Milodino

Who should play Matt King in The Descendants? Without hesitation I said George Clooney

I'm asked all the time 'Did you ever in a million years think George Clooney would star in the movie based on your book?'

It's a question I get asked all the time. In fact I know when it's coming. I see it on people's faces, this manic glimmer: "Did you ever in a million years think George Clooney would star in the movie based on your book? Isn't it amazing!! You must be so excited!!"

I have my canned answers: "It's amazing," "I am thrilled," "I am excited."

I also get asked what was it like working with him, being in the same room with him. Their need for a juicy, ground-breaking tidbit is just too much and often I will deadpan: "It was very intimidating, but I kept reminding him I'm just a normal person."

The thing is, it is amazing and I am excited (though less so the more I'm required to act it out), but when it comes down to it, and I know this may not come off right – I couldn't imagine it otherwise. I couldn't imagine another actor playing this role. The director (Alexander Payne) asked who I saw playing the role of Matt King in The Descendants. Without hesitation I said George Clooney. The novel is set in Hawaii, about a man of mixed lineage (Hawaiian and Caucasian). George looked the part, he was the right age. He looks similar to a lot of people here, athletic types who frequent the Outrigger Canoe Club and have similar backgrounds to the character he plays. It made sense at that level. Also, I thought he'd be great at a part that required some unraveling, some dishevelment. This role was very real, very unheroic. There's no Clooney in King. The other reason, an important one, is that the book is just as funny as it is emotional. I thought of him as a talented comedic actor so he just made sense.

A few weeks after my suggestion Alexander had met with George in Toronto. Alexander emailed: "We got your man." Done. So when asked, "Would I ever think …" I guess my answer is: yes. Knowing Alexander and the films he has made, you'd be a fool to say no and Clooney's no fool. I highly doubt my book spoke to him or the role. Alexander spoke to him, and I'm grateful because to me, this is the best performance of his career (am I allowed to say that?) and I had the privilege of seeing him at work.

There's a scene where King tells a large gathering of friends about his wife's impending death. I watched him do this scene over and over, each time moved by his performance and his ability to express a variety of emotions – grief, pain, vulnerability, utter fatigue and disconnection, yet in the controlled way of his character. It was such a skillful performance because while it stirred up your emotions, it avoided sentimentality. It was the way a man like this would cry in public. The background extras (who included my mother, who had no problem sobbing) were stunned. We were watching an actor act and it was breathtaking. When the scene ended, George said: "Oh don't cry, I'll get a new wife."

What was it like to have Clooney star in the film of my first book? It was always fun, and it was a chance to see an actor acting as opposed to reading about them in magazines or seeing them on awards shows. It was a very cool front-row seat.

I had a scene with George, a quick one where I play his secretary. I had one line. I can now say I was in a Clooney movie and since I was standing across from him I can say that I played opposite George. Here's what's funny: I didn't expect to feel like an equal. He treats everyone as an equal, but it was more than that. The director asked me where King would go to lunch. I said he wouldn't. He's too busy, too frugal; he doesn't know how to go out, sit down, and enjoy himself. He would sit at his desk and eat a home-made or takeaway lunch. When I showed up on set for my scene there was George at his desk with the lunch. I had a part in that. George's costume included a Hawaiian shirt and deal-breaking khakis. He said he'd never get laid again. I had a part in that. All the things that he had to subject himself to traced back to my novel, which gave me this funny queen-like feeling, especially when I was on set just observing. Sometimes I'd think: my god, what am I making this man do?

One day during filming on Kauai, Clooney was standing on the beach wearing his surf shirt and board shorts. My six-year-old daughter was in the background as an extra, on the sand at Hanalei Bay, playing herself. They looked equally related to the place I call home. I was watching my life, my memory, a movie star and my book collide. It was flattering to be used this way. To see fact and fiction, my life and a movie merge so seamlessly. I got to see the pieces of The Descendants and now the film is complete. What is it like? It's a timeless gift. George Clooney's performance is timeless as well. He didn't just convey sadness and grief – he conveyed rage, hurt, love, remorse and my favourite: an awed confusion. We've all felt it – the awe for what can happen to us in this life – the good, the devastating, the magic of letting go.

• The Descendants is published by Vintage (£7.99).

