Remembering Actor Terence Stamp

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm TV critic David Beancoule.

Terrence Stamp, the British actor whose diverse portfolio of roles included supervillain General Zod in the original Superman films, a psychopathic kidnapper in The Collector, and a transgender woman in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, died Sunday at age 87.

Today, we'll listen back to a conversation Terry Gross had with Terrence Stamp in 2002.

But first, we'll start with this appreciation.

Terrence Stamp was born in London in 1938, just before World War II.

His working-class upbringing during tough times didn't make him a likely prospect as a young young actor, but he followed his passion and struck gold early.

He first made it to the big screen in 1962 in the starring role of Billy Budd, based on the story by Moby Dick author Herman Melville.

Stamp played the title role, a childishly innocent sailor recruited onto a British warship in 1797.

The officers were tyrants, and Billy, after watching a fellow sailor get whipped, complained to his new mates.

But the more agitated he got, the more he stuck.

What's wrong, Flogger Man?

It's against his being being a man.

High lad, it is that.

Why do you

stammer, boy?

Because I sometimes can't find the words

for what I feel.

Terrence Stamp was nominated for an Academy Award for that supporting performance, and other roles quickly followed.

On Broadway, he landed the title role in a play called Alfie, but the show lasted less than a month.

When the film version was offered, he turned it down, and it ended up going instead to his flatmate, Michael Cain.

But for a while, the roles were plentiful and meaty.

He starred opposite Julie Christie, with whom he later became romantically involved, in Far From the Madding Crowd.

He was directed by Federico Fellini in a segment from Spirits of the Dead, Oliver Stone in Wall Street, Steven Soderberg in The Limey, and George Lucas in Star Wars Episode I, The Phantom Menace.

He played the Kryptonian supervillain General Zod opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman, and drew rave reviews as a transgender woman in a traveling cabaret show with two drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

His roles were as plentiful as they were eclectic.

He accepted parts in broad comedy films like Get Smart and Bofinger, in erotic films such as Bliss, and even acted as the host of the 1997 TV anthology series The Hunger.

He certainly brought his own unique vibe to that job.

In this episode, he opens the show wielding a sinister-looking hunting knife, using its sharp edge to point out parts of a disembodied brain, which is floating inside a fishbowl.

Until that is, he uses the hilt of his knife to shatter the glass.

Phrenology.

The belief that that different parts of the brain are responsible for different kinds of thoughts.

Romantic love over here.

Vision

over here.

The ability to recognize letters here.

Lust

here.

Reason miles away over here.

Connecting the two?

A bridge of neurons 26,000 miles long.

Do you think you could get from here to there?

Oh no.

I don't think so.

Terrence Stamp's final role ended up being one of his very best.

In 2021, in Last Night in Soho, he played a mysterious character identified in the credits only as the silver-haired gentleman.

There was a reason for the secrecy because the character's true identity is revealed only at the end.

But throughout the movie, he keeps popping up, following or observing the central character of the film, a young woman played by Thomason Mackenzie.

The first time he approaches her, she fears he's a stalker.

But the way he reacts suggests he has something else in mind and is almost humorously dismissive of her concerns.

Excuse me.

Excuse me, love.

I'm talking to you, Blundy.

Sorry, I have to be somewhere.

I'm not trying to pick you up, sweetheart.

Don't worry.

Not worried.

You look familiar to me.

Who's your mother?

My mother's dead.

I thought she might be.

Most of them are.

When Terry Gross spoke with Terrence Stamp in 2002, he was starring in the French film, My Wife is an Actress.

He played a young sports writer who's married to an attractive actress.

He's afraid she will fall for one of her leading men and even be aroused by their love scenes.

Terry asked Terrence Stamp if love scenes are arousing or just work.

Well, it can be either.

You know, it can be

absolutely acting and it can be absolute passion.

I think the great Warren Beatty once said that

the way to get

stars in the movie is to find out who wants to shag who.

is it ever embarrassing when it really is passion

well it's never passion passion because you know because everybody's there it's like you'd have to be a real exhibitionist to get real passion

I mean actual passion

but

I think you have a good idea during a love scene.

I mean, if you're interested in your co-star,

then you have a good idea of whether it's going to lead to real passion, because it's so kind of intimate.

Do you think you could tell the difference on screen between relationships on screen that are just acting and relationships on screen where there really is some passion beyond the acting?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

I mean, well, you're talking about good actors, right?

