It is no surprise that Austrian newspaper Kurier’sClint Eastwoodinterview went viral over the weekend. An audience with a 95-year-old film legend containing stern words about the current state of cinema was always going to go like a rocket. Particularly during cinema’s dregs season: the thin period post Cannes and pre the summer proper, with Mission: Impossible fever fading fast and Lilo & Stitch ruling the box office – a success from which only so many stories can be spun.
Further evidence of this thinness comes from a quick scan of the news stories run over the past week in some of the trade magazines – Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Screen International – who must keep producing them, regardless of actual material. These include a write-off of an interview in which Michael Cera says he didn’t think Jackie Chan knew who he was when they first met, Renée Zellweger revealing that she shed a tear shooting the Bridget Jones film that was released last February and – an exclusive, this – a report that Bill Murray will appear at a film festival in Croatia. Against this backdrop, Eastwood telling younger directors to buck up is, basically, Watergate.
Yet the waves the interview made do appear to have come as a surprise to the publication in which it ran. And, in a way, that itself is no surprise, for most of the apparatus of film journalism remains weirdly rooted in a pre-internet era, one in which Google translate doesn’t exist and 18 sets of roundtable interviews, conducted over at least a decade, can feasibly be spun into a new article – which Kurier’s defence of the piece does indeed suggest is kind of OK.
What the paper does regret, according to itsstatement, is suggesting it was an “interview” rather than a “birthday profile”, implying that the writer, Elisabeth Sereda, mis-sold them her access – which is why theywill no longer be working with her.
Perhaps this is true? If so, it raises some further questions. Interviews of this nature generally involve considerably more back and forth (say 150 emails) between a commissioning editor, writer, picture editors, film publicist, personal publicist and more. Assuming none of these happened, it still feels concerning that the paper never confirmed when, where or how Sereda spoke to such a major, reticent – and elderly – star.
More confusingly, as well as describing its writer’s approach to quote-gathering as basically kosher, Kurier’s statement goes on to further tout her credentials. Sereda, it says, “has been in the Hollywood business for decades, conducting interviews with the biggest stars … Her closeness to them is undoubtedly well known.
“This is also due, among other things, to the fact that Sereda is a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the association that awards the Golden Globes and reports from Hollywood for international media.”
The Hollywood Foreign Press is a defunct organisation, disbanded in 2023 after decades of accusations of unprofessionalism, bribery and misconduct by some of its members – international showbiz writers of hazy credentials and uncertain identity.
The Golden Globes, which it did indeed dish out, were so discredited that they were boycotted by publicists, stars and broadcasters, and the association then had to issue multiple apologies for its lack of transparency and diversity (not a single black writer), before relaunching a couple of years ago.
Writers such as Sereda and many of the original members of the HFPA – like many film journalists, many of them reporters of integrity and expertise – rely to a greater or lesser extent on access granted at film festivals. This access is brief, chaotic and non-exclusive. When I worked for another publication 20-odd years ago, I remember being at such roundtables involving one or two stars and perhaps a dozen sharp-elbowed correspondents from countries across the world.
After a bruising 20 minutes, you would be left with a challenging tombola of quotes about, perhaps, an especially niche style of cinematography, whether the star might one day visit Latvia and a lot of bland waffle about how marvellous the director was. Getting a question of your own in was rare. Getting a good piece out of the results was rarer.
It is possible to make a living on such access, if you trot around all the festivals – Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto – and remain in favour with a couple of publications, and, most crucially, the publicists. A certain level of sycophancy is essential – and, happily, appears to be far from a stretch for many of the writers. Sereda’s Instagram page, for instance, is populated by wide-smiled selfies of her with assorted A-listers. These are posted in the event of a new interview, a new movie or their death.
Such unabashed celeb-worship is absolutely common practice in film journalism, even among the most respected Hollywood pundits. I remember one brilliant writer who would post a selfie with a recently deceased star with such speed after news broke of their death that the gesture morphed from the morbid into the faintly suspicious. Could it be that they were the common factor behind all these tragedies?
Thick skins, malleable standards and dribble: this is how a lot of this world works. Luckily, the Guardian is a publication with sufficient leverage that it does not need to rely on roundtable access – and would generally not accept it, unless for background, ahead of a 1:1. But much of the access that we are often offered and the circumstances of it is, still, sausage factory stuff: you probably don’t want to know.
That roundtables persist is evidence of how much the film industry remains wedded to print publicity. Twenty years ago, the same ragbag quotes appearing in an Austrian broadsheet as well as, say, a Swedish film quarterly and an Australian celebrity magazine, would have gone unnoticed. Today, it makes much less sense. But despite the primacy of streamers and, more broadly, the whole tech-revolution of the past two decades, online versions of articles are of much less concern to publicists than the print version.
Why? Because clients need presenting with something concrete, a hard glossy copy with a pre-approved photo of themselves on the cover – even if this is seen by perhaps 100th of the people who will read it online. That this is still the case is something I find very curious.
Yet maybe the clients are changing. It was, after all, none other than Eastwood himself who first flagged the dodginess of the Kurier article. He had, in fact, said all those things. He just hadn’t said them recently, or knowingly given an audience to that writer, for that newspaper.
A new interview with him would be gold-dust because Eastwood did not do press for his most recent movie, Juror #2, which went straight to streaming in the US, after rumours of a rift between the director and the incoming head of studio Warner, David Zaslav (Eastwood didn’t even show up to the premiere).
Was Eastwood – now shooting his new movie – concerned these historic quotes would be interpreted as a broadside against Zaslav? Or is he, in his 10th decade, simply paying more attention than the rest of us?