INTERVIEWS: Park, Portman, Whedon, Clooney

Salon.com interviews Nick Park : "One of the most fun things to do in animation, actually, [is] to think up these inventions. The story is all to do with the comic nature of the invention. So you think of an idea, "Wallace needs to invent a machine that brainwashes bunny rabbits," and then you start to draw it, and then you have to think of how you shoot it and how it fits in with the overall story, so you keep changing it and swapping things around and building mock-ups. It's a lovely thing about model animation, that you can build these things - and they can actually work - without any technical knowledge. [Laughs] You can be an inventor."

The Times interviews Natalie Portman about V for Vendetta: “It was just an exciting thing for me to see a movie on this scale,” says Portman, “a big studio movie that was about something really interesting and had ideas in it, and strong character relationships — and a great story and complicated characters, too.” Nobody is ever going to get Queen Padmé Naberrie Amidala to say in as many words that the Star Wars [prequel] trilogy had none of the above. Yet, clearly, she knows.

Empire interviews Joss Whedon : "I am still writing Wonder Woman. It is very awesome but incredibly unfinished, but I can tell you that the film will be about introducing you to Wonder Woman. She'll be wearing the outfit and there will be the bracelets, the golden lasso and Greek gods. She comes from a civilization where she's rather perfect, so she's the opposite to Buffy in many ways, but she's going through an adolescent rite of passage because she's new to the world." (Joss also recently traded banter with Warren Ellis, which is geeky fun.)

The Guardian interviews George Clooney : "I was at a party the other night and it was all these hardcore Republicans and these guys are like, 'Why do you hate your country?' I said, 'I love my country.' They said, 'Why, at a time of war, would you criticise it then?' And I said, 'My country right or wrong means women don't vote, black people sit in the back of buses and we're still in Vietnam. My country right or wrong means we don't have the New Deal.' I mean, what, are you crazy? My country, right or wrong? It is not merely your right but your duty to question your government."