Matt Damon & Diana Krall
Kurt Andersen talks with Elysium star Matt Damon about his track to stardom and working with the Cohen brothers. Diana Krall breathes new life into mid-century jazz standards on her album Glad Rag Doll. And Star Trek transforms the life of a college dropout.
Matt Damon seems to have done it all – and convincingly. He’s played a renegade secret agent in the Bourne movies, a tough-talking nincompoop inTrue Grit, and now he stars as a robotically-enhanced revolutionary in Elysium.Kurt talked to Damon just after he had finished shooting Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion. He explained how an ER doctor on set helped shape one of the film’s most dramatic scenes.(Originally aired: January 7, 2011)
Diana Krall‘s interpretations of mid-century jazz standards have won her two Grammys and sold many millions of albums worldwide. Songs from her latest album, Glad Rag Doll, are infused with Krall’s signature purr, giving the old tunes grit and soul. “I didn’t want to go in there and try to play the music like the 1920s,” she explains, “I wanted to play it the way they would have played it if they were here now.” (Originally aired: October 12, 2012)
In college, Ronald D. Moore’s Captain Kirk dorm room poster prompted teasing, but his passion for the original Star Trek has paid off. A few years ago he transformed the sci-fi TV genre when he reimagined the cheesy 1980s Battlestar Galactica into a gripping allegory for the War on Terror. Moore’s new series Helixairs on the SyFy network this fall.(Originally aired: September 17, 2010)
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