VENICE, Italy (AP) — Kim Novak was worried she’d made a mistake. The 92-year-old star of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” had made the long trek from Oregon to Venice, Italy, for the film festival. There she’d be receiving a lifetime achievement award and supporting the world premiere of a documentary about her life and career, “Kim Novak’s Vertigo.”
But on that first day, she wasn’t feeling strong or up to the task.
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Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
“I thought I could handle it, then I thought, no I can’t, I’m not physically strong enough,” Novak told The Associated Press this week. “Then I heard my mother’s voice from heaven and she said ‘just have fun and enjoy it.’”
Novak listened to that voice and was glad she did. Being bipolar, she said, she’s used to going through a lot of emotions. But the experience in Venice has been a dream.
“It’s one of the very first events that I’ve really had fun, really fun,” she said.
Earlier in the week, she was presented with a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award. Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who presented the honor, listed off many of her most famous credits, including “Vertigo,” Otto Preminger’s “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Joshua Logan’s “Picnic,” “Pal Joey” and “Bell, Book and Candle.” Novak was the top box-office star in the world from 1958 through 1960 and became the first woman to start her own production company before leaving Hollywood behind in 1966 to live a private life devoted to painting.
“Most impressive is the fact that she was capable of projecting frailty, power, mystery. To appear, endearing, dynamic, mythical and phenomenal,” del Toro said. “And with all those wonderful arresting performances, she always carried a little bit of warmth, a little bit of heartbreak and a little bit of mystery.”
Novak reflects on her extraordinary life in Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary, which premiered out of competition in Venice. She said it was fate that Philippe came into her life and wanted to make the film.
“I was at the point where I wanted to talk about my life, because I’m at the end of my life,” Novak said. “It was meant to be. And I can’t think of anyone it was better to do it with.”
“I didn’t even know my phone had voice memos,” she laughed. “It’s not always easy for me to open up and discuss the intimate things, but it was wonderful because it was like I was talking to myself. Once you open the door, it all comes flooding out.”
Coming to the festival was brave of Novak, Philippe said. Just over a decade ago, Novak stepped back in the public eye to present at the 2014 Oscars, which led many online, including Donald Trump, to insult her appearance.
“The easy thing would have been to stay in Oregon and keep painting,” he said. “At this point in her life the hard thing is to come back into the spotlight and show herself again. But she did the hard thing. And she came on stage, not as an icon, not as a movie star, but she came on stage and said ‘I am you and you are me.’”
It’s Novak not as a golden age icon, but as a person that Philippe hopes audiences see and connect with in the film, which does not currently have a release date. For Novak, it’s been an illuminating experience, revisiting her extraordinary life.
“It’s time at the end of your life to put the puzzle pieces together and make them fit,” Novak said. “It’s an incredible experience to see them all falling in place and somehow coming to this festival is like putting some of the other pieces that you couldn’t put together that now come together and make a whole beautiful, beautiful, picture.”
Even the “Vertigo” suit she once hated so much as taken on a different light. In the film, she gets to see the costume for the first time since making the film. The fabric that she remembered having been so rough and hard had softened with time, which seemed like an apt metaphor.
“The opportunity to see it when you have all this life behind you, it makes you think that what you thought was right when you were young is not necessarily so. It could be wrong, and vice versa,” she said. “But all this you gain over time. And so becoming old is a beautiful thing, you know? And this festival, being able to experience it through Hollywood eyes, it’s just incredible. I loved it, I love it. I’m experiencing great joy.”
The Venice tribute, she added, was like “icing on the cake,” she said. “I like cake, but icing is the best.”
“What is sweeter in the world than appreciation,” she said. “I feel appreciated and you can’t know how much that means.”
She’s also looking forward to getting home and painting again. Every night at the festival she’s found herself sketching and dreaming up ideas for more works.
“My legacy is my art,” she said. “You have my old movies, but you also have my new perspective on life. I do it all in my work and I want that to be my legacy. I want to get in a whole lot more paintings before I pass. So I can’t wait to get back.”
For more coverage of the 2025 Venice Film Festival, visit https://apnews.com/hub/venice-film-festival.
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Kim Novak, recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, poses for photographers during the 82nd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Federal immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis have used aggressive crowd-control tactics that have become a dominant concern in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of a woman in her car last week.
They have pointed rifles at demonstrators and deployed chemical irritants early in confrontations. They have broken vehicle windows and pulled occupants from cars. They have scuffled with protesters and shoved them to the ground.
The government says the actions are necessary to protect officers from violent attacks. The encounters in turn have riled up protesters even more, especially as videos of the incidents are shared widely on social media.