Yes, that's right, exactly.

With bad actors, you can't tell anything.

Exactly, exactly.

I'd like to do it like a film retrospective with you.

So let's go back to your very first movie, Billy Budd.

This was made in 1962.

It's based on the Herman Melville story.

You play a teenager who's impressed to serve on a British ship.

during war with France.

And you're the epitome of decency and goodness, whereas the master-at-arms is a sadist and very villainous.

After he sets you up to take a fall for a crime you're innocent of, you try to defend yourself verbally, but your speech impediment prevents that.

You have something of a stammer.

You punch him, he dies from a head wound when he hits the ground, and then you're court-martialed.

This was your first role in a movie, and it's the leading role in a prestigious film.

You must have had to learn a lot on camera.

Well, I I didn't, I didn't.

In fact,

as a

young out-of-work actors, I was sharing digs with Michael Cain.

And although Michael Kane wasn't known, you know, he hadn't been discovered, he was absolutely unknown, he did know a lot about the technicalities of filming.

And so he kind of versed me in those.

So I knew the technicalities and

felt confident in that.

You know, I knew how to hit marks, I knew about sort of camera angles, I knew about lenses.

And frankly,

when I started the movie, a kind of an amazing thing happened because I just discovered that it was like I knew it.

It was as though it was absolutely second nature to me.

Everything I saw that was new,

I understood almost instantaneously.

So it wasn't really

I mean, it was nerve-wracking because I had no way of dealing with

the

artistic vision that you have in your head and doing it, you know, when they say action.

So that was a kind of a problem and a fear.

But for the most part, I just had an instinctive understanding of it, really.

How old were you when you made Billy Budd?

I had my 21st birthday during the movie.

Was acting a far-fetched ambition from someone from your neighborhood?

Yes.

I saw my first movie and I just wanted to be that.

And

I never really spoke about it.

In other words, it was a very private sort of fantasy that I had.

And when it got to sort of near leaving school, in other words, let's say I was like 15, 16,

and we

got our first television.

I started making remarks about, oh, I could do that and I could do better than that.

And my dad,

he sort of wore that for a bit.

And then one evening, I was carrying on about how good I thought I could be in that part.

And he said to me,

listen, son,

people like us don't do things like that.

And I went to sort of protest, and he said, son,

I just don't want you to talk about it anymore.

And

my dad was, you know, something of a stoic, and he didn't say much.

So when he said something, it had, you know, it had a kind of

quite a heavy reverberation to it.

But in fact, it didn't deter me at all.

I wasn't allowed to talk about it.

But I was used to not talking about it.

I mean, it was...

I understood that it would have been ridiculous to everybody else, you know.

So all it did was it made made a kind of a steam kettle into a pressure cooker.

Now you said that you grew up in a very cockney neighborhood, so did you have a cockney accent when you started to act?

Oh sure.

I mean when I finally realized that I would have to go to drama school

to get my foot in

in the door,

I'd you know, in those days, it wasn't like today where if you could lift a lot of weights or if you could play football, you could become an actor.

You know, you weren't,

you couldn't get in to see anyone unless you'd been trained.

There was no such thing as sort of untrained actors.

So I had to get into drama school and

you had to do a classical piece, you had to do a piece of Shakespeare and a modern piece.

And

I chose Romeo's death speech and

now I can imagine how hysterical it must have been, you know, like Romeo as a sort of cockney barra boy, you know.

You write a little bit about your accent in one of your memoirs, and you say that you convinced yourself that since you had a natural ear and could pick up accents easily, instead of learning to speak proper English, you would just treat English roles, standard English roles, as a dialect and just learn it for those roles.

Did that strategy work out?

It worked out.

I mean, yes, it worked out.

I mean, it worked out for sort of twenty years.

But eventually, you know, I had to sort of...

And the thing was, I think looking back,

it was something to do with

a loss of identity.

Like I didn't, I wanted to retain my own voice,

but as well,

I think that it was, there was a lot of

there was a lot of sort of fear and trepidation involved in

learning to speak in a completely different way.

So, eventually, treating parts, treating all the parts I did as a dialect,

I still had a kind of a London, I had a sort of London foggy accent for

years.

And it was only sort of,

you know, when I was sort of in my 40s, that I thought to myself, well, I might as well really just see if I can perfect my voice, see if I can have what they call RP.

