Tag: Entertainment-Variety

Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey came together for a one-of-a-kind town hall conversation hosted by Variety and CNN. The program, which aired Feb. 21 on CNN, is now available to stream on Variety‘s YouTube channel, along with bonus footage.

“A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” which was filmed before a live audience of University of Texas at Austin’s students, marked a reunion for Chalamet and McConaughey, who played son and father in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic “Interstellar.”

In the 90-minute conversation, the actors discussed their memories from “Interstellar,” Chalamet’s role in “Marty Supreme,” their approaches to acting and more. Chalamet and McConaughey also answered questions from audience members throughout the evening.

“Man, that’s remains my favorite project I’ve ever been in,” Chalamet told McConaughey about “Interstellar.” “I think it’s your most fantastic role. I know you were coming off ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but that movie, to me, was the origin point in seeing how you carried yourself on set, how seriously you and Christopher Nolan took the work. It gave me a license. Coming out of high school, it’s hard to take yourself super seriously. You can feel like you’re wasting time or stuck-up or something. And I remember you had a yoga mat, and you’d be working out and sleeping on set. It was all very strange to me. But it was super inspiring. I just can’t thank you enough for being warm to me at that time, when you had no reason to be warm to me. Christopher as well. It just changed my life, man.”

McConaughey responded, “Thanks for that, man. You were pretty easy to be warm to. I remember you had what I felt like was a feverish curiosity at that time. You were figuring some stuff out, but it seemed obvious to me that no matter what you were dealing with, you were going to make your way. And I believe you were in some sort of limbo. You were choosing — something about music, and somebody was putting pressure about, ‘Maybe go this way,’ and you wanted to go this way.”

At one point, Chalamet shared new details about “Dune: Part Three,” which opens in theaters this December. He teased that the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy is the “eeriest one” and a “big swing.”

Chalamet later added, “I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”

Watch “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” below.

In bonus footage from “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” the two actors discussed how studios have begun catering to people who are using their phones while watching movies or TV shows.

“In this day of shorter attention spans and vertical 12-second spots, are we losing the patience for Act 1?” McConaughey said. “Because it’s the first thing that gets cut. It’s the first thing a studio wants to get rid of. I’m seeing Act 2, more and more, start on freakin’ page 12 [of a script]. I’m seeing 10-part series where — bam! — Act 1’s over 32 minutes into the opening episode, and you’re off on the conflict right away. It feels abbreviated to me.”

Chalamet responded, “I saw an article about a Netflix production guideline — not for all movies, I don’t want to speak disparagingly, but — where they want their biggest action set pieces up front. The logic used to be: Save your big action set piece for the end of a movie. You save the fireworks for the end. But now they want something up front.”

Chalamet was referencing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s recent interview with Joe Rogan about their Netflix movie “The Rip,” where Damon revealed the streamer’s strategy for making action movies. “The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon said. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”

But Chalamet hasn’t lost hope. “I also think there’s sort of a reverse thing going on where people are desiring things that are more patient and that pull you in,” he said. “I just saw another article that says Gen Z is a bigger moviegoing audience than millennials. ‘Frankenstein’ was a hugely popular movie this year; I didn’t think that pacing was extraordinarily fast, but it pulled people in.”

“Some people want to be entertained quickly,” Chalamet continued. “I’m really right in the middle, because I admire people [saying], ‘Hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive. We gotta keep this genre alive.’ And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it — like “Barbie,” like “Oppenheimer” — they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it.”

With a laugh, he concluded: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore’ — all respect to the ballet and opera people out there.”

Watch the extended version of “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” on Variety‘s YouTube channel or on the CNN app.

On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Variety’s Michael Schneider speaks to “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking” exec producer Bill Lawrence on the relaunch of “Scrubs” on ABC and Hulu. Lawrence explains how he’s busier than ever in his career — after surviving “a couple of five- and eight-year gaps when I couldn’t get anything going on TV.”
 

More to come

Listen to Daily Variety on iHeartPodcasts, Apple Podcasts, Variety’s YouTube Podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.

“Zootopia 2” introduces Gary De’Snake (voiced by Ke Huy Quan), a reptile whose home and community are destroyed by the evil machinations of the lynx family. His heroic actions — along with those of returning protagonists Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) —ultimately foil the villains.

But how do you make a pit viper empathetic?

Production designer Cory Loftis explains that Gary’s design evolved from being intentionally ambiguous — do we trust him? — to feeling instantly sympathetic. Initially, Gary’s eyes were placed more on the sides of his head. “But very quickly, the story started to evolve where it’s like, we want you to love this guy right out of the gate.

So we rotated his eyes to the front of his head so he could look right at you, and you could empathize with him straight away. We rounded his eyes out. We decided not to lose all of the reptileness, so we kept the long vertical pupils, but they’re softened a bit.”

