Gary Lockwood isn’t a name that your average filmgoer might remember, but to film buffs and genre fans, he is legendary. He was the astronaut “murdered” by HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and played Lt. Cmdr. Gary Mitchell, an officer given god-like powers, in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot that Gene Roddenberry made for “Star Trek” (“The one that got it sold,” as Lockwood puts it). He’s been retired for fifteen years now but spoke to Videodrone in support of the home video debut of his 1963 TV series “The Lieutenant,” the show that made him a leading man for the first time. It was also the first series created by Gene Roddenberry and Lockwood talks about Roddenberry, Kubrick, how his start acting career sprung from a stunt gig, and his favorite movies (hint: one of them is in the new Sight and Sound poll of the Best Films Ever Made).

What are you watching?

I’m not a person who has a lot of DVDs. I have maybe four or five. I have “Kill Bill 1″ and “2,” “2001,” “Blade Runner,” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I really enjoyed “No Country for Old Men” a few years back. I grew up on a ranch and going to the movies was salvation.

“The Lieutenant” was not your first TV show.

Yeah, I did a show called “Follow the Sun” where I played a young newspaper reporter, back in the days when you did 40 shows in one year.

How did you get the lead in “The Lieutenant”?

Basically they just invited me to come to the studio. They sought me out. I didn’t audition for it. I think it was body type. I always tell people this and it gets boring for them to hear it, but most of the time you’re making a movie or television show, you’re shooting reactions, and if you have a character that looks like what he should be, then your story moves forward. And I think there’s something to typecasting.

How did you  get your start acting?

I went to see about doubling an actor in a movie called “The Tall Story” (1960) starring Jane Fonda and Tony Perkins [as a college basketball player] and my legs were much too big. Tony Perkins had pencil legs and I had powerful legs, so the director [Joshua Logan] turned to the technical director and said “This guy looks like he could be Slavic,” and I am Polish and German. So the director turned to me and said, “Have you ever done any acting?” I said “No,” but I’d always been a bit of a character. I was a quarterback and I happened to be an art and English major — there were only two of us on the football team in that department — and so I had been reading all my life, and acting was really kind of a piece of cake. He asked me if I could use a Russian accent and they gave me some sides [lines] and the next day I came back and read them and I sounded like a Russian. So I started acting.

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Matthew Modine as Pvt. Joker

Matthew Modine has been making movies for thirty years. After making his big screen debut in a small role in John Sayles’ Baby It’s You, he quickly became one of the most in-demand young actors of his generation, with major roles in Robert Altman’s Streamers, Alan Parker’s Birdie, and Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, before landing the leading role in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The film’s 25th Anniversary is marked by a special edition Blu-ray release, with the new documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes and contributions from Modine himself. Photographs that Modine took on the set of the film are included in the disc’s booklet and he wrote an essay for the edition.

I spoke with Modine by phone in June, catching him between a visit with a programmer developing an iPad app based on his book “Full Metal Jacket Diary” (“The reason I’m excited about it is that he just showed it to me this morning”) and a meeting with John Scully (“the man who fired Steve Jobs from Apple”), who he’s portraying in the upcoming Steve Jobs film. Since then he’s been seen by millions of viewers in “The Dark Knight Rises” and premiered a new film short film at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, and he’s currently developing his second feature as a director.

We talked about Kubrick, Altman, making movies, and what he’s been watching.

What are you watching on home video?

The only thing I watch on television is sports and right now I’m enjoying the Oklahoma Thunder is one game to nothing against the El Fuego. That means The Heat, if you don’t speak Spanish. I don’t like saying the name of the team because I really, really can’t stomach them. So it’s just El Fuego to me. [Note: the interview was conducted weeks before the Olympics]

Do you still go to the movies?

Absolutely. I go to see as many movies as I can. That’s my profession. I go to see as much theater as I can – that’s one of the pleasures of living in New York, we have the greatest theater in the United States – and watch as many movies as I can.