I think it's called receive pronunciation.

I'll see if I can have RP voice without losing, you know, the quality that makes my voice my own.

So what did you do?

Well, I just, I had always been interested in

breath.

One of the things that I'd learned at drama school was this thing called the full breath and

speaking on support, you know, which we all had to learn to do before everybody had throat mics.

and so I had continued that study I'd taken my study from just like learning to breathe theatrically to sort of mystical breathing and breathing exercises and yoga stuff I'd learned like in India and so I just kind of widened my area of learning really and I just continued to

find

you know really wonderful voice teachers and and study with them and pick up things that I could get from them

and so it was a kind of an ongoing thing I mean I'm still a bit of a sucker for like if I hear there's a great voice teacher in town I'll go and check them out you know because I think that there's a great kind of

I think there's a great mystery in the voice but also I think that it's something that is almost a lost art and for my my own personal understanding is that any

study, any work that you do on your voice is really capital in the bank.

I don't regret any of the money that I've spent, you know, studying voice.

I want to play a scene from your movie, The Limey.

And this is a pretty recent film.

And in this film, you play a working-class guy who's just gotten out of prison in England, and you've come to California to avenge the murder of your daughter.

You think she was murdered by a record executive who made made his fortune in the 1960s.

He's played by Peter Fonda.

Anyways, in this scene, you're talking to a drug enforcement agency agent who you think has some clues about where to find this record executive you're looking for.

And you're talking to him in this really thick, cockney accent.

It's not the way you speak in the rest of the movie.

It's just something you're putting on for him in this scene.

How you doing then?

All right, are you?

Now look, squire, you're the governor here, I can see that.

I'm on your manner now, so there's no need to get your niggas in a twist.

Whatever this bollocks is that's going down between you and that slake Valentine, it's got nothing to do with me.

I couldn't care less.

All right, mate?

Let me explain to you.

When I was in prison, second time, uh, no, tell a lie, third stretch.

Yep, third, third.

There was this screw what really had it in for me, and that geezer was top of my list.

Two years after I got sprung, I sees him in Ola Park.

He's sitting on a bench feeding bloody pigeons.

There was no one about.

I could have gone up behind him and snapped his fing neck.

Wallop.

But I left him.

I could have knobbled him, but I didn't.

Because what I thought I wanted wasn't what I wanted.

What I thought I was thinking about was something else.

I didn't give a toss.

It didn't matter, see?

This burg on the bench wasn't worth my time.

It meant sod all in the end because you've got to make a choice.

Went to do something and went to let it go.

When it matters and when it don't, bide your time.

That's what prison teaches you, if nothing else.

Bide your time, and everything becomes clear, and you can act accordingly.

Terrence Stamp, in a scene from The Limey.

Terren Stamp, did you ever talk that way?

No, I didn't really.

Well, I may have, but when I was working on it,

that was really how my dad spoke and how my uncle spoke.

And

strangely enough, in England,

I got a lot of stick for that.

You know, people, critics said, oh, nobody talks like that.

But the truth is that

they haven't been to the local Turkish bath on Saturday morning, you know, where everybody talks like that.

Now, were you starting to act in a time when it was becoming more acceptable, more possible for working-class actors who didn't speak received English to

receive pronunciation, whatever it's called,

to get started?

You know, was it more acceptable to talk like you did and still be on the stage?

I think more than more acceptable, it was actually something that was needed.

Because what had happened in England was that they had passed a bill, a politician called Rab Butler had passed a bill whereby all kids had an opportunity of going to a grammar school.

They had this thing called the 11 Plus.

And if you passed the 11 plus, it didn't matter what strata of society you came from, you could get to go to one of these rather good grammar schools.

And the end of the fifties,

the big sort of mass of working class kids who previously hadn't had a higher education were being sort of released into the world and they were giving birth that was giving birth to the great working class playwrights and the working class playwrights were really writing

plays that needed

a different kind of actor they wanted like working class actors and I think that that was the beginning of that 60s wave of,

you know, working class guys.

And were you cast in any of those plays?

Yes, yes, I was cast.

The first play I ever did professionally was called Long on the Short on the Tour, which was a play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

And it had spawned a host of actors.

I mean, the lead part had been written with Albert Finney in mind.

Albert had got sick.

Peter O'Toole had stepped in,

became a big success.