Elmore Leonard: the great American novelist

Leonard is regarded as the greatest American crime writer, surpassing even Raymond Chandler. But it is time to drop the qualification of genre

The best novelists create a world around the reader. You can feel it bubbling up in irrepressible invention. So we have "a guy by the name of Booker, a twenty-five-year old super-dude twice convicted felon" in his Jacuzzi when the telephone rings. No one answers it, and Booker gets out of the Jacuzzi. At the other end of the line, a woman, Moselle, asks him to sit down. When he does, she informs him that he's triggered a bomb in the chair – "when you get up, honey, what's left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling". The bomb-disposal boys arrive in their nonchalant way: "Booker said 'Another one goes hmmmmm. I'm sitting here on high explosives the motherfucker goes hmmmmm.'" Is there a bomb? They can see 10 sticks of dynamite underneath Booker. But they can't see a fuse. And now Booker really needs to go to the bathroom, and one bomb-disposal guy is talking about his wife Phyllis's bad behaviour to a waiter in a restaurant. "Phyllis goes, 'Wally, when we've finished dinner, you gonna take us out and introduce us to the dishwasher?' She goes 'We really don't care what your name is as long as you're here when we want something.'" And there we leave them.

Does Booker get bombed to bits? Oh yes, of course he does, as we find out much later, in passing. The magnificent first chapter of Freaky Deaky is Elmore Leonard at his most audacious, balancing the promise of ultra-violence, a ludicrous situation and a series of more or less cool dudes possessing a perfect, profane articulacy. As in many Leonard novels, the main action is preceded by an eye-popping set piece with limited connection to the story. It takes the unexpected path from beginning to end; it never abandons the possibility of humour, however rough the going; and it casts its sympathies unpredictably. There is no greater writer of crime fiction than Elmore Leonard, and no one who has more resplendent energy.

Leonard has had the classic career of a market-oriented novelist. Born in New Orleans in 1925, but growing up in Detroit, he began by writing novels and short stories in the then popular western genre. During the day, he worked as an advertising copy-writer. When the magazine market for western stories dried up, he turned to crime fiction with The Big Bounce. His stature has grown steadily. With the publication this month of his new novel, Raylan, a revival of an old hero after the success of a TV series, Justified, his mastery of his own particular genre is complete. Anyone can write a plot in which crooks kidnap each other to extract each other's kidneys; it takes an Elmore Leonard to conceive of one in which the kidneys are sold back to their indignant original owner.

Raylan is unmistakably a late-period work; its texture is spare, even by Leonard's standards, and it cuts to the chase laconically. The hero-marshal, Raylan, has cropped up before: Leonard likes to save himself time by repeating not just the type of character, but the same character under the same name. Raylan is a drily witty cop who, in another life, might have been a useful and charming armed robber. Like the western sharpshooters of Leonard's first books, his speciality is shooting several villains more or less simultaneously without blinking an eye. This novel, too, carries on with Leonard's trademark energy, including some memorable members of the repulsive Crowe family who have previously turned up as pathetic villains; one here has an unbelievable collection of Elvis memorabilia; the other lives in a house so dirty that he entertains himself by shooting the rats in the kitchen and discussing whether it's worth cooking and eating them afterwards. Like pretty well every Leonard novel, it is a delight.

Though many of his novels have been turned into films, it's the novels themselves that possess the real crackle and technical command. If you think of the first lines of the great Tishomingo Blues, it is quite unfilmable – "Dennis Lenehan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder … when he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they'd put a cute look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn't it like really dangerous?" A film could show Dennis telling one girl this, on one occasion. The resources that allow a narrator to convey the endless repetition of Dennis's conversation and the predictable responses, and put it within a dry reported speech, as if Dennis were, bored, half-overhearing himself, are there to be exploited by the novelist of huge technical command.

The beauty of Leonard's novels can be achieved at the expense of any kind of moral judgment. It's often been said that it is hard to tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are in his novels. Sometimes, as in Freaky Deaky, you only work out who you might have been rooting for when you see who is left alive at the end. In a world of unbridled criminality, the criminal who carries out his robbery or murder with style and wit is the object of our admiration. Above all, the allure of intelligence and of articulacy carries the day: we tend to like the man who speaks best and most wittily in Leonard, the one who says "motherfucker" with the best timing.

