The Shoah Foundation is an institution founded by filmmaker Stephen Spielberg. The foundation previously brought together an archive of testimonies from World War II holocaust survivors to create a living history memorial. Now the organisation are looking to do a similar project with the 400 interviews and images of Armenian genocide survivors captured by Armenian filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian.

Hagopian – who survived the genocide – managed to record hundreds of devastating testimonies from witnesses and survivors. One survivor remembers seeing babies snatched from their mother’s arms by Turkish soldiers before being thrown into the air and caught by a bayonet at the end of a rifle. Others remember the systematic torture of intellectuals and bloodied bodies floating down a river.

The whole of his archive of Armenian genocide interviews will soon be made available to the public and universities all across the world.

To escape the Turkish soldiers, Hagopian’s mother hid him in a well when his village of Kharberd in Western Armenia was terrorised. He later migrated to the USA and became a filmmaker.

Carla Garapedian worked with Hagopian and is currently leading the Armenian Film Foundation who are set to digitalise the archives. She believes that it is a huge step forward in terms of educating the public. She hopes that digitalising these testimonies will help the public see the genocide from the point of view of Armenian survivors and witnesses.

She said: ‘In understanding the genocide in that comparative way, we may be able to prevent it.’

According to Stephen Smith, executive director for the Shoah Foundation Institute, the aim of these visual memories and testimonies is to ‘strengthen evidence that such atrocities occurred and show how crimes against humanity are born out of bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance if gone unnoticed’.

And clearly this particular instance of mass killing has gone unnoticed for almost 100 years. The Armenian genocide – in which 1.5 million Armenians were killed – seems to have been put on the back shelf compared to the awareness raising of the Nazi holocaust.

And in 1939 Hitler proved this point exactly. He posed the question: ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’
Even President Obama stopped short of calling it a genocide and called it ‘one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century’ at a memorial service today. He has been heavily criticised by American-Armenians because as candidate for president, Obama vowed to recognise the genocide once in office.

But thanks to the Shoah Foundation and Hagopian’s archives, hopefully now the world will have a new understanding of this event which is considered the first genocide of the 20th century.

We interviewed the two directors to ask about making the transition from page to screen, the role given to French comedian François Damiens, and of course, what it was like working with Ms Tautou…

Q: When you wrote the book, did you know that you were going to make it in to a movie?
David: No, each time I write a book, I only think about the book. It was my brother, when he read the book, he said to me that we [should] do it by ourselves – “even if you have a phone call from Woody Allen, or whoever!” We made a short movie five years ago…
Stéphane: Don’t see it. It didn’t do well internationally because it’s an in-joke, a French joke, and it’s a lot of puns and puns about feet. You only see feet, so you don’t know who’s talking – so it was impossible to translate.
D: So we were waiting for a story for another movie. It took five years, and when he read this book he said to me, “this is the story we are waiting for”. I wrote the script – at the beginning it was like a dream to try to give it Audrey Tautou. We really wanted her, we love her, but she only does one movie a year.

Q: How did she say yes in the end?
D: She loved that we had very precise ideas about the aesthetics of the film. She liked that we had envisioned the whole thing. Also, her last question was, who is going to play Markus? That was a big deal for us too. Even though I did casting for a long time, this was a challenge because he’s Swedish – and there are not so many Swedish actors who speak French. We did a casting session in Sweden but… it did not go well. We had this actor (Damiens) that we loved and physically was exactly what we were looking for . He’s Belgian, but Audrey was very fond of him, and it was a plus for her.
But for him, when we said to him, “We have a romantic comedy with Audrey Tautou,” he was like “Haha”. He’s doing a lot of pranks and candid camera shows in France, where he is very famous for playing these outrageous characters, so he thought it was another joke.

Q: Why was it so important that Markus’ character is Swedish?
D: Because I wanted to make a depressive character, and the first country that came to my mind was Sweden. It’s a cliché – I’m not saying it’s true, but… if I say ‘he is Swedish’ then most of my job is already done.
S: He doesn’t describe his characters very much, but he gives them their citizenship.
D: The first sentence of the book is about Nathalie, I wrote: “Nathalie was rather private, a kind of Swiss femininity”.
S: So everyone in France said, “It’s strange that you’ve picked Audrey Tautou, because [Nathalie] is blonde” – but no. In France, the book is a huge bestseller, and it because a best-seller while we were filming.
D: The paperback edition sold almost one million copies, it’s crazy!
S: So people have a passion for the book, and it’s very difficult that the film had to be faithful to that.

Q: How did you switch between the two mediums – a novel to a screenplay?
D: It was very important to keep the heart of the book, but to make it into a movie script. In the book you have all the childhood of Markus in Sweden – it would have been impossible to have it in the movie (unless you want to see a three-hour movie), so we decided to put only a short scene with his parents, without subtitles. I think that in 30 seconds, you can understand all his life. It was always on my mind to try to explain in my scenes what I have tried to explain in my book.

