Steven Spielberg Warned Antonio Banderas on ‘Zorro’ Set in 1997 That CGI Would Replace Practical Filmmaking: ‘Things Are Going to Change Fast’

EastEnders actor Bobby Brazier has revealed the bizarre way that he is preparing to become an "elegant" dancer on Strictly Come Dancing later this year. Bobby has been announced as one of 15 celebrities taking on the dancing challenge in a bid to walk home with the Glitterball trophy. Strictly will return to our screens later this year, but Bobby is already doing some small things that he feels will help him on the show.

Stacey Solomon has cleared things up after receiving a wave of backlash from fans over her luxury family holiday to Turkey last week – sharing that it's a rare occasion she goes away.The TV personality has just returned from the stunning trip with husband Joe Swash and kids Zachary, 15, Leighton, 11, Rex, 4, Rose, 1 and six-month-old Belle, with the family staying at the Regnum Carya resort in Antalya. While many fans have been less pleased with Stacey's posts, accusing her of being 'unrelatable', the star admitted on social media that she has only been abroad 'twice in three years'.

footage captured by fans. “And when those two decided it’s a no — when God says no and when the pilot says no, the answer … I tried to bribe the pilot.”The Grammy winner said poor weather conditions caused the delay in getting to the Big Apple.“And the pilot said, ‘I do want to see my wife tomorrow.’ So tonight we are going to make up for that. I apologize for that a thousand times.” An hour after the concert was scheduled to begin, the “Hello” singer broke the news to fans on Saturday that he would not perform at the historic venue despite his best attempts to fly into the New York area.“Due to severe weather and being unable to land in the NY and surrounding areas, I’m unable to make it to the show tonight,” Richie posted in a statement on X — formally known as Twitter.“I’m so bummed.

‘Codename: Annika’: SkyShowtime Unveils Cast & Trailer

The BBC has found itself in hot water once again over the behind-the-scenes behavior of one of its highest profile presenters.

Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor has explained how he raises awareness for PTSD on his new album ‘CMFT2’.The metal icon was speaking as part of a new interview with NME last week when he recalled the themes in his upcoming solo album, ‘CMFT2’, and his want to raise awareness for mental health issues.In the discussion, the Slipknot singer reflected particularly on one track from his upcoming project ‘Post Traumatic Blues’ – a reflective song that explores both his personal experience of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the extra baggage that follows.“It was one of those songs that I didn’t want to just be about me and my experiences,” Taylor said, explaining the inspiration behind the track.“I wanted it to be a bridge between people who are dealing with PTSD and the people who are desperately trying to understand the nuances of what people have to go through. It’s one of the reasons why it tears families apart and went so undiagnosed for so many years – we never recognised the rainbow of symptoms and issues that come with it.”He continued, adding how the message behind ‘Post Traumatic Blues’ is in line with the non-profit organisation that he launched last year, which is dedicated to providing support for those battling with the condition.“The song is a reflection of what I’ve done with The Taylor Foundation, to try raise money and awareness for these people who have told me that my music has helped them get through tours of duty or get them through night shifts with the emergency services or law enforcement,” he recalled to NME.

Taylor Swift has become the subject of a new university course in Arizona.The course, entitled the Psychology of Taylor Swift – Advanced Topics of Social Psychology, aims to analyse what psychologists can learn from her career.PhD student Alexandra Wormley, who is teaching the course told Arizona State University‘s news site: “The course is basically using Taylor Swift as a semester-long example of different phenomena – gossip, relationships, revenge,” emphasising that “the class is not a seminar on how much we like or dislike her – we want to be able to learn about psychology.”She added that she will be connecting themes from Swift’s various albums to psychology, giving 2017’s ‘Reputation’ as an example.“Taylor’s sixth album, ‘Reputation’, is her comeback after disappearing from the spotlight due to conflicts with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. She enacts her revenge on them – and the broader media landscape – by dropping an incredibly successful album along with a stadium tour,” she said.“The students know this – but do they know why we like revenge? Do they know how we enact revenge? Social psychology can tell us.”It comes after a university class dissecting Swift’s ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ was announced at Stanford University earlier this year.The course, titled All Too Well (10 Week Version), will be available at Stanford University during its upcoming winter quarter.

