Kyle Buchanan

What would you do if everyone was talking about a movie you hadn’t seen?

Let’s say that movie was “The Farewell,” an indie smash from this summer about the members of a Chinese family who try to keep their beloved grandma from learning about her terminal-cancer diagnosis.

And now, let’s say you’re the actress who played the grandma.

Yes, Zhao Shuzhen may be earning Oscar buzz for her work as the matriarch Nai Nai in “The Farewell,” but that doesn’t mean she’s actually been able to watch the movie she stars in. “I didn’t know it was such a phenomenon!” the 76-year-old Chinese actress told me one night in early November, after she had reunited with her director, Lulu Wang, and co-star Awkwafina to introduce the film at an awards-season screening in Beverly Hills.

It was Shuzhen’s first trip to the United States, and she’d been caught off guard when people at the screening recognized her. Many were on their second viewing of “The Farewell,” which is two more times than Shuzhen herself had been able to see it. “The attention, the praise, it’s inconceivable to me,” she said through a translator. But at least Shuzhen had a good excuse for being late to the party: “It hasn’t come out in China yet,” she told me, “and I’ve been so busy filming.”

Though “The Farewell” was Shuzhen’s U.S. debut, she is well-known and oft-booked in China, where she appears in several television dramas a year. “Some dramas require the grandma to have a bigger part, and other dramas don’t use the grandma as much,” she said. But in her 70s, she was happy to be so prolific. “To have started at 16 and now be at an old age and still be acting, I’m just grateful for it.”

That night in Beverly Hills was the first time Awkwafina had seen Shuzhen since they finished filming last year. As the older woman spoke, Awkwafina gazed at her reverently. “I’m getting a little emotional just sitting with her right now,” Awkwafina said. “After what’s happened with this movie, I want her to know that she’s loved here.”

It was a dynamic not unlike the one shared by their characters in “The Farewell,” where Awkwafina plays Billi, a New Yorker who returns to Changchun upon learning of her grandmother’s diagnosis. Billi’s parents ask her to keep Nai Nai in the dark about the state of her cancer — they believe that if she’s told she has mere months to live, she will lose all hope and succumb — but Billi struggles to deceive the matriarch she so adores.

Regal in an aubergine coat and pearl necklace, Shuzhen beamed as Awkwafina and Wang caught her up on the film’s success: Since its July release in the United States, “The Farewell” had become one of the year’s highest-grossing indies. “Having her here is a reminder that the film became so much bigger than we thought,” Wang said. “I’ve been all over the world talking about it and it’s been released in multiple languages,” she added, saying she was tickled by Shuzhen’s surprise. “She’s like, ‘I haven’t seen the film yet. I hope it’s good!’ ”

The women all laughed, but Wang was sincere. “It’s all really validating,” she said. “We know what it took to make this movie. It might look effortless and natural, but when I watch the film, I see every single battle that went into it.”

When Wang first tried to mount “The Farewell,” financiers balked at the all-Asian cast, tricky mix of tones and potential language barrier — 80% of the dialogue would be Mandarin — and recommended that Wang add more romance and English. Still, Wang had based the film on her own family’s true story, and she was determined to hold fast to what had really happened.

“It was something else that was driving me, something intangible,” she said. “But it can be really hard to listen to that voice and trust yourself.”

Many of those same conflicts will come up again now that “The Farewell” is being positioned for an award-season run. Should the movie be categorized as a comedy or drama? And with its mixture of Mandarin and English, should it be defined as a foreign-language film or an American indie?

For the Golden Globes, “The Farewell” has been ruled a contender for the foreign-language film award, and the arcane rules of that competition restrict such movies from vying for the top comedy and drama trophies. The Oscars have no such stipulation, but the academy doesn’t classify Wang’s film as an international-feature contender, since it was produced in the United States.

These rules can feel arbitrary and out of step with the realities of an increasingly global film landscape, and Wang noted that the academy had recently come under fire for rejecting Nigeria’s submission for the international-film Oscar because it contained too much English. Pointing these things out sometimes made Wang feel self-conscious: “You go, ‘Oh no, I don’t fit in!’ ” Still, she was happy to be part of the complicated conversation about what constitutes a foreign film, and through whose eyes.

“Until you have a real film that challenges the traditional categories and the ways of looking at things, you’re not having those conversations in a specific way,” she said.

A WEEK LATER, I caught up with Wang and Shuzhen at another award-season event, this one held at a trendy West Hollywood hotel. As people rushed Shuzhen for hugs and selfies, Wang gave me an important update: “Zhao,” she said, “has seen the movie.”

Across the room, Shuzhen confirmed the news. The distributor A24 had set an intimate screening of “The Farewell” for her and her daughter, and “I was very moved,” Shuzhen said.

Her translator, Eugene Suen, leaned over to me. “She didn’t say this, but I can tell you, because I sat very close to them: They were all wiping away tears,” he said. “When I saw that, I was like, ‘OK, I think she likes it.’ ”

Over the past several days, Shuzhen had taken to the awards circuit with gusto, doing countless interviews and turning up at several important soirees: At an event held by the group that votes for the Golden Globes, she had even met Robert Pattinson. Her first American trip was about to end, but now that she had fully come to understand what “The Farewell” meant to audiences, she wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye.

“Honestly, I don’t want to leave,” Shuzhen said. “People here are so nice, I’m going to miss everyone.” Nearby, a man cradling a champagne glass and a Chihuahua discreetly took her picture.

What if the Oscars give Shuzhen a reason to return to this crazy city in the form of a supporting-actress nomination? I asked her if she’d be willing to make some more room in her schedule, and she blushed.

“I guess I would say I’m hoping for it, I’m longing for it,” Shuzhen said. “And if it doesn’t happen, I can just dream about it.”

This article originally appeared in

Best Supporting Grandma? For 'The Farewell,' an Oscar Campaign Begins

(The Carpetbagger)

Q: The first “Terminator” was comprised almost entirely of intense, emotionally wrenching night shoots. How did that affect you?

