Claire Denis: 'For me, film-making is a journey into the impossible' (The Guardian)

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Since her 1988 debut Chocolat, Claire Denis has established herself as one of France's most respected film directors, with a wide-ranging body of work and a taste for danger. Her latest film, White Material, which stars Isabelle Huppert, draws again upon her colonial African childhood, and its violence has sparked controversy in the French press. Not that she cares…

One of the lingering charms of the Left Bank of Paris in the 21st century is that, although much of the area has long since surrendered to chain stores and fast-food joints, the streets between Boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Mouffetard are still dotted with fleapit cinemas with names such as L'Accattone, Studio Galande and Le Champo. On any given afternoon – to take a random sample from the programmes on offer in these places last week – you can take in Battleship Potemkin, a Buñuel retrospective, a lesser-known Fellini, or Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (an obscure western from 1954 that is incomprehensibly revered by all French true believers in the art of cinema). Most amazing of all is that these picture-houses are almost always packed, even on a sunny Monday afternoon in June (which is when I took the sample). For French film-buffs these are historic, even sacred sites. Hollywood may be the capital of the film world, but no one takes their movies more seriously than Parisians.

Nowhere is this more true than in the cafe of the Cinéma du Panthéon, one of the most important temples for Parisian cinéphiles. Appropriately enough, this is where I meet up with the film director Claire Denis. For the past decade or so, Denis has regularly been hailed as one of the leading French directors of her generation. This is mainly because, as her track record demonstrates, she is fearless. She does not shy away from difficult subjects – including sex, cannibalism, incest, politics, murder, race, sometimes all of them at the same time. It is this bravery that has inspired many critics to hail her as not only one of the most technically accomplished directors of recent years, but also as one of the leading chroniclers of 21st-century France in all its postcolonial complexity. She has even recently been mooted by at least one serious critic as "one of the greatest film-makers working today".

Our meeting is to discuss her latest movie, White Material – a fairly big-budget production starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Lambert, which has just opened in the UK. The cafe is packed with young people drinking coffee and discussing, with touching Gallic intensity, film theory, Marxism and Jean-Luc Godard (his latest film has just been screened in the neighbouring cinema). Claire Denis is amused by this spectacle and sympathetic to it but insists that this is really not her world. "I am not an intellectual like these youngsters," she says, looking around. "I never was. I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. I am really a very simple person."

This much is obviously untrue. The sheer range of Denis's accomplishments suggests that, at the very least, this is a woman who thinks a lot about the world and her place in it. She married at 19, got divorced and has no children. Her early film career, when she worked as an assistant on film sets, was partly financed by her husband's money. Apart from this, she gives little away about her personal life and cultivates an austere public image. In photographs she is often gaunt and severe-looking, a look which has led to speculation over her sexuality. In the flesh, however, at 62 years old, she dresses sexily in a mini-skirt, black tights and leather boots, though her face is stern, at least for now. At first sight she is a mildly intimidating cross between Barbara Windsor and Simone de Beauvoir.

Denis first came to international prominence in 1988 with the film Chocolat, the story of a little French girl growing up in a remote colonial outpost in central Africa. The focus of the tale is on the little girl's complicated friendship with an older black servant. The film was praised as announcing a new maturity in French cinema, reflecting the complicated sexual and racial tensions at the core of the relations between the coloniser and the colonised. Chocolat was nominated for a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

Since then, Denis has made nine feature-length films that have established her as a key figure in world cinema. In some ways, Chocolat has been her most conventional work. Among the most critically acclaimed of her other films are S'en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a film about two Africans involved in cock-fighting, J'ai pas sommeil (I Can't Sleep, 1994), a study of a black serial killer adrift in Paris that was based on a notorious real-life case, Beau Travail (Good Work, 1999), a homoerotic reworking of Melville's Billy Budd set among foreign legionnaires in the Algerian desert, and 35 rhums (2008), a tale of working-class family life in multi-ethnic Paris. One of her most recent projects was L'intrus (The Intruder), a film about the heart transplant of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy was a friend of Jacques Derrida and is a sophisticated critic of Hegel and postmodernity, and hardly the kind of "ordinary person" that you might find in the films of Claire Denis.

When I ask Denis what brings together these disparate strands, her response is characteristically oblique:"I suppose I am interested in the variety of human life – how people live. I am most interested in individuals and how they respond to challenges or to difficulties, or just to each other. I am curious about people. So that's why I do a lot of different things. The cinema should be human and be part of people's lives; it should focus on ordinary existences in sometimes extraordinary situations and places. That is what really motivates me."

There is probably no such thing as a typical film by Claire Denis, but White Material is consistent with this vision of the role of cinema. It is set in an unnamed African country about to collapse into civil war. This is a blasted, haunted landscape, populated by demonic child soldiers and a shadowy guerrilla army that slaughters in the bush or under the cover of night. From the opening sequences on, everyone we meet, from the local mayor to farmers and shopkeepers, is visibly terrified.

Against this background Maria Vial, a French coffee farmer, struggles to save her crop as her workers abandon her in the weeks leading up to the harvest. This role is played with steely magnificence by Isabelle Huppert, who brings to it a combination of strength and fragility. Maria feels that she belongs in Africa because she works the land, but she is alone, vulnerable and white in a country where the majority population is black. This provides Denis with material for some brilliant visual motifs. Huppert is dressed in white for the early part of the film and always shot against a darkening background. Her almost translucent features are photographed in close-up as she sweats and suffers.

On its release in France White Material was lauded as another Denis masterpiece by the serious critics from Le Monde to Les Inrockuptibles. Not all reviewers have been sympathetic, however. White Material contains long stretches of images that have no apparent narrative purpose. This is a recurring device in Denis's films and one which, when overused, can frustrate the viewer and it is probably why, despite her star-studded cast, Denis has yet to cross over into the middle-brow middle ground occupied by most ordinary French cinema-goers.

The most potentially damaging review, however, appeared in the pages of the magazine Marianne, known for its provocative style. Film critic Danièle Heymann applauded Denis as both "artistically superb" and "politically incorrect". What exactly did this mean? Was she suggesting that Denis was perhaps using her white characters to demonstrate the moral superiority of the whites over the "savage" blacks in Africa in a situation of crisis? Did she even mean that Denis was defending the rights of the white farmers in present-day Zimbabwe?

"Of course not," Denis says now, "but I do know Africa. It was where I was brought up after all and I understand something of how different from Europe it is. It is always much more dense than people think. But sometimes things are literally black and white. So I wanted to show in this film how being white in Africa gives you a special status, almost a kind of magical aura. It protects you from misery and starvation. But although it can protect you, it is dangerous too. This is what Maria has to learn. The danger for Maria is that she thinks she belongs in Africa because she is close to the land and the people. She cannot return to France because she thinks that it will weaken her. But she learns that she doesn't belong in Africa as much as she thinks. For many white people in Africa this is the reality."

Denis has stated publicly that she is an admirer of Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who detested French colonialism and worked for the Algerian side until his death in 1961. In his key books Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon argued that colonialism was a form of psychic violence that destroyed the identity of the colonised. As a response to this, Fanon advocated total rejection of European civilisation. Instead, the colonised must create a new culture, defined by force of arms if necessary. He called this "the will to be a nigger".

Denis read Fanon when she was about 14 and found his ideas devastating. What she found most humbling in his work was his analysis of the degrading effect of the shame and humiliation, which infect coloniser and colonised alike. "I understood that humiliation was the important feeling that people had in this relationship," she says, "and this is on both sides, black and white."

Claire Denis was born in Paris but spent her childhood in Africa, where her father worked for the French colonial administration. The family moved house every two years, mainly through the French colonies that would become Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Djibouti. Unusually for the 1950s, her father spoke several African languages and was in favour of independence for African nations. He was a personal friend of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, an intellectual and the first president of Ivory Coast. Denis loved Africa, felt it was home, and was traumatised when, at the age of 13, she and her sister were forced to go back to Paris, having contracted polio. She returned, aged 17, to finish her school studies in Senegal, but something had been broken.

What this childhood gave her above all, Denis tells me, was a sense of wonder. "When I came back to France I realised that I had seen things that other children had not seen – elephants, zebras, deserts. What other children dreamed about, I had actually seen with my own eyes." When Denis moved back to Paris in the late 1960s to pick up her formal studies she says that she never lost the memory of this hallucinatory landscape. She graduated in 1972 from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), the prestigious film institute in Paris. She then went on to work as an assistant with Jacques Rivette, Costa-Gavras, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. "This is when I really fell in love with cinema," she says. "I began to love the whole process of organising the technology, the actors, and the team. For me, it is a total experience of art in action."

