It felt like Naomi Watts covered it all in a Zurich Film Festival masterclass on Sunday afternoon: dreams, drama and, of course, the menopause.

The British star opened up with host Max Loong about struggling for around a decade auditioning in Los Angeles before she would go on to meet David Lynch and star in his career-transforming Mulholland Drive. Watts was speaking the day after a glitzy Zurich ceremony in which she accepted the fest’s prestigious Golden Eye award for her latest feature, The Housewife.

The conversation began with Watts’ childhood and acting aspirations. Her ambitions were made a little more complicated when Watts’ mother moved the family from the U.K. to Australia when she was only a young teenager.

In a bizarre way, meeting the late, great Lynch — whom Watts did an impeccable impression of, pretend cigarette and all — was almost like therapy for the actress, who landed that breakout role at the age of 31. She was worn down by Hollywood’s faux interest in her talent and the fickle nature with which casting directors operated. “[You’d] line up and see 10 or 15 girls, running their lines, looking much better for the part than you do, and it was really a grind,” Watts told the room.

“That 10 years before I met David Lynch, I just became so locked up and I felt worthless,” she continued. “My agent actually pulled me aside because she put together a reel with some of the work I’d done in Australia — little bits of things — and she said, ‘We need to have a heart-to-heart. Come in and talk to me because I don’t understand why you’re not getting these jobs.’”

Watts was told by that agent: “‘Honey, you’re too intense. You’re freaking people out.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, no shit. I’m desperate. I’m three months behind on my rent. I’m getting evicted! They told me I wasn’t funny last week. I’m trying to be funny now. They told me I wasn’t sexy. I’m trying to be sexy!’” she said, likely validating a lot of women in the room vying for a foot in the door. “You reshape yourself to try and read the tone of what is needed, and it becomes freaky. And I just couldn’t be myself. I was either an extreme version of myself or a diluted version. I was further and further away from myself, and it took a genius like David Lynch to be able to see beyond all of that weirdness that I had built up and undo it and get to the real me.”

At the Cannes Film Festival premiere of the beloved Mulholland Drive, in which Watts plays an aspiring actress who arrives in L.A. and befriends a car crash victim, she remembers sitting in the car with co-star Justin Theroux, about to hit the iconic red carpet, when a sentimental song came on the radio. “The crowds are there waiting, and the song changed to Cat Stevens’ ‘Morning Has Broken,’ and this was the song that had played at my dad’s funeral.”

Watts became teary at this point in the conversation, earning a raucous round of applause from the crowd. Her father, Peter Watts, a road manager and audio engineer who went on the road with Pink Floyd, died of an apparent heroin overdose when she was just seven years old. “It was always a very meaningful song, and I just remember turning to Justin and went, ‘Oh my God, that song!’ […] Thank God I wasn’t alone in that car [and had] Justin because all I could think about was my mascara running down my [face]. He just grabbed my hand and he was like, ‘Come on. Let’s go. Let’s do it.’ I put my head up and off we went onto the red carpet, and it was wonderful. David was obviously very beloved and we just held on tight to each other.”

Mulholland Drive is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, and made an international superstar out of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Watts. It was a modest commercial success, making around $20 million on a $15 million budget.

Towards the end of the masterclass, Watts took a moment to talk about her menopause activism, revealing how her four-year-old menopause and wellness company, Stripes Beauty, came to be. “Menopause has become a huge topic of conversations [and a] passion because I went into it early on in my life and had no clues about what was going on with my body and there was no open conversation,” she said. “Once I talked about it with my partner, who’s now my husband, and he was encouraging of it, I just thought: ‘How about I just own this story? How about I get ahead of it? I’m in on the joke that is not actually a joke, but why should we suffer?’” Watts’ goal was to inject normalcy into menopause, whether it’s through “humor, storytelling, just connectivity, or product solution.”

She lauded her husband of three years, fellow actor Billy Crudup, for being curious about menopause — and implored other men to replicate his openness. “I was hiding in the bathroom trying to scratch off my estrogen patch, and he was like, ‘Is everything okay?’ And I told him what was going on, and I really was so nervous and thinking, ‘Oh God, I bet he’s not going to want to be with me now. He knows I’m in menopause.’”