You had taken substantial roles in films before Full Metal Jacket, but taking the lead role in a Kubrick film must have had an effect on your career.

It’s flattering when any director asks you to be the star of their film and there’s a tremendous responsibility that comes with that invitation. But yes, absolutely, to be invited to work with someone who had previously worked with Jack Nicholson onThe Shining” which I really enjoyed, who worked with George C. Scott and Peter Sellers, two actors I think are just brilliant, James Mason, Kirk Douglas twice, Malcolm McDowell…. To work with Stanley and know his history as a filmmaker, it was a tremendous invitation and a wonderful opportunity. Not just as an actor and an artist, but as a man, having the opportunity to work with somebody who is going to teach me about  filmmaking, who is going to teach me about writing, who is going to teach me about being a human being. This extraordinary experience, this brief moment that we have that we share on this planet, I think of all the people that I’ve met and worked with in my life, probably Stanley understood the brevity of time better than most.

How did you get the part and what was the audition process like?

There was a funny thing about Full Metal Jacket. You were supposed to send a videotape audition to an address in London. And I didn’t. It’s not that I couldn’t afford one, really, but I didn’t have the ambition to go find someone with a video camera or spend some money to hire a casting director  to videotape me, because video in 1984 was something that was not so readily available like it today. To tape yourself, you had to make a real investment of time and effort and money. And  I didn’t. I was busy working and I thought that things were coming to me pretty easily so I didn’t videotape myself and it was quite by accident…

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By her own admission, Susan Sarandon considers herself a character actor. She’s interested in being challenged by roles, in playing different characters, and in the messages of her films. After a career spanning over forty years, five Oscar nominations, and a Best Actress Oscar for “Dead Man Walking,” it’s still a challenge to find those roles. And yet she does. Case in point: “Jeff Who Lives at Home” (on Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount), where she plays the widowed mother of two estranged grown sons whose lives have gone off track.

Videodrone talked to Ms. Sarandon about working with directors Jay and Mark Duplass, her own life as the mother of two sons, and what she’s watching when she’s not making movies.

What are you watching?

I don’t have a television set so all I watch are things I get. I just finished watching a number of seasons of “Breaking Bad,” which I thought revolutionizes television. I haven’t watched a lot of television so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I was blown away by the acting and direction. It was major for me. So I tend to get things like that, I get a lot of documentaries, I watch the TED talks and animal specials. I tend to see movies in the theater, especially foreign films that I think maybe won’t be available later. I like the experience of being with a group of people, watching movies that way.

That’s an experience that is being lost as more people watch movies at home, on disc or On Demand or streaming video. There is something special about the shared experience of watching a film in a theater with an audience.

I like that, and I like being able to lose yourself in a big, dark room. I think that films have a responsibility and have the challenge of reframing people’s perspective, even if it’s just briefly, and I think it’s easier to do when you’re outside of your living room.

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Brad Bird and Oscar

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Paramount) is fun. It’s that simple. The fourth film in the high-tech super spy series finds Tom Cruise’s Agent Ethan Hunt a little older  and a little more mortal, scrambling to put together a rogue mission off the grid with a makeshift team, unreliable equipment, and no tech support. The set pieces are spectacular and the ingenious locations are like nothing we’ve seen in spy movies before, but a lot of the film’s success can be attributed to the director: Oscar-winner animation director Brad Bird, making his live action debut.

Cruise showed a lot of faith in trusting a first-time live-action filmmaker with his blockbuster franchise and Bird came through with a clever, inventive, high-energy trip. While he had never directed a film like this, Bird was no stranger to big, complicated productions thanks to his days at Pixar, and more importantly, Bird had proved himself one of the best storytellers around, no matter the medium.

To mark the release of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol on Blu-ray and DVD, Brad Bird took the time for a few brief phone interviews. Very brief, it turned out, for a filmmaker who has plenty to say about making films. As usual, we began by asking him what he’s been watching.

