ACTORS CAN BE NEEDY, fragile creatures they crave the spotlight, but often it just amplifies their insecurities, like a magnifying glass burning ants. When Judith Weston began working with directors, she was startled to discover how many were scared of their stars.
"Directors come to me and say, 'How do I keep control?"" says Weston, sitting in the idyllic back garden of her home near Venice Beach in LA. "If I tell them they don't have to have control, it's a relief to them." Weston has been coaching directors for close to 35 years, instructing them, among other things, in the care and feeding of the actorly temperament.
"I find it almost like seeing a directors' therapist," says Lucy Tcherniak, a director on the streaming series Station Eleven and forthcoming Apple TV+ series Sunny. "You're surrounded by people, but directing can be a really lonely job." Many devotees discovered Weston through her book Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television, updated last year for its 25th anniversary. Over the years, she has amassed a long list of clients, including Taika Waititi, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ava DuVernay, Boots Riley, and Alma Har'el. Waititi says he considers Weston a creative, maternal figure in his life: "She's basically Yoda, except she's not small and she's not green." When he was making Thor: Ragnarok, he asked her what she thought of the screenwriters' script, and she blurted, "Well, it reads like it was written by a sevenyear-old boy." Even this, he told Weston, inspired him: He could definitely get excited about directing a movie that a kid wrote.
Weston is usually gentler. She greets me in a bright turquoise tunic, talking quietly and radiating empathy.
Denne historien er fra December 2022 - January 2023-utgaven av Vanity Fair US.
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Denne historien er fra December 2022 - January 2023-utgaven av Vanity Fair US.
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Both Now Sides - Selena Gomez is seriously in loveand making the best work of her career. With the audacious Emilia Pérez hitting theaters and Only Murders in the Building returning to TV, the actor, singer, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate talks, about the climb
Selena Gomez is seriously in loveand making the best work of her career. With the audacious Emilia Pérez hitting theaters and Only Murders in the Building returning to TV, the actor, singer, entrepreneur, and mental health advocate talks, about the climb
Give and Let Give -Melinda French Gates is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Melinda French Gates is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
Party Planning - Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
I don’t know which moment in US history former president Donald Trump imagines when he says, “Make America great again.” He has never given a definitive answer in any speech or interview. But I know exactly which moment Vladimir Putin imagines in his own vision for Russian greatness. It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill divided the world in Crimea.
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
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Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
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FUNNY BUSINESS
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BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
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