Noah Wyle, as well as “The Pitt” producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, spoke exclusively to The Knockturnal about George Clooney’s recent comment to Entertainment Tonight that he would rejoin his old ER costar “in a heartbeat.”
Independent filmmakers, journalists, and other industry professionals gathered at Genesis House on Thursday, December 11th for a launch party celebrating the Winter 2025 issue of Filmmaker Magazine.
“When I studied at NYU, when I went to NYU film, the first thing they tell you is the hardest thing in film is animals and children,” director Sarah Goher told the audience at a screening of her debut feature Happy Birthday at the IFC Center.
However, being a mother herself helped her overcome this particular challenge.
“As someone who has two children, I’m very grateful I had those two children before I made this film because it just taught me so much about kids,” she said. “Like, if you really prepare kids and you really earn their trust and you really prepare them for what’s to come, they won’t just give you a hundred percent, they could give you a hundred and fifty percent.”
Happy Birthday, Egypt’s nomination for the 98th Academy Awards in 2026, follows eight-year-old Toha, a child maid for a wealthy Cairo family who forms a special bond with her employer’s daughter, Nelly. Having never celebrated her own birthday, Toha becomes determined to ensure Nelly has a perfect party, secretly hoping to experience the joy she’s never known. As Toha’s relationship with Nelly’s mother, Laila, begins to transcend typical employer-servant boundaries, deep-rooted social hierarchies are threatened, forcing the young girl to confront the realities of class division in modern Egypt.
These realities, however, are communicated in the film through soft whispers.
“At some point, two European sales companies, low-key suggested I add more violence to the film,” Goher explained, “I think they were expecting kind of like Parasite, perhaps I would have something that was much more of a ‘big bang,’ a message about class and about division. And I didn’t for two reasons.”
“I didn’t feel that was true to the reality,” she continued, ”I think there’s a lot more nuance to the reality of these situations. And I feel that at the end of the day, I also want to make a film that I’m not trying to get into a European festival, I’m not trying to sell this to the West.”
“I want a film that when I show this to people in my family, to friends who think that this is okay or who don’t want to acknowledge that there’s something wrong with this kind of situation, the invisibility of certain people in society, that it actually gets to them.”
As it turns out, despite the best efforts of child labor laws, this story resonates with audiences around the world. Happy Birthday is very much a film that pushes back against the notion of giving kids a “better life” via servitude in higher class communities.
“I’ve shown this film to lots of audiences. I get people from India, Honduras, Latin America, Mexico, um, even in Spain, which surprised me. This situation happens,” Goher shared with the audience. “Now, by law, child labor is forbidden in Egypt. But there are kids who exist in this [invisible] limbo under the false pretense of goodwill.”
Still, it was important to Goher that Doha Ramadan (Toha), who the director discovered on the streets of Cairo, didn’t just see her character as a servant.
“The other thing is, when I was directing her, I never told her you’re playing a maid because I didn’t want her to project that,” she explained. “I felt like her prerogative was if I’m this little girl, and this is what I saw with the actual girl who inspired the character, she wants to see herself as a child first.”
“And she would come up with suggestions and be like, ‘Sarah, what if I blah blah blah blah blah,’ or ‘why don’t we blah blah blah blah blah?’ And I would let her do what she felt curious about because I started to find myself like while I was shooting the film, it doesn’t matter what, you know, all the kind of ambitious directing stuff you want to do.”
Since wrapping Happy Birthday, Goher also shared how she stays in touch with Ramadan.
“I didn’t want to be one of those filmmakers who plucks a kid out of obscurity, puts them in front of the camera, and then forgets about them,” Goher shared, “And I’ve seen this happen, and it’s very unfortunate. I’ve been to her school, she does go to a school, it’s not a good school. So I got her a private tutor who, since June of 2024, until now, he teaches her three times a week, and now she can read and write really well.”
“There’s not a lot of outreach for the arts in these communities, so I enrolled her at Cairo Opera House’s Youth Talent Center. So she was doing music, and she hated the singing part, so she’s just doing ballet. So she’s been doing that since June of 2024.”