Michael Kane was Peter O'Toole's understudy and never got to play the part, so he did the tour, which was where I met him.

So that was the first play that I was in that was one of those plays.

But of course, there was like Osborne, there was Pinter, there was Arna Wesker, you know, there was a kind of a whole clutch of

working-class playwrights that were writing wonderful things.

Terrence Stamp speaking to Terry Gross in 2002.

After a break, we'll continue their conversation, and film critic Justin Chang reviews the popular new horror film, Weapons.

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You started to become very well known in the 60s.

In fact, you became kind of a symbol of London in the 60s.

And in Sean Levy's new book about London in the 60s, he writes that you were among the swingingest of young Londoners, handsome, stylish, and always up for some wild scene.

What was it like to become known in the 60s when everything from the class sex system to sexual mores was loosening up?

Well, I think it was

the best time and place a boy could be, really.

It was like after the pill and before AIDS, you know.

So it was

an extraordinary

release and I think that we felt it particularly in England because we'd been

confined by the

you know by World War II and the kind of poverty after World War II which which drifted right on really through the 50s.

So I think that

I think of the 40s and the 50s as being in black and white and I think that

with the birth of the decade of the sixties, it suddenly burst into technicolor.

Now it's said that you and Julie Christie, who were a couple for a while, are the Terry and Julie in the King Song Waterloo Sunset.

Is is that accurate?

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

Ray Davis actually told my brother Chris that.

My brother Chris

discovered the Who and

you know, with his partner Kit Lambert made them I think into the great group they they they became but

Bray Davis told my brother Chris that that when he was writing the lyrics of Wardloo Sunset he envisaged Julie and myself for that lyric

we were talking about your your voice and how you used to have a cockney accent and how you you you

learned to speak differently for for movies and theater.

I want to play a scene from your movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

This is a 1994 Australian comedy in which you played a transsexual who has an act with two drag queens in which you lip-sync and dance to disco hits.

And in this scene, you're in the dressing room with the two drag queens.

You're all putting on makeup.

And this is shortly after you've fallen on your head in shock upon learning that one of the drag queens in your act not only used to be married, but he has a son.

For Christ's sake, Mitz, why didn't you tell us?

Why the hell did you have to shock me like that?

Oh.

This lump on my head is getting bigger by the second.

I'm about to make my Northern Territory's debut, looking like a f ⁇ ing Warner Brothers cartoon character has hit me over the head with an iron.

I think you look more like a Disney witch myself.

Oh, shut your face, Felicia.

At least I don't look like somebody's tried to open a can of beans with my face.

I'm sorry, girls.

I couldn't stand the thought of you bagging me in the bus for two weeks.

Anyway, what difference does it make now?

Oh, about two inches to my head for one.

Did you get a good look at him?

He's got my profile, that's for sure.

I think I'm gonna be safe.

I hate to be practical here, but does he know who you are?

I mean, does he know what you do for a living?

Well, he knows he he has a further in the show business cosmetics industry.

Oh, Lord, I don't understand.

No, you don't understand, so stop trying to.

It'll be fine, but it better be.

It's Taryn Stamp in a scene from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Now, one of the things I find really interesting about your performance in that movie is that you didn't really change your voice.

You change the kind of language that you use and the way you'd speak, but you don't try to make your voice higher in it, even though you're playing a transsexual.

Tell us why you didn't do that.

Well,

during the time I was sort of researching the role, I was getting introduced to actual transsexuals, guys who had actually been sort of tried to change themselves physically from being a man to being a woman.

And one of the things that I noticed about them vocally was that they either spoke below the break or above the the break.

So either they were sort of, hello darling, and yes, my name is this.

Or they were sort of speaking above the break.

And during rehearsal,

I really tried both of those

vocal sort of approaches.

And

the director said to me, like, don't worry, you know, just like, just your voice is fine.

You know, don't really worry about

affecting a voice.

You know, he said like a lot of trans

do that, but

it'll put too much of like a strain on the performance, you know, if you confine yourself to just an area of voice.

So that's really how the finished product came about.

And look at how, say, Lauren Bacall's voice deepened as she got older.

Right, right.

What surprised you most by how you looked as a woman with a long blonde wig and makeup and

women's clothes, heels?

