Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen talks with Woody Harrelson. The versatile and prolific performer has co-written and directed a play, based loosely on a stoned summer before he became an actor. A piece of public art that drew attention to climate change abruptly disappears from the University of Wyoming campus, where the energy industry looms large. And an aspiring lawyer gets a reality check from the movie The Paper Chase.

The violinist Hilary Hahn ditches the classical repertoire and goes full improv. She performs live in the studio with the pianist Hauschka. Kurt Andersen talks with the writer Adam Gopnik about how Hollywood-style violence might have played into the massacre in a Colorado movie theater. And Karen Thompson Walker imagines time slowing down in her debut novel The Age of Miracles.

The creator of Breaking Bad explains how his feel-bad television series (about a meth-dealing high school teacher with cancer) can inspire so much love from audiences and critics. The pioneering indie rocker John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, reveals his soft spot for Black Sabbath. And we visit The Clock, a mash-up film comprising more than a thousand clips about time. It's 24 hours long, and we wouldn’t cut a minute. (Segments in this week’s episode aired previously.)

Are we entering a golden age for women directors in Hollywood? Kurt Andersen talks with Sarah Polley and Lynn Shelton about how the industry has changed, and where the glass ceiling remains. We’ll hear a report from Comic-Con, the bleeding edge of American pop culture. And Dirty Projectors, who make experimental rock you can dance to, perform live in the studio.

This week, Kurt Andersen asks: can computers make art? And if so, is it any good? We’ll meet a program named AARON that’s been painting for nearly 40 years, a filmmaker who replaced her editor with an algorithm, and a professor who thinks what computers need is more Shakespeare. (Originally aired: December 16, 2011)

Canada has a bold new look, thanks to our campaign to rebrand the country. We reveal the winner out of 750 Canada slogans submitted to our contest. And Kurt Andersen tests his knowledge of Canada against a real live Canadian radio host. Plus, Benh Zeitlin, the director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, tells Kurt about his debut film, an apocalyptic fairytale set in Louisiana with a six-year-old hero.

Kurt Andersen talks with Timur Bekmambetov, director of a new movie that shows us Abraham Lincoln as we never knew him: vampire hunter. The playwright Eve Ensler and Michigan politicians stage The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the state capitol. And novelist Glen Duncan explains why werewolves show us how human we really are.

Manhattan’s West Side has plenty of artist studios, but none quite like Hunt Slonem’s. Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen recently dropped by the artist’s eccentric space, which is stuffed with plaster busts, chandeliers, neo-gothic furniture, Persian rugs, porcelain tchotchkes, dozens of live birds, and - oh yeah - paintings.

Angelina Jolie’s latest project found her behind the camera. In the Land of Blood and Honey is her directing and screenwriting debut. Set in the former Yugoslavia during the civil war of the 1990s, it follows a love story between a Bosnian Serb soldier and his Muslim prisoner. The film is violent, political, and it's performed in Serbo-Croatian by a local cast. “I was so excited as an artist to work with other artists from former Yugoslovia,” Jolie says. “What could we learn from each other?"