“There are some people who suffer from this ‘[Auschwitz] disease’ for life, simply because of the experience they have gone through. Another group simply doesn’t talk about it. And a third group of people have learned to come to terms with these events. I’m a writer, so I don’t belong to any one of these three categories. I view my experience as being raw material and I process it in the process of writing. And as I go along, I get rid of this experience. You know, this is how I go on and on and on and on, until I reach a stage, as a writer, where I will have run out of raw material. Then it’s time to die.” https://www.netribution.co.uk/people/writer/nobel-prize-winner-imre-kertesz-fateless

“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans, they were in a firm. Being 15 and having this whole urban myth about hooligans, I was like, ‘You got to take me to a game. I want to stand with you guys.’ They were like ‘No, no, no. No girls allowed.’ I said: ‘You have to take me because after all I’m teaching you martial arts here, so you can’t really convince me that I can’t take care of myself.’ So, in the end, to the guys and in general, I was like the little sister. One they could accept. I wasn’t necessarily a girl’s girl. They took me and for two years it became somewhat of a family for me. Everything I portrayed in the film was really what I saw. Like I thought it was really cool and really fun. I thought it was their way of choosing an extreme sport, they were just adrenalin…

“I’ve never seen poverty on that level. A million people living in a very small space with no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, there’s a very high level of disease, HIV, and yet there’s that scene in the movie where the children come running up to you and they say, ‘How are you?’ They welcome you. I remember coming back and saying this to my sister and saying they’ve got such – I mean the kids have got nothing, they’ve got no toys, literally no toys, so they make footballs from plastic bags scrunched together and they just wrap string around it, and they kick it around, or they take a piece of string with a button on the end and they pull it as if it’s a dog. Toddlers of three or four are already carrying their siblings on their back. And yet their spirit is so welcoming and there’s a life going on. There’s little cafes and they’re barbecuing meat. There’s a life. Anyway, I came back and I said this to my sister and she was like, ‘You’re being so sentimental. You can’t s…

“I had a very difficult time. I actually quit at least 4 or 5 times. I couldn’t get a job. I had done 30 plays in Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job. I was getting little jobs here and there, but no one was really recognising what I thought I had. I thought, ‘I’ve done all this work, why isn’t it paying off?’ That really starts to hurt your self-image; and I already had a questionable self-image coming into the game. I wasn’t like the best candidate to become an actor. I was really insecure and I didn’t particularly like myself very much.” What did your mother say to make you not give up? It’s down to her, I believe, that you carried on? She’d never told me to do anything before and she said, ‘I’ve let you do everything. I’ve tried to let you make all your own choices in your life but goddamit, Mark, I’m not going to let you do it.’ I wanted to go back to Wisconsin and work with my father doing construction painting. She said, ‘Goddamit, I won’t let you do it. If you give up, yo…

Michael White: With Chuck and Buck I do think one of the biggest taboos, at least in America, is still men relating with other men in an honest, vulnerable way. It’s something you rarely see in anything, and I just find it amusing. It’s not keeping pace with the reality of life. Men, in this day and age, are expressing their more vulnerable side. I don’t live the life of an action hero, so, in terms of my own life, those movies don’t really speak to me other than as wish-fulfillment fantasy. Stephen Applebaum: I’ve been writing about Fight Club, and that seems to me a very old way of looking at male relationships: men relating through violence. White: Fight Club is a perfect example of what the media … I think that it’s more acceptable to show two guys wailing on each other as a way of connecting, because then it has all the undercurrent of homoeroticism but, OK, in the end you’re both punching bags. But, you know, to call a spade like in Chuck and Buck, where one character says…

“I came home one evening – I had just driven from Isleworth to Borehamwood, which is a long drive, and my mother said, ‘You’ve got to go back to the studio right away’. “I was furious. I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘They’re testing operators for something – Technicolor or something – so you’ve got to go back to be tested and have an interview’. Those that had been in came out shaken because the questions were highly technical. “When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’. “So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m very fond of painting, and I also watch the light’. I had formed a habit, oddly enough, of watching the light in a room. “Anyway, they said, ‘Which side of the face does Rembrandt light?’ I said ‘This side,’ which was a guess, really. ‘And for etching, of course, it would be reversed’. That was another bluff…

Kelly Reilly: I have to say that I am not the most ambitious person in the world. Stephen Applebaum: So the work’s the most important thing for you? Reilly: Definitely, definitely. It must be nice to go to these parties and show your face and be bit recognised, I’m sure that must be great for a first few months or so. But I think I would just find myself in the corner, wishing all my friends were there, and going why am I here? So where did it all start? I can’t remember where it started. When I was very young I was always grabbing all my friends from down the street and making them put on plays with me. But I never, ever, ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that I could be an actor because I come from a working-class family.” What do your parents do? My dad’s a police officer and my mum’s a secretary. We’re a kind of two-up, two-down, very normal suburban household. I went to a normal secondary school. Other people do those jobs, you know? I forgot about it, kind of gr…

“I think if you put people, actors for instance, under duress, something suddenly happens: you get past acting. Kubrick did that when he was making The Shining. I had dinner with Jack Nicholson and he said, ‘He did 140 takes. It took two days to do one shot. It was just exhausting.” Later I spoke to Kubrick and I said, ‘Why do that many takes?’ He said, ‘Well, I try to exhaust the actors because once they’re really tired they stop acting’. I do think there is something in putting actors into an environment like the Amazon, or putting them into heat and humidity, that they respond to. It’s all about trying to integrate the actors and the environment. So, why do you keep returning to this theme [alienation]? You have even written that you feel alienated from your own work. When you watch your films, you said, they seem like the work of a stranger. I don’t want to psychoanalyse myself but I suppose if you look at my preface to the script of Hope and Glory, where I am talkin…

Stephen Applebaum: Would a film like The Devils be hard to make now? Ken Russell: It would be impossible. No one would finance such a film, I would imagine. Hasn’t the British Film Industry improved? Well I’m not so mad on the British film industry. It seems to just produce one or two gems and then tons of mediocrity. I mean I saw, there was one the other day of people painting electric pylons. Oh Among Giants? Is that what it was called? I thought it was called Men Painting Pylons. And obviously it was so bad that they were desperate. Do you know what they did? They did long shots of them painting these pylons and over it they put a male voice chorus singing spiritual as though these guys from Newcastle would be singing “Nobody has known the trouble I’ve seen”. You know? All this crap. And it was watching paint dry. That was financed all very much by the British film industry. There was no excuse for it no matter what it was. Maybe the establishment just want…