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November 17, 2012 Actor Christopher Plummer has taken his Tony Award-winning performance as actor John Barrymore to film. He speaks with Weekend Edition host Scott Simon about Barrymore as a man and as a role.

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November 16, 2012 Wright has made four feature-length movies, three of which have been adapted from literature. His newest film, Anna Karenina, tackles Leo Tolstoy's iconic love tragedy. He speaks with NPR's Renee Montagne about making a familiar story his own.

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November 15, 2012 Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay for the film Lincoln, which focuses on the 16th president's tumultuous final months in office. Kushner read more than 20 books before writing about Lincoln, a man who had "an enormous capacity for grief that didn't deprive him of the ability to act."

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November 10, 2012 Now considered one of Verdi's masterpieces, the opera flopped on its first run and carries the stigma of cursing those who perform it to terrible fates.

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November 10, 2012 Stephen Spielberg's new movie Lincoln features the authentic sounds of 1865, from Lincoln's own pocket watch to the latch on the carriage door that carried him to Ford's Theatre. Sound designer Ben Burtt talks about making the objects of Lincoln's life heard.

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November 10, 2012 Photographer James Balog has spent the last several years recording global warming in its coldest regions. NPR's Scott Simon talks with Balog about the new documentary, Chasing Ice, which follows Balog on his quest to document the planet's vanishing glaciers.

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November 9, 2012 The actor portrays Abraham Lincoln in the new movie Lincoln; he tells NPR's Melissa Block about one challenge the role posed — figuring out what the 16th president might have sounded like.

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November 9, 2012 Director Sam Mendes won critical acclaim and an Oscar for his first feature film, American Beauty. Now, he is taking on one of the most iconic cinematic franchises in the new James Bond film, Skyfall. He speaks with Renee Montagne about the experience.

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November 3, 2012 Rapper-turned-director RZA could watch Sergio Leone's western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly a million times. "It's funny, this movie is to me an American classic, even though it's an Italian film," he says.

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November 3, 2012 Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man invented a new kind of crime fiction. It was hard-boiled, but also light-hearted; funny, with a hint of homicide. Now, for the first time, the stories of After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man have been published as novellas.

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October 28, 2012 The Walking Dead executive producer Glen Mazzara could watch Ridley Scott's Alien a million times. "I think it taps into those childish fears that we have," he says.

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October 28, 2012 Reilly voices a video-game character in the new animated film Wreck-It Ralph. Sick of playing the bad guy onscreen, his character escapes from his video game to explore other gaming worlds and what it means to be the "hero."

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October 27, 2012 Lemon Andersen discovered poetry while serving time at Rikers Island. The new documentary Lemon tells his story from public housing to the stage.

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October 22, 2012 In January, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win Sundance's best directing award for her second feature-length film, Middle of Nowhere. It's about a young woman who puts her life and dreams of going to medical school on hold while her husband is in prison.

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