The suspension of moral judgment is particularly relevant when sexual considerations come into play, and rules are momentarily suspended. Out of Sight pivots on a moment in a hotel lobby, when an alluring female marshal bumps into the sexually charged bank robber she has been hunting, and they agree to take time out to repair to a suite upstairs to screw. Sometimes, the characters rise above moral considerations quite consciously. Jackie Burke, talking in an entranced erotic haze to the bail bondsman Max Cherry in Rum Punch, seems like a figure envisaged by Nietzsche, beyond good and evil: "We're alike. We weren't before, you were holding back, but now we are. You and I. Could you pass out complimentary tropical punch in little plastic cups? That's my alternative and it's unacceptable." Jackie, an airline stewardess, rises above the mass of humanity just as the magnificent figure of Dennis, the high-diver in Tishomingo Blues does. They look down, and they make choices which may or may not be moral ones but are unconditioned by conventional standards of judgment. This may confuse other characters in Leonard as much as it does the reader. Harry Zimm in Get Shorty, listening to an extended movie pitch based on the pitcher's life, says: "You know why it doesn't work? I mean even before I find out you don't know how it ends. There's nobody to sympathise with. Who's the good guy? You don't have one." But every page of Get Shorty disproves Zimm's inadequate maxim: there are no good guys, and the drama works, supremely.

Leonard's novels are not, especially, thrillers; they are almost completely lacking in the puzzle element and the meretricious wielding of that most boring of novelistic features, mystery. In the end, they are closer to that most joyous of criminal genres, the "caper". You always know very soon who killed whom, who is in charge of the scam, what the criminal's plan is. And so do the forces of the law, more often than not. Secrecy is much less interesting than indiscretion – the joke in Pronto is that Harry tells absolutely everybody the story of how he shot a deserter in the war, all of whom faithfully keep the non-secret when Harry is seeking out new acquaintances to blab to. In Mr Paradise, the wrong prostitute is killed, and the villain persuades her friend Kelly – similarly blond and tanned – to pretend to take on her identity for the sake of an insurance payout. In almost any other crime novel, the pretence would be drawn out, and some kind of mystery spun around the perpetrators of the crime. In Mr Paradise, Kelly's pretence is seen through immediately, and no one is in any doubt from the start that Montez, Mr Paradiso's sullen major-domo, orchestrated the killings. Mystery is the most banal thing in everyday life. Look out of the window and ask yourself where that man you see is going. It's a complete mystery, but, like most mysteries, rather a boring one. Leonard has asked why mystery should be any more interesting in fiction, and has concluded that it can be done away with altogether.

The understanding of a situation can be advanced by bizarre and apparently trivial details, in the tradition of Chesterton's Father Brown. In Mr Paradise, the untrimmed pubic hair of a murder victim acts as a crucial little cog in the powerfully motoring plot. Ezra Pound is crucial to Pronto. In the exuberant Riding the Rap, a kidnap plot is undone by someone noticing some Jell-O. But the unweaving of a dastardly plot is never Leonard's real concern. What interests him more is the evolving of the impossible before everyone's astonished eyes – live alligators delivered to judges as threat, leper colonies (Bandits), whisky priests, Heinrich Himmler's double (Up in Honey's Room), and on and on even into the supernatural. Profanity aside, it is all a little bit like Gladys Mitchell on occasion.

There is a high degree of irrationality in Leonard. One of the disorienting, as well as exhilarating qualities in the books is the sense that neither narrative laws nor the laws of the world as we know it constrain the action. A pivotal book, Touch, which so disconcerted Leonard's publishers that a decade elapsed between its writing and its publication in 1987, turns on a stigmatic with the gift of healing – memorably curing every broken bone in his enemy's body after he has fallen four storeys. Leanne, Bob's wife in Maximum Bob, is in touch with a long-dead slave girl called Wanda, who brings about the denouement. Perhaps more characteristically, there's the thrilling presence of a psychic called Reverend Dawn in Riding the Rap, who recurs in Road Dogs; she seems, on the surface, to be a charlatan, something that most of the characters take for granted. Only as the plot proceeds does it become apparent that Dawn knows much more than she should, and the only way she could attain her degree of understanding is through some kind of supernatural means.

Characters who stand outside the normal run of things are Leonard's stock in trade – miracle workers, gangsters, Nietzschean superwomen, men who dive 80 feet from a platform into a puddle. He's interested, too, in people below the normal standards of humanity. The dazzling cavalcade of Freaky Deaky centres, in the end, on the monstrous figure of the multi-millionaire Woody, constantly sozzled and lying on his back naked in a swimming pool. Woody's inability to understand why his scheming houseboy Donnell wants him to amend his will in Donnell's favour provides some delicious comedy of out-of-focus chatter: "Woody said 'I guess the place to start, put down I want to cross out Mark's name and anything in it that has to do with him. Say "As he is no longer a successor co-trustee of the estate." I'm pretty sure that's what he was. Put that down under his name, successor co-trustee. But you know something? It must say in there what happens if he dies. I mean before I do.' Donnell, sitting at the library desk with the green lamp on, said 'Cross out Mark,' as he wrote it on a legal pad."