A: It becomes much more your reality than your daytime life. It was hard on the psyche — it really was. You’re on the run, losing your mother, your lover, your roommate for three months. When I finished, I fought some depression and kept dreaming about the Terminator being at my parents’ house.

Q: How did you get along with James Cameron on the first film?

A: We didn’t particularly like or dislike each other on the first one. I had one huge explosive moment the only time I asked to see playback — Jim was one of the first directors to pioneer it. Usually, I don’t need that, but there was this tough day I think I lost some of my confidence, and when I asked to see playback, he said, “We don’t have time. Move on!” And I absolutely flipped out.

Q: What happened?

A: I took him off set and said, “If you want to see a human being on screen, then you need to treat me like one.” Really, when I finished that movie, I thought, “Well, that man is on the side of the machines.” This is someone who spends his spare time trying to figure out vertically landing helicopters — that’s where he goes as a vacation for his mind!

Q: When Sarah Connor became a buff warrior woman in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” did it change the way you related to your character?

A: Truthfully, it felt a lot better than the first one because I was playing an empowered woman. That was so much better than playing the victim who’s terrified all the time. Also, I’m kind and compassionate, but I’m not really gentle. I would hug my kids when they were babies and they’d go, “Ow!” There’s something in me that’s incredibly fierce that I have to work against, but that fierceness works for Sarah Connor.

Q: Where do you think your fierceness came from?

A: I remember in the early days of my career, one director said, “Wow, you come quick to this anger stuff.” My father died when I was young, and my mom was left widowed with four very young children. Basically, I think she was overwhelmed. She definitely fought depression, and we just really weren’t allowed to express ourselves. I asked her once, “Why weren’t we allowed to speak and express our anger?” And she said, “Well, there were four of you and only one of me.” I think I got very lucky that I was paid to go out and play rage in a safe environment.

Q: What do you remember about the reaction to “Terminator 2”?

A: “LindaHamiltonArms.” That’s all one word, and that was not the effect I was going for. There was this guy at the gas station near me who said, “I saw the movie! Did they pump air into your muscles?”

Q: Did you rebel against that?

A: I spent a lot of time being the other thing and wearing dresses for years. I cut my hair off and dyed it red or white — anything to not look like the image of Sarah Connor. I know there are a lot of people who embrace their one thing and do that, but I want to open different doors. Not just the same damn door!

Q: You had a tumultuous relationship with James Cameron for several years after “Terminator 2.” How did you feel when it ended?

A: When I broke up with Jim, I was completely devastated for years. I remember immediately assuming that I was going to enter into another relationship, that it was critical to my essence. But I don’t jump from person to person very easily at all. At the end of every relationship, I’d be like, “Another two or three years without sex? What a waste of a woman!” Because it would always take that long. I do not give myself over that easily.

Q: What is your day-to-day life like now in New Orleans?

A: The benchmark of good health for me is how much time I get to spend alone. This might sound sad, but 20% of my day is spent with other people and 80% is spent alone. I like my mind to wander free of the demands of other people, to go to my coffee shop and have laughter with my friends, then come home and see what the day brings, or what books I’d like to read on the couch with my dogs, or figure out how I can be of service to the neighborhood.

Q: How did you feel after committing to “Terminator: Dark Fate”?

A: To have this character you played 35 years before, a midpiece (“Terminator 2”), and then to play her again 35 years later — you can’t do it without making it worthy of the first two films. And then the word “iconic” starts to creep in. I was slightly terrified.

Q: What do you think when you hear that word?

A: “Icon” is never a word that one uses for oneself. After I did “T2,” directors would say, “You’ve never played a woman like this before — normal.”

Q: How do you react when fans treat you like an icon?

A: If people cry when they meet me, I immediately give them my phone number. I’m like, “Aww, honey, come here. We need to talk. Here’s my number.” I want to be real with them instead of, “Thank you, those were my moments of glory.” I’m not very good at being the mysterious movie star. I’m all out there, and anything is open for dialogue.

Q: How involved were you in conceiving what Sarah Connor would be like all these years later?

A: I was like, “What if she’s fat? Wouldn’t that be great?” You want to stun the audience as they were stunned between the first and the second. We also considered making her a serious alcoholic like Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit,” but it’s been done, and then you’ve got an alcoholic handling weapons.

Q: Ultimately, you had to get back into fighting shape for the film, a regimen that included taking hormones and intense training. What was that like?

A: I had a true village of experts trying to get the most out of this body, but I must be really sensitive to hormones because within two months, I was texting my doctor at 2 in the morning saying, “Hell no!” I would get mad about something, and it would start to own me, and my blood pressure would spike. I would walk around, and my interior monologue was, “Who wants to fight?” And they kept delaying the film!

Q: The fans want to see Sarah kick tush, but she’s older now, so the very nature of that is going to change. How did you reflect that?

A: I don’t want to sell her as someone who can do everything she did in that day, because it’s 27 years later. I made a point to get up more slowly when she took a hit — you don’t just pop up like you’re 32 years old — and embraced those truths of this woman fighting at my age. It was so much richer to bring everything that I’ve got to heel on this woman. Doing that felt incredible.

Linda Hamilton on James Cameron and the First 'Terminator' Films

The new film “Terminator: Dark Fate” brings Linda Hamilton back to her signature role of Sarah Connor for the first time since 1991, when “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” made her a pop-culture icon. In a previous interview, Hamilton discussed what it was like to step back into the spotlight after starting her life anew in New Orleans, but she had lots more to say about making that decision, her history with the “Terminator” franchise, and her marriage to the director of the first two films, Jame...

LOS ANGELES — “Do we have an entourage for tonight?” Taika Waititi asked his publicist. It was just a few hours until the Governors Awards on Sunday, a major Oscar-season pit stop where potential contenders go to schmooze and be seen, and Waititi was in his hotel room, wondering if he could still add a few friends to the guest list.

“How many are we talking?” his publicist replied.

Waititi wasn’t sure. He’d never been to the Governors Awards before, but he knew he would be mingling with A-list actors and wondered if he might seem out of his depth. After all, what could a quirky director like Waititi do to compete with the crowds commanded by stars like Leo and J. Lo?

