Radio Times

I met Pete Docter, 41, co-director and writer of the new Pixar/Disney animation Up, and his producer Jonas Rivera, 38, to talk about their influences, the Pixar philosophy and the process of making a film about a septuagenarian, Carl, flying to South America in a house tied to a bunch of helium balloons, with an eight-year-old boy scout on board…

AC: In Up there is an early shock, when, during a montage, we discover that an adult couple cannot conceive. Was this your attempt to create a "Bambi's mother moment"?

JR: "I've...

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It's a cliché to say that when you first arrive in New York it feels like you've been there before, because you've seen it so many times in the movies, from On the Town to Ghost Busters (Sunday 5 April, C4).

On my first visit, I had a particular sense of déjà vu when I passed the otherwise unremarkable Carnegie Deli, setting for the beginning of Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose.

There's something special about an authentic location.

The Interpreter (Saturday 4 April, ITV1) is a political...

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In the early 1980s, the Welsh Development Agency made an ad that was all over the telly: as a helicopter-mounted camera panned majestically across hills and valleys and a doctored version of Bread of Heaven was sung by a male voice choir, a long list of businesses ran across the bottom of the screen, all of which were "made in Wales".

Although the country had its industrial guts ripped out in that cruel decade, national pride thrives. In fact, Wales has become a cultural hub, with Gavin & Stacey partly based in Barry, Doctor Who and...

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It's the oldest adage in showbusiness: "Never work with children or adults."

But animals never listen. Dogs, in particular, seem unable to bark "No!" when offered the chance to star alongside a human. Ever since Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, canine actors have risked being upstaged by people walking on two legs.

Look at the gamble Abbey the German shepherd took by agreeing to appear in dystopian sci-fi horror I Am Legend (from Saturday 21 March, Sky Premiere) opposite Will Smith.

Abbey was the newcomer in her first film...

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Only a very bad fella who lived on a particularly mean street would have denied Martin Scorsese his well-earned Oscar moment in 2007, when, after half a lifetime as one of American cinema's presiding greats, he finally won best director – and a standing ovation.

Having expanded upon the formative Italian-American influences of his upbringing in Queens, he's created a broad-ranging, exquisitely crafted portfolio spanning documentary, costume drama and religious epic. To see the statuette handed to him by contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas was to see movie justice done....

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For studio insurance purposes, Robert Altman, aged 80, was required to have a standby director on what turned out to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (Saturday 7 March, BBC2).

He chose Paul Thomas Anderson, half his age, director of Magnolia (a multi-story collage that had a touch of Altman's narrative democracy about it) and There Will Be Blood (which echoed his love of authentic locations).

In the end, Altman completed the picture, and lived to see its release. He died from leukaemia in November 2006, aged 81.

I was sad...

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The phrase "shaky camerawork" used to be a criticism, like "wobbly set" or "visible boom mic".

Now it's a way of life, a certified cinematographic technique, and sadly a ubiquitous short cut for film-makers keen to add instant realism to their work by simply leaving the tripod and the dolly tracks back in the storeroom and running around like a dad with a camcorder on sports day.

Sometimes shaky camerawork is officially a "good thing", as with the two Paul Greengrass-directed Bourne movies – The Bourne Supremacy (Saturday 28 February, ITV1) and The Bourne Ultimatum...

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Jonathan Ross's recent chat-show interview with the world's biggest movie star was no headline grabber. The highlight came when Ross asked if he ever broke wind in bed with his wife and then "fanned the duvet". Tom Cruise guffawed gamely, but declined to comment.

The weak link was not interviewer but interviewee. Tom Cruise is just not that interesting unless you get him onto Scientology, his chosen creed, and even then only in a slightly creepy way.

The one time he let down his guard and professed his love for Katie Holmes by jumping up and down on...

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On Sunday, I'm due to attend the annual British Academy Film Awards (Sunday 8 February BBC1, BBC2, BBC3).

They'll be the Academy's 62nd Baftas, but my first.

The Baftas used to be a quaint, parochial afterthought in the movie prizegiving calendar, but since moving to February from April in 2001 they have become an international, star-spangled entrée to the Oscars, and a magnet for visiting superstars.

The dread phrase, "I'm afraid so-and-so couldn't be here tonight
. . ." is almost extinct. Heathrow needs that third runway just to cope with incoming Hollywood royalty.

The guest list remains...

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Tim Burton loves Johnny Depp.

"Johnny is like a character actor in a leading man's body," he once gushed. "He could do it all."

Johnny Depp loves Tim Burton, too.

"My life is my life because of Tim," he once declared. As you can see, they are really mad about each other.

They have a working director-actor relationship that Depp likens to "emotional shorthand".

It's said that when they work together on a film, which happens quite often, and Burton is giving his pet actor direction, the crew can't actually understand what they're saying to each...

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Where do you stand on Nicole Kidman's nose?

By which I mean, were you impressed with the latex proboscis they erected upon her porcelain features to help her impersonate Virginia Woolf in The Hours?

Or did you find the sight of it faintly comic and distracting? I'm afraid I'm in the latter camp.

When actors portray a recognisable non-fictional figure on screen, I really don't see the need for them to spend hours in the make-up chair having layers of latex glued to their face. (Unless it's John Hurt in The Elephant Man –...

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There's a 36-year age gap between garrulous Samuel L Jackson, aged 60, and shy Scarlett Johansson, 24.

But they are united by The Spirit, a super-stylised adaptation of Will Eisner's 1940s comic strip from director Frank Miller (creator of Sin City, showing on Saturday 17 and Friday 23 January BBC3).

The actors were filmed against a green screen on a "digital backlot", and the rest of the action was dropped in afterwards.

While Jackson gained fame relatively late (he was 46 when Quentin Tarantino made him an Oscar-nominated superstar in Pulp Fiction), Johansson...

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Keanu Reeves is not the best actor in the world.

He doesn't top polls or get recognised by his peers; he's never been nominated for an Oscar, a Bafta or anything by a critics' circle or foreign festival jury.

Unlike others who came through in the 1980s, such as Johnny Depp or John Cusack, he has yet to mature into a performer of real depth and has never once directed or produced.

He's famous, and can still open big-budget movies (the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still defied toxic reviews and topped the US box...

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If, like me, you come from Northampton, you'll know that the town's links with the movies are few and far between. Marc Warren, star of TV's Hustle and a handful of feature films, was born there, as were Nanette Newman, who enjoyed a substantial big-screen run in the 1960s and 70s, and Joan Hickson, whose pre-Miss Marple career went back to the 1930s.

Meanwhile, legendary comics writer Alan Moore, who still lives in the town, has seen his work adapted into the likes of V for Vendetta and – coming soon – Watchmen. And (apart...

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