Crudup’s reaction was quite the opposite. “He was like, ‘Hold on a second. We’re the same age, and that’s great that you’re taking care of yourself. Love science, love medicine. And why are you ashamed? That’s fantastic. Thanks for telling me.’ And so instantly, I felt, ‘Oh my God, this is so sweet and generous and sexy!’ Like, that just felt really intimate. And I felt safer than I’d ever felt,” continued Watts. “And I told him that I wanted to create a company for women who are not clued in, and the company would be about hydration from scalp to vag.”

Watts comes to Zurich promoting The Housewife, directed by Ben Shirinian and co-starring Tye Sheridan, Michael Imperioli and Luke Evans. It is based on a true story and set in 1964 New York. When a young journalist tracks down a potential Nazi officer living secretly in Queens, he befriends the lead suspect’s charming wife. But the investigation soon takes a disturbing turn.

Her fellow Golden Eye recipients include John Turturro and Tom Hiddleston this year. The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.

Dozens of Israeli Americans and members of Jewish communities gathered outside the Lincoln Center on Saturday to protest the premiere of NAZA at the New York Film Festival.

The documentary, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was filmed at night from Tel Aviv rooftops and examines “the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians” by Israel‘s military operations in Gaza, the filmmakers previously said.

During the protest, demonstrators screened footage from the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from LED screens mounted on trucks outside the premiere. Nova festival survivors Rom El-Hai and Shalev Biton also spoke to the crowd, sharing their accounts of Oct. 7.

“We’re here not because we’re saying, don’t show the film,” Israeli-American Council (IAC) co-chair Tal Shuster said of NAZA during the rally. “Everyone has the freedom of speech, that’s the United States. We are saying: it’s not all the facts. Show everything else, not just the documentary.”

“We have the trucks here,” Shuster continued. “Let’s each one of us be an ambassador and show people what actually happened. If you screen the film, invite a survivor, let them speak, at a panel. Let them be heard. Don’t just show one side without the facts from the other side. Before you go into the film, or after it, come hear about what happened in Israel on Oct. 7. 1,200 people were murdered. 251 people were kidnapped. Yes, show all the facts.”

The IAC also launched a petition, “calling on cultural institutions, film festivals and movie theaters across the United States to accompany screenings of NAZA with panels, survivor testimony, and background and context materials,” according to a press release.

“We are not here to silence a movie, but we believe people should watch, ask difficult questions, challenge what they see and decide for themselves, but they also deserve to hear the perspectives and facts that this film does not present,” Noa Peri-Jensch, the IAC’s chief communities officer, added during Saturday’s protest.

NAZA, which took home the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, will start its theatrical release in the U.S. on Oct. 9, followed by a global rollout.

“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” filmmaker Abraham and Szor previously said of their Israel–Gaza war documentary. “The threats from the Israeli government to revoke our citizenship and the death threats do not change that and will not stop the film. We thank our colleagues for the solidarity and look forward to sharing NAZA all over the world very soon.”

Musk producer Nick Shumaker, Hollywood film financier Vania Schlogel, directors Zack London (Gods Don’t Give Gifts) and Nick Holt (AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About) took to the stage at the Zurich Summit this weekend to dig into the implications of AI for film.

Schlogel, who is founder and managing partner of L.A.-based Atwater Capital, also took up the baton of Chief Strategy Officer at AI creative platform Magnific, formerly known as Freepik, this summer.

The exec said that while her roots were in Hollywood film finance, she had understood it was an imperative for her to get to grips with AI during a board meeting at Magnific.

“In an interview about a year ago with the Financial Times, I’d actually said very publicly, that when all this AI stuff gets really big, I’m just going to go back to Idaho and disappear into the mountains, and that’s always actually been the genuine kind of feeling I espouse, as I’m not a technologist. I’ve always been a traditional Hollywood financier,” she told the panel.

“Our founder showed us videos and images from our largest competitor and how they had become viral, and it was sexualized children’s IP, it was horrible depictions of women, some of them famous, some of them not… some very racist things,” she explained. “I had this light bulb moment that this might not be something that I have necessarily been inured to historically, but I actually do need to be involved in.”

Since embracing the technology, Schlogel said she had seen multiple cases where the use of AI made sense, commercially and ethically, even if there were aspects of the technology she has qualms about such as the way in which the confident tone of AI assistants can encourage “cognitive surrender” in human beings even when their level of expertise on a subject is higher that the LLM they are consulting.

“It really is on all of us to get in front of it so that we can shape the ethical direction it goes. Because this will shape society, is shaping society, is even shaping human empathy and how we view each other. So it’s so important to get in the driver’s seat of it, whether you love it or hate,” she said.

Shumaker, head of AC Independent at Anonymous Content, acknowledged the power of AI as a tool across the cinema chain but said he felt compelled to raise questions around the use of original content by generative AI programs.

“The whole fair use in AI thing needs to be addressed. The lawsuits from New York Times, from every major media outlet, disregarding just stealing things from my perspective and ingesting is totally inappropriate. And I just want to put that on record,” he said.

“That we can say that this is the way things are going, at the same time as there’s theft with regards to intellectual property, it’s not a good thing. The notion that we get clogged up in lawsuits for five or six years to address that is not good for humans, for creators, or frankly, for the future of writers or cinema.”

He clarified that while Alex Gibney’s Musk, on which he is a producer, touches on the way Elon Musk is using AI to shape the future, and not necessarily for the best, the documentary used very little of the technology in its production.

He noted the Elon Musk avatar had been created in CGI by humans at a company, which has collaborated with Gibney in the past, with AI only used at the post-production stage to help lip-synching.

London, who is also known under the YouTube pseudonym of Gossip Goblin, is currently gearing up for the theatrical release of his fully AI-generated sci-fi anthology Gods Don’t Give Gifts.

He echoed Schlogel comments on needing to get ahead of the technology, suggested that the polarisation of views in the creative communities around AI was not necessarily helpful or going to change anything in the outcome..

“The the tricky thing is that people see AI as this monolithic thing. Obviously you have full end-to-end automation on one end of the spectrum, and super light AI augmentation on the other, like tweaking the voice of Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. That’s a pretty vast spectrum,” he said.

“It’s become such a polarized topic, you have kind of radical zealots on both sides of the equation. You have the burn Hollywood to the ground side and you have the fuck AI side that you know basically refuses to even accept that it’s part of the equation,” he said.

“The reality is that it’s happening. It’s coming. There’s no point in human history where we’ve seen incredibly advanced technology and said, ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’ The luddites didn’t succeed, and probably the anti-AI movement won’t either.”

Talking about the use of AI on his upcoming film Gods Don’t Give Gifts, London said it would never have been made without the technology.

“This film would never get greenlit otherwise. It’s way too esoteric and niche and cerebral, and so it’s not that we’re replacing a story that would otherwise get told and hire more people. This story wouldn’t exist otherwise; it wouldn’t get made. “

The trio were joined on stage by director Nick Holt, whose documentary AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About was playing at the summit’s parent event the Zurich Film Festival this weekend

Revolving around interviews with computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” for his work building artificial neural networks, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, as well as Anthropic and OpenAI engineers among others, it explores the question of whether AI will save or destroy humanity. ,

Tapping into questions around how AI will impact creativity, Holt said that, for now, he thought AI tools could make filmmaking more accessible.

“We’ve all got access to a pen and pencil, but not all of us can writer a Booker or Pulitzer award-winning novel. I think there are people with who could use AI to roll out concepts and films that otherwise might not get made. I just hope there’ll be a sense that the best work will always rise to the top,” he said.

“Hollywood studios aren’t shy of making 100 million dollar duds, and then the 14 year old in his bedroom or her bedroom using AI tools could make the next big hit. I think it’s a phenomenal tool for that, but I think the interesting thing that we have to deal with is are these systems grown rather than built, and then where does it go as far as our limitations?