Category: Entertainment

The first major fest of 2023 is nearly upon us. With over 100 films representing 23 countries, the 25th edition of Sundance Film Festival features plenty of promising titles from emerging voices as well as hotly anticipated, star-studded offerings. We’re highlighting some of the films we are most looking forward to seeing. This list is by no means exhaustive. Other titles on our radar include Nicole Holofcener’s latest, Julia Louis-Dreyfus-starrer “You Hurt My Feelings,” Susanna Fogel’s “Cat Person,” based on Kristen Roupenian’s viral New Yorker story about a college student’s relationship with an older man, and Celine Song’s feature directorial debut, “Past Lives,” a romance led by “Russian Doll’s” Greta Lee.

Sundance runs from January 19-29 this year. We’re rolling out interviews with directors throughout the fest.

Here are some of our most anticipated films of Sundance 2023. Synopses are courtesy of the festival.

“Invisible Beauty” (Documentary) – Directed by Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng

What it’s about: Fashion revolutionary Bethann Hardison looks back on her journey as a pioneering Black model, modeling agent, and activist, shining a light on an untold chapter in the fight for racial diversity.

Why we’re excited: The fashion industry is hardly known for being inclusive, but Bethann Hardison has spent decades doing her damndest to transform the biz from within. Long before diversity in the world of entertainment became a hot topic, the trailblazing model was speaking out and getting to work on making a change. She formed the Bethann Management Agency, dedicated to “challenging prevailing notions of beauty,” back in 1984. In 1988, she and fellow model Iman co-founded the Black Girls Coalition, launched to celebrate Black models and connect them with ways to give back to the community.

“Invisible Beauty” isn’t just a doc about Hardison — it’s a work of art by her. In addition to serving as the film’s subject, she co-directed it. After making a name for herself in front of the camera, she’s stepping behind it. We’re looking forward to learning more about this pioneer through her own lens.

“It’s Only Life After All” (Documentary) – Directed by Alexandria Bombach

What it’s about: Blending 40 years of home movies, film archives, and intimate present-day vérité, a poignant reflection from Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of iconic folk rock duo Indigo Girls. A timely look into the obstacles, activism, and life lessons of two queer friends who never expected to make it big.

Why we’re excited: We welcome any excuse to listen to the Indigo Girls. Just reading about “It’s Only Life After All” inspired us to cue up “Galileo” and “Closer to You.” Besides offering the opportunity to revisit some of the band’s biggest hits, Alexandra Bombach’s doc will also offer a fascinating look at friends and collaborators who have known each other since childhood: Amy Ray and Emily Saliers first met all the way back in elementary school. Besides creating decades of beloved music together, the pair are also noted for their activism, which has seen them fighting against racism and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights and environmental causes.

We are also big fans of Bombach’s last doc, 2018’s “On Her Shoulders,” the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, who survived genocide and sexual slavery after being kidnapped by ISIS. She was later appointed as the first-ever Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“Judy Blume Forever” (Documentary) – Directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok

What it’s about: The radical honesty of the books by young adult fiction pioneer Judy Blume changed the way millions of readers understood themselves, their sexuality, and what it meant to grow up, but also led to critical battles against book banning and censorship.

Why we’re excited: Judy Blume rocked our worlds in elementary school, and we’re far from alone in this: it’s no exaggeration to say that she shaped generations of young readers. With a slew of adaptations in development, including a film from Kelly Fremon Craig based on “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” and a Netflix series from “Girlfriends” creator Mara Brock Akil that’s inspired by “Forever,” now seems like a perfect time to reflect on how the author was able to write stories about sexuality, puberty, and relationships that resonated with so many adolescents — and to analyze the intense backlash these frank depictions inspired.

“Plan C” (Documentary) – Directed by Tracy Droz Tragos

What it’s about: A hidden grassroots organization doggedly fights to expand access to abortion pills across the United States keeping hope alive during a global pandemic and the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Why we’re excited: Tracy Droz Tragos previously directed 2016’s “Abortion: Stories Women Tell,” a doc that sees women sharing their own accounts of what their experiences with abortion were like. Now she’s tackling the subject from another angle. With “Plan C,” she will shine a light on Francine Coeytaux, who has spent “decades working in public health and focusing on new reproductive technologies, including the development of emergency contraception,” per Sundance. Coeytaux and her team launched Plan C to expand access to medication abortion. The film follows their efforts to “look for ways to distribute abortion pills while following the letter of the law. Unmarked vans serving as mobile clinics distribute medication to those who cannot get help in their own states.” As utterly horrifying as it is that we are living in 2023 and folks don’t have the right to choose, orgs like Plan C help give us hope — and their call to action couldn’t be more urgent.

“Shayda” – Written and Directed by Noora Niasari

What it’s about: Shayda, a brave Iranian mother, finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her six-year-old daughter. Over Persian New Year, they take solace in Nowruz rituals and new beginnings, but when her estranged husband re-enters their lives, Shayda’s path to freedom is jeopardized.

Why we’re excited: Zar Amir Ebrahimi took home Cannes’ best actress award for “Holy Spider,” and “Shayda” sounds like it will offer her another opportunity to show off her chops. Iranian-Australian filmmaker Noora Niasari drew from personal experiences for this portrait of a  woman doing all she can to create a new, safer, and more stable life for herself and her daughter. This perspective will add depth and richness to an important story that we haven’t seen told on-screen before.

“The Disappearance of Shere Hite” (Documentary) – Directed by Nicole Newnham

What it’s about: Shere Hite’s 1976 bestselling book, The Hite Report, liberated the female orgasm by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Her findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. So how did Shere Hite disappear?

Why we’re excited: It’s been nearly 40 years since “The Hite Report” — dubbed “The Hate Report” by Playboy — was published, and a significant percentage of women still cannot definitively identify whether or not they’ve orgasmed. In news that is not surprising to anyone, the orgasm gap persists. Still, the impact of “The Hite Report” cannot be overstated. Shere Hite’s first book sold a whopping 50 million copies, inspiring plenty of backlash along the way. We’re interested to see just how much of Hite’s groundbreaking work remains relevant all these years later, and how discourse around sex and sexuality has evolved — and devolved — since. The doc marks Nicole Newnham’s follow up to “Crip Camp,” an Oscar-nominated look inside a summer camp for teenagers with disabilities and the social movements it helped inspire, one of our favorite titles of 2020.

“Victim/Suspect” (Documentary) – Directed by Nancy Schwartzman

What it’s about: Investigative journalist Rae de Leon travels nationwide to uncover and examine a shocking pattern: Young women tell the police they’ve been sexually assaulted, but instead of finding justice, they’re charged with the crime of making a false report, arrested, and even imprisoned by the system they believed would protect them.

Why we’re excited: We were impressed with — and enraged by — “Unbelievable,” the 2019 Netflix miniseries inspired by the true story of a teen who was charged with lying about having been raped. “Victim/Suspect” sounds as though it will cover similar ground, exploring how young women who have survived sexual abuse have been further victimized by the legal system — as if the trauma of dealing with their initial attack wasn’t nightmarish enough. The doc hails from Nancy Schwartzman, whose investigation into the Steubenville High School rape case, 2018’s “Roll Red Roll,” demonstrated a deft touch with handling this kind of sensitive subject matter.

In his new ad campaign, former Navy prosecutor Ron DeSantis dons an aviator outfit replete with goggles, billing himself as “Top Gov” and spoiling for a dogfight against the liberal-leading media. Those who disagree with his positions are promptly dis-invited to future speeches or press conferences. 

Will this strategy appeal to a broad audience or will it limit the Florida governor to a “niche”? Top Gov has his eyes on the widest niche — the  presidency — and hence has set his campaign on a political version of Cruise control. Says his top communications aide: ”We know the media hates us and hates everything we stand for.”

Does DeSantis honestly believe he can unite the Republican Party by being even more polarizing than Donald Trump was before he was voted out and, many charge, fomented an attempt at a government overthrow by his unruly hardline base, the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper crowd?

His strategy is the opposite of the one employed by the Golden Globes and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a dubious enterprise that is trying to crawl out of banishment for not having a single Black voter for years, and for other misdeeds by the hundred or so journalists/parasites who are stringers for offshore publications. Given a position of importance with a weighty vote for a popular awards broadcast known to be more irreverent and fun than the stuffy Oscarcast, these journalists grew a rep for supplementing meager incomes with lavish gifts and junkets to glamorous places. They held interview sessions big stars were told by awards handlers they had to attend, often enduring rude and personal questions from these nobodies. And former HFPA president Philip Berk allegedly pawed at Brendan Fraser’s down under – the actor himself used the word “taint” to describe the exchange. Berk, a 44-year member and president for eight years, was allowed to stay after he denied he was a Golden Groper, and he wasn’t bounced until he retweeted a missive about Black Lives Matter being a “racist hate group.”

Fraser was nominated for his performance in The Whale, but said he wasn’t showing up, and didn’t. He was barely mentioned, but not so for Tom Cruise, who was bothered enough by the HFPA’s misdeeds that he rounded up the three Globes he’d won and sent them back. During the show earlier this week, host Jerrod Carmichael came out with three of the awards, said he’d found Cruise’s stash and suggested ransoming them for the “safe return of Shelly Miscavige.” She is the rarely seen wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige. Never mind that many believe Cruise turned around a dying box office with Top Gun: Maverick, after not allowing that film to be sold to a streamer during the pandemic. Whether you consider Scientology to be a form of faith or something else, you would not have seen Carmichael take a shot at Fraser on the same grounds, as that actor is Jewish.

It was noteworthy that this was about the only edgy joke uttered by Carmichael, who in his monologue mentioned he was selected as host “because I’m Black.” It probably didn’t hurt that he recently came out as a gay man, also. And the $500,000 he said he got was an enticement for him, a lot more than the $20,000 or so Deadline hears Oscar hosts receive.

