When I was given the opportunity to interview French composer Alexandre Desplat, the question wasn’t what I would ask him, it was how many questions I would be able to get in. One of the busiest composers in the business, just this year alone Desplat has created the scores for The Tree of Life, A Better Life, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Ides of March, Carnage, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and is already on deck to compose next year’s Moonrise Kingdom. Desplat first caught my attention a few years ago when I realized he was the composer behind both the quirky score for Fantastic Mr. Fox and the epic score for Twilight Saga: New Moon – two very different films with two very different musical tones. Having won Film Composer of the Year at the World Soundtrack Awards, it is clear that the rest of the world is starting to take notice as well. As this year comes to a close, I spoke with Desplat about what inspires him, his composing process, the differences between working on American and French films, and how he balances his various projects while keeping his passion for composing fresh with each go around.

Fans of Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” books will remember Haymitch Abernathy as the drunken battle-to-the-death survivor who is chosen to mentor young Katniss Everdeen as she is forced to participate in the same brutal games that Haymitch won. He’s a character who starts off as comically inept, but who darkens, develops, and is revealed to be quite capable in his own way over time. When it was announced that Woody Harrelson had been cast in the role, I opined that he was a perfect choice, seeing as he was an actor who could merge humor with danger and make it seamless. In a recent interview that the actor did with 24 Frames, he talked a little bit about his approach to the character and revealed that he too thinks that he’s the perfect actor to correctly play both the comedy and the drama inherent in this role. Harrelson said, “It was my objective to give the character as much comedy as I could without it seeming not to fit. I tried to take a certain comedic aspect and give a sense, through that, that he’s been through a lot and is anesthetizing himself as a result of that.” I like his use of the word “anesthetizing” there. When we first meet Haymitch we see him through the eyes of Katniss, who sees him as nothing more than a pathetic lout. But he’s a character who has been though quite a bit and survived, so he couldn’t have always been such [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

We were able to catch up with Smith and gave some news regarding Will Smith and his role in Oldboy, but here is the full report.

The original co-creator and the man at the helm of the film adaptation gave us a look at the philosophy that went into creating a movie that everyone said couldn’t be made.

After seeing the extended footage earlier, and hearing the way these actors approached this film – like a passion project that happened to be backed by millions of dollars -Cole Abaius is even more sold on how fantastic Watchmen is going to be.

Don’t ask me what I was doing driving through the middle of Pennsylvania this weekend. Those picturesque hills and lakes, surrounded on all sides by, well, nothing. I only found out recently that the highway could have been swarming with giant robots from outer space that shape shift into all kinds of terrestrial vehicles fighting a galactic battle of good and evil right on top of my Ford Explorer.