‘Coke and booze didn’t help my creativity’: Joe Eszterhas on his wild times – and his supernatural, anti-woke Basic Instinct reboot

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He was the screenwriting colossus behind Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Showgirls and more. Now clean, ‘Hollywood’s Shakespeare’ talks about today’s scared studios, his refugee trauma – and taking acid with Hunter S Thompson Joe Eszterhas was the swaggering pitchman of 80s and 90s Hollywood; the king of the high-concept, precision-tooled blockbuster. He wrote Jagged Edge, co-scripted Flashdance , and pocketed a then record $3m for his Basic Instinct screenplay. Writers typically skulk near the bottom of the industry food chain but Eszterhas flipped the script to make himself a boss and a brand. ABC called him a “living legend”, while Time magazine posed a breathless rhetorical question: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?” Pride, as any hack writer will tell you, usually comes before a fall, and so it was with Eszterhas, who confused success with excess and barely got out of the business alive. “The coke and the booze,” he says, remembering. “Those weren’t he...
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‘I was making a film about the trauma of an entire country’: director Alice Winocour on her movie about the 2015 Paris terror attacks

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After her brother was caught up in the Bataclan siege, Winocour wanted to address the events that had scarred France. She explains why she focused on the aftermath, not the violence

Even from the safety of her home, the film-maker Alice Winocour’s experience of the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 was terrifying. Her younger brother, Jérémie, was hiding in a back room at the Bataclan concert hall, and forbade her from texting him in case it gave away his location. She had to wait to hear that he made it out alive. Later, he told her about a random thought he had while waiting to die: that he had left a half-eaten yoghurt open in the fridge. What would whoever found it make of his poor kitchen hygiene?

It is a touch of human absurdity that resurfaces in Paris Memories, her new film, about the 13 November attacks. Unlike the recent Jean Dujardin film November, it completely ignores religion and largely passes over the bloodshed. Instead, it joins films such as You Will Not Have My Hate and One Year, One Night to wade through the aftermath. The French title Revoir Paris gets it: starring Benedetta’s Virginie Efira as Mia, a radio translator caught in the crossfire in a cafe, the film focuses on how she reconstructs her memories of that night and with them her inner harmony, as well as that of the city of lights.

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