A former DHL delivery driver who stole thousands of pounds worth of parcels from a depot has been ordered to hand over nearly £25,000. Steven Black - who narrowly escaped a jail sentence in March - was ordered to pay up or face nine months behind bars.

Bruce Willis’ wife Emma Heming Willis has shared a new update amid her husband’s ongoing battle with dementia.The actor’s family first issued a statement in March 2022 announcing that he was retiring as he battled aphasia. Earlier this year, they revealed that his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia.Heming has since served as Willis’ caregiver and has spoken publicly about the emotional struggles she’s faced as his condition worsened, sharing back in March that she has “times of sadness every day”.The model and business owner has now shared a new update which she described as a “care partner PSA”.In an Instagram reel posted Monday (August 14), Heming began by explaining why she had previously asked other caregivers to send her photos of “something beautiful”.“I just think it’s so important for us to break up our thinking, which can feel, for me, very much like doom and gloom,” she explained.“I know it looks like I’m out living my best life.

Selena Gomez and Francia Raisa are hanging out together again!

Tori Kelly is getting ready to hit the road again!

It’s hard to believe That ’70s Show first debuted on Fox almost 25 years ago!

Dennis Harvey Film Critic Though raised in Brooklyn, actor turned producer/director Danny A. Abeckaser was born in Israel. Unfortunately, that birthright isn’t enough to lend authenticity to “The Engineer,” which feels very much like an American B-movie stab at turning Israeli anti-terrorist operations of 30 years ago into formulaic action fodder — without much action, even.

DIY SOS star Jason Liversidge has passed away at the age of 47 after living with motor neurone disease (MND) for ten years. Dad-of-two Jason was diagnosed with the disease in 2013 and appeared alongside his family on the home makeover show in 2015.The family home in Hull was visited by Nick Knowles as the DIY SOS team transformed the home to make it more accessible to Jason. His wife Liz confirmed the sad news of Jason’s passing on Facebook, writing: “Jason Liversidge died peacefully at home surrounded by his girls at 22.59 on the 5th August 2023.

Elizabeth Wagmeister Chief Correspondent Filmmaker Emma Cooper had to turn her notifications off. The director of Netflix’s “Depp v. Heard” knew that by diving back into the trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, her latest project would attract a lot of commentary online.

Team GB swimmer Helen Smart, known previously as Helen Don- Duncan, sadly passed away 'suddenly' at the age of 43, with tributes pouring in from fellow athletes across the world. Helen represented Britain at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 in the 200m backstroke and also won a bronze medal in the same event at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur.The backstroke specialist later retired from the sport and became head of Worsley Mesnes Community Primary School in Wigan. Olympic medallist Sharron Davies was one of the stars to share her sadness, writing to Twitter, "This is very sad news.

Tara Karajica Documentary filmmakers were reminded of the importance of storytelling during a panel discussion about their craft as part of the Sarajevo Film Festival’s industry program Cinelink earlier this week. “It’s about telling the story. It doesn’t have to be a complex story.

Naman Ramachandran World Productions (“Vigil,” “Line of Duty”) is producing a new season of hit series “Showtrial” for BBC One and iPlayer. Writer and creator Ben Richards (“The Diplomat”) returns for the series. In the show, when high-profile climate activist Marcus Calderwood is left for dead in a violent hit and run, he uses his dying moments to identify his killer – a serving policeman.

Holly Willoughby has shared her advice for ‘orgasm anxiety’ as she jokes about having sex with the Duke from Bridgerton. The This Morning star, 42, started her lifestyle brand Wylde Moon two years ago which gives wellness and beauty advice, as well as selling a variety of home products.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” director Christopher McQuarrie revealed before the film opened in theaters that he rejected de-aging Tom Cruise for a 1989-set opening scene. Now on a new episode of “The Empire Spoiler Special Film Podcast” (via /Film), the filmmaker dropped that he considered reaching out to Julia Roberts to de-age her as well for the scene that never happened as planned.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director If you watched “Barbie” and thought it was missing a proper fart joke, then you might’ve loved one scene that Greta Gerwig and editor Nick Houy left on the cutting room floor. In a new IndieWire interview with the collaborators, it’s revealed that “Barbie” had a “fart opera” in the middle of its runtime that got cut because it wasn’t received as well as Gerwig hoped. “We’ve always tried to get in a proper fart joke and we’ve never done it,” Gerwig said.