Well, I was rather

I have to say first out that when I saw the movie I was like bitterly disappointed because

I had understood, I had been led to believe that

you know, the cameraman was making me look like Lauren Bacall and Princess Dinah and and Candy Bergen, you know, that's, and so I'd

been given the performance believing

that I was being made to look like this real babe, you know.

And on the

about five minutes before I saw the film, which was at the Cam Festival, the DP came up to me and said, listen, Terence, I don't want you to be upset with me, you know, but like,

I really didn't make you look good, you know.

And I was really, I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, you know, I didn't do the best for you.

I said, why?

And he said, well, Stephen didn't want me to, you know.

I said to him, Steph, you know, I can make him look wonderful.

Like it's just a lighting thing.

And Steph said, no, no, no, I want him looking dodgy, you know, don't make him look good kind of thing.

And then I'm at the premiere, you know, and the film starts, and there I am looking like this old Tomcat, you know.

So I was like,

I was really taken aback.

It was a huge

instant dismantling of my ego.

Because you wanted to look like a beautiful woman.

Yeah, I was really, that's what I was, exactly.

I was choosing, hearing, oh, I see Michelle Pfeiffer wear those, I can wear those.

You know what I mean?

I was like, I was really into it.

And I said to Stefan Elijah, you know, why did you do that to me?

You know, why did you,

I don't, I really don't understand.

You know, and he said,

he said, well, that's the point.

You know,

what I wanted was

a creature

who believed that she was beautiful.

And the reality was she was an old dog, you know.

So, in other words, he wanted a kind of

he thought that the character would be more touching if that element was there.

He just didn't want me looking, you know, like Lauren Bacall.

Did that work for you when you started to see it that way?

No, no, I always hated it.

I always thought it was a lost opportunity to be a babe.

Terrence Stamp, speaking with Terry Gross in 2002.

More after a break.

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Now, Warren Dowd had a New York Times magazine article with you after Priscilla was released.

And in that article, you say that you used to have this fear of looking stupid on screen and that that used to hold you back.

But after Priscilla, you stopped worrying about that.

Accurate?

Well,

I hate to contradict the lovely Maureen Dowd.

The way in which I

what I felt about that was that I didn't know

that I had this

fear of looking stupid.

It was a kind of

I was tethered by it, but I didn't know.

And during Priscilla, it came up and I had to confront it.

And

I had to confront it because

what I was doing was absolutely ridiculous, and there was no way of doing it without risk of looking an absolute idiot.

And when I'd gone through it, in other words, when it had happened, then I saw it.

And then I saw the extent

to which I'd been limited by it.

So in other words,

the movie was a growth experience on that level.

I want to say

that's basically what she says you said.

And if I misrepresented what she said you said, I apologize for that.

But I think she represented what you said very accurately.

So, can you put your finger on what you did differently after that?

No, not really.

Well, I can explain to you.

I can't really

give you examples, but after it,

after the take, it happened like it actually,

the freeing, the breakthrough happened

during

the performance of Shake That Groove Thing, you know, and

I'm in this town called Broken Hill, and

which is a lot of, like, sort of a mining town where most of the guys were out of work, you know, and they'd got all these miners in to be extras.

And the way they'd kept them there was by giving them lots of beers and stuff.

And I came out of the trailer, and I've got these kind of like

putty-coloured queenies tights, which I've put my force nail through so they're laddered.

And I've got these sort of pink knickers with like little stars stuck on them, and I've got a red wig with detachable pigtails.

And we're all standing on a bar in our high heels, waiting to do this number

in front of this very raucous audience of mine.

And in fact,

as I was standing there,

like the

thoughts that were going through my head were like,

what are you doing here?

You know, you're the best-dressed man in Britain, you know,

you're a middle-aged man.

You were the great Iagu of your drama school.

You know, you're a scholar and a philosopher, you know, and then suddenly there was was like playback,

and you do it.

And you do it.

And we did it.

And I was, I had done it.

I had done the lip-sync, I had done the dancing, I had made an absolute ass of myself.

And I was kind of in the stratosphere.

And I think that after that, so in other words, it was a kind of,

it was like an inner dimension, you know, it was something, it was like a sort of reservoir of energy that had never been released before.

And after Priscilla,

I never had to really

consciously draw on that.

I mean, I haven't done anything that's sort of

extended my fear barrier, but there is that kind of understanding within me that

I'm fearless, you know.

I mean, I would never really turn down another movie from fear.

