Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100

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The director of The Producers hits his century as a uniquely beloved entertainer who embodies his conviction that ‘comedy is the opposite of death’ Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart : “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” In his youth, Brooks’ preferred method of making a noise was playing the drums and he was actually taught the instrument by Buddy Rich. Neither could possibly have known at the time t...
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‘My films are all problematic children’: director Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things, shame and his creative soulmate Emma Stone

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The ​outlandish ​new film from the celebrated Greek director of The Favourite and The Lobster​ is already one of the most talked-about movies of 2024. ​He discusses ​adapting Alasdair Gray’s novel and what makes him laugh​

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and American actor Emma Stone are quite the collaborative powerhouse. Since working together on dark period comedy The Favourite (2018), which earned 10 Oscar nominations and seven Bafta wins, they have made the short film Bleat and the Oscar-tipped feature Poor Things , and shot another feature, currently entitled Kind of Kindness. Their working relationship is clearly nothing if not productive.

In Poor Things, which has been described as a “twisted science-fiction romantic comedy” (and that doesn’t get close to quite how strange it is), Stone plays Bella Baxter – a reborn 19th-century woman, living under the paternalistic care of Frankenstein-like surgeon Godwin Baxter (a makeup-laden Willem Dafoe), whom she calls “God” and who appears to have gifted her with the rapidly developing brain of a baby. While critics have struggled to define the film’s more outlandish elements (the Chicago Sun-Times called it “beautifully garish… unabashedly raunchy”, while Empire went with the rather less prosaic “absolutely batshit, utterly filthy”), Stone says simply that it’s a story about a woman “who doesn’t have to deal with shame”.

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