Latest news with #TheEnglishPatient
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After alleged juror threats, jury finds Harvey Weinstein guilty of sexual assault
June 11 (UPI) -- Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is guilty of sexual assault, a New York jury determined Wednesday amid courtroom chaos when a juror allegedly threatened another. The Manhattan Supreme Court jury of seven women and five men found Weinstein, 73, guilty of sexually assaulting Miriam Haley but acquitted him of the same charge regarding Kaja Sokola, the New York Daily News reported. The jury delivered the split verdict following five days of deliberations. Still to be decided is a charge of third-degree rape of accuser Jessica Mann, who said Weinstein raped her in 2013. Haley and Sokola said Weinstein performed oral sex on them with force and without their permission in separate instances in 2006. A courtroom outburst preceded the reading of Wednesday's verdicts, when a juror reportedly yelled at another: "I'll meet you outside one day." The outburst spurred Weinstein's legal team to request a mistrial, including attorney Arthur Aidala, who accused the juror of criminal "menacing and harassment." Weinstein sat in a wheelchair during the six-week trial after recently undergoing emergency surgery on his heart in September. He also was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in October. After the outburst inside the courtroom, Weinstein told Justice Curtis Farber the jury's actions make it impossible for him to get a fair trial. "We've heard threats. We've heard intimidation. We've heard fights," he said. "This is not right for me, the person that's on trial here." The jury foreman told Farber some jurors were "attacking" each other and said, "I can't go back in there with the other jurors." The foreman first notified the judge of problems among jurors on Monday and said the situation "isn't very good." Farber asked the jury to deliver its partial verdict and told the jurors to go home early to give them time away from each other before resuming deliberating the remaining charge on Thursday. The guilty verdict for sexual assault could put Weinstein in prison for up to 25 years, minus time already served after a 2020 conviction on the charge. Weinstein has maintained his innocence and said all sexual encounters were consensual. A jury trial in 2020 found Weinstein guilty on all charges against him, but an appellate court last year overturned the verdict due to testimony by witnesses regarding unrelated events and allegations. Weinstein co-founded Miramax and won an Oscar for producing "Shakespeare in Love." He also produced award-winning films "Pulp Fiction," "The English Patient" and "Good Will Hunting," among others.
UPI
11-06-2025
- UPI
After alleged juror threats, jury finds Harvey Weinstein guilty of sexual assault
1 of 5 | A jury on Wednesday found former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein guilty on one count of sexual assault but innocent on another count and will continue deliberating a rape charge on Thursday. Pool Photo by Curtis Means/UPI | License Photo June 11 (UPI) -- Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is guilty of sexual assault, a New York jury determined Wednesday amid courtroom chaos when a juror allegedly threatened another. The Manhattan Supreme Court jury of seven women and five men found Weinstein, 73, guilty of sexually assaulting Miriam Haley but acquitted him of the same charge regarding Kaja Sokola, the New York Daily News reported. The jury delivered the split verdict following five days of deliberations. Still to be decided is a charge of third-degree rape of accuser Jessica Mann, who said Weinstein raped her in 2013. Haley and Sokola said Weinstein performed oral sex on them with force and without their permission in separate instances in 2006. A courtroom outburst preceded the reading of Wednesday's verdicts, when a juror reportedly yelled at another: "I'll meet you outside one day." The outburst spurred Weinstein's legal team to request a mistrial, including attorney Arthur Aidala, who accused the juror of criminal "menacing and harassment." Weinstein sat in a wheelchair during the six-week trial after recently undergoing emergency surgery on his heart in September. He also was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in October. After the outburst inside the courtroom, Weinstein told Justice Curtis Farber the jury's actions make it impossible for him to get a fair trial. "We've heard threats. We've heard intimidation. We've heard fights," he said. "This is not right for me, the person that's on trial here." The jury foreman told Farber some jurors were "attacking" each other and said, "I can't go back in there with the other jurors." The foreman first notified the judge of problems among jurors on Monday and said the situation "isn't very good." Farber asked the jury to deliver its partial verdict and told the jurors to go home early to give them time away from each other before resuming deliberating the remaining charge on Thursday. The guilty verdict for sexual assault could put Weinstein in prison for up to 25 years, minus time already served after a 2020 conviction on the charge. Weinstein has maintained his innocence and said all sexual encounters were consensual. A jury trial in 2020 found Weinstein guilty on all charges against him, but an appellate court last year overturned the verdict due to testimony by witnesses regarding unrelated events and allegations. Weinstein co-founded Miramax and won an Oscar for producing "Shakespeare in Love." He also produced award-winning films "Pulp Fiction," "The English Patient" and "Good Will Hunting," among others.