But this was the odd thing about the Globes, which seemed to set a record for the presence of people of color presenting awards and winning them. Was this course correction done on merit? Had this “new and improved” HFPA that is largely comprised of the same membership as years past, and now pays $75,000 to those formerly struggling voting journos to cast their ballot, been sincerely moved by the benefits of all the efforts Hollywood has made toward diversity in the age of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and other things that have leveled the playing field somewhat? Or is this simply desperation by an organization desperate to keep its primetime berth, relevance and outsized TV broadcast rights payment?

Many in the industry remain skeptical of the Globes. Around 27 nominees and multiple winners stayed home that rainy Tuesday night. Ratings were down 25%, not a good result for the HFPA or Todd Boehly in that this marked the end of NBC’s contract that paid $60 million per year. It’s unlikely that network or any other will pay that much going forward, especially for a sanitized version of the season’s most fun awards show, with an attitude of, who cares who voted these awards, the booze is flowing and hosts like Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey & Amy Poehler are puncturing the pompous ego balloon of the evening’s attendees?

Taking a hard turn toward dull didn’t help the Globes as it tries to crawl out of the woodshed. Back to DeSantis. Will his organization’s radical turn in the other direction also narrow his base and be hurt by a return to the insults and polarized messaging that Trump employed when he labeled media liars and evil? The Florida governor who seemed all too eager to parrot Cruise’s Top Gun look seems determined to find out.  

To the major media, DeSantis has emerged as the key rival to Trump. He has built a powerful constituency in Florida, his followers signing up to banning books and fueling the culture wars. His press aides have revoked credentials of CNN or other entities deemed too liberal. The Disney empire has been denounced for opposing DeSantis’ restrictive proposals even to the point of revising lenient tax legislation.

“We in Florida are not going to allow legacy media outlets to be involved in our priorities,” DeSantis explains. Media veterans recall that Trump, while vilifying the press, also cozied up to its media stars, carefully planting favorable stories.  

This country has always voted along party lines, but never has it seemed less sincere than now. In the case of both the Globes and DeSantis, we are left to wonder what is in the hearts of the people putting on these self-interested shows that seem less than honest in serving one agenda or the other. 

The Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild has applied the nominations for its 10th anniversary awards show next month. See the full list below.

The Batman is the sole triple nominee on the film side. Pics scoring two noms apiece are Amsterdam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Elvis and The Menu.

Awards for outstanding achievement in make-up and hair styling artistry will be presented in 23 categories spanning film, TV, commercials/music videos and live theater. Coming 2 America and Saturday Night Live were triple winners at last year’s MUAHS Awards.

Since the modern MUAHS Awards began in 2014, one of its marquee film winners — has gone on the claim the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar every year — except in 2022. The Academy Award went to The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which was up for three of the guild’s awards but went home empty-handed.

Last like year, Legendary again leads the small-screen field — and overall — with five nominations. Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration and Dancing with the Stars waltzed off with four noms each, while American Horror Stories, Pam & Tommy, Saturday Night Live and So You Think You Can Dance nabbed three apiece.

Winners will collect their hardware during the MUAHS Awards ceremony on Saturday, February 11, at the Beverly Hilton. Melissa Peterman is hosting the show.

Oscar- and Emmy-winning make-up artist Steve La Porte and Emmy-winning hair stylist Josée Normand will receive the guild’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Awards. Emmy-winning make-up artist Fred C. Blau Jr. and Emmy-winning hair stylist Judy Crown are set for the Vanguard Awards.

Here are the nominees for the 10th annual MUAHS Awards:

FEATURE-LENGTH MOTION PICTURE

Best Contemporary Make-up

The Batman
Naomi Donne, Doone Forsyth, Norma Webb, Jemma Carballo

Everything Everywhere All At Once
Michelle Chung, Erin Rosenmann, Dania A. Ridgway

The Menu
Deborah LaMia Denaver, Mazena Puksto, Donna Cicatelli, Deb Rutherford

Nope
Shutchai Tym Buacharern, Jennifer Zide-Essex, Eleanor Sabaduquia, Kato De Stefan

Spirited
Monica Huppert, Autumn J. Butler, Vivian Baker

Best Period and/or Character Make-up

Amsterdam     
Nana Fischer, Miho Suzuki, Jason Collins

Babylon
Heba Thorisdottir, Shaunna Bren Chavez, Jean Black, Mandy Artusato

Blonde
Tina Roesler Kerwin, Elena Arroy, Cassie Lyons

Elvis
Shane Thomas, Angela Conte

Till
Denise Tunnell, Janice Tunnell, Ashley Langston

Best Special Make-up Effects

The Batman
Michael Marino, Mike Fontaine, Yoichi Art Sakamoto, Göran Lundström

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever       
Joel Harlow, Kim Felix

Elvis
Mark Coulier, Jason Baird, Barrie Gower, Emma Faulkes, Chloe Muton-Phillips

The Whale
Adrien Morot, Kathy Tse, Chris Gallaher 

Best Comtempory Hair Styling

The Batman
Zoe Tahir, Melissa Van Tongeran, Paula Price, Andrea Lance Jones

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever|
Camille Friend, Evelyn Feliciano, Marva Stokes, Victor Paz

Everything Everywhere All At Once   
Anissa E. Salazar, Meghan Heaney, Miki Caporusso

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
|Jeremy Woodhead, Tracey Smith, Leslie D. Bennett

The Menu|
Adruitha Lee, Monique Hyman, Kate Loftis, Barbara Sanders

Best Period Hair Styling and/or Character Hair Styling

Amsterdam
Adruitha Lee, Lori McCoy-Bell, Cassandra L. Russek, Yvette Shelton

Babylon
Jaime Leigh McIntosh, Ahou Mofid, Aubrey Marie

Blonde
Jaime Leigh McIntosh, Lynnae Duley, Ahou Mofid, Robert Pickens

Elvis
Shane Thomas, Louise Coulston

The Woman King
Louisa Anthony, Jamika Wilson, Plaxedes Kelias, Charity Gwakuka

TELEVISION SERIES -LIMITED, MINISERIES OR MOVIE FOR TELEVISION

Best Contemporary Make-up

“Abbott Elementary”
Alisha L. Baijounas, Jenn Bennett, Constance Foe, Emilia Werynska

“Emily in Paris”
Aurélie Payen, Joséphine Bouchereau, Carole Nicolas, Corinne Maillard

“Euphoria”- Season 2
Doniella Davy, Tara Lang Shah, Alexandra J. French

“Hacks”- Season 2
Bridget O’Neill

“The White Lotus”
Rebecca Hickey, Federica Emidi

Best Period and/or Character Make-Up

“Bridgerton”
Erika Ökvist, Jessie Deol, Sophie Brown, Bethany Long

“House of The Dragon”
Amanda Knight, Sara Kramer, Heather McCullen

“Pam & Tommy”
David Williams, Jennifer Aspinall, Dave Snyder, Bill Myer

“Stranger Things”
Amy L. Forsythe, Devin Morales, Lisa Poe, Nataleigh Verrengia

“Wednesday”
Tara McDonald, Nirvana Jalalvand, Gabriela Cretan

Best Special Make-up Effects

“Angelyne”
Vincent Van Dyke, Kate Biscoe, Mike Mekash, Abby Lyle Clawson

“Gaslit”
Kazu Hiro, Richard Redlefsen, Mike Ornela

“Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities”
Sean Sansom, Mike Hill

“Pam & Tommy”
David Williams, Jason Collins, Mo Meinhart, Abby Lyle Clawson

“Stranger Things”
Barrie Gower, Duncan Jarman, Patt Foad, Paula Eden

Best Contempory Hair Styling                

“Abbott Elementary”
Moira Frazier, Dustin Osborne, Christina R. Joseph

“American Horror Stories”
Valerie Jackson, Lauren Poole, Suzette Boozer

“Black-ish”
Nena Ross-Davis, Stacey Morris, Shirlena Allen, Debra Brown

“Emily in Paris”
Carole Nicolas, Mike Désir, Miharu Oshima, Julien Parizet

“Kindred”
Jamie Amadio, Chantell Carrtherol

Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling

“Bridgerton”
Erika Ökvist, Emma Rigby

“Dangerous Liaisons”
Daniel Parker, Deborah Kenton, Claudia Stolze, Jana Radilová

“Hocus Pocus 2”
Cheryl R. Marks, Curtis William Foreman, Mandy Lyons

“Our Flag Means Death”
Margarita Pidgeon, Stacy Bisel, Kate Loftis, Christopher Enlow

“Pam & Tommy”
Barry Lee Moe, Erica Adams, George Guzman, Helena Cepeda

TELEVISION SPECIAL, ONE HOUR OR MORE LIVE PROGRAM SERIES

Best Contemporary Make-up

“Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration”
Bruce Grayson, James MacKinnon, Melanie Weaver, Angie Wells

“Dancing with the Stars”
Julie Socash, Donna Bard, Alison L. Gladieux, Farah Bunch

“Legendary”
Tonia Green, Tyson Fountaine, Silvia Leczel, Sean Conklin

“Saturday Night Live”
Louie Zakarian, Amy Tagliamonti, Jason Milani, Young Bek

“The Voice”
Darcy Gilmore, Gina Ghiglieri, Ernesto Casillas, Kristene Bernard

Best Period and/or Character Make-up

“Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration”
Bruce Grayson, James MacKinnon, Tyson Fountaine, Julie Socash

“The Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special”
Michael Ornelaz, Matt Sprunger, Jon Moore, Robin Pritchard

“Legendary”
Tonia Green, Tyson Fountaine, Jennifer Fregozo, Glen Alen

“Saturday Night Live”
Louie Zakarian, Amy Tagliamonti, Jason Milani, Daniela Zivcovic

“So You Think You Can Dance”
Tonia Green, Silvia Leczel, Jennifer Fregozo, Natalie Malchev

Best Special Make-up Effects

“Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration”
Bruce Grayson, James MacKinnon, Alexei Dmitriew, Mo Meinhart

“The Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special”
Alexei Dmitriew, Scott Stoddard, LuAndra Whitehurst, Mo Meinhart