The answer, he decided, was to not take things that seriously. “I want our group to feel more like a gang,” he ultimately declared. “Joaquin and them, they’ll be the cool people. We want to be the rebels!”

In an Oscar season dominated by American masters like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Waititi, a 44-year-old New Zealander, is poised to crash their party with “Jojo Rabbit,” a World War II comedy about a German boy named Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) whose imaginary best friend is Adolf Hitler. Waititi cast himself as an awfully goofy führer, and dialed the satire up to 11: The opening-credits sequence equates German nationalism with Beatlemania by playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” over footage of Nazi rallies.

Needless to say, these are not the elements that traditional Oscar contenders are made of. “Remember that joke Kate Winslet has in ‘Extras,’ where she says you’d better make a Holocaust film if you want an Oscar?” Waititi said. “People might think that’s kind of true, but there was never in my mind any reality where this film was going to be part of that conversation.”

And yet, that reality has come to pass: At the Toronto International Film Festival, “Jojo Rabbit” took the People’s Choice Award that has previously gone to best-picture winners like “Green Book” and “The King’s Speech,” and Oscar voters keep telling me it’s their favorite film of the fall. This all means that Waititi, whose last movie was the offbeat Marvel blockbuster “Thor: Ragnarok,” may soon find his brand of irreverence rewarded on Hollywood’s most reverent night.

When I met up with Waititi before the Governors Awards, where honorary Oscars would be given out to the likes of David Lynch and Geena Davis, his graying curls were tucked under a hat that blared “HELP” in big block letters, and he was wearing a brilliant technicolor dreamcoat. Waititi has become known for a personal style as playful as his filmmaking, and it begged the question: If he goes all the way this Oscar season, will he be forced to trade his pineapple-print rompers for something more conventional?

By way of an answer, he led me to the hotel closet, where his stylist had sent over a black tuxedo from Ermenegildo Zegna, his look for the Governors Awards. “It’s quite nice!” he insisted. I told him I’d expected a bit of subversive sparkle, and he shrugged: The suit might be conservative, but the man wearing it wouldn’t be. “I invented partying,” he told me, grinning.

Waititi has only been to the Oscars once before, but it was a significant invitation: In 2005, his “Two Cars, One Night” was nominated for best live-action short. The night before the ceremony, he went out drinking with his fellow nominees, and Waititi suggested that when their names were read out loud, they should all play dead.

“Everyone laughed: ‘We should totally do that, Taika, ha ha ha,’” he said. “And in the state I was in, I was like, ‘I guess they agreed!’” During the broadcast, no one played along except Waititi, who feigned being asleep, then lost. “In New Zealand, they were very disappointed with me,” he said, but he had felt no obligation to make it a sacred moment: “With a lot of filmmakers, it’s been their dream to make movies since they were kids. It wasn’t my dream until I was 30.”

Raised mostly in the Aro Valley neighborhood of Wellington, New Zealand, by a single mother, a substitute teacher, Waititi joined a comedy troupe in college with Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the Flight of the Conchords duo. While working with them, he began to take comedy a bit more seriously and eventually parlayed his Oscar nomination into a career directing features in New Zealand including “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.”

It’s clear from Waititi’s comedies that he is still in touch with his mischievous inner child, which served him well when Marvel Studios was looking for a director to reinvigorate the “Thor” franchise for its third entry, “Thor: Ragnarok.” After it became a huge hit, Waititi was offered plenty more: Next year, he’ll direct another “Thor” sequel, and he hopes to soon resume a tabled adaptation of the classic anime “Akira.” But when Fox Searchlight said it would finance “Jojo Rabbit,” Waititi leapt at the chance.

He’d been developing the film since 2010, when his mother told him about “Caging Skies,” a novel by Christine Leunens about a Viennese boy during World War II. The story is straightforward drama, but as his mother described it, Waititi began to imagine a more comedic take. The result is a film so front-loaded with jokes that when Jojo turns into someone who can finally see the humanity in the Jews perishing around him, you’re not prepared to find yourself moved.

“I think he’s curious about the complexity of people,” said Scarlett Johansson, who plays Jojo’s mother. “I can’t imagine him writing a one-note character — it wouldn’t be fun for him. It’s kind of like the way he picks out his clothes: He looks at the whole picture.”

Still, a key character presented problems: The half-Maori, half-Jewish Waititi had not originally planned to play Hitler, but Fox Searchlight prevailed upon him to take the role. Casting a celebrity would have unbalanced the movie, Waititi said, and if audiences saw an enthusiastic Polynesian playing Hitler, it would be a big hint that this material wasn’t meant to be played entirely straight.

“Other people would have spent a lot of time studying, taking it serious and trying to ‘become’ Hitler, and I was just like, ‘I’ll put the mustache on and be myself,’” he said.

The film shocked Oscar pundits by claiming the People’s Choice Award in Toronto, and Waititi admits he was pleasantly surprised, too: “I’m an ego-based creature,” he said, “so the gears started turning: ‘Oh, I’m pretty special now!’” But before Waititi had any idea that he’d be encouraged to go to award-season parties all winter, he had already set up another movie, a soccer comedy called “Next Goal Wins,” that will shoot in Hawaii for most of November and December.

“I can’t deal with your fabulousness!” Charlize Theron exclaimed. Waititi had finally made his way to the Governors Awards, which were set to begin in mere minutes, but the path to the ballroom led directly through Theron, and Waititi was all too happy to be stopped. “We have to hang out,” she insisted.

Awards season can exhaust even the hardiest campaigner. Still, Waititi was more than game. “I won’t deny that this is a really awesome experience,” he told me. During the ceremony, he spent most of his time chatting with the Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, but not long into the after-party, he was a magnet for guests like the “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson and Theron, who’d come back for a second round to introduce Waititi to her entourage.

“I think all filmmakers are just people who want to be liked, and definitely, that’s the case with me,” Waititi said. “When there’s someone you don’t know who knows your name, it’s a good boost, especially after you’ve been working in solitude for two years on something.”