Perth Now
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Juliette Binoche's confidence has grown with age
Juliette Binoche has become more confident with age. The 61-year-old actress explained that she is more accomplished in her profession as she now feels comfortable enough asking directors to give her more time to perfect a scene. Juliette told HELLO! magazine: "When I started as an actress, sometimes I couldn't do the takes that I wanted to do. "At the end of the day, I was replaying scenes over and over, because I felt that I hadn't gone where I wanted to go. I felt guilty and I felt: 'This is horrible.' So critical. "Now, it has come to a time in my life where directors don't dare say: 'No, this is over,' if I want to do another take. Usually, they say yes, probably because of time and because they allow me to go where I want to go." Juliette reunites with Ralph Fiennes in her latest film 'The Return' – almost 30 years after they starred in the Oscar-winning picture 'The English Patient' together – and admits that the experience made her contemplate the process of growing older. The French star said: "The fact Ralph was there, I think it brought depth and emotions, because time goes by." Binoche continued: "When you're coming towards the end – we're not yet at the end, but we're coming towards it – there's a sense of strength and fragility at the same time. "That's the beauty of life. Life is a movement, so it feels as though it's going through us. This fine line of fragility of life... it's a strong feeling." The Oscar-winning actress has urged others to "live truthfully" if they are to get the most out of their lives. She said: "Live truthfully. What you want, what you feel – don't do the thing you don't want to do. Don't say yes to something you don't want. I think that's the first step. And trust; trust what you have in your heart." Juliette says it was "joyful" having the chance to work with Fiennes once more. The 'Chocolat' actress said: "Being on a set, with the camera, is something very specific, very special. "It's different from being in a restaurant and sharing some time together. He's really involved, and I think in that way, we're very much the same."
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The man who changed the way you see (and hear) Hollywood
To describe Walter Murch as the Yoda of editing wouldn't do the man physical justice. Tall, bearded, professorial, the 81-year-old triple-Oscar-winner has more of a wizardly stature. Murch's sagacity in the field, though? Well, pretty much unmatched, it is. Not only the picture editor on such classics as Julia, Ghost and The English Patient, Murch was also the first person ever to be credited as 'sound designer' (on Apocalypse Now), having already mixed Coppola's first two Godfather films and The Conversation. There are few veterans of either discipline who have ever treated their craft more intellectually, or been more generous about passing on their discernment. Murch, who prefers to edit standing up, returns to his elevated desk every few years for a project now, but devotes more of his time to lectures and masterclasses. (He's an honorary associate of the London Film School, and lives in Primrose Hill with his wife, Aggie.) Previous books include his 1992 long essay In the Blink of an Eye, and, in his spare time, a translation of selected works by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, which he released as The Bird That Swallowed its Cage (2012). His new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, is a dip-in-and-out compendium, an evident passion project, the fruit of a life's work in cinema. There are 30 chapters, mostly adapted from lectures he's prepared in the past. All cleave to editing and sound as his main areas of expertise. (A second, longer volume on filmmaking's essentials will focus on the script, the casting and the vision of the director.) Murch goes off on a few technical tangents mainly addressed to film students; 'I am going to avoid keystroke-specific details about different non-linear editing systems' is intended as reassurance. And while his flights of erudition are wide-ranging – a Copernicus analogy, a tribute to the nymph Echo – they can dazzle and befuddle at once. Luckily, the