Doug Liman Says He’s Boycotting SXSW Premiere Of His Jake Gyllenhaal Film ‘Road House’ To Protest Amazon MGM Bypassing Theaters For Prime Streaming Release
The fact that we still have movie theaters after the global pandemic didn’t happen by accident. It happened because brave filmmakers like Chris Nolan and Tom Cruise insisted their movies play in the theater, and they proved audiences are still there. They proved that despite everything, we still enjoy gathering and sharing in the communal experience of watching a film together. People love going to the movies, despite the convenience of streaming. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, data shows that movies do better on streaming if they have been released theatrically first.
Hathaway tells me that period didn’t just mark a personal low. Even though she had won an Oscar, she says, “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online. I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of.” She’s talking about when Nolan, who’d previously directed Hathaway as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, cast her in Interstellar as a scientist sent to space with Matthew McConaughey. “I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect,” Hathaway says. “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”
Hathaway tells me that period didn’t just mark a personal low. Even though she had won an Oscar, she says, “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online. I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of.” She’s talking about when Nolan, who’d previously directed Hathaway as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, cast her in Interstellar as a scientist sent to space with Matthew McConaughey. “I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect,” Hathaway says. “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”
I love that. She gave two very strong career highlight performances in both films and they were easily some of the most ambitious films of her career, even if at the time they were pretty divisive online. One of the benefits of not listening to an online mob is producing art that's either great or meaningful and the latter certainly applies. Nolan for sure did a very simple, but still meaningful gesture.
