Category: Entertainment

Catherine O’Hara didn’t just have notes for the writers of “Schitt’s Creek” — she would rewrite entire scenes “from top to tail,” according to Dan Levy.

O’Hara died on Jan. 30 in her Los Angeles home after a brief illness. She was 71. On Monday’s episode of podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” Levy recalled working with his friend and co-star on the award-winning sitcom

O’Brien told Levy, “I remembered thinking it was such a nice thing for Catherine to have that role during that last decade of her life, where she was playing someone who was beloved, because people love the character and they’re really getting to see yet another way that she’s really funny. … It was such a nice thing for her that you made happen.”

Levy responded: “She made it happen. I just made sure that I was prepared. That’s really what it came down to. Like so much of Moira Rose was Catherine.” He recalled Seth Rogen once telling him that O’Hara would send emails the night before a shoot that said “Gentlemen, some thoughts about the scenes we’re shooting tomorrow,” and “it would be a full top-to-tail rewrite.”

“And as soon as he said it, it was like: I got those emails. The ‘gentleman’ — it always started with ‘gentlemen, some thoughts’ — and then it was an unbelievable rewrite of the scene. And that is what the amazing, all the great Catherine roles were when she found collaborators that wanted to give her that platform,” Levy said.

Levy continued, “You know, because she had so much to offer, and she was so, the way that she thinks is so on another level that as a writer, you can’t get into her head. So all you can really do is set the table, wait for the email, ‘gentlemen, some thoughts,’ read the scene and say, ‘Fuck yeah.’ You know, and like, just be prepared.”

Levy also revealed that he often stops and watches clips of O’Hara from the show when he sees them online.

“The crazy thing about it is that I’m still like, you know, I go on Instagram and her face is there and Moira’s clips from the show are all over the place,” Levy said. “And I, every time I see her — even though I wrote the thing — I stop and I watch, and I’m watching not for anything that I did, but I’m watching because she is impossible not to watch. And she’s impossible not to love and she’s, it’s impossible not to laugh with her in anything she does. And it’s, it is like an unimaginable loss. She was just an irreplaceable talent and an irreplaceable person.”

On the podcast, O’Brien asked Levy if he owns the costumes from “Schitt’s Creek,” noting that Sarah Jessica Parker owns the dresses from “Sex and the City.”

Levy responded: “Are you fucking crazy? Do you understand how little that show cost? We had to sell every piece of clothing to pay off the debts that the show had, even in our sixth season. We got no cash. It was like slim pickings from the very beginning, and then incremental sort of, I think it’s like a standard 15%, whatever it is, that your budget can increase, but 15% on like a pile of shells and a feather is not giving you much.”

Although they had to sell most of the “Schitt’s Creek” wardrobe, Levy said, he kept four “looks” from his character, as well as O’Hara’s Moria Rose and Annie Murphy’s Alexis. “Unfortunately, my dad’s suits, we can just buy in a store. So I have some,” Levy said. “The retrospective will be small, but I do have some of the looks.” Said O’Brien, “So the museum is going to be like a little nook in a mall.” To which Levy replied, “It’ll be a corner.”

O’Hara starred in “Schitt’s Creek” alongside Dan Levy, Eugene Levy and Annie Murphy. The show followed a wealthy family who became penniless overnight after falling victim to fraud. “Schitt’s Creek” premiered on Canadian broadcaster CBC in 2015 and ran for six seasons until 2020. In the U.S., the series is available to stream on HBO Max.

Dan Levy had previously said he was considering a “Schitt’s Creek” sequel series before O’Hara’s death.

Watch Levy’s appearance on SiriusXM’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” at this link.

A new Martin Scorsese film titled “Aldeas, the Final Dream of Pope Francis” is set to launch with a private screening at the Vatican on Tuesday, which marks one year since the pontiff’s death.

Scholas Occurrentes, a global Catholic educational movement founded by the late Pope Francis, has released some first-look images from the film that Scorsese and his team shot across Italy, Indonesia, the African country of Gambia and Vatican City. According to its synopsis, “Aldeas” features Pope Francis’ last, never-before-seen testimony, recorded shortly before his passing.

“At its heart is a film in which entire communities come together to create and share their own stories, including a return by Martin Scorsese to his grandfather’s village in Sicily, where he works with local young people to make a film of their own,” the synopsis says.

“Aldeas” is described as “a powerful convergence of Pope Francis’ and Martin Scorsese’s visions of art, spirituality and humanity,” moving “beyond traditional cinema, transforming storytelling into an act of resistance, identity and purpose, and positioning film as a force for a new culture.”