Denis co-wrote the script of White Material with Marie NDiaye, a 43-year-old novelist of Franco-Senegalese origin. NDiaye had her first novel published at the age of 17 and, in 2001, was awarded the Prix Femina for her novel Rosie Carpe. In 2009, she won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary prize in France, for her novel Trois puissantes femmes (Three Powerful Women). Given NDiaye's parallel interest in the French colonial experience and its aftermath, as well as her taste for novelty and experiment, this seemed the perfect artistic marriage. There were, however, rumours in the French press that all had not gone as well as it might have done. NDiaye has a reputation as a prickly character and Denis is not exactly known for her easy-going manner. Was there truth in the rumours of a clash of egos?

"Well, that is not exactly what happened," says Denis. "But there were circumstances at the beginning of our relationship that we had to sort out. Marie is a writer and she is used to spending a lot of time on her own, but I always work with people and when I do that I have to spend time with them – a lot of time walking, swimming, eating, talking, living with them. I know that Marie found this difficult at first. She was used to working and thinking without a partner. But we travelled together to Africa and that's when the work came together. I had an African childhood, which Marie did not have, and we discussed that, and what it meant to be white in Africa, and it was from that contradiction that we began to put together White Material."

Denis is impatient with the notion that Chocolat or White Material are autobiographical or even related as films. "No, White Material is not related to Chocolat," she says firmly. "There is no connection at all. They are entirely different visions of Africa and the cinema. Chocolat is about friendship and family, and maybe sex and longing, and White Material is about remaining strong in the face of danger."

I wonder whether the theme of White Material is in any sense linked to Marguerite Duras's novel Un Barrage contre le Paficique (published in 1950 and translated into English as The Sea Wall). This is a part-autobiographical novel in which Duras recounts part of her adolescence growing up in French Indochina, and partly a study of French colonialism. It is interesting that this book has twice been made into a film in French – most recently in 2008, starring none other than Isabelle Huppert in a role not unlike the character she plays in White Material.

Denis softens at this. "Marguerite Duras was a very good friend of mine and an intellectual hero. She was also a sort of mother figure. Of course she was an influence. We had a lot in common in our backgrounds. But you have to remember, too, that French colonialism was not just the same experience all over the world. In Algeria the pieds noirs [French settlers] thought that they actually lived in a country called French Algeria and that this was their homeland, even if it was only a fantasy. For people like Marguerite and me, in Indochina or black Africa, we grew up somehow with the sense that we didn't belong, that we were outsiders. So, yes, there are things about that way of growing up that never leave you. There is a sense of marginality perhaps. That is definitely so."

I also wonder whether Denis's film-making technique owed anything to Duras's literary methods. In the 1950s and 1960s Duras was an avatar of the literary movement called the "nouveau roman". This was a way of building a narrative that leaves out all essential elements – plotting, psychology, narrative twists – leaving only the core inner experience of the central characters as the real texture of the book. This can sometimes be pretentious and deeply tedious, which is why the novels of leading "nouveaux romanciers" such as Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Sarraute now seem so dated. But in the hands of a skilled artist such as Duras the technique has a strange, compelling power, especially when she dealt in subjective experiences such as eroticism, grief, terror or joy.

"It is true that I have taken something from Duras, as a writer and as a woman," Denis says. "I grew up mainly reading detective novels and the usual classics at school. But I do admire Duras's novels, and particularly the way that she leaves crucial details out of the book so you are always guessing at the meaning. I have also read Georges Bataille, who was a friend of Duras and a good philosopher, and he talks about life in this way. It is a way of describing how we really live. We are always trying and failing to understand the world and ourselves. We never really know the final meaning of our lives. Literature and the cinema should reflect that."

For all her avowed interest in the drama of humanity, Denis is vague to the point of opacity about her own family life. But as I probe her relationship with her parents, she makes the most self-revealing comment in our conversation, remarking that for her cinema should be like her dreams. So what does she dream of? "I dream about a lot of things. I worry about the normal things that a person worries about – my parents are old and my father is ill. My mother is tough but he is not. I worry about my own health, the health of the people I love. I am a human being and my dreams are about all of these things, not always good, not always bad."

This is key to understanding the mysteries of the cinema of Claire Denis. She is fascinated by the intimacy and frailty of human relations, and tries not to categorise or define those experiences. She is drawn to extremes of experience – violence is a key motif, but so are betrayal and troubled sexuality. This tendency has led her to make mistakes. Perhaps her most disastrous error was the 2001 film Trouble Every Day, starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle. Its ludicrous plot about sex-hungry cannibalistic vampires in Paris drew derisive laughter when it was screened in Cannes and its gory scenes had even hardened horror fans retching in disgust. Denis found herself briefly bracketed with the "new French extremity" wave of films, fashionable in the late 1990s for depicting sex and death with pornographic relish. "Extreme" directors included the likes of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat and Bertrand Bonello, who all claimed to be extending the boundaries of the cinema by outdoing one another in nastiness.

That is not where Claire Denis belonged at all. At this distance the best we could agree about Trouble Every Day is that the sly and moody soundtrack by British band Tindersticks is superb. Denis has a longstanding association with Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples and the band have provided several soundtracks to her films, including White Material.

At its best, however, her work is truly "prismatic". That is a word, often overused by cinema critics, to describe work that is dreamy, elliptical and apparently disconnected from real life. Denis's approach is to take on reality from a variety of angles – she refracts real experience with a cinematic method that always seeks to conceal more than it reveals. In this way, as seen in the dream-like, terrible landscapes of White Material, she can literally open up a new field of vision.

This approach was not part of her ambition when she started making pictures, she says now. "I always wanted to make an epic. I love epic adventures as I have always loved travelling. An epic adventure takes you on a journey to a place that you have never been before. That is why I love the cinema of David Lean. When you went to see Ryan's Daughter or Lawrence of Arabia, he took you on a journey, and you never knew quite where it was going, or what it was all going to mean. That kind of cinema is gone now. The technology has changed. The digital era also means that the money has gone. But it is a proud ambition for a film-maker to have, to take the viewer somewhere new."

So does this mean that for all her reputation as a difficult and tricky film-maker, she also has a simpler aim: to entertain? "The cinema gives pleasure, certainly. But most of all for me, film-making is a journey into the impossible. When I make a film I have to be like a military commander, in charge of every strategy and tactic, but I never really know where we are going."

At this point she leans across to me, and she finally has a warm if secretive smile. "But of course," she says, "I can never let anyone know this."

Andrew Hussey

Lost John Ford movie unearthed in New Zealand (The Guardian)

An extraordinary collection of 75 early American films, including several that had been considered lost to history, have been discovered in New Zealand and are being returned to the US.

The cache includes the only copy believed to exist of a late silent movie by one of the giants of American film-making, John Ford, as well as several works produced between 1910 and 1920 starring important female actors such as Clara Bow and Mabel Normand.

The collection had been stored at the New Zealand Film Archive but their significance was not fully recognised until last year when they were dug out by a Los Angeles-based film preservationist. A deal has since been struck with the National Film Preservation Foundation based in San Francisco to preserve the reels and return them to the US.

The batch is being seen as a time capsule of American film from the 1910s and 1920s. Only about a fifth of all US films produced between 1900 and 1940 have survived, the rest having been lost through decay or neglect.

The collection comes from a period when the American film industry was just taking off and, propelled by the success of westerns, had begun to triumph around the world. About nine out of every 10 films shown in cinemas globally in the 1910s were made in the US.

"This is a wonderful group of movies," said Annette Melville, the NFPF's director. "About 70% of them are complete, which is extraordinary in itself, and many have their original colour tints."
The crown jewel of the collection is Upstream, a 1927 film by John Ford, the director who later made such Oscar-winning classics as The Grapes of Wrath and The Quiet Man. Ford made more than 60 silent films between 1917 and 1928 but only about 10 are known to exist in their complete form.

The copy of Upstream found in New Zealand has a little damage from decay to its nitrates at the start of the film, obscuring the credits, which might explain why it has taken so long to come to light. The collection also includes a trailer for another Ford film, Strong Boy, which has otherwise been lost.

It is thought that New Zealand had such a rich trove of early films largely because of the distribution system at the time. Copies would be sent out across America and beyond, and after their run had finished they would either be sent back to the distributors or simply be destroyed. New Zealand was so distant that cinemas hung on to the copies and in some cases stored them, from where some made their way into the national film archive.

Melville said that film historians would be fascinated by the relative prevalence of female actors among the cast lineups, particularly in those films made in the 1910s when women enjoyed almost equal billing to their male colleagues.