The comedy of the hopeless and of the inert reaches a sort of climax in the scene in Rum Punch when the three savage "jackboys", Zulu, Snow and Sweatman, find a rocket launcher in the back of their van to fire at the police trying to arrest them. Their superiority in firepower seems assured, but "'How to fire the motherfucker,' Zulu said." Here's the problem: none of them went to school much, and they are thrown back on their limited literacy, trying to read the instructions:

Zulu said "'Re-…' The fuck is that word there?" Snow said "'Re-…lease.' Yeah, it say to release the … something. 'Release the safe…ty.'"

It's going to end badly, as the police gather round the van.

Leonard's work is a very long way from the average crime novel, with its sequence of atrocity, mystery, maverick investigator and solution. He is fascinated, for instance, with the mechanics of writing, and wants his readers to share that interest. Characters investigate the textures of dialogue – "'How come,' Raylan said, 'you can't answer a question without asking one?'" (Riding the Rap.) They discuss diction in intricate detail – Foley and Buddy reading a newspaper report in Out of Sight: "'They think you may "flee the country."' 'I've had to run like hell a few times,' Foley said, 'but I don't think I've done any fleeing. You ever flee?' 'Yeah. I read one time I fled the scene of a robbery.'"

Most strikingly, Leonard often places the action in a context where we are going to have to contemplate the means of narrative. The superb climax of Tishomingo Blues takes place in a civil war battle recreation event where real shootings and staged shootings within a narrative – all within the context of the pretence of the novel, of course – chase each other. Djibouti is strung along a sequence of a pair of film-makers making editing decisions about how to narrate the story the reader is reading.

Most powerful is Get Shorty, accurately described by Martin Amis as "a masterpiece" and surely one of the greatest novels of the century, the American If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. A dry cleaner fakes his own death and flees to Las Vegas, then LA, with the insurance payout. The protection man who has been fleecing him for years follows him, dropping in first on a Hollywood director who owes a fat wad to a casino. The protection man thinks it's a good story, and, in the middle of the night, starts pitching it to the director. The novel revolves around at least three film scripts and an enormous extended pitch, and clearly loves its own consideration of the narrative structure. Scenes begin, repeatedly, "Now they were having a drink," like someone retelling, or telling in advance, a film. Scenes occur in reality then re-occur, mildly or fundamentally jigged, in the pitch and the pitchee's response – "the scene in the casino … should build a certain amount of tension. The audience is thinking, Jesus, here it comes. They know you're a tough guy, they want to see how you handle the bodyguard."

Leonard handles events which occur, are narrated, and then retold in other novels. The celebrated 22nd chapter of Rum Punch, with bags containing various sums of money, or none, being passed and switched around Macy's ladies' department, is followed by at least two detailed retellings of what actually happened. Get Shorty, however, is the most intricate meshing of narrative and meta-narrative, concluding with a lovely Calvino-like consideration between Karen, Harry and Chili of how it should end: "Chili didn't say anything, giving it some more thought. Fuckin endings, man, they weren't as easy as they looked."

The violence in Leonard's action is not dwelt on, but swiftly rendered and passed over. In Pagan Babies, the priest Terry exacts vengeance on some "genocidaires" in Rwanda: "He pulled Chantelle's pistol out of his cassock and shot Bernard, shattering the bottle he held against his chest … Terry held the pistol at arm's length on a level with his eyes … and made the sign of the cross with it over the dead. He said 'Rest in peace, motherfuckers.'" What Leonard loves best is not violence, but the promise of violence expressed with some verbal wit, like the sign in a police station in Mr Paradise: "Too often we lose sight of life's simple pleasures. Remember, when someone annoys you it takes 42 muscles in the face to frown. But it only takes four muscles to extend your arm and bitch-slap the motherfucker upside the head." They are surprisingly chaste novels, too, given the weight they place on erotic fascination. It is generally not the novel but the characters that lapse into obscenity, and then it is clearly the character's way of talking that enchants the novel: the gogo-dancer/drug dealer Cundo is talking to his sexy wife, the Reverend Dawn, from prison, reporting the advice he's getting from the other cons in the telephone queue. "'They ask me if I ever stick hamburger in your – I think they saying "twat" and have a pussyburger.' Dawn said, 'What else?'" (Road Dogs).