Eventually, the crowd numbered a few dozen. Still, Waititi remained, hopping from clique to clique. I watched him happily take selfies with anyone who asked.

“I’ve put a lot of effort in my life into being good at parties,” he had told me back at the hotel. “It’s not like I’m trying to get something out of it. I just want everyone to have a good time: ‘Let’s tell some stories and gather around the campfire!’”

And clearly, Waititi had more stories to tell. As the after-party came to an end, a friend of his murmured something about an after-after-party. The pleasantly buzzed Waititi snapped to attention, like a dog promised a treat, and before I knew it, he had escaped through a side door. The last thing I saw was that black tuxedo, escaping into the night.

Taika Waititi Puts on a Tuxedo

“I was like, ‘I want to play a princess, too,’” Pattinson said.

The hairdresser capitulated by giving him long, honeyed locks, but Pattinson had one more surprise in store: On set, he unfurled a French accent so deliciously over the top that his scenes became charged with a camp jolt. At first, “I couldn’t quite tell, is this ridiculous?” Pattinson recalled. But after the first take, he found another co-star, Joel Edgerton, doubled over in laughter. “And then I thought, ‘I love this! This is the best.’”

There is little that Pattinson, 33, likes more than confounding expectations, and plenty were placed on him after the megahit “Twilight” franchise ended in 2012. Since then, he has reinvented himself as an auteur’s muse, eager to add his mischievous spirit and pop cultural frisson to art-house films by directors like Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, and the Safdie brothers.

His irreverent instincts get their most sustained showcase yet in “The Lighthouse,” a wild, darkly funny new film from Robert Eggers (“The Witch”) that pits Pattinson against Willem Dafoe as 19th-century lighthouse keepers who drink, spar, shout and even cuddle. The Nova Scotia shoot was arduous, and Pattinson’s unusual approach — to psyche himself up before takes, he would sometimes gag and hit himself in the face — often surprised Eggers and Dafoe.

Still, Pattinson found that tension to be helpful. “Even if it’s rage you’re feeling, it’s more interesting than boredom, because you can use rage,” Pattinson told me recently in a West Hollywood hotel, where “The Lighthouse” had just screened for awards voters.

After spending the last few years in independent films, Pattinson is planning another zig: He’s shooting “Tenet,” a big-budget summer movie for Christopher Nolan, and he was just cast as the lead in “The Batman,” a new take on the comic book character due in 2021. “It’s an entirely different experience from the movies I’ve been doing,” the actor said. “Normally I shoot six weeks, and now it’s six months!”

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Q: Is it fair to say you’re drawn to eccentric characters?

A: I’ve always thought that the only reason you’d want to play a good guy all the time is because you’re desperately ashamed of what you’re doing in real life, whereas if you’re a pretty normal person, the most fun part of doing movies is that you can explore the more grotesque or naughty sides of your psyche in a somewhat safe environment. And it’s always more fun if you’re shocking the people in the room. If you end up being boring, that’s the lowest of the low.

Q: Do you think you’ve been boring before?

A: All the time. You can bore yourself! On “The Lighthouse,” I’d do two out of 17 takes that work, and on the other ones, I’d roll the dice in a different direction that leads me nowhere. But it’s more fun doing that than making a plan and sticking to it.

Q: What was the first day of shooting “The Lighthouse” like?

A: Well, my first shot was this ferocious masturbation scene. It’s always nice to do something massive for your opening shot, and I went really massive on the first take. It was a 180 from everything we’d done in rehearsal, and I could see Robert [Eggers] a little in shock afterward. But I was like, “OK, cool, I didn’t get told to stop, so I’ll keep going in that direction.” As soon as I’d done that, it was like the road started getting paved.

Q: Why did you feel like you couldn’t uncork that character in rehearsals?

A: I want to do it different every time, and if you rehearse it 30 times, you have to think of 30 different ways to do it — even if the first way is probably the best way. I just hate it when I do a second take exactly the same as the first take. They might as well fire me.

Q: Doing it the same feels false to you?

A: It’s just boring! I mean, I’ve definitely seen actors who love rehearsing and are very good, so there’s got to be some benefit to it. But there’s something about that full commitment when you’re shooting, when it’s do or die, that allows you to be more free. Or maybe I’m just lazy and I can’t be bothered to do it until the day we shoot!

Q: Did “The Lighthouse” strike you as a comedy at first?

A: I thought the script was hilarious when I read it, but I had a similar experience on “High Life” [a space drama about convicts sent to a black hole]. When Claire Denis and I watched that by ourselves, we were pissing our pants laughing — it’s insane, that movie. But at the premiere of “High Life,” there was this deadly silence as everyone watched it. I was like, “Oh God, no one’s seeing the absurdity of this.”

Q: People just assume that if it’s an art-house film, it can’t be funny.

A: It made me worry that if people aren’t told that “The Lighthouse” is a comedy, they might not feel like they’re allowed to laugh at it. You know, I used to think that doing movies was almost like taking a test, and there was so much pressure to do it right, but I’ve now swung more over to the other side of things: It’s supposed to be really fun, and if you just play it that way, it’s more enjoyable and ends up in a good place. Having a laugh really changes everything.

Q: You’re currently working on Christopher Nolan’s next film and you’ll begin shooting “Batman” soon. How does it feel to have traded art-house movies for big studio blockbusters?

A: I mean, “Dunkirk” is almost an art-house movie! Chris Nolan is literally the one director who can make an art-house movie for hundreds of millions of dollars, so it doesn’t really feel like a studio thing. With “Batman,” if I’d done it a few years ago, I would have been incredibly nervous, but I’ve still got a few months before we start shooting. Plenty of time to have a panic attack!

Q: You were saying earlier that we should be skeptical of any actor who wants to play the hero, and yet here you are playing Batman.

A: Batman’s not a hero, though. He’s a complicated character. I don’t think I could ever play a real hero — there’s always got to be something a little bit wrong. I think it’s because one of my eyes is smaller than the other one.

