- I Will Always Love You: Dolly Parton (1946-2026) (August 26, 2026)
When answering the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire in 2012, the late Dolly Parton said her motto was “Dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.” Parton’s life was lived to the fullest and cannot easily be summed up in words. She was a rhinestone that shined as bright as the stars, pulling others up along with her as she reached for her dreams.
Dolly Parton was a uniquely American icon whose artistic output touched music, film, television, fashion, and even theme parks over a seven-decade career. She was a compassionate philanthropist. She once said she wanted to put her money where her heart was. And so she did, dedicating the profits from her music and other business ventures to uplift childhood literacy, advocate for AIDS research, support disaster relief, create jobs and pathways for others to achieve their dreams through the creation of Dollywood near her hometown in Tennessee, and pursue other philanthropic avenues.
Born in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River near Pittman Center, Tennessee, on January 19, 1946, Parton was the fourth of 12 children born to her mother Avie Lee Caroline and Robert Lee Parton Sr. As a child, she learned Great Smoky Mountain folklore and old country ballads from the Welsh immigrants who settled southern Appalachia. Growing up in the mountains later inspired her song “My Tennessee Mountain Home.”
Parton began performing as a child, singing on the local radio and eventually appearing at the Grand Ole Opry. Although she was pitched as a “bubblegum pop singer” when she first signed with Monument Records in 1965, her big break came when country music entertainer Porter Wagoner invited her to join his syndicated television program The Porter Wagoner Show and later helped her get signed by RCA Victor. In 1973, Parton’s single “Jolene” became her first big hit as a solo artist. In response to her break from her professional relationship with Wagoner, she wrote “I Will Always Love You,” which went number one on the country chart and later proved even bigger after Whitney Houston recorded it for “The Bodyguard” in 1992.
From there, Parton reached a whole new level of success. Her style, her wit, and her soft, yet incisive, feminist leanings allowed her to stand out, carving a singular path in American entertainment. After appearing on dozens of television shows and specials in the 1970s, Parton made her film debut in the feminist workplace comedy “9 to 5” opposite Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The tale of three underpaid secretaries dealing with office misogyny was inspired by Fonda’s relationship with the founders of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, a workers’ rights organization founded in 1973.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert likened Parton’s debut as something for the history books akin to the debuts of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, writing, “she contains so much energy, so much life and unstudied natural exuberance that watching her do anything in this movie is a pleasure.” Parton earned an Academy Award nomination for her theme song and a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. A succession of theatrical and television movies followed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (1982), “Rhinestone” (1984), “A Smoky Mountain Christmas” (1986), “Steel Magnolias” (1989), and “Straight Talk” (1992).
Depending on your age, your entry point for Parton may vary. It could be her music, her television appearances in the 1970s, any one of her movies, or even her recurring role as Aunt Dolly on the Miley Cyrus-led Disney Channel teen sitcom “Hannah Montana.”
For me, it was “Straight Talk,” the 1992 Chicago-set workplace romantic comedy in which Parton plays a small-town dance instructor from Arkansas who leaves her stick-in-the-mud boyfriend, moves to Chicago with dreams in her eyes, and accidentally becomes a beloved national radio call-in therapist. The film is preposterous, but as a kid who loved preposterous rom-coms, and especially loved watching them with my mother, it was one we returned to time and again. In the film, as in real life, Parton recalls Mae West, with a sexuality that was playful and witty, overtly feminine and seductive without being predatory. She made being sexy seem fun, and being sexual not something to be ashamed of. She even wrote a little bop that praises the female gaze.
She poked fun at her own love of over-the-top fashion and makeup, with songs like “Backwoods Barbie.” She likened her style to that of drag, even sharing once that if she’d been born male, she would surely have become a drag queen. Early on in her career, she addressed backlash to her looks by quipping, “I’m not offended by all of the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb…and I also know that I’m not blonde.”
In 1986, Parton bought a stake in an amusement park near where she grew up, which was subsequently renamed Dollywood. With approximately 4,000 people on its payroll, it is the largest employer in the area. Along with bringing steady employment to the area, Dollywood has a program called GROW U, which offers employees 100% free tuition to over a hundred different educational programs, with workers becoming eligible from day one of employment.
In 1987, Parton was named one of Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year. In the issue, Gloria Steinem wrote that Parton was honored for “creating popular songs about real women, for turning feminine style into humor and power, for bringing jobs and understanding to the mountain people of Tennessee.” The next year, she founded the Dollywood Foundation, whose aim at the time was to improve educational opportunities for children in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee.
Around that same time, Parton formed Sandollar Productions, a banner through which she produced films like “Father of the Bride” and the cult television show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997–2003), but also Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Oscar-winning documentary “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt,” which told the story of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. A staunch LGBTQ ally, for the last few decades Parton raised money for many AIDS-related charities and healthcare facilities. In 1993, she was one of several country music stars, including Tammy Wynette, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson, who participated in an AIDS Awareness campaign known as “Break the Silence.” Aimed at showing that AIDS was not just a city problem, the series of public service announcements advocated for sex education and safer practices.
By the mid-1990s, Parton launched a literacy program called Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Founded to honor her father, who never learned to read or write, the program mails one free book a month to every enrolled child from birth until kindergarten. Now in its 31st year, the program has sent out over 300 million free books to kids across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland. Her proudest achievement, Parton once said, “If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will not be for the looks but for the books.” You can learn more about the history and legacy of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Nick Geidner’s 2021 documentary “The Library That Dolly Built: Celebrating the People Who Made Dolly’s Dream Come True.”
In a 1984 conversation between Parton and Andy Warhol in his Interview Magazine, the iconoclastic artist says to her, “You could be a great preacher,” to which Parton replies, “What do you mean? I am a great preacher.” For Parton, her ministry was the way she lived her life, with equal amounts of passion and compassion. When she received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last year, she sent a short video message to accept the award. Rather than spend ten minutes rambling as recipients are often wont to do (which, don’t get me wrong, is always welcomed from those legends), Parton got straight to the point with a simple, effective autobiographical anecdote. She said, “I grew up in a house with twelve kids. Now, that alone teaches you how important sharing is. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t have that much to share, but my mom and daddy showed me by example that the more you give, the more blessings come your way.”
This open-hearted approach to life gave Parton an almost supernatural glow, one that shone so bright she became beloved by strangers around the world. Stories of Parton from those who knew her either center on her humility, her humor, or her otherworldly aura. In his memoir Life Itself, Roger Ebert recalled that she had a “strange ethereal grace,” something he and his At The Movies co-host Gene Siskel would often discuss in wonder. Longtime friend and co-star Jane Fonda described Parton as “simultaneously a naughty, playful southern gal from the hollows of Tennessee and a deep, soulful thinker who could see through people right down to their true selves. She was many things…lyricist, songstress, player of many instruments, writer, prankster, visionary, loyal friend, who’d never go to bed before she and her friends had laughed so hard they’d have to cross their legs.”
During her 2023 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the host noted that Parton is always true to herself and her beliefs, but that she also always includes everyone else. To that notion, Parton replied, “I know that nobody would be the way they are if they could be different…I want to be loved and accepted, so the least I can do is to try to love and accept other people. And I love the differences in people, just like the spice, the variety of life. I mean, if everybody was the same, it would be a boring life.”
With the passing of Dolly Parton, it seems that one of America’s brightest lights has gone dim. She transcended cultural barriers and united us all under her warm smile, sly wit, and irrepressible charm. She showed what was possible when you live your life with your arms open, pulling people up with you. She embraced the communal values of Christianity: to love others as you want to be loved, and to not judge others lest you want to be judged. She believed in the social contract, that we are all in this together. She was the best of us.
I’ll end this tribute with the letter she sends to Imagination Library graduates when they receive their final book from the program:
“There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me — dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you. You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.”
- Shabana Amzi on Her Career, Vulnerability, and “Batwara 1947” (August 26, 2026)
Ask any working actor today in the Hindi film industry, and chances are they’ll cite Shabana Azmi as an inspiration. Over a career of 160-plus films that began in 1974, not to mention a record five National Film Awards (India’s equivalent of the Oscars; the most won by any Indian actress), Azmi has demonstrated an extraordinary range that few have approached since.
Though she also worked in commercial Hindi films, Azmi primarily made her mark through the Parallel Cinema movement, a school of filmmaking that prioritized social realism. Without Azmi’s presence, the simmering class tensions of “Ankur,” the marital heartbreak and eventual resilience of “Arth,” or the shocking violence of “Nishant” would lose their main emotional anchor and their long-lasting resonance today. As she built her prolific film career, Azmi also performed onstage, including in “Tumhari, Amrita” (“Yours, Amrita”)—an Indian context adaptation, written by Javed Siddiqui, of A.R. Gurney’s play “Love Letters”—a play she performed for 21 years along with co-star Farooque Sheikh.