What are you watching?

The last one I saw was actually a movie that I’ve seen several times before but I love it, which is “The Red Shoes,” which is just a great, weird, fantastic movie. It came out on Criterion Blu-ray fairly recently and I just showed it to my sons, who had never seen it before. They’ve been prompting me to show them movies that I think are great, so every once in a while I’ll get them in there and I’ll show them “Yojimbo” or something that they would not normally see and they are loving it.

As an animation director, your involvement begins at the story level. When did you get involved in the process of developing “Mission: Impossible.”

J.J. and Tom had been working with the writers, Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, for almost a year on this script but the script was in happy flux when I showed up, meaning that I asked to see a script and J.J. kept dodging me and then finally I said, “Look, if I’m going to do this, I gotta see a script, ” and he said, “Sure, I’ll show you a script. Which one do you want to see? I have fifteen scripts and we just keep rewriting it and redoing it and throwing new ideas in there.” He said, “It’s probably better if I just pitch the movie and then we talk about set pieces and we can talk about where it’s going because it’s in constant flux.” So I got sold the overarching idea of the story that Ethan Hunt is thrust together with a team, rather than a team he picks, and then that team is isolated. They had the ideas for the set pieces in but other than that, it was up for grabs, and some of the set pieces, like the car park thing at the end, they literally had a photo of a car park, a really unusual car park in, I think it was Germany, and they said, “He chases the bad guy and they have a fight in a car park.” And that’s literally what I had, so I got to really shape, shot by shot, what that car park would be: First they do this and then they kick the case under the car and then they do this. I got to basically riff on that very basic idea.

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Before he embarked on his impressive but unfinished adaptation of “Lord of the Rings,” maverick American animator Ralph Bakshi createdWizards (Fox), a futuristic fantasy set in the aftermath of the apocalypse. A mix of Tolkein-esque quest epic and seventies attitude, it was like a PG version of an underground comic book made for the big screen, and was Bakshi’s first effort to reach a mainstream audience. It was a hit that got overlooked when another 20th Century Fox science fiction film, a little thing called Star Wars, opened just a few weeks later, but a cult following kept it alive through revival house, college campuses, and video releases ever since.

Wizards debuts on Blu-ray this week in illustrated Blu-ray book with commentary by director Bakshi and the excellent interview featurette “The Wizard of Animation” (both originally produced for the DVD release).

To mark the film’s 35th Anniversary, Ralph Bakshi, now 73 years old and long retired from animated features, talked to Videodrone aboutWizards, his career, and what he’s been watching from his mountaintop home in New Mexico.

What are you watching?

Ralph Bakshi: Japanese, Korean, and oriental films off of Netflix. I don’t remember the names, but the ones that are subtitled are the good ones and the production values and the shooting and the camerawork is incredible. And there are also some low budget detective films that they do. I think it’s sensational filmmaking. I’ve been watching an awful lot of that, and I’ve been watching British street films, films made in England about the working classes and their problems, and they’ve been very, very excellent. I’ve been doing a lot of that because they are films I never would have gone to the movies to see. I’m watching no animation.

You say you’re not watching animated films. What’s it like revisiting “Wizards” again after all these years.

How do I say this? My complete budget on “Wizards,” to make the entire film, is spent in a Pixar film in the first minute and a half. What they spend on a minute and a half of a Pixar film, I made my complete movie for. It’s hard looking at these movies that had so many problems. I had no money to do it the way I saw it in my mind, so I get very edgy looking at it. The fact that people are still finding it and enjoying it after all these years is kind of stunning to me. To be quite frank, I thought that they would never be shown again, they were so low budget, so I’ve come to the conclusion that though the work is important and quality is important, what films say might be more important than how they look and what their production values are. The Pixar films and the Sony films and the Fox films are all done incredibly well, visually, and it’s so hard to compete against that with my $1 million “Wizards.” But somehow it does and I don’t quite understand that except maybe it’s content. They’re hard to look at, is what I’m trying to say. They’re hard to look at it.

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Todd Haynes’ 1999 film “Velvet Goldmine” (Miramax) reimagines the Glam rock era and the iconic influence of David Bowie through the kaleidoscopic lens of “Citizen Kane” and the fictionalized persona of rock legend and bi-sexual pop icon Brian Slade (played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers). A young, fresh-faced Christian Bale plays the reporter digging into the mystery of Slade’s rise and fall and Ewan MacGregor almost steals the film as the punk pioneer Curt Wild (equal parts Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain), the genuine article to Slade’s calculated, coifed image of glitter stardom.

It’s a blast, with bouncy music, flamboyant costumes, a fab sense of period, and a complex narrative interweaving of flashbacks, shifting perspectives, public personas and private personalities with Slade as the film’s slippery Charles Foster Kane. But it’s also a study in reinvention and the fluid definition of identity and sexuality embraced by the subculture around the music, the first youth movement to openly accept and embrace ideas of bisexuality and homosexuality.

Haynes revisited the film in November when he recorded a brand new commentary track with producer Christine Vachon for the film’s Blu-ray debut and talked with Videodrone about the revisiting the film, its reverberations with his other fictionalized biography “I’m Not There” and, as always, what he’s been watching.

What are you watching?

Todd Haynes: I’ll tell you one really cool thing I watched. I recently met Stephen Sondheim, who is an *intense* movie buff, and he asked me what my favorite Douglas Sirk movie is. And he said, “I have mine,” and I said, “Well, I want to hear yours.” And he said, “Mine is ‘Scandal in Paris’ from the late forties,” which is one of his very first English-speaking films that Douglas Sirk directed in the United States. You can get it on Amazon. I had read about the movie and I had seen a lot of more obscure Sirk films over the years but it was fantastic. It knocked my socks off. And you can see a connection between the great director Max Ophuls and Sirk like you never have before in this film. That was a complete surprise.

Otherwise I have been watching some of the screeners of new movies that have been coming out bit by bit. I just watched “Young Adult” last night, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Are you a voting member of the Academy?

Haynes: I am.

What are some of the films this year that you have most liked?

Haynes: I had the treat of watching “Hugo,” Scorsese’s new 3D movie, on Thanksgiving Day at the Ziegfeld Theater. And it was just such a complete and total treat, just visually in its aesthetic, just such a tribute to early cinema and the origins of what obviously started to make Scorsese’s mind tick with this love poem to the Méliès story. That was a really fun one. But I’m still waiting to see some serious films that are still emerging. It seems like it’s backloaded this year from Christmas so there are still a lot of stuff I haven’t seen that I’ve been hearing about.

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John Landis had his finger on the pulse of pop culture – and in particular the intersection of comedy, horror and music – from the late 1970s through the 1980s: “Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers,” “An American Werewolf in London,” the epic music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” This week “¡Three Amigos!” (HBO) debuts on Blu-ray, a film that was (at least by Hollywood standards) a “disappointment” upon original release but found an audience on home video.

All these years later, this affectionate tribute to old Hollywood and innocent matinee westerns is just as funny, thanks to a knowing script (by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman), engaging performances (by Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short) and Landis’ savvy direction, which is larger than life in all the ways that those original westerns were. Landis has a real affection for this film and shared in a brief interview where we discussed the film, his love of horror movies and what he’s been watching.

MSN: What are you watching?

John Landis: I just was given the new Blu-ray of “Ben-Hur” which I’m very curious to watch because I think the most gorgeous Blu-ray I’ve ever seen is the DeMille “The Ten Commandments.”

MSN: That’s a stunning disc.

JL: It’s magnificent. I was really blown away by it.

MSN: Comedy is such a product of its time. In the eighties, you and Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis dominated with madcap antics and energized comedy. Now there’s a whole new comedy aesthetic, which is focused on gross-out humor and arrested adolescence. What do you think has changed?