Q: What is it about Batman that excites you?

A: I love the director, Matt Reeves, and it’s a dope character. His morality is a little bit off. He’s not the golden boy, unlike almost every other comic book character. There is a simplicity to his worldview, but where it sits is strange, which allows you to have more scope with the character.

Q: You just paused.

A: I just fear that when I say anything about “Batman,” people online are like, “What does this mean?” And I don’t know! I used to be very good at censoring myself, but I’ve said so many ridiculous things over the years, so I’m always curious when I’m promoting these movies how many times I can mess up. It feels like with every movie that comes out, there’s always one quote from me where it’s like, “How? What kind of out-of-body experience produced that screaming nonsense?”

Q: You’ve said that after you were cast as Batman, you anticipated a vitriolic reaction online.

A: Maybe I’m just used to abuse by now. At least I didn’t get death threats this time — that’s a plus! It’s funny that people are so very angry about “Twilight.” I never particularly understood it.

Q: When an actor stars in a franchise that’s made for women, there are men who resent that: “My girlfriend likes him, so I don’t.”

A: They need to think about why they feel that way. Maybe it’s time for a deep soul-search: “Why do you fear what you don’t understand?” But yeah, it’s very strange. All the stuff with “Twilight” was strange. I used to walk down the street with no one recognizing me, and then that changed for four years.

Q: Are you worried that by making big movies again, you may invite that scrutiny back into your life?

A: People don’t really mess with me in the same way now that I’m older. When I was younger, the paparazzi would be crazy to me — I’d be leaving a place, and people would be screaming abuse — but I can’t imagine it going back to that. Do people really care anymore? The gossip magazines have all kind of gone away, and everyone just puts their stuff on Instagram anyway.

Q: Everyone but you.

A: Well, I’m old and boring. And I only have abs, like, two weeks a year.

What Can Robert Pattinson Do to Keep You Guessing?

When Robert Pattinson signed on to play the antagonistic Dauphin of France in Netflix’s medieval epic “The King,” he knew it was a juicy role that would give him the pleasure of taunting Timothée Chalamet. Still, Pattinson hadn’t quite figured out his character until he saw hair-and-makeup photos of his co-star Lily-Rose Depp, who was cast as a royal ingénue.

“Socializing has really exhausted me as time has gone by,” Almodóvar told me in September, not long after he had jetted from his home in Madrid to the Toronto International Film Festival to present his latest movie, “Pain and Glory.”

It was a surprising thing to hear from a director whose early films, including “Law of Desire” and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” often possessed the anything-goes spirit and mischievous cast of a crowded bacchanal. Even over two days in Toronto, I had watched Almodóvar breeze through an ambitious schedule of press obligations as if he were born to make small talk in a second language.

But when he returned to Madrid, Almodóvar phoned me to confess that as he had gotten older in recent years — his 70th birthday was on Sept. 25 — he had begun to purposefully isolate himself. “People have stopped surprising me so much, they’ve stopped exciting me as much. And secondly, there’s the pain.” He paused. “Pain is not something you can share with other people.”

The startlingly personal “Pain and Glory” will change that for him: After trying his hand at a pair of adaptations in “Julieta” (2016) and “The Skin I Live In” (2011), as well as a fizzy farce (“I’m So Excited!” from 2013), Almodóvar has turned inward. A look back at the desires and deep feelings that have shaped him, all sprung from a body that has begun to turn on him as he exits middle age, “Pain and Glory” is a quiet, career-capping masterpiece.

Antonio Banderas stars in the film as Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker patterned so obviously on Almodóvar himself that he wears the director’s own clothes and lives in a replica of Almodóvar’s chic apartment. Mallo made his name on sensational Spanish sex comedies, but when we meet him, he’s so racked with the pains of getting older that he doesn’t have the energy to create anymore.

Those aches take many forms, both physical and spiritual. Mallo is debilitated by frequent migraines and back spasms, and he’s also haunted by a past relationship torn asunder by drugs as well as a mother he feels he has failed. All of these maladies were taken from Almodóvar’s own life, and that candor caught Banderas off guard when he read the script. “There were things I never thought he was going to expose, not even to his friends,” Banderas said. “Pedro is a very private person.”

That’s not to say that Almodóvar was ever shy: Forged by La Movida Madrileña, a raucous countercultural movement that swept through Madrid when he arrived there in 1969, Almodóvar has long held one of the most provocative points of view in moviemaking. Unafraid to tackle societal and sexual taboos, he regularly packs his films with a surplus of heart, comedy, lust and color, like a child who goes to select a crayon and then absconds with the entire box.

But “Pain and Glory” was different. For all his open-book ebullience, there were still things Almodóvar had kept hidden, especially the extent to which he must navigate wrenching pain as a daily indignity. After he sent the screenplay to Banderas and his other frequent collaborators, including actress Penélope Cruz and his producer-brother, Agustín, “all of them came back to me really worried,” Almodóvar recalled. “They were saying, ‘Are you really as bad off as Salvador is? Are you suffering that much?’”

Fortunately, there are a few key differences. Mallo turns to a newfound heroin habit to cope with his pain, while Almodóvar swears he’s never touched the stuff. And though Banderas wears his hair grayed and unruly for the role, it’s no match for the actual Almodóvar’s famous, dandelion-like pouf, a sign that this is much more than just an easy impersonation. (In May, Banderas took the best-actor trophy at the Cannes Film Festival for his deeply felt performance.)

“But the character doesn’t moan about his ailments, and I’m not a person who complains, either,” Almodóvar noted. To use the parlance of pain, Almodóvar decided to rip the Band-Aid off: If he was going to let the whole world know what’s been hurting him, he had no intention of milking any of it for sympathy. Instead, he spends a minute and 20 seconds of “Pain and Glory” listing all of his physical troubles in a tidy animated sequence.

It’s a gut punch of grievances, though he couldn’t help but make it colorful, too.