They include the silent comedian Mabel Normand of Keystone Studios, Clara Bow, and Mary Fuller, who features in a 1914 serial in which she plays an ace newspaper reporter who always gets the scoop.

"Fuller's films were tremendously popular, as women had just started to enter the workplace and would go to the movies on their way home from work," said Melville. "They wanted to see strong, adventurous women on the screen."

Other films are important for documenting America in the early 20th century. The first film to be preserved from the collection, The Sergeant from 1910, was shot on location in Yosemite before the Californian wilderness had been turned into a national park, and features US army cavalry troops, who at that time were keeping order in the park.

Tim Burton: 'Alice is a very annoying, odd little girl' (The Guardian)

As the director emerges blinking from Wonderland, we peek behind his shades to talk Johnny Depp, Walt Disney and why finishing a film is 'like death'

Nothing is as it should be. Tim Burton hurries into the London hotel room looking not like he has just fallen down the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland, but immaculate in black suit, black suede loafers, stripy socks and pin-striped shirt; hair on the large side but not totally feral. The tinted glasses favoured by both Burton and his best buddy Johnny Depp are missing, leaving the director's face open, benevolent even. He drops into an armchair, crosses and uncrosses his legs, jumps up to turn the air conditioning from freezing to hot.

Burton – his soft Californian voice thick with cold – talks in fractured, distracted sentences with his arms behind his head, holding on to the ears of the armchair. At one point, towards the end of our allotted slot, he is almost in tears when talking about Alexander McQueen, whose funeral is taking place nearby. He leans forward and blinks furiously: "I did some drawings for him … Oh God. It's the most tragic thing … A couple of good friends of mine … It's the most haunting thing for me to this day …"

Outside the hotel room it's a different, make-believe world: the corridor is lined with lavish Alice In Wonderland posters featuring Depp as a psychedelic but tender Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as a petulant, mercurial and very funny Red Queen with an enlarged forehead, and 19-year-old Australian Mia Wasikowska as a stridently feminist Alice who looks remarkably like a sulky young Gwyneth Paltrow.

Disney staff stride up and down, herding international press from one room to another, handing out Mad Hatter stopwatches and Alice mugs. It's all very corporate for Burton, who's supposed to be the cool kid, the king of gothic fantasy, the ultimate outsider. In 1994, after starring in Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood but before his appearances in the director's Sleepy Hollow, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd, Depp wrote of Burton: "He is an artist, a genius, an oddball, an insane, brilliant, brave, hysterically funny, loyal, nonconformist, honest friend."

He may be all those things, but Burton, now 51 and living in Hampstead with Bonham Carter and their two young children, is less indie than most might think. His 3D version of Alice – in which she returns to Wonderland for a second time and reluctantly deposes the Red Queen – cost nearly £160m. According to Variety, it's "a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney" – a glorious CG action adventure with obsessive attention to detail.

Burton, who only finished the film two weeks before its release, is exhilarated but exhausted. He's got a typical director's hangover; right now he never wants to make another film. "Alice was an experiment," he says. "We didn't know what the movie was till the very end. It was exciting and scary. Working on the CG just got more and more and more intense. The intensity peaked last week, when we had to stop." He starts to shout: "We had to stop! STOP! I never consider a film finished and this was no different." He suddenly looks bereft: "Finishing a film is like a death in some way." Surely it's more like a birth?

"You're right. Of course it's a birth. But something definitely dies, too. It's an unnerving feeling that takes time to get over."

'Beyond all the kooky bells and whistles of my Alice, it's a simple internal story about somebody finding their own strength'

When Disney approached Burton with the Alice project, he immediately wanted to make a definitive version of a film that has been adapted for cinema and television nearly 30 times. "I've always hated Alice on screen," he says. "She's a very annoying, odd little girl. I wanted to make her into a character I could identify with: quiet, internal, not comfortable in her own skin, not quite knowing how to deal with things, being both young and having an old soul." Did he want Wasikowska to be feminist? "I'm OK with it! Beyond all the kooky bells and whistles of my Alice, it's a simple internal story about somebody finding their own strength. She's been battered around by real life, has never quite fitted in …"

Burton drifts off. For all his public reputation as being bonkers (he lives not with Bonham Carter, but in an adjoining cottage! They don't comb their hair! They are Mr and Mrs Mad Hatter!), Burton is simply an outsider made good. He grew up an introverted child in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, a bland place he refers to as "Anywhere USA". He watched "crappy" monster movies such as The Brain That Wouldn't Die on TV. He felt alienated but assumed all kids felt the same.

"In my head I was a completely normal child," he says, "but somehow society deemed me to be weird. I felt quite sad about it because people put me aside. And, in a way, nothing has changed. Though my friends would tell you that I'm a pretty regular guy."

Until he temporarily lived in London while making Batman in the late-80s and Sleepy Hollow a decade later, Burton never felt at home anywhere. "When I first came here I had a past-life experience," he says. "I don't get those very often, but I felt extremely at home and comfortable. Weird." He met and fell in love with Bonham Carter on 2001's remake of Planet Of The Apes and soon after moved to his spiritual home full-time.

While earlier films such as Edward Scissorhands were inspired by his Anywhere USA upbringing, recent work such as Sweeney Todd and Alice suggests an Anglophile who by now is pretty much a naturalised Brit. Burton nods enthusiastically: "I've now made more films here than there. I like being away from where the business is. I feel more connected to the film process here. I like the artists, painters and sculptors who live here. They inspire me when I'm making a film."

'It's good to scare kids a bit if they can handle it. Though it might be strange for my son to see his mother with such a large forehead!'

A respected artist himself, with an acclaimed exhibition currently running at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Burton's heavily stylised cinematic world is endlessly inspired by his visual imagination. Yet, for all his talk of not making another movie, he is more smitten by film than any other artistic endeavour. He says his own films are "all my strange children in some way", and that they're all imperfect. "The flaws of a film are part of what it is. I've never made a film that is even nearly perfect. I have different feelings towards different films. Scissorhands was very personal. Nightmare Before Christmas I developed from scratch. I felt very strongly about the material in Ed Wood. Pee-wee's Big Adventure was my first film back in '85. Beetlejuice was such a weird hybrid of a thing. Batman was a big thing for me. My films are like a time capsule of my life; they define my life."

He is unapologetic about using actors on a loop (Depp's now been in seven Burton films to Bonham Carter's six). "I like working with actors who have no real vanity. They're not worried about their careers, they're just kind of, 'Boom! You want to make my forehead big? OK!' I don't think Johnny has ever watched a film we've made together. I know Helena didn't watch Sweeney Todd. She'll watch Alice because we're taking our six-year-old son Billy Ray to the premiere tonight. It's good to scare kids a bit if they can handle it. Though it might be strange for him to see his mother with such a large forehead. I've tried to warn him …"

As the interview draws to a close, Burton talks briefly about heading the jury at Cannes in May. He didn't watch a film for the two years he spent making Alice and is genuinely excited about "reconnecting to movies". He pushes a hand through his hair till it starts, finally, to stick up: "It will be another visit to Wonderland for me. I always go out of my way to be as open as possible with other directors' work because I am acutely aware of the pressure to categorise and label everything. But I'm a moody person," he smiles, "so you never know!"

"La mujer sin cabeza", de Lucrecia Martel (The Guardian)

By Peter Bradshaw

In the past decade, there have been three great films about guilt, denial and the return of the repressed: Mike Leigh's Vera Drake in 2004, Michael Haneke's Hidden in 2005 – and this is the third, La Mujer Sin Cabeza, or The Headless Woman, directed by Lucrecia Martel and co-produced by Pedro and Agustín ­Almodóvar. It is a masterly, disturbing and deeply mysterious film about someone who strenuously conceals from ­herself the knowledge of her own guilt.

Each time I have seen it, this film has swirled residually in my subconscious for days, and each time I have witnessed exactly the same spectacle outside the cinema afterwards: knots of people ­excitably, grumpily arguing about it. Some denounce it for ­being boring, ­wilfully obscure arthouse stuff – and, yes, be warned, it is a ­difficult, challenging film – while others, like onlookers trying to piece together events leading up to a robbery, ­frantically ask each other what happened and where and how and why. Then there's a smaller group, including me, dazed and ­wondering if what we have seen is not a portrait of a guilty person, but rather the ­autobiographical and minutely realistic dream this person is having.