“Legendary”
Tonia Green, Tyson Fountaine, Marcel Banks, Sean Conklin

“Saturday Night Live”
Louie Zakarian, Jason Milani, Tom Denier Jr., Brandon Grether

“Dancing with the Stars”
Brian Sipe, Julie Socash, Bianca Marie Appice, David Snyder              

Best Contemporary Hair Styling

“Dancing with the Stars”
Kimi Messina, Jani Kleinbard, Cheryl Eckert, Gail Ryan

“Legendary”
Jerilynn Stephens, Kimi Messina, Dean Francis Banowetz, Lalisa Turner

“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”
Chantelle Johnson Mosley, Shelby Swain

“So You Think You Can Dance”
Dean Francis Banowetz, Kimi Messina, LaLisa Turner, Ryan Randall

“The Voice”
Jerilynn Stephens, Darbie Ann Wieczorek, Suzette Boozer, Robert Lamarr Randle

Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling

“Dancing with the Stars”
Kimi Messina, Johnny Lomeli, Megg Massey, Jani Kleinbard

“Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration”
Anthony Wilson, Jennifer Guerrero, Maria Sandoval, Myo Lai

“Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special”
Cassandra L. Russek, Amber S. Hamilton, Sean Smith, Dugg Kirkpatrick

“Legendary”
Jerilynn Stephens, Kimi Messina, Johnny Lomeli, Suzette Boozer

“So You Think You Can Dance”
Dean Francis Banowetz, Kimi Messina, Crystal Haynes, Johnny Lomeli

DAYTIME TELEVISION

Best Make-up

“The Bold and the Beautiful”
Christine Lai-Johnson, Hajja Barnes, James Elle, Dan Crawley

“The Boulet Brothers Dragula: Titans”
Swanthula Boulet, Dracmorda Boulet

“I Can See Your Voice”
Tonia Green, Christina M. Jimenez

“The Kelly Clarkson Show”
Chanty LaGrana, Valente Frazier, Gloria Elias-Foeillet, Jessica Reyes Paccitti

“The Young and the Restless”
Patricia Denney, Stacey Alfano, Kelsey Collins, Robert Bolger           

Best Hair Styling

“The Bold and the Beautiful”
Stephanie Paugh, Karlye Buff, Alexis Reyes, Danielle Dubinsky

“The Kelly Clarkson Show”
Tara Copeland, Roberto Ramos

“The Talk”
Jasmin Robles

“The Young and the Restless”
Lauren Mendoza, Justin Jackson, Michelle Corona, Guilherme Schoedler

CHILDREN AND TEEN TELEVISION PROGRAMMING:

Best Make-up

“Danger Force”
Michael Johnston, Bradley Look, Kevin Westmore, Tyson Fountaine

“The Fairly OddParents”
Michael Johnston, Julie Hassett, Gerardo Avila, Tyson Fountaine

“High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” (Season 3)
Kimberly Collea, James Cool Benson, Maryann Marchetti

“The Quest”
Elle Favorule, Michelle Sfarzo, Sonia Cabrera, Sierra Barton, Alisha Baijounas

Best Hair Styling

“Danger Force”
Joe Matke, Roma Goddard, Yunea Cruz, Danyell Lynn Weinberg

“The Quest”
Erica Adams, Alyn R. Topper, Lauren McKeever, Jennifer Tremont

“The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder”
Joe Matke, Melanie Verkins, Justin Jackson, Jennifer Green

“Raven’s Home” (Season 5)
Dwayne Ross, Tamara Tripp, Lauren Kinermon

“That Girl Lay Lay” (Season 2, Ep. 10)
Dwayne Ross, Kari Williams, Lauren Kinermon

COMMERCIALS & MUSIC VIDEOS

Best Make-up

Amazon: “Medusa Makes Friends”
Dominie Till, Christien Tinsley, Josh Foster, Gunn Espegard

“American Horror Stories: Dollhouse” Promo
Kerry Herta, Jason Collins, Alyssa Morgan, Christina Kortum

Imagine Dragons: “Bones” (Official Music Video)
Ally McGillicuddy, Malina Stearns, Meg Wilbur, Dave Snyder

Omaze: “Ozzy Osbourne Has a Falling Out with His Pet Demon”
Richard Redlefsen, Chelsea Delfino

Ozzy Osbourne: “Patient No. 9” (Official Music Video) ft. Jeff Beck
Richard Redlefsen, Chelsea Delfino

Best Hair Styling 

“American Horror Stories: Season 2” Promos
Joe Matke, Tiphanie Baum, Jerilynn Stephens, Johnny Lomeli

“Bejeweled” – Taylor Swift
Cheryl R. Marks, Allyson Joyner, Jemma Muradian

“Holidays: Romeo and Juliet” – Amazon
Dominie Till, Gunn Espegard, Dawn V. Dudley, Renee Vaca

“Life in a Victorian Home” – GEICO
Audrey Futterman-Stern, Tom Opitz, Jackie Weiss, Kerry Mendenhall

“Nourish Every You” LIL NAS X – Vitamin Water
Stacey Morris, Dominique Evans, Taurus Jerome

THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS (Live Stage)

Best Make-up

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”
Jason Michael Torres, Timothy Santry, Jenni Gilbert, Yulitzin Alvarez

“Kinky Boots”
Brandi Strona, Glen Alen, Lilia Villasenor

“Lucia di Lammermoor”
Samantha Wiener, Brandi Strona

“Sleeping Beauty”
Lindsay Saier, Lyre Alston

“Tosca”
Samantha Wiener, Brandi Strona, Danielle E. Richter 

Best Hair Styling

“Kinky Boots”
Brandi Strona, Jacki Nocerino, Mary Czech

“La Traviata”
Jeanna Parham, Christina E. Martin

“Omar”
Samantha Wiener, Danielle E. Richter, Jacki Nocerino

“Sense and Sensibility”
Lindsay Saier, Leilani Norman

During LFF I was fortunate to get the opportunity to interview Cornish director Mark Jenkin about his latest film Enys Men (read my 5-star review here Enys Men Review | Film Reviews (ukfilmreview.co.uk)), which screened in-competition later that day. Currently, the director is on a UK-wide tour with the film, screening a series of films he has curated with the BFI – The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men, and the film is due to be released in the UK on Friday 13th January. We discuss all of the above in this lightly edited transcript of the interview as well as his working relationship with partner and Enys Men lead actor Mary Woodvine, the influence of Robert Bresson, his collaboration with Gwenno, a side-track into Cornish independence, and previous works Bait, and Hard, Cracked the Wind.

This interview contains strong language.

Given that the film offers a space to feel scared, upset and hopeless, is it cathartic for you to express that? Do you feel that as you are making it?

Yeah, but not until the edit. The old cliché goes you make the film three times, you make it when you’re writing it, you make it when you shoot it, and you make it again when you edit it. For me, the most important version is the edited version, it’s the only one that an audience will see. After making Bait several people commented it almost felt like a horror film at times, there was a sense of forboding, that it was almost going to tip over into horror. And that got me interested in making what is nominally a horror film as the next film. I got really excited about writing the script but then I read the script back – I thought, “there is no horror in this” – because the horror came in the form. So I didn’t feel it in the writing, didn’t feel it in the shooting of it, because shooting it is such a fragmented process. It’s not like in theatre where you do a set piece and while it is going on it feels scary, it’s very technical. But certainly in the edit. I never think about the audience when making films at all. I don’t want to second guess what I think the audience is going to feel. When I’m making a film there is only an audience of one, me.

So it’s edited to your tastes?

Yeah, completely. I make films that I like, knowing that we’re all the same, ultimately. That doesn’t mean everybody is going to like the film, certainly not this particular film. But there will be enough people who think and feel like me who will connect with it. That’s always what I hope, whether or not that is delusional or not. One day it’ll be delusional. I’m sure one day I’ll make a film that only one person will like and that will be me.

Is that a problem?

No. No. As long as the people who fund the work don’t lose confidence and I get the chance to do another one.

I have just seen the American trailer, I saw it when I was in America, and that was really interesting cause it made me really unsettled watching it. And that was a revelation. Wow, they’ve made something that feels unsettling, it was my material, but their edit.

But you’ve made something that feels unsettling?

Yeah, but when I watch it, I’m still so close to it, all I think is, “oh that was the day when…”

But is it hard then to edit it to your tastes? When you edit it do you feel something watching it back or do you see the mechanics of it?

Yes but the thing is, the most valuable thing in filmmaking is having distance, and it is the one thing that is not built into the process cause you have to deliver the film quickly. So you don’t have that distance which is why I think a lot of filmmakers traditionally work with editors cause other people bring in that distance. Whereas I love editing and I’m not willing to give up that part of the process, so I don’t have that built-in bit of distance in the process. Luckily with this one, I was beginning writing the next one while I was editing this one. So I had enforced breaks where I might not do anything for two weeks and go and write on this other film. And then I would go back and look, and I would really feel it. That bit that I thought was a jump scare was not really a jump scare at all, or that bit that I thought was quite dull, that was the unnerving bit. Sometimes I might watch it back after a couple of weeks and my sound desk is set up differently so one track might be faded higher than it should be, “oh actually that works, if that’s really low in the mix”. Formally, it’s not a subtle film. The sound goes clang and the shots go *clap*.

Yeah, you’re cutting is very aggressive, white to black, red to blue, jump-cutting, and the sound, how much of that comes before or in post?

I have some ideas of sound before but I don’t record any location sound. I allow myself a lot of freedom to experiment with the sound later on. It’s easier to experiment if you don’t have preconceptions of what it is going to be. It’s very difficult to write sound in a script, and visuals too. Words on a page is a very limiting form of communication, which is why we had to invent cinema, which is much more in tune with the way our minds work. They are a useful tool but unless you are a true poet it is very difficult to compete with film language on the page. A lot of stuff is unexplored until the post-production process. Because I don’t have any sound recorded on location, my starting point is silence. Unless I actively do something, scenes are silent which I think is quite rare but it creates a lot of sonic contrast once you do add something. When it comes to the pictures and it being aggressive within the picture cutting, a lot of that is the way I shoot, cause I don’t shoot a lot of footage.