In addition to her Indian filmography, Azmi’s body of work includes collaborations with Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadha, Blake Edwards, Roland Joffe, John Schlesinger, and Ismail Merchant. Currently, she stars in “Batwara 1947,” a Hindi film directed by Rajkumar Santoshi and based on a play by Asghar Wajahat. Set during the upheaval of Partition, the film follows the Muslim Mirza family (a married couple, played by Sunny Deol and Preity Zinta), forced to leave India and resettle in Lahore, Pakistan. Although they are allotted a local house, they are startled to find it still occupied by an elderly Hindu woman (Azmi), who refuses to leave. Her refusal to depart triggers an emotional conflict both inside the home and in the community at large.
Azmi recently spoke with RogerEbert.com about life in film and theater, working with frequent collaborators, and feeling naked, literally and figuratively, at different moments in her career.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Parts of the interview have also been translated from Hindi to English.
There’s a scene in “Batwara 1947” that really intrigued me. Mai, your character, is being verbally assaulted and physically threatened by Javed Mirza, who has been radicalized by the violence he has witnessed during Partition. He promises to either evict Mai by force or kill her. Javed’s mother Hamida stands in shock, witnessing her son’s newfound vitriol, while Mai cowers in fear.
Immediately after he leaves, Mai turns to Hamida and says, in complete sincerity, “This is your son, isn’t it? Who was missing? I’m so glad he’s come home to you safely.” She’s able to possess two dissonant realities simultaneously: she’s terrified, and yet overjoyed for the safe return of a son who is vowing to kill her. Can you talk to me about your approach for that scene?
It’s very important that you pointed out that moment because nobody else has, and I do think it is a very important moment. For me, that moment expresses the strength of humanity. For me, when you are able to rise above your own terror and your fear, for something which is the very essence of who you actually are as a human being and the values that you bring to life. Now, with Mai, you see that all the time with her that there is just basically a humanity in her, that even when she’s frightened, when these people come, she basically changes within two minutes, as though the sun turned into shade. In one moment, she says, I’m not leaving from here. And then she says [to Hamida], there is wood [to make a] fire over there, and make sure that you speak to the rickshaw driver in the beginning; otherwise, they’ll take you for a ride. That’s what makes her very, very much like very many women that I knew of that age.
I assume that you were familiar with the play. Was there a discussion about maintaining the play’s beats within the script?
I saw the play a long time ago. So I just have memories of moments in it. But after that, when I was given the script, I stuck with it, and I didn’t try to find moments that were different from the play. I just went with the script that came to me. For me, the part that I had to struggle with is…I don’t know how to say that. I felt there is a goodness to her that I, as Shabana Azmi, don’t have, and that was a big struggle for me, because as a person, I am strong, strong-willed, and opinionated. In my heart, because I know women of that kind—who are just goodness embodied—it was very difficult for me to reach that, to climb over everything that Shabana Azmi is—[and] reach that moment of purity.
You once said that your preferred method for working is to start in the middle, because you haven’t yet inherited the world of the character. Have there been times, either during rehearsals for a play or on the set of a film, that you found your way to a character very quickly?
There are very different ways in which I inhabit the world of a character, and there is no method to it. It sort of dictates itself. Sometimes I feel I open the window and then shut it. Sometimes I just peer from behind the glass door. Sometimes I jump straight into the living room. I don’t know what propels me to do either of those, to make either of those choices. But if I were to say broadly, for instance: when I did “Mandi,” I went “Boom!” right there. I was there in the center space, as compared to “Khandar,” which I was filming simultaneously. “Khandar” I did almost immediately after that, and there I was, looking through parted windows, looking gingerly, not knowing at what point I could enter, and that process in itself becomes a way of inhabiting the world of that character.
That’s why I find acting so fascinating. Because it allows you to imagine through your work that you love, it allows you to inhabit the world of characters you would never have known, and gives you the opportunity to live the life of that character at the same time as you give that character the life that you, as a person, have lived.
Shabana Azmi (l) and Farooque Sheikh (r) performing “Tumhari, Amrita.”
You and the late, great Farooque Sheikh performed “Tumhari, Amrita” for 21 years. The director, Feroz Abbas Khan, famously told you both that “You must not learn your lines,” which feels like such a counterintuitive directive. What did you both discover about yourself and Amrita over the course of playing her for so long?
I have to give credit to Javed Siddiqui, who wrote her so beautifully. She’s such a beautifully written part. In fact, she’s my favorite person that I have ever played. She’s full of faults; she’s angry, she’s petulant, she’s lovely, she’s generous, she’s warm, she’s mad, and she’s so many things. But listen, it was a huge challenge to have your director tell you, don’t learn your lines. The first thing that you ever learn is to learn your lines, and then forget about them. So that at the time of the performance, the lines don’t get in the way of the emotion. That’s the whole point of knowing the lines. So you don’t have to struggle with the lines. You’re only dealing with the emotion at that time.
And here was a director who was saying, “No, I don’t want you to fake reading the letter. You are actually reading the letter, and if you don’t actually read it, you will fake it, and it won’t come.” So the penny dropped here, and then I realized that, all right, this is a discipline that requires me to unlearn everything I’ve learned before that. Of course, if you were doing it for 21 years, it’d be impossible that you wouldn’t know bits. But I didn’t know right up till the end what followed what each time, and so that gave an aliveness, if there is such a term, to [the performance] because the audience is a very important third character of “Tumhari, Amrita.” With every breath that they take, with every little giggle that they [give], something changes in the two characters because after all, you’re just sitting on two chairs and reading. And the interesting thing is that A.R. Gurney challenged [us] and said, “It is not a radio play. I promise you, you will have a theatrical experience. It will not be. I have written it so,” and you had to honor that because that was his vision. When people saw “Tumhari, Amrita,” they said that it didn’t sound like a radio play. You experienced the whole lives of these characters over the years you played them.
So sometimes, depending on where I was coming from and what was happening, I played her more vulnerably. Sometimes she was more defiantly played. I didn’t have a fixed way of playing her, and I never decided I would. Also, what is challenging in a live performance is learning to anticipate the audience’s reactions. So you brace yourself: all right, I’m going to take this pause now, and they are all going to burst out laughing. Woe betide you if you start depending on that, because I promise you, you will let yourself down the minute you are there expecting: now comes the laughter. You will be shocked because nobody will react at that particular moment. That is what makes it so fascinating. You cannot take it for granted, and the minute you become overconfident, you’ve lost it. The minute you become cheeky, you’ve done three good shows, three nights one after the other, and the fourth night you say, “I know it all.” You will do the very worst thing that you can ever do. It has happened so unerringly that whenever we’ve tried to feel smug, it hasn’t worked, so it keeps your humility.
You grew up with two legends for parents: an actress mother, Shaukat Azmi, and a poet father, Kaifi Azmi, and your home was regularly visited by luminaries from the worlds of theater, music, film, and literature, who attended your parents’ mushairas. I wondered whether early exposure to this recitation of language from so many different voices, from so many different backgrounds, may have affected how you later approached learning and delivering dialogue.
I would also wake every morning to see my father sitting with my mother and giving her the [dialogue] cues, because she would recite her lines and he would give her cues over tea. That was a ritual I saw every day. So the importance of words and sensitivity to words was something that, again, [happened] by a process of osmosis.
You’ve mentioned a love for Ingmar Bergman, and have cited Liv Ullman as an inspiration for your career. One of my favorite films of yours is “Tehzeeb,” which is inspired by Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata.” There are multiple layers to that film: you’re playing the part based on Ingrid Bergman’s role, and Urmila Matondkar plays the part originated by Liv Ullman. This was the first time you and Matondkar were reuniting onscreen since she debuted as your child in “Masoom.” What was shooting that film like?
It couldn’t have been more complicated and crazier than that. So what we decided was to get away from the enormity of it all and really dumb ourselves down. One of the things that we did constantly was “I hate Urmila Matondkar in real life, and I hate Dia Mirza in real life,” because I was constantly on a diet when I was playing that [part], and both these slim girls with perfect figures would eat batata vada in front of me and eat bhajiya every single day, and I would curse them. “You’re just the worst co-actors anybody can have. You have absolutely no empathy for the fact that I’m just eating steamed fish every day.” They would have the time of their lives, but they both continue to be very, very dear friends and part of a very small coterie of very dear friends that we have. So I always feel very fortunate that I tend to have relationships with my co-stars that go far beyond the film. Normally it’s a project, and then after that you don’t meet up. But fortunately, that’s not the case.
