Film Recommendation

Way back in 2007, I was finding my feet in the world of film journalism. I’d spent a few years on the fringes, bobbing and weaving to make a crust (and getting some good practice writing for the early, funny issues of Little White Lies) before landing a gig on Time Out London’s film section. I felt massively out of my depth, so any assignment I was given would double as an opportunity to home-school myself in the work of a certain director or actor. For one festival preview piece I ended up watching the entire Eric Rohmer corpus across about three weeks, and then later I was commissioned to write a profile of Frank Sinatra relating to his life as a screen actor (he was pretty good!).

One thrilling early task was to speak to Gena Rowlands on the phone, linked to a re-release of the 1977 film Opening Night and a season of Cassavetes films at the BFI Southbank (née NFT). At the point of commission, I knew the name, but hadn’t really encountered her in any meaningful way. And so across a single week I watched all the Cassavetes films I could find on home video, which was a fair few at that time, and prepared to talk to Ms Rowlands for 30 minutes and hopefully try and ask her some things she hadn’t been asked before.