I was going to ask how much footage you had?

About 3:1-4:1 ratio. So maybe 6 hours of footage, not very much. But I don’t shoot coverage, I don’t shoot scenes so that they can be seamlessly edited. Shots crash into each other constantly, and even within shots, literal crash zooms. I like to normally use a single 26mm lens on a 60mm camera, so the equivalent of a 50mm lens like Ozu or Bresson. But in this, cause it was a nod to the 70s, the zooms had to be there. The temptation to bang into a close-up is hard to resist. So there is that sort of aggression within the shots as well as within the edit. There is a great director who lives in Cornwall, called Lawrence Gordon Clark, who was a TV director, then a documentary director and he went on to make most of the Christmas Ghost Story Films. He came from documentaries and as was the way of the BBC in those days he was assigned a cameraman and an editor when he joined the Ghost Stories for Christmas. I think it was the editor who said to him, maybe the cameraman, “Lawrence, what you have got to understand is that horror is the one genre that as a director you have to draw attention to edits, draw attention to the form, cause a lot of the scare is on the cut”. A shot and a reaction to something we haven’t seen yet, individually the shots aren’t necessarily scary but the context, the positioning of those two events that is provided by the edit. Or a zoom, our eyes naturally don’t zoom, we can tilt, pan, kind of pull focus, but we don’t crash zoom into things. It’s a form, a genre that does draw attention to the mechanics of filmmaking which is something I do all the time in Enys Men.

On the flipside the more naturalistic scene, there is only really one, where the boatman turns up, and the volunteer and the boatman have a chat. This was the only scene where I knew when we were shooting it, that “I need to shoot this right”. Cause I want it to feel seamless, I want there to be cuts on action, so he picks up a scone, it cuts from a close-up to a wide, it’s very conventional. It’s how you would be taught to shoot it week one at film school. And it had to be conventional to make the other stuff be deliberately obtuse and aggressive, so it didn’t just look like inept filmmaking.

Did you shoot it fairly linearly? Did you plan it all, or just shoot and find it in the edit?

The budget level we work at it is all dictated by locations, and some locations are cheap and some are expensive. Usually, the expensive ones are easier to control. We shot a week doing the cottage interiors including the buildings in five days, so we shot a third of the film in the first five days. Which you could do cause shooting interior you have weather coverage, you can shoot day for night/ night for day just by masking the windows. So they are all practical considerations, it is never in story order which I find fine because of the way I edit.

It just feels meticulous which is, I guess, why it is hard to believe that you haven’t shot it in some sort of order.

I think it is meticulous. Cause we can’t shoot very much, we have to plan exactly what we want to shoot and then we shoot it in a crazy order. It is hardest for Mary [Woodvine] and the cast, cause for her she has to have an emotional… although my strict direction was that she didn’t emote much feeling.

What does the script look like then, in terms of how much planning is in the script?

I was asked this in New York, cause I’d never been asked it before. Nobody asked what the script for Bait looked like. It looks just like the one for Enys Men, just more dialogue in it. So my action, direction – so you know if it was this scene it would be “Interior, office, day. Two men sat…” Some screenwriters would write, “The sun bleeds in through the window and dappled light across a thesaurus that has been owned by several people and was bought by someone in a second-hand shop…” All this bullshit, which no one needs to know. It’s great if you are writing a short story. There is a good story that John Boorman told about Kurosawa chastising his scriptwriter who would write “The bird flew with a tranquillity that would inspire a restless man”, and Kurosawa said “The bird flew”. That’s it, we never knew what the bird was feeling, we didn’t need to know. None of that flowery language is in there. It is never “The volunteer walks along the moor considering her past”. People have said “It’s a film about grief”, or “it’s a film about trauma”, or “it’s a film about the pandemic”, or “it’s a film about isolation”. So all these different versions of the script say “She wandered across the moor thinking about what had happened since the pandemic”, or “she walked across the moor thinking about what happened since she lost the baby”, or “she walked across the moor thinking about her ex-husband who drowned”. It would prescribe a meaning, and I want the audience to have all of those options and I want that to come after the fact. So Mary has got no clue in the script why she is doing what she is doing. She has to provide that. Because when I am writing a script, every character is me. I can’t write anybody who isn’t a version of me. And I’m what Jung would have defined as a classic introvert. Mary, The Volunteer, is a classic extrovert. So the character, that I have written on the page, in action is an introvert, and then through Mary, in performance, the character becomes an extrovert. But as Jung always said we are all part introvert and extrovert, we’re all on a sliding scale, so you create a character that is somewhere on that scale. I think by giving less information you get a more rich interpretation.

Was it hard asking Mary to do the Bresson model [method of acting]?

It is difficult because she is highly trained and highly skilled whereas Bresson deliberately picked non-actors who had no – what he would call bad habits – I wouldn’t call bad habits, I would say craft. I’ve just picked my top 10 greatest films for Sight & Sound and the first one was a Bresson film.

Which one?

L’argent.

That would be mine. Either that or Lancelot [du Lac].

That or Mouchette, would be mine. But I love picking a director’s final film, because I don’t think there are many directors who peaked with their final film. And the tragedy of Bresson, if you could say there was a tragedy in the life of a man who lived for ninety-nine years, was that he never got to make his Genesis epic, not the band… that would be a whole other film.

I think Mary finds it challenging but she’s my partner as well, we know each other professionally and personally. She knows what I’m like. The Venn diagram of our film tastes would be two separate circles. She grew up with theatre, her dad [John Woodvine] was an established actor in the theatre, so she grew up in the theatre, became an actor in the theatre, and crossed over into doing TV and film. She is very skilled at being a performer in wide shots, whereas my films – when I’m filming humans – mostly close-ups. I’m constantly saying, not to just her, but to everybody including myself, “think of the camera as a magnifying glass”. Everything you are thinking is going to come out of your eyes, you don’t have to articulate it physically. And she challenges it, which is great in a way that people who don’t know me as well probably don’t. She’ll go, “are you sure?” and it makes me have to justify it, which is really helpful. Because I operate the camera I’ll be right next to the actors, which is why I got into shooting these big close-ups, because I have to be right near them. And when you are sharing that space with your partner in real life as well as the film, half the conversation is about filmmaking and the technicalities, and the other having conversations about whose turn it was to buy the cat food. There’s an intimacy that is professional and personal that is different than me working with any other actor. And sometimes I can be quite short with her, I have a sort of short hand, “you know what I want”, but she’s testing me, like all the other actors do. But the other actors, because I don’t have that relationship with them, I’m more willing to take the time to explain what I am doing. Also, not in a manipulative way, but you have to kind of make the actors do what you want them to do, but not go “do this, do that”. Which is really interesting because the myth around Bresson and models, moving them around…

It’s how he wrote the book [Notes on the Cinematograph]

But if you watch there is some brilliant behind-the-scenes footage on the new Mouchette Blu-ray. He’s such a lovely, avuncular figure. Typical French filmmaker, two-hour break for lunch, everybody sits round and drinks wine.

Well he worked with kids a lot in that period

Yeah, I think what he wrote in his book was more of an intention than a reality a lot of the time.

Yeah, more of a manifesto

I don’t think he could make those films if he had stuck [to his rules], if he had been so cold in his approach

You wrote a manifesto and the last rule, was break a rule. So I’m guessing you don’t always stick to it

Yeah, and you can’t. If you read that book [Notes on the Cinematograph] you think, “that guy sounds like a right cunt”. But he made these beautiful films. Some people do read them as being very cold, I know Mary finds them very difficult to connect with emotionally, but I just think… I can’t articulate what effect Bresson’s films have on me, that’s the beauty of it.

It’s like going to a film, and I know you don’t want to discuss too much into the film [Enys Men], because the point is that you watch the film and you feel it

“Feel it”, that’s my favourite Bresson quote. “It’s more important to feel the film than understand it”. [paraphrased from “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it”]

Gwenno has a song in the film, and you shot a music video for her, so how did that relationship come about? I’m guessing the answer is Cornwall, but can you talk about that a little

People mentioned Gwenno to me before she released Le Kov, her first Cornish language album, so I knew of her, and I knew of The Pipettes, the band that she was in before. The conscious decision to do something in Cornish was really inspiring. We were introduced, and Denzil the producer of Enys Men had met Gwenno, and then we met up and talked about doing a collaboration at some point. Me and her have this thing where we are always talking about collaboration but we went ages without finding anything to collaborate on. I think it is because we are quite similar – we like to do a lot of stuff ourselves. We did talk about me and her making this film for Tresor [her latest album] but ultimately, I didn’t tell her what to do, but I said “you should make this film, you can direct it, you don’t need a director”. In the same way, I decided I didn’t need a musician to do the score on my films, despite being the world’s shittest musician and not being able to read music or play a note. I know what I like the sound of and I don’t know how to do things conventionally, and so what a brilliant creative space to be in. And so she was like that with the film, she said she didn’t know what she was doing, and that is the perfect starting point, cause you’ll create something new and different. So anyway, that is more recent. I made the Den Heb Taves film, but I actually put that together in the lockdown when I was looking for stuff to do but couldn’t go out and shoot stuff, but I had all that footage already. So I put that music video together after the fact, she didn’t ask me to do that. I did it and then said “do you want to put it out”, and she said, “yeah, great”. And so it was something she put out during the lockdown. I wanted to make something bigger than a music video, and the song is bigger than a song in a way. It is a statement about the Cornish language and it’s got an intro to it that is kind of separate to the song. I was sort of thinking about Derek Jarman’s The Queen is Dead music video for The Smiths.

I was going to ask why there were no Derek Jarman shorts on your programming for the BFI

There is one, A Journey to Avebury, very short film about standing stones.

Ah I don’t think I can read clearly

It’s a very minor work.