In the absence of detailed description of sex and violence, what fills the novels – joyously, incomparably – is talk. Leonard is rightly celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, but it isn't exactly a realist rendering. Rather, like PG Wodehouse, or Dickens, or Waugh, he has half-heard and half-invented a totally convincing idiolect. No one ever talked so well in reality as Robert Taylor in Tishomingo Blues, telling the story of his life like a Scheherazade in a silk shirt, chain and pleated slacks: "I never got sent down. I went to Oakland University three years and did some dealing to pay for my tuition and books and shit, but only weed. I wouldn't sell heroin to students, fuck up their young minds. Lot of 'em were fucked up to begin with, worrying about what they gonna do when they got out. I took eighteen semester hours of history – ask me a question about it, anything, like the names of famous assassins in history. Who shot Lincoln, Grover Cleveland. I took history cause I loved it man, not to get a job from it."

One source of Leonard's eminence is a semi-jocular "10 Rules of Writing". They constitute good, solid advice on the side of simplicity – "Don't go into great detail describing places and things. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." The magic of his own dialogue, however, is that he never underestimates the potential pleasure of the elaborate, high formality and the abstruse in speech. His characters are allowed to explain what they do in dizzying arcana: "A guy calls, he says 'I like the Vikings and six for five dimes.' Another guy calls. 'Harry, the Saints minus seven thirty times.' He loses, what's the juice, straight ten percent? If they forget the juice they won't even get close to the gross." (Pronto) He allows even the most brutal of his gangsters the right to bicker over terminology – "'We didn't kidnap him,' Louis said, 'we took him hostage.'" (Riding the Rap). And, most of all, he recognises the relish his characters have for single words, such as the splendid moment when the hangdog houseboy Lloyd comes into his heritage at the end of Mr Paradise and takes the guns to massacre the villains with the words: "I told you this ain't your bidness."

Leonard has long been seen as the greatest of crime writers, walking all over even Raymond Chandler, but perhaps the time has come to drop the qualification of genre. In his analysis through laughter of money, crime, spectacle and the play-acting of the powerful, he has created something entirely his own. In his 40-odd novels, his examinations of the way people manipulate language and stories have both recorded and created an aspect of human behaviour. He is just the great American novelist of the great American comedy.

‘It took great care to make Like Crazy look so natural’

Sundance 2011 success starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones started out with 'backstory, subtext … and no dialogue'

"Who hasn't overheard a conversation between a couple?" Drake Doremus grins. "Who hasn't been a voyeur in certain situations?" From an older man, these words might sound sleazy, but coming from this fuzzy-faced 28-year-old, it sounds playful. After cutting his teeth two years ago on a cheap indie road movie called Douchebag, this Californian director has moved on to a more considered study of young love, becoming an overnight indie star at the 2011 Sundance festival with a film that puts the audience, often unwillingly, right in the heart of the action.

Called Like Crazy, it stars Felicity Jones as a British girl who meets an American boy (Anton Yelchin) in college, beginning a to-and-fro transatlantic affair that will both thrill and thwart them as they try to make it work. "It came about," explains Doremus, "because I had gone through a long-distance relationship myself, and I wanted to explore a lot of the feelings that I'd felt. Now, she wasn't actually British, but I spent a lot of time going back and forth between LA and London in that relationship because she was living there. So to make the character British seemed like a no-brainer."

Though the story's slight, what makes the movie remarkable is the level of closeness that Doremus creates around his two leads. It seems at first sight to be about very little, but over time the minutiae become fascinating, like a live-action version of Robert Doisneau's famous 1950 photograph of a couple kissing by the Hotel De Ville. "I really wanted to make a film that felt intimate to the point that it's so intimate, it doesn't belong to the audience," Doremus says. "I wanted them to feel uncomfortable about what they're watching. The movie that does that really well, that the style in my movie is something of an homage to, is Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, where the camera floats in and out of intimacy and into voyeurism. The two things create this juxtaposition of feeling very connected emotionally with the characters and also feeling, like, 'Jeez, should we look away now?'"

To achieve this effect, Doremus used a style of improvisation more connected with Brits such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach than the US indie world. "We started with a 50-page outline," he says, "which was very specific. It had a lot of backstory, a lot of scene objectives, subtext, plot points, emotional beats and things. The only thing it didn't have was actual dialogue, because that sort of thing comes later, after we've understood the objectives and we know where we're going emotionally in the scene. And it keeps the scenes fresh, spontaneous and alive; and therefore they hopefully resonate more, because they feel more real."

