From left to right, Diablo Cody, Dana Fox, and Lorene Scafaria. Or, the “Femmepire” as they call it, a triumvirate of female screenwriters.

Lorene Scafaria has been toiling as a screenwriter for awhile, although her first produced film, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, is actually an adaptation of a novel by the same name. However, it manages to nail the “teen voice” without slapping a message all over it, and it should open up a few more doors for Lorene. Not that she needs them, since she’s already recorded an album of her own music, and has her next project already in the works.

Read on to find out how she tried to capture the New York City feeling in this movie, what she’s been doing with best friend and fellow screenwriter Diablo Cody, and what’s in store for her.

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Danish director Kristian Levring is probably best known for his feature The King Is Alive, which was the fourth film put out under the Dogme 95 rules. His new movie Fear Me Not resides as the other end of that spectrum as a dark thriller that rests on the edge of becoming sinister at any moment. It’s a great commentary on modern day pharmaceuticals, and what they might or might not be doing to us.

Read on for our in-depth interview with Levring, in which he talks about pharmaceuticals, his favorite filmmakers, and the Dogme legacy.

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Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir includes himself as a central figure, and the film concerns his inability to remember events that occurred during the massacre in Lebanon in 1982. It’s a terrible and beautiful movie that isn’t just about war, but also comments on the human brain’s ability to shape itself by erasing events from our memories.

Talking to us at the Toronto Film Festival last week, Folman discussed going back in time for the project, the year he spent on a fake vacation, and what he’s working on next.

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Director Peter Sollett turned his short film Five Feet High And Rising into the 2003 Sundance darling Raising Victor Vargas, and now he’s moved into studio fare with the Sony Pictures flick Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel like a powerhouse of a film, and he manages to make a night in New York City feel honest, and not like a slickly produced starfest.

Read through the break to find out what it was like making this movie, why he thinks Union Pool is “retarded,” the skinny on MPAA censorship, and how much improv Michael Cera did in the movie. [He also swears and then apologizes for it, which Karina finds super endearing. -- Ed.]

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Rosemarie DeWitt is best known for her role as Don Draper’s beatnik-artist-in-residence Midge on AMC’s hit show Mad Men, but her turn as Rachel in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is already getting rave reviews. She’s been acting since 2001 and has done a lot of television work, but after this performance she may be ready to turn the corner and move into film.

Read the full interview after the break to find out how she got the role, and what it was like working with Anne Hathaway and Jonathan Demme.

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Rian Johnson is the director of the innovative modern-day film noir Brick, which premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and The Brothers Bloom is his impressive followup. While Brick is certainly set in a world of its own, with everyone in a contemporary high school speaking in 30s and 40s detective-speak, The Brothers Bloom takes place in a fantasy world chock full of steamships, fancy cars, and mysterious settings. He gets impressive performances out of Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz reinvents herself nicely, and Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi is terrific with an extremely tiny amount of dialogue. It’s well worth seeing when it comes out in January.

I sat down with Rian in Toronto and he told me about writing a part for Bob Dylan, his feelings about being compared to Wes Anderson, and his next project: a dark science fiction movie called Looper.

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Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t made a feature film since 2002’s Harrison Ford starrer K19: The Widowmaker, unless you count the “blink and you’ll miss it” Mission Zero with Uma Thurman. The Hurt Locker returns her to real roots as a character-driven action director, and she gets some terrific performances out of relative unknowns Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie in this film about the war in Iraq.

In our interview, she discusses fictionalizing real war stories, what The Hurt Locker does that other Iraq films haven’t, and the everlasting legacy of Point Break.

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Anna Hathaway has come a long way since The Princess Diaries, although speaking to her in person you sort of forget everything she’s done, from Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada and now Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, because she still looks like that young girl thrust into the role of suddenly becoming a princess. Although she might look the same, she’s definitely matured in both her acting and how she handles a press room.

Read on to find out about her role as Kym in the movie, why she isn’t entirely satisfied with her previous acting roles, and what she’s doing next.

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Jonathan Demme has had an extremely successful career ever since directing Caged Heat in 1974. He won the Oscar for Best Director in 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, and helped Tom Hanks act his way to a Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia. He’s also directed things as varied as a Saturday Night Live episode in 1980, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, with a new Young movie on the way in next year’s Trunk Show.

Rachel Getting Married represents another big change for him, as the film was shot completely handheld, features a lot of improvised dialogue, and uses ambient music from musicians actually on the set. It’s about as close to a Dogma film as you can get these days. We sat down with Jonathan in Toronto, and read on to find out what inspirations he drew on for this film, why he wanted to cast director Paul Thomas Anderson as the male lead, and how he came to work with Anne Hathaway.

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I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.

The first thing you notice about Michael Cera in person is that he seems a lot smaller and skinnier than he does in the movies. Maybe it’s actually true that the camera adds ten pounds. He’s also even nicer and seemingly more vulnerable than the characters he plays, if that were actually possible. His role as Nick in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is nothing new for him, but because he’s so honest and innocent, it hasn’t gotten old. Yet. He’s like the Lloyd Dobbler for an entirely new generation.

Read on for our interview with Michael in Toronto to find out all about the Arrested Development movie, how he likes his coffee (and what that says about how he likes his men), and what Lindsay Anderson film’s soundtrack he should hav on his iPod, but doesn’t.

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Keven McAlester’s second documentary The Dungeon Masters, which takes a look at three people who run Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, was at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. It could have easily been a comedic film, poking fun at people who are generally called geeks or nerds, but it ends up becoming an intimate glimpse of personalities and situations that are often touching and tragic.

I sat down with Keven and talked to him about how he set about making this movie, how he got into documentary filmmaking and working with Lee Daniel, and how he was able to put together such a good look into the D&D lifestyle, despite having never played the game. Read on after the break for the interview.

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It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, and we’re lucky enough to have Barry be big fans of Spout as well. His little film has had a long journey since it premiered in Austin at SXSW earlier this year, and it’s continuing to take him around the world.

We spoke with Barry in Toronto about the genesis of the movie, what has happened since that first screening in Austin, how he found the actors, and if this film represents a love letter from him to the city of San Francisco. Read on for the full interview.

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One of my favorite things about film festivals is the chance you’ll have at seeing something that you’d probably never come across otherwise when you visit the multiplex or browse your rental queue. When the Toronto International Film Festival schedule was released last month and I saw Keven McMcAlester’s documentary about Dungeons & Dragons gamemasters, The Dungeon Masters, listed, I knew I had to see it. It wasn’t that I’d seen Keven’s earlier documentary about Roky Erickson, You’re Gonna Miss Me, and wanted to see this, nor did I want to see what fine cinematography Lee Daniel had crafted for the movie. No, I wanted to see this one for the geek in me. Heck, it even made Karina’s list of Films We’re Betting On for TIFF, and she doesn’t dole out the nerd love lightly.

Although Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1974, the game is still played across the world, and has directly contributed to the creation and success of online sword and sorcery games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Almost everyone you as about the game knows that there’s a certain nerdy/geeky vibe associated with it, although most people probably couldn’t tell you anything else about it. The Dungeons Masters attempts to show you the personalities behind the dice-rolling by taking intimate looks inside the lives of three different dungeon masters who, in effect, become the game themselves.

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