So, our direct working relationship came from Tim out of the BFI, when Bait had come out in the cinema and sort of blown up. He said, “we’ll re-release it in the cinema next year, do a few screenings, and when the Blu-ray is released we’ll do an event with a live score”. And I said, “Oh great, who is going to do the live score?”, and he said, “well you did the score, you do it”, I said, “I can’t fucking do it! I can’t recreate those sounds I made”.

How did you make the score then?

With an analog synthesizer and a tape loop. So I play a few notes, with the Bait score it was chords, in the Enys Men score its notes because I was using a new-old monophonic synthesizer, whereas it was a new-old polyphonic synthesizer for Bait. And a tape loop, so literally two tape machines and a loop going around the room, which I can interfere with and pull and stretch.

Yeah, I believe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre used that a lot.

Oh right, yeah. So that was the score, but once it was done it was set in stone, there was no way to repeat it. And attempting to try and repeat it in front of four-hundred people… I’m sure I’ve had the anxiety dream where I’ve tried.

So Gwenno, we’d used Es Kes in Bait, it’s just playing in the jukebox in the pub. I loved the idea of a Cornish language pop song playing in the pub and no one batting an eyelid. That seemed so alien back then. Now, it happens all the time because those two albums are out. So Gwenno did the score live. She wanted some strings in it, she wanted to do all the electronic stuff, and she DJ’d the pub jukebox live with records on stage at the NFT. And she said, “do you know anybody who plays strings?”. Well, Georgia Ellery, who plays Katie in the film, she’s in Black Country, New Road and she is one-half of Jockstrap. Georgia is much more of a musician than an actor, but she acted in the film cause I think she is a fucking brilliant actor as well. I’m kind of hoping she’ll be in something that I do in the future.

So are you still wanting to cast actors going forward?

Yeah, well anybody. Actors and anybody who is right, and mixing it up. When I am in London now I am meeting with actors, cause I now have agents coming to me and saying “will you meet these people”. And I look at the list and think bloody hell, these are A-listers. Part of me is thinking that I haven’t got anything that is appropriate and part of me is thinking just go and meet these people and hang out.

So Gwenno then did the live score, and that was really popular. That was amazing, it was like watching the film new, like being an audience member. When Bait came out everyone said, “it’s such an amazing experience cause it is so different”. And I couldn’t relate to that because it is so the same for me, it is the same as everything I do – I couldn’t watch it as an audience member, the closest I got to watching it as an audience member was with Gwenno’s score. Suddenly it was a different film, all the shots looked different cause the sound was different. Then she went on tour with it, we were supposed to go and do SXSW, but then the pandemic happened. But then what happened during the lockdown was she created her new album, which came out recently, and she went and toured Australia. She did Bait with the live score alongside her album, so some places she did two dates where she played the film and did the live score.

And then with Enys Men we needed an ancient pagan Celtic May song, there are plenty of them around and all of them I suppose will be copyright free, but I didn’t want to use one that existed, I didn’t want it to have the connotations, cause they are so geographically specific. We could have used the Padstow May Song, but you just don’t touch it, that is just for Padstownians, that is just about Padstow. So we commissioned Gwenno to write a brand new ancient May song and she wrote Kan Me, which is brilliant. Sung in a round so the kids could sing it. Then she recorded her own demo version of it which we just loved and we put it over the end credits, and she actually recorded a full version of it.

Yeah, it’s on her album as well.

She said to us, “can I put it on the album?”, cause we commissioned her to write it. And we said, “Yeah, of course”. I mean, she is the artist and the performer. So we have her version over the end credits and it appears in different guises throughout the film. We have worked out ways of working together. She is just brilliant, a force of nature, I have so much respect for what she does, she just goes, “this is what I want to do” and she does it. And through Heavenly Records who are amazing. It gets to a big audience and it has really revitalised the audience in Cornwall amongst young people which is so important.

I was going to say – you have this link to Cornwall, to Cornish, the landscape, miners, and fisherman, do you feel a personal sense of responsibility to that or do you just have an interest in spreading that outward?

Cornwall has a real identity crisis when it comes to all forms of media, whether it’s film, television, radio, music… we’ve got a stereotype that is perpetuated through media. So everything I do that is set in Cornwall, I want to redress the balance. It is not necessarily a conscious thing, I just portray the Cornwall that I see as authentic. And I think people are very good at recognising authenticity. The more people write about it and comment about it the more conscious I become about it, which is fine. I can’t control whether people like the work or not but I can control whether it is authentic or not. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being inauthentic.

What do you mean by authentic?

Representations of Cornwall. So the big thing for Bait was getting the fishing culture right. The detail. The detail of processes. The big scene in Bait where the fisherman makes the kid mend the lobster pot – the way he mends that would last about thirty-seconds back in the sea cause he mends it with a thin bit of twine – but on the whole, getting the knots right, I want to be very specific. The cliché is the more specific you get, the more universal it becomes. Why that phrase makes sense to me is – that you can make the setting authentic, even if it may be foreign to people. People on a very gut level, which is the most important level, recognise authenticity. If they recognise that something like the setting and the context is authentic, they are more susceptible to receive the message of the film, and feel the film. That’s why with Bait for example, when it premiered in New York, I had a woman come up to me who was a New-Yorker but her family were from the Caribbean, she came up to me in tears at the end of the screening and said, “thank you, you have made a film about my Dad”. That was because he was a fisherman in Barbados. So there is a link there because of the fishing, the way we fish and the way they fish is completely different, but there was an authenticity that she connected with. Also when it premiered in Istanbul, I had people come up to me who had been working with people who had been kicked out of a certain neighbourhood because it was being gentrified. They would say, “ This film is about Istanbul”. We’re able to see the universality if you think that the context is authentic. And that’s why when people say, “oh are you always going to make films in Cornwall?”. I think I probably will always make films in Cornwall but they won’t always necessarily be about Cornwall.

Is it hard to move away then? If you are representing Cornwall, and it is important to you – why would you want to go further afield?

I would only go further afield if I wanted to make a film where the context is deliberately alien. Which I might do, like The Shout by [Jerzy] Skolimowski. I was going to put it on my list for Sight & Sound but bumped it off for some reason. But The Shout is a really good example. There is this foreign eye, telling a very British story. So somebody makes that context seem foreign, there is a layer of abstraction there. I think Symptoms is on my list, so Larraz, a Spanish look at the English countryside and it feels deliberately alien. So I think if I wanted to make the context seem slightly abstract then I could go and make a film in a place that I know nothing about. A lot of my favourite filmmakers have done that.

Memoria, is that. The Apichatpong Weerasethakul film.

I haven’t seen it.

It’s incredible, it is his first film outside of Thailand.

It’s like John Boorman making Point Blank so early in his career.

I haven’t seen that one.

You should watch that one. It’s a sort of crime thriller, basically a chase movie, but it feels like a Bresson film, the performances… I think it has a lot in common with Lost Highway in a lot of ways, in terms of what you think is happening, and what is really happening.

I think I’m conscious enough of why I make films in Cornwall to be comfortable not making a film in Cornwall if it was right.

But you have your reasons not wanting to – just go to America cause you can

Yeah, because I’ve seen enough people go, “oh I’ve got a story, let’s go set it in Cornwall”. And that’s not Cornwall. And it’s never about Cornish people, they say, “I’ve made a film about Cornwall”. Fuck you, you haven’t made a film about Cornwall. You’ve made a film about somebody, normally from London, who has problems in their life that they are unaware of, but they go to Cornwall and through a brief interaction with the ‘simple folk’ who live there, they realise that their life is hollow, they adopt some of the lifestyle of the village idiots, who are all portrayed as that on screen, and then they go back to their other life bettered for this interaction with people who ‘don’t realise how lucky they are’ and ‘don’t have big worries like city people’. That can be anywhere. It happens everywhere but if you haven’t got something that is countering that then it doesn’t take long before that is what somewhere like Cornwall is. Say the movie Pearl Harbor or Titanic, they are not supposed to be taken as real but say in one-hundred or two-hundred-years time when there is no living memory they will be taken as historical texts. There is a responsibility to represent a time and a place I think, and why wouldn’t you want to have an authentic setting that you can create universal stories on top of? Luckily I feel that we have a distinct, ever-changing but ancient culture and way of life in Cornwall that I don’t see in some other places because populations are too transient. Things change very quickly and often leave a feeling of a vacuum. I feel really lucky to have a place that I think is distinct.

Yeah, I have moved from Scotland to somewhere that feels less culturally rich

Did you become much more Scottish once you left Scotland?

Yeah, I was in tears when I went back to Glasgow, and I’m not even from there, just hearing the accent.

That’s like me, I spent my youth trying to get out of Cornwall, and then I crossed the border and became the world’s most Cornish person to exert a sort of difference. And then spent the next few years working out how I was going to get back to Cornwall and be sustainable. I have been so lucky that I have been able to do it. Now I love coming to London, but it’s exotic, this is abroad for me. I’m visiting from another country, I feel no less alien here than I did yesterday in New York. That is what I have learned. That’s the complex constitutional position that Cornwall is in, and I envy the position that Scotland is in.

I’m sure we’ll form an alliance.

Scotland, like Cornwall, have their own parliament. If there was a will…

This is getting a bit too exciting now.

That’s my dream, I’m sure it’ll be like Bresson’s Genesis biopic, I want to make that film about Cornwall. It’ll be a historical… somewhere half-between Peter Watkins’ Culloden and Braveheart

Maybe just drop the Braveheart. I mean Bait moves in that direction.

It does, and the beauty of what has happened with Bait, which I can’t take responsibility for and is actually really depressing is that it becomes more and more prescient and relevant every day. The problem with Cornwall is we have this word ‘dreckly’. It has no English translation, the closest translation is the Spanish ‘mañana’. If you say, “I’ll see you dreckly”, then it means “I’ll see you at some point in the future”. So there is a saying in Cornwall which is “Independence… dreckly”. It’ll come. Thing is with Cornwall, there has never been any history of organisation, no trades union movement or anything. The Cornish have always gone from passive acceptance to riot, there has never been anything in-between. So I wait for the moment where enough Cornish people stand up and say, “we have had enough of Westminster now”, and draw the bridge up.