Did you observe a difference in Khalid Mohammed’s approach to technique or character on the set of “Tehzeeb” because of his background as a film critic?
I think I looked for it, even if it was not there. I think he was able to keep the critic away and focus on what he was trying to make. I don’t think it’d be fair if I said that his being a film critic hampered his being a director. I don’t think so.
When you look back at what you did in “Ankur,” your debut film, and for which you won a National Film Award, can you pinpoint the artistic decisions you made, or was it just a sort of alchemy with Anant Nag and Sadhu Meher?
For me, the physicality of it was what took away a lot of my attention. I had to wear the palla of the sari very short, which means it keeps falling down, and obviously you can’t pin it in a particular way. So you have to get used to that movement. I couldn’t sit on my haunches, and that for [director] Shyam Benegal was a no-no because most of my work [as Laxmi] was in the hut, in which I’m sitting on my haunches and cooking. He told me, “You’re not going to sit at the dining table with us and have lunch. You sit on the ground, in the corner, and you have your lunch there.” I did that diligently.
On about the fourth or fifth day, while we were shooting, a group of college-age boys came by the set and said, “Where is the heroine?” So I said, “She hasn’t come today.” They said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m the ayah.” They said, “Ah, okay, okay, come, come, let’s go.” Shyam was watching this from the corner of his eye, and he said, “Now you’ve earned your place. Now you can come and sit with us and have lunch because you convinced those people that you were actually sitting on your haunches and eating.”
That was the kind of discipline I had to [engage in], and the emotions took second place. [Even] the [harvesting] of the red chilies, there’s a certain rhythm to it, and the village women would laugh at me that I was an urban person, and I didn’t even know something as simple as that. It was the first time I’d ever entered a village. I was this St. Xavier’s College, English-speaking child who’d gone there, and for the first three days, Shyam said, “Just wear your costume and just walk in the village. Familiarize yourself with the contours of the village.” That did something to me because I made friends with the village women. As I walked, I talked to them, and that broke the barrier between [us and them]. It was like we became kind of a family.
The one scene that I remember that I became completely dry is the scene where I wake up and I notice that Sadhu Maher has come back and I’m pregnant with his child. I could feel nothing, and so Shyam called for a break. We had lunch, and then he just started talking to me, not [asking] me why I had dried up, just talking to me about other things, and then talking to me about a woman that he had seen in a documentary on a Bengal famine, something about how vulnerable and helpless [she] looked. Suddenly, I just looked at him, and I said, “I’m ready.” [Cinematographer] Govind [Nihalani] was ready, because Shyam had told Govind that you have to be absolutely ready, and I went and boom. The dam broke, and it happened. Now, it could not have happened with a less sensitive director. He understood the block, and he worked it in a way that made me feel that if he had just said, “Oh, why are you doing this? Don’t worry, it’ll happen,” it would have made me even more nervous. So we had a different system. He was a psychologist in that kind of way.
I remember I was very upset with him in the scene in “Nishant” when [Sushila, my character] gets raped by those boys. [Shyam] was on top with the camera, and I was lying on the floor. And in those days, we didn’t have walkie-talkies. We didn’t have mics. You had to shout down orders, and from there he shouted at me, and he said, “Open your blouse! Open one more button of your blouse.” I felt so humiliated. I said, “He’s treating me like an object. He doesn’t even realize that I am here on a set, when there are so many people watching me.” I hated him; I hated the moment. After that, I broke down, ran out of the room, and wept and wept and wept.
Then that sweet Anant Nag came; he was sitting next to me, he was holding my hand and saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you.” It was so sweet of him, and then he told Shyam that she was very upset that you said that. Then, of course, Shyam being Shyam, gave me a big hug and said, “I was very insensitive. I’m so, so sorry, Shabana. I’ll make sure nothing of that kind ever happens,” and it never happened in all the 40 years that I worked with him. You don’t know when you suddenly start to feel very exposed.
Shabana Azmi in “Batwara 1947.”
In fact, in “Batwara 1947,” there is that scene where you know the villain [rips my clothing] in the final act. I was lying on the street, and all the assistants went running to the monitor to see if the shot was okay, and not even one single girl assistant came up to me and tried to cover me up. Because I was lying like that, I could do precious little about it. I felt so humiliated and [it was so] horrible, my god! Then [executive producer] Amir [Khan] had come that day on the set, and I wept and howled, and then of course he called everybody. But in that moment, when I was feeling like that, when Sunny Deol came and just put that dupatta on me, I really felt he was my protector and my son. That moment is very, very, very strongly etched in my memory. So, being an actor and experiencing humiliation of this kind can be really tough. It can be very, very difficult.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. So, there are no intimacy coordinators in the Hindi film industry?
No, no, no. There weren’t. Now, I think, in intimate scenes, they’ve started doing that. Earlier, there was no such thing, but you know, this kind of sensitivity is only now being spoken about. Because otherwise, see, you were shooting 12 films at one time. Who had the time to think of anything, except that you just wore your makeup and said your lines and went away to the next? It was completely mad, the way we used to work.
In the West, intimacy coordinators are also a more recent creation. It’s not just for intimate scenes. It’s also for scenes of rape or assault, like the one you were in. It requires clearance from everyone in the scene: that this piece of your clothing will be ripped here, is that okay? But I don’t know what equivalent protections exist in the Hindi film industry.
I think we are learning on the job. But the fact that that was one of the rare days that Amir had come on the set, and he was so shocked to see me so vulnerable, and of course, then he called everybody, and then a big thing was made about it. It was just that I felt naked. I felt stripped. It was very, very, very difficult.
What you felt comes through very clearly in the scene.
And especially when [Mai] says, “Look what they’ve done!” Almost like a child, she says, “Look what they’ve done to my clothes!” But I remember similarly, I did a scene in “Arth” with Khulbhushan Kharbanda when I’m asked [his character] to give me one more chance, and I’m literally begging, and Mahesh Bhatt told me, “You’re not to cry.” Here I was, experiencing begging and humiliation, insulted, yet trying to keep my dignity. And of course, after the scene happened, I broke down and just wept for so long. Mahesh just said, leave her alone. She’ll get over it. After you worked for 50 years, you think that things should become mechanical. They can, but something triggers at some time, and some vulnerability of yours gets attached to that. I don’t think I can explain it in any way except that it happens sometimes, and it doesn’t happen sometimes.
Shabana Azmi in “Masoom.”
“Arth” and “Masoom” are interesting taken together because they’re both about infidelity. But they reach very different conclusions. Your character in the latter, Indu, chooses to forgive her husband because there’s an illegitimate child who needs a home, while “Arth” prioritizes a woman’s interiority, and your character, Pooja, walks away from that marriage with her spine intact. How have your own impressions of the films changed over time, given that you are two very different people in both films?
I was. Pooja to me is the person that you see only because of [director] Mahesh Bhatt, because there was such a strong chemistry between Mahesh and me. It was like he knew exactly how to press my buttons. We were very good friends. There was no complete script. There was just a story idea, and we wrote the scenes as we went along. I remember that scene in which I make an ass of myself at the party scene, where I go and confront [Kavita, the mistress character played by Smita Patil]. And what happened is that Babu Ram Ishara—who’s a friend of ours and of Mahesh and everybody—he spoke to Smita and then came and told Mahesh and me that, “Smita is feeling very uncomfortable about the scene, and I agree with her. I think that a woman like Pooja wouldn’t fall to such depths. She wouldn’t do such a thing.” This confused the daylights out of me because we thought of Babu Ram Ishara as a very liberal person, and I was getting ready for this scene, and then this happened. Then Smita’s costume wasn’t ready, so that day we didn’t shoot. Imagine you’re prepared for a confrontation scene, and it doesn’t happen.
The next day you go at it again, and Kiran, Mahesh’s wife, comes on the set, and I tell her, “Kiran, Babu-da is saying Pooja wouldn’t behave like this.” Kiran said, “Pooja would lift a slipper and hit someone. What do they mean? Nothing of the sort. She’d pick up a slipper and hit someone.” Oh my God! That gave me so much moral courage, I can’t tell you! Because that’s coming from right within her, and that gave me the strength then to do that scene. It takes a lot to let yourself go [for a scene like that]. So there were so many moments that just killed me in “Arth.” But it was a film we believed in so strongly, especially the ending.