Q: Does it matters that international audiences will not recognise Francois Damiens as a famous comedian?
S: Of course in France, the moment François Damiens appears, people love him. But it was also very difficult for him to be accepted as a character that is not that outrageous. To him, it was hard because sometimes he would say to us, “But I’m doing nothing?” but it was like, “But you’re brilliant!”. The fact that he was not that at ease, in the way that he was dressed especially – he said, “Oh no, another beige sweater, please no! How can I seduce Audrey Tautou dressed like that? It’s not possible!” There is a link between him and the audience in France which exists… but people bought the fact that he was Swedish. Now, when we go abroad, [audiences] love him the same way, even though they don’t know who he is.

Q: You tackle quite a sensitive subject for a comedy with the death of her husband towards the beginning of this film – were you keen to keep it light-hearted? How did you go about merging the comic and tragic elements?
S: We followed the book. It was very difficult when we adapted it – we had a big discussion with the producers and they said, “You have the biggest comedian in your country, and he’s making an entrance 30 minutes into the film!” It was really tricky, but we said, “No, we cannot change that. It will be cheating the readers and cheating the audience.” We even did something that is really perverse: [Nathalie] has a meeting with all her colleagues and we see [Markus] from behind – we don’t see his face, but we know it is him.
D: This is a joke for France, because a lot of people came to see him, and they were saying, “Where is François Damiens? What is this movie? Oh I see him!”
S: We are waiting for him like [Nathalie] is waiting for him, even if it is unconscious.
D: (pointing at another journalist’s Jaw’s t-shirt) I like your t-shirt!
S: Do you know that there is a link between your t-shirt and our film? There’s a cameo from Steven Spielberg’s daughter in the film. When Nathalie comes back to the café where she met [Francis], and she sees this couple, and they ask her to take a picture – that’s Sasha Spielberg. So Steven Spielberg wants to see the movie! (laughing) We hope he does the remake with Will Ferrell and Natalie Portman.

Q: What was it like working with Audrey Tautou?
S: It was quite impressive. She’s so normal in real life, she’s not a diva, she hates everything that is associated with being a star – if she could, she would run away from the media. It’s not because she doesn’t like it; she loves her job as an actor, and she is extra generous to other actors, which is very rare for someone of her status.
D: It was funny, François Damiens would say when we were shooting the same scene five times, “You are waiting for me to be good, because Audrey is always perfect first time.” She is really amazing. She said, for this film, that she wanted everything that came out of her mouth to be truthful, she didn’t want to think too much. That’s why we didn’t want her to read the book before – she read the script, but we didn’t want the actors to read the book because there is too much information in it.

Delicacy is released in UK cinemas on Friday 13th April – take a look at our review here.

Without a doubt, Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park set the precedent for many other monster/dinosaur-related films and has remained a giant among the releases of the 1990s. It has a fantastic cast including Jeff Goldblum, Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Attenborough, and some truly terrifyingly realistic dinosaurs (considering it was released back in 1993).

What could make this film even better? We think the answer is indeed 3D and are excited, if a little nervous, about confronting those raptors head-on. This film has all the elements that suggests it will be a success in 3D, and it will definitely have more sustained action and monsters-in-your-face than the likes of Titanic, which will hit theatres in 3D at the beginning of April.

From rumours flying around, rather like that goat from the T-Rex enclosure, it sounds as though no expense will be spared for this technological update. It is also clear that the director needs to be heavily involved in the process, which is hopefully something that Spielberg will agree with.

Jurassic Park 3D is set to open in the US on 19th July 2012, and we will let you know as soon as we hear a UK date!

As well as working on the iconic designs for the original Star Wars movie in the mid-1970s, McQuarrie also worked on the original 70s Battlestar Galactica TV series, and Steven Spielberg films Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1985 he won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for his work on Spielberg’s Cocoon.

Born in the steel town of Gary, Indiana in 1929, McQuarrie started work as a technical illustrator for Boeing. He soon got extra work designing film posters and working on the animation for US television network CBS’s coverage of the Apollo space missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Star Wars took McQuarrie into the big time, but it may never have been made had he not been involved. George Lucas had been turned down by both Universal Studios and United Artists and decided that his next pitch would have to be enhanced by pictures. This lead to the director hiring McQuarrie to draw up his ideas for the characters he had created for the project.

The vivid images of worn-looking droids, eerie desert landscapes, lightsaber fights and now instantly recognisable space ships helped Lucas win funding from 20th Century Fox. McQuarrie worked on the first three films and without his input they would have had a very different look.

Anthony Daniels, the British actor who played C-3PO, has said that it was the pictures of his character that persuaded him to accept the part he had initially turned down. McQuarrie also came up with Darth Vader’s mask that enabled him to survive in space.