And I was able to look back and see that I had turned down wonderful roles

because I was a frightened.

I turned down

Camelot with the wonderful Josh Logan, you know.

You would have had a singing role on that?

Yeah, I would have been the king, you know.

If ever I would leave you, is it?

Yeah, you wouldn't have been there.

It would have been Terren Stamp singing that?

Yeah, and that was the fear, you know.

And it wasn't that I didn't really know it until I had that breakthrough.

And I thought, yeah, I turned that down for the wrong reason.

You know, I turned it down because I was frightened that my singing voice wouldn't have been good enough, you know.

And there were lots of things like that that I've, roles that I've turned down because,

you know, later on in life I saw, yeah, I could have, of course, I could have done that.

You know, I could have gone through that fear bere earlier.

Well, you know, you haven't had the most prolific career.

You've been making a fair number of movies lately, but there was a period in, I guess, the seventies and part of the eighties when when you weren't doing that much and part of what what you were doing was um international productions.

Was that a conscious choice?

No, no, no.

On the contrary, um you know, the sixties ended and I ended with them.

I was sort of out of work for ten years, really.

And and you know, that was like a tragedy for me.

But it was just one of those things.

It wasn't anything that I could uh

if I had wanted to continue working during the 70s then I would have had to have done real crap you know and I'd already I'd been spoilt you know I'd worked with Ustanov, Wyler, Fellini, Pasolini, Lossi.

I didn't want to do

cockney lorry drivers

and gangsters and stuff.

So I just I was out of work.

I was out of work from

about 69

till I

got the Superman movies.

How would you describe the phase of your career you're in now?

How would I describe?

Oh, I think I'm a golden oldie now, you know.

I think I'm an old master

with wisdom

and vestiges of sex appeal.

I think one of your greatest performances, and this is my humble opinion, is in the limey.

I think you're just so wonderful in that film.

It's funny with the limey because it was something that

it's to do, I think, with resignation.

When you resign yourself to the fact that you're never going to get another great role, then something happens.

And

when it happened, it was just so wonderful, I mean, to work with a guy like Soderbergh, you know,

who's

I would in my book, you know, is the greatest American director since Willie Wyler.

You know, he's just so extraordinarily talented.

But

a funny thing happened.

They had a Carson crew screening and um

at at the at the Directors Guild right here on Sunset Boulevard and um

he asked me to come and look at it.

And a friend of mine, a great friend of mine called Richard LaPlante was actually in California and I said, come with me, you know,

I need a bit of backup, you know, know, because none of us really knew what Stephen had been doing.

Like, we didn't actually know

that he was,

you know, making a film that was sort of outside the time-space concept, you know.

We didn't realize that it was going to be like a non-linear movie.

And anyway, I go along to this,

and there was only supposed to be sort of

you know, 40 or 50 people.

The place was packed.

There were hundreds of people.

And

it was just extraordinary.

It was just an extraordinary event for

me and you could tell from the audience that everybody was locked into it from the first frame, you know, which is the way

you can tell a great master director.

You know, they pick you up and you're confident that they're going to take you somewhere and put you down, you know.

And everybody in that movie was like...

totally attentive.

On the way home, I said to my friend, like, what do you think of it?

He said, my God, I think it's like the best thing you've ever done.

And I was a bit taken aback, you know, because that seemed, I thought, well, I've done lots of terrific things.

But when I was going to sleep that night, I thought to myself, you know something?

If it had to end here, like if this had to be the last one,

really from Billy Budd to the Limey was like more than any young actor could hope to do, really.

Well, Terren Stamp, a pleasure to talk with you.

Thank you so much.

Not at all.

Actor Terrence Stamp speaking with Terry Gross in 2002.

He died Sunday at the age of 87.

For a time in the 1960s, he and actress Julie Christie were a couple.

And earlier in the interview, he confirmed that they were the Terry and Julie mentioned in the famous kink song Waterloo Sunset.

Let's listen.

Waterloo Station

every Friday night.

But I am so lazy, don't want to wonder

I stay at home at night.

But I don't

feel afraid

as long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset.

I am in paradise.

Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new horror film Weapons.

This is Fresh Air.

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Our film critic, Justin Chang, recently caught up with Weapons, the hit horror movie set in a small American town where 17 school children suddenly vanish without explanation.

It's the latest film from the writer-director Zach Krager, who previously made the 2022 thriller Barbarian.

