Claim OwnershipMovie People: Interviews & More From the Southampton Playhouse
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© Copyright 2026 Eric Kohn
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Filmmakers. Actors. Artists. You never know who might show up on Movie People. Veteran journalist Eric Kohn, the artistic director of the historic Southampton Playhouse, engages with new guests to discuss the past and present of moving images and other related art forms, as well as how they relate to the world at large.
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This week's episode features a reunion between Southampton Playhouse artistic director Eric Kohn and his former colleague, IndieWire's Anne Thompson, a veteran entertainment journalist who has been covering the Academy Awards for decades. Plus, on our Playhouse People segment, Think Inc. trivia founder Paul Johnson shares his movie fandom.
The new animated Pixar hit Hoppers follows a teenager who befriends her local beaver population. Like many Pixar favorites, it combines big ideas with imagination and heart. Director Daniel Chong talks to Movie People about how he navigated that formula and the films that inspired his own work. This episode also features South Fork Natural History Museum's Frank Quevodo on the defunct beaver population of Long Island and a new edition of Playhouse People with Rebekah Wise.
With four Oscar nominations and a year's worth of acclaim, the Brazilian period piece The Secret Agent has made waves around the world. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho and producer Emilie Lesclaux traveled to the Southampton Playhouse in the final week of Oscar campaigning before voting closed to discuss the genesis of the project and its global resonance.Also in this week's episode: Filmmaker Nathalie Musteata joins us to discuss her short film Two People Exchanging Saliva, which is currently nominated for Best Live Action Feature Film. And we close out with a new segment, Playhouse People, featuring members of our community and their relationship to our historic movie theater.
Comedian Jimmy Tatro talks about his role in Scream 7 and how comedy prepared him for doing a horror movie.
This week's episode features longtime Baz Luhrmann collaborator Jonathan Redmond, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on 2022's Elvis. The duo have followed up that achievement with EPiC: Elvis in Concert, a dazzling look at the King of Rock 'n' Roll in action with never-before-seen footage. Redmond shares the history of the project as well as how he came to work with Luhrmann more than 25 years ago on Moulin Rouge!
With Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw poised to make history as the first female cinematographer to win an Oscar in her category, this week's Movie People looks back at another woman who deserved it more than 20 years ago. Just in time for Valentine's Day, veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras visits the Playhouse to discuss her experiences with the masterful sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
One year after Sinners first opened on IMAX, in the wake of the movie's historic 16 Oscar nominations, we're kicking off Black History Month by taking a look at the backdrop of the movie that goes beyond the South where it takes place. Southampton African American History Museum founder Brenda Simmons joins Movie People to discuss the legacy of the juke joints seen in the movie — and so much more.
This week's episode featuring Jennifer Venditti, the woman behind the many memorable faces of last year's breakout hit Marty Supreme. Venditti has been a significant player in the casting director universe for years, but it was only in 2026 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to add a new category recognizing her craft — and now, she's one of five nominees up for the very first Best Casting Oscar in history. In this conversation, she recalls her unique journey into the world of casting and why it stands out from so many others.
This week's episode features Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez, an East End resident who has spent the past 30-odd years advocating for independent film. As the festival enters its final edition in Park City, Utah, Hernandez shares his insight into the importance of the festival for anyone who cares about film culture -- and what might come next.
This week's episode features veteran sound designer and Sag Harbor resident Leslie Shatz, whose credits go back to Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back. His latest credit, Dead Man's Wire, marks his latest collaboration with Gus Van Sant. In this conversation, he explores on the past and (difficult) future of his profession.
We are wrapping up a busy year with a truly wonderful guest: Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, one of the most celebrated directors working today. From the early genre efforts like Cronos and The Devil's Backbone all the way through Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, del Toro has built a career out of generating empathy for monsters and mining them for all the metaphorical value they offer up. It was only a matter of time before he directed his attention toward the most famous fictional monster at the center of FRANKENSTEIN, as he has done with his new adaptation of the Mary Shelly novel. Del Toro joined us for a conversation about his longstanding obsession with the material, and closed out the chat with a poignant series of observations about the past year and how the movies helped us through it.
