Singer-songwriter Arlissa took the stage at The Contenders London to perform “We Won’t Move”, a song from the drama The Hate U Give starring Amandla Stenberg. After gorgeously belting out the tune and stirring emotions in the audience, she spoke with Deadline co-Editor-in-Chief Mike Fleming Jr. about the film and how…

Amazon stopped by Deadline’s Contenders London conference today with not one, but three pics in potential contention: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, and Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy. And if there’s a thruline running throughout the trio, it’s how human pain becomes poetic, though all…

Hugh Grant gave a lively — and funny — discussion during the Paddington 2 presentation at The Contenders London event. He talked about acting opposite of a stick, his “weird history” with the voice of Paddington Ben Whishaw, and that big Busby Berkeley-esque musical number at the end of the film. In the StudioCanal…

After premiering A Private War at the Toronto Film Festival, Aviron brought stars Rosamund Pike and Jamie Dornan together for a panel to discuss the legacy of famous war correspondent Marie Colvin (played by Pike in the film), who was killed in 2012 after illegally crossing the Syrian border into the city of Homs with…

After buying North American rights to Three Identical Strangers, Tim Wardle's Jury Prize-winning Sundance doc, Neon reunited the director with producer Becky Read and executive producer Dimitri Doganis for a panel explaining how this amazing story – of how three total strangers found out in the '80s, at the age of 19…

“It’s not a biopic, it’s not a movie about a person, it’s a movie about a moment,” says filmmaker Jason Reitman about his latest film The Front Runner which opens on Election Day. In the film, Hugh Jackman plays embattled U.S. Presidential Democratic candidate Gary Hart. Though the Hart scandal occurred when Reitman…

One of the sublime performances in Studio 8/Sony’s White Boy Rick belongs to British actress Bel Powley, who portrays Dawn Wershe, the sister of Detroit teen-turned-drug-dealer/government informant Rick Wershe Jr. Yet while Rick initially lifts the family out of its financial problems before getting arrested, Dawn…

Michelle Yeoh was a big fan of Kevin Kwan’s novel for Crazy Rich Asians, but when she received Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim’s script, “I was very upset” the actress told the crowd at Deadline’s The Contenders London today. “Eleanor (Young) was written as nasty, mean, mean, not nice at all. I don’t think that Eleanor…

A hardboiled LA neo-noir with a tough female lead and a cool female director is hardly par for the course in today's Hollywood. Which is why Karyn Kusama was full of praise for distributor Annapurna at the company's panel today while discussing her new film Destroyer with her star Nicole Kidman. "They're mavericks,"…

Showcasing just three movies, today's Netflix panel was a fascinating insight into the wide-ranging tastes of a company fast changing the landscape of the film industry. First up was the Coen brothers' portmanteau western, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, which was represented by an all-actor line-up comprising Zoe…

Two very different Focus Features titles, Morgan Neville’s Mister Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and the British period piece Mary Queen of Scots have their own touch when it comes to history. Neville was drawn to Fred Rogers’ oddity, but there was something greater in the PBS children’s talk show host: “He’s a…

Filmmaker Wash Westmoreland first wrote Colette, the story of Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, back in 2001. The script went through 15 drafts, and three title changes: Colette and Willy, All She Wrote, and The Real Claudine before he settled on Colette.  Why the long wait? Other…