We should probably talk about film a bit more. So I wanted to talk a bit about your short films, Enys Men has this relation to the Christmas Ghost Stories and so too does Hard, Cracked the Wind. Do you want to talk about that a bit?

Yeah, it is kind of, of a piece with Enys Men thematically. That’s a real outlier of a short film for me because I didn’t write it. That was written by a writer called Adrian Bailey – who I was collaborating with on Enys Men originally, before it was even called Enys Men. We had an idea that we would come up with a story together, he would write it, I would direct it. I was looking for that kind of collaboration.

We shot Hard, Cracked the Wind because we had a bit of film stock left over after Bait. So he wrote Hard, Cracked the Wind. I don’t want to speak for him, but my brief was sort of a Ghost Story for Christmas, a sort of M.R. James story, with the haunted writing case. And that was great, but to be totally honest with you I was a little bit lost because I worked with a cinematographer and a writer, both of whom were great. But I was a bit at a loose end as a director cause I normally write and re-write whilst I’m shooting, and I’m normally operating the camera, so I’m normally running on nervous energy and no sleep every second of the shoot. On that film, I just wandered round most of the time just drinking coffee and chatting to people thinking, “is this what a normal director does?”. We shot for five days and on the fifth day I had food poisoning and was wrapped up in the corner of the room just shivering and being sick, basically not saying anything, and the film continued without any input from me. It was like “Oh wow, I’m so unimportant in this thing”. Anyway, it was good experience, the film did well, and we rode the wave off the back of Bait and it opened up some short film festivals that I hadn’t had work at before, which was great.

Then we set to work on Enys Men, me and Adrian bashed out a story together, he wrote a treatment for it. He took it in one way and I wanted to take it in another, so we agreed that I would write it, and he kind of handed it back to me, and he’s got a co-story by credit on the film but then I wrote the script.

In a lot of ways Hard, Cracked the Wind was a really good process for me – working with a cinematographer which I hadn’t done for a long time, which was really illuminating. It made me realise what I wanted to do, which films I could shoot myself and which ones I couldn’t shoot myself. And working with a writer educated me as to how that works, how you can work with a writer and not necessarily hand over everything to them, it can be a collaboration despite the writer having a sole credit. Also if I have a story that I can be very specific about the brief with, which I felt I did have with Enys Men, then it wasn’t going to work with a writer. I thought I might as well write that myself. I’m collaborating with a writer on an adaptation that is going to be a little way off yet, but for Enys Men it was suddenly, by reading the treatment that someone else wrote I realised what film I wanted to make and it wasn’t that film. It was a fantastic treatment, and it would have made a great film, but not a film I could have made.

Oh, that reminds me, back to Bresson, did you ever consider having a voiceover for Enys Men?

I did think about voiceover, yeah. What voiceover quite often is, is a bit of a safety net. Some people work with voiceover brilliantly in a really literal beautiful way, like Terrence Malick. I rewatched The Thin Red Line the other day which is one of my favourite films. That should have been on my top 10 list! That works beautifully, it is an added layer of poetry to a film that is already like a poem. Then there is Withnail and I, masterful voiceover used so sparingly, there is hardly any in it, but it is so beautifully done. Cause it is Marwood, it’s Paul McGann, but the way he delivers it, it’s almost like he is whispering it when Withnail’s not listening, so it has got a performative complexity to it as well. Voiceover – if you are using it like a safety net is like an exposition tool, so when things get too confusing you can drop a bit of voiceover in. I did it with a film I made years ago, I wouldn’t have used it if we had money to do reshoots, but I didn’t have money for it. So what those reshoots were conveying in terms of information I just put it into a voiceover, and then put voiceover over the whole thing, so it became a voiceover movie, which I really like but I was forced into it.

With Enys Men, for two reasons I didn’t go into voiceover – one, I thought there is no use trying to explain anything in this film, if I tried to explain stuff, it would make it look like a film where it made no sense and then I was trying to explain it to an audience. Or it could have been a voiceover that added to the ambiguity, but then I realised that I have three outlets for exposition within the film already: the VHF marine radio with which she [the volunteer] communicates with the land, the AM radio which gives the history of the stone, and her journal. I already had these three channels. And the journal stuff is all a pickup. That’s not Mary’s hand, I wanted very specific handwriting, that’s my First AD, Callum, who writes in the book. Very beautiful hands. So I didn’t have to commit to what was being written until later on. It’s all in the script what has been written, except I came up with the idea later on for the “No change”. When it gets to May 1st and it says, “No change” on the day, and she stops writing about the flowers. This kind of [The] Shining, head on, looking at some text. From principal photography we didn’t record anything she was writing in the book, we just filmed her from behind writing, but I knew in the edit, if I wanted to muddy the water, or clear the water, she could write. Maybe about her relationship with the boatman… Or at any point I could have a stray radio broadcast bring a clanger of exposition without it feel like you are being explained to. So I ruled out voiceover early on because I knew I had those other tools, which are less blatant, less obvious than voiceover.

There’s a writer called [Blake] Snyder who wrote a screenwriting book called Save the Cat! There is an expression he has called ‘Pope in the Pool’, which is a way of doing exposition. He wrote a screenplay, where there is a scene in the Vatican and the Pope’s envoy has to come in, the Pope is sat behind a desk, and just communicates a shed load of exposition for the film to move on, and he couldn’t work out any way of getting around it. So rather than saying it in the Pope’s office, he put the Pope in a swimming pool doing lengths. The envoy comes in doing exposition and the audience are going, “I suppose the Pope would have a swimming pool in the Vatican”, and “I suppose he would do breaststroke”. And you’re thinking that whilst hearing all this exposition, without knowing that you are being hit over the head with it. So I always knew I had this ‘Pope in the Pool’ device with the radio. Not only that but I knew that I had the convention that sometimes it could be inaudible cause it was coming across the sea. If I felt like it was too much information coming out I could put a bit more crackle on it so you only hear every other word. You have to lean forward and engage with it, you have to work for it so it doesn’t feel like you are just being fed it. Long answer to the question, I ruled out voiceover very early.

For the films that you have programmed at the BFI in January (The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men) you have picked Jeanne Dielmann… which is a film that is relatively inaccessible in the UK right now, and it is obviously this centrepiece of cinema, it is towards the top of the Sight and Sound list, what does it mean to you to have films like that as inaccessible? And also your own films, like David Bowie is Dead, which means a lot to me, as inaccessible? [Context: this was pre-2022 S&S list and Jeanne Dielmann… is available to stream now on the BFI Player]

I’m conflicted cause I quite like the fact that some films are difficult to see. It is different if they are impossible to see. But now in the days of streamers, if they are possible to see they are very easy to see, or they are impossible to see. Whereas in the past it was more interesting when you had to go on a bit of a hunt to find a film. I remember trying to get hold of a copy of Long Weekend, which is on my list, the Colin Eggleston, 1978, Australian film. You literally had to try and find a VHS tape from Australia. Pre-eBay. God knows where I was even looking for it. It made things like libraries and inter-library loans a thing, so by the time you got it, you had worked for it, so you were invested in it. It’s a shame that that has been lost. I saw Jeanne Dielmann… a long time ago, once. The reason I put it on the list is because other people kept mentioning it. I thought if other people are mentioning it, consistently, it must be an influence, even though I have only seen it once. It just shows the power of the film. I said to Julie at the BFI I want to programme it and then I asked if they could get a copy of it cause I haven’t seen it in twenty years. This is the luxury of the position I am now in, and a Criterion copy arrived from the States.

Yeah, that’s how you have to do it, you have to pay £30-odd to get it and get a region-free DVD player.

The luxury is I can just ask the BFI, I’m making the most of it whilst it lasts. But then it is nice to put it on [Screen it publicly at the BFI]. Conversely, I said to Julie – I picked Lost Highway, which they have on soon –“shall I take it off the list”, and she said, “No, keep it on, cause people will watch it with a different context”.

It is sad that it isn’t available, but I feel a real responsibility and a real pride, that I can choose to put that on and introduce it to people who haven’t seen it before. It’s a real outlier in terms of endurance to watch it. It was difficult to watch it at home, even though I loved the film. I wanted to watch it, and I needed to watch it for work purposes, but I still had to switch off all devices.

Still two hours left…

Yeah

It’s a marathon

Yeah, I think it is really helpful. Afterwards, you put on a two-and-a-half-hour film and it feels like you are watching a short. It broadens your ability to appreciate how gruelling cinema can be, and gruelling in a good way, cause it stays with you.

With regards to my own work, it is all down to licensing, people license the work. I’m really pleased that the BFI have got a lot of my back catalogue. These things run in cycles. If you look on amazon or the BFI player, if my film comes up it means that it is coming back.

That’s good to know.

Enys Men is screening across the UK from Friday 13th January. Look out for a Q&A screening with director Mark Jenkin near you. Enys Men | Official Website | 13 January 2023

The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men season is running throughout January at the BFI Southbank. The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men | BFI Southbank

See a selection of Mark Jenkin’s short films at the BFI Southbank as part of London Short Film Festival Buy cinema tickets for LSFF: Mark Jenkin: An Fylmow Berr | BFI Southbank

Prince Harry is working overtime to do the interview rounds ahead of the release of his memoir Spare on Tuesday. And this one is a BIG one, even by those already-lofty standards.

On Monday night, the 38-year-old prince sat down with Good Morning America co-anchor Michael Strahan. The Brit delivered an expansive, long-form interview about his book and his life. Nearly no stone was unturned as Harry spoke about his relationship with wife Meghan Markle, the fractured relationships he now has with father King Charles III and brother Prince William, and every other dramatic detail about his former life with the royal family.

Related: Prince Harry Claims Dig At William’s ‘Alarming Baldness’ Wasn’t A Diss At All!