When the distributors saw the film, they said it’s a wonderful film, it’s a beautiful film, but this ending won’t work: An Indian woman is not forgiving her husband after he’s asking for forgiveness. This film will not run a day! Mahesh and I just dug our heels in and said, “We’ve made this film for this end, and come what may, we will not change the end.” Thanks to Kuljit Pal, the producer, who went along with us, the film was released and became not only a critical success, but also a big commercial success. That shows you how often distributors are not in tune with what the audiences are ready for. The audiences were ready 20 years ago. At the same time, I did a film called “Yeh Nazdeekiyan,” [which has a similar plot] and finally [the wronged wife] goes back to her husband, and we thought that was the safer film. That film didn’t work, and “Arth” did, so people were ready for that.
You mentioned “Nishant” before. It’s the very last line of that film that haunts me. The mob is nearly upon Vishwam (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sushila (you), as they gasp for breath on a hill, and Vishwam asks, “How did this happen?” And Sushila simply says, “Will knowing the answer make it easier to die?”
So Vijay Tendulkar.
And then the movie ends. I don’t know what sequence you shot that in, but did you feel that in your body? How was it to film that scene?
So draining. So draining. Just the simplicity of that line is so powerful because that’s what Vijay Tendulkar’s writing is. He can just cut to the chase. And I remember when it was shown at Cannes, too. People talked about that film nonstop, and they talked about the violence in it. Actually, the actual violence that you see in the film is so little compared to what Hindi cinema routinely does. But just the strength of having that violence seem almost like it’s just around the corner.
For Vishwam, the violence has only now caught up to him. But for Sushila, this is just the logical extreme of everything that’s happened in the film. And this brings me to your lengthy onscreen collaboration with Naseeruddin Shah. You’ve said that working with him was always a pleasure because if you look your co-star in the eye and they’re always telling you the truth, your job was halfway done. What did you learn from working with him?
When I used to watch him, I realized he could calibrate his performance. I want to give 100% in every shot of mine. I want to please the director. Naseer has worked it out for himself, and he’s worked out that in this shot he needs to give only 70%, because then three scenes later, he’ll give 85%. It sounds all very calculated. It’s not like that. It’s almost instinctive, but there is a craft to it that he understands very, very well. But if you haven’t watched Naseer on stage, then you don’t know what kind of magic this actor has on stage. I can’t find any other words except to say I’ve never seen an actor breathe like him onstage. He could well be sitting in his drawing room. There is no tension whatsoever. He’s a brilliant, brilliant actor, and I’ve been very fortunate because we’ve played so many different roles together.
“Madame Souzatka.”
Speaking of collaborations, John Schlesinger directed you and Shirley MacLaine in “Madame Souzatka,” and watching that gave me the same pride as watching Om Puri and Helen Mirren in “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” because amazing things can happen when legends from different film industries work together. What was it like to work with the two of them?
Firstly, for a long time, Asians have been saying, why are we cast only for our ethnicity? Why can’t we move? Why can’t we have colorblind casting? So it’s really only as recently as “Halo,” when I played Admiral Paragonsky, that I did not have to change my accent. I didn’t have to change the color of my hair or eyes or whatever. So that is happening now.
But at that time, I remember I was the only Indian on the set, the only Asian on the set. So it was a very strange experience for me to be on that set, but Shirley MacLaine was lovely. She was so generous and so warm. We had some shots to do, and she wanted to go watch a play, so John took her close-ups. Then she came to me, and because they were my close-ups after that, and these were just silent close-ups, she said, “Shabana, I’m getting late. If I remove my wig and I give you your cues, would you mind?” I said, “Shirley. Such a thing does not happen in Hindi films. The actual actor never comes and gives you cues.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Some third assistant screams things. Nothing of that kind happens, and you’re being so considerate [by offering to just remove your wig].”
It was so generous and so wonderful, and she was so hardworking. She was so passionate. I remember the first couple of days I was staying at John Schlesinger’s house, and there would be Shirley MacLaine every day with her script, saying, “I’ve thought of yet another way that we can do this.” So for me, it was all very strange because this was Shirley MacLaine, and she was behaving like a newcomer. It was a completely different kind of experience,
The American actor Carrie Coon, who, like you, is a theater-trained actor, said her life isn’t lived on red carpets, and that she doesn’t define her life by box office numbers. She lives her life in rehearsal and in finding her character, exploring the beats of a scene with her co-actors, and trying to find the truth in any artistic endeavor she undertakes. Is that true for you? Is your life lived in the moments that we, the audience, don’t see?
Absolutely, absolutely. She couldn’t have said it better, and she couldn’t have literally echoed my thoughts. The red carpet and all that is such a small little part of this whole thing, honestly. Social media and this obsession with it is taking away from so many things and making everything so lightweight. We have to shut it out and say, this is what we are doing, and everything else has got absolutely nothing to do with my work over here. Uske bat bonus ya minus that is something completely separate. But this is what we need to concentrate on.
That’s not happening so much, unfortunately. Christopher Nolan said to me, “Hollywood is not interested in making films; they are making projects.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, don’t you see that it’s just big companies coming together and how they can make the maximum money and all that? It’s all speculative business. It’s not that you have a story that you’re dying to tell, and so you want to make it. And that seems to be happening the world over.” I only hope that it is a passing phase, because it would be very, very, very sad if the purity of telling a story is not the reason that you make a film.
It must remain that, because all the cinema that stays with you is because the filmmaker—whether it’s Satyajit Ray or whether it’s Ingmar Bergman or whether it’s Kurosawa—wanted to tell a story because we are all fascinated with stories, and I think that’s what we should keep our concentration on.
“Batwara 1947” is playing in theaters now.
- Sheer Force of Ambition: David Kittredge on “Exorcist II” and “Boorman and the Devil” (August 25, 2026)
From practically the moment that it first hit theaters in June of 1977, “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” John Boorman’s follow-up to William Friedkin’s enormously successful 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-seller, has been written off as one of the biggest and most baffling disasters in Hollywood history.
In many ways, the virulence it received from critics and audiences alike was not entirely off the mark. Instead of giving viewers the kind of straightforward continuation of the first film that they might have logically expected, Boorman—who had spurned the chance to direct the original because he felt that it was only about torturing a child—presented them with an audacious narrative that presents its supernatural premise of a girl possessed by a demonic presence as an ambitious, highly metaphysical and visually startling take, more fever dream than nightmare.
Alas, moviegoers back then were clearly not in the mood for such a super-trippy take, and after an understandably huge opening weekend, what was once expected to be a blockbuster instead disappeared from theaters. To this day, many still regard it as not just one of the worst horror films or worst sequels ever made, but one of the worst films of any kind to ever hit the screen.
But what if “Exorcist II” wasn’t just a bizarre sequel to one of the most successful films ever made? What if it was, in fact, an example of an enormously gifted filmmaker who was given the chance to make a borderline experimental commentary/critique on a work that bothered him on some basic level, given every possible resource by studio executives who didn’t bat an eye at the weirdness? What if what Boorman’s film was closer to the likes of Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” Steven Spielberg’s “1941” and Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”—lavishly-funded projects from gifted auteurs that helped hasten the end of the New Hollywood era of the 1970s but which have been reappraised decades later? What if “Exorcist II: The Heretic” was actually great?
Director David Kittridge.
That is the premise behind “Boorman and the Devil,” a fascinating new documentary from David Kittredge that takes a look at the entire startling history of “Exorcist II” from its ambitious beginnings to its tumultuous production to its disastrous reception, including a preview screening in which the audience not only revolted against the film but drove the studio executives in attendance out of the theater. He does so through vivid recollections from many who worked on it, from Boorman and co-stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher (who passed away in 2022) to several crew members.
In addition, there is also commentary from a number of critics and observers, including filmmakers Joe Dante, Karyn Kusama and Mike Flanagan, who make the case that while the film might have failed as a sequel to “The Exorcist,” it displayed such a unique cinematic vision that it deserves reconsideration. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, of course, but as someone who has always felt “Exorcist II: The Heretic” is one of the boldest works from a filmmaker not known for playing it safe, Kittredge has more than made the case for it.
Having toured the world on the festival circuit, where it often screened alongside the film at its center, “Boorman and the Devil” is finally opening commercially. Recently, Kittredge sat down with RogerEbert.com to talk about his film, the genius of John Boorman, and why crazy cinematic swings like “Exorcist II: The Heretic” matter.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I can be briefly glimpsed in the film, albeit blurred, and I am thanked in the end credits. In addition, contributor Simon Abrams also appears as one of several critics offering on-screen commentary.
