Quills
INTERVIEWS
The Marquis de Sade biopic Quills opens in more cities this week. While interviews with artists are often as
dull and unenlightening as interviews with athletes, director Philip Kaufman, writer Doug Wright and star Geoffrey
Rush have engaged in some fascinating dialogues about sexual and artistic freedom in various publications.
Andrea Meyer
interviewed Kaufman
about audience reactions, the ratings system and more.
Michael Sragow
interviewed Rush about his
portrayal of Sade.
Stephen Lemons
talked with Kaufman about
"sex, writers, repression and his movie's parallels to the Starr-Clinton fiasco."
Eric Layton
talked with Wright
about collaborating on the adaptation of his play.
Or you could go right to the source: this buff site features a page of
quotations from Sade's writings.
"Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never
been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me
as I am, for I shall not change."
IndieWire | Salon | Entertainment Today
The Onion's Scott Tobias interviews
Quills director Philip Kaufman. At one
point, Tobias raises an issue that bothered me about the film: "The main criticism leveled against the film is that in
order to advance an argument against censorship, you gloss over or soft-pedal the Marquis' own atrocities." The
interview also touches on Starr and Clinton, the difficulty of making serious adult-themed movies today, Henry Miller
and Kaufman's earlier film Rising Sun.
The Onion
REVIEWS
John Patterson, LA Weekly
J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Andrew Sarris, New York Observer
Scott Heller, Boston
Phoenix
Kenneth
Turan, LA Times
Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
James Verniere, Boston
Herald
Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
Kelly Vance,
East Bay Express