JL: A lot has to do with the movies the studios are making. It’s a different time and they won’t take the risk that they used to take. Things are a lot more conservative. But having said that, I thought “Bridesmaids” was funny. I mean it wasn’t perfect but it made me laugh and that’s what you want from a comedy.

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Ken Burns has spent all of his thirty year (and running) career as a documentary filmmaker turning his camera back on the history of the United States: the defining people, events and accomplishments that defined, divided and united the country. From “Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Statue of Liberty” to “The Civil War” and “Jazz” and “The National Parks” (to name but a few), he has tackled subjects small and expansive with the same focus: finding the human stories that illuminate the history. His latest production, “Prohibition” (PBS/Paramount), presents a complex story of unlikely allies, disastrous political misjudgments and destructive consequences, and a political climate that is eerily familiar today.

Ken Burns

The three-part documentary debuted over three nights on PBS and arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, October 4. Videodrone spoke with Burns about “Prohibition,” his fascination with American history and what he’s been watching.

What have you been watching?

Ken Burns: Not much. I’ve been working 24/7 promoting the “Prohibition” series. Basically I’ve been watching “Boardwalk Empire,” which is a kind of cousin of what we’ve done, a dramatic, fictionalized version of the themes that we tackled with our documentary on “Prohibition.”

What does Ken Burns pull out of his DVD library to watch to relax after working on a documentary all day?

I’m a child of R&B and rock and roll, I was born in the early fifties and grew up in the late fifties and early sixties and that was my music, but in 2001 we released a 17 ½-hour history of jazz and everything is filled with jazz, I listen to it all the time. I like the old stuff, I like the new stuff, I listen to Louis Armstrong, I think he’s God. I think he is to music in the 20th century — and I didn’t say jazz — I think he is to music in the 20th century what Einstein was to physics, what Freud was to medicine and what the Wright Brothers are to travel, that is to say, a quantum leap in our musical understanding.

My father told me stories of my grandfather, who as a child in the Dakotas would accompany my uncle as he made deliveries of moonshine that his family made from a still in the hills.

Burns: You know what? We traveled all around the country on this promotional tour, every walk of life, and I don’t know anybody that doesn’t have some related prohibition story. It’s really wonderful. I love the way our films — “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The National Parks” — but this one in particular draws out stories in people quite apart from our own stories that we’re trying to tell.

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Kristin Wiig, one of the only reasons to check in with “Saturday Night Live” in recent years, has been turning bit parts into defining comedy moment in films as “Ghost Town” and “Adventureland,” not to mention a half dozen Judd Apatow comedies. Now Wiig takes charge as co-writer and star of “Bridesmaids,” a boys night out comedy for women that defied all industry expectations, becoming a smash hit and the most successful comedy to date for producer Apatow. It’s also a necessary reminder that, Hollywood’s obsession with making films for adolescent males aside, effective comedy cuts across gender lines. Especially when you throw in a little bathroom humor. “Bridesmaids” hits DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download this week and Videodrone checked in with the multi-talented Ms. Wiig to talk movies, DVDs, Jon Hamm and doing nasty things in bridal shops.

Kristen Wiig

MSN: I just listened to the “Bridesmaids” commentary track, with you, director Paul Feig, co-writer Annie Mumolo and most of your fellow bridesmaids.

Kristen Wiig: Uh-oh.

It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun.

Wiig: We did. I’m actually nervous because I haven’t heard it yet. Did I say anything to embarrass myself?

Let’s just say that you didn’t say anything that was more embarrassing than anything you said in the movie.

Wiig: There! Okay, that’s fair.

You recorded that commentary track the day before the film opened, when you had no idea that it was going to be huge.

Wiig: Yeah, that’s crazy. I was probably very, very nervous. It’s probably why we were drinking wine.