The Headless Woman is set among an extended wealthy family in ­Argentina. Maria Onetto plays Verónica, an ­elegant, middle-aged woman who works as a dentist. Driving back from a ­family ­get-together, Verónica hits something in her car – bang! – her ­forehead lunges ­forward and appears to smash either into the steering wheel or the ­windshield, and whiplashes back. Verónica brakes and for a long, long ­moment, Martel's camera holds the shot of her profile: as she sits immobile and silent in the car. Is she in shock? Is she gazing at what she has hit in the rear-view mirror? For the first time, we see a child's handprint on the driver's-side window, a handprint which, in some kind of nightmarish ­continuity error appears to change ­position in the next shot.

But couldn't that just be from the kids who were larking around her car at the party earlier? We turn with Verónica, and all we can see at this stage is a dead dog in the distance, which in an earlier scene had been with some boys playing by the roadside.

Verónica returns home: clearly ­traumatised. She cannot answer simple questions; she is ­confused. But it is not merely the physical impact. Verónica is dealing with the awful suspicion that she killed not merely the dog, but its owner. She has killed a child. Verónica confesses as much, in a quiet, wondering voice, to her ­husband, perhaps ­conveying an unspoken ­instruction that he and the menfolk of the ­family – ­doctors and medical types well ­connected with the cops – should ­handle this situation.

Martel's movie intuits and imitates her concussed state, a state which ­embraces evasive semi-consciousness. Shots are asymmetrically composed in such a way that we can't be sure what we are supposed to be looking at: Verónica, with her faint, not-all-there smile, will be in one part of the screen, while someone else, in another part, will be quietly getting something sorted. Like Verónica, the film glimpses the truth out of the corner of its eye. The sound design is such that voices that we think are emanating from just behind the camera, near Verónica, are ­coming from people talking in the middle ­distance: belatedly, we match the sound to their moving lips.

Often, people talking to Verónica will be seen only from the neck down – they are headless, like the famous photo of the "headless man" in the 1963 Duchess of Argyll divorce case. Her disorientation becomes most disturbing when she goes with a family party to visit an ancient aunt, who is suffering from dementia, and who complains that her apartment with its ancient furniture is filled with squeaks, like the sounds of the dead. In the same state of ­suppressed panic that she ­perceives ­everything else, Verónica sees that this old woman is a kindred spirit; she too must now live with ghosts.

But even here the complications and agonies are not complete. This is not the first time Verónica has had to swallow a secret and live a lie. There is another elephant in the living room she has to feed. A long, mysterious trip to a hotel just after the accident, and sexualised encounters with two different ­family members, indicate that avoidance, ­secrecy and denial are lifelong habits.

This is not an easy film to watch, or to understand, but the potency with which it resonates in the imagination is remarkable. Lucrecia Martel's other films, The Swamp (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004) have both had something of this spacey, floating style, but never before has it been applied to something so painful, so relevant, and never before has she delivered such a psychologically real portrait: demonstrating in both style and content what happens when we go into denial. I'm as certain as I can be of the towering talent of Lucrecia Martel, but I can't quite be certain of exactly what The Headless Woman is about. For example: the child's ­handprint changing position … did I just ­imagine that? You tell me.

Avatar: hit or miss? We can't really tell you (The Guardian)

By Mark Brown

It has been one of the most hyped movies of the decade: the return of James Cameron with a $230m-plus 3D interspecies action movie that will, some observers say, decide the future of the industry.

Today it arrived with 20th Century Fox choosing London to launch Avatar, Cameron's sole movie in 12 years – the last being Titanic with its 11 Oscars and record-breaking box office of $1.8bn (£1.1bn).

Cameron said he was just relieved the movie was finally out there. "We can hold our heads high. We got the picture done by the skin of our teeth. It's been a four-and-a-half-year process and it's a relief to let people see it, to quit talking about it, to forget the rumours."

And there have been a lot of rumours. Rumours that the budget was double the stated amount, more like $500m. Rumours that the 3D effects were making people nauseous. Rumours that the film, two hours and 40 minutes long, was a complete car crash.

The Guardian can reveal that the last two are untrue. The film does not make you feel sick and it is not a disaster. All journalists watching the movie in Fox's Soho headquarters had to sign a form agreeing not to publish a review or even express a professional opinion online or in print before Monday.

So by saying Avatar was really much, much better than expected, that it looked amazing and that the story was gripping – if cheesy in many places – the Guardian is in technical breach of the agreement. It is not a breach, however, to report that other journalists leaving the screening were also positive: the terrible film that some had been anticipating had not materialised. It was good.

There is, though, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief needed when watching Avatar. Cynics might sneer at the plot. The film, set in 2154, revolves around a paraplegic marine assigned to a planet where brutish humans are forcing the natives from their homes to mine a precious mineral, unobtanium, which is the only thing that will keep Earth going.

To get it they need to blast away an agreeable species called the Na'vi – 12ft or so blue humanoids with tails and pixie eyes. Sam Worthington as the paraplegic marine pretends to be a Na'vi through avatar technology. At first he's on the nasty human military side but he falls in love, gains a conscience and so on.

Perhaps most surprising was the politics. At one stage the deranged general leading the attack, with echoes of George W Bush, declares: "Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror, with terror." There is more shock and awe in this movie than almost any other.

Cameron agreed there was a connection to recent events but there were also references to Vietnam, and to the 16th- and 17th-century European colonisation of the Americas. "There is this long wonderful history of the human race written in blood going back as far as can be remembered. We have this tendency to just take what we want. And that's how we treat the natural world as well. There's this sense of we're here, we're big, we've got the guns, we've got the technology, therefore we're entitled to every damn thing on this planet. That's not how it works and we're going to find out the hard way if we don't kind of wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural life on Earth."

The film will open at cinemas next week and gets its world premiere in London tonight with Cameron joined by the actors Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldano in Leicester Square.

Audiences will be able to watch in normal 2D or in what Cameron called the "turbo-charged" version, 3D. Some industry observers are hoping that audiences will be so blown away by the effects that 3D starts becoming the norm.

If it does well – and there seems little doubt that it will not – then can we expect more? "We'll see," said Cameron. "But yes, I have a story worked out for a second film and a third film."

Tom Waits gives the devil his due (The Guardian)

At 59, Tom Waits has finally landed the role he was born to play: the devil. He reveals how his part in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was informed by a lifetime's fascination with beatniks, stories and lonely old men

Xan Brooks

All thoughts of conducting a straightforward interview with Tom Waits turn to steam within seconds of his arrival in the Soho hotel suite. I come in through one door, carrying a notepad and a tape recorder. He comes through the other, carrying the exact same equipment. "Now OK," he says, arranging his effects on the table. "You have your questions for me, and then I have some questions for you." Introductions complete, he whips off his porkpie hat to let the hair stream up. He could be a conjurer unveiling a rabbit.

One does not so much interrogate Waits as be granted an audience, a private performance. Talking to the press, he once confessed, is like talking to the cops. You only do it when you have to, and it is always better to bear false witness. So he will claim he was raised by a pair of circus acrobats, or that he met his wife after busting her out of a convent, or that he trained as a doctor and still occasionally practises on the kids. "Most of the time I just tell 'em stories," he allows. "And if the stories are entertaining, who cares whether or not they're true?"

Waits is in town to discuss his role as the devil in Terry Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I tell him Gilliam has said this is the role he was born to play, and he chuckles and says he can't think why; he was raised in the church. I mention this is actually his 25th screen role and he shrugs and says that Oh Lord, he wasn't keeping track. In person, Waits looks much the same as he always did: the same hunched, simian posture and weathered Dustbowl features; the same wispy, rust-coloured bouffant. This, perhaps, is the benefit of a life spent play-acting the wily, disreputable old puck. At the age of 59, he has finally grown into the costume.

Now look, he says. He figured I would probably ask him about some movies he likes, so he has done his homework and written them down. He crouches over his notepad and reads out the names. Putney Swope. The Pawnbroker. The Ox-Bow Incident. "Did you ever see a movie called Dirty Little Billy?" he asks, squinting up at me. "Starred Michael J Pollard. Made right around the same time as McCabe & Mrs Miller."

The jump-rope testActing, he points out, is merely a sidebar. He has been fortunate enough to work with the likes of Coppola and Altman, Jarmusch and Gilliam, and yet this has always been secondary to the music. Music was his first love – but then everybody loves music. "What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. That one day … " He coughs and regroups. "I used to imagine that making it in music – really making it in music – is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture."

