David Nicholson has tête-à-têtes with some curious characters:
| Joan Collins and Steven Berkoff on the set of Decadence in Luxembourg, The
Independent Collins, turning 60 in June, has more money than time.
She is at work on her third novel, having ditched her fourth husband in favour of an old
Etonian art dealer. She eats mini-Mars bars in a modest dressing room, Michael Medved's
Hollywood Versus America sharing shelf space with her second novel, Love and Desire and
Hate ("You have a degree in literature? Well you'd better not read it"). |
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Both of them smoke avidly between scenes, going into little huddles with their
respective assistants, like boxers between rounds. It is an extremely violent script,
intellectually, with verbal streams of blood, vomit and semen. "It's so beautifully
written," says Collins, "that even when she says those four letter words, it's
not nearly as shocking as watching an Eddie Murphy movie."
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Norman Mailer in Cannes, The Business of Film
Asked about editing a film of his own novel, Mailer said: "There is no force more
powerful in filmmaking than the fear of an audience's boredom. It is remarkable how
quickly things which seemed vital to the novel can be forfeited in the film."
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Christo in Berlin, The Independent
How did the Reichstag's changes affect them? "The building has not changed,"
Christo replied in a gentle French-Balkan lilt. "It has an additional dimension.
Everything that happened before 1990 will still belong to the building." "All
that stays," interjected Jeanne-Claude. (They have that old couple's habit of
completing one another's sentences: born on the same day, 13 June 1935, they have been
inseparable ever since).
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Charlotte Gainsbourg in Paris, The Sunday Times magazine
She has her mother's gawky, flat-chested body and lifeless hair and her father's Slavic
slump to the jowls, a nose borrowed from Barry Manilow and a mouth designed to accommodate
an endless sequence of cigarettes. "I'm very hung up about my face, my body,
everything..." she says in her Paris flat. "I certainly don't have the typical
Hollywood face. I'm no Julia Roberts."
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Tim Roth and Nic Roeg on the set of Heart of Darkness in London, The Independent
Nic Roeg took his cast to Belize and out into the jungle for six weeks. "On the
first day," says Tim Roth, "the boat sank." Finally another was built. But
then people began to get sick. "There was one actor whose pants exploded, basically,
while he was standing there. At times it was a nightmare. Diseases of the bowel were
prevalent."
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A review of Richard Grant's book Ghost Riders, UK Press Gazette
"I was in a bar and a woman came and sat on my lap," he recalls. "Then a guy comes along and starts to beat the shit out of me. Southern women are very skilled at getting men to fight over them." He was also bashed over the head with a brick by a drifter he'd met, who then stole his belongings. When he came to, Grant discovered a ring of fur around the bathtub. After knocking him cold, "he still found time to wash his dog," writes Grant.
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