Words by Ryan Lambie

About this site

I’ve been writing about entertainment (mostly film, a fair bit of video gaming, some TV) since 2007. And in more recent years, it’s dawned on me just how easy it is for work published online to quietly vanish in the ether. Rooney Mara’s character in The Social Network may have argued that the internet’s “not…
Douglas Trumbull interview (2014): 2001, Silent Running

This one was truly special. Douglas Trumbull, who passed away in 2022, was a true pioneer of visual effects. His ‘film school’, as he put it, was a two and-a-half year stint on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which he created miniatures, production drawings, and the iconic stargate sequence that lights up its…
Rutger Hauer interview (2016) – Alien: Out Of The Shadows, Blade Runner

As I wrote at the time, this interview with the wonderful Rutger Hauer is one of the most unusual I’ve ever done. First, because it was timed to promote an audio book, Alien: Out Of The Shadows – a type of media I haven’t spoken to an actor about before or since. Second, this was…
Gary Oldman interview: RoboCop (2014)

I only had 12 minutes to speak to Gary Oldman, unfortunately, but given just what a wonderful actor is, it was still exciting to sit with him even for such a brief length of time. My enduring memory is that he’d been put in an unusually cavernous hotel room, dimly lit, and that I was…
Ridley Scott interview | The Martian (2015)

As a youngster only just beginning to understand how films were made – and that real people made them for a living – among the first directors whose names I memorised were Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Ridley Scott. It was borderline intimidating, then, to meet Sir Ridley in 2015 to talk about what was…
Peter Hyams interview: Capricorn One, Outland, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (2014)

Director Peter Hyams made several of the genre films that affected me most as youngster: the taut conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (1978), the claustrophobic western-in-space Outland (1981), starring Sean Connery, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984). I spoke to Mr Hyams over the phone in 2014 to mark the release of the action…
Stuart Gordon interview: Re-Animator (2014)

The cult horror classic Re-Animator got a Blu-ray reissue in 2014, and to mark the occasion I spoke to director Stuart Gordon about the making of his 1985 shocker and his other wayward movies. The interview was over the phone, and initially, I got the vague impression that he wasn’t expecting my call. After a…
Brian Cox interview: Manhunter (2011)

One thing I ought to mention: the years in the titles of these interviews refers to when they took place, not when the film came out. In this case, I got to speak on the phone to the incredible Brian Cox about Manhunter, which originally came out in 1986 but got a reissue 25 years…
Sharlto Copley interview: Elysium (2013)

Another interview that very nearly vanished from the internet, this 2013 interview with actor Sharlto Copley was thankfully ‘backed up’, shall we say, by a different website from Den of Geek UK, which originally published it. This one took place at a London hotel a few days before the release of Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 sci-fi…
Producer Robert Watts interview: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond (2013)

Here’s an interview – originally published on Den Of Geek UK in 2010 – that almost vanished into digital oblivion. Thankfully backed up by the invaluable Wayback Machine, it’s a lengthy phone chat with the charming Robert Watts. A British producer whose career began in the 1960s and spanned some of the most iconic films…