Is that what motivated him? The quest for immortality? "I guess, to a certain degree. Whether you say it or not, that's what you're thinking. You want to feel ongoing, because it's like getting extra time." He glances at the page. "Now, what do you think of Zatoichi? The blind samurai."
'We're all insects crawling on the shiny hood of a Cadillac'Waits was born not to circus performers but to a pair of teachers in Pomona, California. He was, by his own account, a strange little boy: bookish, overwound and with a tendency to be spooked by untoward noises. He did not thrive at school, he says, because he did not like the little holes they drilled in the cork-board ceiling, or the hooked stick they used to open the windows. He did not like being young, and took to shuffling around with his granddad's hat and cane.

Later, he fell under the spell of Charles Bukowski and the beat generation, and took to hanging out amid the flotsam of downtown LA. He was fascinated, he said, by "the great American loneliness", a loneliness that stretched from coast to coast and was as elusive and mysterious as ground fog. "Yeah, that all came from Bukowski and Kerouac," he recalls. "I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath."

Throughout the 70s, Waits viewed the fog at eye-level. He lived semi-rough at the Tropicana motel, where he would set his piano up in the kitchen and fish his songs from the old men who sat in the lobby. "You know how it is," he says. "If you're a writer you know that the stories don't come to you, you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were. And then when the record label would send me on tour, I always resisted checking into the usual places. I'd step off the bus and look for the hotels named after presidents." Hotels named after presidents, he argues, guarantee a certain grubby authenticity. "The Taft!" Waits says with relish. "You could usually rely on finding a Taft in every town. Take me to the Taft! You walk in and there they are: the old men in the lobby."

Bourbon and rumba Waits's musical output falls into two distinct categories. The songs on those early albums arranged themselves like the patrons of a seedy lounge bar. They were woozy, jazzy offerings, marinated in bourbon, and spinning tales of loss and longing and half-chances that never quite came good.

Then, with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, a curious transformation occurred, and these barflies grew wings. They began hammering on the lamp-shades and rattling the optics. They learned rumba, gospel and delta blues. They became wilder, richer, more radical.

I confess that I like the early songs as well. But it's too late, they're gone, disowned like bad relations. "I'm embarrassed by them," he admits. "It was a time when I was trying to find my place within the business. I was figuring out who I was and where that person intersected with the world of commerce. It was like I was sitting there with a ventriloquist's dummy on my knee. And the dummy is made out of wood. And after a while you start to hate each other."

Then whoops, it's back to the notebook. "Cantinflas," he says, bent low over the page. "You know Cantinflas?" Cantinflas was Mexico's answer to Charlie Chaplin and a comic beloved by Waits's own father. "Oh Cantinflas, he was something else. He had the hair and the walk. Looking back, I now see that I lifted a lot of my act from Cantinflas."

Who's steering the ship?The catalyst, however, came courtesy of his wife. Waits met Kathleen Brennan on the cusp of the 1980s, when she was working as a script consultant on Coppola's One from the Heart. It was Brennan who broadened his range, knocked him out of his rut. Without her, he says, he would probably be playing in a steakhouse today.

"She rescued me. Maybe I rescued her too; that's often how it works. Upshot is that we both got into the same leaky boat. Maybe the weight drags it down, because now you've two people sitting in it. Sorry, baby! But on the other hand you've also got two peoples' imagination to patch it up again."

The fact is, women are just that bit smarter than men. "Everybody knows she's the brains behind Pa, as Dylan might have said. I'm just the figurehead. She's the one who's steering the ship."

Specifically, she has steered it all the way from downtown LA to a home amid the hills of northern California. Brennan helped Waits to clean up his act. He quit smoking, embraced sobriety and went on to raise three children who are now all but grown, except the singer argues no one ever really grows, they just become different. In the meantime, the albums have kept coming, even if they wash in at a slower rate these days. Real Gone, in 2004, was his last collection of original material. Since then, he has put out Orphans, a collection of offcuts and offshoots, and has a live album, Glitter and Doom, set for release next month. "I'm almost 60," he marvels. "An honest-to-God old man. I'll write you from there and tell you what it's like."

Do we have time for one last trip to the notebook? It transpires that we do. Waits loves Toby Damnit, a short film by Fellini, and the opening scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, when the tin windmill turns around and says "Weaargh! Weaargh!" He loves Central Station and City of God; all those fresh films out of Latin America. I tell him about Tony Manero, a Chilean black comedy that came out earlier this year. He likes the sound of that one and duly jots it down.

"You know what one of my favourite movies of all time is? And if I'm at home with my kids and say, 'What do you want to see?', the big joke is, 'Aw Dad! Not Pig in the City!' But I love that movie. I'd see that any time."

I tell him I like the Babe sequel myself, but am now struggling to recall the details. Wasn't there some scene in a vivisectionist lab? A tragic orangutan who won't leave his cage because he is not properly dressed? "Oh, I know," groans Waits, raising a hand as if to ward off evil spirits. "Oh God," he says. "Don't." Nothing pierces his heart so keenly, it seems, as a monkey that has spent too long in the world of men.

'When you're in hell, keep going'I ask whether he ever feels nostalgic for the wild years, when he lived at the Tropicana and laid his head at the Taft. "I can't say that I miss it," he says with a shrug. "We're all eating our way through the potato. Like they say: when you're in hell, keep going. Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you."

In any case, he says, so what if he no longer holds court at the Tropicana? The world is different, but it is not entirely different. There are still dark pockets to explore, so long as you know where to look. If he wants to spend a night out on the railroad tracks he still can: he just has to plan it in advance. And if he cares to check in at the Taft then hey, he can do that too. "I kept hold of the room key," he confides. "I can go back anytime I want." And at this point, Waits dissolves into an emphysemic cackle. "That's the key," he says. "The key is the key."

"Inglourious Basterds", de Quentin Tarantino (The Guardian)

By Peter Bradshaw (1/5)

Quentin Tarantino is having what Martin Amis readers might call a "Yellow Dog" moment - something which happens when, following a worrying, mid-to-late period of creative uncertainty, a once dazzlingly exciting artist suddenly and catastrophically belly-flops, to the dismay of his admirers.

His new film is a cod-second world war adventure about a Jewish-American revenge squad sent into occupied France to spread terror among Nazis. Brad Pitt plays their leader, Lt Aldo Raine, and Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, is his ferocious second-in-command Sgt Donny Donowitz; Diane Kruger plays a German movie star called Bridget Von Hammersmark who has secret quasi-Dietrich sympathies with the Allies, and Michael Fassbender plays Lt Archie Hicox, a cucumber-cool British commando who in civvy street was, of all things, a film critic. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman who has had to change what in France is a resonant surname; she owns the Parisian cinema at which the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, will assemble for one of Goebbels's propaganda movies. Here is where the Basterds hope to make their hit: but opposing them is the chilling SS Colonel Hans Landa, nicely played by Tarantino's personal casting discovery Christoph Waltz, who won the best actor award at Cannes for this performance.

It is notionally inspired by a 1970s B-movie called Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato, otherwise The Damned Armoured Train, renamed Inglorious Bastards for its American release: a war picture in the Dirty Dozen style by Italian director Enzo Castellari. But Tarantino's debt is much more obviously to Sergio Leone, weirdly mulched in with Mel Brooks. Having seen it once in Cannes earlier this year, and again for its UK release I was struck afresh by how exasperatingly awful and transcendentally disappointing it is: a colossal, complacent, long-winded dud, a gigantic two-and-a-half-hour anti-climax, like a Quentin Tarantino film in form and mannerism but with the crucial element of genius mysteriously amputated. Over-stretched scene follows over-stretched scene in plonkingly conventional narrative order and each is stuffed with dull dialogue which made it feel like Mogadon was somehow being pumped into the cinema's air-conditioning. The cut is now marginally different from that which premiered in Cannes, slightly longer in fact, and there appears to be a new introduction to the unendurably, unbelievably tedious scene set in a beer cellar where the actors play a guessing-game with playing cards.

There's no doubt that the 52-year-old Waltz - an Austrian-born actor who had been plying his trade on TV until Tarantino plucked him from the ranks - is a real find, and Mélanie Laurent also deserves this leg-up to stardom. But they can't make any real difference, and Brad Pitt gives the most wooden and charmless performance of his life; he acts and speaks as if the lower half of his face is set in concrete. Now, it is misleading to complain about boredom, when we all know how Tarantino can alchemise this into something special. In Pulp Fiction two hitmen famously put the exciting business of murder on hold while they discussed dull things like what Europeans call a quarter-pounder.

But there the ostensible banality was sexy, funny and above all intentional, and the director could in any case turn the action on a sixpence into something thrilling or horrifying whenever and wherever he felt like it. He exemplified Don DeLillo's maxim about America being "the only country in the world with funny violence". But here the boringness is just boring, and the violence doesn't get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste - and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo.