Socializing may take its toll on Almodóvar these days, but I’ll be damned if he’s not still good at it. When I sat down with him in Toronto, he was talkative and funny, and he pumped me for details on a party he’d skipped the night before. (“Was Jennifer Lopez there?” he asked, ready to gossip.) Across from us sat his translator. Though Almodóvar speaks fast, fluent English, he frequently toggles over to Spanish like someone breaking into song in a musical.

It’s easy to see what beguiled Banderas so long ago in Madrid’s Café Gijón, where the young actor had gathered with other thespians from the nearby Teatro María Guerrero. It was 1981, and Almodóvar, fresh off his first full-length feature, “Pepi, Luci, Bom,” had wandered over to the group to hold court. “He appeared with this red plastic briefcase, and he talked — a lot — in this beautiful monologue,” Banderas recalled. “After 20 minutes, he stood up, looked at me and said, ‘You should do movies. You have a very romantic face.’ And he left.”

Banderas asked his fellow actors who the mystery monologuist was: “They said to me, ‘His name is Pedro Almodóvar. He just directed a movie, but he will never do another one.’” Banderas snorted at the memory. “They tried to be a prophet, which is a very common thing in my country. And they failed horrendously.”

Before long, Almodóvar had offered Banderas a role in his next movie, the comedy “Labyrinth of Passion,” kicking off a juicy collaboration that would span several decades and bring them both international fame. Almodóvar was the button-pushing auteur, Banderas was his sex-bomb male muse, and they lived colorful lives that spilled across Madrid’s night life.

“I was like somebody invited to a party they didn’t know about,” Banderas said. “I wanted to be a serious theater actor, and suddenly I was in the middle of that tsunami.” Through it all, Banderas was both enamored of and intimidated by his director: “We were all in a group of friends,” he said, “but Pedro was the pope.”

As their profiles rose, especially after the Oscar-nominated “Women on the Verge” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” Hollywood came to court both men. Only Banderas made the leap, working in major films including “Philadelphia” and “The Mask of Zorro.” Almodóvar, offered the chance to direct studio comedies like “Sister Act,” decided to stay in Spain.

“I have to confess that I missed him a lot in the beginning of the ’90s,” Almodóvar said. “I had the impression that one day, when we were older, we would meet each other again, but I was in no rush for that re-encounter. In my head, I wanted to reconnect with an older, more mature, more adult Antonio, as if all that youthful energy had already exploded.”

But it would take two decades for that reunion, and when it arrived, things did not go smoothly. Almodóvar cast Banderas as a sociopathic plastic surgeon in “The Skin I Live In,” and both men had changed considerably in the interim. Almodóvar was in a new phase of his career, directing polished, Oscar-winning melodramas like “All About My Mother” and “Talk to Her,” while Banderas had become a Hollywood star, blossoming outside Almodóvar’s tutelage.

Banderas said, “I arrived on set with all my new things that I had learned over 22 years. ‘Look Pedro, I’m now more secure in front of the camera, I have worked on my voice and my body, this and that.’” Almodóvar was dismissive. “He said, ‘These things, I cannot use.’”

Both men described the shoot as rocky. “The fact that I was encountering an actor who was very experienced wasn’t an advantage to me,” Almodóvar said. “Quite the contrary. What I was looking for was that innocence, an actor who relies on his intuition, not his intelligence.”

Eventually, Banderas acceded to his director’s demands, and once he saw the final cut, he said he was impressed by what Almodóvar had pulled from him. Still, after all that, he had no reason to expect that his old collaborator would give him another starring role. Time had passed, and perhaps their moment had, too.

“Pain is passive,” Almodóvar told me. “Someone suffering from pain isn’t easy to film — it’s not cinematic at all.” So when he began writing “Pain and Glory,” he did not have Banderas in mind to play the lead: What use would the actor’s boundless vitality be in a muted role like that?

Then, Almodóvar happened across a photo of Banderas as he was recovering from surgery after a 2017 heart attack. “I saw the experience of pain in his face, and that was something very important to the character,” Almodóvar said. He knew he had his Mallo, and now, in a irony worthy of his movies, it would be Almodóvar serving as the muse for Banderas.

This time on set, director and actor were in sync: Instead of impersonating Almodóvar, Banderas should go small. “He still ended up stealing the scenes from other characters because of that subtlety!” Almodóvar said, laughing. But the role served an olive branch: Banderas played it as a tribute to the man who had transformed his life, and when Almodóvar went to embrace his actor on the final day of shooting, he burst into tears.

“It was shocking for everybody on the set — the casting director, the art director, everybody,” Banderas said, adding, “He’s not like that. Pedro is a hard cookie.”

Almodóvar was as surprised as anybody. Despite the fact that he had drawn so much of the film from his own life, when he was on set, he had tried to treat Mallo as a character, someone separate from himself. Now, as he embraced Banderas, that all fell away, and he couldn’t stop crying.

Instead of remaining stoic in his 70s, then, “I think I need to break away from that,” he told me. “I need to open up more.” It’s true that Almodóvar has found his pain hard to share with other people. It’s also true that in that moment, he found it harder not to.

Sometimes It Hurts to Be Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar is fun at parties, but parties aren’t always fun for Pedro Almodóvar.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — “We will start this interview at some point,” I insisted to Renée Zellweger.

It was mid-August, and I had gone to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to ask Zellweger about “Judy,” the new drama that casts her as Judy Garland in the last year of her life, when the singer-actress was at her most down and out. It’s a transformative role played with so much gusto that the 50-year-old Zellweger will be hard to beat for this year’s best-actress Oscar, a major coup considering her recent six-year break from the screen.

But it took us a while to get to all that. First, there was the matter of coaxing Zellweger to the interview in the first place: As a publicist kept emailing me to push her arrival back, our lunch date crept closer to happy hour. I wondered whether Zellweger, who’s sometimes had a rough go of it in the media, might be stalling for time.

For nearly two hours in the hotel lobby, I watched a series of well-dressed women and underdressed men emerge from the elevator, and then Zellweger appeared, small and inconspicuous in workout clothes, her blond hair tucked beneath a weathered Texas Longhorns ball cap. “Thank you for sticking around,” she said shyly. “Everything kept spilling over.”

