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1922-2018 THE EMPIRE TRIBUTE STAN LEE Remembering the man who changed comics, cinema and storytelling forever HIS INTERVIEWS Ś THE COMPLETE STORY OF HIS LIFE Ś COLLABORATORS REMINISCE JANUARY 20 9
KICKS OFF OUR ANNIVERSARY YEAR CELEBRATING CINEMA’S ADVENTUROUS FILMMAKERS
THE LEGEND ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS A PERSONAL ESSAY FROM CAMERON HIS CREATIVE PARTNER SHARES HIS STORY
ALITA ROBERT RODRIGUEZ AND JAMES CAMERON JOIN FORCES FOR A R EVOLU TI ON ARY CYB ER - E P I C 20 Y E A RS I N T HE M A K I NG
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I N C I N E M A S J A N UA RY 1
THIS MONTH AT EMPIRE JUST THREE DAYS before this issue of Empire was due at the printers, the sad news broke. The godfather of comic books, the man without whom we wouldn’t have the modern cinematic universe, had died. Stan Lee, it was announced, had left this earth at the age of 95. As the tributes poured in, the Empire team gathered to share their own. He left an indelible print on all of us: his imagination, his energy, his spirit, his optimism, his heart. He didn’t just shape our childhoods, but our adulthoods too. He’s why we still believe in magic; in the transformative, transcendent power of stories. He was, quite simply, one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived. And we remember the life, career and legacy of the master of the Marvel Universe in a 22-page special starting on p11. It seems fitting that this issue is also the first in a special year of issues celebrating Empire’s 30th birthday and the filmmakers who have changed cinema forever. See below for more details, but for now let me just say... Excelsior!
TERRI WHITE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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2019 sees Empire turn 30! And to celebrate, we’re toasting the 30 most adventurous filmmakers of our lifetime, starting with James Cameron (see empireonline.com for the full list). That’s not all: we want to say thanks to our lovely, loyal subscribers for being such an important part of the Empire family. The coming year will see a host of subscriber-only treats including special covers (like the one you’re holding!), priority event booking and world-exclusive content. Not a subscriber? You’re going to want to fix that, pronto!
TURN TO PAGE 77 FOR DETAILS ON HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
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This month’s subscriberonly limited edition 30th birthday cover, by Supertotto.
Illustration: David Mahoney
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Whilst stocks last.
stan lee tribute AN AUDIENCE WITH STAN LEE Empire’s final interview with the great man, from Comic-Con 2017.
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STAN LEE REMEMBERED Chris Hewitt and Kenneth Branagh reminisce about the Stan they knew.
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A LIFE IN COMIC BOOKS How Stan Lee changed the world of popular culture forever.
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MARVEL ON SCREEN Charting the (sometimes rocky) cinematic journey of Stan Lee’s creations.
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JAMES CAMERON CELEBRATION Every month during our 30th anniversary, we celebrate one of our favourite directors. Starting with the director of the biggest films in history.
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ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL Robert Rodriguez directs. James Cameron writes and produces. The rest of us rub our thighs like Vic Reeves in Shooting Stars. THE FRONT RUNNER When it comes to the Oscar race, this is the favourite.
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ROMA Alfonso Cuarón guides us through the year’s best film that shares a name with a 2017/18 Champions League semi-finalist.
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LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA We are not throwing away our shot at making a predictable Hamilton reference.
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Alita: Battle Angel; Cold Pursuit; Teen Titans Go! To The
HELLBOY No del Toro or Perlman. But going back to the comics for inspiration, this reboot could still be a pearl, man.
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ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL The full story on how Deadpool has gone all 12A for this festive re-release, the complete count.
THE FAVOURITE When it comes to the Oscar race, this is the front runner. Hang on a sec...
HOW MUCH IS A PINT OF MILK Putting the ‘tea’ in Monty Python, nudge nudge, wink wink, milk milk, say no more — it’s only Eric Idle.
AQUAMAN The heartwarming tale of the bloke who sang, “Come on, Barbie, let’s go party.”
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CREED II Or ‘Rocky VIII’. Or ‘Rocky IV Part 2’. Whatever it’s called — it kicks of our verdicts of every new film.
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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT An oral history of that bathroom fight. Reloading arms included.
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Movies; Creed II; Stan Lee.
Getty Images. Spine lines issue 356: Newsstand: “Tack on another 12 months for courtship, an additional six months for attempting procreation” is from Couples Retreat. Subs: “Some ininities are simply bigger than other ininities” is from The Fault In Our Stars.
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Editors
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Editor-In-Chief Terri White
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CONTRIBUTORS
CLICK BAIT My delight at receiving my subscriber copy of issue 356 soon turned to horror... then anger. After a quick glace through the magazine, I placed it absentmindedly next to my expensive ďŹ gure collection. You can imagine my disbelief as half of my collection (mostly Marvel ďŹ gures) suddenly vanished out of existence. I demand some sort of compensation for the trauma, grief, and inconvenience this has caused. I’ve attached a photo as a warning to others. GORDON SMITH, VIA EMAIL
We can only apologise for the wanton destruction of 50 per cent of your property. But hey, it’s a magazine with Thanos on the cover — you should have heeded the heads-up. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the lagship Picturehouse Central in London’s West End, each membership comes pre-loaded with four free tickets, and gets you access to priority booking and exclusive discounts on everything in the cinema. When you write to us, please ensure you include your full contact details so we can arrange delivery of your prize.
GHOST RANKER on Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old:
“I SAW THIS YESTERDAY. THERE’S NO OTHER ‘WAR’ FILM LIKE IT. IT’S MASTERFUL AND CUTS YOU TO THE CORE.� ROXANNE FEA
Absolutely loving The Ranking. Can you please, please, please do Nicolas Cage? You could have a top ten for each year! STUART MASTERSON, VIA EMAIl A Face/Of between Empire stafers on the ďŹ lms of Nic Cage? Knowing us, it’s Inconceivable that it wouldn’t turn into a Dog Eat Dog situation. Still, Kick-Ass idea, Stuart.
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“Excelsior!�
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HARRY POTTER characters, names and related indicia are © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. WB SHIELD: © & ™ WBEI. WIZARDING WORLD trademark and logo © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Publishing Rights © JKR. (s18)
1922 2018
EMPIRE ’S 22-PAGE TRIBUTE TO THE MASTER STORYTELLER WHO CHANGED NOTJUST COMIC BOOKS BUT CINEMA FOREVER. EXCELSIOR! ILLUSTRATION JACEY
JANUARY 2019
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IN THE SUMMER OF 2017, EMPIRE GOT A CHANCE TO SIT DOWN WITH THE COMIC-BOOK TITAN FOR A FRANK AND FUNNY INTERVIEW. HERE, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN PRINT, IS THAT CHAT IN FULL WORDS CHRIS HEWITT PORTRAITS SARAH DUNN
WHERE BETTER TO meet the king of comic books than at San Diego Comic-Con? After all, were it not for Stan Lee’s creations, the entire event might very well not exist. Wherever he wandered around the vast San Diego convention centre, he was routinely mobbed by legions of Wolverines, Iron Men and even the odd Alien Queen (hey, everyone loved Stan Lee). In this place, the Marvel Maestro was nothing short of a deity, but, ever humble, Lee never missed an opportunity to walk among his people and talk to true believers face to face. In July of 2017, 42 years after his first appearance at Comic-Con, Lee granted an audience to Chris Hewitt for the Empire Podcast, reminiscing about his creations, his legacy and the importance of a well-placed hyphen. We’re at Comic-Con, Stan, and without you there probably wouldn’t even be a Comic-Con. Oh, I wouldn’t say that. The Comic-Con is a product of all the work that everybody does in the comic-book business and now it’s much more than comic books. Now you have actors, directors. It’s become a big pop-culture thing. Do you enjoy getting out there and meeting the fans? Oh, I love being with the fans and shaking hands and saying hello. And of course, my hand gets very tired after a while. They ought to allow you to shake with your left hand also. In fact, that may be a custom I may start. We can try it at the end of this interview. Speaking of customs, there is a very important thing I’d like to mention to your viewers worldwide. Most people who write the word comic book write it as two words. Don’t ever let them do that again! When you write comic book as two words, it means a comic book: a funny book. That’s not what comic books necessarily are. It should always be written as one word. That makes it a thing, a comic book. Sets it apart from everything else. Calling it a comic book as two words — that’s like saying it’s a science-fiction book or it’s a lovely story. No. It’s a comic book, one word. And you see to it. I will check on you later and all your listeners and make sure that they’re doing it right. We will update our house style. Attaboy. So this interview hasn’t been a total waste.
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Speaking of grammar, Spider-Man has a hyphen. Is that important to you? Yeah, very important. Without the hyphen, Spider-Man wouldn’t even be able to swing from building to building. That hyphen means so much. He checks the comics himself: “Is my name spelled right?” And I can relate to that. If anybody wrote Stan Lee and left out an E, I’d be upset. Well imagine how Spider-Man would feel without the hyphen. I tremble to think of it. Why did you originally hyphenate it? I wanted to play up the word “Spider”. By putting the hyphen, the kids get the Spider by itself. And then they see that he’s a man. But if it was all together, hey, there’s Spiderman. You know, there’s Batman. It would be like nothing. You notice I threw in that little ding at Batman? Never heard of him. You’re my kind of interviewer. It’s been a big week for you, Stan. On Tuesday you made your handprint at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in LA. It took me a half-hour to wash my hands and get that of me! That was terrible. It felt good, though. I don’t know what those things mean, really. I mean, so there I am with my handprint on the sidewalk where someone can step all over me. I think maybe that’s what they do to people they don’t like. ‘“Hey, let me put your print here on the sidewalk. Come on, everybody, walk all over him.” Of all the movie cameos you’ve done, what’s your absolute favourite? My favourite cameo is the one I did in the Thor movie [actually Avengers: Age Of Ultron] where he’s having a very potent drink. And I’m standing next to Thor and I say, “Hey let me have some of that.” And he says, “No, you can’t drink it. It’s too strong for you.” And no, I can handle it. So he gives me a drink and in the next scene they’re carrying me out. Now, you’re saying to yourself, “Why is that his favourite cameo? It’s no big deal.” It’s my favourite cameo because it’s my only cameo that had two scenes. First me with Thor with the drink and then being carried out. I hope that’ll give the various directors and producers the idea that Stan is more than a one scene kind of guy! You know, pretty soon I could run through the whole movie. You created all these amazing characters in the 1960s: Reed Richards, Peter Parker, Bruce Banner. A lot of alliteration there. Oh yeah, I’m a big alliteration kind of guy.
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The reason I did it, frankly, is I have the world’s worst memory. So if I have a name where the first name is the same letter as the second name, if I can think of one of the names, it gives me a clue to what the other name’ll start with. And it makes it easier! For instance, if I say, “Bruce, what the hell is his last name? It began with B. Oh yeah, Banner.” But if his name was Wilson, what would lead me to Wilson? I’d never think of his name! Did you ever imagine that these characters were going to live on as long as they have? I hoped the first issue would sell so I’d keep my job! You never know. I mean, you bring out a book and then I’d wait breathlessly for a month. It took that long to get the sales figures. And at the end of the month, my publisher would either say, “Alright, Stan, do a second issue of this, it’s alright.” Or he’d say, ‘“Boy, that was a bomb. Don’t write any more of this thing.” Fortunately he hasn’t said that, so it was alright. I wasn’t thinking legacy. I was thinking, “Can I pay the goddamn rent?” If you absolutely had to pick a favourite character, who would it be? It’s hard to pick a favourite, but you’re gonna ask me and the answer is Spider-Man. I like Spider-Man because he’s the most recognisable. Anywhere in the world you have a picture of Spider-Man, people know who he is. It’s sort of like Disney used to have Mickey Mouse, or the Coca-Cola bottle. You see it anywhere you knew what it was. Somehow or other, Spider-Man has become world famous. And Spider-Man costumes are bestselling costumes on Hallowe’en for kids practically all over the world. And of course, I’m so smart I never had a costume factory. I never did a Spider-Man costume. Everybody’s making all the dough but me! Stan Lee,
In the 1970s you wrote two screenplays with French director Alain Resnais, which were never made. What happened? It was a funny thing. It was called ‘The Monster Maker’, I think. It was in those days people were worried about pollution. So I got the idea to treat pollution as if it’s a monster. There’s a monster called Pollution. I wrote the screenplay. Alain loved it. And we took it to a guy named Martin Ransohof, who was the head of a company called Filmways. Martin read the screenplay and he said, “I like this. This is good. But of course, you’ll cut at least half of the dialogue.” ’Cause I had never written a screenplay before. I had these people talking like I’m talking now. They were going on endlessly, speech after speech. And they don’t do that in movies. So I said, “Okay.” But then my friend, Alain, who was sitting next to me, ruined both our careers by saying, “Stan will not change a word of it!” My luck, Alain loved it as it was. He was such a purist. He wanted every word there the way I had written it. So that script is still hanging around somewhere and if I could find it, I bet I could auction it of and get 20 or 30 bucks for it. He was a French filmmaker, was he also a comicbook fan? He wasn’t into comic books, he was into me and the intellectual things we discussed. Like baseball. Alain was a great guy. He was a brilliant man. He had really come over here to America to see if he could get to direct the Spider-Man movie. He was one of the first people who thought it would be good to have a movie about Spider-Man. I assume that he spoke to whoever made those decisions in those days and they decided not to do the movie. So then he was stuck with me with my pollution movie. He was a funny guy. He always wore a red shirt. Every time you’d see him, he had a red shirt. And one of the biggest
photographed exclusively for Empire in San Diego, California, on 23 July 2017.
mysteries of the time was, is it the same red shirt and he washes it every night and puts it on in the morning? Or does he have a lot of red shirts? We never figured that out. What’s next for you? Well, finish this interview. And then to ask my partner, Max [Anderson], what we do next. Max tells me where to go and what to do. And I’m gonna kill him for putting me next to a guy who asked me for such a long interview. He said, “Oh, it’ll just take a minute, Stan.” Stan, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Hey, it’s always a pleasure with you. Thank you. A left-handed handshake, to give your hand a rest? Oh well, that’s very considerate of you. You ought to give my mouth a rest with the talking too!
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EMPIRE ’SCHRIS HEWITT REFLECTS ON HIS TWO MEETINGS WITH THE MAN, THE MYTH-MAKER, STAN LEE
WHOEVER COINED THE maxim, “You should never meet your heroes,” clearly never met Stan Lee. I was lucky enough to do so on two occasions. The first at my very first San Diego Comic-Con, way back in 2003. A Comic-Con newbie, I wandered the halls, dazed and confused. And then, in a hotel lobby, I bumped into Stan The Man. On his way up to the penthouse suite, he was gracious enough to stop for a photo. It blew my mind. Was every Comic-Con like this, where you could just casually run into the godfather of modern comics? Well, as it turned out, no. I didn’t run into Lee at Comic-Con for another
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14 years. But when I did, it blew that old maxim out of the water. First, a confession: I grew up reading Marvel comics, but not ones written by Stan Lee. Instead, reading people like Chris Claremont, Peter David and Jim Shooter, writers who took the vast array of characters Lee had created (along with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Bill Everett and others), and made them their own. In fact, when I eventually went back and tracked down early copies of The Amazing Spider-Man, or Fantastic
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Clockwise from left: Stanley Martin Leiber, the man behind our modern mythology; Chris grills Stan for the Empire Podcast, July 2017; The look on Chris’ face is why you should should always
Alamy
meet your heroes.
Four, or X-Men, I often found Lee’s writing somewhat melodramatic and overly tricksy. But his knack for creating indelible characters, and his ability to mine universal themes, could not be denied. Without that, those who followed wouldn’t have had anything to build upon. They were truly standing on the shoulders of giants. I almost jumped of the bannister when I was three years old, convinced I was Spider-Man — that was, in no small part, down to Stan Lee. (My mum stopped me, thankfully.) And he was my hero because I had grown up, in the ’80s and ’90s, with Stan Lee’s voice inside my head. A born showman, who knew the value of brand recognition, he had positioned himself from the of as the face of Marvel. Every issue of every comic back then seemed to feature the words ‘Stan Lee presents’, even if he wasn’t actually involved. He seemed omnipresent in the Bullpen Bulletin section of each comic, where he would constantly deliver his catchphrases — “’Nuf said”, “True Believers”, or “Excelsior!”, and talk about “No-Prizes”. His distinctive, brassy voice introduced each episode of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, the first cartoon I remember worshipping. His was a voice you immediately liked and could trust. In some ways, he was as big a name as the heroes he helped create. So, then, July 2017. Comic-Con. San Diego. The same hotel in which I’d run into Lee years before, only now I was also going to the penthouse suite. I was due to interview Stan for the Empire Podcast, only I was slightly nervous. Not about the interview itself — but about Stan himself. Just weeks before, his wife of 69 years, Joan, had passed away. Frankly, I was worried about Stan. I’d seen my dad struggle to cope after my mum died and knew how heavily the loss of a partner could weigh on someone. Plus, Stan was now 93. I was concerned about how fragile he might be. Age, no respecter of legends, is the great leveller. I needn’t have been too concerned. I heard Stan before I saw him, that unmistakable Noo Yawk voice coming from an adjacent room. Then he appeared — a little thinner, a lot shakier. That unmistakable slicked-back barnet, which had always seemed glued to his head, a lot whiter. But, the second we sat down and I pressed the record button, the frail OAP in front of me disappeared, and Stan Lee sat in his place. Stan Lee, the great entertainer, who took great pleasure in busting my balls any time I asked a dumb question. “I’m gonna kill Max for putting me next to a guy who asked me for such a long interview,” he joked, as we wrapped up. It wasn’t the hardest-hitting interview of my career. I wasn’t there to give him a Paxmaniacal grilling. And I wasn’t going to push a 93-year-old man, grieving over the loss of his wife, on the finer details of that stellar burst of creativity 50 years prior. Instead, we talked about alliteration in superhero names, about the importance of the
hyphen in Spider-Man. I like to think we both had fun. The PR who set up the interview, Clare, took a picture of me interviewing Stan, which now hangs on my oice wall. In it, I look like a man transfixed by one of his childhood heroes. You get a no-prize for guessing that’s because I was. One thing that stands out in my memory from that all-too-brief encounter. As we chatted, Stan sitting in an armchair, me perched on a footstool next to him, a small crowd, made up of Stan’s associates and the Empire contingent, gathered to watch. We were about halfway through when I realised that part of that contingent was Michael Rooker, who plays Yondu in the Guardians Of The Galaxy series. I realised this because Rooker gatecrashed the interview, coming over and briefly chatting to Stan. Rooker, it seems, had just rocked up at the penthouse to pay his respects to the great man; the Don Corleone of comic books. When he got up to leave, he gave Stan a kiss on the forehead, and that’s when it struck me: all of us in that room had grown up with this rambunctious, perky personality in our lives. We were all, in some way, the children of Stan Lee. Without him, there might have been a Comic-Con, but not on this scale. There might have been comic-book movies, but not like these. And I might not have fallen in love with writing, which led me to fall in love with cinema, which led me to Empire, which led me to a hotel room in San Diego on a warm July afternoon. And in that moment, I realised that the old saying was a load of bollocks. You should meet your heroes. And, if you can, have them bust your balls a little. Thanks for everything, Stan.
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THOR DIRECTORKENNETHBRANAGHWRITES EXCLUSIVELYFOR EMPIRE ABOUTTHESINGULAR EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH STAN LEE
Main: Branagh on set with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Odin (Anthony Hopkins). Inset: Branagh ямБnds his new Hamlet at the premiere of Thor in Los Angeles, May 2011.
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Alamy, Getty Images
LUNCH WITH STAN Lee was a journey into a hyperspace of fame. First you pass through his version of Beatlemania. He was cheerfully mobbed as the pair of us strolled through Beverly Hills together. Car horns toot, all ages smile and genuflect, selfies are numerous and borne by the great man with an insouciant twinkle. Then into the restaurant where the hard-nosed masters of the movie universe step aside to kiss the ring and allow Stan to be ushered to his favourite corner table, where he sees all and is gazed upon by all. I was there to quiz him about the history of Thor, which I was to direct for Marvel Studios. He was there to tease me about having blagged the job because, as a so-called Shakespearean, I was the only director who travelled with his own bag of “thees” and “thous”, which he had so loved writing for early versions of the comics. He said he was disappointed that I hadn’t shown up in tights. There was indeed something Shakespearean about Mr Lee. Our lunch revealed the energy and appetite of Falstaf, even though his nimble frame could only attract words like “dapper”, and “slender”. For a long life lived through all the usual human melodramas, I sensed no secret sadness in Stan. His energy, his optimism, his idealism, were NOW. That very afternoon he told me he was of to make a deal that would net him large profits, a situation he warmly welcomed, even relished. The life force was astonishing, his concentration electric. He answered all my questions about him and the great Kirby, his collaborator of genius, and of course we talked about what Stan’s cameo would be in the new Thor movie. He wanted something Shakespearean. I told him he could do whatever he wanted, but as one of the great American originals, we might start with that. In the end, when it came to his role, Stan, as a crusty cowboy countryman, tried with frustration to drive a pick-up truck out of a crater, where it was attached to Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. I figured if anyone on Earth could shift that hammer who wasn’t a mythic Norseman, it would be Stan Lee. But even he couldn’t do it. Instead he brought the house down with a comic oneliner — channelling W.C. Fields crossed with P.T. Barnum — and left the car. At the end of our day of work together he gave me a hug, said I should cast him as Hamlet, and that we’d make a fortune out of a new Danish comic. I started to tell him I’d think about it, but before I could finish the sentence, he’d been swept up in a massive crowd of admirers (that day’s crowd artists). He was danced away like Fred Astaire impersonating the Pied Piper. I assumed this day was being wiped from his mind even as we spoke, but at his car, he turned before getting in, stood tall on the footplate, above the crowds, and yelled back to me, “Hey, kid (he always called me kid), you, me and Billy Shakespeare — pretty good team, don’t you think?” He got into the car. I could have wept. I only had one regret. And then the window wound down, the hand came up, the head inclined back, and with the wind in his (I suspect) not entirely natural hair, he said it, “Thanks, kid — EXCELSIOR!” Thank you, Stan Lee. Rest well.
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HOW A POOR KID FROM NEW YORK CHANGED THE FACE OF POPULAR CULTURE AND BECAME, TO SO MANY, A SUPERHERO HIMSELF WORDS DAN JOLIN
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HIS STORY BEGINS IN A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW. It’s 1929 and seven-year-old Stanley Martin Lieber lives in a tiny rear apartment in upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights, where his family moved after the Wall Street Crash ushered in the Great Depression, crushing his father Jack’s career prospects as a dress cutter. When Stanley looks out of the window of the apartment’s front room — his bedroom — all he can see are the bricks and mortar of the building on the other side of a narrow alleyway. While his father sits, scouring the job ads for something, anything — or arguing with his mother, Celia, about money — the kid loses himself in the adventures of The Hardy Boys or Dick Tracy, and creates his own adventures, too. “I began scribbling little illustrated stories to amuse myself,” Stanley — or Stan Lee, as he’d become — wrote decades later in his autobiography, Excelsior! The Amazing Life Of Stan Lee. With no horizon through his window, he drew his own: a long pencil strike across a blank sheet of paper, onto which he would scratch crude stick figures, living out his simple stories. “This was a make-believe world I loved,” Lee recalled, “because I could retreat to it from the outside.” This early act of creation came to define Stan Lee. He was an escapist rooted in a real, relatable world. A person who so abhorred the “forced idleness” sufered by his father, he could seemingly never sit still for a moment. The optimist who always managed to find the positive in the negative. The lonely kid who craved community. “Stan Lee wrote about how adventure books and Errol Flynn movies shaped him,” says Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, “but I never once heard him talk about sharing those passions with other kids. Which makes his desire, years later, to create this kind of surrogate-family work place at Marvel all that more poignant. I think that probably wouldn’t have happened if he was a super-happy, perfectly socialised young boy.” It’s as if those cramped, penurious and socially remote formative years filled Lee with so much pent-up energy, it powered him for the rest of his long, productive life. He couldn’t slow down, couldn’t give up — even when he’d won. When he was 15 years old, Stanley entered a weekly contest in the New York Herald Tribune, inviting high-school students to pen a 500-word article on what they considered to be the week’s most important news story. He won first prize. So, he re-entered the next week, and won again. After scoring a hat-trick, the Herald Tribune’s editor wrote to him, asking him to give other kids a chance. He also suggested he might want to become a professional writer.
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Previous spread: Stan Lee peruses 50 years of Marvel, October 1991. Clockwise from main: Lee oversees Spider-Man with artist John Romita, 1978; Lee serving in the US Army as part of the Signal Corps Training Film Division during World War II; The debut of The Fantastic Four; X-Men assemble; Spider-Man swings by for the first time.
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A long, tangled string of parttime jobs followed writing obituaries, putting together press releases for the National Tuberculosis Hospital in Denver, and selling Herald-Tribune subscriptions to fellow high-schoolers. On graduating DeWitt Clinton High in 1939, he needed something more permanent. His uncle, Robbie Solomon, worked at a small publishing company on Manhattan’s West Side. They needed a gofer in their comics division. After an interview with Timely Comics’ editor Joe Simon — one of Captain America’s cocreators, with staf artist Jack Kirby — 17-year-old Stanley Lieber was hired for $8 a week. Less than two years later, he was made editor-in-chief. Albeit under a diferent name.
THE ORIGIN STORY
of Stan Lee — the pseudonym, that is — is one of professional embarrassment. Rather than being thrilled at having the opportunity to write text fillers for Captain America or create superheroes like 1941 Nazi-basher the Destroyer, young Lieber was mortified. He was a jovial presence in the oice, at times even tootling little tunes on his ocarina — much to Kirby’s annoyance — but he harboured an ambition to write The Great American Novel. And comic books at the time were galaxies away from Great, having only recently evolved from newspaper strips like Tarzan and Popeye to overtake pulp magazines in popularity. This was a mere three years after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman for National Allied Publications, with
Timely heroes like Captain America, the first Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner muscling onto newsstands soon after. Aside from them, it was all Westerns and monsters and jungle adventurers and funnies. “I was probably the ultimate, quintessential hack,” wrote Lee in Excelsior!. He decided he would only put his given name to the work that might one day win him a Pulitzer. So, for his comic-book scribblings, he adopted a variety of pen names: Stan Martin. S.T. Anley. Neel Nats. And Stan Lee. Fortunately, it was the latter one that stuck — so well, he eventually adopted it legally. By Lee’s own admission, he ascended from ocarina-playing inkwell-filler to editor-in-chief “by default”. After a pay dispute, Simon and Kirby quit Timely ❯ late in 1941 for its biggest rival, DC
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Comics. “Since I was the only other one in the department, Martin [Goodman, the owner] put me in charge ‘temporarily’ until he could find a replacement,” Lee wrote. “But apparently he had a short interest span and eventually stopped looking.” The truth was, Lee’s exuberant nature made him someone Timely’s employees could look up to — even when he wore a propeller beanie around the artist’s oice (nicknamed The Bullpen). He also mucked in, writing two or three stories per week. But while Lee started young, and was full to the brim with ambition and vim, it would be another two decades before he hit his creative peak and forever changed the popularcultural landscape. This fast-rising workaholic was, strangely, a slow-burn success. And that success didn’t hit until he was on the verge of walking away from comic books forever.
IN 1954, NEW
York psychiatrist Dr Frederic Wertham published Seduction Of The Innocent, which blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency, sexual permissiveness and spreading Communism. Hundreds of thousands of American parents were scared into binning these apparently toxic publications and the comic-book industry was in a serious decline. If this weren’t enough to dampen Lee’s creative spirits, Timely’s distributor went out of business in 1957, forcing it to turn to another distributor, Independent News — which was owned by DC. It stipulated that Timely could only publish a maximum of eight titles a month (previously it published close to 80). Mass layofs followed, executed by Lee: “It was the most horrible thing I ever had to do,” Lee told Howe. Meanwhile, Lee felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction; if he left Timely, what else could he do? He was now in his late thirties and had spent so long in comic books, he didn’t imagine being taken seriously by the likes of Time magazine or Simon & Schuster. Even after Timely found a new distributor and set about rebuilding its lines — tempting back Jack Kirby, who along with artist Steve Ditko saw an opportunity in this fresh burst of creativity — Lee remained downcast. Comic books were still ailing, disposable, and aimed at kids. Almost 20 years after setting Stanley Lieber aside, Stan Lee was still no closer to writing that Great American Novel. “I felt I was wasting my adult life and whatever little talent I might possess on a job that wasn’t all that meaningful,” he wrote in Excelsior!. He needed something fantastic to happen.
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That something was a game of golf. In mid-1961, Martin Goodman hit the green with Jack Liebowitz, publisher of DC Comics, who started boasting about how well his new series The Justice League of America — which teamed up Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other DC heroes — was selling. Goodman rushed back to the oice and ordered Lee to come up with his own Justice League-y superhero gang. “You could use our old Human Torch and Sub-Mariner and maybe Captain America,” Goodman suggested. “That’ll save you from having to dream up any new characters.” Lee had just that day resolved to announce his resignation, but found himself wrong-footed by Goodman’s sudden
ebullience. If he was going to quit anyway, what did he have to lose? So, working closely with Jack Kirby, Lee concocted an entirely new kind of superhero group: The Fantastic Four. Debuting on 8 November 1961, Mr Fantastic, The Thing, the Invisible Girl and the (second) Human Torch were diferent from the chest-thrusting do-gooders who populated DC’s titles. Their powers were foisted upon them by a traumatic bombardment of cosmic rays.
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They were flawed, they bickered. They had to deal with paying the rent when they weren’t trying to save the planet. They were out-of-this-world, for sure. But they were also surprisingly relatable. “The Fantastic Four were like a family, and had the kinds of fights and moments of warmth you wouldn’t see between, say, Superman and Batman,” says Howe. “These heroes had a ‘feet of clay’ appeal.”
EVEN BEFORE THE
Clockwise from main: Lee, with Hulk artwork in 1979; Moving into TV with Thor Eric Kramer and Hulk Lou Ferrigno in 1988; The Bill Bixby/ Ferrigno interface for the incredibly popular Incredible Hulk show; Lee chats with Peter Parker/ Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond, 1978.
sales totals came in, Lee knew The Fantastic Four was a success, “because of the amount of enthusiastic mail we received”. So, he, Kirby, Ditko and other artists entered an astonishing period of creativity, dreaming up Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Thor, Ant-Man and the X-Men during a fevered two years that saw sales rise beyond anyone’s expectations. The next year, Goodman wanted to rebrand the company and he and Lee settled on Marvel, after Timely’s very first comic-book publication, Marvel Comics. It appealed to Lee, “because it lent itself to so many slogans and catchphrases, such as… ‘Make Mine Marvel’, and ‘Marvel Marches On’.” Lee, with his P.T. Barnum-esque tendencies, couldn’t resist a catchy slogan — or, for that matter, a bit of alliteration. Now Marvel was rolling, and posing a serious threat to its stunned competitors, Lee and his collaborators’ innovations came thick and fast. Foremost, there was the psychological depth and the moral ambiguity they brought to their characters; “I don’t think a reader would like a superhero if he had no particular personality, no problems,” Lee told Yahoo Entertainment in 2015. “I always felt that way about Superman: Clark Kent was just a guy, a reporter. I didn’t know what his problems were.” Often, Marvel’s heroes sufered pangs of loneliness, and felt like misfits — much like little Stanley Lieber once did. But Lee also made them speak in a realistic way, using slang, making quips, being smartasses. He introduced long story arcs which would continue over several issues, as well as establishing a shared universe, where Spider-Man could try to join the Fantastic Four, or Captain America (revived from his war days) could trade barbs with Iron Man. It was a universe that Marvel’s readers could immerse themselves in and feel a part of, something Lee encouraged by introducing letters pages to his comics, and interacting with his readers via his ‘Stan’s Soapbox’ column and the ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ page, which shared news on upcoming titles. For the first time, comics were not just a read-and-trash format, they were the medium for a community of readers to express opinions, ideas and enthusiasm. “I tried to do everything that the competition wasn’t doing,” Lee said. “It was especially important to me to keep a warm, friendly tone.” If a reader wrote “Dear Editor,” he’d change it on the page to “Hi, Stan.” And he’d never sign of “Yours Truly”, favouring “Hang Loose,” “Face Front,” “’Nuf Said,” and, eventually, “Excelsior!”, which, he explains in his autobiography, is “an Old English word meaning ‘Upward and Onward to Greater Glory!’” It was an appropriate choice. During the ’60s, Marvel boomed, reaching a far bigger audience than children — Hulk, Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer became a hit with college students particularly — while readers stuck with their favourite characters issue after issue, year after year. DC, though home to such greats as Superman and Batman, seemed stale by comparison, and by the mid-’60s was eclipsed by its underdog competitor, which now sold an estimated 35 million ❯ comics per year.
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DURING THIS DECADE,
Lee was writing and editing as many as eight series simultaneously, meaning the traditional approach of providing artists with full scripts before they illustrated the panels wasn’t feasible. Rather than simply delegate to other writers, Lee pioneered ‘The Marvel Method’. He’d give the artist a synopsis that they’d expand on the page into a full visual story, after which Lee would fill in the empty word balloons and captions to fit the action. “Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all,” Lee said in a 1968 interview. “I’ll just say to Jack, ‘Let’s let the next villain be Dr Doom’. He’s so good at plots. I’m sure he’s a thousand times better than I.” This was a much more collaborative process than the artists had experienced before, giving them a huge amount of freedom. But it blurred the lines between writer and artist to a degree which, many felt, the credits on the splash page failed to reflect. Lee, they claimed, took too much credit, with Kirby and Ditko feeling especially unappreciated. Eventually, both quit. Ditko exited Marvel in 1966, never forgiving Lee for not properly recognising him as the creator of Spider-Man, while in 1970 Kirby defected to DC. “I was never given credit for the writing I did,” Kirby said at the time. “Most of the writing at Marvel is done by the artist from the script.” Fantastic Four, he insisted, “was my idea.” After Kirby’s departure, the long-running DC/Marvel rivalry took a fierce, personal turn, with the artist inventing a Lee-a-like character called Funky Flashman, who spoke alliteratively and never kept a promise. Lee was hurt. In Excelsior! he wrote, “I’ve always felt the Marvel Method strips were true collaborations between artist and writer in the most literal sense.” Sean Howe believes Kirby and Ditko genuinely contributed much more than just the art and the visual concepts on their respective titles. “I think it’s appropriate to see Kirby as the ‘director’, in a sense,” he says. “While I see Stan Lee as a brilliant editor and a brilliant marketer and talent scout. But I do think having his personality behind it was also a key component of what made it work.”
LEE WOULD NEVER
again be so productive as he was during the ’60s, when Marvel hit its peak and comic books experienced their Silver Age. Eventually, in 1971, three years after Goodman sold Marvel to the Perfect
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Film and Chemical Corporation (later renamed Cadence Industries), Lee was promoted to president and publisher of the company. The former role didn’t suit him well — too much number-crunching, not enough showmanship — but after swiftly resigning, he threw himself into his publisher duties with his customary brio. While he was finally stepping away from the editorial coal face, Lee hardly stopped coming up with the big ideas, and talking them up even bigger. “I wanted to bring our company to the next plateau, to make it the next Disney,” he reflected in Excelsior!.
But that never happened (though Marvel is now owned by Disney, and responsible for a fair chunk of the studio’s mega-revenue). While Lee travelled around the US, appearing at conventions and pushing its characters on TV and radio, the comics dropped in circulation, the result of an industrywide malaise. In 1980, he finally stepped away from print completely, and in ’81 moved to LA, becoming creative director
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Clockwise from main: At the premiere of Spider-Man 2, 2004; A rare mis-step with Howard The Duck; Collaborator and artist extraordinaire Steve Ditko; Just one of his trusty cameos, in
Alamy, Getty Images, Marvel, REX/Shutterstock
2004’s Fantastic Four.
of the newly formed Marvel Productions, to develop “Saturday morning cartoons, prime time specials and pilots”. However, despite Lee’s belief that Marvel’s characters were ripe for the cinema, the only one that made it into cinemas during this time was Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck in 1986 — a critical and commercial disaster. Lee didn’t fare much better in his own business ventures, and the twilight of his career was characterised by bad business decisions and bizarre new project announcements. In 1998, while still a paid figurehead for Marvel, he formed Stan Lee Media with an entrepreneur named Peter F. Paul. Lee would create all-new characters for movies, video games and the web as well as comics, while looking for opportunities to marry up with other brands, and acts such as the Wu-Tang Clan and the Backstreet Boys. But it
turned out that Paul was using Lee’s name to rip of investors, and he was arrested for fraud in 2001, leaving the company to collapse. Lee’s next venture, POW! Entertainment, hardly fared much better, but given the projects it announced, we can’t be too surprised. There was 2003 cartoon series Stripperella, for example, a team-up with Pamela Anderson that had episode titles like ‘The Curse of the WereBeaver’. Or the Jason Connerystarring direct-to-cable movie Stan Lee’s Lightspeed. Or the Arnold Schwarzenegger cartoon show which cast the Austrian Oak as The Governator. It didn’t end well with POW, either: earlier this year, Lee announced he was suing the company for $1 billion in damages, for stealing his identity, name and likeness. During his latter days, Lee’s zany failures may have outnumbered his successes, but they are further proof of his undimmed enthusiasm and high-velocity creativity, which powered him all the way through his life. There are certainly dark moments in Lee’s story — the rifts with Kirby and Ditko; his suing of Marvel in 2002 for not paying him movie royalties, despite an astonishing salary deal to simply remain its figurehead; and, more troubling by far, the accusation earlier this year by a Chicago-based masseuse of sexual misconduct [a claim Stan Lee denied through his lawyer]. He was far from perfect. But he was never a phoney. That chummy, zingypattered persona wasn’t a mask. It was, says Howe, “an amplification of his personality, an extension of who he really was. Kind of like his superheroes: bigger than life.” For Howe, the most enduring aspect of Lee’s legacy is his commitment to joy. “It’s not the superhero genre that makes people happy. It’s that feeling of exuberance that Stan Lee fostered.” We felt that in every cameo Lee provided for all the movies that eventually were made, based on his creations. He was a bright, sprightly, almost mischievous presence, always happy to deliver a little gag, or be the butt of one. And Lee was absolutely right: his characters do make for great cinematic entertainment. It all started in a room without a view, with a seven-year-old boy creating his own make-believe worlds. And now Stanley Lieber’s story ends in the cinema auditorium — a room with a limitless view, where we can all retreat into his make-believe worlds.
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MODERN CINEMA WOULD LOOK VERY DIFFERENT WERE IT NOT FOR THE INNOVATION AND IMAGINATION OF STAN LEE WORDS CHRIS HEWITT PORTRAIT JASON BELL
THE FIRST WAS on a beach, as a hot-dog vendor staring open-mouthed at a mutant out for a stroll. The most recent, which is just about to be seen by cinemagoers around the world, is rather meaningful, as a fancy-dress store owner giving advice, and a costume, to a young, confused Spider-Man. In between, there were stints as a general, a beauty pageant judge, a postman (twice!), and a school bus driver. Yes, Stan Lee’s cameos are fun. Partially because Lee was a terrible ham who loved gurning for the camera. And not least because they’re the means by which an entire generation of people who never picked up a Marvel comic know his
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name, and his face. He’s that old geezer who keeps cropping up in all those Marvel movies, so much so that some bright spark came up with a theory that Lee is an omnipotent being, recasting himself in various movies as a demonstration of his power. But they’re also important. Especially the cameos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All 20 of them (and counting — it’s believed Lee had filmed his Captain Marvel and Avengers 4 cameos before he passed; no word yet on Spider-Man: Far From Home). Because there didn’t need to be 20 of them, for a start. Kevin Feige and co could have paid Lee lip service with a cameo in Iron Man
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(as ‘Himself’, getting mistaken for Hugh Hefner by Tony Stark), and let that be that. But they didn’t. Because the cameos are more than cameos. They’re a way of saying thank you to the man whose vision, and Vision, set out the template which allowed the MCU to change the film industry. Possibly forever.
YOU CAN’T TRACE
every hurricane back to the butterfly whose flapping wings started it of. But in the case of Hollywood and Stan Lee’s seismic impact upon it, we absolutely can. In the early ’60s, Lee, Kirby and Ditko et al were in the middle of that inspired, feverish burst of creative activity, coming up with iconic characters at a dizzying rate. But the big twist was that these characters all lived in the same world, and for the most part, the same city (New York), and could come and go in each other’s lives, and stories, as they placed. This idea of a shared universe wasn’t a particularly new one, but Lee had a golden touch, particularly back then, and a knack for tapping into the zeitgeist. By the time The Amazing Spider-Man launched, in March of 1963, the Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko cover featured the friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler surrounded by the Fantastic Four. Inside, the cover blurb promised, “Spider-Man Meets The Fantastic Four”. And it made good on that promise. Just a few months later it was followed by The Avengers, which packaged together The Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man and Iron Man like they were a Domino’s meal deal. It went down a storm. Crossovers and cameos became de rigueur, not just for Marvel but the comic book industry as a whole. And, eventually, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When Kevin Feige sat in a room at Comic-Con in 2006 and announced tentative plans for the first self-financed films from Marvel Studios, with a series of solo films for characters like Iron Man and Captain America, culminating with The Avengers (Avengers Assemble here), he was drawing directly from the Lee playbook. That it took almost 40 years to get to that stage speaks volumes about Hollywood’s long, complicated relationship with comic-book movies — and some world-class idiocy into the bargain.
MOVIE STUDIOS WERE
wary, perhaps even suspicious, of comic books. They were bright, garish — y’know, for kids. Now and again, a toe would be dipped tentatively into the water, with varying degrees of success. But even when ❯ something would hit really big, as with
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1978’s Superman The Movie, the lone canary down the coal mine would invariably not be followed by an opera. Which came as something of a surprise, because Hollywood was nothing if not a town largely devoid of ideas. When something came along that was a licence to print money, even briefly, they tended to run it into the ground. But through the ’60s, ’70s and most of the ’80s, they gave comic-book movies the kind of wide berth Captain America gives sex parties. Marvel, in particular, really struggled to get its properties onto the big screen. Lee was aware of the potential of the characters he had co-created — ‘The Monster Maker’, that unproduced screenplay he wrote for French director Alain Resnais, came about as a result of meeting with Resnais to discuss a potential Spider-Man movie — and, in 1981, having long since stopped writing comic books, relocated to Hollywood in an attempt to get some deals of the ground. It’s fair to say that these endeavours, by Lee and others, were less than successful and, in some cases, disastrous. Without a coherent, cogent strategy in place, rights to Marvel properties were sold seemingly willy-nilly, almost as if some kind of tombola were involved. For example, the rights to the Fantastic Four were sold to a German producer, Bernd Eichinger, for a paltry $250,000. When the rights were about to lapse back to Marvel, he teamed with Roger Corman for an ultra-cheap FF movie that was so bad, it was never oicially released. Those who’ve seen it say that it’s worse than the Josh Trank movie of 2015, which is quite the statement. Marvel really started getting serious about the movie business in 1993, when the company was acquired by toys giant ToyBiz. Avi Arad came aboard, and recognised that Marvel was sitting on a potential goldmine; one which it would be wise to mine itself. Setting up Marvel Entertainment (which became Marvel Studios in 1996), the company started getting involved with adaptations of its properties. The snowball efect was almost immediate. In 1998, Blade became the first Marvel character to get his own movie, via New Line. That did well enough to convince Fox to finally take a gamble on X-Men, that weird line of comics they’d had the rights to since 1994. When the first X-Men movie opened in 2000, complete with Stan Lee cameo, and grossed $300 million worldwide, that quickly begat Sam Raimi’s record-breaking Spider-Man, complete with another Stan Lee cameo, over at Sony. Which in turn begat Daredevil and Fantastic Four (a releasable one) at Fox, Ghost Rider at Sony, Hulk at Universal, and more. Many, many more. The comic-book movie, after years of derision, was having its day. But still, something wasn’t quite right.
ESSENTIALLY, THE PROBLEM
was that the rights to major Marvel characters had been dotted around town. And while there were tentative talks at having the Fantastic Four, including a young actor called Chris Evans, cameo in an X-Men movie, or vice versa, that was about it as far as emulating Lee’s utopian ideal of a shared universe went. You can almost imagine the screams of frustration from Marvel HQ at the great opportunities gone begging to do something truly groundbreaking. Again, shared universes, where characters from one movie flit in and out of another movie that isn’t necessarily a sequel, aren’t new to cinema. Just ask Kevin Smith, or Quentin Tarantino. But Marvel saw a chance to cultivate by far the most ambitious. After an internal shule that saw Arad depart, with his number two, Kevin Feige, stepping into the hot seat, Marvel Studios announced that slate of films: Iron Man, Captain America, a new Hulk film, and Thor. To most of Hollywood, they were second-tier characters, nuts they had found diicult or almost
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Previous spread: Robert Downey Jr, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, Rocket Raccoon and Stan Lee in 2017. This page, top to bottom: Hugh Jackman in 2003’s X-Men 2; Lee greets Chris Evans (Cap!) at Comic-Con 2011; Ryan Reynolds reclines as Deadpool in 2016; Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) in this year’s game-changing Black Panther.
s ta n l e e t r i b u t e
This page, top to bottom: Avengers Assemble in 2012, including Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man; Tobey Maguire slings his web in Sam Raimi’s 2004 Spider-Man; Lee dressed as a postman for his Fantastic Four cameo in 2005, with Michael Chiklis (Thing); 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War: Wong (Benedict Wong), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Tony Stark (Downey Jr).
impossible to crack, with the rights reverting to Marvel in most cases. But Feige and his team were confident of the power of these characters. And you know the rest. From the moment Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury casually gatecrashed the very, very end of Iron Man, the modern movie landscape changed forever. Yet, it’s easy to forget how easily it could all have gone wrong; how it could have crashed down around Feige’s ears had even one of those early movies gone badly wrong. Instead, they trusted in the characters they had — each one of which was co-created by Stan Lee — and kept faith in the course they were setting. Which was something that had never been attempted before — a multi-part narrative, unfolding over many years, with each new instalment informed and enhanced by what had come before. And all of it built on the platform provided by Stan Lee. The success of the MCU, which eventually attracted a $4 billion takeover from Disney in 2009, has been a validation of all those who felt, like Lee, that superheroes could work on the big screen. And what a success it has been — last year alone, two movies in the MCU, Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, passed the billion-dollar mark, and shaped the cultural narrative for months. The latter, in fact, became just the fourth movie in history to gross $2 billion. There are those, of course, who see Marvel Studios and the MCU as the epitome of everything that’s wrong with modern blockbusters, particularly as Feige and his team make groundbreaking deals like the one that brought Spider-Man, ensconced firmly at Sony, into the MCU. Or, indeed, Disney’s multi-billion takeover of 20th Century Fox, which opens the door to the X-Men being incorporated into the MCU, and further world domination. They rail against the homogenisation of mass entertainment, and lay the blame for all the copycat shared universes and interlinked franchises that have sprung up in its wake. But that almost wilfully ignores the creative success of these movies. Funny, thrilling, laced with great character work, a Marvel Studios movie (important distinction: not to be confused with movies made “in association with” Marvel Studios, like Venom) is as surefire a guarantee of a good time at the movies as it’s possible to get. In just ten years, Marvel Studios has gone from being Hollywood’s great gamble (putting Iron Man on the cover of Empire in 2008 was by no means a sure thing) to transforming the business. Throw a rock in Hollywood, and chances are you’ll hit someone working on a shared universe, desperately trying to unlock the secrets of Marvel Studios’ 11 herbs and spices. Very few of those have even come close to emulating Marvel’s success, though. And frankly, blaming Marvel Studios for the mistakes made by, say, the DCEU or Universal’s much-ballyhooed and then quietly shuttered Dark Universe — two examples of shared universes that tried to copy the Marvel model without really understanding it, or first laying the groundwork — is as futile as blaming George Lucas or Steven Spielberg for the way Star Wars and Jaws changed the blockbuster landscape in the 1970s. Yet the MCU is now at an interesting juncture in its development. With the first decade under its belt, and next April’s Avengers 4 promising an end to so many storylines, and with it the last Stan Lee cameo, the future is uncertain for the first time in a long while. It seems inevitable that new characters will be introduced, new franchises launched, new ground broken. But whatever happens, it all stems from, and honours, the legacy of Stan Lee; the man who, 55 years ago, put a team of cosmic-powered superheroes into the same room as a teenage boy who’d been bitten by a spider and — eventually — changed the world.
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“KEEPMOVINGFORWARD, AND IF IT’S TIME TO GO, IT’S TIME. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER.” Holger Keifel/Focus/Eyevine
STAN LEE
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EDITED BY JOHN NUGENT
Empire spoke to Neil Marshall on set in Bulgaria on 13 November 2017.
To Hell and back TAKEN AS RED
Director Neil Marshall on making a darker, bloodier, R-rated Hellboy
THREE COMICS THAT INSPIRED THE MOVIE
“I LIKE A challenge,” grins Neil
DARKNESS CALLS This 2007 series saw Hellboy take on witches from around the world, who demanded he become their king.
THE WILD HUNT Published from 2008, this arc riffs on the Arthurian tale of the Blood Queen (played in the ilm by Milla Jovovich).
THE STORM AND THE FURY Completing the trilogy, this arc (from 2010-’11) sets up a game-changing war for Hellboy.
Marshall. “Maybe I’m just a sucker for punishment.” Hellboy’s legacy is almost as intimidating as his horns. The blood-red half-demon, having been birthed in comic form by creator Mike Mignola, starred in two beloved films by Guillermo del Toro, but a long-awaited third fizzled out. Around 2014, plans arose to reboot the beast, and Marshall, the British director of The Descent and Dog Soldiers, was chosen to nurture him back. “It’s a tough act to follow,” he tells Empire of taking over from del Toro. Marshall contacted the monster master to get his blessing. “I didn’t want to step on his toes or get his nose out of joint. So I got in touch and said, ‘This is something very, very diferent and I want to make sure you’re cool with that.’ And he said, ‘I’m totally cool with it.’” And it really will be diferent, says Marshall. For starters, they’ll dive deep into the comics, which are hardly for kids — this Hellboy will be R-rated, and then some. We’re promised gallons of gore, with a darker emotional core, all in the name of honouring the comics. “It was always a case of, ‘When in doubt, go back to the source material.’ Some of the stuf is pretty sick,” says Marshall, gleefully. “More violent and more bloody. We weren’t making it with handcufs on.” Mostly, Marshall wants the film to stand on its own two hooves. The director was chosen for his genre chops — this iteration skews much more horror than fantasy, has been partly filmed in the UK, and has “a little bit of a Hammer, gothic” vibe, says the director. “It’s taking Hellboy out of his comfort zone.” Bring on the nightmares. ALEX GODFREY HELLBOY IS IN CINEMAS FROM 12 APRIL 2019
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We spoke to Adam McKay on the phone on 7 November, while he completed finishing touches to the film.
You don’t know Dick ADAM McKAY IS aware that choosing Dick Cheney as the subject of a biopic is unusual. It’s not something he intended. “Most of us don’t know much about him,” he says. “People called him Darth Vader and he shot a guy in the face; that’s as much as most people know.” Many years ago, the filmmaker started reading a biography of Cheney, who served in the administrations of Presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush Sr before becoming Vice President to George W. Bush. Despite never having the top job, Cheney was one of the most powerful men in modern history, shaping the US response to terrorism post 9/11, including controversial approaches to interrogation, and marching the country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It sounds grandiose, but he changed the course of history,” says McKay. As he read more, he realised that Cheney had to be the subject of his first movie since winning an Oscar for The Big Short. “The more I read, the more astounded I was by
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how brilliantly this guy gamed the system. He had a Zelig-like knack for always being in the middle of things. Where did he come from? What was driving this guy?” McKay sees his story as one about what motivates people to ruthlessly hunt power. He says it’s as much about Cheney’s wife, Lynne, played by Amy Adams, as it is about Dick. “She had this very tough upbringing and I saw how there could be a desire for power and safety and security. I could see how Dick Cheney became the vehicle for that, for the family.” When it came to casting Cheney, McKay’s choice is at once surprising and inevitable. No-one looked at Christian Bale and remarked on a resemblance to the ex-Veep, but McKay knew Bale, who co-starred in The Big Short, could reshape himself to become anyone. “When it comes to physical transformation, anyone can do it, he can,” says McK “Boy-oh-boy did we pick the right He found all these idiosyncratic ti movements. I’ll never forget the d when the [prosthetic] make-up star to work. He put it on for a test. He’ gained the weight and was wearing the suit and he did the Cheney wal I got chills. He wasn’t just playing this guy — he summoned him.”
Top to bottom: Wife Lynne (Amy Adams) with Cheney (Christian Bale); Another remarkable transformation for Bale; The Cheneys shape US political history; Director Adam McKay: “I can’t tell if this is the darkest comedy imaginable.”
If The Big Short led McKay from the pure comedy of Anchorman and Step nto something a little more he calls Vice a bigger step still. h more of a mix,” he says. “It’s mes we live in now: I can’t tell if he darkest comedy imaginable traight-up tragedy. So that’s e the movie lives.” He may not the news — but Cheney is as ificant as ever. OLLY RICHARDS E IS IN CINEMAS FROM 25 JANUARY
Alamy
Director Adam McKay on why Vice, the untold story of Vice President Dick Cheney, is more relevant than ever
CA
AN
We hear that you that you passed your driving test recently. Yes, I did! Congratulations! How did it go? It wasn’t easy. I failed five times. The first time was for Never Let Me Go. The director Mark Romanek insisted that I learn how to drive a manual car. I didn’t have a licence. They put me on this intensive course for a week. I failed within the first three minutes of my test. Then I came back to the UK and took my next two tests when I was nine months pregnant with my daughter. Failed both of those, which was tragic. Then took two more when I was nine months pregnant with my son. Failed both of those. Then, this year, I was just like, “I’m doing it. I’m going to do an intensive course.” So I did, with a driving instructor, Noel — my favourite person in the world. And I passed! It changed the game. Are you a confident driver now? I just drove for a month in LA! On the wrong side of the road! Does that include driving on freeways? I did drive on the freeway. Though I had a friend coach me through it. Are you careful? I’m so unbelievably careful. I’m not out to make any mistakes. I drive like a 90-year-old woman. WILDLIFE IS IN CINEMAS NOW
TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT... JOKER Will DC’s standalone supervillain story put a smile on your face?
1Joaquin The Clown Prince Of Crime is back. 6enemy Despite the Joker being the archPhoenix, donning the green hair of Batman, the Caped Crusader __
and perma-grin for a film simply titled Joker, says it was the uniqueness of the project that appealed it to him. “It is its own world,” Phoenix told Collider about the project. “And mostly, it scares the fucking shit out of me.”
2 Warner Bros. has described the __
film as an “original, standalone story not seen before on the big screen”, a “gritty character study”, and a “broader cautionary tale”. It’s set in the 1980s, which suggests it is inspired by Batman: The Killing Joke, the 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore which explains how the Joker went from failed stand-up comedian to mayhem-loving psychopath.
3continuity. This film is not part of DCEU Variety reported in June that __
Jared Leto’s take on the Joker would also get his own, separate standalone movie.
4movieRobert De Niro makes his comic book debut here, playing a talk show __
host “instrumental in the Joker’s origin”.
5 Alec Baldwin was attached to play __
Thomas Wayne, father of Batman — for two days, before dropping out. “I’m sure there are 25 guys who can play that part,” he told USA Today. Brett Cullen (who briefly appeared in The Dark Knight Rises as a politician) has taken the role instead.
__
won’t be appearing here. Bruce Wayne will make an appearance — but only as a pre-Bats child, played by Dante Pereira-Olson.
7across Filming has taken place on location New York City and New Jersey, __
with leaked phone footage showing the Joker causing chaos on the subway, being chased by cops, and extras screaming for their lives.
8 A mocked-up Gotham subway map __
spotted on set featured a few neat Easter eggs, with nods to Batman creator Bob Kane (‘Kane County’), DC Comics editor Mark Chiarello (‘Chiarello Drive’) and former Batman director Christopher Nolan (‘Nolan Lane’). There’s even a little bitty reference to Superman The Movie (‘Otisburg’).
9 Paparazzi have been “all over the set”, __
according to Phillips, leading him to unveil official shots on Instagram. “It bums me out that they constantly put out their bad shots,” he has said. “So, I figure, may as well put out some good ones.”
10 With a reported budget of $55 million, __
according to The Hollywood Reporter — thrifty, by superhero standards — Joker will cackle its way into cinemas in November 2019. JOHN NUGENT
JANUARY 2019
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Empire spoke to Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese by phone on 9 November, and David Leitch on 11 November.
A very Deadpool Christmas NO, IT’S NOT a joke. Deadpool — the sweariest, most savagely violent superhero out there, who fought tooth-and-nail for an adults-only R rating — is moving into PG-13 territory. “What’s so great about Deadpool,” says Paul Wernick, co-writer with Rhett Reese and co-writer/star Ryan Reynolds, “is that anything is possible. Deadpool is inherently a character that breaks all rules. This PG-13 version is further example of that.” Only Deadpool could be rebellious by being less ofensive. But the idea of a re-edit and re-release came about when children started complaining that they couldn’t enjoy the most childish superhero out there. “So many people said, ‘My tween kids are killing me because they aren’t allowed to watch it,’” recalls co-writer Rhett Reese.
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With the studio on board, the three writers began hashing out an idea. First, they needed a framing device. “We stumbled onto an idea of [reprising] The Princess Bride,” recalls Wernick. “But with an adult Fred Savage!” Reynolds reached out to Savage, who, as a child actor listened intently to his grandfather’s stories in Rob Reiner’s fantasy classic. He agreed to parodically reprise his role, now listening intently to Grampa ’Pool retell the events of a sanitised Deadpool 2. Recreating The Princess Bride’s set shot-for-shot, a “guerrilla crew” spent a day filming, resulting in 15 minutes of new footage. Director David Leitch flew from the London set of Hobbs & Shaw to be there. “As soon as they pitched me the idea,” says Leitch, “I said, ‘I’m there.’” But if you take out Deadpool’s naughty bits, what’s left? As it turns out, a sanitised version existed. “Sometimes you make cuts for TV, airlines or foreign markets,” explains Leitch. “I had done such a version of the movie. The new material added a lot of opportunities.” The censors were less tricky than you might think, too. “What we found
Above: Hang about, Deadpool is back… Right, top to bottom: Fred Savage and Deadpool riff on 1987’s The Princess Bride; A young Savage and Peter Falk as grandson and grandpa in the beloved fantasy film.
— which was either encouraging or discouraging — was that PG-13 movies get away with a lot,” explains Reese. “If you go back and look, The Dark Knight was a PG-13 movie. That movie was really violent!” While extreme gore and swearing is a no-no — the demise of the X-Force will be considerably shorter — with selective editing and re-recording dialogue you could get around restrictions. “You miss a couple of F-bombs,” says Wernick, “but it’s pretty much the same movie.” Helpfully, Deadpool wears a mask, which made dubbing fairly seamless. After considerable back-and-forth with the censors over what they could get away with, the finished product, Once Upon A Deadpool, earns a one-night release in December. But who’s the target audience? Kids or adults? “Really, it’s families,” says Wernick. “Deadpool 2 is all about family, after all, and this is us trying to keep families together”. Family, it seems, is the only F-word you’ll find here. JOHN NUGENT ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL IS IN CINEMAS ON 11 DECEMBER
Alamy
Deadpool 2 is getting a family-friendly Christmas re-release. The director and writers explain why and how
PRIME TIME
We put Detective Pikachu
D detective who happens to have the name Pikachu? No. This is the one you know and possibly love, Pikachu the pointy-tailed Pokémon mascot — as a detective. So it’s a Pokemon solving crimes? Explain. First released in 2016, Detective Pikachu was a video game for the Nintendo 3DS. A curious, quirky spin-off from the billion-dollar franchise in which players are encouraged to catch ’em all, this saw an unusually gruff-voiced Pikachu don a deerstalker cap and investigate various mysteries through an adorable magnifying glass — including the disappearance of Pikachu’s owner, Harry Goodman. And they’re making another direct-tovideo animated movie, then? Not this time. There have been over 20 animated ilms in the franchise, but Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is set to be the irst live-action entry, with Pikachu and his fellow Pokémons depicted using CGI. Who’s playing Pikachu? Ryan Reynolds, who slips out of his spandex Deadpool outit and into a mo-cap suit, providing the voice and movements of the tiny yellow hero. On the human side of things, he’ll be joined by Ken Watanabe, Bill Nighy, Rita Ora, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s Justice Smith, while Monsters Vs. Aliens’ Rob Letterman will direct, and Guardians Of The Galaxy writer Nicole Perlman on script duties. Catch ’em all in May 2019. JOHN NUGENT
JANUARY 2019
39
Idris Elba spoke to Empire in London on 10 May, while shaking off a “lurgy”.
Back on the case 1 __ IT’S FOCUSED ON JUST ONE CASE
DCI John Luther is back. Every time you think he’s done, he emerges again, all gruf and becoated, ready to solve more crime. Where previous series have tended to give Luther several cases to crack, over one or two episodes each, series five is entirely focused on one, and it’s shorter, to boot — just four episodes. This series begins with an attack on a London bus, which draws Luther back into the darkness he’s always trying to escape. “[Writer Neil Cross] always conjures up more hideous storylines,” says Elba, adding that we should expect a number of revelations. “We peel the onion back on John Luther more and more personally.”
2 __ HE’S GOT (ANOTHER) NEW PARTNER
Luther may be a loner, but he always has someone to assist his detective work, some of whom eventually move on, some of whom are eventually buried. The fourth series’ DS Emma Lane (Rose Leslie) will not return for series five. She’ll be replaced by Wunmi Mosaku as Catherine Halliday, a junior detective who aspires to be as good as Luther, if a little more rule-abiding. “All Luther’s partners test his moral standing,” says Elba. “Halliday has a real admiration for Luther, which is something he has to navigate. Where it ends up is compelling.”
Clockwise from main: Idris Elba’s Luther, who we will get to know a lot better; Wunmi Mosaku joins the cast as junior detective Catherine Halliday; Ruth Wilson’s Alice will, somehow, be back.
chess games we’ve seen on television. Luther is in awe of her. She is exquisite as a criminal: intelligent beyond belief.”
4 __ THIS ISN’T THE
LAST OF LUTHER
In the past, Elba has been ambiguous on whether he’ll ever return as Luther again. This time he’s clear: there is unfinished business. “This season is not the end,” says Elba. “But there are some real changes that will happen.”
5 __ THE NEXT ‘SERIES’ COULD BE A FILM
“Neil and I have got the ambition to make a film, and this season may be the stepping stone,” says Elba. They already have their blueprint for a movie: “Our ambition is it falls on the scale of Seven.” Bleak. Intense. Willing to kill any of the cast. We can see part six being the new Seven. OLLY RICHARDS
3 __ ALICE IS BACK! Ruth Wilson has confirmed Alice Morgan, the fan favourite genius psychopath, will return this series, despite apparently being dead in series four. Elba is keeping schtum about the details, but admits “the dynamic between them has grown to be one of the best character
LUTHER IS COMING SOON TO BBC ONE
DIRECTOR BARRY JENKINS ON THE ARTISTS WHO INFLUENCED IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
DOUGLAS SIRK (DIRECTOR)
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GORDON PARKS (PHOTOGRAPHER)
ROY DECARAVA (ARTIST)
IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (2019)
Alamy, Getty Images, REX/Shutterstock
Luther himself, Idris Elba, offers five clues on the next series of the detective drama
Marvel Studios Cinematic Universe: Phase 3 - Part 1
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SOUNDING OFF ON THIS MONTH’S BIG NEWS
It’s time to give Jack Sparrow the heave-ho So they’re rebooting Pirates Of The Caribbean? Perfect opportunity to move on from the Jack Sparrow days, thinks Dan Jolin
WE HAD SOME good times with Captain Jack. His unforgettable entrance, clinging to the mast of a sinking ship. The bit where he got upset about Elizabeth burning the rum. That cool, closing line, “Bring me the horizon.” Yeah, good times. And they were all in the first film. As a report comes from Deadline that Disney is rebooting the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, with Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick rearranging the rigging, there should be no call for dismay. Not even at the prospect that a fresh, piratical adventure would likely excise the series’ star entirely — something original Pirates writer Stuart Beattie hinted at in a recent interview when he thought Johnny Depp “had a great run” with the character. Jack certainly endured, making Depp one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors,
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and helping turn a theme-park ride adaptation into a $4.5-billion-grossing superyacht of a franchise. Although there is now plenty of tarnish on that gold-toothed grin. The fifth Pirates Of The Caribbean instalment, last year’s Salazar’s Revenge, was the series’ weakest, both in terms of critical response and box-office returns. Meanwhile, Depp himself has been accused of domestic violence (which he denies); given Disney’s recent firing of James Gunn over some controversial tweets, it wouldn’t be surprising if the studio decided to toss him overboard. But the problem isn’t merely Depp. It is Jack himself. The character was a happy accident, a novelty supporting act stitched together by Depp, the writers and director Gore Verbinski. He was, deservedly, a hit with audiences, who loved how he tottered through the sabre-clashing, cannon-blasting action like an inebriated Pepé Le Pew, wrongfooting our expectations and anarchically undercutting the drama. But he wasn’t built to anchor an ongoing franchise. As Verbinski noted ahead of the first sequel’s release in 2006, “You don’t want just the Jack Sparrow movie. He’s the spice and
Peak Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in Dead Man’s Chest.
you need a lot of straight men. Let’s not give them too much Jack. It’s like too much dessert.” The truth is, his wobbly shtick has gotten old — especially in his last two outings, which removed him from the Will Turner/Elizabeth Swann context, and served enough “dessert” to leave us nauseous. Why not start completely afresh with a whole new Pirates Of The Caribbean concept? It’s not like Disney would be ditching a beloved character from already established source material. This isn’t like trying to do Iron Man without Tony Stark. Sparrow wasn’t even one of the animatronic corsairs on the Disney World ride. It would be far more interesting and exciting if Reese and Wernick completely jettisoned all the clunky lore that cluttered up those five films and sent an entirely new set of characters out to sea. Certainly better than trying to remix Sparrow himself and tasking a new actor with rebottling Depp’s 2003 lightning. In fact, ‘young Jack Sparrow’ feels like the worst way they could go. Jack’s had his long moment in the Caribbean sun, and outstayed his welcome. Time to bring us a whole new horizon.
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Hans Petter Moland spoke to Empire from his home in Oslo on 9 November.
Remaking a murderer How to have another crack at your own film (with Liam Neeson in a snowplough)
Norwegian original. It was a good process to try and make a good film and to understand that character.”
EXPLORE NEW IDEAS IF NEW THRILLER Cold Pursuit, starring Liam Neeson as your regular snow-ploughing vigilante, seems familiar, that’s because it’s a remake of 2014 film In Order Of Disappearance. Norwegian filmmaker Hans Petter Moland — who made both films — talks Empire through the bonkers déjà-vu process of filming your own film again for an Englishlanguage audience.
DON’T AUTOMATICALLY DO IT “The original got a terrific response at the Berlin [international film] festival and the next morning, America came calling about a remake. I had to give it a serious think. It was a little bit like if you put on a play in Norway and somebody asks you to bring it to Broadway. It’s a chance to speak to a diferent audience.”
DEVELOP IT WITH A DIFFERENT STAR “Liam was part of the suggested set-up, and that made it attractive and tempting. He was clearly interested in exploring the humorous aspects of this film. And he didn’t just want to plug and play the
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“Because it’s in an American setting — the Rocky Mountains — some new elements are brought into it. Instead of a Balkan gang it’s a Native American gang, which means the satire and prejudices being played with are transposed into other cultural diferences.”
HAVE FAITH IN YOUR TONE “I lived in America for many years, so making it in America with Americans wasn’t a big deal to me. I felt comfortable with American humour and the American way of life. I feel that my sense of humour Above: Nels Coxman (Liam Neeson) seeks Rocky-sloped revenge. Right: Neeson explores “the humorous aspects” of being threatened by a gang member with a gun.
is not a generic Nordic brand — my dark, dry humour is just as much like a Walter Matthau or Billy Wilder film. So my sense of humour is not foreign to America.”
SPEND THE BIGGER BUDGET “We had resources to achieve things that we couldn’t in the original. We were able to build bigger sets, which I think contributed greatly to the story: it could place the Native American gang in a setting which resonates with their particular predicament. But filmmaking is funny. It ultimately boils down to a camera and some actors in front of it and a few people behind it.” ALEX GODFREY
DIRECTORS WHO REMADE THEIR OWN FILMS ALFRED HITCHCOCK After making The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934, he repeated the trick — this time in colour — in 1956.
SAM RAIMI The Evil Dead (1981) was famously given a remake-sequel in 1987.
COLD PURSUIT IS IN CINEMAS FROM
MICHAEL MANN
22 FEBRUARY
His made-for-TV movie L.A. Takedown (1989) was turned in the more cinematic Heat (1995).
Michael Haneke Haneke made a shot-for-shot, English language remake of Funny Games in 2007, a decade after the Austrian original.
WAIT, WHAT HAPPENED? THE ONE THING WE CAN’T. STOP. TALKING. ABOUT
THE BIZARRE TWIST IN THE SPIES IN DISGUISE TRAILER Steven Yeun spoke to Empire during the London Film Festival on 19 October.
This month, a new trailer arrived for Spies In Disguise, an animated comedy from the makers of the Ice Age franchise, starring Will Smith as a super-spy. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then...
BLAZINGA NEW TRAIL How a Korean thriller marks another reinvention for The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun
SHAKING LOOSE A character that
Alamy
After some fairly standard spy shenanigans, Will Smith’s character, erm, turns into a pigeon. For reasons that are not immediately clear. We imagine the script meeting went something like: “James Bond... but a pigeon!”
With gadget nerd Walter (Tom Holland) also along for the implausible ride, it’s all based on the short ilm Pigeon: Impossible, with directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane adapting their own single-line pitch into a feature-length romp.
you’ve played for seven years in a wildly successful TV series can be hard. Steven Yeun is still best known as The Walking Dead’s Glenn Rhee — but in Burning, a new thriller from Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-Dong, he turns from zombieburdened pizza boy to Korean tycoon with efortless confidence. Amazingly, he nearly turned down the role. “There was a moment where I was like, ‘Can I do this?’” he says. For a Korean American, born in Seoul and raised in Michigan, Yeun was troubled by his first non-English language role. “I don’t have that understanding of Korean language. I thought, ‘Can I even play this part?’” Yeun is quick to credit Chang-dong, who has quietly estabished himself as a critical darling since his 1997 debut Green Fish, as the reason to overcome his fears. “He opened the door and said, “You are the actor for this character.” To get a blessing like that from a really wise director gives you a lot of confidence.” Loosely based on a Haruki Murakami short story, the film follows lonely Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), his crush Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo), and Ben (Yeun), a Gatsby-type businessman with a nasty habit of burning down greenhouses. Yeun prepared meticulously for the role, perfecting Korean, reading Nietzsche and making
Top to bottom: There goes the greenhouse; Firestarter Ben (Yeun); With Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) and Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon).
playlists (including “Bon Iver, a little classical music, and a lot of hip-hop”) that spoke to his character. From pizza to Nietzsche — not a bad progression. In the two years since Glenn’s bloody exit from The Walking Dead, Yeun has chosen a run of surprising film roles (Okja, Sorry To Bother You), but took a lot from the show that sent him into orbit. “It was seven years of allowing myself to feel confident in a safe space,” he says. “It prepared me to do the job that I’m intended to.” So acclaimed is that job that it could lead Burning to earn South Korea’s firstever nomination at the Oscars. For his part, Yeun is keeping both eyes on the prize. (Unlike Glenn.) BETH WEBB BURNING IS IN CINEMAS 1 FEBRUARY
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Once upon a time in Westeros 1 __ THE LONG NIGHT This was the pilot title apparently leaked by George R.R. Martin himself (and quickly denied by HBO), which refers to the cataclysmic lifelong winter that descended upon his world around 6-8,000 years before the events of Game Of Thrones. That would place the prequel show in a suitably tumultuous time of Westerosi legend, a kind of murky pre-historical period that gives showrunner Jane Goldman plenty of room to flex her creative muscles.
2 __ THE ARRIVAL OF THE OTHERS
HBO’s official log line mentions “the true origin of the White Walkers”, aka the Others, who swarmed southward from the Lands Of Always Winter and invaded Westeros during The Long Night. As we know from the last season of Thrones, the White Walkers were created by ancient forest people The Children, in retaliation for the crimes against nature committed by the First Men of Westeros. So the new show could dig into that human/ faery-folk conflict, as well as the subsequent foundation of the Night’s Watch and the building of the Wall to repel the Others.
3 __ THE NIGHT’S KING AND QUEEN
Another possible story thread could be the fall of the 13th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, who, according to Westerosi legend, fell for a woman “with
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skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars”. He became the Night’s King, siding with the Others, corrupting the Watch and ruling from the Nightfort for 13 years. That mysterious sorceress could be the “charismatic socialite” role we know has been taken by Naomi Watts.
4 __ THE EARLY STARKS Yes, even 8,000 years before Ned lost his head, there were Starks. But back then they were known as The Kings Of Winter, a rough and resilient dynasty which may have produced heroes like Brandon The Builder (who built the Wall and founded the House), but held the North by brutal force for generations. Interestingly, House Stark’s rivalry with the flay-happy House Bolton started during The Long Night, so it’s likely we’ll discover how that particular feud kicked of.
5 __ WELCOME TO YI-TI? HBO’s mention of “the mysteries of the East” might not actually refer to Essos, where Danaerys adventured for six seasons. Perhaps it takes us further East, to, er, The Further East, and the so-far-unseen nation of Yi Ti. Here, according to myth, the Long Night was caused by a sacrilegious tyrant known as the Bloodstone Emperor, who renounced the gods of Yi Ti and founded a cannibalistic cult. It’s tough to see how this would feasibly tie in with all the frosty business in the North, but it fits with HBO’s hints that we’ll be seeing something completely new in this show. DAN JOLIN THE GAME OF THRONES PREQUEL WILL BEGIN PRODUCTION IN 2019
Illustration: Kerry Roper
The first Game Of Thrones prequel series is coming — here are five storylines it could well tackle
Main: Melissa McCarthy plays author Lee Israel. Empire spoke to director Marielle Heller on the phone from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 5 November.
Below: Lee hanging out with her only nonfeline friend, Jack (Richard E. Grant).
A SERIOUS WOMAN How a new forgery drama gave Melissa McCarthy her first big non-comedic role
WE HAVE COME to expect a certain kind of Melissa McCarthy movie by now. Since her breakthrough in 2011’s Bridesmaids, the actor has turned out big, brash, bonkers comedies at a prolific rate. Her latest, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, does not fit that mould. It’s a tragicomic drama that already marks her a favourite in the Best Actress Oscar race. “I think she knew it was a diferent type of movie,” says the film’s director, Marielle Heller (making her second film after the excellent The Diary Of A Teenage Girl). “She approached it from a diferent perspective.” Adapted from the memoir of the same name by New York author Lee Israel, an abrasive outsider who “likes cats better than people”, it tells a sad, quiet story about urban loneliness and what Heller describes as “unrequited talent: the pain of being an artist who’s not recognised”. A successful author and biographer in the ’70s and ’80s, Israel’s work dried up in the ’90s. In desperation, she turned to forging letters by her literary heroes, selling them for huge sums. For Heller, it proved a fine balance in making a criminal misanthrope sufficiently sympathetic. “You don’t want to soften someone to make them likeable,” explains Heller, “but it’s important that we understood her motivations. I found her totally fascinating.”
Which is not to say there isn’t humour here. Israel had a fiercely sharp mind and a savage wit, and many of the film’s funniest scenes come from Israel’s interactions with her only non-cat friend, Jack, played by Richard E. Grant in a gloriously Withnailesque role. “I was a huge Withnail fan,” says Heller. “We were so lucky to get Richard.” Still, McCarthy devotees expecting her usual schtick should know what they’re in for. “I worried that her fans might not want to see her doing something so diferent,” admits Heller. “It’s just not what the public knows her as. But [Melissa] was always so game.” Get ready to have your expectations shattered. JOHN NUGENT CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? IS IN CINEMAS FROM 1 FEBRUARY
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Joel Edgerton spoke to Empire on the phone from San Francisco on 6 November.
“It’s a hopeful but harrowing story” Joel Edgerton explains why gay conversion drama Boy Erased is as frightening as any horror movie
camera, acting in films like Loving and The Great Gatsby, Joel Edgerton made a storming debut behind the camera in 2015 with The Gift, a Hitchcockian horror that made its modest budget back more than ten times at the box oice. His second directorial efort, the real-life drama Boy Erased, is more earnest, more virtuous, and — if the bookies are to be believed — more awards-y. But as Edgerton explains, it’s just as much of a horror movie as his last film. “I think Boy Erased has more scary moments than The Gift,” Edgerton asserts. “The Gift is designed to make an audience jump and jitter. Boy Erased is a true story that gets under your skin and makes you uncomfortable in other ways.” Here, the threat is more sinister because it’s real. And it spoke to Edgerton’s own deep-seated childhood terrors. “I happened to have a childhood deep fear of being separated from my parents, and being institutionalised in any fashion,” he recalls. As a child, Edgerton once burst into tears after his dad joked about sending him to the other side of Australia. Those fears sparked Edgerton’s interest in Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley, which he read voraciously in early 2017. Like many people, Edgerton knew only the basics
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From top: Reeling ’em off, director Edgerton; He also plays therapist Victor Sykes; Jon (Xavier Dolan) with Jared (Lucas Hedges) on the controversial conversion programme.
about the controversial practice of gay conversion therapy, the pseudoscience ofered by some right wing religious organisations that claim to change people’s sexuality. “I literally heard that it existed,” he says. “I had the same are-you-kidding-me reaction that a lot of people had.” Understandably, he expected to find horror in Conley’s experiences, which saw the teenage Christian presented with an ultimatum from his conservative parents: undergo conversion therapy, or be disowned. But Edgerton was surprised
by the nuance of the story. “I think I was just looking for madness in the pages: diabolical people and mad ideas and backward thinking and viciousness and blood on the pages. I got some of those things, but what I also got out of it was a hopeful story, albeit very harrowing. It was more complicated and less blackand-white, I thought.” Central to the movie is a profound sense of empathy. Edgerton kept returning to the protagonist’s parents (played in the film by Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe), realising that though their choices around their son were clearly wrong, they came from a good place. “There’s no need to vilify any of these people. I couldn’t deny, when I kept examining it, that the action [of sending their son to conversion therapy] was born out of love, albeit based on the misinformation of a belief system.” In the real world, the only way to beat horror is empathy. JOHN NUGENT BOY ERASED IS IN CINEMAS FROM 8 FEBRUARY
Sheryl Nields/August Image, Alamy
AFTER YEARS IN front of the
Echoing in eternity Gladiator 2 is happening. What will it look like? We ask a historian
CIVIL WAR! At the end of Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Gladiator, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) is killed. Where could the now-greenlit sequel go? Despite what the original implies, Rome does not become a republic. “There’s no real republican feeling in the 2nd century,” says historian Dr Benet Salway, of University College London. What follows is a power struggle and the socalled ‘Year Of The Five Emperors’. “When Commodus gets stabbed in the back, there is no obvious successor. It’s very unstable for a year. Then there’s a more long-term civil war which lasts for three years.”
GLADIATORIAL COMBAT! It’s not unreasonable to expect gladiators in a film with the working title of
‘Gladiator 2’. This is not historically inaccurate. “Games go on being held in the Colosseum until the early 4th century,” says Dr Salway. Given their short lifespan, there are few famous gladiators to focus on (Maximus was fictional, after all), although one stands out. “Probus Paullianus, rather surprisingly, managed to live to the age of 90.”
Russell Crowe, unleashing hell in Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic.
ETHNIC DIVERSITY! Any film set in 2nd-century Rome should reflect the diversity of the time, says Dr Salway. “A large proportion of the Senate is non-Italian, and moreover a lot of them are people from what’s now Turkey, Syria, Israel-Palestine, and North Africa,” he says. “They’re
certainly not all Anglo-Saxon white Protestants, and the slave population was not all black. That’s not pushing a politically correct agenda — being more diverse would represent the reality of the situation.”
SOMETHING COMPLETELY MADE UP! Reports suggest the new film may focus on Lucius, the young son of Lucilla and nephew of Commodus from the first film. But is Lucius a historical figure? Dr Salway “struggled to find any direct ancient evidence” that Lucilla had any children with the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius. As with the first film, Ridley Scott may just play fast and loose with the history. JOHN NUGENT
THIS MONTH’S BIGGEST TRAILER MOMENT
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JANUARY 2019
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ERIC IDLE
same escape
ern — you know, you have to you must get into drag
What’s your favourite word in th English language? I’d say “sillographer”. It’s a satirist. B I do also like “Daddy”. I always liked called Daddy. It was always good fun When were you last naked outdo Well, every day. ’Cause I swim naked. Why? What’s the point of putting on pants to get wet? I don’t shower in my underwear! You have to keep guests and people away, obviously, and I try not to frighten the dogs, but it’s one of the nicest things I think there is. What’s your earliest memory? I have to say a Mickey Mouse gas mask, which they threw over your head during wartime. It was made of horrible, foul-smelling rubber. I guess they were trying to make things nicer for children, but it was terrifying. And it means I’ve always been frightened of Mickey Mouse, and scuba diving. Which film have you seen more than any other? I would say probably Some Like It Hot. It’s hilarious. It’s very beautifully written and directed and it just works all the way
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RECENT WORK ROBIN WILLIAMS: COME INSIDE MY MIND (2018)
What s your favourite smell? Sandalwood. Not from real sandals, obviously. What’s the worst thing you ever put in your mouth? Golly. There was a thing at school called ‘gobby’, which is a pudding dessert. They would slam it down and you’d go, “Oh fuck, it’s gobby again.” That was about the worst. And we’d have it three or four times a week. It was kind of a sponge puddingy kind of thing, but that’s to give it far too many nice adjectives. What’s the best thing you’ve ever stolen from a hotel? I think I stole from the Trump Hotel in the days when it was still okay to go there. They had a nice little leather thing that you could put notes in, and I happily stole that. And I’m glad I did it now because, you know, he’s stolen it all back!
Idle contributed as a talking head to this documentary on the late comedian. SPAMALOT (2019)
After hit runs on Broadway and in the West End, Idle is adapting this stage musical — itself an adaptation of the film Monty Python And The Holy Grail — for a bigscreen adaptation.
g g I don’t think I’ve ever seen her movies. I had a little pin-up of her; one of those little postcard things, and she was very young and she still had dark hair, and looked like a southern, French, sultry, attractive woman. That’s remained my desirable type [laughs]. Where do you go when you die? [Laughs] You go into carbon and you are recycled as other things. As I say at the end of my book, I want to come back as a Tesla, so my wife can continue to drive me. Do people ever quote your lines back at you? They do, but not so much these days. When people come and say, “Say no more,” or, “Is your wife a goer?”, what are you supposed to say? I always stop them and go, “Hi, I’m Eric. What’s your name?” Then you can snap them back into reality. But if you’re in an airport, people often smile at you. And what’s popped into their head is probably you dressed in some stupid costume, or being crucified. But you made them laugh. So that’s quite the nicest thing about being a comedian. DAN JOLIN ERIC IDLE’S BOOK, ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE: A SORTABIOGRAPHY, IS OUT NOW
Illustration: Matt Herring
What one thing do you do b anyone else you know? Put up with having to take the dogs out for a shit.
Is Die Hard a Christmas film? Four Empire experts duke it out over the debate that’s raged for 30 years as Die Hard comes to Sky Cinema
Yes! CHRIS HEWITT, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DO NOT BE blinded by curmudgeons telling you Die Hard is just a movie that happens to take place at Christmas, as if the setting is insignificant. Don’t be fazed by Bruce Willis’ declaration at his recent Comedy Central roast. It was a roast, folks. He was joking. In fact, Die Hard may be the Christmassiest movie of all. There are the incidental details — the dead villain wearing a Santa hat; Hans Gruber saying, “It’s Christmas, Theo, it’s the time of miracles”; John McClane killing the bad guy with a gun he’s stuck to his body using Christmas Sellotape —
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and then the great, big thematic punch. Like A Christmas Carol, it’s a film about a man undergoing fundamental change on Christmas Eve. Only instead of three ghosts, his transformation comes courtesy of a dozen thieves. When we meet John McClane, he’s a closed book of a man, sarcastic and hostile. By the time the sun comes up on Christmas morning, the battered, bloodied McClane has become more open, honest and accepting. The time of miracles, indeed.
Clockwise from main: Bruce Willis and white vest take on terrorists on Christmas Eve; Alan Rickman oozes evil charisma as Hans Gruber; McClane (Willis) and now grey vest assess the lift situation; It’s not really the time for a cigarette, John; McClane swinging into action; And with LAPD cop Sgt
No! JOHN NUGENT, NEWS EDITOR
Every December, it’s the same debate. Is McClane McChristmassy, or not? Let’s examine the evidence. Yes, the film takes place on Christmas Eve, but McClane could have come out to the coast for a few laughs for any sort of office party. And the film was originally released in July in the
Al Powell (Reginald
United States, which hardly suggests it was intended as a seasonal movie. Yes, it is a beloved staple on Christmas telly every year — but, crucially, you can (and should) watch it any time of the year, unlike all those other jolly holiday movies. Yes, the film’s screenwriter, Steven E. de Souza, once claimed that, “If Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, then White Christmas is not a Christmas movie.” But, to counter that, consider this: John McClane himself, Bruce Willis, recently asserted: “Die Hard is a not a Christmas movie.” And really, who among us is willing to question him?
VelJohnson).
Yes! JONATHAN PILE, DEPUTY EDITOR
The argument that Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie goes something like this: “It was released in July.” And that’s it. Well, Gremlins was released in June, and no-one seems to be questioning
To listen to the podcast debate, featuring Sky Cinema’s Alex Zane and Dave Berry, go to www.empireonline. com/podcast.
its festive credentials. But Die Hard doesn’t just happen to be set on Christmas Eve; its setting is intrinsic to the plot — a man visiting his kids and estranged wife for the holidays. If it weren’t Christmas, he’d still be in New York. And families coming together despite their diferences is a Christmas movie staple, so why is there even a debate about this? What’s more, its soundtrack is peppered with festive standards, the score features sleigh bells, and Bruce Willis even does a Santa impression (sort of ), writing, “Now I have a machine gun. Ho-ho-ho,” on a deceased terrorist’s sweater. What more do the nonbelievers want?
Yes! JAMES DYER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF (DIGITAL)
How could anyone, upon watching Bruce Willis and Bonnie Bedelia slip
into the back of Argyle’s limousine at the end of Die Hard, doubt that this film is not just a Christmas movie but the Christmas movie? With Christmas morning breaking, Vaughn Monroe’s rendition of ‘Let It Snow’ playing and a metaphorical snowfall (in reality $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds) falling around the couple, surely only the coldest of hearts isn’t thawed by festive cheer. It’s the definitive Yuletide tale: a husband and father returns home for the holidays, reunites with his wife at the office Christmas party and declares his devotion (by killing ten terrorists and blowing up half a building) before going home to open presents with the kids. Both the film’s writers agree there would be no Die Hard without the Christmas setting, and I put it to you that there can be no Christmas without Die Hard either. Now I have a machine gun. Ho-ho-ho.
CHRISTMASONSKYCINEMA This Christmas Sky Cinema is the go-to place for movies, with their biggest-ever premiere line-up including Avengers: Infinity War, The Greatest Showman, Rampage and much more. They also have their largest-ever collection of Christmas films — from Home Alone 2 to It’s A Wonderful Life, there is something for everyone to watch whenever you want this Christmas. Visit sky.com/skycinema for more details on how to subscribe
DIE HARD AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY FROM 1 DECEMBER
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EDITED BY JONATHAN PILE
+++++ EXCELLENT ++++ GOOD +++ OKAY ++ POOR + AWFUL
PAGE 56
PAGE 60 CREED II
PAGE 72 THE OLD MAN & THE GUN
PAGE 74 ROMA
THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES
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film
CREED II ★★★
OUT 30 NOVEMBER CERT 12A / 130 MINS
Steven Caple Jr CAST Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Wood Harris, Russell Hornsby, Phylicia Rashad, Dolph Lundgren, Florian Munteanu DIRECTOR
PLOT Against the wishes of cornerman Rocky (Stallone) and girlfriend Bianca (Thompson), new heavyweight champion of the world, Adonis Creed (Jordan), faces Russian Viktor Drago (Munteanu), the son of Ivan Drago (Lundgren), the man who killed Adonis’ father.
The cape is off as Creed meets Drago.
CREED WAS THAT boxing ideal: a haymaker out of nowhere. Writer-director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan took a practically moribund property and made it at once old-school and modern, deftly mixing full-blown romance with punishing pugilism, nuance and social awareness to stave of any potential triteness. Creed II, with Coogler only on executive producer duties, is sadly a lesser efort, full of programmatic plotting and onthe-bloodied-nose writing, but leavened by the chemistry of its stars and its commitment to the beats of the series. The jumping-of point for the sequel is not Rocky II but Rocky IV, aka ‘The One Where Rocky Grows A Beard, Chops Wood And Wins Over Moscow’. By 1985, Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed had been relegated to Sacrificial Sidekick Status, and it’s his death at the hands of Ivan Drago that provides the engine for the new film. Under the tutelage of Ivan (Lundgren), Viktor Drago’s (Munteanu) rise as a contender for Adonis’ (Jordan) newly won heavyweight crown throws the young fighter into turmoil, as shown by endless scenes of him debating (with Rocky, Bianca, his mother) whether he should take the fight to avenge his father. To further compound his confusion, Adonis and Bianca (Thompson) are about to become parents, and have to face the prospect that the baby might inherit deafness from Bianca. The first film leaned into its more melodramatic elements. Here director Steven Caple Jr almost feels embarrassed by them, never letting the fears of the prospective parents register.
The big problem here is the writing. There’s more speechifying this time (“Are you here to prove something to other people or prove something to yourself?” barks Rocky (Stallone) at Apollo) and the exposition — often done through through TV punditry — lacks Coogler’s economy and subtlety. While Creed made Adonis’ life in Philadelphia authentic, Creed II doesn’t bring telling specificity to Adonis’ new world as a champ: it’s just a tired litany of spacious apartments, lovemaking montages to R’n’B and interactions with the smallest entourage in boxing history. It’s also a film that wears its subtext on its stars-and-stripes robe. “It’s Shakespearean!” announces a ringside commentator, referring to the nexus of fathers, sons and tragedies in play. Creed II is Shakespearean minus the wit, profundity and emotional heft. On the other side of the pond, Ivan and Viktor are given a thread of a through-line about trying to work their way back into the graces of the Russian boxing establishment. Although it’s nice to see Stallone and Lundgren share the same frame again, Ivan and Viktor remain ciphers. Viktor, in particular, is granted all the complexity of a Brosnan-era Bond henchman. Still there’s pleasure to be had in spending time with these characters. Jordan and Stallone still retain their first film chemistry. Jordan and Thompson also still vibe, despite the latter being denied any inner life of her own. The film continues to find fun in all the Rocky staples. There are montages that crosscut between Adonis and Viktor training — the former shadow boxing underwater, the latter doing impressive things with ropes — although sadly not to sub-rate synth music à la 1985. And Caple Jr mounts impressive fight sequences, using slow mo sparingly and a great use of POV shots — the light of the doctor’s torch will stay with you. And it’s a hard heart that doesn’t respond to the impossible-toresist button pushing — that music — in the enjoyably OTT boxing finale. But after the first film, it feels like a regressive step. First time round Coogler’s footwork was fast, his power both pinpointaccurate and devastating. Creed II only connects occasionally. IAN FREER VERDICT Creed II is to Creed what the Rocky sequels are to the original: a more generic, less textured take on familiar boxing movie tropes. The difference, it seems, is Coogler.
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PAPILLON ★★ OUT 24 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 130 MINS
Michael Noer Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Yorick van Wageningen DIRECTOR CAST
film
RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET ★★★
OUT 30 NOVEMBER CERT PG / 112 MINS
DIRECTOR Rich
Moore, Phil Johnston CAST John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Bell, Gal Gadot, Taraji P. Henson PLOT When a broken steering wheel threatens the decommissioning of arcade racer Sugar Rush, lead character Vanellope (Silverman) and her best friend Wreck-It Ralph (Reilly) head to the internet to try to secure a replacement via eBay.
FOR A FILM about a fictional ’80s arcade game character, Ralph Breaks The Internet sure raises some weighty issues. We’re not ten minutes into the Wreck-It Ralph sequel when a broken video game cabinet creates the displacement of several hundred pixelated characters, all looking for a new home among Litwak Arcade’s other coin-op machines. It’s an interesting set-up — could this brightly coloured, sugar-coated cartoon be a modern-day fable, about to slyly educate its young audience about the world’s current refugee crisis? Sadly, no. A couple of scenes later it’s all but forgotten, the film far more interested in sending its two main characters — best friends Ralph (Reilly) and Vanellope (Silverman) — on a pop culture-crammed adventure to the internet. The internet — with its high-rise representations of the world’s biggest online brands — represents the big city to Litwak Arcade’s small town, and it’s here Ralph Breaks The Internet finds both its central conflict and its message. There are lessons here but — with Vanellope enchanted by the possibilities suddenly open to her, and Ralph set on achieving their task then returning home to his
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usual routine — it’s about the nature of friendship. Not a bad thing to learn, it’s just a well-trodden set-up and, in the context of the film’s opening, a missed opportunity. Still, it’s an entertaining and rapidly paced adventure, which takes its heroes from eBay to a dangerous urban MMORPG, to YouTube substitute Buzztube, to (a sanitised version of ) the dark web. They’re hassled by pop-up advertisers, get distracted by clickbait and try their hands at loot hunting. The highlight, however, is Vanellope’s trip to Oh My Disney (a real website) — it’s the funniest section of the film, especially her encounter with the studio’s roster of Princesses, as the studio sends up its own creations but also fights back against the most common online criticisms of its female heroes. Sharp and knowing, it’s also a triumph of animation and characterisation. For example, the original, hand-drawn Ariel (The Little Mermaid) was slightly more manic in her movements than, say, the stronger, more noble Pocahontas (Pocahontas), and that’s mirrored here. If only all of Ralph Breaks The Internet was so inspired, instead of being mostly content to make funny but first-base jokes about social media culture. These characters have lived in isolation at the arcade — wouldn’t their escape leave them faced with questions about the nature of their being as they discover thousands of other similarly segregated versions of themselves exist? It’s not the case that its target audience couldn’t handle it — Toy Story was smart enough to tackle such existential crises, and that was over 20 years ago. But then, that’s the diference between an enduring masterpiece and something that just achieves being funny but forgettable. This is resolutely the latter. JONATHAN PILE VERDICT Entertaining, and occasionally inspired, but Ralph Breaks The Internet is too often content to achieve a quick laugh, rather than exploring the themes its set-up suggests.
Ralph and Vanellope venture beyond Litwak Arcade to what shortly be a broken internet.
A REMAKE OF the Steve McQueen/ Dustin Hoffman 1973 prison break drama. Safecracker Henri Charriére (Hunnam) is wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to a penal colony in French Guiana. There he forges a close bond with fellow inmate Louis Dega (Malek) and they plot their escape. Sadly, this gives the pair little to do but trudge through episodic and not-terribly-interesting prison staples — yard ights, narrowly avoided shankings, spells in solitary — while doing their best to disguise a lack of chemistry. The ilm briely sparks to life in one of the escape sequences, and during a solitary coninement-inspired, hallucinogenic dream sequence. Mostly, though, inspiration’s in short supply. DH
TIDES ★★ OUT 7 DECEMBER / CERT TBC / 99 MINS
Tupaq Felber Jon Foster, Robyn Isaac, Simon Meacock, Jamie Zubairi DIRECTOR CAST
THIS MICRO-BUDGET British indie is hard to dislike, but equally hard to recommend. Four actors in early middle age go on a long weekend captured with docudrama realism on the canals of Surrey. The cast — who co-wrote — are able, but oddly enough don’t give themselves much to play beyond London creative types who still live ten years younger than they are. It’s ine to choose minimalism over melodrama, but there’s not much here to grab onto other than skilful photography that uses black and white to render the most familiar settings strange. A thinly cut slice of life, the ilm never really makes a case for why we’re following these characters. AL
film
THE GIRLINTHE SPIDER’S WEB ★★★
OUT 20 NOVEMBER CERT TBC / 117 MINS
Fede Álvarez CAST Claire Foy, Lakeith Stanield, Sverrir Gudnason, Stephen Merchant DIRECTOR
When gifted hacker Lisbeth Salander (Foy) is attacked in her apartment, the assailants make off with a dangerous computer program. As she tries to retrieve it, ghosts from her past begin to haunt her at every turn.
PLOT
LISBETH SALANDER CAN handle a lot. She’s been to hell and back, and attacks without prejudice. But now, the ever-mutating righter of wrongs, currently wearing a Claire Foy skin mask, is up against something that may well crush her: a franchise. The Girl In The Spider’s Web is very much the further adventures of Lisbeth Salander, adapted from the 2015 book
written by David Lagercrantz following original author Stieg Larsson’s death. The previous cinematic takes on her misadventures — the original Swedish trilogy, a classical crime thriller starring Noomi Rapace, and 2011’s sublimely cold David Fincher piece, starring Rooney Mara — were completely diferent interpretations with distinctive character. Fede Álvarez, who lent horrific atmospherics to the 2013 Evil Dead remake and directed 2016’s claustrophobic Don’t Breathe has again left-turned. Yet so much of what unfolds is nothing new. Criminally, at Lisbeth’s expense, it’s played safe. From the start of the prologue, which introduces us to the young Lisbeth, her sister and their abusive father, you feel the myth-building, and with the very Bond titles that pipe up, everything screams epic. The subsequent adult Lisbeth scene follows suit, and as soon as we see a terrible man behaving terribly, you know exactly how it’s going to play out. Lisbeth sweeps in like a superhero — like Batman, to be precise — and we must cheer, presumably. That’s the main disappointment — everything feels a bit big, from the scope to the sweeping score to some gorgeous but overly iconic shots. A lot is lumped onto Lisbeth, and it feels like an awkward fit.
It was tense as they waited to see if the holiday pics would load.
Her world has not been sanitised: heavy stuf goes down, and Álvarez does indulge himself in some disconcerting body horror. There’s a great drug sequence involving some disturbing physical contortion from Foy, who is terrific throughout — her Lisbeth isn’t as frighteningly unpredictable or as primal as those before, but her performance is great regardless, shining with subtlety, a pressure cooker of repressed pain. Even if she is needlessly rude to fast food delivery guys. But it mostly smacks of familiarity, a conventional action thriller. In that regard it’s a perfectly serviceable, tense, propulsive genre outing. But convention is the last thing Lisbeth Salander needs. Despite her vulnerabilities, she is definitely a sort of superhero now, even getting herself a Batmobile. Well, a black Lamborghini, but it might as well be. If this hits and breeds more, fine. It does its job. But something — certainly psychological nuance — has been lost. Lisbeth has always been a square peg in a round hole. Now more than ever. ALEX GODFREY VERDICT An
often effective reboot, this does everything you’d expect, but that’s a real shame. Lisbeth might be a nomad, but she doesn’t feel at home here.
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THE OLD MAN & THE GUN ★★★★
OUT DECEMBER 7 CERT 12A / 93 MINS
DIRECTOR
David Lowery CAST Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Afleck, Tika Sumpter, Elisabeth Moss, Tom Waits, Danny Glover PLOT
Dapper old gent and career criminal Forrest (Redford) embarks on a string of heists with fellow OAPs Waller and Teddy (Waits, Glover) with Detective Hunt (Afleck) on their trail. But will he reform when he meets kind-hearted Jewel (Spacek)?
ROBERT REDFORD’S SWANSONG starts with a caption that tells us this story is “also, mostly true”. The “also” is important — an indication of a tone that is warm, witty and quietly celebratory without being self-indulgent. It’s a callback to almost half a century ago, when the opening text of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid informed us “most
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of what follows is true”. That movie made Redford a superstar, and if he felt typecast then he used it rather than resented it — hence the film festival which bears his character’s name. So it is perfectly fitting that this similarly beguiling outlaw story brings the curtain down on one of the greatest screen careers. If he sticks to his announced retirement — and the nature of The Old Man & The Gun could itself be a comment on how likely that is. Redford plays someone who can’t resist his vocation regardless of age or worry or the law. He believes he should carry on doing what he loves. Which is robbing banks. “I’m not talking about making a living,” he says. “I’m just talking about living.” The story could seem absurd, and perhaps that’s why writer/director David Lowery (A Ghost Story) sprinkles it with specific dates, as if to gently remind us this really happened. The banks are robbed during the early ’80s, but stylistically Lowery’s film is grounded in the decade before. From the unpretentious but elegant shooting style to the percussive, Lalo Schifrin-flavoured score (by regular Lowery collaborator Daniel Hart), this feels a bit like an undiscovered Don Siegel picture. Except it isn’t anywhere near as pessimistic as films it might bring
Casey was in no doubt: that hat would definitely go better with his jacket.
to mind, whether Siegel’s own Charley Varrick or Peter Yates’ The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (a decidedly more acrid take on an old criminal who isn’t able to quit). Aleck dubs the shady septuagenarians the ‘Over The Hill Gang’ and his dogged, professional pursuit is laced with quiet admiration. This is a film that loves its central character and never really challenges his behaviour, or faces the fear he causes — although it does, in a matter-of-fact manner, present some of the other damage caused by his choices (an Elisabeth Moss cameo stays with you). If Redford had chosen to a make a movie that wrestled with that drama more intensely, he may have had a better shot at the Academy glory that has always eluded him (he has won as director, but only been nominated once as actor, for The Sting). But, as heavily as it leans on his history — there’s a mugshots-and-memories montage comprised of his films — this really isn’t a movie for Redford. It is, as ever, for us. NEV PIERCE A delightful folk story from one of the best filmmakers working today — and a fitting final turn from Redford, all easy charm and grace. It takes a lifetime of effort to look this effortless.
VERDICT
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS ★★★ PG / 99 MINS / OUT 2 NOVEMBER DIRECTORS Lasse
Hallström,
Joe Johnston CAST Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Helen Mirren, Matthew Macfadyen, Morgan Freeman HERE’S A FILM for the little princess inside us all. Happily, underneath its glitter and sparkle, there’s a surprisingly coherent story. Our heroine Clara (Foy) is mourning her mother when she stumbles into a fantasy world. There, she’s drawn into a conlict between the terrifying Mother Ginger (Mirren) and Sugar Plum (Knightley), with plucky nutcracker Phillip (Fowora-Knight) to help. The plot’s suffered major changes — note the two credited directors — but it effectively addresses grief, and when it sticks to that theme the solid cast and fun villain make it work. Those with a sweet tooth will love it. HOH
film
DISOBEDIENCE ★★★★
OUT 30 NOVEMBER CERT 15 / 114 MINS
DIRECTOR Sebastián
Lelio CAST Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola, Anton Lesser PLOT After the death of her estranged rabbi father, Ronit (Weisz) returns from New York to London and the Orthodox Jewish community of her youth. Old tensions rise again as she runs into Esti (McAdams), their teenage affair having lead to Ronit’s exile.
CHILEAN DIRECTOR SEBASTIÁN Lelio returns — following
THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS ★★★★ 12A / OUT 97 MINS / 30 NOVEMBER DIRECTOR Tim
Wardle Galland, Robert Shafran, David Kellman
CAST Eddy
YOU GENUINELY COULDN’T make this true story up: in 1980, identical triplets who’d been adopted by different families reunited by happenstance and became minor celebrities in Reagan’s America. It’s an unlikely tale down to the smallest details, but this fascinating doc goes deeper, exploring the hugely unethical psychological research that led to the brothers being separated in the irst place — and the emotional wreckage the scientists casually inlicted on their subjects. It’s an amazing enough story on its own, but director Tim Wardle delves into the deeper questions the triplets’ story opens up about nature’s relationship with nurture, making for a fascinating and stimulating ilm. AL
his Oscar win for A Fantastic Woman earlier this year — with Disobedience, a passionately fraught drama and riveting character study. It’s an achingly beautiful portrayal of love, loss, lust and regret, continuing his exploration of these themes in his previous films. Lelio once again navigates female desire, identity and oppression, but this time within the strict boundaries of religion. Faithfully following author Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name, he focuses on the moral tension between faith and sexuality. Lelio continues to flourish in his English-language debut — his first with an A-list cast. Upon returning home to London, bohemian, New York-based photographer Ronit (Weisz) has nowhere specific to stay, and ends up seeking awkward refuge in the marital home of two childhood friends, Dovid (Nivola) and Esti (McAdams). This marriage comes as a shock to Ronit as she was previously banished from their tightknit community due to her illicit romance with Esti, which is only ever acknowledged in hushed whispers and disapproving looks.
Lelio counterpoints simmering surface-level emotion with the damply muted backdrop of London. It’s a poignantly artful coupling that amplifies Ronit and Esti’s snowballing tension. Lelio emphasises the escalating emotional pressure with his intimately framed camerawork subtly capturing the yearning glances, discreet physical caresses and fleeting micro expressions that let decades of secrets slip. The anguish, torment and lust in each of these shots has a delicate and raw earnestness. Lelio juxtaposes the opposing sexual relationships throughout Disobedience. Dovid and Esti’s matrimonial intimacy is dutiful, yet ultimately mechanical and detached. Ronit’s and Esti’s reunion is passionate: urgent, yet tender. Thankfully, Lelio’s framing of female pleasure is stylishly shot, never feeling fetishised or voyeuristic. It’s an elegantly orchestrated piece of sensual choreography. However, this swell of passion is sadly short-lived as the couple’s bliss is shattered by the impending crash of reality, and the trappings of responsibility and consequences it brings. The performances from Weisz, McAdams and Nivola are faultlessly nuanced, anchoring the film with a frank sincerity that gives Disobedience a heartfelt realism. Nivola’s portrayal of stoic religious devotion is perhaps his finest performance to date, whilst Weisz’s guilt-racked rebellious streak plays of McAdams’ seeming naivety with knife-sharp precision. Depicting the soul-searching crossroads they face when deciding between deep-seated spiritual belief and personal freedom, Disobedience is a quietly devastating tale of forbidden love that has a crushing universality. CHLOE CATCHPOLE
The ties that bind: tensions build in an Orthodox Jewish family.
VERDICT An understated yet profound examination of identity and selfsacrifice, this honest depiction of repressed romance will unashamedly tug at every heart string.
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BUILDING BURSTEAD Ben Wheatley on the inspirations for his new film
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A WEDDING
★★★★
OUT TBC CERT TBC / 95 MINS
DIRECTOR Ben
Wheatley CAST Neil Maskell, Hayley Squires, Sam Riley PLOT For New Year’s Eve, Colin Burstead (Maskell) hires a country manor for his extended family to convene in, despite everyone’s seeming reluctance to do so. His sister Gini (Squires), meanwhile, has invited their black-sheep brother David (Riley), which causes consternation from the start. This will not end well.
BEN WHEATLEY’S NEW film begins epically, with an unassuming suburban bungalow. Outside stands Neil Maskell’s middle-aged Colin, vaping for England in his sleeveless V-neck, for 15 seconds, in profile, in slow-motion, soundtracked by a score that makes it feel like a Western. For the next 90 minutes, everything ordinary is aforded such glory. It is kitchen-sink Sergio Leone. And a battle awaits. Wheatley has half-joked that he did Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May with Sightseers, and with this he’s onto Abigail’s Party, but he’s selling himself short. Certainly there are some similarities, but he’s also said Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is loosely based on Coriolanus (hence the soundalike working title ‘Colin, You Anus’). A closer comparison, both in its vicious presentation of family misfortunes and its handheld, fly-on-the-wall stylings, is Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, but it also feels like the Modern Toss cartoons come to life — apt, asWheatley directed some of the strip’s Channel 4 transition. Above all, though, it is pure, uncut Wheatley — biting, bitter, irreverent and funny.
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After 2016’s Boston-set Free Fire, this is resolutely British, snide and direct from Dorset, where people smile sympathetically before cursing under their breath, sarcasm is endemic, and resentment uncontained. Fleeting remarks or looks speak to years of disgust. Colin asks someone to check into non-regulation steps after his self-pitying mother trips over and makes a meal of it. Someone says, “Fuck you,” to a fusebox. It is all horribly resonant: the petty jealousies sting, while the long-running feuds, manifested in barely repressed hatred, are painful. Wheatley goes big on the small things. There is talk of fiefdom and misdeeds, more than one reference to the country pile as a castle and, thanks to Clint Mansell’s score, full of flutes (always scary), it does feel like medieval power-play. The film was written by Wheatley, with contributions — presumably improvisation — from the cast, sometimes obviously. There is a sense that he devised this as a means, in-between bigger projects, to hang out with some of his favourite actors, have a laugh, and just let them go at it for a couple of weeks. That works in its favour, though — there is a fluidity to the film, and it always feels alive. These are snatches rather than scenes, giving it all a montage feel. Every performance is idiosyncratic, with one-liners too good to spoil here. It loses steam a little: the explosions are underwhelming, and the film never quite climaxes, possibly because it’s been letting rip from the start, but also because Wheatley presumably didn’t want to shoehorn in any overwhelming plot device. And that’s no bad thing. The film is contrivance free, as it is sentimentality. Yet for all its sniping, there is heart here. Somewhere. ALEX GODFREY VERDICT A
slight but consistently entertaining, thoroughly funny slice of life, this is Ben Wheatley untethered, letting off steam with a workout. It is a welcome carnival of misanthropy.
The vape escape: Colin (Neil Maskell) takes stock on New Year’s Eve.
CORIOLANUS “The hero who is told to do something, does it, then everyone turns on him, that’s what happens in Coriolanus. It’s a particularly un-western, Elizabethan kind of arc — you couldn’t see it in modern cinema at all, it’d be like Captain America being asked to become Captain America and then The Avengers telling him he’s an idiot for the rest of the ilm.”
FESTEN “I really loved Festen. As much as anything it was the freeing of cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, it was so radical. That and The Idiots, they felt realer than anything else I’d ever seen. And it’s handheld and in a country house. It’s a sub-genre of ilm, the party, the get-together with many characters coming together and interacting.”
GREY GARDENS “Laurie Rose, the director of photography, and I always look back to Grey Gardens as a touchstone for a lot of our ilmmaking. The Maysles stuff feels like ‘witness camera’ to me, like being in the room, experiencing it with the characters. I bounce backwards and forwards between the tableaux-style shooting of, say, High Rise, which is more stylised, to a more gritty, bootson-the-ground handheld look.” ALEX GODFREY
Alamy
HAPPYNEWYEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD
“A Wedding is a massive inluence on me, it’s one of my favourite [Robert] Altman ilms. In terms of dealing with a massive cast and having multiple stories running through it, that’s the one I enjoy the most. I rewatched it a couple of years ago and it totally stood up, it’s as good as ever. So that was the starting point for me.”
SORRY TO BOTHER YOU ★★★★
OUT 7 DECEMBER CERT 15 / 112 MINS
Boots Riley CAST Lakeith Stanield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Danny Glover DIRECTOR
Cassius ‘Cash’ Green lives in his uncle’s garage, frustrated with his life and prospects. Getting a job as a telemarketer for shadowy company RegalView, he is exposed to dazzling individual opportunities — but at what cost?
PLOT
“HEY YOUNGBLOOD,” SAYS novice telemarketer Cassius’ (Stanfield) cannier colleague Langston (Danny Glover). “Use your white voice. Like being pulled over by the police.” If the African-American Cassius wants to succeed, he needs to play the system, as well as some dirty tricks. More significantly, he’s got to be someone — something — he’s not. If he even knows what he is to begin with.
Sorry To Bother You is a dialled-up, adrenalised satire that throws everything it’s got at the screen, writer-director Boots Riley’s wealth of life experience exploding indiscriminately. The son of civil rights campaigners, Riley has been proactively into politics forever, and his debut film is fiercely anti-capitalist. Stanfield (Get Out, Atlanta) holds it all together as Cassius, a goofy klutz who lives in his uncle’s garage, lacks conviction and sufers extreme existential angst: just for one night, can he not fret about the sun exploding, pleads his activist/performance artist girlfriend Detroit (Thompson). Social concerns are wrestled — make that piledriven — from the start. It’s a technicolour rant, from its stop-motion sequences to its horrific gameshow ‘I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me’ to the gold elevator reserved for RegalView’s top level ‘power callers’. It’s a very Trumpian elevator, but Riley isn’t raging at specific figures or political parties — it’s the entire system that’s up for the chop, including us. We are all capital, Riley reminds us, but all also infected by capitalism — we’re part of the problem. Sorry To Bother You is about how money and ego can corrode us; it’s about selling out, sacrificing our identity, our morality, our principles.
Lakeith Stanfield as Cash goes for the hard sell.
Riley has ideas to spare, and then some. Tonally, aesthetically and narratively, everything is crazed, with absurdist diversions and DIY stylings reminiscent of, respectively, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. An early sequence of Cassius, at his desk, literally crashing into people’s lives, is a startling jolt, and things get wilder as the film goes on. It’s a blast; sometimes it’s a little too much so, as everything is so skitty, so mad, and fast, it’s hard to keep up with. Yet it hits hard, thanks to its endless invention and the sheer balls of it all. There are amazing lines; when Cassius posits that comparing his department to RegalView’s upper echelons is like comparing apples to oranges, he is told it’s more like comparing apples to the Holocaust. Stanfield, once again, is great as a man out of place, and Thompson, once again, is like a unicorn spewing glitter. But it’s Riley’s film, and this is him rigidly planting a flag. Unapologetically. ALEX GODFREY VERDICT No fence-sitting here, Sorry To Bother You wallops its targets. Drenched in self-awareness, it is fantastically refreshing, defiantly announcing Riley as a radical new voice.
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FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD ★★★
CERT 12A OUT NOW / 134 MINS
DIRECTOR David
Yates CAST Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Don Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Zoë Kravitz PLOT Hogwarts’ professor Dumbledore (Law) enlists former pupil Newt Scamander (Redmayne) to take down Gellert Grindelwald (Depp), a dark wizard hell-bent on raising pure-blood wizards to rule over No-Majs (Muggles).
THE CRIMES OF Grindelwald is a weird rather than fantastic beast. The second chapter in J.K. Rowling’s five-part story, it’s a film stufed with characters, big moments and impressive spectacle, but still feels bizarrely underpowered. There are twists and revelations, but very few that alter the outcome of the film. Just like the first one, it feels like it’s set-up for bigger pay-ofs down the line, without the satisfying clif-hanger qualities of, say, The Empire Strikes Back. The beginning is a lively afair, as Grindelwald (Depp) — being shipped to Europe to stand trial — masterminds a thrilling escape from a flying stagecoach. Dumbledore (Law) sends Newt Scamander (Redmayne) to Paris, where numerous interested parties are searching for orphan Credence Barebone (a dialled-down Miller), who survived the events of New York and holds the key to the wizarding world battle. Yet Rowling’s writing doesn’t imbue this hunt with any urgency — Newt is
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distracted by his search for love interest Tina (Waterston, wasted in another franchise after Alien: Covenant); Grindelwald seems content to let Credence come to him. Any potential dynamism is further blunted by emphasis on sub-plots (Fogler’s Muggle Jacob chasing Sudol’s pure-blood Queenie) and backstories such as a stretch devoted to new character Leta Lestrange’s (Kravitz) lineage. From the smallest detail to the most expansive world-building, the craft on show is impressive. It’s matched by Rowling’s imagination peppering the story with charming invention such as a cheeky wind spell. Happily, Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander anchors the madness better this time round, less tic-y and diffident, more engaged. The Crimes Of Grindelwald works harder than the previous tale to tie into the series history. There’s flash-backed returns to Hogwarts, Voldemort’s snake Nagini (Claudia Kim in human form) and the vaunted appearance of young Dumbledore, Jude Law bringing tweed and a twinkle to a more mischievous professor. The question of Dumbledore’s sexuality is only coyly suggested — if it’s passed you by that Dumbledore is gay, you still might be none the wiser. Elsewhere Rowling further sews modernity into the proceedings, from a family tree that neglects to give women their due to Grindelwald himself, his Trumpian fake news spiel normalising the most horrific ideas about No-Maj cleansing. Depp, bleached blond with shifting eye colouration, gives serviceable villain in only a handful of scenes, his masterplan building to a rally with some spectacular CG sturm und drang. Just don’t expect to leave the meeting with any answers. IAN FREER An enjoyable foray into J.K.’s imagination, bolstered by a more appealing Eddie Redmayne, but you can’t help feeling Grindelwald is still treading water until future chapters.
VERDICT
THE BIGGER PICTURE
THECRIMES OF BUILDING WORLDS SPOILER WARNING
Creating a successful franchise requires focusing on the here and now, says Empire’s Helen O’Hara
IT MAY SEEM counterintuitive, but the further a story strays into the fantastical, the more you need rules. We can buy a wizarding school if we know there’s a specific platform at King’s Cross from where its train departs. We’ll believe a man can fly if we know what planet he comes from. World-building is the reason that every book with a dragon on the cover seems to have a map inside, and every space opera a glossary of terms. But as fantasy filmmaking searches hungrily for new material, this worldbuilding task can become onerous. Look at The Mortal Instruments, The Maze Runner or Divergent to see films that
spent half their runtime patching together their worlds instead of having a great adventure. And now, sadly, look at Fantastic Beasts. We’re two films in and still waiting for Eddie Redmayne’s ostensible lead, Newt Scamander, to truly engage with the (apparent) overarching mission of stopping Gellert Grindelwald. That’s not to say there isn’t fun stuf there, but while Voldemort and Harry were linked from the beginning, Rowling is now taking her time moving the pieces into place. It’s unsatisfying — film is not TV, so each outing should stand largely alone. There’s a reason Marvel adopted an incremental approach, introducing only a couple of Avengers for each of five films before the first glorious pay-of. Marvel gives each story an individual tone (space opera, paranoia thriller) and near standalone plot before setting up the future stuf, usually in the credits. Even Avengers: Infinity War, a film that
Above: Depp’s as yet untouchable Gellert Grindelwald. Right, top to bottom: Potter and Voldemort, connected from day one; Avengers: Infinity War has had an 18-film lead-up.
builds on 18 previous stories and ends on a clihanger, still boasts a plot you can follow from scratch. The carcasses of the MCU’s would-be imitators show how diicult that is. There’s economy, too: every previous doohickey in the Marvel Universe turned out to be an Infinity Stone, saving endless exposition. Where films have too obviously built towards the future — Iron Man 2, Age Of Ultron — the storytelling has sufered, something that seems to have been realised. Much of the problem stems from Hollywood’s quest to replicate Harry Potter and, again, the MCU. No studio chief wants to announce a single $150 million film. They want to unveil a new franchise that will bring the stockholders that sweet, sweet Marvel money for decades. Unless you’re Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg, you better be proposing at least a trilogy. And that means laying threads from the outset that might pay
of several films down the line, and a first film’s finale that leaves the door open to your planned, say, Dark Universe movies to come. If they come. Ideally, such planning is subtle and unobtrusive, but fans are wary of presumptions of loyalty — something severely tested by the lengthy tangent to visit Russell Crowe’s otherwise irrelevant Mr Hyde in The Mummy. Those loose threads can make a film look shabby. It’s fair enough to have the occasional clihanger after your heroes and baddies fight one another to a temporary standstill. But it’s not okay to be so focused on introducing characters who will be super-important later, honest, that you forget to have your opposing forces even engage. World-building matters — a lot — but story and character must always come first. If Hollywood forgets that, we’ll see more universes going dark.
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Simon had a horrible feeling there was a small, begging
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dog sitting on his shoulder.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ ★★
OUT NOW CERT 15 / 104 MINS
Crispian Mills CAST Asa Butterield, Finn Cole, Hermione Corield, Michael Sheen, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg DIRECTOR
Working-class boy Donald Wallace (Cole) struggles to it in at Slaughterhouse, an exclusive public school. The headmaster (Sheen) has authorised fracking in the grounds to raise funds, but monsters are raised too. Wallace rallies his peers to ight back.
PLOT
SCRIPTED BY DIRECTOR Crispian Mills and critic Henry Fitzherbert — whose names suggest they might well be familiar with private education — the public school-set Slaughterhouse Rulez offers a mixed bag of horror and comedy. By not settling on one tone, it remains unpredictable — but it’s never as funny or horrific as it might be, and has quite a few painfully flat stretches. Imagine random scenes from If…, St Trinian’s, Scooby-Doo and The Descent spliced together. Slaughterhouse is a hellhole of posh privilege and random bullying, but also staffed by endearingly useless comedy types and rife with comedy wheezes, japes and sixth-form orgies. A serious sub-plot about teenage suicide meanders on amid the tomfoolery mandatory for a film featuring Simon Pegg (star of Mills’ A Fantastic Fear Of Everything) and Nick Frost, who also score executive producer credits. Parvenu hero Donald ‘Ducky’ Wallace (Cole) gets a rare place at the
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exclusive school because one has opened up thanks to the suicide of a bullied gay viscount who hanged himself with his school tie. Everyone but the dead boy’s best friend/room-mate Willoughby Blake (Butterfield) would like to forget about the tragedy, and Blake is either plotting revenge on sadistic head prefect Clegg (Tom Rhys Harries) or intending to do away with himself too. Meanwhile, Ducky sets his cap at posh but nice princess Clemsie (Corfield) — and goes through the ancient business of mistaking her brother for a rival boyfriend. Pegg keeps popping in as a lovelorn house master — picking up on a running joke from Hot Fuzz — and Frost loiters on an eco-protest site in the woods as a drug-dealing old boy who has his own underdeveloped backstory about a missing brother and the secret of a labyrinth of tunnels under the school. Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield play absurd upper-class caricatures as actual people — and the few moments when the film connects emotionally are down to them, though grace notes are always clumsily followed by fart gags. When it arrives, the monster action is surprisingly decent. With swooping drone shots of the lavish grounds and an ominous thread about flames burning green thanks to toxic gases unleashed by fracking, the film establishes a sense of menace — and the mythology about a school-founding, monster-fighting crusader who drove the beasts below the grounds is nicely thought out. The ferocious, tenacious critters — squirmily repulsive, giant rat-catfish things — gnaw their way through a lot of characters, splashing the screen with a great deal of slapstick gore. KIM NEWMAN
BIRD BOX OUT 13 DECEMBER
★★★
(CINEMAS); 21 DECEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT TBC / 117 MINS
Susanne Bier Sandra Bullock, Sarah Paulson, John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, Tom Hollander DIRECTOR
CAST
Heavily pregnant Malorie (Bullock) barricades herself in a house in order to escape a mysterious entity that, once seen, drives people to suicide. Five years later, blindfolded and accompanied by two children, Malorie strives to reach safety.
PLOT
PERHAPS TOO HASTILY and VERDICT Showing more enthusiasm than aptitude, this earns ‘could do better if it tried’ on its report card — but it’s a strange enough genre mix to be vaguely worth a look.
unfairly dubbed as ‘A Quiet Place (but without sight)’ simply for having a vaguely similar high-concept premise, The Night Manager director Susanne Bier’s Bird Box presents a chilling and
uncompromisingly dark post-apocalyptic narrative. Adapted from Josh Malerman’s 2014 novel of the same name, it’s a promising production which may ultimately sufer from failing to measure up tonally and thematically to John Krasinski’s game-changing horror narrative. Presenting a slow-burning, if at times overly simplistic plot, Bird Box actually owes more to the old George A. Romero bleak and unforgiving “end of the world” films of antagonistic survivors than it does to A Quiet Place’s more straightforward monster story. Reluctant, single mother-to-be Malorie has given very little thought to the fate awaiting her after the birth of her unwanted child. Pressed by her worried sister (Paulson in a disappointingly brief appearance) to attend a scheduled prenatal appointment, the two find themselves caught up in the chaos when a mysterious force starts killing people. Holed up indoors with a group of strangers, including a resourceful construction worker, played with great
conviction by Trevante Rhodes, and a cantankerous, bad-mannered drunk (Malkovich), Malorie has no other option but to rely on these strangers if she and her unborn child are to survive the end of the world. Re-emerging five years later, Malorie has learnt to live with the horrors of what awaits her and the two children she’s trying to get to safety. Refusing to even give the five-year-olds names, we sense she sees the world as an unforgiving place in which it pays not to get too attached to anyone. Giving a beautifully measured performance, Sandra Bullock excels as a woman who has learnt to rely solely on her survival instincts and pragmatic nature without ever losing her humanity. For his part, Malkovich is brilliantly acerbic and suitably petulant as a glass-half-empty kind of guy for whom the apocalypse serves to prove that his misanthropy was the right choice all along. As we follow two parallel narratives which take us back and forth between
Sandra Bullock’s Malorie, finding a way to fly from her apocalyptic nightmare.
the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic events and a few years into the future, screenwriter Eric Heisserer is able to develop a story which takes into account the efect of the events on his embattled survivors, but only with mixed results. Bier does an impressive job in ofering the apocalypse as a deeply traumatic, claustrophobic and utterly hopeless experience, electing to present a world in which survivors are far more likely to meet a gruesome end at each other’s hands than have to worry about what awaits them outside. But in profering a decidedly contrived dystopian narrative where each character behaves exactly how you would expect them to, Bird Box fails to bring anything new to the postapocalyptic genre. LINDA MARRIC VERDICT Contrivances and clichés abound, but Bird Box still manages to be a compelling, high-concept idea thanks to Bier’s faultless direction and impressive cast.
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THE METHOD
TARON EGERTON How the Kingsman star became Nottingham’s finest
film
★★
OUT NOW CERT 12A / 116 MINS
Otto Bathurst CAST Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Eve Hewson, Ben Mendelsohn, Tim Minchin, Jamie Dornan DIRECTOR
PLOT “Spoiled
toff” Robin of Loxley (Egerton) returns from the Third Crusade to ind his manor ruined, his girlfriend Marian (Hewson) with another man (Dornan), and Nottingham’s citizens bled dry by the Sheriff (Mendelsohn). He becomes ‘The Hood’ to restore justice.
“FORGET HISTORY,” WE’RE told during the opening narration of this latest attempt to reinvent one of England’s richest legends. “Forget what you think you know.” It feels like less of a demand than it does a plea. Because if you even start to think about Otto Bathurst’s Robin Hood in terms of historical viability, it crumbles quicker than a sandcastle in a rainstorm. The Third Crusade of the late 12th century is portrayed as a kind of proto-Iraq War, with soldiers such as Taron Egerton’s Robin of Loxley waging urban, guerrilla warfare in breastplates that look like flak jackets. Nottingham, meanwhile, is recast as an industrial mining hellhole where fire constantly belches into the air — rather like 1919 Birmingham, which was stylishly recreated under Bathurst’s direction for the first three episodes of Peaky Blinders. To be fair, when you’re dealing with something as culturally ingrained and cliché-ridden as Robin Hood you might as well go for something fresh, and go for broke. But for all its stylistic ambition, and its eforts to reference modern concerns (the Sherif of Nottingham’s anti-Islamic invective), Robin Hood misfires thanks to a crucial absence of internal logic. This world just doesn’t work.
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It’s set around a huge mine, but we never see what it actually produces. Gold? Iron? Er… Coal? Ben Mendelsohn’s Sherif, the latest in a run of smoothly preened evil-executive types for the Aussie actor, behaves like a president seeking re-election rather than a feudal-era autocrat, demogoguing to crowds who can’t even vote. And after Robin becomes a Batman-esque outlaw known as ‘The Hood’, he fosters a Bruce Wayne-ish daytime persona, impressing everyone by tossing gold coins around — despite having just been revealed as losing everything after returning from the crusade. That his mentor, John (Foxx), is a Moor who’s somehow familiar with the inner workings of the English political and economic system despite just arriving in the country only adds to the preposterousness of it all. Egerton does his valiant best, giving Robin a callow, inverse Eggsy-fromKingsman likeability, and Bathurst’s earthy-but-slick, Peaky-honed style works for the action scenes, of which there are many — usually involving Egerton slo-mo twirling through the air and firing of multiple arrows at once like a 12th-century Hawkeye. But nothing else really hangs together. Eve Hewson’s Marian (the only named female character in the entire film, hmm) goes from plucky to passive to outright damsel in a few swift mis-steps. Mendelsohn seems almost bored now of shouting at underlings in big, polished rooms. And Foxx is criminally wasted in sidekick role that requires little more of him than the aforementioned exposition and a bit of training-montage shouting. The ending (owing much to Ridley Scott’s 2010 movie of the same title) suggests a sequel. To be honest, we’d rather see Disney redo its version of the legend with live-action foxes. Now that would be an interesting take. DAN JOLIN VERDICT Like Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur, this tries hard to do something new and exciting with an old formula. It quickly makes you wish for something more traditional and straightforward.
1 LEARNED ARCHERY
__ “I trained in traditional Saracen archery with a recurve bow. You load alternating arrows on the opposite side of the bow, which allows you to hold four in your hand at any one time, ire them, grab another four and repeat ire. I was taught by a Danish guy, Lars Anderson — he’s quite a stern taskmaster. We spent quite a few hours together. It was very challenging.”
2 __ ATTEMPTED HORSERIDING “Learning to ride was probably the most challenging thing. I’m actually quite nervous of horses and they sense that. I like things that I’m perched on the top of to be reliable and solid. I was thrown off a horse in the irst couple of weeks which was pretty intense. But that’s the joy of being an actor — having these new challenges to mount. Quite literally in this case.”
3 __ REFRESHED HIS COMBAT SKILLS “There’s quite a lot of hand-to-hand combat in the ilm. It’s something I’ve done a lot of with Kingsman. It’s essentially choreography; the trick is making it edgy, and like it’s the irst time you’ve done it — that involves a lot of rehearsal beforehand to make sure you can do it safely and also make it look real. I’ve been hit in the face many times.” IAN FREER
Illustration: Dave Hopkins
ROBIN HOOD
THE GRINCH ★★★ OUT NOW / CERT PG / 90 MINS DIRECTORS Yarrow Cheney, Scott Mosier CAST Benedict Cumberbatch, Rashida Jones, Cameron Seely, Kenan Thompson
film
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT ★★
OUT 14 DECEMBER CERT 18 / 155 MINS
DIRECTOR Lars
von Trier CAST Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Riley Keough, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Soie Gråbøl PLOT Jack
(Dillon) is a serial killer. In a conversation with a mysterious stranger, Jack confesses some of his worst murders, committed, he believes, as a form of art. As they walk towards some unknown inal destination, the two men discuss how death became the focus of Jack’s life.
WHETHER FILMING SELFadministered clitorectomies or unsimulated sex, or expressing Nazi sympathy at press conferences, Lars von Trier loves to cause headlines. He sends controversy before his films like a leering herald. Shock is one of his tools and when used well it can harshly underline his films’ message. When used needlessly it just looks childish. The House That Jack Built is seeping with horrible moments — a breast sliced of; a taxidermied child; a mutilated duckling; the casual hunting of a family — all in service of a lumpen point that is being made better in many other places. His gruesome instincts are not underlining his intent but scribbling over it. The film opens in pitch darkness. Jack (Dillon) and an unidentified man (Ganz) are conversing in a way that indicates Jack is being led to some sort of afterlife and reflecting on his existence. He tells his companion about the murders he has committed, illuminating five randomly chosen ‘incidents’ (some have single victims, others multiple). They range from the bludgeoning of
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an annoying woman (Thurman) seeking help with a broken car, to a picnic/hunting lesson that ends with a woman numbly trying to feed her child pie as his brain leaks out of the back of his head, to a casual date with Jacqueline (Keogh) that ends with the aforementioned breast removal as she screams to a world that’s not listening. Jack discusses all these incidents as his art, his statement on a society beneath him. The joke is that Jack is a banal man who ofers the world nothing. He is a trained architect but attempts to build his own house are stymied by his limited vision. In a very darkly comic sequence, Jack’s OCD forbids him to leave a crime scene before repeatedly checking every surface for blood. He gives himself the murder-moniker Mr Sophistication. Yet he achieves his goal of notoriety. Narcissism trumps talent. Von Trier’s message is clear: a nihilistic statement on the mess of our world and specifically America, and the ascent of men who believe declaring yourself the best means you are, with no burden of proof. Jack has Trump-ish vocal and physical tics when delivering his lies; the hunted family wear MAGA-y red caps. The metaphor doesn’t need further explanation, but von Trier jams in a clumsy soliloquy in which Jack moans that the white man is always the bad guy, as he stabs a bound woman. “The world is fucked” is a message you can read in countless places — von Trier is joining the discussion, but all his lurid, gory presentation can’t disguise that he has little to add. He even seems bored by himself, at one point illustrating a damning rant with a montage of older, better von Trier films. Upsetting scenes might make you look away, but there’s not much else to see here. OLLY RICHARDS VERDICT One
of von Trier’s most confrontingly horrible films is also one of his weakest. A story about a man disguising his lack of worthwhile contribution with violent self-interest is guilty of every point it’s making.
Jacqueline (Riley Keogh) with serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon).
THE 2018 THE Grinch is almost the antithesis to Ron Howard’s Jim Carrey-starring How The Grinch Stole Christmas. That took Dr Seuss’ tale of the holiday-hating grouch and ran with it; this is a cutesy, safe adaptation that follows the original book to the letter. Benedict Cumberbatch — all menacing sniggers and snooty tone — suits the role perfectly while the richly detailed visuals match his brilliance; particularly when depicting a brightly lit Whoville at night. And there’s a peppering of great gags too; it’s just a shame that a mawkish message is pushed, rather than adding anything new. OR
LIZZIE ★★★ OUT 14 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 105 MINS
Craig William Macneill Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart, Fiona Shaw, Jamey Sheridan DIRECTOR
CAST
THE STORY OF Lizzie Borden swiftly became notorious when it broke in 1892 — she was the prime suspect in the murders of her father and stepmother. This retelling doesn’t stint on its gruesome aspects. The murders are frenzied and graphic, the toxic atmosphere of the Borden household enhanced by Jeff Russo’s foreboding score. The effect is unsettling, but while not at odds with the central theme of female oppression — both Lizzie (Sevigny) and her lover, maid Maggie (Stewart), are violated by the family patriarch in different ways — the tone often slides into lurid melodrama. Still, Sevigny and Stewart are compelling, adding up to an arresting if not comfortable piece. LB
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film
ROMA ★★★★★
OUT 14 DECEMBER CERT TBC / 135 MINS
DIRECTOR Alfonso
Cuarón CAST Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa In early 1970s Mexico City, a family and their two housekeepers live an ordinary life. When a series of events threatens to disrupt their existence, maid Cleo (Aparicio) must preserve the peace, while also dealing with her own dilemmas.
PLOT
A POST-APOCALYPTIC future, a low-Earth orbit space station and a school for wizards: Alfonso Cuarón’s recent filmography has been, by any standard, pretty otherworldly. Roma is in every sense a more grounded afair for the director, a low-key domestic drama about an ordinary middle-class Mexican family in the 1970s.
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And yet, with a confidence and ambition that again solidifies his status in the very top tier of modern filmmakers, the director deftly sprinkles the magical into this astonishingly authentic, honest portrait of humans living and coexisting. Indeed, it might be his best film yet. Set in the Roma district of Mexico City where the director grew up, and centred on a middle-class household that painfully recreates his own formative years, it is by all accounts deeply autobiographical. But in an act of artistic humility, Cuarón’s focus is not on a young Cuarón. Instead, it’s on Cleo (Aparicio), one of two live-in maids for a busy, noisy, happy family of six. We learn her routine intimately, from the elegant opening titles of a driveway being mopped clean of dogshit (a pleasingly recurring motif ), to the evening ritual of the four kids being lovingly put to bed. Sometimes in these early moments, it feels like nothing happens at all. One sweetly realised scene sees the family literally just watch TV. Cleo joins them, maternally cuddling one of the kids and sharing in the simple joy — at least until
told to clear the plates away. There’s a dash of Upstairs, Downstairs in the contrasts of class and race, but Cuarón never condescends and recognises the nuance in that relationship: even as she occasionally reproaches her employee, the mother Sofía (de Tavira) always acknowledges Cleo’s importance to the family. It’s shot in black-and-white, which at first glance lends it a classical and neorealist feel. There’s undoubtedly a conscious influence of Fellini — his flair, flamboyancy and profound sense of feeling is all there. (By neat coincidence the Italian master also made a semiautobiographical film called Roma.) But the monochrome here is less nostalgic afectation, more thrilling innovation. Each frame is crisp and rich, using a high dynamic range and an unusually deep depth of field. The efect is jaw-dropping. It’s not hyperbolic to rate it as being among the most beautiful photography ever committed to screen. Life spills into the frame, from the comforting familiarity of the family home (where a fixed camera pans gracefully between rooms, like an
Dinner time in 1970s Mexico. Not an Arctic Roll in sight.
He could have made effort for the street’s ’70s soirée.
WHITE BOY RICK ★★★
OUT 7 DECEMBER CERT 15 / 111 MINS
Yann Demange Richie Merritt, Bel Powley, Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Jason Leigh DIRECTOR
CAST
The based-on-fact story of Detroit teenager Richard Wershe Jr (Merritt), aka ‘White Boy Rick’, who became a drug dealer and FBI informant, much to the concern of his small-time arms dealing dad (McConaughey).
PLOT
RICHARD WERSHE JR is the unjudging observer) to the dazzling later set-pieces as the pace picks up (a forest fire, a student riot, a beach accident). The camerawork makes everything feel hyperreal: more dream than documentary. Cuarón has always loved challenging the boundaries of technical innovation — his favourite flourish, the unbroken single-take, is present and correct here — but, more so than in the flashier Gravity or grittier Children Of Men, this has real soul to it. Aided in no small part by Aparicio’s stunning debut performance, there is a devastating emotional coda that will wrongfoot you, and still leave you feeling buoyant. Perhaps Roma’s most impressive feat is its humanism: its understanding of the chaos of life, and its unerring respect for those who meet that chaos with love. Really, Roma feels like a celebration of what it means to feel alive. JOHN NUGENT VERDICT Pairing thrilling technical prowess with profound artistic vision, Alfonso Cuarón has made a masterpiece, at once understated and otherworldly. We need more filmmakers like him.
very embodiment of the phrase “too much too young”. As the facts of his rather crazy, real-life case aren’t widely known, we won’t go into the full details; suffice to say, the kid known as White Boy Rick didn’t so much come of age as headlong crash into it. It’s a fascinating story — high-school drop-out joins a Detroit drug gang and informs on them for the FBI — and ripe material for director Yann Demange, who dealt with another young man in a very diferent hostile urban environment with 2014’s ’71. But with more ground to cover, White Boy Rick is a far less focused story than Demange’s searing Belfast-set debut, so anyone hoping for something that matches ’71’s explosive intensity may be disappointed. White Boy Rick’s straightforwardly chronological approach ofers the best way to package its surprises, but it also means it drags in places, especially toward the end, where empathy for its protagonist threatens to slide into mawkishness. Still, there is much to appreciate, like Demange’s attentive recreation of ’80s Detroit: a grim world of rat-infested
decay and everyday lawbreaking, but also a vibrant musical hub where roller discos throbbed to the heavy, energising pulse of electro and hip hop. It is also replete with fine performances, from the likes of Bel Powley (as Rick’s addict sister) and Bruce Dern (as his craggy gramps), and not least Matthew McConaughey, who strips away his rugged charms to reveal an impressively weaselly side as greasy “low-life” Rick Wershe Sr. He’s a man whose blend of optimism, self-confidence and broken moral compass make him the worst possible advert for the American Dream. Like a Midwestern Del Boy, Rick Sr flogs assault rifles out the back of his car and announces every year as the one he’ll make it big… By setting up a VHS rental store. It’s a shame we don’t see more of him, but while the film pokes at the malign efect of this particular father-son relationship, it’s less about the connection between Ricks Sr and Jr than it is Jr’s own trials — which squarely foregrounds newcomer Richie Merritt. Perhaps it is just how the real Rick was, but there is a lumpen blandness to the character and Merritt’s performance, which makes him the least interesting to spend time with, despite the incredible events that befall him. He’s reminiscent of James Frecheville’s similarly crime-plagued adolescent in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom: a kid who would actually be quite dull and forgettable, but for the lifethreatening situations he finds himself in. Of course, his any-teen normality only heightens the efect of his abnormally hazardous situation. But it is a challenge for any audience when the main character is, ultimately, the one you’re least excited to hang out with. DAN JOLIN VERDICT A patchy follow-up to the searing ’71 from director Yann Demange, but one which tells a compelling true story and offers a treat of a supporting turn from Matthew McConaughey.
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CINEMA’S GREATEST SANTAS The Christmas Chronicles producer Chris Columbus chooses his top Clauses
KURT RUSSELL
film
★★★
NETFLIX / OUT NOW CERT TBC / 103 MINS
DIRECTOR Clay
Kaytis CAST Kurt Russell, Judah Lewis, Darby Camp, Lamorne Morris, Martin Roach PLOT Christmas Eve, 2018, and fractious siblings Teddy (Lewis) and Kate (Camp) are struggling to feel the Christmas spirit. After hatching a plot to catch Santa (Russell) on camera, they not only discover that he’s real but they stowaway on his sleigh and cause it to crash in the streets of Chicago. With only hours before morning, they need to help Santa save Christmas.
AS THE DIRECTOR of Home Alone and the writer of Gremlins, Chris Columbus is well-versed in portraying things going entertainingly wrong at Christmas. And while he only has a producer credit on The Christmas Chronicles (Angry Birds’ Clay Kaytis directs Matt Liebermann’s script), his candy-cane-sticky fingerprints are all over this Netflix production. The story starts with kids being left home alone on Christmas Eve (their firefighter dad is dead and their nurse mom has to pull an emergency shift), while Santa’s CG elves are fuzzy, squeaky and distinctly Mogwai-ish. But the Columbus joint this most resembles is 1987 debut Adventures In Babysitting. Both films involve kids set loose on the night-time streets of Chicago, dealing with a domino efect of little disasters and racing against time to get home. Although, to be fair, Adventures… didn’t feature flying reindeer, or Kurt Russell turning into sparkly dust and whooshing down chimneys.
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While The Christmas Chronicles doesn’t come close to rewriting the Christmas-movie rulebook — it relies heavily on pop-song references, twinkly music cues and humbuggy characters whose frosty hearts melt — it does have fun with the mythic figure at the centre of it all. No, not Jesus. The other one. Russell’s Santa is a bracing blast of fresh air, less jolly than feisty, getting annoyed when asked to go, “Ho ho ho,” and lamenting cola adverts that make him look rotund. There’s a straight-talking, blue collar edge to this Saint Nick (“I’m not an oicial saint… I guess it’s who you know”) who disarms everyone he encounters by knowing their names and recalling every present they ever asked for. And also, if they’ve ever been on his naughty list, their crimes. Of course, he’s kindly and warm-hearted, but you get the impression he’d kick your ass if he had to. Certainly, he’s not averse to a bit of dangerous, high-speed driving (in a bright-red Dodge Challenger, no less). The film’s lucky to have him, and you’ll miss Russell’s Nick when a turn of events takes him of-screen for a while. Especially as the kids who mess up his 2018 present-run make for less than scintillating company. Perky ten-year-old “true believer” Katie (Camp) doesn’t really have anywhere to go as a character (apart from learning Elvish, which makes you sound like an Ewok doing a Swedish Chef impression), while her vanilla bad-boy big bro Teddy (Lewis) gets lumbered with some run-of-the-mill dead-parent angst. At times the tinselly schmaltz will make you wince, at others it even turns a bit creepy. But thanks to Russell’s roguish spin on the big, bearded house-breaker, this serves up a Christmas spirit most will be happy to glug. DAN JOLIN VERDICT It’s as predictable as an Advent calendar, but thanks to Kurt Russell’s grizzly charms, The Christmas Chronicles at least gives us one of the movies’ best Santas yet.
Easily sled: Santa (Russell) lets Kate (Darby Camp) and Teddy (Judah Lewis) take the reins on this festive frolic.
EDMUND GWENN MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET “There’s something ethereal and downright spiritual here. He won the Academy Award. Not only one of the best Santas, but one of the best performances of the last 80 years.”
DAVID HUDDLESTON SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE “It’s the version of Santa we wanted [Kurt] to be the opposite of, but there’s something I love about this Santa. It was the one thing I walked away from the movie really liking.”
ED ASNER ELF “I love that little bit of gruffness — perhaps the irst time that happened. But he still had warmth and humour.” JONATHAN PILE
Alamy
THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES
THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES “I’ve seen the ilm 350 times and never tire of Kurt. He said, ‘This is the third-most important role of my career: I’ve played Elvis, Snake Plissken and now Santa.’”
Tv
HOUSE OFCARDS: SEASON 6 ★★★
NETFLIX / OUT NOW EPS VIEWED 1-5
Frank Pugilese, Melissa Gibson CAST Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Patricia Clarkson, Greg Kinnear, Diane Lane SHOWRUNNERS
Claire Underwood (Wright), now President, must ight to keep power. Her husband is dead, but allies and enemies are trying to enforce promises he made against his widow, and Claire’s independence is under greater threat than ever.
PLOT
LOSING A STAR is no easy thing for a drama series. But it’s not only the absence of Frank Underwood that causes problems for House Of Cards. This sixth and final season sees Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood finally take centre stage, and her increased role gives the show a tone and pace that feels diferent from what has gone before. It’s fresh, but not always satisfying
— and can’t surmount the tricky issue of its contrast to America’s political reality. Once again, plot elements are ripped from the real world, with Syria, mass surveillance and the testimony of criminal accomplices all in play as Underwood attempts to cement her own power. But the main thrust is her attempt to stay free from the dominance of big business, which puts the show firmly in wish fulfilment territory. Frank Underwood is missed — at first. There was an impish edge to his Machiavellian scheming; Claire is, wisely, wary in her plots, facing a greater uphill battle than her husband ever did. The first scene, for example, notes her much higher volume of hate mail. She must keep her emotions in check, so her composure is absolute. Her strategy is to recruit other women, idealistically to promote equality, but also calculating that such appointees will be loyal. Yet she trusts almost no-one entirely. Her opponents are right-wing industrialist Bill Shepherd (Kinnear) and his sister Annette (Lane), a childhood friend of Claire’s who’s just as gifted in using her looks and her brains to get ahead. Underwood’s risk-averse incrementalism feels realistic for a female politician, though it doesn’t always make for gripping drama. Wright, however, is
Yet again she’d got the cracker with the crappy ring.
magnetic, while Lane adds fire and Patricia Clarkson’s political operator Jane brings a touch of unpredictable quirk. The dialogue can be clunky — a US Vice President corrects Russian premier Petrov (Lars Mikkelsen) when he refers to World War II as the “Great Patriotic War”, rather than diplomatically acknowledging the designation — but there are still gloriously sharp moments (“Playing incompetent is so exhausting,” sighs Claire to camera). Claire Underwood is a monster, yes. She does put personal power over her country’s interest. But her schemes still achieve occasionally positive things and she has little regard for self-enrichment. Some of her actions are even, almost, noble. The strange fact is that Netflix’s first big, homegrown hit has begun to feel a little dated, because its format, and lead, are too formal to allow for much evolution. As we saw last season, politics is faster than this now, an endless churn of scandal and grotesquery, while House Of Cards remains its own chilly, composed self. HELEN O’HARA VERDICT An icier, more remote protagonist requires some adjustment, but the show has kept its plotting satisfyingly labyrinthine and its quality generally high. If only reality had done the same.
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MEET OUR CRITICS
JAMES DYER @jamescdyer Evangelical about Aliens and Nuns On The Run. Once had a wee next to Ice Cube.
IAN FREER @mrianfreer Loves Jaws and The 400 Blows and Apocalypse Now. Yet to see The Big Lebowski.
TERRI WHITE @terri_white Is disappointed in any film that isn’t unrelentingly grim. Apart from La La Land.
NICK DE SEMLYEN @nickdesemlyen Loves film noir and Peter Jackson films. Can recite the lyrics to Magic Dance from Labyrinth.
JONATHAN PILE @jonnypile Flirts with highbrow films, but is happiest in front of a decent thriller.
CHRIS HEWITT @chrishewitt Loves horror and Marvel flicks. Freddy vs Tony would be his best movie ever.
HELEN O’HARA @helenlohara Likes superheroes. And films about smart people arguing, ideally while falling in love.
JOHN NUGENT @mr_nugent Big fan of Powell, Pressburger, Pixar and Predator. And other films that do not start with ‘P’.
DAN JOLIN @danjolin Favourite film is Brazil, director is Nolan, franchise is Planet Of The Apes (the good ones).
OLLY RICHARDS @olly_richards Insists Batman Returns is the best Batman film and will (weakly) fight you over it.
HOMECOMING PRIME VIDEO
★★★★
OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 10
Sam Esmail Roberts, Stephan James, Bobby Cannavale, Shea Whigham, Alex Karpovsky, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
CREATED BY CAST Julia
Heidi Bachman (Roberts) is a caseworker at a government facility helping soldiers return to civilian life. The story cuts between her time working at the facility and an investigation four years later looking into the strange circumstances under which she left her job.
PLOT
HOMECOMING IS NOT a show to watch with any other distractions. Put your phone away. Leave your chores for later. It demands complete attention. Not because the plot is hard to follow, but because so much of its storytelling is in the visuals. It doles out its story at a slow pace, yet the peculiar mood it creates is riveting. Based on a podcast of the same name, Homecoming is split across two timelines. In the first, we venture into the definitelynot-what-it-seems Homecoming facility, which helps soldiers prepare for a return to civilian life after completing their service. Heidi Bachman (Roberts) is a caseworker who interviews the soldiers to discuss their issues and monitor their progress. The facility is dingy and odd. One worker hosts a weirdly intense class on how to interview for a job in a shoe shop. Nobody ever goes outside. It doesn’t seem right. In the second timeline, four years in the future, Heidi is working in a diner. She is clearly long gone from Homecoming, but a government agent (Whigham) brings her past back to her when he begins investigating why she left the company
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under strange circumstances and what was really going on inside those walls. While the fact this is Roberts’ first lead in a TV show is the obvious big news here, this isn’t just a showcase for an A-lister. Hers is one of the quieter roles. Heidi is a dowdy, uncertain woman who gradually grows in forcefulness over the ten episodes. Roberts keeps her star wattage dimmed — there are no bursts of that famous laugh — and takes her place in a superb ensemble, which includes Bobby Cannavale as Homecoming’s obnoxious boss, Stephan James as a soldier Heidi becomes close to and Marianne JeanBaptiste as that soldier’s mother. Sam Esmail, who also created Mr. Robot, has clearly carefully considered every single frame of the show. It is wildly stylish, but not precious about it. Most of the show is constructed of two-way conversations, which Esmail frames in skewed, disorientating ways, making the actors look small and vulnerable in big Kubrickian wide-shots or completely exposed in extreme closeup. There’s no softness or comfort to any of it. Paired with a Hitchcock-esque score, every minute makes you feel unsettled, as if at least one person is lying to you at all times, which they usually are. Homecoming is a slow-burner that is worth the time. It needs a sedate pace to really make you feel the wrongness of the Homecoming facility, where every day is mundane but with an edge of nightmare. A second season is already confirmed. By the end of Season 1, it’s impossible to imagine exactly what else it could possibly reveal, but it’s easy to believe there are countless other secrets inside Homecoming’s cold walls. OLLY RICHARDS VERDICT This gives Julia Roberts the most interesting, layered role she’s had in years, yet she’s just one reason to watch this eerie mystery that will give you the creeps in a seriously stylish way.
Who knew she’d won £10 on the Premium Bonds back in ’89?
Illustrations: David Mahoney
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STATE OF THE ART JAMES CAMERON REFLECTS ON A LIFE SPENT MAKING MOVIES, AND THE PASSION THAT NEVER DIMS PORTRAIT ART STREIBER
efore I ever dreamed of being a filmmaker, I was in love with cinema. As a kid, I knew all of the old B sci-fi films from the 1950s by heart. I’d record them on a little audiocassette recorder I got for Christmas, then listen back to them later and replay them in my mind, because home video was still decades away. Inspired by those movies, I’d draw pictures or build my own robots. Not
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that they were very sophisticated robotics — they were cardboard boxes filled with paper-towel tubes, and if you turned a crank they would dispense Maltesers. I made them as Mother’s Day presents and things like that. I also built humanoid robotic torsos and put them on top of a remote-control toy tank, which I’d drive around. I guess that was the precursor to the treaded Hunter Killers ❯ in The Terminator.
James Cameron, photographed exclusively for Empire at Lightstorm, Los Angeles.
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It was 2001: A Space Odyssey that toggled a switch in my brain and turned me into a practitioner. I was 14 and had never picked up a camera before. But now I wanted to know how visual-efects shots were made. So I got my dad’s Super 8 camera and started building model kits of the spacecraft in the movie. I read the 2001 ‘making of’ book probably ten times. And I figured out that if you painted tinfoil black, put a light bulb behind it and poked pinholes in it, you could make a pretty decent star field. My first epic space story had a budget of probably ten bucks. But it got me of my duf. Back then, however, I didn’t know if I wanted to be a writer or an artist or a physicist or an astronomer or a sculptor. I was all over the map — my brain was just firing in all directions at once. And I didn’t really focus on the idea of being a filmmaker for real until I was in my mid-twenties. In my mind I had all these images for hyper-kinetic space battles, with aerobatic motion and energy weapons firing and ships exploding. Then I went to a movie theatre and saw a little thing called Star Wars. And I felt like one of those paranoid-schizophrenic people that puts a little bit of foil underneath a wig to keep the CIA from spying on their thoughts. Because the images I had in my brain were up there on the screen. For me, it wasn’t the shock of the new — it was the shock of the familiar. And I thought, “If the world rewards this film as resoundingly as it has, then there’s a market for what’s in my brain.” It was time to get busy. A year on, in 1978, I was on a set with two friends making Xenogenesis, a proof-of-concept reel for a complete sciencefiction feature. We managed to talk this girl who wanted to be an actress and another friend of mine who was a writer into
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starring in it, as a young space couple. It was wildly ambitious, completely impractical and pretty dreadful, but the imagery is actually not that bad. And I learned an awful lot. How to run a 35-mm camera, how to do in-camera matte paintings, how to rotoscope. And I got to say “action” and “cut”. That’s when you become a director. All you have to do is shoot something and say “action” and “cut” a few times. Everything after that is just negotiating your price. orty years on, the bug is still there. The only thing that’s going to stop me from making films is getting hit by a cement truck or the inevitable march of time. But I think now I have Hollywood more in perspective. There was a time when making a film was the most important thing in the world to me. Now, it’s not. It’s a thing that I love to do. But I know how important my family is. And some of my activities around food and sustainable agriculture and exploring are equally important. So I have it in perspective, and that’s a very, very healthy place to be. Otherwise you can be bruised and damaged psychologically by Hollywood in general.
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Above: Directing Linda Hamilton on the set of The Terminator back in 1984. Below: Shooting Aliens with Sigourney Weaver, 1986. Right: With Rosa Salazar, still breaking ground with 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel.
That said, I have enough of a work ethic that it’s not like I’m ever phoning it in or slacking of. My schedule is as intense now as it ever was. And I like that just fine. I don’t know what to do with myself if I have a day of, so I just work continuously. I think my wife would prefer that I took a little time of from time to time. But I get nervous and pace around and think about all the things I could be doing, so it doesn’t really work for me. I still get a buzz from filmmaking on a fairly regular basis. I get it every time we lock a scene for the new Avatar films, because the process is piecemeal. You don’t have dailies and all that sort of thing — it’s all done with capture. So all you see is people in spandex tights for a long period of time. And then there’s a moment where you walk into what we call a ‘camera session’ and actually see the colours and characters and so on. It’s all whacked together and suddenly you’re watching a scene that’s taking place in a bioluminescent ocean, or flying in the air with some fantastic creatures. That’s when I think, “I have the coolest job in the world.” All filmmakers create a sort of reality bubble around their characters, whether it’s an apartment building in Florida or a far-flung planet. It’s really just thrilling to create something from nothing. And although every single atom of the fabric of filmmaking has changed — as of the first Avatar, we’ve even done away with the physical camera — the basic principles are the same. All the diferent styles and ideas that were pioneered throughout the age of the physical photochemistry of film are still extant now. It’s just that we’ve gone far beyond that in our ability to create another reality.
We can do anything right now. With digital tools and enough money, there are no limitations. And that makes it even more important that we’re disciplined. Now, once I capture a scene with actors, I can put it on the moon, or underwater; I can play it all in one master shot or do it in 30 close-ups. Having infinite choices, it forces you to really understand the creative decisions you’re making at every second. feel very positive about what’s possible. If you look at all the big movies of the last decade, there’s very little in the way of original IP that gets to inhabit the billion-dollar club, or even the half-billion-dollar club. But I still believe it can be done. Titanic didn’t fit any mould of its time. It’s a big no-brainer now when you look back at it, but at the time it didn’t make any sense as a film done on that scale. Everybody knew that the ship sank and the people died. It wasn’t going to be part of a franchise. It certainly didn’t have a feel-good ending. As for Avatar, that was practically pronounced dead by the powers that be before it was released — I remember the
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head of the studio at the time saying, “Avatar’s just a word. It doesn’t mean anything to people.” I guess what I’m saying is that you don’t have to play by the rules if you don’t want to. In terms of the world at large, it feels like we could be heading for another Dark Age. That’s what I look around and see. The film industry tends to be very liberal, and we pride ourselves on being the pioneers that are going to show everybody a better way when it comes to civil rights and gender issues and so on. I look at the political landscape right now and think, “Well, guess what, guys? That didn’t work. We’re just as benighted and fucked up as we ever were, if not worse.” It used to feel like we were always moving forward, even if only in small steps. I never thought we’d suddenly wind up losing so much ground. But I still like to think that film and television is a shining light, where we get to have a sense of communion as people. We get to celebrate human nature. We get to walk in the shoes of other people. We get to have an empathic reaction to the plight of others. Even if that doesn’t seem to be enough anymore, it doesn’t mean I’m going to back of the throttle. Not one iota.
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YOU HAD QUESTIONS — LOTS OF THEM — FOR THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL FILM DIRECTOR. SO WE WENT ROUND HIS HOUSE TO GET THE ANSWERS
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This is because the most successful director in Hollywood history, the action-movie maestro who’s mounted blistering battles on Earth, in the ocean deep and across far-flung planets, is sipping his beverage from a ceramic receptacle emblazoned with three massive-eyed, primary-coloured cartoon kindergarteners. “You know somebody’s got young daughters when they have a Powerpuf Girls cup,” Cameron explains, catching Empire mid-gawp. Then he grins and repeats the catchphrase he’s clearly heard countless times: “Saving the world before bedtime!” Nine years after the release of the phenonenally successful Avatar, in which a band of intrepid heroes saved Pandora before bedtime, the director is beavering away on four sequels concurrently, a mammoth task the likes of which has never been attempted before. But he’s happy to take a break from blue folk to welcome Empire to his Malibu home, for a very special interview kicking of our 30th-birthday festivities. “Thirty years? Is that even possible?” he marvels. “When I look back at my early movies, I still remember doing every shot...” Casa Cameron is preparing for Hallowe’en — “I build a spook-house every year,” he reveals, evoking images of Titanic-sized pumpkins and zombie Stephen Langs. Out in front of the house, an enormous German Shepherd with the quite brilliant name of Reaper Cussions patrols. And by the side of his swimming pool, where surely he has dreamed up all manner of heady aquatic set-pieces, Cameron sits for an hour to answer your questions about his incredible career, from serious queries to really quite silly ones...
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Do you have a go-to Na’vi phrase? CAROL FRANCO LEYVA
Oh, absolutely. It’s the one my kids like the most, which is “skxawng” [pronounced “skown”] — it basically means “moron”. For a few years after the film came out, they just called each other skxawng. [Laughs] Our house band at the Avatar production is actually called The Skxawngs. They’re gonna play at our wrap party in December.
screwed on Battle Angel. So we moved. The only sensible thing — I got out of my own way. Am I anxious to see it? I’m curious, let me put it that way. He was never a comic-book character I particularly liked. Even of those two underwater guys, I preferred Sub-Mariner. What is the most challenging action set-piece you’ve put to film? JASON PHILLIPS
What was the first film you remember deeply impacting you? CARRIE CASE
Clockwise from main: James Cameron on the set of Avatar in 2008; Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington in Avatar (2009); Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris in The Abyss (1989); “A perfectly good luxury liner” goes down in Titanic (1997).
The Wizard Of Oz, which is still to this day my favourite movie. When I was a kid, seven or eight years old, one of the three stations that were on the telly would always run it at Hallowe’en. And it just scared the shit out of me. The damn flying monkeys. So that had a deep impact. But the film that had the greatest single impact was a little bit later, when I was 14. It was 2001: A Space Odyssey, on a huge screen, a matinée. I had the place basically to myself. I picked the best seat in the house, which was front row of the balcony, dead centre. And watching the Star Gate sequence was like falling down this endless pit of energy. I’d never seen anything like it. I felt so overwhelmed by vertigo that I went outside, sat down on the kerb in broad daylight and puked. My brain just got turbo-charged by the power of the imagery. And I was drawing spacecraft for the next three years straight. What’s your favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that you didn’t direct? BETSY CHU
Oh, that’s an interesting one. Probably Predator, because it was right around the time Arnold was coming on strong in the mid-’80s. I liked the way they used the optical efects to have the creature disappear in stealth mode. And the POV stuf and the infrared vision. It was a really fresh approach. You directed the fake Aquaman movie in Entourage. Are you looking forward to the real one? JAKE LEVIN
There is a weird connection, because we somehow wound up with Battle Angel booked to open on the same day as Aquaman. So I would have been competing with myself. And God forbid Aquaman did have the kind of numbers that they said in Entourage — I’d be
Well, they’re all flashing through my head now. The steel-mill scene in Terminator 2 was very difficult, especially flipping over the nitrogen tanker. But I would say the sinking of the Titanic, the part where the first 200 feet of the first-class deck area goes underwater. There were hundreds of extras and we had to keep them all alive. The set was so big that even lighting it was enormously problematic. And the ship just wouldn’t sink. We had this giant hydraulic system and kept trying over and over to get it to sink fast enough. But it just proved to be this gigantic engineering/safety nightmare that we finally fought to a draw. If you could go back in time like Kyle Reese, what one thing would you change from one of your films? THOM DENSON
Just to put this to rest, I would not change Jack getting on the door. That was there for a purpose. Well, with what I know now, I would know how to realise the ending of The Abyss better. We could make it spectacular now with CG. Or I’d just tell myself, “Don’t try to do that. The tools aren’t available now. Don’t be an asshole — just stop the film when he brings her back to life.” [Laughs] As such a visionary director, you have forced technology to move to catch up with you. Are there any ideas you have that you think technology won’t catch up with in time for you to film it? TARYN STRONG
I don’t think there’s anything unfilmable at this stage. Obviously there are some things that are more expensive than others. But basically we’re knocking down [the obstructions] one by one. And I don’t think you can get any higher difficulty level than Avatar 2, because we’ve got so much interaction with water. You’ve got 100 per cent CG characters in a 100 per cent CG environment with scenes with water at the surface interface, which is the hardest. ❯ Underwater’s no problem — it’s when
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characters and animals are coming and going through that interface, with the aeration and displacement and water splashing up where the density of the air afects it. The simulations are unbelievably complex. But we’re doing it. I think the biggest limitation these days is just our own imaginations. I can do scenes with blue people all day long. It’s the scenes that are a little rubbery conceptually that are still tricky. Like going into a vision state, some kind of subjective state inside somebody’s mind. Not that we can’t do it — it’s just that it’s hard to finitely imagine what it’s gonna look like.
Main: They’re back — Arnie and Cameron on the set of Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991. Below: 1994’s True Lies – and the scene of Cameron’s favourite Arnie story. Bottom right: The Alien Queen rears her ugly head in Aliens (1986).
It’s inevitable that a movie will be shot in space one day. Do you have any plans to be the one to make it? CHARLIE STEVENS
They just announced recently that the next Mission: Impossible might do a space scene. It’s the only thing Tom Cruise hasn’t done — they gotta fire that guy of on a rocket, holding on to the outside! You gotta admire Tom, man. I actually talked to him about doing a space film in space, about 15 years ago. I had a contract with the Russians in 2000 to go to the International Space Station and shoot a high-end, 3D documentary there. And I thought, “Shit, man, we should just make a feature.” I said, “Tom, you and I, we’ll get two seats on the Soyuz, but somebody’s gotta train us as engineers.” Tom said, “No problem, I’ll train as an engineer.” We had some ideas for the story, but it was still conceptual. Will we ever get a True Lies Blu-ray? JED SHEPHERD
Man, it’s on my to-do list. It’s a question of time-management. True Lies and The Abyss both have Blu-ray transfers that are complete for my review. The problem is the next 14 hours when I have to go back and trim the colour and get each one perfect. That’s 28 hours. I don’t have 28 hours. But I’ve put it on my list to try to get it done before the end of the year. You said once you’d never return to the Terminator series. Yet you’re heavily involved with Terminator 6. What made you change your mind? STEPHEN SCOTT
It was a chance to get the band back together, I guess. I made it an absolute necessity that if I was involved, Arnold had to be involved. And we didn’t know how much or how little he was gonna be in the film. Then we started to explore
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the whole thing and it turned out there was a really wonderful approach to his character. He’s been programmed for bad, programmed for good. So what was left to do? And I think we came up with something pretty cool. Then Linda [Hamilton] and I talked and she said, “Yeah, if you can do the things you’re talking about with [Sarah Connor], then I’d like to do it.” I think it’s an opportunity to reinvent a franchise that’s ultimately about artificial intelligence in a day and age where a lot of the themes of the first movie are not considered science-fiction anymore. You talk to top AI experts and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s not a question of if — it’s when.” In fact, my paranoid mind goes to, “It has already happened. And many of the seemingly inexplicable things that are happening in our world right now are actually being manipulated [by AI].” Have you seen the French and Saunders Titanic sketch that was directed by Edgar Wright? JODY WILSON
No, I haven’t, but Edgar Wright’s great.
I didn’t know he had done a Titanic sketch. I’m gonna have to check that out. Who would win in a battle royale between a T-800, the Alien Queen and Colonel Quaritch in his mech suit? DAVE CHIN
Mmm, interesting. Well, we already saw a mech suit defeat the Alien Queen. And if Quaritch had the full GAU-90 cannon with him, I think he could blow a T-800 in half. Quaritch wins. But he’s highly amplified — they don’t call it an AMP suit for nothing. The Alien Queen would be a pile of bubbling acid. What’s the maddest thing you’ve ever seen in the deep ocean in your submersible? THOMAS NICHOLSON
Well, somebody threw away a perfectly good luxury liner. [Laughs] That’s a pretty stupid joke. In terms of creatures, I saw some pretty amazing organisms down there. The dumbo octopus is fairly well known, but when you see one in real
life, they’re just astonishing to watch. Then there’s this hydrothermal structure that we found of Guaymas in the Sea Of Cortez, at a depth of two miles, I’ll say, that still fascinates me to this day. They were hydrothermal vent structures that for some reason would propagate laterally and form this kind of mushroom cap that was 20 or 30 feet in diameter. Deadass flat, like a mirror. What was the exact equipoise between the growth of bacteria and the deposition of minerals that allowed it to form this absolutely flat underside surface? I still have never heard an explanation. I don’t think people know how these things form. But they’re amazing. I sit and watch them all day long.
I’m fascinated by the fact you started off as a truck driver. What’s your most vivid memory of trucking?
You’ve filmed lots of traumatic scenes in elevators, like the ones in Titanic, Terminator 2 and Aliens. Have you had a bad experience in one?
CHRIS BAILEY
CHLOE TURNER
[Laughs] Only in dreams. My nightmares are quite rich and fertile ground, so I’m sure I’ve had some bad elevator ones. Tidal-wave nightmares, cyborg nightmares — you name it, I got ’em all. So many nightmares, so little time... Would you ever make a lowbudget sci-fi film again using only practical effects? PAUL JEREMIAH HAYES
It’s funny — as much as I cherish that time in my life when we were painting things on glass and doing foreground miniatures and all that, having fun tricking the eye in every known way, I wouldn’t be interested in doing it that way now, because I know how easy it is to do it as a digital composite. Why would you go back? Having directed arguably the best sequel ever in T2, is the pressure to deliver with the Avatar follow-ups greater? JAMES TRAVIS
The pressure is huge. But what I found in the course of the writing is that I also have to up my own game between Avatar 2 and Avatar 3, and between Avatar 3 and Avatar 4, and Avatar 4 and Avatar 5. I’ve built it in such a way that there is an escalation of the imagery. But I actually think the thing that’s in my favour across all five films is that we will come to know the characters so well, the single biggest thing that will pull you back to the cinema is just to see what happens.
MATILDE PRATESI
It wasn’t long-haul trucking — it was mostly local deliveries around the Orange County area. My enduring memory is this one particular billboard that I could pull the truck behind, so none of the other drivers in my company could see me. I’d get an hour ahead in my deliveries and then pull over behind this billboard and write for an hour. I still feel like I owe those guys some money for that. Please share your favourite Arnie anecdote. There are so many. Some of them are unprintable. He used to like his practical jokes, and I remember on True Lies he had this thing where if any of the stunt guys made a mistake — because he was always very close with the stunt guys — they had to bark like a dog and wear a dog bone. A big rawhide bone that went over your neck on a rope, right? So I’m choreographing the bathroom fight with the machine gun shooting the stalls and all that. And Arnold had to rip a hand dryer of a wall and clock this guy across the face with it. With fight choreography, I always try to get in there and do parts of it myself, ’cause I need to feel the body dynamics of it, and I’ve done a lot of martial arts, so I kind of know a lot of the moves. So I grabbed this hand dryer, pulled it of the wall and swept it around in an arc, and my hand hit the side of the bathroom counter. I’m like, “Alright, don’t do that. When you pull it of, sweep it around here and backhand him with it.” Arnold says, “Yeah, yeah, I got it.” First take: BAM! He tore open the whole back side of his hand. It swelled up to this crazy size. I now couldn’t shoot the scene. So I said, “Arnold...” And he goes... [Barking noises] He had to wear the bone. I love South Park’s James Cameron song: “No budget too steep/No sea too deep...” Have you heard it? CHRIS JOHNSON
Oh yeah, I know it. It’s from the episode about raising the bar, right? When you’ve moved the needle enough to get your own South Park episode, then you know you’ve arrived. [Laughs] That and the Oscar.
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THE VOYAGERS
Sanchini, the president of his company, asked if I would be interested in coming on board to produce a project called ‘Planet Ice’. I read Jim’s scriptment and loved it. ‘Planet Ice’ was the codename for Titanic. I vividly remember when Jim and I walked on the deck of Titanic for the first time — I don’t think the set had been dressed yet — there was a feeling of wow. Titanic was a long, hard shoot. One of my most indelible memories involved the filming of Captain Smith on the bridge as it imploded from the rising water; one of the very last shots during production. Jim was the lone camera operator inside the bridge. The whole set was submerged in water as Tommy Fisher, our special efects supervisor, exploded the glass. Thousands of gallons of water came pouring in, creating utter turmoil and making it impossible to see what was happening on the set. When Jim and the rest of the crew surfaced safely, there was this feeling of, “Okay, we did it.” Films in general forge relationships in fire. This one formed an amazing bond. Jim expects a lot from the people he works with but never more than that which he demands from himself. He consistently pushes the bounds of what we think is possible. Prior to Avatar, no-one had done virtual production. We created a tiered workstation environment right on the set which looked like an old NASA mission control centre. We called it the ‘brain bar’ because the people who worked there were the brains that made the virtual production possible. We started without all the answers but together we made it happen.
TITANIC AND AVATAR PRODUCER JON LANDAU WRITES EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE ABOUT HIS LONG-TIME COLLABORATION WITH JAMES CAMERON hen someone asks me to tell them about Jim Cameron, one of my first responses is to say, “Jim’s an explorer.” He explores in his life — both literally and metaphorically — and in his filmmaking. He has a deep yearning to discover, and I think that’s what primarily motivates him. Whether it’s diving to the wreck of the Titanic, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or creating the world of Pandora, he approaches it from an explorer’s standpoint. With that comes an inherent sense of daring. That’s what Jim does in his movies — he takes people on an adventure. The adventure may be wrapped around a marriage such as in True Lies or in a mother-daughter love story as it was in Aliens. Whatever he does, he brings the crew and audience along with him to share in that sense of discovery, that sense of wonder, that sense of adventure. My journey with Jim started on True Lies, while I was an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox. CEO Peter Chernin asked me to be the point person on the film when it was in the latter stages of pre-production. Up until that point my only contact with Jim had been a quick handshake in someone’s office. I remember Jim jokingly saying to me, “So, Jon, I understand we’re going to get to be pretty good friends — or bitter enemies.” And I said, “Pretty good friends, I hope.” I spent weeks with him on location in Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, Miami, the Florida Keys and Lake Tahoe. I guess we ended that film with a strong enough relationship that when I decided to leave the studio, Jim and Rae
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Clockwise from top: Jon Landau and James Cameron atop Titanic’s Grand Staircase; At the 67th Golden Globes, after Avatar’s triumph, with Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver; On set with Alita: Battle Angel director Robert Rodriguez; The Titanic Oscar party, 1998; Visiting troops in Bahrain with Weaver, Stephen Lang and Michelle Rodriguez; Experiencing Zero G with Julie Landau; At Titanic’s Los ere.
Many people questioned whether the movie itself would work. “Blue people with tails?” they would say. Just a few weeks before the film hit the theatres, we screened the completed movie for the first time in the Zanuck Theater on the Fox lot. We invited a handful of people, including some of our cast members along with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Spielberg. I will always remember what happened at the end of the screening. On the way out, Steven (a business associate but not a social friend) came over and gave me a hug. He said, “That was the most amazing cinematic experience I’ve had in 33 years.” Wow! Not something I will ever forget. There’s a lot said about the taskmaster side of Jim, but few people hear about the other side. Jim truly cares about everyone he works with. Recently Jim spearheaded a GoFundMe campaign for a crew member who lost his home in a wildfire, matching the funds we were able to raise. This is just one example of Jim’s generosity and concern for the wellbeing of the people he works with. We know our work days are hard so we try to find ways to incorporate fun during the production process. Whether it is hosting ‘family day’ at the studio or buying tickets for the entire crew to see a blockbuster on opening day. Just this week we started the crew’s work day with a screening at the Arclight Cinemas of the documentary The Game Changers. In my view Jim is always a step ahead. He will dream a dream and boy, does he dream big. It is then our job to pull together a team of people who can make that dream a reality. But Jim doesn’t just dream — he has an unparalleled ability to find new ways to address and solve problems across all areas of the production. His talents are not limited to writing and directing but include engineering feats such as figuring out how the ship could split in Titanic and artfully articulating what he needs musically to composer James Horner. He has an incredible facility to see the solutions no-one else can envision. Jim and I are our most demanding critics. As we go through the production process we are bombarded from all sides but always keep the focus on making the movie Jim has envisioned. Jim is not someone who rests on the laurels of his past. He is always asking, “What’s next? What’s the new challenge?” For a true explorer there is always a new horizon to venture towards.
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IT’S TAKEN 20 YEARS , T WO A- LIST DIRECTORS AND BRAND-NEW TECH TO BRING CYBORG EPIC
ALITA: BATTL E AN G E L TO
THE SCREEN. EMPIRE GOES INSIDE JAMES CAMERON AND ROBERT R O DR IGUEZ’S Q UEST TO SHOW YOU SIGHTS YO U’V E N EV ER S EEN WORDS NICK DE SEMLYEN
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>>>>>>>>> It began, just like the horror movie ringU, w i t h a J a p a n e s e v i d e o ta p e . Handed by one friend to another, with no idea of the consequences that would arise. It was sometime in the late 1990s, and director buddies Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron — each recovering from a gruelling shoot, Mimic and Titanic respectively — were meeting up for one of their regular geek-out sessions. It was customary for them to bring along things they thought the other might dig: comic books, sci-fi novels, movies. On this occasion del Toro (or, as Cameron called him, ‘El Gordo’, aka ‘The Fat Man’) had in his satchel a VHS cassette, an import from the Far East. Cameron (or, as del Toro called him, ‘Jaimito’, aka ‘Little Jim’) hadn’t heard of it, but he took it home, popped it in his player and hit play. Then, just like in the horror movie Ringu, an otherworldly female form popped out of the screen at him. The character was a young cyborg named Alita, blank of memory, bionic of limbs, deadly in combat, wandering the surface of a ravaged Earth in search of answers. Cameron watched the whole thing, rewound it and watched it again. Battle Angel: Alita had a new fan. In fact, it had a champion. What he had seen was animated — a 2D adaptation of a cyberpunk manga series by Yukito Kishiro. Almost immediately, Cameron started thinking about what could be were he to make it in live-action. He called del Toro and asked, “Are you gonna go after this?” Del Toro replied, “No, Jaimito. You like it, you do it.” And so began years of obsession. Even as Cameron grappled with the enormous project known then as ‘Project 880’ and finally released as Avatar, he began to map out the world of
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Producer Jon Landau, James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez scope out the set.
Above: Alita and friends explore outside the city. Here: Dr Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) performs cyber-surgery on Alita. Alita (Rosa Salazar) comes face to turret with one of the Centurians, robots that patrol Iron City.
Battle Angel: Alita in far more detail than Kishiro ever had. “I did a shit ton of notes,” the director understates. “Because the books evolved over time — whenever he had a new idea, Kishiro just kind of shifted the rules of reality slightly. I was trying to get it to trueup internally.” This included taking some of the hardest hard-sci-fi elements, such as a city called Zalem that hangs high in the air, throwing trash down onto the surface where the characters live, and reverseengineering the science. “In the story there are space elevators that connect Zalem to the Earth,” says Jon Landau, Cameron’s long-time producer. “And Jim figured out that for them to work, it would need to be set on the Equator.” “We don’t have tensile material strong enough to make a space elevator yet,” frowns Cameron, ruefully. “But when we do, someone will build them.” Nearly 20 years passed. The director made Avatar. He revolutionised VFX technology. He went on an underseas adventure with Blackadder star Tony Robinson (truly a cunning plan). And all the while he brainstormed Alita, waiting for the right time to direct it. “I was being a dog in a manger,” Cameron admits. “I thought, ‘It doesn’t matter if I’m 80 and I’ve got an oxygen tube up my nose and a walker — I’ll do this movie.’” But then he went to lunch with another friend. And everything changed.
Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron had been mutual admirers for many years. Cameron was amazed by Rodriguez’s gym routines: “He does these insane, monster workouts. Like, beyond CrossFit kind of things.” Rodriguez, for his part, got over-excited by the sophistication of Cameron’s DIY video-conferencing kit: “Unbelievable… You could zoom in and out!” The two directors first met back in the early 1990s, clicking as they swapped tales of their ultra-low-budget early films. In 1995, Rodriguez screened Desperado for Cameron, sitting outside reading Cameron’s “scriptments” for Spider-Man and Avatar while his hero watched his movie. Over the following years, they came close to working together. In 1997, midTitanic, Cameron asked Rodriguez if he’d be up for directing a major franchise film, to appease worried Fox executives. “Titanic was going so over-budget that it was like, ‘Hey, can you make this movie for me to get them of my ass?’” Rodriguez laughs. “We talked about it for a while and then stopped talking about it. I got the feeling they said, ‘The guy’s so over-budget, we don’t even want that other movie.’” They even considered co-directing a Conan The Barbarian movie in 2003, using burgeoning performance-capture tech to create a muscle-bound hero who would out-Arnie Arnie. “He was going to look like a Frank Frazetta painting,” says Rodriguez. “But the technology wasn’t there yet. I ended up doing Sin City instead.” Fast-forward to the summer of 2015. Cameron and
Rodriguez meet up for a meal at Lightstorm, the former’s LA HQ. They shoot the shit. They peruse artwork for the Avatar sequels. And then, outside in the parking lot, sitting in his car but with the door yet to swing shut, Rodriguez asks if Cameron is working on anything. It turns out to be a fateful question. Because just as del Toro passed Battle Angel: Alita on to Cameron, so Cameron, in a spark of inspiration, decides to pass Battle Angel: Alita on to Rodriguez. “It suddenly dawned on me that I was going to be working on the Avatar movies for another eight years,” he says. “Somebody should make Battle Angel. And who better than Robert? So I sent him a mountain of stuf.” Cameron isn’t kidding. Over the years he had typed up over 1,000 pages of notes on the project, plus several script drafts he had noodled at with co-writer ❯ Laeta Kalogridis. One of them was
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Jennifer Connelly as Chiren, Ido’s ex-partner and a cyber-whizz herself, with Mahershala Ali’s shady businessman Vector.
Eiza González as hit-cyborg Nyssiana, essentially a walking cutlery drawer.
a sprawling tale of insurrection: “Alita brings down an empire — very much in the Star Wars mode.” But in the end he sent Rodriguez what he thought of as the “romantic” draft. “It’s the one that tugged on my heartstrings the most,” Cameron says. “The kind of Romeo and Juliet script, which I had written back in 2004 and discarded. It was unwieldy — about 180 pages long — but I thought it captured the spirit of the anime, the kind of bittersweet aesthetic, the best.” Rodriguez was blown away when he sat down to read it. “It wasn’t a jumbled mess,” he recalls. “It was just long and he’d never had a chance to cut it down. The story was fantastic. And I could really identify with Alita, as she goes from being dumped in the trash to becoming someone who could go change the world. I was hooked.” As the sun went down, he sent Cameron an email, referencing the bounty hunters in the story who turn in cyborg heads for credits. The email read: “How many heads do I have to collect to work on this thing?” Cameron’s reply came an hour
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later: “You’ve collected enough heads. Call me tomorrow.” Up until then, Rodriguez had made moderately budgeted movies, usually writing, shooting and cutting them himself. Now, suddenly, he was heading up one of the biggest and most ambitious movies ever made, backed up by Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker. “Even though I’ve known Jim a long time, this was now at a diferent level,” he says, still giddy. “That’s not, ‘Let’s go get a pizza together.’ It’s, ‘Let’s make a project together.’ It was really cool.”
When Empire visits the Alita: Battle Angel set in January 2017, we find a Robert Rodriguez movie that’s not exactly a Robert Rodriguez movie. Yes, he’s on his home turf — Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, where he’s shot everything from Sin City to Grindhouse. Yes, he’s in a director’s chair, thumbing through script pages. And yes, the Iron City set that sprawls across one of the soundstages, bright and sundrenched, brings to mind the settings of his Mariachi movies. But this time he’s
not personally overseeing the cinematography (that would be The Matrix veteran Bill Pope), or the editing (that would be Avatar veteran Stephen E. Rivkin). And he’s the first to admit that with this project he’s doing something akin to karaoke. “I don’t want to see another Robert Rodriguez movie,” he smiles. “I want to see another Jim Cameron movie. There’s a dearth of those. So like an actor gets into character, I’m getting into character as him.” Jim Cameron movies, traditionally, share one quality: each is a high-wire walk, pushing the art of filmmaking forward in risky fashion. Alita: Battle Angel is no exception. It’s rolling the dice on whether audiences will become emotionally invested in a lead character who looks human, but is actually computer-generated, brought to life by performance capture. This aims to be the blockbuster that finally crosses the Uncanny Valley, into the realms beyond. “We could only make this movie now,” Rodriguez says. “With Avatar and Planet Of The Apes, those were aliens and apes.
Salazar, Keean Johnson (Hugo) and Rodriguez go for a spin on a gyro bike.
Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka, a nine-foot-tall cyborg who can out-Terminator the Terminator.
They still really hadn’t done a human. So it wasn’t like they had the tools already. They had to build them for this.” For Rosa Salazar, the actor cast as Alita, it’s been a strange and mindblowing experience. Not only does she get to play two physically diferent versions of the character — at a key point in the story the cyborg upgrades to a ‘Berserker’ body — but she has had her face studied in more detail than probably any human in history. “The visual-efects guys know the muscles underneath my skin and how they behave,” she marvels. “At one point Ritchie from Weta ran up to me with his laptop, looking frazzled, and said, ‘You’re moving your left eye up and the right corner of your mouth is moving in tandem. I don’t understand why.’ When my face doesn’t behave, it crashes their software.” On set, Salazar is clad in a grey bodysuit and helmet, a titanium rod gathering minute data on her facial movements. On screen, it’ll be both her and not her — an eerie blend of reality and fantasy (in one scene, real tears will trickle down a CG face), punctuated by two oversized eyes. “Those eyes, you just get lost in them,” says Keean Johnson, who plays Hugo, a cyborg-hating human who finds himself falling for Alita. “She has such a wholesome, beautiful, strong presence about her.” In a project with many bold design flourishes, not least a whopping great city in the sky, these eyes are the boldest —
the thing that will get everyone talking. Salazar, for one, loves it. “I never, ever, ever, ever want to do a project where people look at the trailer and go, ‘Oh yeah, I get it,’ and then move on to the next one,” she says. “I want to do things that make people go, ‘Holy shit.’ We wanted to be faithful to the manga, to make her as Alita as possible. And, you know, there’s a reason in the story for it.” Cameron in the past has pulled of tales of the unlikeliest star-cross’d lovers: a broke artist and a high-society lady, a human Marine and a blue alien, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis. Alita: Battle Angel pushes things even further: prepare for a romance between a woman who is almost entirely machine and a man who collects machine parts for a living. If it sounds like an out-there premise, then shooting it was often equally as surreal. “There’s a scene where we’re on a bridge in the rain, and I’m putting my hands through her hair,” says Johnson. “Actually, I was putting my hands through string. They’d stuck 11 or 12 ❯ pieces to the side of her helmet with
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The Motorball contestants line up: they’re a good-looking bunch.
Velcro.” It’s reassuring to know that, even in state-of-theart mega-budget filmmaking, some problems can still be solved with string.
Cameron and Rodriguez may have gone with the “romance” draft, but no-one will be able to accuse the movie of being short of action. Set 700 years from now, its world is one in which humans can cybernetically upgrade themselves, bolting on metal limbs and turning themselves into fearsome fighting machines. Cue some truly outlandish creations, some of which are essentially a human brain attached to a mass of whirling weaponry. There’s the sneery Zapan (Ed Skrein), Cameron’s favourite piece of design. “We had the idea that these guys would treat their bodies like car culture in LA,” he says. “So we took that rif and designed this Latino cyborg, with an Aztec calendar motif on his back. Robert added the little chrome dealio on his face.” And there’s Grewishka, a nine-foot-tall metal maniac played by the usually diminutive Jackie Earle Haley. “He’s got brute strength, but he’s also empowered by these cyber-doctors,” explains Haley. “One of his skills is that he’s got these talon-like fingers that can shoot across the room, pierce just about anything and snap back just as fast.” Even Christoph Waltz, who plays Alita’s own cyber-doctor/ mentor, Ido, gets in on the action. The scene Empire watches him perform on set, scanning Alita’s body in Ido’s cheapjack medical bay, is a relatively quiet day. “This is a visceral story,” he grins. “Literally — there are viscera torn out!” Elsewhere he will
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wield a rocket hammer (yep, a hammer that’s also a rocket) in his duties as a ‘Hunter-Warrior’, tracking down rogue cyborgs. And he is present for one of the film’s most ambitious set-pieces. Set in Iron City’s Bar Kansas, it’s a good old-fashioned brawl, except brought to life with cutting-edge tech and pitting Alita (who specialises in a form of cyborg martial arts called panzer kunst) against roughly 40 mech-heavy killers. “Our aim was to make the ultimate bar fight,” explains Rodriguez, who has form with human/machine hybrids, having given Rose McGowan a gun-leg in Planet Terror. “Before we shot it, I went to YouTube and looked up ‘Top Ten Bar Fights’ — and found out several of the entries were from movies by me and Jim. T2, Desperado... We kind of do similar stuf. Except that mine go into pure fantasy, and his stay grounded. Jim would never have a guy pick up a guitar case and fire a missile. That doesn’t fly with him.” Alita will also be tested via an insane sport called Motorball, high-velocity racing where souped-up cyborgs attempt to mush each other into nuts and bolts.
“It’s NASCAR racing meets MMA meets WWF, on steroids,” hypes Jon Landau. “It gets pretty crazy... You know, ‘My Dinner With Andre Part 2’.” For Rodriguez, reading the Motorball sequence that evening back in 2015 was the moment that convinced him to make the movie. “Jim has used the sport in a really cool and dramatic way,” he says. “Fuck, you’re excited because the stakes are so high. It gets you jumping out of your seat.” If the director’s excitement hasn’t abated one bit, the same is true of Cameron himself, who made a single visit to the set for two hours in late 2016. There, he gave a rousing speech, then headed straight to the props department, where he hoisted aloft the manga’s most iconic weapon, a super-charged sword known as the Damascus Blade, a big grin on his face. Ed Skrein was gifted a Blade on his final day. “It was a nightmare getting it through British customs,” the actor laughs. “But I have it in my oice in East London now and it’s my pride and joy. Right next to my Deadpool katana.” Cameron, on the other hand, is still waiting for his. “I’m thinking my tail-lights were out of sight about the time they forgot about sending it,” he mock-grouches, two years after that happy day. “But I’ll remind them.” If you were wondering what to get him for Christmas this year, now you know.
ALL YOU NEED IS KILL BATTLE ANGEL’S DAMASCUS BLADE AIMS TO JOIN THE PANTHEON OF ICONIC SCI-FI WEAPONS, ALONGSIDE THESE…
THE M41A PULSE RIFLE (ALIENS, 1986)
Without a doubt, the coolest made-up irearm in movie history. Aliens’ Colonial Marines didn’t need boring old laser-blasters when they could pop holes in xenomorphs with the M41A’s 10mm caseless bullets. James Cameron designed it hi lf Of
Vector and goons.
MENACE, 1999)
The science is nonsense, but who cares? George Lucas’ swooshy, glowing laser swords took knightly duelling into outer space, and playground-game combat changed forever. Then Darth Maul rocked up and made the lightsaber twice as good with twice the blade.
Prepping for the mother of all brawls in Bar Kansas.
THE NOISY CRICKET (MEN IN BLACK, 1997)
A pistol so teensy, it’s barely bigger than its own trigger. Loaded with comedy value, too, as Will Smith’s Agent J learns when he inally pulls that trigger, iring off an unexpectedly huge ball of energy — and getting knocked lat by the ridiculous recoil.
THE GRISTLE GUN (EXISTENZ, 1999)
The ultimate assassin’s weapon, given you can build your own from, er, the carcass of an edible mutant beastie. Just gnaw the rank meat off the bones, snap the gristly bits together, then load it up with your own false teeth. Perfect! Especially if your target is a waiter. DAN JOLIN
Could Alita: Battle Angel pull an Avatar and get four sequels? No-one knows. One thing’s for sure: Cameron has plenty more story to tell. He refers to this as “the first film” and mentions, of the record, a few things to expect should there be a second (let’s just say that Zalem, which is only glimpsed from below in this movie, would play a far more significant role). There is a lot of story to explore with Alita too, in terms of both her past and her future — she ends the movie in a literally diferent form to that with which she begins it, experiencing a cyborg’s version of adolescence. Whatever happens, here is history being made. CGI character or not, it’s refreshing to have a giant tentpole blockbuster fronted solely by a female character: even Avatar and Titanic were two-handers. “I love this movie for my sevenyear-old daughter,” says Jennifer Connelly, who plays Motorball impresario and Ido’s ex-wife Chiren. “I like that [Alita] is so powerful and flawed, and has to wrestle with her wildness and the parts of her she feels don’t fit. I love her being the central character of the story.” There’s the technological aspect, paving the way for a whole new kind of interface between human performance and performance-capture wizardry. “It took me a few times to see it to disassociate with her, because she’s me, but she’s also a brand-new person,” says Salazar. “I’m finding that people love talking about Alita. People on other sets. Random people in my street. My local barista. He loves the eyes, by the way.” And then there’s the fusion between two A-list directors,
unprecedented on this level, blending Rodriguez’s rock ’n’ roll swagger with Cameron’s steely focus. During production, a sign went up at Lightstorm, reading, “Troublemaker West”; a short while later, another, “Lightstorm South”, was stuck to a wall at Troublemaker. “It was a dream collaboration,” says Cameron. “I’d feed him a page in the morning — he’d run out and shoot it.” Only on one single occasion did the two men fall out. And it was exactly the kind of spat you’d hope for between the directors of Sin City and The Terminator. “It was over the way a cyborg’s face got sliced of,” Rodriguez chuckles. “I wanted to keep an eye and enough of his tongue so he could say a line. Jim wanted it all on the ground.” It’s all in the details. ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL IS IN CINEMAS FROM 6 FEBRUARY
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T WAS 8 NOVEMBER 2016. The day of the Presidential election. The day that would end in a night that would bring the curtain down on Hillary Clinton and the curtain up on President Donald Trump. And, with something close to poetic coincidence, there would be an end and a beginning for director Jason Reitman too. It was his final day on Tully and as the sun rose the next morning, Reitman would go straight into production on his next film, The Front Runner, the story of Gary Hart, Democratic dead cert for the 1988 Presidential nomination, whose bid fell apart within a week after revelations of an extra-marital afair.
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As darkness fell, Reitman sat in Brooklyn, with a clear view of Manhattan, waiting for the city’s buildings to light up the colour of the successful candidate, as was tradition. “When it became clear he was gonna win, they lit the city red,” he remembers, with still-visible disbelief. “And it felt like the Death Star. From Brooklyn, looking across the water, it looked as though Manhattan had gone evil.” As it happened, 8 November 2016 was also 29 years and six months to the day since Gary Hart delivered his withdrawal speech. It was both passionate and measured, taking aim at the first real incident of tabloid culture entering the world of politics. “In public life,” said Hart in front of the assembled press, “some things may be interesting, but that doesn’t necessarily make them important.” It’s fair to say that by the first day of production on The Front Runner, the American public
Above: Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart, facing the press. Right, top to bottom: Director Jason Reitman and his star take a pause on set; Molly Ephraim as campaign coordinator Irene; Hart
had made a very diferent statement on what was interesting and what was important. “So that was the timing,” says Reitman. “And, as you can imagine, now we’re in production and we’re getting the first waves of the Trump Presidency, and that is afecting everything as we continue to make the movie…”
chats with a group of female supporters.
BY THE TIME Manhattan turned red, the script for The Front Runner had been finished for a year. Adapted from political journalist Matt Bai’s book All The Truth Is Out by Reitman, political strategist Jay Carson and Bai himself. It was a story that Reitman had been captivated by ever since hearing a Radiolab podcast that very same year. “This is a story,” he remembers thinking. “It sounds like a movie.” Though the Gary Hart scandal has since become a flippant footnote in
taken through a field of people — journalists, campaign operatives, protestors. Several conversations are happening at once, and Reitman confirms there’s anywhere between 12 and 16 people, all mic’d up. It’s impossible to listen to them all at once so you, the viewer, have to decide what to tune in or out of. It’s a shot with clear intent. As Reitman describes it: “This is what you’re about to watch, and this is how you should watch it.”
THE CASTING OF Gary Hart
American history — an afair now hardly seems so shocking — Reitman was taken by its significance, surprised that no-one had tried to make it into a film before. “It was one of the weeks that arguably changed politics and the intersection of politics and the personal, forever,” he says. “The story had been broken down into gossipy soundbites and not a moment in which journalists had to confront what they were willing to report upon and investigate. And not a moment in which voters had to reckon with what our interests were in the personal lives of our politicians.” One person who immediately shared Reitman’s belief in the importance of the event was his first choice to play Gary Hart: Hugh Jackman. “It’s part of the power of the story,” states Jackman. “It could be a blip in political history but actually, under today’s lens, it’s very telling as a turning point.” There is arguably a pretty straight
line from the birth of tabloid culture and personality politics around Gary Hart to a Presidential nominee still being voted into the highest office in the land after boasting of grabbing women by “the pussy” 30 years later. “It’s obviously spun out of control to the point where we don’t even know what is important anymore,” says Reitman. “We have a President who’s completely indecent and not a respectful human being by anyone’s standards.” This untangling of what’s important, what matters, what we feel we need to know and why, heavily influenced Reitman’s direction. He showed his co-writers, cast and crew movies like The Candidate and All The President’s Men, talked about the influence of Robert Altman and his cinematic study of diferent points of view. “The movie is centred around the question of relevance,” he says. “What is important versus what is entertainment, and this is the question we’re asking the audience throughout the movie. We wanted it to be cinematically asking that question at the same time, so it’s a movie that constantly has three conversations overlapping, three visual ideas overlapping.” It’s a filmmaking choice established from the opening scene — a two-and-a-half minute shot that takes you to the heart of the campaign trail. Joining the Democratic National Convention, it opens on a series of televisions. Pulling out of a van, you’re
would, you’d presume, fall to a choice between a small group of seasoned, dramatic actors. But Jason Reitman only ever really had one man in mind. A man with his beginnings in musical theatre and a career made in comicbook movies. For Reitman, there was something vital that Hugh Jackman and Gary Hart shared, as men. “I’m not going to lie, I think his decency helps,” says Reitman. “I think his kindness and his decency bring warmth to a character that is cerebral and complicated, and it allows you to like Gary Hart when he is not seeing the one thing that seems so obvious to everyone else in his life and in the audience. So it’s definitely strategic.” Hugh Jackman — the actor who made his knees bleed as P.T. Barnum and got up at 4am to train for three hours before set as Wolverine — was as committed as ever. Though, hairpiece aside, this wasn’t a physical challenge. In fact, playing Gary Hart demanded entirely the opposite — he was a (relatively) ordinary-looking man with an extraordinary brain and talent who’d found himself at the heart of extraordinary events. And a man who, while charismatic and charming, kept most of his true feelings private. “He’s just a mountain of intellect and a person who had people believing in him, following him,” says Jackman. “He’s enigmatic, a mysterious kind of character. Hard to get to know.” The task at hand was completely new to Jackman, who also describes himself as “an outsider” in the political system, with its own language, its own world. “I didn’t want anything in my head telling me I should have done more work,” he says. This meant learning not just about Gary Hart but about his family, his campaign team, the political system in which he operated. He began studying, hard, and worked with a researcher who “disseminated” almost 40 books and 80 hours of video. Jackman watched raw ❯ footage of Hart at events. He spent time
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with the real-life campaign team. By the time the shoot began, Jackman had five notebooks full of details, plus hours of audio and video, all of which would accompany him to set. “I would listen every morning before set and on my way to work,” he says. “And then sometimes I would ask the sound guy just to put a little snippet of his speeches through my ears, so I could get that feeling of Gary.” Then came the mannerisms. “The little eye-flick up. The way he would hold his thumb and never point. He said he never pointed because it always looks angry to point as a politician.” But how do you inhabit the skin of a man who drew people in without actually letting them in? “That was a big challenge for me,” Jackman admits. “As an actor, I do love the feeling at the end of the day of going, ‘Yeah, we nailed that. Got it!’ It was not the kind of film where we were aforded that feeling. It was a little more nefarious and difficult to put your hands on. And that’s why my relationship with Jason is so strong. I really needed to rely on him to know that I was in the right ballpark.” It’s a challenge that extended to Reitman as director and one he speaks of with candour, sharing a story from the third day of the shoot. “I remember noticing, ‘God, he’s smiling too much,’” says Reitman. “I went to him and I said, ‘I’m going to be rude. I think you’re smiling too much.’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I definitely smile too much. Tell me. Yell it at me from over the screen. Just yell it at me.’” Jackman had to maintain strict emotional control in his performance. Something that didn’t always come easy — particularly when he shot the press conference in which Gary Hart withdraws from the Presidential race. Jackman confesses to feeling “very emotional” and recalls Reitman noticing before they started the take. “He said: ‘I really want you to pull back on that. I want you to be honest and open but restrained.’ And when I finally saw the film, I was so grateful to him because for me, watching that end speech, it’s all the more powerful with me being more restrained. And Gary was restrained, so it was the right thing to do.” The filmmaking process was unlike anything Jackman had done before. This was a true ensemble cast, with the film full of one-shots weaving through multiple conversations, some of which he led, some of which he didn’t. “It really felt like theatre, with 30 actors on stage at
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extras who ended up being in the film with spoken lines. And every take felt very real.”