When I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, my traumatised complaint was that it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp. Since then, its defenders have claimed that the point of the film is that it is "kosher porn": an over-the-top revenge fantasy for Jews. Well, erm, maybe. But it might simply have the highly un-porny effect of reminding us what actually happened. And if "kosher porn" was the point, wouldn't it have been better to make the Basterds' leader actually Jewish? Instead of which, their CO is Brad Pitt, the good ol' boy from Tennessee, a part of the world in which progressive sympathies with European Jewry are - how can I put it? - atypical. Even this, moreover, isn't exactly the point. Wildly bad-taste ahistorical fantasies about Nazi Germany are great: but here they are nullified by middlebrow good-taste cinephile stuff referencing UFA, Emil Jannings etc, in which the details of course have to be exactly right.

Tarantino's genius always lay, for me, in his audacious and provocative adventures in style, making generic textures bubble and react. His great riffs were sublime, similar to what Godard saw in Nicholas Ray: pure cinema. What happens when these surfaces fail to fizz? You get what you have here: great heavy lumps of nothing. I have always deprecated the growing and rather supercilious critical consensus that the Master's best film is Jackie Brown - a good film, yes, but uncharacteristic, and without the brash inspiration of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or the late-flowering delirium of Kill Bill. Yet maybe this is the sort of thing that Tarantino should now work on: solid adaptations to steady and re-settle his greatness. That could be a way to put his mojo-loss into remission and return to the glory days.

Friendly Fires: 'We had two good songs, no fans and the PA broke - but now look at us' (The Guardian)

Friendly Fires - Live @ Buenos Aires - 19 Agosto - La Trastienda

Finally they're the band of the summer. So why did Friendly Fires take so long to get going, asks Ally Carnwath

Jack Savidge, drummer with electro-funk trio Friendly Fires, is thoroughly satisfied with his afternoon's shopping. "I've got a new pair of pants," he says triumphantly. "I've got a new toothbrush and toothpaste and socks. It'll certainly make up for the fact that I've only got one pair of trousers for the next five days."

The group had assumed they would get a day's respite from their touring schedule to head home and do their laundry. No such luck: following the evening's gig at a sold-out Roundhouse in north London, they were due to drive overnight to Belgium and then on to Switzerland, an itinerary that at the very least necessitates a washbag and a change of underwear.

Ask the trio of affable 25-year-olds what it's like to be in one of the most exciting and critically feted British bands of the past year, and these are the type of observations you get. Hailing from St Albans, where they met as teenagers at the city's all boys public school, they are far too middle class and self-deprecating to indulge in self-aggrandisement. Instead, there's a stream of amiable banter and studenty humour - routines honed over more than 10 years of friendship.

Since the start of the year, when the trio appeared alongside Glasvegas and Little Boots on NME's annual tour of tipped new artists, their schedule has felt like some particularly masochistic homage to Phileas Fogg. They have played throughout America and Europe, returned to Britain for a headline tour and have trips to Australia and South America coming up.

All of this is designed to capitalise on the slow-burning success of their brilliant self-titled debut. It reached number 38 when first released last September but, 10 months later, has attached itself, limpet-like, to the upper reaches of the album charts and there's been a corresponding swell in the number of people shouting back the lyrics every night.

The band had visions of their concert in Mexico being attended by a small group of bored-looking Latin-American Anglophiles. But "it was the loudest crowd noise we'd ever had. We had to be taken through the crowd by bouncers," remembers singer and chief songwriter Ed MacFarlane. Forty thousand people attempted to buy tickets for their gig at the Roundhouse. "When I heard that I was like, 'Fucking hell, that's ridiculous,'" he says. "It feels like people are starting to give a shit about us and that this is our time."

And last month, they played to an audience of more than 35,000 fans at Glastonbury, a performance that put them up with Blur's return and Lady Gaga's fire-spitting boobs as one of the weekend's main talking points. Just before their mid-afternoon set, their record company had had to abandon its plan to release a cascade of balloons during the chorus to their best-known single, "Paris", but the natural buoyancy of their anthems was enough to send the crowd into fist-pumping ecstasies. And like the consummate crowd-pleasers the band are, they even managed to bring the sun out.

It's a far cry from their early days, playing at birthday parties in St Albans for their teenage friends. The trio's original incarnation, First Day Back, specialised in earnest instrumental rock and covers of jockish nu-metal bands. "It was a broad church," observes guitarist Edd Gibson wryly.

But they survived beyond the life span of most adolescent groups, reconvened after university, and by the time of their first gig as Friendly Fires - at the Old Queen's Head in north London in September 2006 - had even developed a minor industry buzz of the sort that can beef up and then swiftly kill off a fledgling band.

They stifled that through the clever expedient of giving a lousy performance. "Half the PA broke, we only had about two good songs and we didn't have any fans; it was just A&R people jotting notes," remembers Ed. They returned to St Albans, no longer flavour of the month but with the time and space to develop their sound. They are now reaping the benefits.

"We've been able to do things at our own pace and make an album we are content and happy with," says Ed. "We have been playing the record for two years and if we weren't happy with it, we'd be a lot more insane than we are now."

Having taken several years to emerge and the best part of a year to take off commercially, it's an album that, in many ways, has peaked at the right time. Its intuitive grasp of itchy art-funk, electronic euphoria and stadium anthems - a sound described by one critic as "sophisticated but unashamed pop music" - make it the perfect distillation of the year's prevailing musical trends. That defining Glastonbury performance has brought them more attention and this week the shortlist for the annual Mercury Music Prize is announced, with the band widely expected to make the cut. How do they feel about that?

Ed is diplomatic: "I think it would be great if we were nominated and to win it would be fucking amazing but I'm not going to say I'll be disappointed if we don't." Jack is cheerily fatalistic: "We've had people talking to us about it, which instantly jinxes it. We are definitely not going to get nominated now." And Edd is philosophical: "We were nominated for the South Bank Show Breakthrough award and we got beaten by this guy who choreographed a Kylie video so we're used to rejection."

But happy as they are to pay lip service to the honour of a possible shortlist place, the band give the impression of having other things on their minds. All three are keen to start working on songs for the new album.

"We have sketches but I don't want to start writing the music on a laptop on the tour bus because it's going to sound like this totally inorganic, computerised mess," says Ed. "As much as I love touring, there are two sides to being in the band.

And Edd is obsessing slightly over their September homecoming gig, at the unlikely sounding Alban Arena. It's not so much the prospect of playing to a venue full of people he grew up with that worries him, more a fear that the band may not live up to the venue's illustrious heritage.

"I've seen Sooty there, I've seen Paul Merton, I've seen The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," he says, brow wrinkled with concern. "I mean, Sooty. A puppet. How do you follow in the footsteps of someone with no feet?"

Leonard Cohen: "I'm blessed with a certain amnesia" (The Guardian)

After his comeback to performing and Hallelujah's unlikely chart domination, Leonard Cohen has had a remarkable year. He talks to Jian Ghomeshi about love, death and taking risks

What have you learned from being back on stage?

Leonard Cohen: I learned that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I've been grateful that it's going well. You can't ever guarantee that it's going to continue doing well, because there's a component that you really don't command.

What component is that?

LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck. It's hard to put your finger on it - you don't really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. You never really know whether you're going to be able to be the person you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there's so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected - even when you've brought the show to a certain degree of excellence.

In 2001, you said to the Observer that you were at a stage of your life you refer to as the third act. You quoted Tennessee Williams saying: "Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act." You were 67 when you said that, you're 74 now - does that ring more or less true for you still?

LC: Well, it's well written, the beginning of the third act seems to be very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, is when the hero dies. My friend Irving Layton said about death: it's not death that he's worried about, it's the preliminaries.

Are you worried about the preliminaries?

LC: Sure, every person ought to be.

Let me come back to the beginning of the first act. This was a brand new career for you that started in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career?

LC: I've been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time - an edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems. At a certain point I realised that I'm going to have to buckle down and make a living. I'd written a couple of novels, and they'd been well received, but they'd sold about 3,000 copies. So I really had to do something, and the other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville - I thought maybe I could get a job. I love country music, maybe I'd get a job playing guitar. When I hit New York, I bumped into what later was called the folk-song renaissance. There were people like Dylan and Judy Collins and Joan Baez. And I hadn't heard their work. So that touched me very much. I'd always been writing little songs myself, too, but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.

Some people would think it's ironic to go into music to make money, given that it's not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists.

LC: Yeah, I know. In hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folk singer. And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either. I don't know how these things happen in life - luck has so much to do with success and failure.

