Watch Mike Leigh discuss his debut feature Bleak Moments in the first Q&A session from our Mike Leigh in Conversation season earlier this year
We are joined by writer/director/actress Nana Mensah. Mensah’s first feature film, the award-winning Queen Of Glory, will be screening at the Garden Cinema on 26 November.
The film follows the trials and tribulations of Sarah Obeng, the brilliant child of Ghanaian immigrants, who is quitting her Ivy League PhD program to follow her married lover to Ohio. When her mother dies suddenly, she bequeaths her daughter a Christian bookstore in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx where Sarah was raised.
We were also joined by Lily Parrott, co-director of the Migration Film Festival. We chatted about Nana’s forays into filmmaking, her start as an actress, and its selection as part of the festival.
Find us on the usual platforms. Send us your comments, feedback and suggestions via Twitter @thegardencinema or by contacting us at podcast@thegardencinema.co.uk.
Watch our resident Film Curator Dr. George Crosthwait’s introduction to our final repertory season of 2022: Hollywood on Hollywood.
Our selection of Hollywood’s most bitingly satirical, truly interesting, or blissfully entertaining examples from the industry’s undying focus on itself are now showing until the end of the year.
Mike Leigh at the Garden Cinema discussing the open-ended nature of his films and the reception to his award-winning film Naked (1993) at the New York Film Festival.
Recorded at The Garden Cinema, London on 19 September 2022 as part of Mike Leigh in Conversation: a series of retrospective screenings of Leigh’s films, each followed by a discussion and Q&A with Mike Leigh and Gary Yershon. 8th September – 30th October, 2022
“Over 12 half-hour episodes, we’re seeing a man have a nervous breakdown”.
This week, we talk to journalist Darren Richman about some of his favourite genres and filmmakers.
We discuss the pessimism of Film Noir and the optimism of Mike Leigh, the nature of comedy from Faulty Towers to the Coen Brothers and debate whether or not there is such a thing as “dark comedy” and the depiction of love and compassion in Hollywood films.
You can follow Darren on Twitter @darrenrichman.
Find us on the usual platforms. Send us your comments, feedback and suggestions via Twitter @thegardencinema or by contacting us at podcast@thegardencinema.co.uk.
We chatted with French director Cécile Ducrocq about her first feature film Her Way. We talked about her successful short film Back Alley that served as inspiration for this feature, her longstanding working relationship with actress Laure Calamy (Call My Agent), the conflicting feminist views over prostitution and the film’s focus on the mother-son relationship.
Mike Leigh discusses his battle to maintain final cut on his Palme d’Or winning film Secrets & Lies (1996) against the wishes of the French funders.
Recorded at The Garden Cinema on 13 September 2022 as part of Mike Leigh in Conversation: our ongoing series of retrospective screenings of Leigh’s films, each followed by a discussion and Q&A with Mike Leigh and Gary Yershon.
This week, we speak to Angela Allen who has worked on the film sets of many celebrated films, including The Third Man, The African Queen and The Dirty Dozen, for nearly six decades, overseeing continuity, supervising scripts and advising directors.
Angela shares with us anecdotes and personal stories from her time on and off the set. This podcast episode is slightly longer than usual, so we’ve included a discussion breakdown:
2.04 How to know if a film will be good.
2.45 Angela on the editing process and working with Carol Reed (The Third Man)
7.30 The current fashion for “overcoverage” and working with John Huston
10.25 Zeffirelli vs Huston and filming Elizabeth Taylor
13.58 The auteur theory from France
15.47 Different directors, same scripts
18.25 “We’d have sixteen pages on the fact that Jennifer Jones’s toilet paper had to be pink”, meeting David O’Selznick
21.10 Working with Korda and Spiegel, “the most intelligent producer but a bit of a crook, too”
26.40 Working with Orson Wells and stories from The Third Man
35.36 Arthur Miller & Marilyn Monroe (The Misfits)
39.55 “Paula Strasberg made her as impossible as she was”
43.23 “Do you feel sorry for [Marilyn]? No I don’t”
44.32 Angela on writing a book
Find us on the usual platforms. Send us your comments, feedback and suggestions via Twitter @thegardencinema or by contacting us at podcast@thegardencinema.co.uk.