If the commentary track is anything to go by, it sounds like you all had quite a time on the set as well.

Wiig: We did. It was like summer camp for three months. It was so fun and the cast made it so special. We just got lucky. All the girls all fell in love with each other and, yeah, those are my girls.

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The director talks about gods, superheroes, ‘Wallander’ and what he’s been watching at home

Kenneth Branagh may not be the first name that comes to mind to direct a superhero film, but when that hero is Thor, the Norse god of thunder, who better than a director steeped in the Shakespeare and the classics? Which is not to pigeon-hole Branagh, whose heart belongs to Shakespeare but whose career spans stage, cinema and TV and all manner of projects, including a portrayal of Sir Laurence Olivier in the upcoming feature My Week With Marilyn and another BBC series as the gloomy Swedish detective Wallander. To mark the release of Thor on DVD, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D this week (reviewed on Videodrone here), we talked with the Branagh about gods, superheroes and what he’s been watching at home.

What have you been watching?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, I can tell you I’ve been watching Thor for the past few days because I was checking on how the DVD worked out. Ah, what a question, because my mind’s gone blank now. Just the other day I watched for the second time Taken, which was on BBC. My wife is a fan of that movie and I’m a great fan of Liam Neeson so I enjoyed that very much.

I’m quite a fan of that movie and the Luc Besson-produced European action films in general. They remind me of what American action films used to be like in the seventies and eighties, when they were on a budget.

Branagh: You’re absolutely right. And I think they have a distinct style and flair to them. That film has a great economy and knew exactly what it was and the action elements of it were most impressive.

I enjoy seeing older actors play action figures defined by experience. What would you think of becoming one of Besson’s action heroes?

Branagh: I’ve just been making my TV show Wallander and we just shot an episode of it, a ninety-minute film based on a book called “The Dogs of Riga,” in Latvia. By the time we were a week into it and I was running around for the fourth or fifth day with a gun in the market in Riga, someone said, “Hey, this is like The Bourne Ultimatum. I like this. I want to see this film.” So maybe that’s my audition for Besson.

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See my review of the home video release of Thor here at Videodrone

Stephen Frears

The cover of the DVD and Blu-ray release of Tamara Drewe reads: “From the director of “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons“,” which is true and certainly something to brag about—director Stephen Frears has a rich career and those are two of his most celebrated films—but doesn’t quite communicate the flavor of this mix of British pastoral and modern sex comedy. This is more like the Stephen Frears of “High Fidelity” and “Mrs. Henderson Presents” (the latter a lovely little piece which will live in infamy for offering a not-quite-so-lovely Bob Hoskins nude scene). The 69-year-old Mr. Frears, speaking by phone from his home in England, agreed. “It is a lighthearted film,” he says, but hasn’t much of an opinion either way on the advertising. “I just make them and let my personality come out in different ways.”

In fact, he doesn’t really seem to like talking about his films. A thoroughly pleasant and friendly gentleman, he is also modest and reticent to go into detail about the film. But he does have a sense of humor and a sense of pride in his co-stars. “They are very, very good actors,” he explains when I ask about the actors. “I mean, I don’t know. It wasn’t difficult to achieve an ensemble.” Perhaps not. There certainly is an ease that comes across in the little community that Tamara Drewe creates. I guess when you have the career that Stephen Frears has, you don’t feel the need to explain yourself. It’s all there on the screen.

What’s in your DVD player?

“Only Angels Have Wings.” I was asked to talk about Howard Hawks.

“Tamara Drewe” was based on a graphic novel, but understand it ran in the newspaper The Guardian before it was published in graphic novel form.

It ran in The Guardian as a strip, where I remember seeing it, and then it became a book, where I didn’t see it, and then it turned into a film script.

In an interview on the DVD, you said that you had read the strip and enjoyed it, but it was the script that excited you about the project.

I didn’t think you could make a film of it until I read the script.

Continue reading at MSN Videodrone.