People talk about the fact that you've written songs that you've almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?

LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else's songs.

You say you've always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as, and call yourself, a legitimate singer and musician?

LC: You cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one's life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn't go well, one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one's life right to this moment.

Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?

LC: Good question. It's not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we're invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there's no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it's always softening and hardening. We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.

Are there times when you've lamented the power that women have had over you?

LC: I never looked at it that way. There's times when I've lamented, there's times when I've rejoiced, there's times when I've been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience. And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don't. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they're defeated and sometimes they're manifested.

Do you think love is empowering?

LC: It's a ferocious activity, where you experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And the affixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it's going to be an easy ride, you're going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it's going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.

Do you regret not having a lifelong partner?

LC: Non, je ne regrette rien. I'm blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don't remember what went down. I don't review my life that way.

Even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future, do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?

LC: Well, it was a part of every process. The central activity of my days and nights was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, anguish, distress. A background of anguish that prevailed.

How important was writing to your survival?

LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It was not a luxury for me to write - it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things. So in my own case I have to write the verse, and then see if it's a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can't toss it until I've worked on it and seen what it really is.

What do you consider your darkest hour?

LC: Well I wouldn't tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don't think I've had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we've really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.

How much do you reflect upon your own mortality?

LC: You get a sense of it, you know - the body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. So I don't know if it's a matter of reflection, I don't know that implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation.

Is there a way to prepare for death?

LC: Like with anything else, there's a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything. There are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death. And you can embark upon them and embrace them and give themselves to you. But I don't think there's any guarantee this could work, because nobody knows what's going to happen in the next moment.

Are you fearful of death?

LC: Everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one's death. The actual circumstances, the pain involved, the affect on your heirs. But there's so little that you can do about it. It's best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We've got to live our lives as if they're not going to end immediately. So we have to live under those - some people might call them illusions.

Let me ask you about Hallelujah, because it's been an interesting year for Hallelujah - it took on a new energy. A song that you wrote in 1984, and it appeared at No 1 and No 2 on the UK charts, and your version was also in the top 40. What did you make of that?

LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions - [a] record Sony wouldn't put out. They didn't think it was good enough. It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said "Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?" And I kind of feel the same way. I think it's a good song, but I think too many people sing it.

• This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. Leonard Cohen plays Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, tomorrow, and the Liverpool Arena on Tuesday. Leonard Cohen Live in London is out now on CD and DVD (Sony).

The awkward squad (The Guardian)

Ken Loach and Eric Cantona looked like a mismatch, until they worked together and it turned out they're soul brothers - uncompromising and intense. So how come the result is Loach's most light-hearted movie in years? Simon Hattenstone talks to them both.

April 9 2008, and they are spotted together for the first time. Nobody can quite believe it. Ken Loach is sitting next to Eric Cantona in the directors' box at Old Trafford for Manchester United's Champions League match with Roma. Surely some mistake. After all, Loach is the puritanical socialist film-maker who despises corporate fat cats such as United, whose football-going normally involves Bath City and their rivals in the Blue Square South league and who hardly ever works with stars (the last one was Terence Stamp, 42 years ago). The tongue-in-cheek rumours start instantly. On the Guardian's live minute-by-minute coverage of the match, it is suggested that Cantona is going to be in Loach's new film about deep-sea trawlers. The last line of the commentary concludes: "And incidentally the rumour about a Loach/Cantona project was a joke. Although Ken, if you're reading this ..."

June 16 2008: Eric Cantona stands in a Manchester pub whispering arcane Cantona-isms to a scruffy, unshaven bloke. Cantona is playing big Eric, himself; the other man is Little Eric, a postman who has cracked up, driven hundreds of times round a roundabout at speed the wrong way, ended up in a psychiatric hospital, smoked too much cannabis on his release and now believes that his idol Eric Cantona has become his friend and mentor. "He that sows thistles shall reap prickles," Big Eric, the bearded superhero, whispers urgently to Little Eric, the scabby failure.

"Y'what?" Little Eric says.

"If they are faster than you, don't try and outrun them," Big Eric says, getting into his aphoristic stride. "If they are taller, don't outjump them. If they are stronger on the left, you go right. But not always. Remember, to surprise them, you've got to surprise yourself first."

The philosophising is a joke, but it's also at the heart of the film. Little Eric learns that he has to think positive and take risks to have a chance in life. Looking For Eric is also a film about old-fashioned solidarity - Cantona tells the postman you must always trust your team-mates, something he grows to appreciate through the film.

As the two Erics chat, Loach is looking through his monitor. I've known Loach for ages, and have never seen him so content. He laughs at Cantona's attempt to deliver the sowing thistles line. "It was a dirty trick by the writer, because a French person cannot say those words."

Looking For Eric is Loach's first comedy in 20 years. It's a wonderful, humane, feel-good movie. Though, as you'd expect with a Loach film, he still plumbs the depths along the way. The film deals with broken men, drugs, poverty, violence, betrayal, corruption. Business as usual, then, for the director, except he's swapped down and dirty realism for down and dirty magic realism.

Cantona has a huge presence, especially with his collar pulled up and his chest puffed out. Dark eyes, deep voice, direct stare; even his smile is scary. In his heyday at Manchester United, the fans simply called him God. Loach is on the small side - size seven and a half feet, delicate hands, a beansprout of a man. Vincent Maraval, one of the film's producers, tells me that the first time Loach and Cantona met it was awkward. "They were both very intimidated by each other. Very humble. They couldn't think of anything to say." Maraval says it was a good job he was around, otherwise they would have just sat in silence.

Well, yes, Loach says, of course he was overawed - he was a huge fan of Cantona's. "I mean, I'm not overimpressed by anybody in films because it's the business and we just work in it, but when it's somebody from outside who is very special in their own field, and particularly if it's a field you care about, then I think you are overwhel ..." He looks embarrassed. "Well, not overwhelmed, but you are impressed because, that level, it's something you can't approach - you can only stand back and admire really."

Loach says he loved the wit of Cantona - as a player and as a man. He mentions the famous and much-derided seagulls quote, after Cantona was banned for kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace supporter. "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in the sea." The seagulls in question were the press, the trawler Cantona himself, and the sardines his titbits. "The wit of it was to say it to the hacks, who would then scratch their heads and say, what does it mean?"

Cantona's production company had originally approached Loach with an idea he had for a film about his relationship with a fan who had become a friend. Loach and his regular writer, Paul Laverty, didn't much fancy the story, but they had always wanted to make a film about football and, despite their golden rule not to work with famous actors, this was, after all, Cantona. It was Loach, by the way, who created British cinema's greatest football scene in Kes when games teacher Brian Glover provides a running commentary as he dribbles past his tiny pupils imagining he's Bobby Charlton.

Laverty went away and dreamed up the story of the two Erics - big Eric the idol and little Eric the loser. If he was working with a famous man, he might as well explore the nature of celebrity - how stars are perceived, how we put them on pedestals and what their lives might actually be like. While Cantona is larger than life, Eric the postman feels he has become invisible, even among his friends - middle-aged, crippled by uncertainty and lost in his memories.

Laverty says there were two conditions he set before agreeing to let Cantona loose on his script - first, he had to feel for Little Eric's situation and, second, he had to be willing to take the mick out of himself. Hence all the proverbs. "Big Eric was up for that. He laughed his head off at some of the daft ideas. He's prepared to laugh at his own persona - he's done lots of adverts referring to sardines. He's a very bright, perceptive man."

Ken Loach and Eric Cantona, the odd couple. But perhaps it's not so surprising they teamed up. They are two of the most uncompromising men I have met. Loach, now 72, has won numerous awards in Europe (three years ago, he won the Palme D'or at Cannes for The Wind That Shakes The Barley), but has not had a commercial hit in Britain since Kes in 1969. He often uses real people rather than actors in his films; refuses to show his actors the whole script, so they are surprised by what happens next (in Kes, David Bradley, the boy who plays Billy Casper, thought his kestrel really had been killed); he turned down an OBE in 1977 ("It's all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest," he said in 2001); and has had films about trade unions commissioned by Channel 4 and ITV, and then withdrawn (he says both decisions were politically motivated). He might be quietly spoken, but Loach is not a man who holds back.