The interview covered a lot of ground. As the former New York Giants football star prodded William’s little bro and sat in awe to hear the responses, Harry spoke candidly about how life has changed since walking away from Buckingham Palace.

Here are all the highlights from Monday night’s Prince Harry: In His Own Words tell-all interview…

The Divide Was Already There

As we’ve reported, Harry has already spoken in GMA teasers about the growing rift between himself, Prince William, and King Charles. When Strahan asked about that, as we’ve noted, Harry doubled down:

“I have thought about it long and hard. And as far as I see it, the divide couldn’t be greater before this book.”

Still, the Spare author remained optimistic about possibly finding some kind of reconciliation with his family in the future. If that comes, Harry told the television host, it would be life-changing:

“If we can get to the point of reconciliation, that will have a ripple effect across the world. I genuinely believe that, and that’s kind of what is pushing me. And if that doesn’t happen, then that’s very sad.”

Wow. Clearly, there are a lot of emotions here.

Harry’s (Not So) Beloved Brother

To the outside world, Harry and his 40-year-old brother have always seemed close — especially after the tragic death of their mother Princess Diana when they were children. But in speaking to Strahan, Harry explained there is actually more to the story regarding the connection between him and William.

The memoir writer, who called William his “beloved brother and arch nemesis,” explained:

“There has always been this competition between us weirdly. Again, I think it really plays into, or is played, by the heir/spare.”

Harry even went so far as to tell Strahan he felt William was jealous of his position as the “spare” of the two brothers.

While Prince William sits “in the monarch’s shadow” and waits for his turn on the throne, as Harry said, the younger brother gets to enjoy relative freedom. To that end, Harry explained the dynamic to the former NFL star:

“I have more freedom than he does, right? So his life is planned out for him. I have more flexibility to be able to choose the life that I wanted.”

Well, that’s true. And Harry proved as much when he walked away from the royal family. So there’s definitely something real about that assessment.

The Brothers’ Broken ‘Pact’

Harry also opened up about a “pact” the brothers had in the past. As the younger bro moved towards marriage with Meghan several years ago, he and William apparently agreed to an informal deal. In it, they intended to not allow their offices or publicists to fight externally or brief the media against each other.

But that didn’t end up happening, Harry claims. Instead, he told Strahan that members of the royal family allegedly fed stories to the press. They also supposedly refused to discredit other salacious stories about Meghan and Harry that the fam knew were plainly phony.

Harry explained:

“The people that he employed broke that. But again, within the family, it’s hard because you are led to believe that if you don’t play the game, that you will be destroyed. And again, I’m the one who’s proving that that is true, right? Chose not to play the game, but they’re trying to destroy me.”

The Suits alum’s husband went on to say that the press ate it up. In turn, they worked up a feud between the two couples for maximum ratings and attention from the public:

“[The media] pitched the Waleses, which Kate and William are now, against the Sussexes, me and my wife. They always pitched us against each other. They pitched Kate and Meghan against each other.”

Wow. Not great!!

Oh, and speaking of Meghan and Kate…

Catherine Vs. Meghan

Harry blames press reports and media strife on disrupting Markle’s relationship with Princess Catherine when it was still in its very early stages. Of course, we’ve written quite a bit about that tense relationship over the past few weeks.

The memoir author said:

“Without question. If you read [news coverage], it very much feeds into how you function, operate, and behave. Without question. But the moment you don’t read it, you can live a truly authentic life.”

Such was the thrust of their Netflix docuseries released late last year. So it sounds like Harry is actually practicing what he preaches with that?

Reconciliation On The Horizon?

All the while, Harry claimed to Strahan, the British press worked tirelessly to “drive a wedge” between the brothers. However, he still hopes he can one day be close with William again at some point far in the future:

“I hope that we will be joined at the hip again. Because, you know, if there’s something that will terrify the British press more than anything, it’s William and I being aligned.”

Damn!!

It just may take some time.

Related: Prince Harry Walks Back ‘Villain’ Claim About Queen Camilla

And to be fair, Harry did admit to bearing some of the blame for the fractured relationship he has with his older bro. Still, he told the GMA host that he has worked hard behind the scenes to try to mend fences:

“What people don’t know is the efforts that I’ve gone to [in order] to resolve this privately, both with my brother and with my father.”

As you can see, Harry is remarkably emotional over the challenge of navigating that tough relationship:

Prince Harry to @michaelstrahan on rift with his family: “What people don’t know is the efforts that I’ve gone to to resolve this privately, both with my brother and with my father.”

Stream now on @ABCNewsLive or on @Hulu here: https://t.co/pwf8p4chSC pic.twitter.com/EBGCicBcBt

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) January 10, 2023

Ugh!!

A difficult situation for all, no doubt.

Major Security Concerns

A big remaining point of contention for Harry goes back to the moment when he and Meghan chose to step back from the royal family. When he approached the family with his choice, Harry claims he was met with “zero compromise.”

When he and Meghan moved to Canada briefly while starting that process, then, they received no security after a previously-agreed-upon 12-month transition period of guard was pulled out from under the couple. Harry told Strahan:

“I was stunned that my family would allow security to be taken away, especially at the most vulnerable point for us. And maybe they didn’t understand the concerns that I had. I mean, I listed them. I laid them out.”

Strahan asked the famous father whether Buckingham Palace didn’t realize about his security concerns or didn’t care. To that, the younger prince replied:

“I think probably a little bit of both.”

Oof. Definitely not a good look for the royal fam. Just saying…

Wishing For Windsor

Still, initially, Meghan and Harry didn’t want to leave their roles within the royal family. He recalled how being based in Windsor made him feel — for a while — like that was where he was meant to spend the rest of his life:

“We were based in Windsor. That was where we genuinely thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives.”

But things were tough, too. The “filter of the tabloids,” as Harry noted, made life difficult to live in the public eye as part of the monarchy.

And so he and Meghan tried to find a way through it — but to no avail. The embattled prince told Strahan:

“We were trying to find a different way to work, but for one reason or another, despite the fact that it already exists within the family, we weren’t allowed to do things slightly differently. To still perform and work and support and represent the monarchy, but to be financially independent, to remove the supposed public interest, which the tabloids had used repeatedly to invade every single element of our life.”

It sounds like its own prison, TBH. Definitely not fun in some ways! Even if it might feel like a fairytale life from the outside looking in! The grass is always greener, after all…

Striving For Peace

Now, Harry is in a mood for peace. Spare bares all when it comes to his fractured relationship with the institution and his family, of course. But he thinks telling his story in book form will eventually lead to a truce among family members:

“I don’t think that we can ever have peace with my family unless the truth is out there. There’s a lot that I can forgive, but there needs to be conversations in order for reconciliation, and part of that has to be accountability.”

And one day, Harry told Strahan, he hopes to have a candid (and private!) conversation with his family to clear the air:

“I just hope that there’s a way that we can have a conversation that is trusted within that conversation that isn’t then spilled to the British press. That’s where I am.”

Well wouldn’t that be something? Not holding our breath here, tho…

Interacting With The Queen

Interestingly, Harry did tell GMA that Queen Elizabeth II was not angry with him for wanting to alter his royal role. Instead, he thinks she was “sad” about the situation and how it unfolded near the end of her life.

Harry hypothesized more on the late Queen’s possible mindset towards him and Meghan in her final years:

“I had many, many conversations with her both in the U.K. over the years and in the run-up to the point of this change, so it was never a surprise to anybody, least of all her. She knew what was going on. She knew how hard it was. I don’t know whether she was in a position to be able to change it.”

Say what you will about Harry, and Meghan, and the royal family in general, but clearly this was a tough situation for all.

Dealing With Diana’s Death

Harry also spoke openly about the past. Specifically, he talked to Strahan about his mother’s shocking death in a car accident in Paris while being pursued by paparazzi in 1997. He told Strahan that he initially didn’t want to believe Diana was dead, and as a 12-year-old boy who was confronted with the shocking fact, it harmed him greatly.

Calling his wish to avoid the death a “defense mechanism,” Harry told the GMA host:

“I think for anyone, especially if you’re a kid, I was 12 years old. I refused to accept that was what had happened.”

He also explained how Charles woke him and William up early the next morning to break the news to them, saying:

“It was really important to be able to sketch that scene and share with people where my story really began. As a dad, I would never, ever want to have to break that news ever, so I have a huge amount of sympathy and compassion and understanding now about how ill-equipped I guess my dad was, how ill-equipped anybody would be in that situation.”

Wow.

Harry admitted that the moment was truly the most difficult one imaginable, and even now, he’s not sure how it could have possibly turned out any better:

“I don’t think my family knew what to do. I don’t think they knew what to do, and I can’t say whether other families would’ve done a better job.”

No kidding. Such an awful situation.

As we already reported based on early GMA teasers, Prince Harry spoke about his take on Queen Camilla‘s role in the royal family. In his comments to Strahan, Harry said some surprising stuff:

“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade off information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her, on the way to being Queen Consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”

Jeez!! Then, when asked what Camilla had done to make Harry so resistant to welcoming her into the family, Harry replied:

“I have a huge amount of compassion for her, you know? Being the third person within my parents’ marriage. And she had a reputation or an image to rehabilitate, and whatever conversations happened, whatever deals or trading was made right at the beginning, she was led to believe that that would be the best way of doing it.”

That “compassion” comment definitely made Strahan raise his eyebrows. And now, despite claiming there’s no bad blood between the two, the author did reveal they don’t have much of a relationship these days:

“We haven’t spoken for a long time. I love every member of my family, despite the differences. So, when I see her, we’re perfectly pleasant with each other. She’s my stepmother; I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation and her own image for her own sake.”

Well then! Are U guys buying that?

A Future Far From Home

So what does the future look like, then?

For Harry, he doesn’t believe his family will ever return full-time to the United Kingdom. Directly referencing the overly-aggressive British press, he told Strahan:

“Even if there was an agreement or an arrangement between me and my family, there is that third party that is going to do everything they can to make sure that that isn’t possible. Not stopping us from necessarily going back, but making it unsurvivable, and that’s really sad because that is essentially breaking the relationship between us.”

