September 11, 2021 Leave a Reply

Colors were spreading alright, but it wasn’t just Jessica Chastain’s dress. Colors were spreading from her shining smile and lighting the whole environment. Earlier today, Jessica attended the Press Conference for the Tribute Awards at Toronto Film Festival. Enjoy the photos in our gallery!




September 11, 2021 Leave a Reply

There were days on the shoot for “Scenes From a Marriage,” a five-episode limited series that premieres Sept. 12 on HBO, when Oscar Isaac resented the crew.
The problem wasn’t the crew members themselves, he told me on a video call in March. But the work required of him and his co-star, Jessica Chastain, was so unsparingly intimate — “And difficult!” Chastain added from a neighboring Zoom window — that every time a camera operator or a makeup artist appeared, it felt like an intrusion.
On his other projects, Isaac had felt comfortably distant from the characters and their circumstances — interplanetary intrigue, rogue A.I. But “Scenes” surveys monogamy and parenthood, familiar territory. Sometimes Isaac would film a bedtime scene with his onscreen child (Lily Jane) and then go home and tuck his own child into the same model of bed as the one used onset, accessorized with the same bunny lamp, and not know exactly where art ended and life began.
“It was just a lot,” he said.
Chastain agreed, though she put it more strongly. “I mean, I cried every day for four months,” she said.< Isaac, 42, and Chastain, 44, have known each other since their days at the Juilliard School. And they have channeled two decades of friendship, admiration and a shared and obsessional devotion to craft into what Michael Ellenberg, one of the series’s executive producers, called “five hours of naked, raw performance.” (That nudity is metaphorical, mostly.)

“For me it definitely felt incredibly personal,” Chastain said on the call in the spring, about a month after filming had ended. “That’s why I don’t know if I have another one like this in me. Yeah, I can’t decide that. I can’t even talk about it without. …” She turned away from the screen. (It was one of several times during the call that I felt as if I were intruding, too.)
The original “Scenes From a Marriage,” created by Ingmar Bergman, debuted on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman’s first television series, its six episodes trace the dissolution of a middle-class marriage. Starring Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s ex, it drew on his own past relationships, though not always directly.

“When it comes to Bergman, the relationship between autobiography and fiction is extremely complicated,” said Jan Holmberg, the chief executive of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

Read the full article/interview in our press library.


September 10, 2021 Leave a Reply

I added to the video vault two new videos related to “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”, a clip and a featurette. Enjoy!



The Eyes of Tammy Faye: “Who Is He Fighting” Clip
The Eyes of Tammy Faye: Featurette

September 8, 2021 Leave a Reply

In the first in-person interview since the pandemic started, Jessica Chastain visited the TODAY SHOW this morning to talk about Scenes from a Marriage and her relationship to long time friend Oscar Isaac, and also briefly talks about “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”


September 7, 2021 Leave a Reply

Day of update for “Scenes from a Marriage” with a new photo still from episode 3, synopsis and episodes titles release and the official poster for the mini-series.




September 5, 2021 Leave a Reply

Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain spoke this morning about some of the challenges behind new TV drama Scenes From A Marriage which is debuting at the Venice Film Festival.

Adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s lauded 1973 Swedish miniseries, the HBO mini-series re-examines Bergman’s iconic depiction of love, hatred, desire, monogamy, marriage and divorce through the lens of a contemporary American couple. Chastain plays Mira, a confident, ambitious tech executive left unfulfilled by her marriage. Isaac is Jonathan, a cerebral and accommodating philosophy professor desperate to keep their relationship intact.

Chastain admitted that the project was an intense one to make: “It felt incredibly exposing”, she said. “It was hard to go home and leave it at work. Part of myself was in it.”

The limited series reunites Chastain and Isaac, who were classmates at Julliard, are longtime friends and starred together in 2014’s A Most Violent Year.

Despite that friendship, the intensity of the show posed unique challenges.

Chastain continued: “We would joke that [the friendship] is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because there’s immediate trust. You don’t have to be worried about offending. You can be very honest. The difficult thing is that at times we were reading each other’s minds. It was like ‘get out of my head’. So, I felt on this job there was no quiet time.”

Isaac — who is also at the festival with Dune and The Card Counter — added: “That’s well said. Professionally, it’s great when you know someone so well because you don’t have to worry about a lot of stuff you usually worry about. However, on something this intense you care about the person so much, because it’s like working with family. If you didn’t know someone so well, getting your own space isn’t so hard.”

Chastain said of the intimate scenes in the series: “In terms of physical intimacy, we had an intimacy co-ordinator and HBO was really great about us all having conversations about what we were comfortable with. Oscar and I are very comfortable with each other so we had our own separate talks. That was helpful.”

She added, laughing: “I would still get embarrassed, though, so bourbon helped a lot. But the level of trust was high.”

Oscar nominee Chastain said later in the press conference: “For me, I’m really excited about looking at the series in terms of gender roles. The original looks at the gender roles in that time period, this version looks at it through the current time period in terms of salary, who is supporting the family, what it means to be a mother, a woman’s relationship to sex, fertility, there are so many aspects.”