Zellweger told me she was getting reacclimated to the schedule of stardom, including a photo shoot, endless dress fittings, film-festival appearances, and our interview. If “Judy” goes the distance this award season, she’ll have to do a lot of talking about herself — and that’s fine, she supposes, but isn’t it more fun to have a conversation about something else?

I think that’s why she seized on a bit of small talk offered as we walked to the restaurant: My boyfriend had moved away that morning, and we were about to embark on a long-distance relationship. Suddenly, Zellweger was the one grilling me: What did he do for a living, how long had we been dating, and wasn’t it Rilke who once said that love is being the guardian of one another’s solitude?

“It’s going to be fine, I know it!” she said, her squeaky, Texas-accented voice now so determined that it brought to mind old-fashioned words like “pluck” and “moxie.” Forget all the fears I might be harboring, she told me: “People are cynical and they’ll say this kind of thing doesn’t work and Itotally disagree. Look at Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, for cryin’ out loud!”

She said the distance would teach us never to take each other for granted, and recommended meditation and frequent FaceTime sessions. It was all so compelling that after 20 minutes of earnestly proffered advice, I had to remind Zellweger that she was the one meant to be answering questions today.

Her face fell just a bit. “First of all, are you starving?” she asked, coolly opening the menu. “You must be, honey.” The waiter came over and Zellweger placed an order for me: “He’ll have a triple martini,” she said, cackling.

Once Zellweger resigned herself to the interview, she started to enjoy it. “Judy” happened much the same way: The director Rupert Goold coaxed Zellweger carefully toward the project, aware that an early offer might prove too daunting. “Someone was asking, when was that moment you knew you were in?” Zellweger told me. “And I don’t think it ever arrived!”

She was sent the script in 2017. “At first, I didn’t understand why they thought of me for it,” Zellweger said. The movie would require a great deal of live singing, because it follows a near-destitute Garland after she accepts a five-week engagement to warble at a London nightspot, and despite earning an Oscar nomination for the musical “Chicago,” Zellweger didn’t consider herself much of a vocalist.

But Goold felt that the vulnerability Zellweger showed in “Jerry Maguire” and the chutzpah that won her an Academy Award for “Cold Mountain” made her exactly right for the role.

“Garland had such incredible emotional immediacy,” Goold told me by phone. “You feel like you’re getting a spirit that has this innate innocence and hopefulness in it, and I wanted someone who had that kind of fragility.” He also said that Zellweger’s own Hollywood experience, which has drawn scrutiny about her romances and tabloid speculation about cosmetic surgery, could help inform a lead character who must constantly fight damaging rumors.

So Zellweger began to explore. Since Goold insisted on no lip-syncing, she booked studio time and hired a singing coach to see if Garland’s distinctive vocal stylings were within reach. She worked with a choreographer and costumer to channel Garland’s hunched, puttering posture. And she went down a rabbit hole reading biographies, watching old clips, and scanning Garland fan forums for any useful detail.

But whenever Zellweger caught herself telling me about these things for too long, she became self-conscious. “How is that a job? What fun!” she said, over and over.

The most dramatic sequences in “Judy” come whenever Garland is forced to sing despite a voice ravaged by time and addiction. Goold leaned into that suspense: “I told Renée, ‘I’m going to structure the script so that it’s not only building up to ‘Can Judy Garland deliver what she needs to in this moment?’ but also, ‘Can Renée Zellweger?’”

She performed those numbers live in front of an audience, and Zellweger recalls the scenes now with the excitement of someone who went sky diving and didn’t die. “I was elated. I was so high. Talk about things you’ve never done before!” she said. “I didn’t allow myself to think about it too much — it was in the back of my mind, terrifying, and I kept pushing it back, back, back. Luckily, it was such a whirlwind that I didn’t have time to pause and think, ‘I’d rather not do that thing tomorrow.’”

Still, Zellweger has become wary of projects that ask her to take on too much without the time to properly metabolize it all. Garland was exploited by a Hollywood machine that rarely allowed her time to rest, and Zellweger said she understood what it’s like to reach “a certain place where you just don’t know if your skin is thick enough, and then having to go anyway.”

In 2010, after working nearly nonstop for her entire film career, Zellweger withdrew from Hollywood for a hiatus that lasted six years, until she re-emerged in the sequel “Bridget Jones’s Baby.” “I was lying to myself, and I don’t know why,” she said. “I didn’t see the exhaustion side of it. There was a moment where I stopped recognizing that I had to take care of myself.”

She doesn’t regret having taken on several major projects per year, but all that time off helped get her priorities in order.

“Instead of saying, ‘Boy, I sure hope I can make that special person’s birthday party,’ I needed to say, ‘I’m going to the birthday party,’ and I didn’t feel like I had the right to make that decision because of the blessing of this work,” Zellweger said.

Freed from that duty, Zellweger entered therapy, traveled, took classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, and even wrote a pilot for Lifetime (the channel ultimately passed): “I took time off so I wasn’t regurgitating the same old emotional experiences to tell stories. I lived some new ones, and all of it is informative.”

And without that perspective, she couldn’t have played Judy Garland. “It made me appreciate my little bit of experience with having to navigate your way around a public persona that’s a ball hog in your life,” she said.

Weeks later, I went to an after-party for “Judy” at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie had premiered that night to rapturous tweets and a standing ovation, and when Zellweger took the stage at the theater, she cried.

Everybody at the after-party just down the street was eager to offer their congratulations, but an hour later, the crowded soiree still lacked its star. “Where is Renée?” I heard a publicist ask. “Does anyone have eyes on her?”

Finally, it was confirmed: Renée was about to enter the building. I caught Zellweger walking very deliberately up the stairs in a powder-blue dress and sky-high white heels. Flanked by two representatives, she was lost in focus, as if willing herself to enter the first of many parties this season where she would be the center of attention.

Then she looked up and squealed. “I’m so excited to see you again!” she said, rushing up the stairs to pepper me with questions. Would I see my boyfriend soon? Oh, next week? How wonderful! “This is a very special time for him,” she told a publicist.

