Hey, look, it’s my second consecutive NOW cover — this one featuring Naomi Watts, who swings for an Oscar this week in the tsunami drama The Impossible. And here is a sidebar thing on her five best performances.
This marks the first time I’ve interviewed Watts, though we’ve bumped into each other at various TIFFs over the years. In fact, we were scheduled to sit down together at the Mullholland Drive press junket in 2001 … on the morning of September 11th. So instead of a conversation, I got to watch her ushered out of a hotel suite and into an elevator, clearly in a state of shock. As we all were, I suppose.
Elsewhere in the paper, I chat with Quentin Tarantino for the first time since 1992 (!) about his new film, Django Unchained. He’s as enthusiastic and eloquent as ever, and I was nice enough to leave out the bit where he mispronounced “Caligula”.
How did he pronounce it?
“Cah-ligg-lee-uh”. He slips into malapropisms when he gets excited; it’s how “Au Revoir Les Enfants” turned into “the Reservoir Dogs movie” in his video-store days.