Israeli director Hagai Levi explained his inspiration for taking on the series: “I was shocked when I first saw Bergman’s version. I was really young. It made me realize that TV could be art. It became a reference for me when making shows like In Treatment. When I was approached by Ingmar Bergman’s son Daniel I was frightened and excited but knew I had to try to crack it somehow.”

Sunita Mani, Nicole Beharie, Corey Stoll and Tovah Feldshuh co-star in the five-part series which launches on HBO on September 12.

Source


September 5, 2021 Leave a Reply

And following in the night was the premiere for “Competencia Oficial” during the Festival and when we thought Jessica Chastain was looking amazing during the morning, we didn’t know about her plans for the night. STUNNING!!!
Over 300 photos have been added to the gallery. Enjoy!




September 5, 2021 Leave a Reply

What a wonderful thing is to see Jessica Chastain back at events, radiant, splendid and smiling. Gorgeous.
Here are the over 200 photos from the Photocall of Scenes from a marriage that took place yesterday at Venice Film Festival.




September 3, 2021 Leave a Reply

First images of Jessica Chastain in Venice are popping up and I got to add one to the gallery from the “The Hand Of God” Pre-Cocktail event. Hopefully more will show up in the day!




August 31, 2021 Leave a Reply

The actress opens up about her upcoming film, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and television series, Scenes from a Marriage

In 2012, not long after Jessica Chastain wrapped Zero Dark Thirty, a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about the search for Osama Bin Laden that garnered the 44-year-old actress her second Academy Award nomination, she took a serious look at the Hollywood around her.

“I immediately saw there weren’t a lot of options for women, at least in terms of great characters that are different. Actresses were regulated to a single type,” says Chastain, talking via Zoom while on vacation with friends and family in Italy. Studying acting and repertory theater at Juilliard in New York had given her a wide breadth of choice roles, but, suddenly, she opened her eyes to see that the film world might be “a tad limiting in terms of what people were offering.”

It was around that time that Chastain stumbled on the 2000 documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Narrated by RuPaul, it’s about the life of the late Tammy Faye Messner, a Christian TV personality, singer and evangelist often parodied for her marriage to Jim Bakker (who was later imprisoned for fraud and conspiracy), not to mention her over-the-top style, which included heavy makeup and a perpetual tan. Messner died in 2007 of colon cancer.

“I knew about Tammy from what I’d seen on Saturday Night Live, but I actually had never seen her give an interview until I watched the documentary,” Chastain says. “My impression from sketch television was that she cried all the time, she was a crook and always had mascara running down her face.”

But Chastain found herself particularly moved by the film and Messner’s message that “everyone is deserving of love,” she explains. So she called her agent and manager and bought the narrative feature film rights to the documentary herself.

Go ahead. Call it one of Chastain’s “crazy ideas,” she says. “But I have these ideas that we have to push against an old-fashioned way the film industry has worked.”

Read the full interview/article in our press library.


August 23, 2021 Leave a Reply

Jessica Chastain’s whole body was shaking. She’d never been this nervous on a film set — not with the kind of anxiety that gave her trouble breathing.

What am I so afraid of? The thought reverberated in her head. She’d played a superhero so powerful she could rearrange the structure of matter. The ringleader of a high-stakes underground Hollywood poker game. A CIA analyst who took down Osama bin Laden.

But this was Tammy Faye Bakker, the infamous televangelist recognized more for her heavy makeup than the fact that her husband, Jim, stole millions from his own parishioners. To play her, Chastain would put on gobs of mascara and lip liner, adopt a thick Minnesotan accent and belt out songs about loving Jesus.

“I was scared the people were going to make fun of me,” the actor recalled of her on-set jitters. “And there’s going to be a lot to make fun of if I fail because it’s so out there. I’m swinging for the fences here.”

But that was the reality Bakker — who died in 2007 after a long bout with cancer — faced every day. Remembering the ridicule Bakker endured — and ultimately ignored — allowed Chastain to quell her panic: “You have to let go of your ego and wanting to look cool. This is connecting you to her.”

“The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” out Sept. 17, will mark the culmination of Chastain’s near-decade-long journey to bring Bakker’s story to the big screen. In 2012, while on the press tour for “Zero Dark Thirty,” she was switching through the TV channels in her hotel room when she stumbled across a documentary on Bakker. Chastain had seen the film — directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey in 2000 —- before, but on this night she connected with it on a different level.

So she secured the rights to the doc, which had the same name as the eventual feature film. She had yet to establish her production company, Freckle Films, but still found a home for the project at Fox Searchlight. The studio will debut the film next month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the 44-year-old Chastain will receive the event’s Tribute Actor Award.

She has another movie playing at the festival — “The Forgiven,” a drama co-starring Ralph Fiennes — and also will appear in an HBO limited-series remake of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” beginning Sept. 12.

From her home in the countryside of New York, where only birdsong interrupted her speech, Chastain spoke to The Times about playing Bakker.

Read the full article/interview in our press library.


August 17, 2021 Leave a Reply

Take a peek into the first photos of Jessica Chastain in “Scenes from a Marriage”, enjoy!