If Gaby Wood's longish profile-interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor is any indication, the star of Redbelt and Talk to Me has got the equilibrium thing down pretty well. Ejiofor was in the New York area for his role in Philip Noyce's Salt, a thriller that also stars Liev Schreiber and Angelina Jolie, of whom he says, "She is very beautiful, but you know, you get used to it." Born in London in 1974 to Nigerian immigrants, Ejiofor's breakthrough movie role was in Stephen Frears's 2002 Dirty Pretty Things, in which he played a Nigerian immigrant--a former doctor--living under the radar in London. His other recent roles include that of Thabo Mbeki, who would go on to become president of South Africa, in Endgame, a TV drama about political negotitations during the dying days of apartheid. Wood writes that it "was the second time Ejiofor had been to South Africa. It took him a while to get over the first, a trip he made in 2004 to shoot the film version of Gillian Slovo's book Red Dust. In that, he played a torture victim, and was, as he now says, 'slightly traumatised'. He explains: 'I just wasn't expecting... I don't know, it was crazy not to have been expecting to come across a really complicated racial situation...There were people in our crew who had burned down villages in Zimbabwe, for example. You know, if you have a torture scene and somebody in the room says: "Yeah, that's exactly how you do it", it's a complicated set.'"

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The Guardian recently sent two writers on different expeditions to track down David Lynch, currently camping out as Gaby Wood discovered, in "a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills", and his daughter Jennifer, who's been busy clearing the ground for the U.K. release of her own second feature as a director, Surveillance. Wood's own feature is short on terrific new quotes from the great man, which probably reflects less on her journalistic abilities than on where Lynch's head is at these days: he's still deep in that "Film and me are quits!" space he's been promoting ever since he discovered digital video and made Inland Empire. Wood describes that work, accurately, as "a three-hour ode to impenetrability.") " 'I just love this camera,' Lynch says, in his nasal, deliberate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It's a machine.' A look of delight passes across his face. 'It's just a glorious world,' he says.

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