Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Criterion have announced their August line-up (click titles for details):
Watch the full Cannes press conference for Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees:
Mark Harris will write a biography on Mike Nichols, THR reports.
The Telegraph breaks down what it is like to audition for the Coen brothers:
Ethan and Joel Coen head the jury for the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and are working on their new film Hail, Caesar! For that film Dolph Lundgren got “a call out of nowhere”; sometimes, as with Nicolas Cage for Raising Arizona, even superstar actors have to go through as many as 10 auditions to land a role, auditioning as the famously arch and publicity-shy directors sit with wry expressions and chain-smoke camel cigarettes. Here are 27 stories of auditioning for the Coens . . .
Watch Peter Bogdanovich discuss the recent Criterion release Make Way for Tomorrow:
Grantland‘s Larry Fitzmaurice on the career arc of Charlize Theron as an action star:
Fury Road is not the first time Theron has taken the lead in a high-profile action flick, though: That’d be 2005’s sci-fi flop Aeon Flux. The second feature from Karyn Kusama, whose 2000 drama Girlfight made critical waves, Aeon Flux is an adaptation of a dystopian Gen X–era MTV cartoon. The show featured little dialogue and a protagonist who frequently died at the end of an episode. The movie could have been a fascinating break from the oft-masculine action film status quo, but the resulting product was dull and sterile, with a narrative structure that felt incomplete. The film’s production was fraught with issues, too — its distributor, Paramount, changed administrative hands a whopping three times during production, and a brutal editing process (the film was cut from 100 minutes to 82) caused Kusama to nearly take her name off the film.