'Improv was always in my bones. Anything that's intended to be comedic is something I spent 15 years learning about'

The most surprising thing about Doremus, as he discusses his "process", is how much he smiles while he's at it, with affection rather than po-faced reverence. He's not a disciple of realism for its own sake; neither is he from the shambolic, guerilla school of film-making known as mumblecore. "Everything you see in the film we had permits for, but it's all made to look stolen," he says.

But then, it's maybe not that surprising, given that Doremus's roots lie in comedy. His mother, Cherie Kerr, co-founded LA comedy troupe the Groundlings, which gave the world Will Ferrell, Lisa Kudrow and Kirsten Wiig. "I grew up in that world, from when I was six, then I started performing improv, and eventually teaching it. It was always in my bones. Anything that's intended to be comedic, or have a joke, is something that for 15 years I was learning about." A stint at the American Film Institute taught Doremus about "normal" film-making; he credits that with helping him learn "how to break the rules".

Right now, Doremus is finishing his third movie, another relationship drama starring Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones. He marvels at the way his budgets have spiralled – tenfold from Douchebag's $25,000 to Like Crazy's $250,000 alone – and credits his producer's faith for bringing in seven figures the third time round to rope in a relatively stellar cast. "It's an unrequited love story between an older man and a younger woman who find a connection at a really bad time," he explains. "And the movie's about them navigating those emotions and those feelings."

Is it part of a series; a long-term study of the human heart? "Strangely no," he shrugs. "I get an idea, I wanna make it, and within six months I do it. But I don't have ideas all the time. Like Crazy was a lightning bolt; I was like, 'OK, that's a movie I have to make, and I have to make it in three months.' But I don't have constant ideas, and I worry about that. Because one day the well may dry up ..."

This week’s new film events

David Lynch, London & Edinburgh

Has Lynch really retired? Maybe not, but you get the feeling he has done all he can and he's created a body of work that only gets stronger with age. Even "failures" like Dune are worth revisiting, while triumphs such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man or Mulholland Drive can be watched over and over – with the help of this retrospective. Lynch's influence has seeped into not just cinema but advertising, design and music, where his new disguise as "Lana Del Rey" seems to be working out just fine.

BFI Southbank & Edinburgh Filmhouse, Wed to 11 Mar

Steve Rose

Barbara Hammer, London

"Radical content deserves radical form," says Hammer and, since the late 1960s, the American experimental film-maker has been pushing the boundaries of both film language and sexual politics with a steady succession of works focusing on lesbian identity, both personal and political. The titles of her early Super-8 shorts say plenty: A Gay Day, Dyketactics, Multiple Orgasm, Sappho. In the 1980s she appropriated masculine computer technology in works such as Sync Touch. Her 1990s documentary, Nitrate Kisses, framed a history of gay oppression around four same-sex couples making love, and in 2008's A Horse Is Not A Metaphor she dealt with her own ovarian cancer. As well as surveying her work, this month-long celebration includes an expanded cinema event in the Turbine Hall, as well as pieces by Hammer's friends, colleagues and admirers, the premiere of her new short devoted to Maya Deren and talks and discussions with the artist herself.

Tate Modern, SE1, Fri to 26 Feb

SR

Food On Film, Kingussie

There are food festivals, there are film festivals, and now there is Kingussie's novel blend of the two. The theme is From The Hills To The Plate, with a celebration of wild food that includes MasterChef finalist Fi Bird revealing recipes using venison or pheasant. But this festival goes to inventive lengths to draw everyone in. Temptations include whisky tasting, a vintage tea party and an Indian food evening with Bollywood dancing. All of this revolves around a film programme of features, documentaries and shorts that's just as playful, with treats including Toast, the biopic about chef Nigel Slater, Like Water For Chocolate, and, after a chocolate-making demonstration, a screening of the much-loved original 1971 version of Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.

Various venues, Thu to 5 Feb

Katrina Dixon

Don't Think, Nationwide

If you're not one of the thousands who've seen the Chemical Brothers' psychedelic live show, here you can see what you're missing. And if you are, you can find out what it's like when you're not in a muddy field. The highs are purely sonic and cinematic, with their new movie Don't Think, filmed at Japan's Fuji Rock Festival by their visuals collaborator Adam Smith. It's more than just a gig documentary, with crowd's-eye views and rural interludes to leaven the synaesthetic mayhem. Don't Think rocks blocks and blows minds nationwide this Friday, and Smith, a veteran of UK music video and TV including Dr Who, gives special Q&As at the BFI Southbank (Fri) and Curzon Soho (9 Feb).

Various venues, Fri

SR