Director, producer, and writer Steven Spielberg will be honored with the Eva Monley Award from the Location Managers Guild International (LMGI) at its 10th annual LMGI Awards on August 26, 2023 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage. 

Steven Spielberg and Paul McCartney recently attended a screening of Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer together.The pair were spotted outside a cinema in New York’s summer vacation hotspot the Hamptons on Monday (July 24). You can view the pair at the premiere below.McCartney and the famous director have known each other since 1986, when the former Beatle told Rolling Stone at the time that he sought out Spielberg’s advice on the possibility of making a movie about the Fab Four’s career.More recently, Spielberg noted that The Beatles song ‘Michelle’ from 1965’s ‘Rubber Soul’ brought back memories of his first kiss in college.Steven Spielberg and Paul McCartney were spotted at a theater to watch #Oppenheimer in the Hamptons on Monday July 24.

Given the chaos wrought by the SAG-AFTRA strike, Toronto has just announced a surprisingly strong first-wave lineup.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is now playing in theaters nationwide, but one if its most emotional scenes might not have made it to the big screen had the filmmaker not held her ground against studio executives. In several interviews before the comedy’s theatrical release, Gerwig revealed that it was suggested she cut out the scene where Barbie (Margot Robbie) meets an elderly woman on a bench and tells her she’s beautiful. “I love that scene so much,” Gerwig told Rolling Stone. “And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, ‘Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.’ And I said, ‘If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.'”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Lawrence Sher, the Oscar-nominated cinematography for “Joker,” revealed on “The Trenches Talk” podcast that he “never even met” Lady Gaga on the set of the sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” because she was presumably in character the whole time (via IndieWire). Gaga stars opposite returning lead Joaquin Phoenix in the 2024 comic book movie, which casts her as Harley Quinn opposite Phoenix’s Joker. Sher said it wasn’t until he started calling Gaga by the name “Lee” (presumably a nod to Harley) that she even warmed up to him. “I didn’t know Stefani at all,” Sher said referring to Gaga’s real name, Stefani Germanotta. “Strangely, I felt like I never even met her, even during the makeup/hair tests. Maybe it was my philosophy of not trying to get in their space. And then I remember for a week, being like, ‘God, I feel like we are disconnecting. Not even connecting. We are like on opposites.’ And I would say to my crew, ‘Jesus, I can’t crack it. She either hates me or we hate each other. There’s something weird going on here.’”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Samuel L. Jackson told The Times last year that he deserved to win the Oscar for best supporting actor over Martin Landau (“Ed Wood”) at the 1995 Academy Awards. In a new interview with Vulture, the actor said he was robbed of a second chance to win an Oscar just a couple years later with Joel Schumacher’s 1996 legal drama “A Time to Kill,” co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock. The John Grisham adaptation starred Jackson as a man on trial in Mississippi for killing the two men who raped his daughter. “In ‘A Time to Kill,’ when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again — that I will do anything to protect her,” Jackson said. “That’s how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, ‘What the fuck?'”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director As a producer of “Barbie,” it was up to Margot Robbie to convince a studio that her vision for the film would lead to financial success. No wonder the Oscar nominee flat out said during pitch meetings that she believed a “Barbie” movie could bring in $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Such success depended on landing writer-director Greta Gerwig, Robbie stressed to execs. “I think my pitch in the green-light meeting was the studios have prospered so much when they’re brave enough to pair a big idea with a visionary director,” Robbie said in an interview with Collider. “And then I gave a series of examples like, ‘dinosaurs and [Steven] Spielberg’ – pretty much naming anything that’s been incredible and made a ton of money for the studios over the years. And I was like, ‘And now you’ve got Barbie and Greta Gerwig.’ And I think I told them that it’d make a billion dollars, which maybe I was overselling, but we had a movie to make, okay?”

