Friday after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

As Bill, the father of a college student who died committing a bloody campus shooting, Sheen, alongside Maria Bello as his wife, Kate, cycles through all the conflicting feelings and self-criminations one might expect from the emotional aftershocks of such a devastating event.

Like Lynne Ramsay’s upcoming “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” about a mother coping with the devastating consequences of a son’s violent, lethal outburst, “Beautiful Boy” tackles a hot-button subject matter. But for first-time feature writer-director Shawn Ku, the story was principally a portrait of a marriage in decline, watching two people forcefully thrown together at the very point they are most distant from one another.

“Initially we set out to write a story about a relationship, with two people who didn’t know each other as well as they thought they did,” Ku explained of the process with his co-writer Michael Armbruster. “And from that we came to this idea of having them be parents of a campus shooter. We’d never seen that before, even in press coverage. We tend to vilify these people when those things happen, so they’re not open. The Columbine kids, those parents didn’t speak for more than a decade.”

While the film touches on events with real-world echoes, Sheen said he didn’t prepare in the same way he did for his turns as Prime Minister Tony Blair in “The Queen” or TV personality David Frost in “Frost/Nixon.”

“There’s always something you can research, and I can do this as much as anyone, but you can start to do research for the sake of doing research. Almost for the sake of being able to say, ‘yes I did research’ in interviews to make you sound like a proper actor,” he said. “But sometimes it’s just not appropriate. It felt in a way that it would be more useful not to know anything because they have no idea what to do. They’re lost.”

“Beautiful Boy” was shot in just 18 days in late 2009 — “Basically Michael and I had to pay them in order to be in this movie,” joked Bello — and Ku acknowledged the difficulty of the low-budget production.

He mentioned that Sheen had to shoot one of his most emotional scenes, a poignant voicemail message Bill leaves on the phone of his dead son, in a rush at the tail end of Sheen’s first day of filming.

The production schedule also didn’t give Sheen and Bello much rehearsal time to build up the small shorthands that make them seem so much like an authentic couple in the film.

“We didn’t have a lot of time, but we got a lot done in that time,” said Sheen of his working relationship with Bello.

“It is rare, even when you connect with another actor, to have such a level of trust as we had. Because of what we worked on before shooting, talked about with Shawn, we were very honest with each other about our relationships and our own experiences and that connected us, I think. I’ve never felt more comfortable with another actor.”

Sheen and Bello determined that in the series of scenes featuring just the two of them together, each actor would always be at some differing point on the emotional scale in an effort to make the film more than just a one-note chamber piece on grieving.

“I read this book on grief beforehand because I had heard that the grief process when someone loses a child takes years,” Bello said. “Here we have to fit it into two weeks [of on-screen time] and go through grief, rage, denial, all the levels. Michael and I wanted to be sure we weren’t playing the same emotion at the same time in the same scene. So when he was in anger I was in denial, or I was in sadness when he was in rage. It was interesting to figure out how to get all these levels in there so you’re not just playing shock.”

Although his performance in “Beautiful Boy” shows off Sheen’s dramatic skills, it is his versatility that might be most notable about his work overall. In “Tron: Legacy,” for example, Sheen turned a small role as a duplicitous nightclub owner into a spectacular piece of showmanship that was purposefully drawn from David Bowie at his most chameleonic.

“All these things get put together and out of it comes this weird thing,” said Sheen of the self-aware playfulness he tends to bring to his roles in bigger-budget films. “And until someone says, ‘No, stop it,’ I’m just going to keep going. It was the same with Aro in ‘Twilight.’ There’s this character who is ultimately completely insane who was driven mad by being immortal and plays games with himself.”

He’ll reprise the role of the menacing vampire leader later this year with the release of the first installment in the franchise’s two-part finale “Breaking Dawn,” and Sheen noted that the majority of his time on the shoot was spent on a single battle sequence, which should promise to be a showstopper.

“People talk about the characters being camp, but there’s just a sense of self-conscious theatricality about them because they are playing games,” he said. “There’s a sense of joy there but also an anger and darkness as well.”

There is also a lovely new image attached to this article. A copy of which has been added to the Gallery.