The film’s promotional materials go on to say that “Aldeas” is rooted in Pope Francis’ vision and was described by Francis as “an extraordinarily poetic and deeply transformative project, because it reaches the very root of human life: our sociability, our conflicts and the very essence of life’s journey.”

The statement continues: “Pope Francis understood that cinema would play a fundamental role in making the culture of encounter a reality. Working from the peripheries, the project creates space for people to tell their own stories, celebrating cultural diversity while fostering intercultural and intergenerational dialogue. It is a new kind of cinema, born from a new kind of education, helping shape a new culture.”

On April 21, exactly one year after Pope Francis’ passing, “Aldeas” will be screened just a few steps from where he lived and where his life came to an end.

“This film is a tribute to the Holy Father,” Scorsese said in a statement. “It honors his memory by embodying the spirit of his ministry and his dream of creating an ever more human culture. At this moment in history, I believe that is not only a dream, but a necessity.”

In an interview last June with Variety at the Taormina Film Festival Scorsese spoke about the Sicilian component of this project “In a way I think that for me that [Sicilian connection] combined with the religious experiences, it has propted a curiosity and a search as to my own identity. As to who I am,” he said.

“Aldeas” is produced by Aldeas Scholas Films in association with Scorsese’s own Sikelia Productions and Massive Owl Productions. Producers include Scorsese, Teresa Leveratto, Ezequiel del Corral and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, with Lisa Frechette, Romilda de Luca, Ariel Tcach and Ariel Broitman serving as executive producers. 

Directors Clare Tavernor and Johnny Shipley, together with producer Amy Foster, lead the creative team. Acclaimed cinematographers Ellen Kuras and Salvatore Totino also contributed to the film. 

The project features collaborations with internationally recognized artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, including actor Babou Ceesay, actress Happy Salma and Oscar-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore, representing Africa, Asia and Europe, respectively.

The film and the broader project are independently financed by international sponsors and donors, ensuring that all proceeds are reinvested in sustaining and expanding the initiative globally.

LBI Entertainment and Double Agent are handling sales on “Aldeas.”

It was one of the most anticipated events of the 41^st Guadalajara Film Festival (FICG) where Chile is the country guest of honor.

On April 19, director Pablo Larraín and his producing partner brother Juan de Dios Larraín, founding partners behind Chile’s most successful production company, Fabula, sat down with Netflix’s Francisco Ramos, VP of Latin American Content, to discuss how their company has grown into the international player that it is now, with offices in Santiago, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Madrid and perhaps Bogota, Colombia, in the not so distant future.

Throughout the conversation, they reflected on how Chilean and Latin American cinema has grown from a small, resource-limited industry into a globally visible creative force.

Ramos asked a question in many people’s minds, how a country so remote and relatively small could have such a strong creative output. “We’ve got you here, Maite Alberdi, Sebastián Lelio —but beyond that, there are so many other filmmakers who’ve emerged over the past 30 years. And it’s really interesting to ask why. Why are there so many compelling voices coming out of Chile?

He went on: “It makes you wonder about the kind of environment that fosters that level of talent. Because it’s not just directors—there are producers, cinematographers, designers, writers… all these roles branching out and feeding into each other, forming that ecosystem you need for an industry to really grow and thrive.”

The question stumped them, but only to some extent. Pointing to Chile’s rich culture of painters, poets, writers and more recently, its growing cinematic sensibility, Juan de Dios said: “I do think the visual side – the graphic sensibility—plays a big role. Chile is almost like an island: on one side you’ve got the Andes, on the other the Pacific, and then the desert up north. It’s a pretty isolated place. Growing up there, any time you wanted to do something or go somewhere, it usually meant getting on a plane. We grew up in a much more remote environment, and I think that creates this urge to go out into the world, to be seen, to be validated abroad. That pushes you, it shapes you, gives you an extra drive.”

“But honestly, that’s just a theory – I’m not even sure I fully believe it myself,” he added, drawing laughs from the audience.

Pablo, whose body of work has expanded from local stories of resistance like “No” to his English-language trilogy of three iconic women, Diana Spencer, Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas, concurred: “I think it’s amazing that we can be so diverse while being such a small country, and at the same time so hard to define. I don’t know if there’s a clear explanation for it. We’re also very close to it – we’ve been immersed in this world for so many years and we’re part of it ourselves.”

