The Last Thing I Saw Nicolas Rapold

Ep. 239: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast, Experimenting with AI, Crafting Melodrama, Reading Henry James, and more

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Bertrand Bonello’s latest film The Beast has been melting minds with its time-skipping saga of star-crossed lovers and strangers played by Léa Seydoux and George Mackay. Inspired by a Henry James story, The Beast spans three different time periods and pairings: a married woman and a suitor in the 1910s (Belle Époque), an actress and a madman in 2010’s California, and a woman facing a fateful choice in a not-too-distant future where artificial intelligence promises to remove individual trauma. I chatted with the restless French auteur (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) about the struggle for connection across these stories, being tempted by AI, directing Mackay and Seydoux, and more.

The Beast is in theaters now, and Bonello’s previous feature, Coma, will have its first U.S. theatrical run on May 17.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 238: Time director Garrett Bradley on instincts, Devotion, America, and Satyajit Ray’s Devi

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. Garrett Bradley is the director of Time, the Oscar-nominated 2020 documentary about Sibil Fox Richardson and her efforts to get her husband released from prison. Bradley has directed several incredible short films, including Alone (2017, about a friend planning to marry her imprisoned boyfriend) and America (2019, an amazing visual historical pageant that includes shots from the 1914 film Lime Kiln Club Field Day starring Bert Williams). Bradley has described her work as being about Black life, and also as a series of love stories, and she’s just published a new book of dialogues, essays, and images, called Devotion. The book will be celebrated with a program at Metrograph screening some of her shorts, Time, and a film of her choosing: Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi, about a young woman believed to be a goddess.

We spoke about the instincts that guide her filmmaking, the importance of editing and immediacy in her practice, her thoughts on her film America, and what she’s working on now (which may include an adaptation of Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower...).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 237: Screen Slate leader Jon Dieringer on Civil War, plus Roadhouse, Quiet on Set, The Eclipse

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. With the country in the grips of Civil War fever, I join forces with Screen Slate editor-in-chief Jon Dieringer, who was fresh from seeing the much-anticipated movie at a local Regal Cinema. We talk about the different layers to Civil War and Alex Garland’s approach to depicting a future United States that’s broken up into separate regions and armies and has a belligerent president in the White House. (The plot follows four journalists—played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson—who are driving to Washington, D.C., to try to interview the president.) Jon and I also share some other recent watches, including the documentary series Quiet on Set (directed by Mary Robertson & Emma Schwartz), the Road House remake (Doug Liman), Larry Fessenden’s latest horror movie, Blackout, and nature’s own mighty contribution to cinema.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 236: CPH:DOX 2024 with Mads K. Mikkelsen on Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, Kix, and much more

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For this episode I journeyed to Copenhagen for the 2024 edition of CPH:DOX, and talked about my favorite documentaries from the selection with the festival’s Head of Program Mads K. Mikkelsen. These include films about a Hungarian skateboarder growing up (Kix, directed by Dávid Mikulán and Bálint Révész), about the relationship between photographer Joel Meyerowitz and writer Maggie Barrett (Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, directed by Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet), and about Brazilian love motels (Eros, directed by Rachel Daisy Ellis). We also discuss The Limits of Europe (directed by Apolena Rychlíková, featuring journalist Saša Uhlová), Balomania (Sissel Morell Dargis), La Base (Vadim Dumesh), Once Upon a Time in a Forest (Virpi Suutari) and the documentary that went on to win the festival’s top prize, The Flats (Alessandra Celesia).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 235: K.J. Relth-Miller on Berlin Retrospectives: Lubitsch, Helke Sander, Carlos Saura, and more

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. For a number of festivals now, I’ve been fortunate enough to delve into the retrospective selections with programmer K.J. Relth-Miller from the Academy Museum (who also teaches at CalArts). This time we talked about the special Retrospective selections drawn from the Deutsche Kinemathek and films in the Classics section at the Berlinale. We start with Ernst Lubitsch’s 1921 silent comedy Kohlhiesel’s Daughters, which screened with live musical accompaniment, and then move on to later selections such as The Germans and Their Men (1989, Helke Sander), Herzsprung (1992, Helke Misselwitz), Angels of Iron (1980, Thomas Brasch), and Deprisa, Deprisa (1981, Carlos Saura).

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass

Ep. 234: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This week I present a chat with Radu Jude, the director of what’s already the most acclaimed movie of the year: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. The wild, funny, multi-layered movie follows a young production assistant, Angela (the incredible Ilinca Manolache), on her endless days working in Bucharest, Romania. Jude creates a crazy quilt that captures what it’s like to get through the world today, folding in Angela’s hilariously foulmouthed Instagram videos and weaving in clips from a Communist-era 1981 film about a female taxi driver. Nina Hoss and Uwe Boll also have memorable roles. I first saw Jude’s continually surprising film at its world premiere in the Locarno Film Festival, and we spoke on the eve of its U.S. release on March 22.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass