
movies
SXSW London 2026: What To Expect From Year Two
SXSW set up camp in London’s East End last year with its first-ever edition in the UK. Deadline has been covering the announcements and news for this year’s lineup. We also managed to pull the Director of Programming, Katy Arnander, away from the rigors of getting this year’s festival in shape for a deeper dive on what to expect and how the team plans to put SXSW London on the map.
DEADLINE: You’re headed into your second year, what did you learn the first time out that has informed this year’s edition?
KATY ARNANDER: A chunk is the programming and audience learnings, and then there are the operational learnings, which have been great because you just don’t know how things are going to work until people are there and you can see how they interact across the music, screen and conference elements.
We got great feedback and great data because we had over 25,000 people last year. It gave us a chance to understand the types of audiences who come and get the most of a festival like this, which is all about what’s new, what’s next and what the future brings, but is also about checking in with established and well-known creatives, artists, business leaders, and visionaries within their respective fields.
DEADLINE: What hit the spot last time?
ARNANDER: Big-hitter names who have useful and important things to contribute resonated, like Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA, who came and spoke about the role of AI and music. And there were so many others… there were political speakers, there was Tony Blair in conversation with [then UK Technology Minister] Peter Kyle talking about how AI will transform government. The King also visited, which was amazing.
Unexpected conversations with high-profile names are always bullseye moments. We had Ben Lamm in conversation with Sophie Turner, talking about his company Colossal Bioscience and discovering the DNA of extinct woolly mammoths. We call them unexpected pairings and non-obvious conversations.
DEADLINE: How has the conversation around AI moved on since last time?
ARNANDER: It has definitely become more nuanced. Speakers are coming and talking about how AI has shaped their businesses.
A year ago, everybody was talking about, what is it, what’s it going to do? Twelve months later, it’s incredible how AI is just here. Now, it’s what are the applications of it? How can you use AI to help R&D? Let’s have a look at AI and misinformation in the world of news and media. Let’s look at AI in terms of making music.
DEADLINE: How much do you seek to keep the DNA of SXSW in Austin?
ARNANDER: The plan is very much to build up the brand. We want to bring the DNA from Austin, which is bringing people together from tech and business and the creative industries. London has all those things, but particularly East London. What Austin is to Texas, Shoreditch is to London, a slightly alternative melting pot of creativity.
The bit that we added to it, which they don’t have so much in Austin, is the visual arts strand. We’ve had the YBA movement moving through Shoreditch and there’s the whole visual arts and street art side to it.
Many of the best, well-known festivals have been going for many years. They’ve built their brand and their base over many years, which is precisely what we intend to do, because we have a 10-year license, at the very least, here in London.
DEADLINE: London is hugely diverse and international, how does the your event reflect that?
ARNANDER: It’s a festival of the future and about what’s new, what’s next, and discovery. What’s really nice is that we have American companies wanting to talk about what they do in Europe. Six hours from London means not just continental Europe, but also North Africa and the Middle East. That’s our radius, so we’ve got a very large spread of different countries and nationalities and industries and businesses. We can cover that part of the world, and [SXSW in Austin] can cover America, Central America and South America.
DEADLINE: Whether we’re talking about music, film & TV, tech or the arts there’s a huge number of events. Where does SXSW London fit into a jam-packed calendar?
ARNANDER: It’s unique, which is the whole point. We’re not an industry-specific event. Our main focus is let’s put some heads together, let’s throw ideas around, let’s look to the future, and let’s actually not silo ourselves.
I think SXSW reflects the reality of the way that we all work today. Essentially, we are becoming multi-hyphenates and our festival represents that world and the way we live, work and play.
There is also this sense, more than ever, that people need to be together. If you have a group of people in a room who might be from the film industry or might be from a startup, someone might be a geneticist or from a tech company, and you get them talking together, then ideas spark. You can’t generate that outside of a real-life setting.
Those serendipitous moments are what SXSW is famous for. We’ve really invested a lot of time, effort and thought into how we improve networking opportunities. We also now have a very strong mentoring program with over 200 mentors coming to the festival. We’re convening roundtables where you might have 10 people together with a moderator, and then we have organized networking parties and meetups.
DEADLINE: Drilling down into the screen program and lineup, what are some highlights?
ARNANDER: We’re really excited about the partnership we have with AGBO. The Russo brothers are coming to speak with [AGBO CCO] Don Mustard, who is formerly of Epic Games, which is very cool. We have Russell T Davies and Sharon Horgan is also coming and I’m a great fan of hers. We’ve already announced a couple of our headliners at the Barbican, and Savage House is one of them.
DEADLINE: You mentioned you had 25,000 people last time; can you top that this year?
ARNANDER: In terms of how many we can fit into our spaces, there is a finite capacity, but this year, we’re doing more public activations and events. So, we’re doing some events in front of the Truman Brewery in Ely’s Yard, which is a public space. We’re doing some events potentially down in Montacute Yards. There are many more public activations this year, so we will get more footfall. And we’ve got a big activation with Waymo, the automated cars that are coming to London.
DEADLINE: Maybe the stars can arrive at their premieres in driverless cars?
They don’t have their license yet, so they’re in the testing phase, but next year they could turn up to the festival in a Waymo car.
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movies
Obama Relives Tan Suit Debacle In ‘Life, Larry & Pursuit of Unhappiness’
As Larry David‘s comedic trip through U.S. history comes to an end, he took credit for one of the nation’s more recent presidential scandals.
On Friday’s season finale of the HBO sketch comedy miniseries Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, President Barack Obama made a surprise appearance as himself in a sketch set in 2014, as David advised him to wear the now-infamous, outrage-inducing tan suit during his live press conference on military response to ISIS.
Following some banter on how the POTUS avoids stains, David accidentally spills juice on Obama’s suit jacket when he leaves the room. When the 44th president returns, the comedian recommends he wear the tan suit that Obama planned on taking it to Turin for NATO Summit, for “a daytime event, it’s outdoors, a little more casual.”
“First of all, it’s a gorgeous suit,” David declared. “And this is casual Friday!”
“It is a great suit,” admitted Obama, as David told him, “Oh boy, oh boy. I think this is the move. … Old lips won’t let you down. You’ll thank me!”
As Obama models the look, David gives him his signature, “Pretty good! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
“You sure about this?” asks Obama, as David assures him, “Never been more sure about anything in my life. People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.”
Obama’s cameo in the finale comes as David marks the United States Semiquencentennial with the seven-part sketch comedy limited series, which recounts major events in U.S. history through the comedian’s signature observational humor.
David’s longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm partner Jeff Schaffer, who serves as an executive producer on Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, previously told Deadline that Obama, who produced under his Higher Ground banner, reached out to his buddy David to ask if he’d be interested in making the show to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday.
“When you’re doing a show about American history, you want to do it warts and right now we have this orange saggy wart that we wish would go away,” said Schaffer. “But the nice thing about having President Obama produce this and be a part of it is that this country’s had a lot of fuck ups, we’ve seemed to have learned very little, but we’re still moving forward sometimes, and then we move back a little bit, but we always move forward again. While Larry’s pointing out a lot of the steps back, the President is telling us we can still step forward.”
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movies
Matthew McConaughey Performs “Quill” From ‘Rivals of Amziah King’ — Watch
Matthew McConaughey shows off his vocal skills (and some hidden banjo talents) with his latest role in The Rivals of Amziah King.
On Friday, Lakeshore Records released the single and music video for “Quill” from the original motion picture soundtrack, performed by the Oscar-winning and co-star Ben Hardesty, also featuring Miranda Zickler, Angelina LookingGlass and Andrea Pister.
Set in the backwoods of Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King follows the musically gifted Amaziah King (McConaughey) and his bluegrass-playing band of misfits while overseeing the premier honey-making operation in town. When Amaziah’s estranged foster daughter unexpectedly returns, he leaps at the chance to reconnect and create a family business. But the honey game is ruthless, and Amaziah’s rivals threaten to destroy everything he has built.
Premiering Aug. 14 in theaters, the Andrew Patterson-written-and-directed drama also stars Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Jake Horowitz, Tony Revolori and Kurt Russell.
Producers are David Heyman, Teddy Schwarzman, Jeffrey Clifford, Michael Heimler, James Montague and Will Greenfield.
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movies
Jane Schoenbrun On Tackling “Toxic Soup” Of Slasher Genre In ‘Camp Miasma’
With their latest directorial outing, Jane Schoenbrun used subtle pieces of nostalgia to deconstruct the slasher genre.
The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer/director explained to Deadline that they wanted to create “a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary,” noting the frequent symbolism of candy and junk food as providing an atmosphere “that’s actually safe” while diving into a horror movie or exploring sexuality after trauma.
“There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe,” said Schoenbrun, who is non-binary. “Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, ‘Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.’”
In Schoenbrun’s latest film, Hannah Einbinder stars as queer director Kris, who is tapped to helm a new installment of the long-running Camp Miasma horror franchise. While courting Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, to reprise her role, the pair spirals into a psychosexual frenzy as the slasher’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven), comes to life.
Acknowledging the problematic trans representation of horror films like Psycho (1960), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), Schoenbrun admitted the genre has been “catnip to me since I was 10 years old,” and they jumped at the chance to direct their own.