Atom Egoyan will be returning to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to premiere his latest movie, “Seven Veils”.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Ira Sachs’ sexy Sundance drama “Passages” has received an NC-17 rating by the MPA but will be released unrated by MUBI, the distributor confirms to Variety. MUBI called the rating “unexpected” and said it was “deeply disappointed by the MPA’s decision.” “MUBI has officially rejected this NC-17 rating,” the distributor added. “MUBI remains committed to releasing ‘Passages’ nationwide in its original version as the filmmaker intended, with our full backing, unrated and uncut.” “Passages” centers on a love triangle in Paris between a movie director (Franz Rogowski), his artist husband (Ben Whishaw) and a grade-school teacher (Adèle Exarchapoulos, no stranger to NC-17 controversies as the star of “Blue Is the Warmest Color”) he meets out one night. The film includes several sex scenes in which the actors are fully nude, but none of them are salacious or gratuitous. One scene centers on the husbands having sex and is shot in an unbroken long take that runs just over two minutes.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director James Cameron has no intention of using artificial intelligence to write a film script. In a new interview with CTV News, the Oscar winner expressed doubt over AI bots being able to write “a good story.” According to Cameron: “I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it…I don’t believe that’s ever going to have something that’s going to move an audience. You have to be human to write that. I don’t know anyone that’s even thinking about having AI write a screenplay.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Sheryl Crow is one of the more high-profile names calling out country music star Jason Aldean after he dropped the controversial music video for his song “Try That in a Small Town.” Aldean shot the clip in front of a courthouse in Colombia, Tenn., where a Black man was lynched in the 1920s. The lyrics of the song have widely been accused of being pro-gun and pro-violence, but Aldean has denied those claims. “I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence,” Crow wrote on Twitter in a message aimed at Aldean’s account. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting. This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame.”

Steven Spielberg warned Antonio Banderas of the imminent rise of CGI back on the set of 1998 film The Mask of Zorro.Celebrating the 25th anniversary in a recent interview, Banderas reflected on the Martin Campbell-directed action-adventure film – which was produced by Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment – and how the latter told him that “things are going to change”.“Steven Spielberg said to me once when we were shooting, ‘This is probably going to be one of the last Westerns shot in the way the Westerns were shot in the old days, with real scenes with real horses, where everything is real, [real] sword fighting, no CGI.’ Everything was [practical],” Banderas told Yahoo Entertainment.“And he said, ‘But things are going to change. They’re going to change and they’re gonna change fast.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Robert Downey Jr. and Jimmy Fallon crashed a recent episode of “The Howard Stern Show” and revealed they auditioned together for Nancy Meyers’ 2006 romantic-comedy “The Holiday.” Downey Jr. read for the part later played by Jude Law, while Fallon auditioned for Jack Black’s role. Both actors knew they weren’t Meyers’ frontrunner picks at the time, and Downey Jr. was well aware Jude Law was stiff competition. “We both got called in just as seat fillers…[director Nancy Meyers] needed someone to read with the gals and we’re sitting there going, ‘It’s about to happen for us,’” Downey said, adding that he felt he was a “shoe-in” to steal the part away from Law. “And I was like, ‘I’ve got to have a better English accent than Jude Law at this point.’ And Winslet said, ‘That was the worst British accent I’ve ever heard.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll check out now, but I’m taking the gummy bears from the minibar.'”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Cillian Murphy said during an interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast that Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was made on a relentlessly fast schedule. “We made the movie unbelievably quickly. We made it in 57 days,” the actor revealed. “The pace of that was insane.” By comparison, Nolan’s World War II survival thriller “Dunkirk” shot for 68 days, and his massive spy movie “Tenet” shot for 96 days. Murphy is front and center in a majority of “Oppenheimer” scenes, making the shorter shooting schedule all the more intense for the actor. “The sets are huge, but it feels like being on an independent movie,” Murphy added about working with Nolan, which he has been doing for over 20 years now. “There’s just Chris and the cameraman — one camera always, unless there’s some huge, huge set piece — and the boom op and that’s it. There’s no video village, there’s no monitors, nothing. He’s a very analog filmmaker.”

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Michael Cera revealed in an interview with The Guardian that he suffered a career crisis at 19 years old after his career exploded thanks to the 2007 releases of awards juggernaut “Juno” and R-rated comedy blockbuster “Superbad.” Both films made Cera a recognizable actor, but that made life difficult for him in return. “I didn’t know how to handle walking down the street,” Cera said. “Fame makes you very uncomfortable in your own skin, and makes you paranoid and weird. There were lots of great things about it, and I met a lot of amazing people, but there’s a lot of bad energies, too, ones that I was not equipped to handle.”