In 'Pom-Poms Up , From Puberty to the Pythons and beyond, the British born, American raised and RADA trained actress reveals her life, loves and laughs as the 'Glamorous PYTHON GIRL' who famously kept her cool and a straight face in the heat of the humour generated by Cleese, Palin, Jones, Gilliam and the late Chapman, The 'MONTY' Pythons.

Beginning with her critically acclaimed independent feature film Eve's Bayou (1997), writer-director Kasi Lemmons's mission has been to push the boundaries that exist in Hollywood. With Eve's Bayou, her first feature film, Lemmons (b. 1961) accomplished the rare feat of creating a film that was critically successful and one of the highest-grossing independent films of the year. Moreover, the cultural impact of Eve's Bayou endures, and in 2018 the film was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film. Lemmons's directing credits also include The Caveman's Valentine, Talk to Me, Black Nativity, and, most recently, Harriet, making Lemmons one of the most prolific and long-standing women directors in Hollywood. As a black woman filmmaker and a self-proclaimed black feminist, Lemmons breaks the mold of what is expected of a filmmaker in Hollywood. She began her career in Hollywood as an actor, with roles in numerous television series and high-profile films, including Spike Lee's School Daze and Jonathan Demme's Academy Award-winning The Silence of the Lambs. This volume collects fifteen interviews that illuminate Lemmons's distinctive ability to challenge social expectations through film and actualize stories that broaden expectations of cinematic black femaleness and maleness. The interviews reveal Lemmons's passion to create art through film, intimately linked to her mission to protest culturally and structurally imposed limitations and push the boundaries imposed by Hollywood.

Patrice Chereau (1944 - 2013) was one of France's leading directors in the theatre and on film and a major influence on Shakespearean performance. He is internationally known for memorable productions of both drama and opera. His life-long companionship with Shakespeare began in 1970 when his innovative Richard II made the young director famous overnight and caused his translator to denounce him publicly as an iconoclast, for a production mixing "music-hall, circus, and pankration". After this break, Chereau read Shakespeare's texts assiduously, "line by line and word by word", with another renowned poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Drawing on new interviews with many of Chereau's collaborators, this study explores a unique theatre maker's interpretations of Shakespeare in relation to the European tradition and to his wider body of work on stage and film, to establish his profound influence on other producers of Shakespeare.