The publicist tried to usher her into the party as I asked her about the standing ovation. Zellweger steadfastly resisted both of us.

“I heard the premiere went amazing,” I said.

“Not as amazing as you seeing your boyfriend next week!” she replied, jabbing a finger into my chest.

It went on like that until it couldn’t anymore.

After all the work she had put into this role, she had just gotten a three-minute standing ovation. What did that feel like?

“I don’t know how to take it,” she finally said.

How to take what? That kind of adoration?

“Yeah,” she said, scrunching up her face. “What do you say to that? ‘Congrats on being lucky?’”

Renée Zellweger Will Be Back in a Moment

NEW ORLEANS — Linda Hamilton laughs the way Courtney Love sings, with great raspy bravado. It would be an intimidating laugh if it didn’t come easily, and if it weren’t so often offered at her own expense.

Take the story Hamilton tells about the time she went to a North Carolina pool hall, shortly after “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” had given her a permanent place in the pop culture pantheon. During the game, Hamilton could feel people noticing her: Was that really the actress who had played waitress-turned-warrior Sarah Connor in the biggest movie of 1991?

“I heard someone say in a stage whisper: ‘That can’t be her. She’d shoot pool a lot better than that!’” Recalling the story, Hamilton let loose with that throaty laugh. “I’m not Sarah Connor, who can do everything brilliantly,” she said, ashing her Camel Blue in a nearby wineglass. “It has kept me very real, because I tend to swing the other way when people assign that to me.”

After nearly three decades spent trying to shake Sarah Connor’s long shadow, the 62-year-old Hamilton has finally reprised the character for “Terminator: Dark Fate,” due in November. The movie hands Hamilton that most quotable catchphrase, “I’ll be back,” though after all that time away from the “Terminator” franchise, you can’t blame audiences for wondering where she’s been.

The answer can be found in the colorful New Orleans town house where she fixed me a cup of Earl Grey tea in early August. “Here you go, baby!” she said, illustrating one of the key differences between her and her character: Linda Hamilton will happily call a stranger “baby” or “honey bunch,” while the closest Sarah Connor comes to granting a nickname is when she uses an expletive as a noun.

On the day I met her, Hamilton was blond, trim and wore no makeup; her every move was tracked by two dogs, a massive Anatolian Shepherd named Turk as well as Noodle, a small lap dog. (“Marriage of opposites,” Hamilton said, grinning.) On her wrist was a tattoo with the coordinates of the Malibu villa she sold in 2012, shortly after a recurring TV gig on “Chuck” came to a close: “I woke up one day and I was like, ‘Well, here I am in my beautiful mansion and my kids aren’t here, my agents aren’t calling, and this is not real.’”

Disillusioned, she left the furniture behind and fled Los Angeles, roughing it for a few years on a Virginia farm before moving to New Orleans, a city whose lively spirit she treasures. “I know people here after four years better than I ever knew anyone in Malibu,” she said. The walls of her two-story town house are crammed with paintings and portraits; the only way Hamilton would consider taking a new husband, she joked, is if the proposal came from her favorite artist, Kehinde Wiley.

Otherwise, her life in New Orleans is gratifyingly spartan. “I love my alone time like no one you’ve ever met,” said Hamilton, who divorced her “Terminator 2” director, James Cameron, in 1999. “I’ve been celibate for at least 15 years. One loses track, because it just doesn’t matter — or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I have a very romantic relationship with my world every day and the people who are in it.”

Director Tim Miller, who was tasked with enticing Hamilton back to her signature role for “Terminator: Dark Fate,” said, “She doesn’t care about any of the trappings of stardom — in fact, she doesn’t seem to want it at all,” and added, “One of the hardest things for her with coming back to this character was knowing she’d have to step into the spotlight again.”

Hamilton agreed: “That was my hesitation: Do I want to trade this lovely, authentic life for that? I didn’t want my neighbors looking at me differently. We’re neighbors because of who we are, not what we do, and I don’t want that to creep into my life again.”

When she was making the first “Terminator” film, released in 1984, Hamilton never could have predicted the impact it would have on her budding career. “Did I think I was going to become an action-adventure star? Not once!" said Hamilton, who grew up in Salisbury, Maryland, and studied under Lee Strasberg in New York. “I was going to be a Shakespearean actress, and with ‘Terminator,’ it all took a left turn.”

In that seminal science-fiction film, Sarah Connor was an ordinary woman targeted by a time-traveling cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger) because she would later bear the savior of all mankind. The cast and crew worked long nights, and Hamilton spent much of her role cowering or on the run. “It was hard on the psyche,” she said. “When I finished, I fought some depression and kept dreaming about the Terminator.”

Kyle Buchanan

Articles written by the author

Best Supporting Grandma? For 'The Farewell,' an Oscar Campaign Begins

Linda Hamilton on James Cameron and the First 'Terminator' Films

Taika Waititi Puts on a Tuxedo

What Can Robert Pattinson Do to Keep You Guessing?

Sometimes It Hurts to Be Pedro Almodóvar

Renée Zellweger Will Be Back in a Moment

Linda Hamilton Fled Hollywood, but 'Terminator' Still Found Her

Elizabeth Banks: It's getting harder to make money in Hollywood

Barry Jenkins: No matter the format, filmmaking is as expensive as ever

The Russo Brothers: Even we have a hard time getting small films made

Jon M. Chu: Young filmmakers don't have the baggage of self-hatred

J.J. Abrams: Even giant event movies aren't a given at the box office

Jessica Chastain: stars needn't let studios decide which women are valuable

Forecasting the future of the movie business

Which Cannes films will factor into the Oscar race?

Xavier Dolan has gone to Cannes for 10 years. It hasn't gotten easier.

The director of 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' Leers again

Alejandro González Iñárritu has words for Hollywood

Cannes Film Festival: Jury head Alejandro González Iñárritu praises Netflix

A thorough analysis of the makeovers in 'avengers: Endgame'