Filmmaker Josh Safdie and veteran cinematographer Darius Khondji join the Southampton Playhouse to discuss the new dark comedy Marty Supreme, which stars Timothée Chalamet as ping pong pro Marty Mauser, and share some of the films that inspired them. Then, expert 35mm projectionist James Faller explains his craft and why watching movies projected on film is sometimes better than digital alternatives.
1The Playhouse closes out its East End Cinema series with a 50th anniversary celebration of the most famous Hamptons movie of all time, the legendary documentary Grey Gardens. Producer Susan Froemke, co-director Muffie Meyer, and Rebekah Maysles of the Maysles Documentary Film Center joined Playhouse artistic director Eric Kohn to discuss the genesis of the movie and its ongoing legacy.
This week, we're joined by the brilliant author Sigrid Nunez, who has been churning out imaginative stories for over 30 years. However, her work has been adapted to the big screen only recently with two movies both released at the top of 2025: The Room Next Door, the first English language movie directed by Pedro Almodovar, which stemmed from Nunez's novel Where Are You Going -- and The Friend, possibly one of the most underrated American movies of the year, which was adapted into a beautiful and poignant drama starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray.
This week, we're wrapping up a month of Halloween program with a very special conversation about the legacy of one of most resilient horror franchises of all time, Scream. When Wes Craven's movie was released in 1996, the horror genre was in a bit of a dormant phase. That changed rather quickly with this comedic riff on the horror movie formula, a meta take on the genre about a ghost-faced killer stalking teenagers in a small town. We showed the movie at the Playhouse a few days before Halloween. After the movie, we had some wonderful guests onstage to help contextualize the movie's legacy. Cary Woods, the producer of Scream, local filmmaker Sam Pezzullo, and Ashley Cullins, a journalist for the Ankler whose new book Your Favorite Scary Movie chronicles the history of the franchise.
This week, we've got a Halloween season double bill: First, a conversation with NPR journalist Larry Maslan, whose new book Hitchcocktails pairs films from the master of suspense with first-rate drink recipes. Then, we'll hear from a real-life ghost hunter: Michael Cardinuto, co-founder of the Long Island Paranormal Investigators.
This week, we're keeping the spirit of Halloween season alive. First we looked at vampires, then zombies, and now it's ghosts...thanks to this conversation with Black Phone 2 editor Louise Ford, best known for her collaborations with director Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, Nosferatu). Tune in to learn more what it takes to cut a good horror movie!
This week, we're keeping the spirit of Halloween season alive, following on recent episode, which focused on the vampire monstrosities of I Am Legend. Now we're moving on to zombies...and, specifically, Zombieland, the 2009 horror-comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg. In addition to looking back on this major turning point in his career, Eisenberg spoke about his unique challenges as an actor and filmmaker over the course of his career.
This week, we're joined by Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind. Goldsman is a truly eclectic writer with a number of major Hollywood achievements under his belt beyond that major crowdpleaser, from Batman and Robin to The Da Vinci Code. In late August, he joined artistic director Eric Kohn at the Playhouse to discuss one of the more fascinating chapters of his career: His 2007 adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. The original post-apocalyptic book finds the sole survival of a world overrun by vampires gradually coming to terms with the end of the world. It's a tense and at times quite frightening horror movie, but the version that came out in theaters two decades ago wasn't as bold as Goldsman originally intended it. At the Playhouse, we screened the "alternate cut" of the movie, the writer's preferred version. In a post-COVID world, I Am Legend resonates on a whole new level that deepens the material and makes it well worth a revisit -- especially this month, as Halloween season takes hold. Goldsman spoke about the unique backstory of the project, his feelings about Will Smith, and the rather unique way they originally intended to release the movie.
This week, we're joined by David Nugent, the chief creative officer of the Hamptons International Film Festival, which begins October 3 with screenings at the Playhouse taking place October 9 - 12. If you're lucky enough to have access to a festival of this caliber, it means that you can take the temperature on the state of world cinema from many angles at once. This year's lineup does that with highlights from other festivals. Our conversation covers a lot of those, as well as Nugent's history with the festival and his thoughts on the curatorial process as a whole.
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