Dear Diary

Most journals are about our own little problems. But Toronto actress Mia Kirshner travelled to four desperate parts of the world to bring back the tales of the most vulnerable people, Gayle MacDonald writes

For the past seven years, Toronto actress Mia Kirshner has been obsessed with self-financing and publishing her debut book, I Live Here, a harrowing tribute to the overlooked victims of war, corrupt governments and crippling disease.

“I worked on the book - all the time,” says Kirshner, a gorgeous, dark-haired slip of a thing who started acting as an extra in low-budget television and saw her career take off after nailing roles in Love & Human Remains and Exotica.

“I drove my friends and family insane because they said it’s all I talked about. I know it’s true, and I’m sure, very annoying to be around. But it literally has been an odyssey, an obsession for me. Because once I saw how many people have sacrificed so much … well, I became obsessed,” she says with a smile.

Kirshner says all this while in town last week to present her so-called paper documentary at the International Festival of Authors. The 33-year-old explains that she became fixated with the idea of the four-part book - which took the actress and many collaborators to some of the most ravaged places in Chechnya, Myanmar, Juarez, Mexico, and Malawi - after 9/11.
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Mia article in Glamour - September 2008

There is a 2 page article in the September 2008 issue of Glamour magazine (Penelope Cruz on the cover) about Mia and her work on her book I Live Here. I picked it up yesterday and it’s a really great, though rather short, read and includes photos and artwork from the book. I will have scans available as soon as I can, though it may be a little while as I am having some issues with my scanner and I’m getting ready to move in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to Johanna for the heads up on this.

Interview: Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma has made legendary crime and noir-ish thrillers, so adapting James Ellroy seems like a perfect fit for him. His film of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia combines all those elements – seedy gangsters, hard boiled detectives, violent crimes and a macabre sense of humor. He talked about that and more when I caught him out junketing for The Black Dahlia.

“But that’s the tone of the book,” said De Palma. “That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to some journalist about this is closer to Sunset Boulevard with the funeral of the monkey and when he arrives at Norma’s estate. It’s like, ‘Okay, how are we supposed to take that?’ I mean, you take Bill Holden’s kind of wry analysis of what he’s watching and this is very much true in this piece too because once you’re at the Linscotts, you’re in a nut house. These people are insane and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience originally was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, ‘Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.’ ‘How is a policeman in my living room?’ So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a dog stuffed with the newspaper with his first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started tosses it off like the weather, I mean, you go, ‘Wow. I’m in a looney bin here and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.’ That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book”

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CHUD.Com Exclusive Interview: Brian De Palma

“What’s it like to work with Scarlett Johansson?” I may not be the most adept interviewer, but I’m not about to blow my twenty minutes with Brian De Palma at the historic Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles with so routine a query. Actually, it’s the director himself posing the question, only it’s with weary sarcasm and to no one in particular – a grim acknowledgment of the boilerplate interrogations he’ll be enduring all day at the hands of personalities from Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra and all the other glitzy, low-cal entertainment news shows.

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