When did you first see “Exorcist II: The Heretic” and what knowledge did you have about the film’s history and reception when you did watch it?
The first time I saw “Exorcist II: The Heretic” was on Betamax—the big clamshell from Warner Brothers—and it was the European cut, the shorter one, not the original U.S. theatrical release. That one didn’t have a lot of the stuff that the film is most infamous for—there is no tap dancing, and in that cut, Richard Burton doesn’t live. I hadn’t seen a John Boorman film, but I knew he was a noted filmmaker. I knew that it was infamous.
I knew that it was indicated in “The Golden Turkey Awards,” that Medved book, as the second-worst movie ever made, which is absolutely fucking ludicrous, but whatever. I watched it, and I was intrigued by it and fascinated by it, but I didn’t really love it, mostly because it didn’t feel like a sequel to “The Exorcist”—I didn’t know what it was. It was kind of a weird, trippy hard left turn into surrealist filmmaking in a way.
It wasn’t until the mid-’90s, after I was out of college and living in New York, when Warner Home Video came out with the full cut on VHS, the original theatrical version that hadn’t been available since its opening weekend. That version really resonated with me because, even with its issues, I found it a fascinating and ambitious swing of a movie, and I became obsessed with it. I tried to figure out how they did this and what they were trying to do. The more I learned about the film, the more intriguing it felt and the more inspired I got.
In 2017, my friend Jeffrey Schwartz, a documentary filmmaker who actually has this great film out now about “Cruising” called “Mineshaft,” had been on me for a number of years to do a documentary on “Exorcist II” because he knew that I was so fascinated by it and by the stories behind it. I didn’t want to do it because documentaries are a lot of work, but he basically told me, “If you don’t do this and soon, this story is never going to be told.”
I knew he was right, and I didn’t want to live in a world where this story wasn’t told because I just find it so fascinating in any number of ways. Not just the movie itself but how it was made, and not just how it was made but the fact that it was made—the fact that Warner Brothers put their biggest budget ever behind this movie, this huge departure from the highest-grossing film in their history and the third-highest-grossing film of all time.
Even in its earliest phases, the film was going in a completely different direction from its predecessor—the fact that they were willing to take that chance and spend a lot of money on it is really amazing. At the end of the film, you have a roll call of wildly ambitious and expensive auteur-driven New Hollywood films from that era—things like “At Long Last Love,” “New York, New York,” “1941” and “Heaven’s Gate”—and “Exorcist II” fits in perfectly amongst them.
The sheer force of ambition behind those movies and the fact that the studios kind of met those auteurs where they were and gave them the financing to do it, like Scorsese with “New York, New York” or Spielberg with “1941” or William Friedkin with “Sorcerer.” My argument, if there is an argument in this film, is that we need to give brilliant directors the latitude to potentially make a disaster if we want anything good. You hope it isn’t a disaster, but I think that if you don’t have something like “Exorcist II: The Heretic” in your work, you are kind of doing it wrong. To me, it means you aren’t risking enough. If you don’t fail at least once in your career, you’re playing it a little too safe.
In the film, you reach out to a wide variety of people involved with the project, ranging from well-known names like Boorman and co-stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher to a number of below-the-line crew members. How did you go about rounding these people up and convincing them to take part in discussing a subject that might have still been touchy for them?
Boorman was the first interview we did, so once people heard he was part of it and an enthusiastic supporter of the film, nobody really questioned it after that. The first interviews were with Boorman, then Rospo Pallenberg, then Linda and Louise, and once we had those guys, it was all kind of gravy. Certainly none of the crew said no, especially once they heard about the people we had already interviewed. I think there was one camera operator that just said “I don’t remember anything,” but other than that, it was kind of a love fest. This was a movie that was made fifty years ago, and they recalled it like it was yesterday.
This was such a profoundly formative production for all these people, some of whom have gone on to have insane credits. You look at Victor Tsu’s credits or Ron Vargas’s credits—they have been on everything—and for them to remember this particular movie that has this horrible reputation so well is because they put their heart and soul into it. Boorman inspired everybody to bring their A-est of A games, and they did, which is why I think it was so painful for everybody, even down through the crew, how the movie was received.
These people care about their work. They aren’t just collecting a paycheck. It is much easier to work in many other industries than in the entertainment industry. These people love movies, and they thought they were making a great movie.
Maybe the most surprising moment in the film occurs during the segment discussing the infamous preview screening, when the audience not only turned on the movie itself but chased the studio executives in attendance out of the theater. You use footage of William Friedkin recounting what happened during an appearance at the Chicago Film Critics Festival, and when he told it, I assumed he was exaggerating significantly. However, you then interweave that recounting with an interview with someone who attended that same screening, and their two accounts do indeed line up.
One part of that story has been disputed, but only one. That was the claim that the executives were chased down the street at the very end. That has been contested, but other than that, everything else that he said has been supported by other people that we talked to. Someone stood up and said, “The people who made this piece of shit are in this theater!” pointed to where they were sitting in the back, and other people chased them as they left to yell at them, but it wasn’t a mob. I didn’t know any of this when we were making the film, but it was a great story, so we animated a mob chasing the Warner Bros. executives. Apparently that may not have happened or may not have happened quite like that—they may have been chased by a couple of people. I don’t know, but that is the extent to which I don’t know.
Are there stories about the making of the film that you simply were not able to find a place for in yours, and will we be seeing them as a bonus feature when it comes out on Blu-ray?
It is funny you mention that, because I just delivered the bonus features for the Blu-ray that is going to happen. This will be months from now—I don’t want people to wait for the Blu-ray and not see it in theaters—and there are about two hours of stuff.
There are a couple of stories in there that I find very entertaining, but we just couldn’t use them in the film. There was one about Richard Burton breaking into a bar with a fire axe—that was fun, but we had so many Richard Burton stories, and I have already seen in reviews that there is a perception that I beat up on Richard Burton. We had so many stories about Burton that we were astonishingly nice, given some of the things that happened on that set, and I would push back at anyone who thinks we were Burton-bashing.
Directors John Boorman (l) and David Kittredge (r).
Do you think that if “Exorcist II” had come out at a different time that it might have had a better chance of being accepted by audiences, or was it always going to be more or less doomed on the basis that it did not give audiences what they would have not unreasonably expected from something called “Exorcist II”?
I don’t know. I’m often asked whether the title was an issue or whether it was all about audience expectations, and I think it was a perfect storm of a lot of things. If I were a Warner Brothers executive and had been given that film, I honestly would have done what they did. The film would have been hated less if you’d called it “The Heretic” and kind of intimated that it was a follow-up to “The Exorcist,” but not really hung your hat on it. I don’t think it would have opened well, and it still would have failed at the box office because it is a flawed film. I do love this film and certainly spent enough years making a documentary about it, but it is flawed. The most interesting thing about it is that so much ambition and energy went into it, along with so many big creative swings.
My view is that whether these swings work for everyone all the time is not really the point. The point is “What are you doing with your work and your art? Are you doing something different and interesting and taking risks and chances?” This is one of the riskiest films I have ever seen. It would have been nothing for them to spend a quarter of the budget to make another movie about another possessed kid somewhere and just redo the first one somehow without hiring Linda Blair or any big stars. They would have made bank, and they didn’t. Instead, they took this huge risk on this very involved story about metaphysics and the world mind and people coming together in the next phase of evolution and giving Reagan a character. It’s really impressive to me how much they tried and how much they risked—that was pretty much the main inspiration for this documentary.
When you have been screening “Boorman and the Devil” at festivals, it’s often been shown alongside “Exorcist II” itself. When those audiences, most of whom are probably on the younger side, see it, how do you see them reacting to it? One aspect I was particularly curious about was how “The Heretic” tackles the original’s dubious sexual politics. That film could be read as a conservative reaction to things like feminism and the sexual revolution, in which the only cure for such ills is Catholicism.
Or even more reductive, when the shit hits the fan, what is going to save you is not your doctors or science or your secular movie star friends. It is going to be the old guy in the priest’s outfit reading the ancient texts. It is a very conservative and patriarchal message. “Exorcist II” is the opposite. “Exorcist II” says that science and religion, at their best, are trying to do the same thing—they are trying to search for truth and should work together. It has a very pro-feminist and progressive message.
Horror, as subversive as it is, tends to have a more conservative bend if you look at it in any kind of skeptical way. Who are the kids getting killed in the slasher movies? The ones off having sex and doing drugs. The Final Girl is always the virgin who doesn’t smoke pot or whatever. You can go through a lot of horror and kind of boil it down to kind of a conservative and patriarchal message. “Exorcist II” a.) I would argue is not even a horror movie and b.) is the opposite of that. It is not just a one-stop shop message about religion knowing everything—it is religion and science and wisdom and humanity. It is a very humanist movie.