man is a outright genius at what he does, with rare and deep first-hand knowledge of the whole production process. He co-wrote THX-1138 (1971) with George Lucas, and was temporarily fired by Disney while making the audaciously dark Return to Oz (1985), his sole directing job. What happened there was an executive reshuffle, which cast doubt on his vision, and it took phone calls from Lucas and Coppola to restore faith. We learn most from Murch when he digs into the nitty-gritty of particular problems he had to solve. For instance, when Coppola was yanked away from finishing photography on The Conversation (1974), because Paramount had him under the cosh to start The Godfather, Part II, Murch inherited a massive jumble of raw footage and a script that hadn't been completely filmed. There were holes. There wasn't really an ending. His salvage job on that classic of paranoid surveillance, deservedly famous, gets back-to-back chapters, and even film buffs who know the details are treated to a fascinating blow-by-blow account, complete with QR codes to Vimeo links of animated graphics (these are eccentric to see on the page, but strangely charming). Murch reshaped that whole film using sound, trimming subplots, and moving scenes into a revealingly different order. He never even met Gene Hackman, but he was responsible for piecing together arguably the late actor's greatest performance. The same ingenuity marked his work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) and his painstaking restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), when he was hired in 1998 to address all the complaints the late Welles had fired off, in a 58-page typed memo to Universal, when they re-edited it without his approval. Murch used all the available sources – a magnetic master of the audio, and a 15-minute-longer cut found in the 1970s – to refurbish the film in line with Welles's intentions. All of these adventures are charted, and make the book an enthralling treasury for anyone who cares about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. There's a chapter, too, on dealing with Harvey Weinstein, back when he was nicknamed 'Harvey Scissorhands' for his infamous meddling on final cuts (before the considerably greater infamy to come). Murch had helped to restore 'semi-cordial relations' between the bullying producer and Minghella when they couldn't agree on the right way to end The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). For surviving Harvey's post-production tyranny on Cold Mountain (2003), the author gives less credit to himself and more to his beloved border terrier, Hana. The dog pounced into Weinstein's lap in the edit suite. 'Within five minutes his personality transformed, as if he had been slipped a dose of ketamine. All the changes that we had made to the film were now 'wonderful' and we were 'geniuses'.' A dumbfounded Minghella proposed an executive position for Hana at his production company. He was barely joking. It was Murch who wedded Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' to the helicopter raid in Apocalypse Now. When he did so, no one had bothered to check whether the rights to use George Solti's great 1965 recording had actually been obtained. This sent Murch scurrying off to purchase 19 other stereo versions of the piece from Tower Records, to find the closest approach to Solti's rubato. Nothing else worked quite so well. Thankfully, Coppola was able to seek permission from Solti directly. One issue remained: this was so late in post-production that there wasn't time to source the magnetic masters for a state-of-the-art mix. 'What you hear in the film,' Murch explains, 'is a tape transfer from the LP disk, spread in re-recording to six channels of sound as if it were coming from those military speaker-horns that you see sticking out of the side of the helicopters. But perhaps this contingency lends a certain serendipitous truth to the scene, since Colonel Kilgore himself, now revealed to be a connoisseur of music, would doubtless have also copied his tape directly, as we did, from Solti's Decca disk.' Other figures in cinema history have expanded the parameters of how we see or hear it. No one but Murch has welded sight and sound with such intuition for both.