“So many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals … And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy,” they explained.
“But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants,” said Schoenbrun. “It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.”
Read on about Jane Schoenbrun’s love letter to the slasher genre with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, now playing in theaters.
DEADLINE: It was really fun to see the slasher genre through your eyes. Tell me about finding inspiration in that genre and “final girls.”
JANE SCHOENBRUN: I mean, it was the easiest thing in the world because it’s just one of those genres that has been catnip to me since I was 10 years old. I just raided the horror section of the video store as a kid from an age when I really shouldn’t have been doing that, like in 5th grade, I watched in the span of about one week, every Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I think that I was always drawn to movies and really anything entertainment where it felt forbidden in some way, like the thing on the tape, how is that even allowed? And that’s the thing that I love about a lot of my favorite slashers. Don’t get me wrong, I love like brutal ones, like I love Texas Chainsaw, that’s a nasty movie at its core, and that’s what’s so special about it. But so many slashers do have this sense of humor, and even if they’re not overtly meta like the Scream movies are, they’re so aware of their own tropes and the sort of rituals of, OK, what’s the most outrageous way that like these like dumb kids can get killed? But watching it, it’s not about fear a lot of the time, it’s about joy and celebration. And I just loved that from a young age and loved all of the little rituals within it, and so, getting to make my own is just like play and joy. But it also felt like the perfect way to talk about sex and to talk about my experience as a trans person post-transition, learning how to come into a sexual identity that I could feel comfortable within, because so many of these movies are obviously deeply engaged in gender and sexual roles, and these movies have so much to say for better or for worse about deviants, whether that be Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Sleepway Camp or Jason, Michael Myers, Leatherface in drag. It is there in the DNA of the slasher genre that these movies are talking about fear and desire, gender and sexuality, normativity and deviance. And that’s all swimming in the toxic soup of the genre, so I wanted to remake it in my own language.

DEADLINE: I’m curious about the symbolism of all the processed junk food and the chandelier of wrappers.
SCHOENBRUN: The junk food in the movie, I forget when it found its way in there. It’s like so much of the movie is about, like I said, ritual, about being in a mindset where you can really enjoy something scary, whether that be Kris [Hannah Einbinder] in bed, with, you know, with Raisinets and the popcorn, watching a schlocky horror movie, or the two characters learning how to be present and enjoy sex after a lot of trauma. There is this idea that if it gets too real, you can turn it off, that you’re exploring something dangerous, doing it in a way that’s actually safe. Which in my experience of coming into my sexual identity post-transition, kind of required some gummy candy on hand. What I mean by that is, even if we’re going to be exploring scary and vulnerable and potentially embarrassing, triggering parts of ourselves, we trust each other well enough to know that at any moment, we can be like, “Let’s stop, we gotta just eat some fucking gummies.”
DEADLINE: And one thing I really love—I just feel like it’s a theme in your work—is how it depicts the way media and entertainment influence us. Why does that inspire you?
SCHOENBRUN: I think it comes from a fascination and sensitivity to the complex relationship between what we think of as fiction and what we think of as reality, which we tend to, as a society, think of as pointing in one direction. Like, reality dictates fiction, not vice-versa, but when you actually look at the way the world works, it’s like one echoes off the other. And I think a complicated, sometimes terrifying and sometimes beautiful way, where the fiction, the cultural norms, the things we grow up looking at on our screens, the roles that we’re told people play, they kind of inspire us to create reality. There’s something liberating when you start thinking in that way. I think it’s a way of thinking that we as a culture, could do a lot more of. To think about the idea of fiction inspiring reality just as much as reality is inspiring fiction, is a potential path to liberating us from this hellscape that they’re telling us is the only way the world can be.

DEADLINE: And I know you have the Secretary reading. Tell me what it’s been like prepping for that and why you all chose that movie.
SCHOENBRUN: I mean, that was such a huge influence on on Miasma. There just aren’t that many fun and funny movies about deviant sex. And just the way that movie is like feather light while talking about really raw and taboo things, it is just really inspiring to me. And the dynamic between those two main characters is definitely one that had a lot of influence on on Kris and Billy’s [Gillian Anderson] relationship in Miasma. And it’s already to me a very queer movie in its way, but having Gillian reading the James Spader part and Hannah reading the Maggie Gyllenhaal part, I think it’s just gonna be like a very unique joy. Honestly, we’ve been prepping a little bit, but I think it’s just gonna be about getting up there and feeling the chemistry of it all, and just letting these folks who we have all gotten to know each other really, really well, but we haven’t actually done anything wacky and creative like that in a while, like as a reunion, it’s gonna be a real blast, I think.
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