At the beginning, it kicks things off with a failed exorcism, and at the end, good triumphs once the forces of science, religion, and feminism come together as one. Well, depending on which version you are watching.
That is important. I tell people that if you love the movie, you definitely want to see both the shorter version and the longer one, but the longer one is more cohesive and coherent. It is a really involving and valuable film, and even if you don’t like it, laugh at it, or it doesn’t work for you, there is so much in it that is brilliant and amazing. Even just from a technical filmmaking perspective, those ghost glass shots and the fact that all that stuff was done live with a two-way mirror and two sets—that is artistry of the highest order.
It really is one of the most visually impressive films that I have ever seen, and Boorman is certainly no slouch in that department.
No, he is amazing. “Excalibur” alone is amazing. The 4K that Arrow just put out is astonishing, and I am not just saying that because I have a commentary track on it. It is literally one of the most visually astonishing films I have ever seen.
Even a smaller film of his like “Where the Heart Is,” one that doesn’t have big battles and things like that, is absolutely gorgeous to look at throughout.
It really is, and it is so inventive. I don’t think that movie works, but it is really cool to watch. I’d rather have one movie like “Where the Heart Is” than ten that are fine but which don’t try anything. “Where the Heart Is” is trying a lot of stuff. Even with the plot, you are watching it and thinking, “This is going there?” I remember seeing it for the first time and having no idea where it was going, and by the end, you are thinking that you weren’t expecting any of that.
Finally, has Boorman seen “Boorman and the Devil” yet and, if so, what were his thoughts on it?
Yes, he has, and he has been very gracious. I don’t have the quote from the email in front of me, but he was very moved by it and very happy with it. This was all quite emotional for him. I didn’t want to press that because this was a film about one of the greatest traumas of his life, at least career-wise, and he didn’t have to be that open with me in that interview. He didn’t have to tell me all that stuff and talk about his life and art and his theories about cinema.
That was just a gift, and after that interview, it didn’t matter how long it would take—I had to finish this movie, and it had to be one of the best movies ever made about making a movie, and I am not going to stop until it is. I hope we got somewhere up there.
- We Were Warned: On “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” at 35 (August 24, 2026)
A teenage boy talks to his machine, giving it commands.
His first task begins innocently enough: “Stand on one foot,” the boy says. The machine obeys.
His second task reveals a sinister edge: to target nearby onlookers. The boy orders his machine to grab one of them by the head, pulling him into the air while he screams. His friend tries to intervene, and the machine, leather-clad and 6 feet tall, draws a handgun, and just as it’s about to blast a hole in the man’s head, the boy screams “NO! Put the gun down now!” and stops him just in the nick of time.
This short scene from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” captures in elegant shorthand the possibility and danger of using thinking machines. Released in the final months of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation remained a terrifying possibility, “Terminator 2” harnessed those fears and redirected them towards something more intimate: the rise of the computer, and unlike the atom bomb—which could only be misused by Governments—these machines would soon be in millions of homes around the world. The terrifying result? Using them would turn each person into a makeshift cyborg, with silicon computing becoming an amazing, but frightening, transhuman extension of how we think and behave.
At release, “Terminator 2” was a tech-noir cautionary tale on the rise of computers (in military application and at home). 35 years later, it plays as a cyberpunk mirror of how far we’ve already let technology disrupt and dominate our lives. From the devices we hold in our hands to “smart” algorithms and predictive language models, we don’t have to carry laser rifles or battle armies of skeletal machines to feel as though we’re in a cyber-dystopia. Machines replace us in the workforce, our dopamine is dependent on the addictive scrolling of our devices, and it’s never been easier to blur ethical lines in how you behave online. Whether through the moral prompts of how to use the T-800 or the propulsive set-pieces, “Terminator 2” demonstrates the more we use machines, the more we risk becoming like them. The danger from A.I. isn’t necessarily a singularity superbeing starting World War III, but the way we let technology change who we are in the first place.
So when that boy, John Connor (Edward Furlong), escalates a physical gag into physical violence, he’s proven just how quickly machines blindside us into morally pernicious choices we may never have otherwise. Vigilance is required. It’s that key scene that sets John on the path to become the future leader of the human resistance, where, in the far future (in the film, 2029), he fights against Skynet, a synthetic super-intelligence that enslaved humanity. To save his younger self, he sends a reformatted version of the villain in “The Terminator,” the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), which obeys any and all commands John Connor (of any age) gives. It’s for good reason: Skynet has sent the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) after John, a nexus point to save this once and future leader. The young John may have been told how this android operates—it will follow precise instructions without question—and yet his careless teenage words still nearly get a man killed.
Sometimes seen as a softer, less hardcore sequel to the straight-horror original, “Terminator 2” is still plenty horrifying; beyond the tests of will that Cameron imposes on the human characters, the film’s scares reveal the ways a digital intelligence can penetrate, and then distort, what we know reality to be. In what was a landmark leap in CGI technology, the T-1000’s body is a kind of shape-shifting, liquid metal, and thus can take on any physical form, have any voice, or become any non-complex object: deepfakes that can kill you. It can trick a husband that his wife—already deceased off-screen—is still in the room. It can take on the blue dress of law enforcement, a not-so-subtle hint at Cameron’s dismal view of authority.In one of the film’s most uncanny moments, the T-1000 breaks into a mental health facility by taking on the appearance of a security guard and terrifies the guard with, well, himself. Gazing at this digital homunculus leaves him terrified, only for the villain to morph his hand into a shimmering metal spike and kill him. It’s a warning by Cameron that soon, computer technology will be able to inhabit, if not also replace, human beings. Thus, the T-1000 is, itself, a meta-cinematic device. On its most basic level, the plot follows a killer computer repeatedly trying to kill a teenager, but on another, the clearly digital liquid-metal visual effects add an uncanny wrongness to the film’s moments, where something clearly synthetic, diegetically and to the movie audience, is attempting to replicate being human.
Part of Cameron’s genius with spectacle comes from his magician’s way to blend multiple techniques across micro-seconds of footage, like stop motion, reverse photography, CGI, practical explosions, and miniatures, to create a convincing tableau for his impossibly epic images. It’s just the same in “Terminator 2” and the T-1000, a mix of Robert Patrick’s lithe stunt work, makeup and prosthetics in the form of metallic geometry attached to Patrick’s body, and computer-generated imagery. Together, they make him a frightening, wholly credible foe. It also, however, shows possibilities of the limits of machines: when the T-1000 liquifies and moves through a gate in the hospital, he forgets he’s carrying a gun and is snagged on the bars. The weapon can’t move through as he can, and the T-1000 didn’t realize it.
On one level, this is Cameron’s way of selling a cool visual effect. But on another, it reveals that something so seemingly advanced can still have blind spots. Even the way the T-1000 always re-absorbs its liquid metal is a disarming reminder that machines are closed systems; they cannot iterate on themselves, and if they can adapt, they’re still slow learners. Each masterful set-piece becomes a chess match where the underdog heroes try to exploit a machine’s weaknesses (something that, if anything, is more cathartic today than at release). Sometimes that’s brute force—pumping round after round into its fluid metallic body—and, in others, it’s by forcing it into the extreme elements of ice and fire.In fact, in some ways Cameron’s obsessive desire for photorealistic visual effects has led us to where we are today. From the enchanted tentacle of animated sea water in “The Abyss” to the effervescent beauty of the Na’vi in “Avatar,” the creation of a digital character as perceptually real as any human has been his life’s pursuit. Pause any close-up from “The Way of Water” and marvel at its artistry: the cracks of Ikran-feet around the hero’s aging eyes, the perfect pores that dot Neytiri’s face, the fidelity of skin as it wrinkles from an outburst of a teenager’s volatile emotion. The greatest triumph of his “Avatar” Trilogy is how, while watching, you are seduced by its mimetic spectacle; you soon forget that none of it is really happening.
“Avatar” is the crowning achievement of how persuasively computers could create a fully believable, lush, dynamic and hyper-immersive digital world. Or, at least it was, until that same push for verisimilitude has (in a sense) encouraged A.I. programs like Grok, Sora and Midjourney to achieve the same, but with more unsettling results. Just as the T-1000 was a shape-shifting metaphor for digital tech in the ’90s since we can perceive a certain offness as it tries to inhabit different shapes and people, these programs have largely produced images that are lifelike but with details that betray their veneer of fidelity. For a long time, the most upsetting part was studying the hands: while the location, props, and even faces might look alright (if somehow, undefinably weird), images made by these applications might have too many fingers or too few. In some cases, the hands would appear as if they melted together under intense heat (ironically, one of the weaknesses of the T-1000). Today, A.I. images come eerily close to replicating whatever they want, and just as John initially used his terminator as a bad actor to razz some nearby onlookers, the potential consequences for easy, thoughtless misuse are massive.