The Independent
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Juliette Binoche on reuniting with Ralph Fiennes: ‘I know his desires. I know his dark sides'
Juliette Binoche is chilly. It is a sunny day in central London, but she has bundled herself up in a sturdy leather jacket and ordered a hot chocolate. 'Thin or thick?' our waiter asks. Binoche seems thrown by the question. Thick, she says, ambivalently. The waiter's eyes light up: 'Ah, the French way!' Binoche shrugs. As if anyone needed a reminder. Binoche is to France what Matthew McConaughey is to Texas, or Sean Connery was to Scotland – that brilliant face of hers, round and lovely, may as well be printed on the national flag by this point. Binoche has spent more than four decades as one of the world's most adventurous movie stars; putty in the hands of auteurs such as Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Godard, Olivier Assayas and Michael Haneke. The confectionery romp Chocolat and the grand love story of The English Patient – for which she won an Oscar in 1997 – may have leant into her gamine luminosity, and are likely her most well-known films, but they're mere snapshots of a more colourful, mercurial career. Her ashen grief in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Blue avoids histrionics – there is a slight quiver here, a flush of devastation there. There is potency, too, to her reckless, sophisticated sexuality in Denis's Let the Sunshine In, and her carnally minded scientist in the filmmaker's sci-fi oddity High Life. Haneke seems to bring out the icy prickliness in her, in movies like Code Unknown and the frightening Caché. When she is on film, you never know which Binoche you're going to get. Likewise, in person. The 61-year-old is fiercely intense, slamming her hands down on the table between us at one point. Soon after, she is giggly and upbeat. The mere act of her sitting down feels grand and theatrical, as if it's been scripted by a dramatist. She pulls off her jacket (too hot), then slips it over her back (too cold). She takes an almighty gulp from her hot chocolate as soon as it arrives, and burns her mouth. Interviewers have found Binoche incredibly open, spilling out facts about her love affairs (among her notable former partners are the filmmaker Leos Carax and, reportedly, Daniel Day-Lewis, while she has two children, one with the scuba diver André Halle and the other with the actor Benoît Magimel). Others have remarked on her reticence. Whichever Binoche you get, she'll certainly keep you on your toes. We are here to talk about The Return, a subversive spin on Homer's Odyssey that marks her third film with the actor Ralph Fiennes. They first appeared together as Cathy and Heathcliff in a maligned adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in 1992, then played a traumatised nurse and disfigured convalescent, respectively, in The English Patient. Much of the power in The Return, which casts the pair as lovers separated for decades by war, stems from their shared history as actors: we've watched them fall in love once before, share a kind of love story elsewhere; now they reunite in a world of loincloths and savagery. 'We've remained friends over the years,' Binoche says. 'So we came to this story with luggage.' She laughs. 'I moved myself, honestly. Because we were playing these archetypes but also playing human beings, and it was the two of us bringing that humanity to them. We were Odysseus and Penelope, yes, but we were also Ralph and Juliette.' I believe there is a God up there, but it cannot just be belief. It needs to be concrete for me – real, embodied. Otherwise it is just ideas I ask how they've evolved in the years since they first met. 'I see evolution more with Ralph than I see with myself,' she thinks. 'I know him better now. He's let me in closer to him. I know his desires, I know his dark sides and his beauty.' She won't be broached on the specifics, but says she adores him. 'He knows his limits, and he's not afraid to talk about them with me. It feels like we are from the same family in a way.' Fiennes has spoken about being more guarded and grumpy when he was a young actor, particularly on sets, while Binoche would seek rapport and agency. Many early interviews described her as lightly challenging for her directors – Claude Berri once dropped her from a film mid-production for taking issue with choices made by her character. Today, though, Binoche disputes that she was like that early on, and that it actually took time for her to gain such confidence. For The Return, she asked director Uberto Pasolini to allow her total free rein for three takes of each one of her scenes, in exchange for his having control over her performance from take four onwards. He could then pick and choose which Binoche he wanted in the editing room. 'I would never have dared ask that as a younger actress,' she says. 