Paul Dano: ‘Nobody needs to know about my high-school band!’

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The actor on singing with Brian Wilson, why War and Peace is the best book ever written and what drew him to his latest film, The Wizard of the Kremlin You were wonderful as Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy . Did you get any feedback from the great man himself? Fran2016 and Aubrey26 Thank you. I spent a bunch of time with Brian before filming. If you asked him about the world, you might only get a little bit out of him. But if you asked about music, he’d light up. I loved talking with him. I also got to sing with him and his touring band a few times, which was amazing. We filmed in the studio in which they recorded Pet Sounds, and he came on set, which was a trip. I didn’t get much feedback in terms of my performance – it was more getting to know each other and learning about his life. Which was more challenging in Little Miss Sunshine – the first half where you don’t speak, or the second half where you break your vow of silence? mattyjj I remember the first few days, filming...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 7 – Saint Omer

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Alice Diop’s award-winning courtroom drama doubles as an unsentimental study in empathy with one of the year’s most mesmerising performances

At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.

The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.

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