Far more insidious than any Terminator attacker is how machines create gateways for our behavior to change for the worse, and how easy it becomes to embrace the digital devils of our worst selves. It’s why John’s interactions with the T-800 are so revealingly dangerous. It exposes the (now cliché) difficulty of choosing our words carefully when communicating with literal-minded machines; a technical design comes with technically specific instructions. A.I. can only know what we program it to know, and even the most advanced language models in the world expose huge gaps in problem-solving. This dilemma has given rise to a whole subset of sci-fi storytelling—from “I, Robot” (2004) and beyond—where the infamous scenario involves telling an A.I. super-intelligence to “protect humans,” only for it to enslave the human race because we are the greatest threat to ourselves. This is at the heart of landmark sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov’s law of robotics, where the first states “a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.” His stories would create complicated scenarios where artificial intelligence could do just that.Likewise, John quickly realizes he still hasn’t solved the dilemma of how to work with the T-800. In one of Cameron’s most intense sequences, designed with low-angled shots that make the characters look a thousand feet tall, they have to spring his mom, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the main character of “The Terminator,” out of a mental institution. Though John has already given the command never to kill, the T-800 pulls his handgun and casually double-taps a security guard in both of his legs; John screams “what are you doing,” and the T-800 replies with Schwarzenegger’s effortless comic timing: “he’ll live.” John’s input removed one sort of action from the table, without accounting for others. The rest of the movie shows the T-800 balancing his non-kill rule with Cameronian blockbuster badassery, none more so than pumping rounds of gas into an army of police who have the building surrounding. They’ll live, but only just.
Worse, it reveals the critical issue isn’t whether John can control the T-800, but whether John can control himself. When John had the T-800 razz the two men nearby, they only approached after “his” android seized John, and the boy screamed for help; they weren’t just random bystanders, they were good samaritans. Drunk off the power fantasy that this all-powerful action figure clad in biker leather will do whatever he wants, his line of empathy temporarily clicks off, and he abuses these men for no reason other than a cruel pleasure.
No one reveals that entangled psychology more than Sarah, who begins the film with enough hatred towards robotics that she gets thrown in a mental ward for trying to blow up machine factories. She gave up her motherhood for the cause. By the time the reprogrammed T-800 shows up to liberate her, she still holds a repulsive, virulent anger towards all machines. Expectedly, she panics when it first appears. But after they’ve escaped and she has time to stage her next steps, Sarah makes the decision, in Cameron’s words, to become a terminator herself and assassinate the man about to create the chip that will eventually launch Skynet, Mike Dyson.
What gets overlooked isn’t the ethics of her is-it-ethical-to-kill-baby-hitler sniper mission, but what comes immediately before it: in narration, she gives an uncharacteristically sentimental speech on why the T-800 is an ideal father for John. This machine isn’t only a valid or valuable ally, but a fit father figure, one that’s better than her past boyfriends and better, she imagines, than most fathers period. What she says is simultaneously true and untrue: a harsh, if fair, judgment of humanity. By this point, the T-800 hasn’t just learned to crack jokes or evolve with his “thinking chip” (in the “Special Edition,” they remove a chip Skynet built to inhibit learning as a way to explain his personality shift); he’s protected John better than Sarah ever has.
But Cameron, typically sharper a writer than he’s given credit for, has a dual meaning beneath what could sound like a mom’s cornball parental philosophizing: this speech is Sarah’s rationalization that the murder she’s about to commit is okay, that John will have someone to take care of him, that this new robotic dad, this machine, this computer moments ago she thought she could never bring herself to stop hating, will take care of him.
In other words, Sarah has made herself into a terminator by projecting shades of humanity onto a terminator, a more psychological version of the dilemma of John back in that parking lot. It’s not the orders she’s giving the machine that matters; it’s that the machine has allowed her to change, that it has allowed her to act on her worst impulses. In those moments, neither she nor John understands how the very existence of these super-machines can reprogram their behavior in ways beyond their self-conscious understanding. Once these machines exist, we need to police what they let us convince ourselves to do, rather than policing the machines.
In one of Cameron’s greatest bars, the iconic “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves” speaks to today as much as it did when he wrote it. It’s a line that speaks against a predetermined universe, and that no amount of certainty about a worse tomorrow justifies inaction today. It’s a crucial bit of dialogue that recalls one of the ending lines from “Tenet”: “What’s happened happened. It’s an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world, but it’s not an excuse to do nothing.” The same is true in “Terminator 2,” where a time loop should make their situation fruitless. The chip Dyson is about to make is based on technology he only had access to because of the events of “The Terminator,” but that doesn’t mean we should not act to change it.
In 1991, computers were about to enter our homes before we realized all that meant. As if to complete the metaphor, Cameron set both “Terminator” climaxes in the iconic backdrops of an automated machine factory, making his breathless action a forewarning that if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon be just as mechanized ourselves. Today, Cameron warns the next cycle of escalation won’t be in stock loads of nuclear weapons, but artificial intelligence, where wars will be fought between data centers instead of battlefields. At home, jobs will be lost. The CEOs of companies building these products insist these changes are inevitable, that there’s no use fighting the tide. The most powerful legacy of “Terminator 2” is to fight the fatalism of tomorrow, and to remember its refrain, “no fate.” Our digital age may have dehumanized and changed us, but we are still in control—and the future is always in our hands.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” will be re-released in a new 4K edition this Friday, August 28.
- Liminal Spaces, Transitional States: Alexander Ullom on “It Ends” (August 21, 2026)
Fred Rogers’s song “What do you do with the Mad that you Feel” comes to mind when watching director Alexander Ullom’s existential road-trip nightmare, “It Ends.” In his song, Rogers articulates a need for vessels to place our rage, angst, and grief, and sings how easy it is to feel powerless in the face of all that afflicts us. That same thorny longing, terrifying questioning, and ultimately deep-seated hope that depression won’t rule the day courses through Ullom’s film, which takes the straitjackets of horror and hangout movies and blends them into a unique meditation on growing up and finding your way.
Ullom’s film follows four recent college grads, James (Phinehas Yoon), Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson), who embark on a late-night drive before they go their separate ways. They realize that they’ve turned onto a never-ending road, and any time they try to pause to catch their breath, they have only ninety seconds of respite before hordes of screaming people swarm and attack them. As the odometer climbs and days begin to blend, each member of the crew has to wrestle with what this purgatory means for the futures they once thought they had.
Though the foursome are plagued by eternal monotony, the road to “It Ends” finding a movie home was far from straightforward. After a premiere at SXSW, a subsequent tour on the festival circuit that included the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival, a stint on the Letterboxd Video Store, and creative persistence from Ullom himself (“insanity,” he corrects me in our interview) involving influencers at a “Jurassic World: Rebirth” event, “It Ends” finally roars into theaters now.
RogerEbert.com spoke with Ullom once in person during the film’s Chicago premiere and once over Zoom after Ullom wrapped principal photography on his follow-up, “4×4: The Event”; this piece combines those interviews into one fluid conversation. Ullom spoke about the importance of silly questions when navigating our present hellscape, humanity’s tendency to create liturgies to process suffering, and how his decisions to balance the film’s horror and hangout elements manifest in the characters’ arcs.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I found the sequence where James is pleading out to some unknown force for the car to start to be relatable for those who come from religious backgrounds, in particular, the ways people of faith or dechurched people can be so quick to revert to crying out to God in a moment of crisis. Did drawing from your own faith background prove prudent when articulating some of these characters’ spiritual angsts?
Alexander Ullom: The film is definitely religious trauma coded, but I have nothing against religion. Anything that would give people a sense of comfort as they’re dying is probably a good thing, and we have an increasingly short supply of those balms. That scene where Fisher is lamenting that his mother might think he’s going to hell because he told her he was not religious has personal resonance.
In the two-and-a-half-hour version of this movie, there was a whole swath of scenes where the group was trying to remember stories from the Bible. They were talking about Lot’s wife and how she turned to a pillar of salt because she turned around to look at the destruction of Sodom when God told her not to, and trying to understand why she’d do that. Like, dude, if God–like literally, God– fucking showed up and was like, “Do not turn around or else …” I would be like, “Yeah, absolutely. Assignment understood.”