What is unfolding in Minneapolis reflects a broader shift in how the federal government is asserting its authority during protests, relying on immigration agents and investigators to perform crowd-management roles traditionally handled by local police who often have more training in public order tactics and de-escalating large crowds.
Experts warn the approach runs counter to de-escalation standards and risks turning volatile demonstrations into deadly encounters.
The confrontations come amid a major immigration enforcement surge ordered by the Trump administration in early December, which sent more than 2,000 officers from across the Department of Homeland Security into the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Many of the officers involved are typically tasked with arrests, deportations and criminal investigations, not managing volatile public demonstrations.
Tensions escalated after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman killed by an immigration agent last week, an incident federal officials have defended as self-defense after they say Good weaponized her vehicle.
The killing has intensified protests and scrutiny of the federal response.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota asked a federal judge to intervene, filing a lawsuit on behalf of six residents seeking an emergency injunction to limit how federal agents operate during protests, including restrictions on the use of chemical agents, the pointing of firearms at non-threatening individuals and interference with lawful video recording.
“There’s so much about what’s happening now that is not a traditional approach to immigration apprehensions,” said former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldaña.
Saldaña, who left the post at the beginning of 2017 as President Donald Trump's first term began, said she can't speak to how the agency currently trains its officers. When she was director, she said officers received training on how to interact with people who might be observing an apprehension or filming officers, but agents rarely had to deal with crowds or protests.
“This is different. You would hope that the agency would be responsive given the evolution of what’s happening — brought on, mind you, by the aggressive approach that has been taken coming from the top,” she said.
Ian Adams, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, said the majority of crowd-management or protest training in policing happens at the local level — usually at larger police departments that have public order units.
“It’s highly unlikely that your typical ICE agent has a great deal of experience with public order tactics or control,” Adams said.
DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a written statement that ICE officer candidates receive extensive training over eight weeks in courses that include conflict management and de-escalation. She said many of the candidates are military veterans and about 85% have previous law enforcement experience.
“All ICE candidates are subject to months of rigorous training and selection at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, where they are trained in everything from de-escalation tactics to firearms to driving training. Homeland Security Investigations candidates receive more than 100 days of specialized training," she said.
Ed Maguire, a criminology professor at Arizona State University, has written extensively about crowd-management and protest- related law enforcement training. He said while he hasn't seen the current training curriculum for ICE officers, he has reviewed recent training materials for federal officers and called it “horrifying.”
Maguire said what he's seeing in Minneapolis feels like a perfect storm for bad consequences.
“You can't even say this doesn't meet best practices. That's too high a bar. These don't seem to meet generally accepted practices,” he said.
“We’re seeing routinely substandard law enforcement practices that would just never be accepted at the local level,” he added. “Then there seems to be just an absence of standard accountability practices.”
Adams noted that police department practices have "evolved to understand that the sort of 1950s and 1960s instinct to meet every protest with force, has blowback effects that actually make the disorder worse.”
He said police departments now try to open communication with organizers, set boundaries and sometimes even show deference within reason. There's an understanding that inside of a crowd, using unnecessary force can have a domino effect that might cause escalation from protesters and from officers.
Despite training for officers responding to civil unrest dramatically shifting over the last four decades, there is no nationwide standard of best practices. For example, some departments bar officers from spraying pepper spray directly into the face of people exercising Constitutional speech. Others bar the use of tear gas or other chemical agents in residential neighborhoods.
Regardless of the specifics, experts recommend that departments have written policies they review regularly.
“Organizations and agencies aren’t always familiar with what their own policies are,” said Humberto Cardounel, senior director of training and technical assistance at the National Policing Institute.
“They go through it once in basic training then expect (officers) to know how to comport themselves two years later, five years later," he said. "We encourage them to understand and know their training, but also to simulate their training.”
Adams said part of the reason local officers are the best option for performing public order tasks is they have a compact with the community.
“I think at the heart of this is the challenge of calling what ICE is doing even policing,” he said.
"Police agencies have a relationship with their community that extends before and after any incidents. Officers know we will be here no matter what happens, and the community knows regardless of what happens today, these officers will be here tomorrow.”
Saldaña noted that both sides have increased their aggression.
“You cannot put yourself in front of an armed officer, you cannot put your hands on them certainly. That is impeding law enforcement actions,” she said.
“At this point, I’m getting concerned on both sides — the aggression from law enforcement and the increasingly aggressive behavior from protesters.”
Law enforcement officers at the scene of a reported shooting Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
Federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
People cover tear gas deployed by federal immigration officers outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
A man is pushed to the ground as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Locher)
A woman covers her face from tear gas as federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray)