As for Cantona, he makes Loach look like a diplomat. In 1987, he was fined for punching team-mate Bruno Martini in the face. The following year he was banned from international matches for a year after calling the French team's coach a "bag of shit". At Montpellier, six players called for him to be sacked after he threw his boots in a team-mate's face. In 1991 he threw a ball at the referee, and when he was banned for a month at the subsequent disciplinary hearing, he walked up to each member of the panel to tell them individually they were idiots. When his ban was increased, he announced his retirement from football. He changed his mind and returned to play the best football of his life in England at Leeds and Manchester United. Alex Ferguson called this sublimely gifted footballer his most important signing. In his six seasons in England, he won the premiership title every year except 1995, when he was banned for nine months for that kung-fu kick.

When Cantona returned from his ban, he scored one of the greatest goals the game has seen, against Sunderland, turning on a sixpence, beating three defenders, playing a one-two with Brian McClair, then outrageously chipping the ball into the top corner, apparently in slow motion. After the goal he held out his hands to be adored, preening.

He retired for real at the ridiculously young age of 30. No injuries, no trauma, he'd just had enough. While Loach has spent most of his career revered in France and ignored at home, Cantona is still revered in England 12 years after he stopped playing. But in France he tends to be regarded as an underachieving maverick - although he scored 20 goals in 45 appearances for the national side, he last played in 1995 and had retired by the time France won the World Cup in 1998. Since retiring, he has worked consistently as an actor in French cinema, a pretty good one - notably as an obese police inspector who falls in love with a murder suspect in 2003's L'Outremangeur.

In the afternoon, Cantona and I head off to another location - a council tower block in Manchester. I ask why he was so keen to work with Loach. He stares at me with those dark, defiant eyes. It's a look that says: who wouldn't want to work with Loach? "We wanted someone who was English, we wanted someone who was involved socially and politically, and we wanted someone who was a fan of football. In France, it is well known he is a fan."

Had he seen any of his films before working with him? Now he gives me a how-could-I-not look. "I have seen a lot of Ken Loach's films. I've seen Riff-Raff, Carla's Song, Land And Freedom, the one about the war in Ireland, Family Life ..." He reels them off. Unbelievable. He has seen just about every Loach film. Family Life, about a pregnant teenager who ends up having electric shock treatment, is one of the most miserable films ever made. I tell Cantona that I am a Loach junkie, but even I found this too depressing and walked out of the cinema. He smiles, and tells me it is a great film.

Cantona did not watch many films as a child. He preferred to play football on the street, in school, everywhere. Even as a boy, it seemed like a profession. "I always knew I had to work hard." His father, a psychiatric nurse, told him it was not enough to be gifted. "He'd say to me, OK, you have abilities, now you need to work hard. Work, work, work." Like Loach, Cantona grew up in a working-class family - he was born in Paris, but the family soon moved to Marseille.

He believes the modern game has betrayed its working-class roots by pricing many of its traditional supporters out of the game. "The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game. So maybe when the game will need fans, they will be in trouble. And they will realise they were wrong - the people who come today don't come for the right reasons."

To Cantona, now 42, football was as much an art form as a sport. When Paul Laverty was writing the script, he asked him for the favourite moment from his career - Cantona did not mention any of the famous goals but a chipped pass to Ryan Giggs. He says that the move from footballer to actor was a natural one to make - acting is just another form of performance.

Cantona leaves me to play the trumpet into the Manchester skyline, as Little Eric (brilliantly played by Steve Evets) delivers his post. It's a beautiful scene. Big Eric lifts the trumpet to his lips and blasts out La Marseillaise - poignantly, it's recognisable, but still hopelessly out of tune. "When Big Eric plays the trumpet, he's all fingers and thumbs," Laverty says. "I suppose what I wanted to show is him struggling through life like everybody else. It's implicit in the relationship between the two Erics - they're just two flawed human beings in this adventure of life."

I ask Cantona when he learned to play the trumpet. "When I was banned, I wanted to focus on something else." Did the nine months drive him mad? "No. I'm never bored. I always find something to occupy me, to love. I didn't watch many games when I was banned. I tried to improve myself."

As he approached the Crystal Palace fan, did he realise what he was going to do? "No. I just reacted as a man. With my personality. And after, I think." That's how he's always lived, for good and bad - act first, think second.

Did he regret it? "No. I don't like it when people say, 'I had a bad time.' I endured. So I learned a lot and now I am a man. Every experience makes you a man."

In 1997 he told Alex Ferguson he wanted to retire because he had lost his passion. Was he surprised that he fell out of love with the game? "Yes. It happened because I felt I couldn't play better. You need to say to yourself, 'I can improve every time.' One day you realise you will not improve any more, and you lose a bit of the passion." He says he had lost the ability to surprise himself.

Cantona's pride would not allow him, or us, to witness his deterioration as a footballer. But he found retirement tough. Is it true that he compared it to dying? "Yeah, it was, but I lived that before because, when I was 24, I retired from football for two-three months, and I really believed I had retired. And it felt like a death. With myself and with people around." He says it was a painful experience, but also strangely enjoyable. "I liked it. It's a dream for a lot of people to come when they put the body in the cemetery ... to see the reaction of people."

And how did they react? "People tried to encourage me not to take this decision, but they quickly realised it was better not to say anything. I prefer to live this kind of death than to kill myself."

Maybe it's all of this that makes him so capable of empathising with Eric the postman - yes, he experienced enormous highs, but, despite appearances, he also had a developed sense of his own vulnerability; the fact that a footballer's peak is so short-lived that he's unlikely to do anything as well in his life again.

It's April 2009, and it has just been announced that Looking For Eric will be in competition at Cannes. It's strange how Loach's movies have never had so much as a sniff of a Bafta, while the rest of the world can't give them enough prizes. For once, though, a Loach film is getting a decent release in Britain.

The odd couple don't seem half as odd as they did a few months ago. In his own reserved way, Loach is every bit as cocksure as Cantona. And in his own cocksure way, Cantona is every bit as reserved as Loach. Rebecca O'Brien, Loach's long-time producer, says she is not at all surprised they ended up working together. "They are both very shy men, self-effacing, neither of them puts up with any shit, and both are pretty serious about football." Plus, she says, with a wicked producer's grin, "Eric being French helps - France is our best territory, always has been!"

What did Loach most admire about Cantona as a footballer? "He was a player of consummate skill and great cheek." Loach is staring out of the window. A parabola of water is squirting over a wall in our direction. There is no sign of what or whom it is coming from. Loach is giggling. "It's a very tall man," he says. It could be a scene from one of his films. For all their bleakness, he's always enjoyed knockabout farce. "Oh yes," he says, refocusing. "Most people who enjoy football just saw in Eric's performance a very strong personality that communicated the joy of football."

What did Cantona admire about Loach as a film-maker? "I like the way it's so real, like documentary. And I like how you don't know if you have to laugh or cry. For instance, in Riff-Raff, in the pub the girl sings and you laugh because she cannot sing well, but at the same time, the way they film this scene, you can cry. It's a strange feeling."

When I met French producer Vincent Maraval, he told me that Cantona had found it tough in France because he was expected to compromise. "In English football, you have more space for the strong personality, for being yourself," Maraval said. "And Eric is not for any compromising in his life or his career. He is always very straight what he thinks about you ... he is the opposite of a hypocrite. He had a lot of respect for the stories Ken was telling, and has a vision of life that is very pure. He could feel that Ken was on his side."

In the film, Big Eric plays with the notion that he is a superior being. He tells Little Eric, "I am not a man, I am Cantona." I ask Cantona if he could imagine saying the line in real life. "Yes, I could say that, because I have a lot of... auto-derision?" He grins, and looks at Loach for confirmation.

"Yes, self-mockery," Loach says.

When he came to England, Cantona turned away from the gated properties and exclusive clubs beloved of contemporary footballers. He lived with his first wife Isabelle and their two children in modest, semi-detached houses in the community. When they split up after close to two decades, it was painful - Cantona has said neither came from families where there had been divorce. In 2007, he married the actress Rachida Brakni. Loach has been married to his wife Lesley for 47 years.

Cantona has always regarded himself as on the left politically, and talks with pride of his grandparents fighting for the republicans in the Spanish civil war. His parents taught him all the important things in life, he says. "I think I had a very good education of love ... le plaisir des petites choses, a delight in small things. I'm not sure the people who want to show their power with big houses, bigger cars, are very happy. I feel sad for them."

We talk about their various run-ins during their careers, and both agree compromise is not their favourite word.

It's amazing how two such obstinate buggers have ended up working with each other and loving the experience.

"Well, it's not obstinacy," Loach says. "I think it's more that life's too short to sell out, really. Why bother in the end? It's easier to stay with what you think than make a compromise with something you're not happy with. Then you regret it for ever."

He looks at Cantona, and Cantona looks at him.

"Yeah, exactly," Cantona says.