The Film Programme this week features ill -fated romance, outer space and excessive drinking. So something for everyone! Francine Stock talks to Withnail's creator, Bruce Robinson about his return to directing with The Rum Diary starring Johnny Depp; Errol Morris will be discussing his new documentary --Tabloid -- about Joyce McKinney the former beauty queen known to some readers and newspaper editors in the Seventies as the woman at the centre of the sex in chains scandal;and Fish Tank's direct...
Nov 14, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock meets three of the biggest stars in American cinema -- Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Landis and Miranda July. Philip Seymour Hoffman will be discussing his debut as a director, Jack Goes Boating and the challenge of playing a man whose integrity is matched by his diffidence. Miranda July offers a few tips on how to navigate the charming but quirky world of The Future where cats speak and time stands still; and John Landis - the director of An American Werewolf in London and Michael...
Nov 04, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock meets with director Roland Emmerich whose new film Anonymous claims William Shakespeare is not the man behind the plays. Is George Clooney a future President of the United States of America? His character in the Ides of March is hoping to go all the way to the White House - at any cost. The man behind the film Beau Willimon discusses the grubby game of getting elected. Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo explains why his film Miss Bala is a desperate plea to the Mexican authorities ...
Oct 28, 2011•28 min
In a special edition of the Film Programme Francine Stock and guests travel back four decades to what might be the most extraordinary year in American cinema - 1971. The year that saw the release of such films as Klute, The Last Picture Show, The French Connection and Carnal Knowledge. Filmmakers James Watkins and Marc Evans explain how they have been influenced by films from that era. Director Jerry Schatzberg discusses his film from 1971, The Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino in his fir...
Oct 21, 2011•28 min
Presenter Francine Stock talks to Tilda Swinton about her role as the mother spurned in the film adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay. What happens when a group of Swedish journalists comes face to face with the Black Power movement? Director Göran Olsson explains all. Julia Leigh discusses her erotically charged debut Sleeping Beauty. 2011 is fast becoming a record-breaking year for British cinema but we reveal why this week is not a good week to be releasing your...
Oct 17, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock travels to Manhattan for an extended interview with the supreme exponent of screen neurosis in the 1970s and beyond, Woody Allen, currently enjoying his biggest box office success in years with Midnight in Paris. Producer: Craig Smith.
Oct 07, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock talks to Lars von Trier about his new film Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst as depressed bride Justine and Charlotte Gainsbourg as her sister Claire, responding in their different ways to their imminent annihilation - a rogue planet is hurtling towards earth and there is nothing they can do to stop it. John Madden reveals the details of his new spy thriller The Debt starring Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds. The film is set in Israel in the 1990s with extensive flash...
Sep 30, 2011•28 min
If you fancy a change of gear or need your batteries charging The Film Programme is the place for you. Francine Stock talks to Nicholas Winding Refn about his new film, Drive, starring Ryan Gosling as a stuntman who drives getaway cars in his spare time. He falls for the wife of a criminal played by Carey Mulligan and soon falls foul of the local gangsters. Its a turbo-charged ride and shares the fascination with violence evident in Refn's earlier work. Drive's 21st century sheen is more than ma...
Sep 23, 2011•28 min
Who can forget James Dean in Rebel without a Cause or Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the thriller, In a Lonely Place. Come to that who can forget the man who directed them both - Nicholas Ray? Ray was one of the Hollywood greats and was hero- worshipped by the French New Wave but he ended his career away from the limelight at a college in upstate New York where he made a multi-screen experimental feature with his students - We Can't Go Home Again. This has now been restored and is on rele...
Sep 16, 2011•28 min
Spy fever is about to grip the nation so if you want to steal a march on your rivals listen to the Film Programme with Francine Stock. She'll be talking to Gary Oldman about playing George Smiley in Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy - the John le Carre novel that thrilled audiences when it was adapted for television in 1979 with Sir Alec Guinness in the starring role. The director of the brand new cinema version,Tomas Alfredson, will also be in the studio. He made his name with the brilliant vampire f...
Sep 09, 2011•28 min
Pack your bags..Francine Stock is wearing her travelling shoes. First stop is the North of England to meet Moira Buffini's new Jane Eyre. Then its off to the Continent with Martin Scorsese for a guided tour of the commanding heights of Italian cinema - among them Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni. On the way back we'll be stopping off in the Greece of Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg -- a brilliant, playful feature about sex, grief and the passing of the old order inspired by the wil...
Sep 02, 2011•28 min
Leading ladies hog the limelight in this week's Film Programme with Matthew Sweet. Anne Hathaway talks about mastering a Yorkshire accent for her role as Emma in the celluloid version of David Nicholls' much loved book, One Day and Elena Anaya discusses the challenges of acting for Pedro Almodovar in his disturbing new feature, The Skin I Live In... a sort of cross between Frankenstein and Jane Eyre if you can imagine that! There's also the concluding part of Mark Gatiss' world of horror series....
Aug 26, 2011•28 min
The Film Programme this week is all about odd but exhilirating couples. Harrison Ford talks about his new film, Cowboys & Aliens and resists attempts to suggest he has anything in common with John Wayne; the writer and comedian Mark Gatiss shares his guilty pleasure in Coffin Joe - the star of an extraordinary Brazilian horror which glories in the title Tonight I Will Possess Your Corpse; and the film historian Jeffrey Richards and the critic Karen Krizanovich vie with each other to come up ...
Aug 19, 2011•28 min
In the Film Programme this week Matthew Sweet talks to James Marsh about Project Nim, the director's first feature since the Oscar- winning Man on Wire. It's the story of a chimpanzee taken from his mother as a baby and brought up in a human family as part of an experiment to see if he could acquire and use language. With the release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes as well this week the philosopher and cinephile, Raymond Tallis reflects on cinema's fascination with the links between apes and h...
Aug 12, 2011•28 min
Matthew Sweet ranges from Iraq to India and from Baghdad to Buddha in this week's Film Programme. He talks to Dominic Cooper about playing both Saddam Hussein's psychopathic son, Uday and Latif Yahia, the man forced to impersonate him in Lee Tamahori's feature, The Devil's Double. Then, having set up camp in the Middle East, Matthew investigates the background to an extraordinary film commissioned by Saddam about the end of British colonial influence in the region. With the help of two members o...
Aug 05, 2011•28 min
In this week's Film Programme Matthew Sweet talks to Hollywood royalty, Anjelica Huston. Their extended conversation embraces her latest excursion into kids films, Horrid Henry but also her reflections on Montgomery Clift, Jean Paul Sartre, Dick and Dom, her father and childhood in Ireland. She's joined by the designer, Wayne Hemingway, who shares his enthusiasm for the vintage film, Jazz on a Summer's Day and by Mark Gatiss who reveals the extraordinary story of the Spanish Dracula in the secon...
Jul 29, 2011•28 min
Modern love is the focus in this week's film programme presented by Matthew Sweet. A septuagenarian Christopher Plummer comes out after forty years of marriage when his wife dies in Mike Mills' Beginners; Jennifer Aniston plays a randy dentist in Seth Gordon's new film, Horrible Bosses; and Rita Hayworth torments herself and Glenn Ford in the luminescent, Gilda -- King Vidor's classic film noir which has just been re-released. All are subject to scrutiny -- Matthew discusses the part autobiograp...
Jul 22, 2011•28 min
As the Hogwarts Express prepares to chug off into the sunset Francine Stock reflects on the legacy of Harry Potter. There's an interview with David Yates, who directed the last four films in the series and you can hear some of the distinguished British actors who've given the films much of their savour. Francine will also be talking to Aidan Gillen about his role in Treacle Jnr - the new film by the much lauded independent director, Jamie Thraves who remortgaged his home to fund the feature. And...
Jul 18, 2011•28 min
Terrence Malick is one of the most thrilling and charismatic directors working in America. He's not prolific and his films - like some wine -- only seem to be released in good years. This is one of those vintage years. His new feature,The Tree of Life, is in cinemas this week and Francine Stock talks to one of its stars, Jessica Chastain, about working with Malick. Francine will also be assessing David Schwimmer's new film Trust and Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier. Even though t...
Jul 08, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock meets with Tom Hanks to discuss his new comedy Larry Crowne, and reveals why smoking marijuana and watching pornography doesn't necessarily make a character irredeemable. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation was the first Iranian film to win the Golden Bear award at the Berlin film festival earlier in the year. As it gets its UK release, critic Karen Zarindast discusses this tale of a troubled marriage. Director Bob Rafelson looks back at his celebrated feature from 1970, Five Easy Piece...