Happy Birthday, which received several honors at the Tribeca Festival, is Egypt’s submission for the 98th Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film.
As she hosted the Breast Cancer Research Foundation’s annual luncheon, actress Julianna Margulies was holding space for her grandmother, Henrietta, in her heart.
“We shot some stuff that we stole going up the West Side Highway. I don’t know if there’s any cops here,” Will Arnett told the audience following a press and industry screening of Is This Thing On? at the New York Film Festival, “But one point we’re driving up the West Side Highway and Bradley’s on the dash shooting me…and I’m like ‘cop, cop, cop!'”
Where do you go from here when you’re trying to rebuild a “Tron” franchise — one that honors the original while breaking free from its successor?
“How many people are in therapy?” Rebecca Zlotowski asked the audience, following the premiere of “A Private Life,” prompting hand raises and knowing laughter.
Not every music biopic needs to chronicle an entire life, and Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere doesn’t attempt to depict The Boss in such a way. Bruce Springsteen’s catapult to fame? Skipped over. Instead, the film trades Springsteen’s hits for the moodier tracks of his sixth studio album, Nebraska. With a focus on this particular chapter of his life, the film sidesteps some biopic clichés — only to trip over others.
“The first thing I thought was, it would be cool to make a film with Tom Waits as Adam Driver’s father.”
Naturally, the audience was cued to laugh, as Jim Jarmusch explained his writing process.
“I always have a kind of haphazard way of writing where I’m gathering small ideas that I don’t quite know the overall structure or picture yet,” he explained a moment earlier “And I write thinking of actors I would like to collaborate with on these characters.”
After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film was screened at the New York Film Festival as the centerpiece film of the festival. The film, directed by Jim Jarmusch features a triptych focusing on the relationships between adult children reconnecting or coming to terms with aging or lost parents.
So when Jim called, Adam Driver answered the phone immediately.
“Anytime he calls about anything,” Driver said, “Regardless of what it is, if it’s, you know, therapy, wallpaper, I’d be interested in doing that. He’s one of my favorite directors of all time.”
When it was their turn to praise Jarmusch, Indya Moore described their experience working with the director in poetic terms.
“I got to do my best work on James’ film,” they shared, “It was my best work because all of the years of experience that I’ve had, I came up to that moment in the discipline. I got to really fill out my space on set to really embody this character. But when it comes to my instrument as an artist, what I find is that I’m able to provide the most sincere reflection of whatever human experience I’m reflecting as an actor when the environment supports that.”
”I felt respected, there was food,” they added, after noting that Jim curated a safe space on set.
Luka Sabbat echoed similar sentiments. “Jim creates such like a great work environment,” he said, “And he’s particular without like being like arrogant or mean in any sort of way, and he really knows how to communicate his ideas and I feel like as an actor it’s so helpful to be with somebody who really knows what they want and knows how to communicate their ideas, you know.”
Expanding on this, he shares, “I’ve always wanted to be an actor and I grew up watching his films and actually moved to, I grew up in Paris and I had moved to New York to become an actor and then, like, my first big time movie, I got to shoot it back in Paris with one of my favorite directors, so I was like, wow, this is really awesome.”
While all of these actors expressed gratitude to work with Jim Jarmusch, the director himself expressed no desire to see Father Mother Sister Brother following its release in December.
“We presented the film in Venice at the Film Festival, and we presented here,” he said, “And after that, I will see it one time more with a paying audience that doesn’t know I’m there. And then I will never see it again.”
“You can’t change them later,” he added, ‘And I always follow the French poet Paul Belair. He said, ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned. And you could edit forever and ever.’”
“Father Mother Sister Brother” is now playing at the New York Film Festival, and will be seeing a limited release on December 24, 2025.
Biting cynicism is a hallmark of a Noah Baumbach movie. In the case of Jay Kelly, Baumbach tackles the cynicism of the film industry, or, more specifically, he puts a harsh spotlight on the nature of an A-list acting career that voraciously demands decades of one’s life and self.
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