Having created some of the most iconic images in modern sci-fi, Ralph McQuarrie was hired by Stephen Spielberg to design the UFO in Close Encounters, he went on to work on E.T., Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Total Recall among other classics of the genre.

George Lucas has said in a statement, “I am deeply saddened by the passing of such a visionary artist” before going on to acknowledge his seminal influence “he was a generous father to a conceptual art revolution that was born of his artwork.”

It only remains for us to add, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” Farewell Ralph McQuarrie.

Despite the fact that Michael Bay’s previous Transformers film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, was heavily criticised – for everything from being ugly, to incoherent, to soulless – it seems that the director has been given the opportunity to return for another film. This Monday Bay revealed that he had signed a two-part deal with Paramount to take on two more films, the first of which will be black comedy titled Pain and Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock), followed by a brand new Transformers film.

The decision may also come as a surprise since Bay himself reportedly admitted that Transformers 2 had been ‘crap’ and Megan Fox, the female lead from the first two films, likened working with the director to being like working with Hitler – resulting in her subsequent absence from Dark of the Moon.

However, Bay appears to be keen to give the series something of an overhaul – despite being somewhat vague as to exactly what this might entail. Bay has said that the next film will be “a whole new re-imagining of Transformers,” while producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said “the challenge there is we really are gonna do a reboot, and what that’s gonna be we don’t even know yet.” Riveting stuff, we’re sure…

All this seems particularly baffling in relation to Transformers star Tyrese Gibson’s confident comments last summer, in which he is reported to have said “There are no concepts, no direction, no nothing for Transformers 4, because everyone has been so focused on Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But here is the safety net…There is always Steven Spielberg!… it is a beautiful safety net to know that one of the biggest, most respected directors in the world happens to be an executive producer on Transformers…he could easily step in and direct Transformers 4 if he decided to.” Assuming Spielberg is willing to continue his association with this franchise by reprising his role as executive producer, we can only assume that he has turned down the opportunity to take over as director.

Shia LaBeouf, on the other hand, appears to be rather less tolerant, and is currently standing by his vow not to return to the franchise in his role as the male lead. It is thought that Jason Statham could be lined up as his replacement, meaning that he would star alongside his real-life girlfriend Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who took over from Fox as the female lead in the last film.

While Bay’s return doesn’t mean that the film won’t be financially successful (Dark of the Moon grossed $1.12 billion worldwide), it may disappoint fans of the original Transformers toys and the cartoons. Many had undoubtedly been hoping that their favourite shape-shifting robots might fare a rather better on-screen fate this time around, especially since Bay was still maintaining that Dark of the Moon would be his final Transformers film this time last year.

Transformers 4 is expected to be released in the summer of 2014 – we’ll keep you posted…

Gordon-Levitt began his acting career aged just 7-years-old, and has starred in everything from A River Runs Through It to (500) Days of Summer and Inception. Back in 2004, he also launched his own online collaborative production company, hitRECord.org. Proving that he is, indeed, a man of many talents, it seems that Gordon-Levitt’s next project will be to direct his first feature film.

Next new project, that is. Gordon-Levitt already has a number of films in the pipeline – and we hope he’s been taking notes from the range of first-class directors who he’s been working with. First up he’ll be appearing as a Gotham City cop in Christopher Nolan‘s third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, before reuniting with Brick director, Rian Johnson, to play the lead in sci-fi flick, Looper. He’s also been working with legendary director Steven Spielberg on the Abraham Lincoln biographical drama, Lincoln. However, it seems that his own directorial plans could mean that Gordon-Levitt is forced to drop out of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming spaghetti western, Django Unchained, due to potential scheduling conflicts.

That said, the actor’s not without his own directorial credentials – he’s helmed a 24 minute-long adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story, Sparks, back in 2009, and directed another short film, Morgan and Destiny’s Eleventeenth Date: The Zeppelin Zoo, a year later.

His first feature film, however, is reported to be a comedy, in which Gordon-Levitt will also star. He’ll play a modern-day Don Juan character who is looking to reform himself from being, as Gordon-Levitt put it, a bit of a “selfish dick”. hitRECord.org will co-produce the film, along with The Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier’s production company, Voltage Pictures, who are also funding the venture.

As any young chap who’s writing, directing, producing and starring in their own movie might well be inclined to do, Gordon-Levitt’s decided to cast the stunning Scarlett Johansson as his leading lady. A second principle actress is also expected to be announced soon – and with his pick of the hottest stars in Hollywood, who knows who he might choose.

Shooting for the as-yet untitled film will begin on 16th April this year. Meanwhile, you can check out Gordon-Levitt’s short film, Morgan and Destiny’s Eleventeenth Date: The Zeppelin Zoo, below:

This is according to Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director at the National Theatre, who thinks that the income from the Broadway shows will make the War Horse play more successful and profitable than the big screen version.