Jul 01, 2011•28 min
Comedian Kristen Wiig on Bridesmaids, her rom-com from the female point of view. Co-written by Wiig, Bridesmaids is produced by Judd Apatow, king of the buddy comedies. Andrew Collins assesses his influence. Director Denis Villeneuve discusses his Oscar-nominated film Incendies, about a pair of twins who travel to the Middle East to shed light on their family's complicated past. Viva Riva director Djo Munga reveals his struggle to make the Congo's first gangster film, where there are no studios ...
Jun 24, 2011•28 min
Topping the bill in this week's Film Programme are Kevin Macdonald and Brendan Gleeson. Macdonald discusses his extraordinary documentary, Life in a Day, which he quarried from more than eighty thousand clips submitted via the internet and Gleeson offers insights into Gerry Boyle, the quirky Connemara cop he plays in John McDonagh's The Guard. Francine Stock also talks to the critic, Jane Graham, about Edinburgh's International Film Festival which opened this week and invites the film historian ...
Jun 17, 2011•28 min
The Film Programme this week is all about seeing double - from acting partnerships to technological innovation. Francine Stock will be investigating Francois Ozon's new film, Potiche, which stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu - you could say the Bogart and Bacall of contemporary French cinema - and there's also a revaluation of one of the lost gems of the Eighties, Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way which features Jeff Bridges and Lisa Eichhorn. For those fascinated by the mechanics of cinema t...
Jun 10, 2011•28 min
Documentaries are in vogue. From Man on Wire to the films of Michael Moore they've captured our hearts and our minds. In this week's edition of The Film Programme Francine Stock examines the very latest and very best of the current releases such as Asif Kapadia's much lauded Senna and Jerry Rothwell's subtle account of the family in the age of the sperm bank, Donor Unknown. The BBC's Storyville editor, Nick Fraser, will be paying tribute to two acknowledged masters, the Maysles Brothers, whose w...
Jun 03, 2011•28 min
In the Film Programme this week Francine Stock talks to the screenwriter Jane Goldman about the latest X-Men feature; discusses metaphysics and the intractability of goats with Michelangelo Frammartino, the director of the brilliant and mysterious Le Quattro Volte; and shares in the author and critic Kim Newman's enthusiasm for a comedy thriller featuring Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum and Vincent Price. There's also a master class in the kind of music that makes an action sequence really fizz fro...
May 27, 2011•28 min
Francine Stock has her travelling shoes on for The Film Programme this week. There's a trip to Cannes to hear what's soon going to be showing in an art house near you; there's a journey back in time to assess Karel Reisz' Isadora starring Vanessa Redgrave; and Francine nips down to the Antarctic to savour Herbert Ponting's Twenties classic, The Great White Silence which has just been released in a dazzling new print with a brand new score composed by Simon Fisher Turner. And last but not least -...
May 20, 2011•28 min
From multiplex to art house - Francine Stock talks to the man behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Jerry Bruckheimer and probes him on the reasons for their perennial appeal. There are interviews too with three of the directors behind this weekend's film releases - Emilio Estevez speaks about his movie The Way, staring his father Martin Sheen; Chad's Mahamat-Saleh Haroun explains why he's thrilled to follow his success with A Screaming Man at last year's Cannes festival with a place on...
May 13, 2011•28 min
In the Film Programme this week Francine Stock talks to the director of Atonement, Joe Wright about his new film, Hanna; the charismatic Christoph Waltz, who stars in Water for Elephants, discusses the craft of screen acting; and the film historian Neil Brand reflects on cinema's ironic use of music. There's also a look back to two cult films released in 1968 - Bob Rafelson's Head and the even rarer Joanna, directed by Mike Sarne, which has just been released on DVD. Producer: Zahid Warley....
May 06, 2011•28 min
Ray Winstone and Christian Carion talk to Francine Stock about their new films. There's a preview of the London Australian Film Festival which opens soon at the Barbican and Lucien Castaing-Taylor explains the fascination of sheep and the motives behind the beautiful and unsentimental documentary he and Ilisa Barbash have made about the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous mountains for summer pasture. Producer: Zahid Warley....
Apr 29, 2011•28 min
The Film Programme covers all the tenses this week - past, present and future. Francine Stock talks to the director, Guillaume Canet, about his latest film, Little White Lies, which has sold five million tickets in France alone and is opening in cinemas here now.To look back she's joined by the writer, Paul Mayersberg and the historian, Pasquale Iannone. Paul will be discussing the genesis of Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth while, on the eve of a big Bertolucci season on London's South...
Apr 11, 2011•28 min