'But it is essential to me. When a director has strict ideas about how they want a character to be, I struggle. As an actor, it is dangerous to be a prisoner of someone else's thoughts. Acting needs to be unpredictable. It needs to be about discovery in the moment. It is almost a call of the spirit. Or a prayer.' She feels everything, she says. When I ask if she and Fiennes have ever, on some level, fallen for one another while playing out love stories over the last 30 years, I am surprised by her sudden candour. 'Of course we fell in love,' she says, firmly. 'Your body, your eyes, your skin, your being – it has to believe it, and you have to make the audience believe it.' Her hands become animated as she explains further. 'In the realm of acting, you do believe what you're feeling, every single step. But it doesn't mean that you are lovers outside of it.' She senses my disappointment – that I briefly thought I'd got a scoop. 'I understand it from your perspective, though,' she says. 'I remember asking Meryl Streep, 'Did you fall in love with Robert De Niro [on the set of The Deer Hunter ]? How could you resist him?' She said, 'I love him, I'm really deeply in love with him, but when it comes down to life, it's another story.'' Binoche smiles. 'That's acting.' The young Binoche, who was packed off to boarding school at the age of four after her parents divorced, saw the world of acting as a space of stability. She talks lovingly of sets, and the importance of experts in different mediums (actors, costume designers, lighting technicians) all coming together for the sake of a common goal; she repeatedly refers to Fiennes as 'a brother'. Stardom happened quickly: minor parts in films and on stage led to André Téchiné's Rendez-Vous in 1985, in which her character – a young actor – flitted between toxic men. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where she played Day-Lewis's tormented lover, thrust her onto the world stage in 1988. For all her international success, though, she has never been drawn to American cinema for long periods of time. This has partly been a positive – little feels quite so jarring as witnessing the elegant Binoche die of radiation poisoning in Gareth Edwards's Godzilla reboot, or romance Steve Carell in the forgotten comedy Dan In Real Life. But there was always a sense that the rhythms of American celebrity were slightly alien to her sensibility. Just look at her Oscars speech, which clocks in at around 25 seconds ('It must be the shortest ever!') and feels incredibly, unusually guileless. She is surely one of the few winners to explicitly state mid-speech that she expected the award to go to a different person in her category. Lauren Bacall, whom she mentioned by name, was indeed the favourite to win that year for Barbra Streisand's quirky romantic drama The Mirror Has Two Faces. She speaks of that period as if it were a strange dream. 'I definitely enjoyed the attention [ The English Patient ] was getting, and myself as well,' she says. 'And I felt like I needed to give something back to Anthony [Minghella].' The filmmaker was known to bond strikingly with his actors. (He directed Binoche once more, in 2006's urban drama Breaking and Entering, and died in 2008 at the age of 54.) She says that at first she had a difficult time on the set of The English Patient. 'I was trembling all the time. I was so insecure. I was aware of the chance I'd received by getting to play that part, and I would find myself just crumbling. But he helped me become more comfortable, more creative. He took such care of me, so when the Oscars happened, I played the game for him.' In conversation, Binoche is loose with her words but quickly dismisses attempts to probe deeper than the surface. Pick up on particular phrases she uses (the 'game' of Hollywood, or her 'crumbling' on sets) and a barrier appears. Ask about the phone call she received from Quentin Tarantino in which he confessed that he'd burst into tears when she died in Godzilla, and she can only faintly remember it. She has lately bemoaned the state of the French film industry, but she shuts down wider conversation about it today. 'You have to create from within yourself and not worry about the outside,' she shrugs. I ask about her faith – she is a Christian and has said she reads the Bible every day – and whether it impacts her professional choices. 'I try not to separate my life from my work,' she says. 'It needs to be one. I believe there is a God up there, but it cannot just be belief. It needs to be concrete for me – real, embodied. Otherwise it is just ideas.' It is similar to what she said about acting – about the freedom she requires from her directors; how she and Fiennes didn't just act their love stories but felt those love stories. Of course she turned the ordering and consumption of a hot chocolate into a full-bodied performance piece. She's Juliette Binoche.