Director Alex Ullom. (Photo: Chris Violette)
One thing that your film really dives into is the fear of eternity. I feel like as human beings we’re not built to fully reckon with the concept of “forever.” What’s your relationship to eternity?
I think for people my age, our relationship with infiniteness and liminality–call it “Backrooms,” if you will–all stems less from a religious place and more from the fact that we don’t really have a destination to “arrive at” anymore. There’s a movement away from any sort of interconnected moral system in our generation that there might have been in the past. The tent poles of structure that used to hold up society, whether it was having a family or buying a house, or literally religion–which used to be one of the moral center points of what held all the kids together–all of those structures have kind of dissolved, and in their place is kind of nothing, like a transitional state.
If liminal spaces are transitionary states, it just feels like we’re in a long one right now. Our relationship with nature is off right now, and because, in general, I think people are becoming less religious or spiritual, we’re losing a connection to something bigger than ourselves.
I was struck by a relatable, futile tendency to graft ritual onto otherworldly situations to shrink them down to size and make them relatable. It’s why I resonated so much with the on-screen rituals we see the characters undergo once they accept their fate. What was the origin of coming up with these rituals?
The guide rails were that each practice or “time” was crafted to process a specific emotion. The screaming is the physical sensation of getting the fear out; the memes are brain gooping, to give your mind space to unwind. I’m probably not smart enough to articulate this, but with the dancing, one of the things I was trying to communicate was how, within the confines of capitalism, every emotion and physical need is exploited, individual time that needs to exist inside of a larger structure. So dancing was a way to break free from some of that.
Are there practices you find yourself implementing now that act as your form of release? What do you do with your anger, despondency, and despair?
It has changed over time. When I was young, meditating was ridiculous to me, but now I figured out how to climb our fire escape to get to the roof of my apartment. So now I’ll go up there and just sit in the sun for a while. Reading has reentered my life, which is crazy. I’m trying to commit to doing things that actually are good for your well-being. Eating all the food groups …
Where do Clif Bars–which get a nice payoff at the end of the film–fall into that diet?
I don’t think I can eat those anymore. I told Phineas I’d eat bar for bar what he ate during production, and I ended up eating a lot of them. This stuff to actually improve your life is just what everyone already knows; you just have to commit to doing it, which sucks. With meditation, my attitude was, “ I don’t want to waste 15 minutes sitting in silence when I could be, I don’t know, doing anything else.” But then after 15 minutes, I’m like, “All right, I feel a little better. I can enjoy TikTok a little better now.” (Laughs)
NEON
How do you think growing up terminally online has shaped your (or Gen Z’s) approach to processing trauma?
Personally, I was fifteen when I saw the Russian Brick Video. I saw a cartel execution online when I was twelve years old. Every single time you watch anything on a phone–even in movies– there’s a simulation of emotion, and so if I was going to feel the real thing, I had already been desensitized to the actual sensation of that feeling. I think we’re all walking around with a functioning numbness, spawned in part due to a collective dissociation.
I’m curious if someone in medieval times who saw their family’s heads chopped off in real time would process it better than how we’re processing similar images now because their emotions are rooted in witnessing something real. Every time we see awful footage online and go on with our lives, we are–as Fisher says–experiencing weaker shades of emotions.
I remember my first heartbreak, and it was world-ending, and then I got used to it. It feels like we only have a certain reservoir for a specific emotion, and over time, it gets ground down and down. You run out of it, and the more you’re online watching stuff, the more I think you use up that reservoir.
Even with watching a horror movie, about an hour in, I just get desensitized to the actual sound of the theater. There’s only a certain number of times a speaker gets really loud before I’m completely used to it.
It’s terrifying how easily we get used to things. In addition to the aforementioned Russian Brick Video and Bible story retelling scene, I also know there were lots of conversations and scenes that you ultimately didn’t include in this edited cut, like another one including the song “Viva La Vida.” Tell me more about the process of choosing the cultural references in this film, knowing that by the time of release, the film may feel dated by what its characters talk about?
I just wanted to root the dialogue in the stuff that’s stuck around with my actual friends in real life. It’s weird because by the time this movie comes out, people are going to think that we’re copying the “100 men versus gorillas” meme based on the question that the characters bicker about at the start of the film. This interview proves we are ahead of the game right now. I think what will keep it universal and fresh is that the references aren’t necessarily rooted in a specific trend. Like modern art, people use memes to process what they’re going through, and that’s what will be familiar, less so the content of the meme itself.
You’ve shared before that when you were in a dark place, the silly debate you had with a friend about whether a gorilla or bear would win in a fight galvanized something in you that helped make life worth living. Tell me more about the role of silly questions in friendships.
There’s no such thing as objective truth anymore. So now these questions are a truth in a way. The actual limit of the human experience is questions with no answers. The confines of existence are questions without an answer, but also know that since there’s no truth, everyone’s subjective opinion is the most important thing now. So the person arguing for the gorilla …. That debate is essentially a spiritual battle, because that’s all that’s left (Laughs). I feel like scholars and scientists have kind of already figured out everything there needs to be, and now it’s for us to debate the silly questions of life. Maybe that’s the unifying moral structure our generation can push together in the absence of religion. In many ways, arguing over a stupid hypothetical is actually the most important thing in the entire world.
A lot of the characters’ grief stems from a legitimate nihilism that anyone would feel living in the world we’re in now. I found their grief to be an almost righteous form of discontent.
If there’s all this horror, if all this shit is going on around us all the time, then the only real thing we can do to make our fellow conscious experience a little bit better is hang out and connect with someone through conversation. Talking with people, hearing different perspectives- to me, these feel like the ways to combat that desensitized meaninglessness. They don’t necessarily need to be these “bear versus gorilla” questions either. If everything’s horrifying, terrifying, and meaningless, then the only reaction is to hear everyone talking about it.
NEON
You talked about how one read of “It Ends” that you like is that there’s a war over the film’s tone with the characters themselves, right down to the changes in aspect ratio. The film widens during the hangout moments, whereas in its “horror” phase the frame is tighter. Talk to me a little bit about that wrestling you were undergoing as a director with this film, and then transplanting that struggle onto the characters?
I think that if they didn’t make that turn, the group would have gone and had a “Dazed and Confused” kind of night. The film would have been a dope little hangout movie, and they probably would have kept butting heads because James is a bit of an asshole. But the film turns onto the road, and now it’s in horror movie mode.
Horror and genre are built on overcoming conflict as quickly as possible. A belief runs through those projects, rooted in the hero’s journey: I’m going to conquer this object, this conflict, and then I will return having changed. That is not how adulthood works at all, or real life. There’s just this scrap in the mud where you pull meaning from wherever, and that’s the thing that James couldn’t fully understand.
So while James is on one end, bringing in that framework and horror, you have Fisher and Day on the other, who, after the time jump, are just trying to hang out. There’s a healing in vibing, and that helps save us from the period of transition we’re in. James is literally saying: “I want the new thing? What is the new thing?” That’s very typical of a genre audience member. For James, he can’t accept that relationships and the people you love are what give life meaning. He doesn’t want to hang out. That was me when I was younger; I couldn’t be present. I couldn’t live in a world where I couldn’t get an answer for that, partly because of my religious upbringing too.
Fisher and Day have to literally turn off the story vehicle. James can’t accept that, so he takes the same vehicle, the one driving the plot, and takes off on his own. They’re battling, and the movie can’t conclude till the plot concludes and, by extension, he takes the movie from them.
Going just off the logline of your next film, “4×4: The Event,” it feels like if “It Ends” is going to be about that transition to adulthood, your follow-up is about how to survive the reality of adulthood.
Yeah, if “It Ends is like “Hey, don’t kill yourself. Love the people around you,” “4×4: The Event” is very much “Okay, now that you didn’t kill yourself, we need to unite.” It’s an intense escalation. If “It Ends” was about the transition from 18 to the ages 23-25, then the next project is about me going from 25 to 30 and watching the people I love’s lives be deeply and negatively affected by the state of the world.
Visually, the film was inspired by my time living in that windowless walk-in closet while I was making “It Ends.” You don’t get this from the logline, but yeah, all the contestants are living in small, dark, windowless concrete rooms with tunnels between them. There’s a drop chute where their orders come in. It’s a setup that truly inverts the natural world. There’s not a single thing in that room that’s organic. They’re pretty much told, “Hey, here’s your computer … here’s your tool to conquer the world. Good fucking luck.” That’s modern life in a nutshell.
“It Ends” is in select theaters via NEON.