And yet he left the door open to be of service to the Commonwealth in some other way moving forward if he felt there were something he could do:

“If there was something in the future where we can continue to support the Commonwealth, then that’s of course on the table, but there’s so much that needs to happen between now and then, and so much that can happen.”

That would be interesting. But it sounds like the door is (mostly) closed for him and Meghan. Especially in regards to being back in London!

With the memoir, Harry told Strahan he is now hoping to “change the media landscape” in the United Kingdom. It remains to be seen whether that will happen, of course.

Related: Harry Will No Longer Have Role In King Charles’ Coronation After Memoir Claims!

But Harry took a dim view of the role the tabloid media plays in the Commonwealth. And he regrets very much what it did to him and his extended family:

“In this instance, the most popular, most read and therefore most influential newspapers in our country are tabloids. That affects the country. That affects the construct of the country.”

He also told GMA about his hope for changing the “codependency” the royal family and the tabloids have on each other:

“There are some people, especially in the U.K., who have been led to believe that because you are a member of the royal family, somehow everyone owns you or has a stake in you. And that’s a message that has been purely pushed out by the British tabloids, and it creates real problems within that family and that relationship. Of course, there has to be some sort of relationship, but where it’s got to now is incredibly unhealthy.”

Obviously, that’s a real line in the sand on that one. Whether Harry — or anyone — can succeed in changing that close relationship is anybody’s guess. But we’re not holding our breath. Just saying…

Modernizing The Monarchy

Finally, the Duke of Sussex spoke about what he hopes the monarchy will become in the future. He “genuinely” believes it should continue, he told Strahan. But he also hopes it will modernize through the 21st century.

Harry said:

“I think the same process that I went through regarding my own unconscious bias would be hugely beneficial to them. It’s not racism, but unconscious bias if not confronted, if not acknowledged, if not learned and grown from, that can then move into racism. And the way that I understand it is that we all want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”

Specifically, Harry also felt the royal fam had “a huge missed opportunity” when they failed to represent and promote Meghan as a biracial woman during her time in London:

“It’s what she said to me from right from the beginning, representation. And I, as a privileged white man, didn’t really understand what she was talking about.”

Well said.

Harry also worries about younger members of the royal family, and what they may go through. He explained:

“I also worry about other young kids within that family if this continues. Because who’s to say that someone else doesn’t fill my shoes and that their partner, whether it’s a husband or a wife or boyfriend or a girlfriend, doesn’t get treated exactly the same as Meghan did?”

That’s a tough one, for sure. Do U have any solutions, Perezcious readers?

You can see more highlights from the GMA interview (below):

Wow.

That’s obviously a heavy subject — and one that means a great deal to Harry.

What do U think of Harry’s whole interview with Michael Strahan? The duo covered a LOT of ground. What are your reactions to it??

[Image via GMA/YouTube]

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Prince Harry continued to tell all during his 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Jan. 8. The Duke of Sussex, 38, sat down with Anderson Cooper to discuss his bombshell memoir Spare and the on-going rift in the Royal Family that ultimately caused him and his wife Meghan Markle to step down from their royal duties and move to North America in 2020. During the intense one-on-one, Harry also admitted he wasn’t able to bring himself to tears over the 1997 death of his mom, Princess Diana, even well into his 20s, which became a source of tremendous “guilt” for him. “I was constantly trying to find a way to cry,” he admitted.

Prince Harry said that for years after his mother Princess Diana’s death, he believed that she had disappeared and would one day return. Searching for proof, Harry asked to see the police files of the crash that caused his mother’s death. https://t.co/Pq5F644mVs pic.twitter.com/s7MRFcuuU5

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 9, 2023

“Even sitting on my sofa, and going over as many memories I could muster up about my mom, and watching videos online,” Harry added, before admitting that none of it worked. He eventually sought out therapy to help with his grief and eventually tried psychedelics. “I would never recommend doing this to all people, but doing it with the right people, if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss and grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.” He said the medicine helped him realize that he didn’t have to cry to mourn his mom and that his mom “just wanted” him “to be happy.”

Harry also went into detail about the woman who would ultimately take his mom’s place next to his father King Charles: Camilla Parker Bowles. He admitted he and his brother Prince William asked their father not to marry the now-Queen Consort eight years after their mother’s death because it would only cause more turmoil. He also called Camilla “dangerous” around that time as she was now deemed the “villain” after Princess Diana suggested Camilla was the “third person” in her marriage to Charles. “She needed to rehabilitate her image,” Harry said. To do such, Camilla and her “PR team” were willing to throw Harry and William under the bus to make her look better in the tabloids, according to Harry.

The Duke of Sussex then discussed the Spare passages about his father waking him to tell him about Diana’s death, not being included in the family travel plans to visit the dying Queen and the royals’ first reaction to the “love of his life,” Meghan. Harry wrote in the book that Charles took a liking, William was skeptical, and other members weren’t having it. When Anderson asked why, Harry offered, “The fact that she was American, an actress, divorced, and Black, bi-racial with a Black mother.”

Prince Harry said his brother Prince William told him when they attended the same high school that he should “pretend we don’t know each other.” In his new book, Harry describes their childhood sibling rivalry. https://t.co/IlqO1DmD5g pic.twitter.com/Lvab9ONTtP

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 9, 2023

Meghan’s race, according to Harry, was the root of his wife’s mistreatment by the British press and, ultimately, why they decided to start a new life. “What Meghan had to go through was similar, in some part, to what Kate [Middleton] and what Camilla went through — very different circumstances,” he said. “But then you add in the race element, which was what the British press jumped on straight away, I went into this incredibly naive. I had no idea the British press was so bigoted. Hell, I was probably bigoted before the relationship with Meghan.”

Following up, Anderson asked if Harry thought of himself as bigoted. “I don’t know,” Harry replied. “Put it this way, I didn’t see what I now see.” Harry also said the issues with Meghan made Buckingham Palace claim Harry became a different person after he met her. “He’s changed, she must be a witch,” Harry quipped.

Anderson then pressed Harry on why he decided to speak out publicly against Buckingham Palace and what he claims is their misinformation campaign against him and Meghan. Harry insisted he had initially tried to keep his concerns behind closed doors. “Every single time I’ve tried to [resolve issues] privately, there have been briefings and leakings and planting of stories against me and my wife,” he told Anderson, adding, “You know, the family motto is never complain, never explain.”

Harry went on to claim that Buckingham Palace “spoon-feeds” information to a correspondent, who then writes up a story for the press using that information and adding that the correspondent had asked for a comment from Buckingham Palace. “But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting,” Harry explained. “So when we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you.’ But you do it for other members of the family. It becomes— there becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”

“The family motto is never complain, never explain. But it’s just a motto.”
Prince Harry told 60 Minutes that rather than leaking or planting stories with the press, he wants people to hear directly from him. https://t.co/3Rp651Zv4y pic.twitter.com/G6eXualjI7

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 9, 2023

In a preview clip for his 90-minute ITV special, Prince Harry: The Interview, which aired the same day as the 60 Minutes interview, Harry also touched upon a possible reconciliation with his family even after the drama was exacerbated when the couple spoke out on their alleged mistreatment by the Royal institution during their 2021 bombshell Oprah interview. “I want reconciliation,” Harry told Tom Bradby. “But, first, there needs to be some accountability. The truth, supposedly, at the moment, has been there’s only one side of the story, right? But, there’s two sides to every story.”

“I would like to get my father back,” he added. “I would like to have my brother back.”  Harry also said that he’s hoping that he can sit down and talk to members of the family before his dad’s coronation ceremony in May.

Harry also sat down with Good Morning America in an interview with Michael Strahan that airs on Monday, Jan. 9. In a teaser, Harry touched upon Princess Diana and how she would feel about the feud between himself and his brother Prince William. “I think she would be sad,” Harry said. “I think she’d be looking at it long term to know that there are certain things that we need to go through to be able to heal the relationship.”

Prince Harry tells @michaelstrahan he thinks Princess Diana would be “sad” about his relationship with his brother Prince William now, in wide-ranging interview ahead of his memoir release. Watch @GMA Monday. https://t.co/StuYIvP8bO pic.twitter.com/8m38b7nFAK

— Good Morning America (@GMA) January 5, 2023

Ahead of the memoir’s release, excerpts were reported on after a major leak occurred, including the accidental early sale of the book in Spain, per ABCNews. One claimed that King Charles banned Meghan from visiting Queen Elizabeth as she lay dying in her home at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Harry said he told his father in response, “Don’t ever speak about my wife that way,” according to the outlet.

Another excerpt found Harry breaking his silence on his uncle, Prince Andrew’s, sexual abuse allegations that involved ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Harry slammed Andrew’s “embarrassing scandal” and the fact that Andrew’s security was not removed despite Harry and Meghan losing theirs after stepping down from royal duties.

One of the more explosive excerpts detailed a fight between Harry and his brother William, per The Guardian. The Duke of Sussex described an alleged meeting with his brother in 2019 that led to an attack. Harry claimed William had called Meghan “rude” and “abrasive.” Harry said he tried to leave before it escalated. “He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

On 60 Minutes, Harry acknowledged the physical fight and said his relationship with William was sadly non-existent after the death of their mother. “Even when you were in the same school, in high school, your brother told you, ‘Pretend we don’t know each other?’” Anderson asked to which Harry replied, “Yeah, and at the time it hurt. I couldn’t make sense of it. I was like, ‘What do you mean? We’re now at the same school. I haven’t seen you for ages, now we get to hang out together.’”

Harry continued, “He’s like, ‘No, no, no, when we’re at school we don’t know each other.’ And I took that personally. But yes. We had a very similar traumatic experience, and then we dealt with it two very different ways.”

HollywoodLife will keep you posted on the upcoming interviews with Prince Harry — including Tuesday’s appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — and the all the explosive details that will emerge when Spare is finally released on January 10!

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