Snakes don’t have eyelids, so Gary’s eyes protrude from the top of his head “more like a frog than a snake,” Loftis says. “So it’s not pure snake anatomy, but we built this thick brow over the top that he could push down onto his eyes to make lid-type shapes.”

As for the village where the snakes once lived, art director Sang Jun Lee proposed that the houses be interconnected to convey a strong, close-knit community. This made their destruction — and the community’s separation — feel all the more devastating. Scale motifs appear throughout both exteriors and interiors. “We made sure the counter heights were all low, because they would sort of slither up to them,” Loftis notes. The tables are curved, with natural scoops for snakes to settle into.

“We also ensured that all the handles on doors and cabinets could be wrapped by a snake’s tail, with pull handles on almost everything,” he says.

“And we really tried to think about where they would sit. Chairs didn’t seem particularly useful, so there are lots of cushions and poufs for them to curl up on.” Loftis adds that some story artists contributed clever ideas as well, including ensuring that every area had a snake accessible ramp so characters could slide up without bumping over stairs.

“There are slides everywhere so they can move around,” he says. “I have a very inventive art team. They really went to town on the mission and came up with some great ideas.

Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey came together for a one-of-a-kind town hall conversation hosted by Variety and CNN. The program, which aired Feb. 21 on CNN, is now available to stream on Variety‘s YouTube channel, along with bonus footage.

“A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey,” which was filmed before a live audience of University of Texas at Austin’s students, marked a reunion for Chalamet and McConaughey, who played son and father in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic “Interstellar.”

In the 90-minute conversation, the actors discussed their memories from “Interstellar,” Chalamet’s role in “Marty Supreme,” their approaches to acting and more. Chalamet and McConaughey also answered questions from audience members throughout the evening.

“Man, that’s remains my favorite project I’ve ever been in,” Chalamet told McConaughey about “Interstellar.” “I think it’s your most fantastic role. I know you were coming off ‘Dallas Buyers Club,’ but that movie, to me, was the origin point in seeing how you carried yourself on set, how seriously you and Christopher Nolan took the work. It gave me a license. Coming out of high school, it’s hard to take yourself super seriously. You can feel like you’re wasting time or stuck-up or something. And I remember you had a yoga mat, and you’d be working out and sleeping on set. It was all very strange to me. But it was super inspiring. I just can’t thank you enough for being warm to me at that time, when you had no reason to be warm to me. Christopher as well. It just changed my life, man.”

McConaughey responded, “Thanks for that, man. You were pretty easy to be warm to. I remember you had what I felt like was a feverish curiosity at that time. You were figuring some stuff out, but it seemed obvious to me that no matter what you were dealing with, you were going to make your way. And I believe you were in some sort of limbo. You were choosing — something about music, and somebody was putting pressure about, ‘Maybe go this way,’ and you wanted to go this way.”

At one point, Chalamet shared new details about “Dune: Part Three,” which opens in theaters this December. He teased that the final film in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi trilogy is the “eeriest one” and a “big swing.”

Chalamet later added, “I didn’t want to be complacent about a single moment. Everything was sacred, and it was my last time doing a ‘Dune’ film, so I really wanted to treat it as sacred. Because people can get complacent, but I was more intense on the third one. It felt like that was the natural momentum, so I wanted to push against that as hard as I could.”

Watch “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event: Timothée Chalamet and Matthew McConaughey” below.

Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Perfect Neighbor,” will hold special screenings at Stanford University on Feb. 25 and Fordham University School of Law on March 4.

Directed by Geeta Gandbhir, “The Perfect Neighbor” tells the story of a minor neighborhood dispute in Florida that escalated into deadly gun violence when Ajike Owens, a young Black mother of four, was shot and killed by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz. The documentary is made from police bodycam, ringcam, and cell phone footage, as well as recorded 911 calls.

The film highlights Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws, which allow individuals to use deadly force if they believe it necessary to prevent death or bodily harm, as invoked by Lorincz during her trial.

Stanford Law School will hold a screening and discussion with Gandbhir and producer Nikon Kwantu on Feb. 25 at 5 p.m. The event will be held in collaboration with the American Constitution Society, the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Women of Stanford Law, and the Middle Eastern and South Asian Law Students Association.

Fordham Law School’s Center on Race, Law and Justice will hold a screening and Q&A with Gandbhir and producer Alisa Payne on March 4 at 5:30 p.m.

Leading up to the 2023 shooting, Lorincz called 911 consistently over a two-year period, complaining that Owens’ children and other neighborhood children were making too much noise and playing on “her property.” In an interview with Variety, Gandbhir described the pace of the film as “a slow burn.”

“You have these revelations that make you deeply uncomfortable throughout,” said the filmmaker. “It’s a horror film in many ways.”

Originally premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, “The Perfect Neighbor” was acquired by Netflix in February 2025 for a reported $5 million. The documentary debuted with 16.7 million views in its first three days on Netflix.