Category: Interview

Angelina Jolie| Wild Angel

Posted January 17, 1999

Her portrayal of drug-ravaged a supermodel Gia put her on the map, but with a scene-stealing turn in Playing By Heart and rolls in two more upcoming films, Angelina Jolie is getting a chance to spread her wings. Angelina Jolie is publicly desecrating herself. Her eyes fluttering under tightly closed to lids. She lies face down on the table in front of a window, her jeans rolled low enough to reveal her black underwear. Her white T-shirt is raised, exposing the shallow curve of her back. Her feet, clad in black cowboy boots, are demurely crossed. A group of schoolboys […]

The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats

Posted January 1, 1999

I had the honor of meeting and getting to know Allen Ginsberg for a short time. The initial meeting was at a soundstage in New York City, where we were both doing a bit in the film The United States of Poetry. I was reading a piece from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, the “211th Chorus,” and as I was rehearsing it for camera, I could see a familiar face out of the corner of my eye: “F** me,” I thought, “that’s Ginsberg!” We were introduced, and he then immediately launched into a blistering rendition of said chorus, so as to […]

Claire Forlani| Death Becomes Her

Claire Forlani| Death Becomes Her

Posted November 1, 1998

Meet Claire Forlani, a thoroughly enchanting young actress who, in a career-making role, shows Death — Brad Pitt, that is — what life is all about. While Claire Forlani and Brad Pitt were looping Meet Joe Black, tagged as perhaps the most expensive (at a reported $90 million) Hollywood romance ever made, “she was obsessing about something,” director Martin Brest says. “I was teasing her about it, and I said, ‘C’mon, Claire, don’t turn into Frances Farmer on me!’” Surprisingly, Brest’s euphemism for nutcase did not go whizzing past the young actress’s radar. Quite the opposite: Forlani let everyone know […]

Brad Pitt| A Commanding Lead

Posted November 1, 1998

Between this month’s Meet Joe Black and the upcoming Fight Club, Brad Pitt covers both poles of his career, swinging from romance to visceral drama. At the 34-year-old actor’s Los Angeles home, Pitt firmly charts his own course, combining the courtly derring-do required of a $17 million sex symbol with the tasteful domesticity necessary to design an engagement ring or plan a Monet garden. So what is he like? Surprisingly, irresistibly… true – a man whose openess and unspoiled sense of decency are precisely the reasons why he is able to come across to millions of moviegoers as “the real […]

Brad Pitt| Walking The Walk

Posted November 1, 1998

All of this hot California day, I have been on the phone with Brad Pitt’s publicists, trying to determine when and where my meeting with their client will take place. First, it was going to be a four o’clock, in a coffee shop. Then 4:30 at a restaurant. Then we rescheduled for five o’clock, at his place. Then word came that Brad wanted me to swear not to write about how he lived or what his house looked like. In fact, could I not tell anyone I had been to his house at all? At this, I balked.  And so […]

Winona Ryder

Posted December 1, 1997

The most respected young actress in Hollywood is also the most unpredictable. Witness her turns as a monster masher onscreen in Alien Resurrection and as a prancing spice girl in real life. In the past year, Winona Ryder has given two eulogies. “I’ve dealt with loss for the first time,” she says, “and it’s so… strange.” One morning, sitting over breakfast in her San Francisco house, Ryder mentions the first. It was for Timothy Leary.  Three months after I was born, my dad, who was Tim’s archivist, went to see him in Switzerland, where Tim was living in exile after […]

Brad Pitt| Rebel Star Top Dog

Posted April 1, 1997

Getting to Brad Pitt is a pain in the ass. First of all, he is in the Canadian wilderness, where he is filming Seven Years in Tibet. So you take a six-hour flight from New York to Vancouver. Then there is another flight up to the mountains on the terrifyingly named Wilderness Air. After you land on a tiny airstrip, you must wait for a van to pick you up, so you wander down a long road, over to a diner situated in the middle of a piney field. As a waitress slaps a burger on the table, she remarks, […]

The Mystery of Christian Bale

The Mystery of Christian Bale

Posted March 24, 1997

Bale’s Hollywood saga is unique, a subtly managed trek up astonishingly steep acting challenges and neatly over the barbed hurdle of puberty, all transpiring more or less outside the eye of publicity and gossip. Bale has survived with his sanity, privacy and gift intact. He stands poised on the verge of one of the most promising adult careers of his generation. “I’ve never worked more than once a year,” Bale tells me in Paris, where I meet up with him. “In between I’ve had nothing written about me whatsoever. It was definitely a strategy. I like not being in magazines, […]

Johnny Be Good

Posted February 24, 1997

For all his offbeat roles Johnny Depp has the elegance of the silent-screen star and a decidedly European cut. Kevin Sessums finds the nomadic founder of Hollywood-style grunge making his directorial debut, The Brave, and settling into a $3 million 1930s mansion. Johnny Depp sits in the middle of the Mojave. His shoulder-length hair has been dyed a shade or so blacker than the Hills that pass for mountains over in South Dakota. Movie makeup darkens his skin. Those hood­ed, haunted eyes of his concen­trate on the screen of a tiny monitor. Physically spent after many weeks of directing The […]

Jeremy and Jason London

Jeremy and Jason London

Posted February 1, 1997

Much has been made of the seemingly interchangeability of Jeremy and Jason London, the drop-dead-handsome, 24-year-old identical twins who have Hollywood calling. When Jason had to pull out of NBC’s acclaimed yet short-lived series I’ll Fly Away, Jeremy was hired to take his place. When PBS decided to film a finale to the canceled show, Jeremy was unavailable, so the producers called on Jason. Nonetheless, one is struck more by the twins’ dissimilarities. Jason, known for his roles in Dazed and Confused and Safe Passage, is rail thin and brooding, retaining more of his native Oklahoma twang than his brother. […]