Hytner told Sky News: “I’ll stick my neck out and predict the play will be more profitable to us than the movie will be to DreamWorks.”

He added, that even though the theatre has stage rights for the novel, ‘We’re not movie producers so we wouldn’t look for the movie rights, but we do have a stake in the movie because Dreamworks gave us a good deal on material that is specific to the play.’

The popular play is set to reach Melbourne and Toronto next year, as well as Los Angeles and California during its 2012 US tour.

The epic war story, based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel of the same name, has earned around £10m since its world premier at the National Theatre in 2007. The show has been seen by more than one million people in London and it is estimated to make a further £6.7m.

Spielberg’s tear-jerking adaptation, took in more money from its opening weekend than the National’s annual profit, however, its production costs of £70m dwarfed that of the theatre’s.

While the political biopic, The Iron Lady, took in £1.49m, War Horse brought in more than double this amount at the box office. In addition, it has taken $67.5m in the US. The film has also been rumoured to be an Oscar winner.

Before Hytner starts making any more success claims, he will have to wait and see how profitable the stage shows are next year in the US. We’ll keep you posted.

But even the Duchess of Cambridge couldn’t eclipse the thoroughbred, Joey, who seemed undeterred by the showbiz glitz and glamour as he walked the carpet. This was no doubt a by-product of the two months training he had prior to filming, preparing him for the explosions and loud noises he would face during the shoot. In comparison, flashing cameras and loud screaming must be a doddle.

His trainer Dan Naprous said at the premiere: “The premiere itself was great, and Joey certainly got a lot of attention as he walked down the red carpet.”

The First World War epic is based on the West End play that in turn was inspired by Michael Morpurgo’s novel. The tale centres on young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and his relationship with his horse, Joey. When Joey is sold to the cavalry, Albert enlists in the  hope that they will be reunited on the battlefields of Europe.

It is a touching tale that is thought to have reduced Kate to tears. Spielberg who sat next to the new Royal during the screening, claims:

“I was sitting next to her and my wife, who was on my right, passed a Kleenex right across my face.”

The premiere was attended by 600 serving and ex-serving military personnel and their families. The director, who is supportive of the armed forces, has made many war films in the past, including 1998′s Saving Private Ryan.

“I make my movies about war so that their contribution will never be forgotten,” he says. It sounds as though we’re not likely to forget with this tear-jerker either.

War Horse stars a host of British names including Emily Watson, David Thewlis and Benedict Cumberbatch, and Spielberg admits the film is: “British through and through.”

War Horse opens across the UK Friday 13th January 2012.

Click to see bigger image of Kate and Wills at the War Horse Premiere:

The annual ceremony, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, recognises films, television programmes and video games for their outstanding use of special effects.

In this year’s film category, Spielberg’s Tintin is leading the way with six nominations across four categories. They include Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Motion Picture and Outstanding Visual Effects in a Motion Picture.

Animated characters which have been commended for their excellent visual effects, include Tintin, Ceaser from Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Paul from Simon Pegg’s Sci-Fi comedy of the same name.

Captain America: The First Avenger and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides will be receiving nominations for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture.

The nominees for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects include Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and War Horse which premièred last night.

In the television category, Pan Am, Breaking Bad and the hit US gangster series, Boardwalk Empire, have been nominated.

Boardwalk Empire – a period drama set in the 1920s – has been nominated four times this year.

The Visual Effects Society awards show will take place on the 7th February 2012 in The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.

The iconic director, whose most recent offering, Hugo has been a box office hit was described by BAFTA Chair Tim Corrie as, “a legend in his lifetime,” who is a “true inspiration to all young directors.”

Previous winners of the award include silent-film legend, Charlie Chaplin and directors Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock.

Scorsese will collect the award on the 12th February 2012, in a ceremony to be held at the Royal Opera House in London. Speaking about the accolade in an official statement, the director said:

“It is a great honour to be recognised by the British Academy, and to join the ranks of such an esteemed group of industry colleagues and friends.”

Having had a long and illustrious career, Martin Scorsese first gained notice in 1973 for Mean Streets starring Robert De Niro, a film that can be seen as having formed the foundation for all his later pictures. It wasn’t until the release of Taxi Driver in 1976 that he gained respect from his peers. More than 30 years on, he has made a sizable impact on the industry with his directorial and production credits. These include titles like: Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Aviator, and Shutter Island. And that is just the film credits. He also dabbles in television and is well known for his documentaries.

His latest projects are set to be a Frank Sinatra biopic, Sinatra, alongside Silence which will star Daniel Day Lewis and Benicio Del Toro.

Catch the British Academy Film Awards 2012 on BBC One on the 12th February 2012.