It features an ensemble cast that includes Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan.

The movie currently is playing in theaters everywhere.

Here is Justin's review.

As I emerged from a showing of weapons at my local multiplex on Saturday night, I saw a teenager running around the lobby, his arms extended downward and outward, to the great amusement of his friends.

You're going to see a lot of kids running like that on Halloween, I heard someone say, and I think he was right.

Weapons has been in theaters for just two weeks, and it's already given us an unshakably memorable image of children quietly running through a neighborhood, their arms stretched out in that same unsettling way.

Zack Krager's ingenious and exultant new horror film is like a Stephen King riff on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and it has a wonderful campfire tale spookiness.

It begins with an unseen, unidentified young girl telling us about strange events that happened in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania.

One Wednesday, at exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 children get out of their beds, walk out their front doors, and disappear into the night.

All 17 children are students in the same third grade class.

The only classmate who doesn't vanish is a shy boy named Alex, played by a very good Carrie Christopher.

Julia Gardner is their teacher, Justine, who soon comes under suspicion from furious parents.

At a school meeting, Justine insists she had nothing to do with what happened, but no one seems to believe her.

I just want to say how

very sorry I am for all of what's happened.

I know there's nothing I can say to make this better.

The truth is, is that I want an answer just as bad as all of you.

I love those kids.

And

I know.

I know, I know it's...

That scene jogged my memory of a very different school meeting from Field of Dreams, in which Amy Madigan stands up to an angry mob of book banners.

I'm guessing this was very much by design, since Madigan herself has a late-breaking but memorable role in Weapons.

Krager has a knack for springing outrageous surprises, and here he's made a chiller that's as fiendishly unpredictable as his previous one, Barbarian.

Like that film, but on an even more ambitious scale, Weapons is about the dark underbelly of American suburbia, and unfolds from the perspectives of multiple characters, sometimes replaying the same events from new angles.

We spend a lot of time with the teacher, Justine, whom Gardner makes an appealingly flinty heroine, devastated for her students, but also unwilling to take the blame that others have heaped upon her.

Josh Brolin plays a dad so obsessed with finding out what happened to his son that he descends into what might seem like conspiracy-mongering paranoia, except that he really is onto something.

The strong cast also includes Benedict Wong as the school's by-the-book principal, Austin Abrams as a drifter and petty thief, and Alden Ehrenreich as a none-too-competent cop.

There's something schematic about the movie's episodic structure, but I was pulled along by the sheer craft and momentum of it all.

Krager stages action with exuberant flair, and he's good at making you cackle in between jolts and screams.

He shows how horror manifests not just in dark hallways and creaky basements, but out in public in the bright light of day.

During its past two weeks of box office dominance, Weapons has inspired a lot of jokey memes, and also a lot of think pieces about what, if anything, it's about.

It's clear enough by the end what's happened plot-wise, but the movie is full of rich ideas that invite deeper interpretation.

Maybrook is in many ways the quintessential American any town, pretty and idyllic on the surface, but riven by issues of addiction, poverty, and police brutality.

The children's disappearance evokes both the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s and the continual tragedy of school shootings, something the film makes explicit with a hallucinatory image of a semi-automatic weapon, looming over someone's house like a ghost.

The most haunting plot point involves the ring cameras that proliferate in the neighborhood, speaking to our moment of heightened surveillance, but not necessarily greater security.

The cameras here are a silent witness to horror, capturing footage of the kids running away on that terrible night.

In a subtler, less condescending way than the current COVID-themed horror western Eddington, Weapons shows us a town that has lost any sense of community.

Here, in a state of crisis, no one can agree on what to do, or even on what is actually happening.

But Weapons also passes what has become my own personal test for a horror movie.

I returned home from the theater shivering, satisfied, and more grateful than usual that my wife had left the porch light on.

Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.

He reviewed the new horror movie, Weapons.

Well, it's one for the money,

two for the show,

three to go.

On Monday's show, we begin R ⁇ B Rockabilly and Early Rock and Roll Week, featuring interviews with influential performers and songwriters.

We hear from Elvis Presley's guitarist Scotty Moore and from Carl Perkins, one of the early Rockabilly musicians.

He wrote and first performed Blue Suede Shoes.

Later, it was one of Elvis' early hits.

I hope you can join.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Schurach.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Biancoule.

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