He cited Chile’s revered documentarian Raúl Ruiz, who described it as “a country that resists classification, where categories don’t quite stick.” “And within that, there’s also a lot of internal tension – we challenge each other, there’s a kind of constant self-scrutiny, a restlessness.”

Juan de Dios Larraín also pointed that it was precisely the size of Chile’s market that has forced them and their peers to look outward in order to make their films.

“Co-production isn’t just helpful—it’s essential to Chilean cinema. There’s really no other way to do it. You can’t finance a film purely through the Chilean market; the numbers just don’t add up. So from early on, going out and seeking funding became a fundamental part of the process – it’s built into the system”

“In a way, that limitation forces growth. It pushes you to adapt, collaborate and think beyond your own borders from the very beginning,” he noted.

Pablo Larraín added: “We’ve produced a lot of films – close to 50 – with different directors. And looking at both the most successful ones and the ones that didn’t quite work, I keep coming back to the same idea: the key is supporting the director.” Fabula has backed the likes of Lelio who won Chile’s first International Feature Oscar for his transgender drama “A Fantastic Woman” and Alberdi, twice nominated for her documentaries.

Juan de Dios also pointed to another key factor that has contributed to the company’s growth, television, with advertising still a strong pillar of support.

He said: “The first 10 or 15 years, we were a very independent production company, with a strong editorial identity, working with directors from all over and driven by very auteur-led ideas. Then we gradually shifted into something more collective – almost like treating filmmaking as a shared sport, if you will. At the same time, there was this push to access larger budgets, which led to our first production with Lelio.”

“Around that same time, television also entered the picture as a major force. And that combination created a kind of perfect storm for us as a production company. It pushed us to evolve, to expand from being a relatively small outfit operating in just a couple of countries into something more structured – more “corporate,” for lack of a better word. If it weren’t for television, the company probably wouldn’t have grown the way it did. And in a way, the Oscar gave us a kind of legitimacy or identity that helped us take that next step at exactly the moment when the opportunity was there.”

The Guadalajara Film Festival (FICG) runs over April 17-25.

“Double Freedom” (“La libertad doble”), Argentine director Lisandro Alonso’s sequel to his milestone debut “La Libertad,” has been acquired for worldwide sales by Paris-based Luxbox. The deal comes in the run-up to May’s Cannes Film Festival where “Double Freedom” will world premiere at Directors’ Fortnight.

Bowing at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2001, “La Libertad” moved waves for what came to be called its minimalism, which can also be seen as an  affirmation of cinematographic pleasures other than a propulsive plot. Championed by other cineastes such as Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, this rebellion against usual cinema came to characterise part of a new Latin American cinema celebrated by its fans for its creative freedoms. 

“Double Freedom” picks up the story woodcutter Misael, 25 years after he was seen in “La Libertad.” Two key questions posed by the film is how Miseal (Misael Saavedra) and indeed Alonso have evolved as a character and filmmaker respectively.   

Misael begins “Double Freedom” still living his solitary existence felling trees to sell for a few pesos. An unexpected event, however, upends his existence and adds a distinctive political edge to “Double Freedom.” The film itself also delivers a clear statement by Alonso about the need for – and ways to achieve – creative independence.

“25 years after ‘La Libertad,’ Lisandro Alonso reunites with Misael in a political and powerful gesture,” Luxbox CEO Fiorella Moretti told Variety. “The result is as moving as it is unforgettable. We are proud to continue our collaboration with Lisandro, a director with such a singular vision.” 

Notably, “Double Freedom” is produced by Fernando Buscuñan’s Chile-based Planta which is also behind a second Directors’ Fortnight title, Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s “La Perra.” Chilean Augusto Matte also lead produces out of his London-based Dartford alongside Alonso’s label 4L. 

“Double Freedom” is co-produced by Les Films Fauves, The Match Factory, Cimarrón, Pulpa Film and Carte Blanche.  

“We worked with Luxbox on ‘Simon of the Mountain’ and the trust we built there made this decision very natural. They understand how to move a film like this through the market and they bring a real commitment to the work. We are very happy to be reuniting with them on ‘Double Freedom,’” said Bascuñán. 

‘Fiorella has been working alongside Lisandro Alonso for many years, supporting his films across distribution, international sales and production,” added Matte. “No one understands his cinema better, the audience it speaks to and what it takes to bring that work into the world. Having her alongside our artistic producer Ilse Hughan gives ‘Double Freedom’ the best possible hands it could be in.”