WHILE REITMAN AND once,” he says. “And you have a director who’s absolutely, not just intellectually, philosophically, but literally, crafting a perspective for the audience to go wherever they want to go. I mean, you can go with Gary or you can go with [wife] Lee. Or you can go with Andrea, the daughter, or the young campaign worker. He would often just switch the focus onto a conversation in the back that I didn’t know was going to happen and pick something else up.” The naturalism and organically shifting perspectives Reitman sought meant Jackman was often being approached or asked something without warning. “He would constantly have people come and interrupt me,” Jackman says. “When we did the press conferences, for example, I didn’t know who was going to ask the questions or in what order. Jason came over and said, ‘You can point to anybody in that room of a hundred and ask them to ask questions.’ So I did — I asked
Jackman had agreed that this shouldn’t be a “literal impersonation”, the actor was keen to meet the man himself. He had questions for the ex-Senator that only he could answer. But when word got out, Jackman’s phone rang of the hook with calls from those who had worked with Hart over the years, all ofering advice on how to play their meeting. “It made me start to feel like maybe this is gonna be trickier than I thought,” says Jackman. “So when I arrived, he’s standing there on the kerb, waving, with the trunk of the four-wheel drive open. And I walked up to him and he shook me by the hand and with his other hand, he placed it on my cheek. And I’ll never
Clockwise from left: Hart with wife Lee, played by Vera Farmiga; Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), the third corner of the central triangle; Jackman and Reitman prep on set; The campaign team have their work cut out.
forget it. It was quite unexpected and warm and paternal, actually. And it made me feel like everything’s gonna be okay. Like he understood that I would be nervous. He instantly made me feel at ease.” Everyone involved in making The Front Runner, but particularly Jackman and Reitman, were aware that a level of responsibility came with depicting a real-life husband, father, human being, who had a very real wife, Lee, and a very real son and daughter. Who had had a relationship with a very real woman, Donna Rice. Thirty years may have passed but still, they were revisiting one of the most traumatic periods of all of their lives. Reitman himself felt a very specific connection with Gary and Lee Hart’s daughter Andrea, who was a teenager in 1987. “We have something in common,” he says. “We’re both the children of famous people. I reached out to her early on and said, ‘I think you
and I share an experience of what it’s like to be born carrying someone else’s legacy.’ I’ve always kind of known that with my father’s work.” When the film was finished, it was these people that were Reitman and Jackman’s most feared, most treasured audience. Reitman was still awaiting the final reaction as he drove to Telluride for the film’s premiere in September 2018. He’d just left Denver, where he’d shown the film to Andrea and the campaign staf and then Gary and Lee. He was waiting on Donna Rice. The woman who arguably endured the most mockery and criticism back in ’87 and a great deal since. When the phone finally rang, it was good news. “To be arriving in Telluride on the heels of having already had my most important screenings,” remembers Reitman. “It had an energy to itself.” Jackman remembers feeling unusually protective of Gary Hart as he watched the film for the first time — his normal concerns around the quality of the film and his performance supplanted. “I wondered how it would impact him,” he says. “There’s no way, no matter how redemptive the film is, that it’s not a really painful part of his life. And it’s all coming back up again. So it was a very complex set of feelings for him, I’m sure. And I was very nervous.” It’s a complexity and empathy that certainly seems lacking in today’s political climate. “It’s genuinely starting
a conversation,” says Jackman. “One that starts with humanity and understanding from every side of it.” And this is ultimately what Jackman and Reitman wanted to try and reintroduce with The Front Runner. “We want to take the viewers out of 2018,” says Reitman. “Which is such a shrill moment that you walk onto Twitter and the conversation’s at an 11. You say anything, you get your head ripped of. But if you go back to 1987, you dial the knob down to, like, a five. And now there’s the opportunity to actually have a conversation about someone who requires conversation, and I suppose that was the reason I wanted to pull on this thread.” It’s a thread that begins with the Death Star, but ultimately, is about A New, Old Hope. THE FRONT RUNNER IS IN CINEMAS FROM 11 JANUARY
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ALFONSO CUARÓN’S ROMA IS A MASTERPIECE RIPPED DIRECTLY FROM HIS OWN CHILDHOOD IN ’70s MEXICO. HERE HE TALKS THROUGH HIS MEMORIES, BOTH JOYOUS AND PAINFUL, AND WHAT IT TOOK TO BRING THEM TO THE SCREEN WORDS IAN FREER
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SOME TEN YEARS in the making, Roma is the passion project of Alfonso Cuarón’s life. It covers the story of one year in the life of a Mexican family between 1970 and ’71 — Cuarón himself was just ten years old — that cleaves very closely to his own. In fact, 90 per cent of the screenplay is drawn from his own memories, iltered through the eyes of the domestic help, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), based on Cuarón’s real-life nanny, Libo. It’s a tumultous year that features an earthquake, a forest ire, a massacre and a near drowning, but it’s also a ilm that captures the ebb and low of family life in small, affecting detail. Before the ilm’s premiere at the London Film Festival, Empire sat down with the ilmmaker to talk through the telling images of his intimate magnum opus. From script to costume design to cinematography, the ilm is intricately designed as both tribute to and exorcism of the director’s past. “I wanted to connect the personal scars with the social scars,” he says. And that journey ❯ starts in the very irst frame...
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The
Titles ROMA BEGINS WITH a sustained shot of a stone-patterned floor being washed down with soapy water. It’s the start of a motif of running water that Cuarón returns to throughout the story, illustrating the transient nature of life. “Colonia Roma is the quarter where the ilm takes place. Now it’s a very hipsterised, trendy place in Mexico City but, in those days, it was a very decadent area, the middle classes down on their luck, houses very much in decay. The title has nothing to do with
Fellini’s Roma. The funny thing is, the screenplay was untitled when we started. Because we were looking for locations, one of the producers called it ‘Roma’ as a temporary title to seek for permits. And it stuck. “I wanted the ilm to begin looking at the earth.
By the end of the ilm we are looking head onto the sky. Another thing I wanted was to immerse audiences in the slow pace, but also give them the comfort that these are credits. “When you are a kid, the garage can be a football ield
but it can also be the race track or the jungle — it can be anything. But at the same time it’s where the cars are parked and the place where the domestic workers have to wash and take care of the dog poo. There is a whole universe in that place.”
The
“When Libo started describing her free days, I realised there was another set of people and places outside this microcosm I existed in, the home. I didn’t frequent this theatre as a kid. I used to go to the more upscale one but this was a more popular theatre. In this shot, I am proud of the photography because the only light source you see is coming from the screen. Technically that was complicated to do. “The ilm in Spanish is La Fuga Fantástica. I don’t know
the name in English [Don’t Look Now…We’re Being Shot At]. It’s a French ilm [original title La Grande Vadrouille] with a French comedian, Louis de Funès. It was a ilm that was playing at the time. The script had speciic dates of things that happened and we were very rigorous about the events we portrayed around those days; not only the headlines of the newspapers but also the TV shows or ilms that were shown. And on top of that, it was a ilm I loved a lot.”
Cinema CUARÓN’S MEMORIES OF movie-going in ’70s Mexico are dotted throughout Roma. His cinematic ardour was informed by movies not only from Mexico but Hollywood and Europe. The film also includes a glimpse of 1969 space drama Marooned, a key influence on Gravity.
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The
THE MAKE-UP OF the family mirrors Cuarón’s own. The mother, in the middle, is Sofía (Marina de Tavira), whose husband has left home, the children believing he is on a business trip. On her right is grandmother Teresa (Verónica García), holding Sofi (Daniela Demesa). Sofía is cuddling Pepe (Marco Graf). On the end are Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey) and Paco (Carlos Peralta Jacobson), the latter a surrogate for the young Cuarón.
“I said to my casting department, ‘Go and look for these people. I don’t care if they are actors or non-actors.’ [Ultimately, the only person hired who had previous experience was de Tavira.] The family are very lookalike to the real ones. The same costumes, the same sweaters. If you want to go further, the boy in the portrait is actually me. It’s not recognisable, I was maybe six. And there is a portrait downstairs that is a real portrait of my mother that everyone thinks is Marina. In the ’70s, the TV was the ireplace of the home. You’d have Hollywood shows to Doctor Who to French shows. Very diverse programming.”
“There’s a ire, and for all the upper classes it’s an opportunity for more hedonism and celebration, extending the party. For the workers, it’s about extinguishing a ire. And this just comes from memory. The singer is from Norway. In Norway, there was a New Year’s tradition where people would dress up in kind of Pagan costumes. It’s still alive but it is now tied to Hallowe’en. This is a song [‘Barndomsminne frå Nordland’] from that tradition. It’s a complicated name in Norwegian but the song speaks about the nostalgia of going home, which speaks to
the whole of the ilm.” “We tried to do the light as naturalistic as possible so we used huge panels of ire to bring light to the scene. You see that everything is lit by the ires. Part of the principle of this ilm was I would never direct or instruct everybody at the same time. I talked to each actor individually, not telling the other actors what they were going to do, creating chaos in between the trafic. I could not predict what was going to happen pretty much in any scene of the ilm. But with the addition of the ire, ❯ we planned everything out.”
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Fire CUARÓN VIVIDLY REMEMBERS being taken to a hacienda as a child for a middle-class New Year’s Eve party — the dogs’ heads mounted on the wall in the scene are pulled directly from his memories of sleepovers. In the film, the party shenanigans are interrupted by a raging fire, beautifully shot by the director.
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The
Military Camp CUARÓN WANTED THE film to be as much a portrait of Mexico as his own family. A sequence depicting a state-sponsored martialarts training camp is a sinister note within the warm reminiscence.
“This is very well-documented. The paramilitary group was trained by the army but also there was a US army consultant, a CIA consultant and the real-life Professor Zovek, who was an escape artist on a Sunday variety show. “The ‘LEA’ on the mountainside are the initials of the president, Luis Echeverría Álvarez. You see male energy at full steam here. It is a completely masculine
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Massacre ON 10 JUNE 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi Festival, Mexican soldiers broke up a student demonstration, leaving a death toll close to 120. News coverage of the event lodged in the young Cuarón’s mind, but the filmmaker was keen not to sensationalise it. “This is one of those collective scars we share as a society in Mexico. In my particular case, it was an awareness of a greater universe beyond the
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bubble of my house, street and neighbourhood. We shot in the avenue the events took place. “When the massacre happened, I was ten and looking at it in the newspapers. There was a photograph of a guy with a stick chasing a long-haired student and in the background there was this building. In it I saw there was a furniture shop and people looking out of the windows. As a ten-year-old, I was looking at that photograph imagining the people in the furniture shop
looking down at that horror. “I think that was the seed of the whole thing — everything was seen from up there. I know this could open up a lot of opportunity for spectacle, stunts and stuff, but I wasn’t interested in that experience. I was interested in observing everything from a certain distance. “We had thousands of extras and each had to have hair and costumes done. Some of these people were there since 3am. They were heroes.”
kind of number. “The [martial arts] discipline is called kendo. There are not that many people who do kendo, so they had to train for months and months to learn the choreography. They would meet three or four times a week and it was complicated because each time you have a rehearsal you have to pay all of these people. It was expensive.”
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Beach AS A FILMMAKER, Cuarón has always experimented with the long take (think Children Of Men, Gravity). This scene, again inspired by an event in the filmmaker’s own life, is covered in one long tracking shot, with the camera following Cleo up and down the beach, into the water and out again. “Libo, the real-life Cleo, saved my sister and I. My mum left us for a little bit and said, ‘She doesn’t know how to swim — stay on the shore.’ My sister couldn’t care less, went straight into the sea and then we were drowning. It was Libo who went in the water, not knowing how to swim, and saved us. She couldn’t swim but she really saved my life. “I did it in one shot because the ilm was trying to honour time and space. Our conines in existence are time and space. They limit us but also create the bonds. So I wanted it to have that sense of low of both. In order to do the shot, we built a huge dock all the way deep into the ocean. The problem we had is the day before we started shooting there was a tropical storm that weakened the whole structure. It stopped being level so when we started shooting we had a big Technocrane on top that kept derailing. It was only at the very last moment we got one complete take, when the light was waning. There was time to do another, but I was scared at that point of the reliability of the whole thing. “The thing is poor Yalitza, like Libo, didn’t know how to swim. I always say as a joke to her, ‘Look, we shot it at the end of the ilm so maybe we would have had a different ending.’”
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Drive Home
WHILE ROMA BEGINS by looking at the floor, Cuarón broadens the viewpoint as the film goes on — notice that the sky is beginning to creep into this shot. “All the characters are kind of relecting. There’s a sense of, ‘We are going back home but it’s not the same anymore.’ This is about uncertainty but at the same time hope for the future. I remember feelings like that. Again, what we wanted here is to starting seeing the
sky. At this point it’s still relected but now it’s relected over her face. “Roma was a journey through my memories and reproducing those memories in very heated ways. I was doing a ilm about someone I love and my personal scars, not a ilm about someone who doesn’t have a voice. There’s a whole demographic that doesn’t have a voice but it goes beyond that. It’s not that they don’t have a voice, it’s that they are invisible. They do so much of
what supports us and their existence is completely ignored. Their existence is recognised when some job is not properly done or when you demand something. But that’s the limit of their existence. “Obviously my whole family has a very emotional response to the ilm but the most touching one is Libo. She cries and cries. At the end she is always weeping. She has seen it three times. And her concern is not her own circumstance but the children in the ilm. She is worried about them.” ROMA IS IN SELECT CINEMAS FROM 29 NOVEMBER AND ON NETFLIX FROM 14 DECEMBER
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WORDS HELEN O’HARA
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PORTRAITS MILLER MOBLEY
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ry ecame e roa a s ccess o a enera ion. erni Miranda became a mega-successful multi-hyphenate: composer, lyricist, actor, rapper. And high among the opportunities that have followed is the fact that he was cast as Jack, the male lead in Mary Poppins Returns. “I have had some audacious dreams in my life,” he says. “I wanted to be on Broadway and I wanted to do movies, but the audacity to dream that there would even be a sequel to Mary Poppins and that I could be in it? That’s not something I ever thought could be on ofer.” It’s not something many others saw coming either. Here is a complete list of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s roles in Hollywood studio movies, prior to Mary Poppins Returns: a small role as a botanist in The Odd Life Of Timothy Green, about a boy who miraculously grows from a vegetable patch, and a cameo in the first Sex And The City movie. That’s it. Yet when director Rob Marshall was looking for someone to play the newly created character of lamplighter Jack, the top of his list was Miranda, then starring on Broadway. “We went to him for many reasons,” says Marshall, whose movie musicals include Chicago and Into The Woods. “He comes from the streets in his own way [Miranda’s from the Washington Heights neighbourhood north of Harlem, in New York City]. We knew he’d understand that everyman. We also love his work as a singer and a performer. But if I had to pick one reason, it’s his purity of spirit, who he is. It’s very important that Mary Poppins has that cohort, we felt, someone who shares that magical quality, and Lin has this spirit about him. He’s very honest and true, and not jaded.” Marshall and his producing partner John DeLuca arranged to meet Miranda across the street from Hamilton’s Richard Rodgers theatre between shows on a two-show day, and Miranda couldn’t believe his luck. “I couldn’t believe what they were pitching me,” he says. “As soon as they said ‘Emily Blunt’, and that this is a new story not a remake, I was in. I happen to think that Rob Marshall is one of the best makers of musical films ever, so I wanted to learn.”
It’s important to
explain the Hamilton phenomenon before we go much further, because it makes it clear why an Oscar-nominated director would be buying cofee for some guy on Broadway. The show is a hip-hop musical about one of America’s founding fathers, a summary that sounds more like the cringeworthy proposal of an over-enthusiastic history teacher than the foundation of a billion-dollar theatrical hit.
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Jack and Georgie (Joel Dawson) — yes! — go fly a kite.
Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) rides shotgun with the beloved nanny and charges in Mary Poppins Returns.
Miranda as the titular Alexander Hamilton performing at PA
the 2016 Tony Awards.
And yet that’s exactly what it became, because Miranda spotted that Hamilton lived “a hip-hop life”. A penniless immigrant to the US, Hamilton married well and grew richer, becoming one of George Washington’s key aides-de-camp during the War Of Independence. He then established much of the US state machinery, including its entire financial system and much of its constitutional theory, in a brief few years of astonishing productivity (“The man is non-stop,” as the show’s lyrics succinctly put it). Add an ill-advised love afair, duels, bitter rivalries and his death at the hands of a sitting US vice president (not a spoiler: it’s history and it’s in the opening number), and you have an epic that captured the imagination of a generation. It wasn’t initially going to be a musical — when he debuted the opening number at the White House in 2009, Miranda introduced it as a hip-hop concept album — but with his regular director Thomas Kail and musical collaborator Alex Lacamoire it gradually evolved into one that references everything from Beauty And The Beast to Busta Rhymes, with two stage turntables to Les Misérables’ one (this one-upmanship delights Miranda’s theatre-nerd side). Miranda wrote and composed the entire thing, playing Hamilton himself for its first year. The show was, to put it mildly, a phenomenon. It won 11 Tonys, from a record 16 nominations, plus seven Oliviers for its London production. Tickets for Miranda’s final weeks in the lead role changed hands for tens of thousands of dollars. It even inspired two comedy homages: Jeb! The Musical (about a less stirring political figure, Jeb Bush) and Spamilton. It’s no overstatement to say that Hamilton had a similar efect on musicals to that which Harry Potter had on publishing, drawing new people to the theatre and seeing ardent fans obsessing over its characters (sales of historian Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography went through the roof ) and connecting around the world through their shared Hamilton vernacular. Miranda himself also won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, three Grammy awards, an Emmy (for his Tony Awards opening number ‘Bigger’), a MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “genius grant”) and a Tony for his first musical, In The Heights. That was a contemporary hip-hop-tinged story of immigrant life, set in Miranda’s native Washington Heights, that he started writing while still in college. “We talk about the success of Hamilton, but nothing will change my life like In The Heights,” he says. “I went from broke substitute teacher to of-Broadway composer to Broadway composer, and there is not a bigger leap I could ever make.” Not that Miranda only wanted to perform his own material. In 2007, he had earned his first screen credit as a bellman in The Sopranos. “I am so green at acting you can actually see me look down for my mark where to stop. My one direction from Mr [David] Chase was, ‘Really tranq’ed out.’ I was like, ‘Tranq’ed out, check.’ I had two lines.” Stardom did not follow that turn, but In The Heights landed Miranda a film opportunity, albeit in a role as tiny as it’s possible to be. Miranda auditioned for Sex And The City director Michael Patrick King. “He said, ‘You shouldn’t be auditioning for me; this is crazy. You shouldn’t be playing this part, but I’m gonna find a way that I get to hang out with you.’ So he cast me and Tommy Kail moving a couch in one scene. That was his way of having some of the cast of the show he liked at his job. If anything prepared me for playing Mary Poppins in London, and the zoo that would happen when we filmed outdoors, it was the Sex And The City movie. I don’t know if you remember, but that was such a huge deal. I remember people trying to do their lines while just outside of frame there were tons of paparazzi. That was a very surreal day. In the extended director’s cut I think Tommy Kail has a line.” ❯ The day that In The Heights finally closed, as Miranda
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took a midnight train to Georgia (literally: Atlanta flights were grounded by a small snowstorm) to start work on his second musical, Bring It On, he got a call ofering him The Odd Life Of Timothy Green. “That was the ultimate door-closing, windowopening kind of thing. All that stuf came about because of In The Heights. I only started writing those shows because no-one was casting me in anything.”
But the Hamilton ofers, when they came, were on another level. Just before it opened of-Broadway, Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, came calling. Twenty years before they had spotted that Little Shop Of Horrors composer Alan Menken (Miranda’s hero) and his late writing partner, Howard Ashman, had something special, and recruited them to work for Disney on Mermaid and Beauty And The Beast. Now they wanted Miranda, who took a fact-finding trip with them to the Pacific for their new film, Moana. Backstage in the Richard Rodgers theatre as Hamilton took of, Miranda would beaver away on the (eventually Oscarnominated) songs for that film, sending tapes back to Burbank or grabbing of-duty cast members to perform his latest rif. “Moana very much kept me sane through the Hamilton phenomenon, because it kept my feet on the ground as a writer. All this crazy stuf is happening and our actors are getting insane job ofers and we’re getting magazine covers, and I have two songs due, every Tuesday and Thursday. A big part of my year [performing] in Hamilton was saying no to a lot of stuf to make space to write. That really kept me level, because I was still working and couldn’t let my head get too big because I had a Disney hero to look after.” As the wave of hype crested, everyone who was anyone was coming to see the show. The Obamas, Oprah, Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand — and J.J. Abrams, as he worked on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. “J.J. Abrams comes to the show, and at the intermission — I was in the audience taking notes; it was my show of — I joked to him, ‘Hey, if you’ve got a cantina in this one I’ll write the music,’ and he said, ‘I DO have a cantina!’ Talk about a joke going right!” Miranda passed his work back and forth with Abrams for feedback and tweaks. They eventually came up with two songs, one of which, ‘Jabba Flow’, is performed in Huttese and rifs on Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’. After a crazy year Miranda stepped back from his Broadway baby, chopped of Hamilton’s long hair and moved to London to shoot Poppins. But that meant working even harder to live up to the legacy of extraordinary dancing in the original Poppins film, and adding “dancer/actor opposite animated animals” to his already groaning CV. “That was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked,” Miranda admits. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed: there’s incredible dancing in Hamilton but Hamilton doesn’t do a lot of it. I stand and rap while amazing things happen around me. Whereas with this, I’m a huge fan of ‘Step In Time’, and I wanted to earn that.” Cue a dance boot-camp to learn the film’s enormous and ambitious dance numbers (Marshall himself oversaw the choreography). Miranda would then spend his lunchbreaks practising smaller flourishes, eating a sandwich with one hand and tossing his hat gracefully onto a lamppost with the other. “I really worked very hard to even hold a candle to Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in that original film.” But Jack occupies a diferent role to the original film’s Bert. If Bert was a near-peer to Poppins, Jack “straight-up looks up to [her] because he learned that when Mary Poppins is around, cool things happen. Which very much mirrors my own sense of awe at finding myself in a Mary Poppins film.”
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But Jack was once Bert’s apprentice and that posed a challenge, one that loomed even larger than the Bank Of England, where they shot one sequence: the accent. Should Jack sound as, well, bad? “For me, the lesson was, ‘Don’t go full Cockney,’” laughs Miranda. “I went more for an Anthony Newley, Billy Bragg, working class East End just shy of rhyming slang. But it afects rhyme. I’ve got some pretty hardcore... I wouldn’t say rapping, but patter, in this film, and that was a joy to unlock. And you’re filming in Shepperton Studios. You’ve got a crew that are all going to help you out, so it was really fun to slip in and out of it every day. And by the way, no-one has a better sense of humour about that accent than Dick Van Dyke himself.” He had enormous support from Emily Blunt as Poppins, and he’s a fan of both actor and character. “She is this sort of ageless Doctor Who Timelord,” grins Miranda. “Emily’s take is a little more Dorothy Parker’s Mary Poppins [than Julie Andrews’ original], if that makes any sense. It takes place in the 1930s and I think she took her inspiration from there.” He also threw himself into British culture and especially, for some reason, the sweets (“I mean, flying saucers. Communion wafers with tang in them. I never had that flavour outside Catholic mass”), and enjoyed the fact that no-one beyond the occasional American tourist had the first idea who he was. That’s not likely to last much longer. After Mary Poppins Returns wrapped this summer, Miranda went to Wales to play Lee Scoresby in the TV adaptation of His Dark Materials. “I am in this very enviable position, and I am fully aware of how lucky I am, in that I have the ideas that I carry around with me like luggage, the things that I’m dying to write and make. And then there are opportunities that if I didn’t say yes to, I’d be cursing at the screen whenever Lee Scoresby showed up. I had to do it! His Dark Materials? A season for each book? And Jack Thorne writing? I was in.” Holding a Texan accent in the middle of Wales is, however, more of a challenge even than Jack’s dialect. There’s a potential re-team with Marshall on a new, live-action version of The Little Mermaid down the line, though neither will discuss it beyond professing a love of the original. “Anything that puts me in a room with Alan Menken makes me happy,” says Miranda. “I’m sort of around for anything that needs doing. You need someone to shine Sebastian’s claws, I’ll do it.” And, of course, he’s carrying around those three new potential musicals in his head, “two of which threaten to become screen musicals”, as well as writing songs for animated musical Vivo with his In The Heights co-writer Quiara Alegría Hudes. He’s throwing himself into every opportunity ofered, but he’s too wary, “too much of a New Yorker”, to expect a Hamilton level of success every time. “My philosophy is that you can’t control the success or failure of a thing. I’m in a business where I could spend seven years writing a show and it could close after a week, and I need to be okay with that. So I either need to know I’m going to be a better artist on the other side, or just really believe so whole-heartedly in it. On Mary Poppins Returns, it was both. I knew I’d learn a ton and hopefully we would make a continuation of the story that fans of the original will be proud of. I think we did.” Miranda described himself, on The Hamilton Mixtape that followed the show, as having “no chill”. He may have the occasional sleepless night and grumpy morning from parenting, but he shows no sign of slowing down as a result. Like his most famous role — at least until Poppins — the man is non-stop. MARY POPPINS RETURNS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 21 DECEMBER
From musicals to movies FIVE OTHER BIG NAMES WHO SANG THEIR WAY TO STARDOM
The Artist Formerly Known As Logan has hardly disguised his song and dance roots: from Les Misérables to The Greatest Showman, he’ll warble at the drop of a (top) hat. A 1990s musical sensation in Australia, Jackman got his claws into a slew of stage roles, including Oklahoma!’s Curly and Beauty And The Beast’s Gaston.
Anna Kendrick went viral with her one-girl, one-cup performance of ‘When I’m Gone’ in Pitch Perfect, her singing-voice, well, pitch perfect, which was no surprise to her early acolytes. Kendrick stormed Broadway at just 12 years old, starring in — and getting a Tony award nomination for — 1998’s High Society.
If any ilm star has Broadway in their bones, its this guy, who early on changed his name from Joseph to Nathan, after Guy And Dolls’ Nathan Detroit. He hit the boards in 1982 and barely left, mixing his later movie career with star turns in, yes, Guys And Dolls (as, yes, Nathan), The Birdcage and, well, everything else.
August Image
Long before starring in TV’s Sex And The City and its less beloved cinematic offspring, 11-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker was singing her heart out on the New York stage. At 13 she bagged the titular role in Broadway’s Annie, with television and ilm soon stealing her for the camera. The sun came out for her, tomorrow.
Previous to becoming king of Dale in The Hobbit, Aberbargoed’s inest was prince of the West End. Beginning in 2000, for almost a decade he sang his way through Rent, Miss Saigon, Avenue Q and Boy George’s Taboo. Those booming vocal chops you heard in 2017’s Beauty And The Beast were well honed.
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THE CHARACTER HAS LONG BEEN A KELP-DRAPED JOKE. BUT DIRECTOR JAMES WAN AND STAR JASON MOMOA ARE DETERMINED TO TURN AQUAMAN INTO A FANTASY EPIC THE WORLD TAKES SERIOUSLY WORDS DAN JOLIN
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IT’S HARD TO
tell when the Aquaman gags started. So hard, in fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking the subaquatic DC Comics hero was always a joke. Around 2012, stop-motion sketch show Robot Chicken started lampooning him regularly; at one point Batman’s sidekick Robin used his magic trident to clear a blocked toilet. Boston indie band The Motion Sick wrote a 2010 song titled ‘Aquaman’s Lament’, in which the orange-and-green-suited crimefighter lists other superheroes’ fantastic abilities before grumbling, “I can talk to some fish.” And then there’s Entourage, HBO’s Hollywood satire, which in 2005 began spinning a long-running, dafy plot line around an Aquaman movie directed by James Cameron. It’s something Jason Momoa, returning to the role for the third time (after Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice and Justice League), has done his utmost to ignore. “I’m not a big TV dude, so in my free time I’m definitely not watching Entourage,” states the one-time Conan and Khal Drogo. And all those other jokes and memes about him having useless powers? “Obviously, people made fun, but I’m not interested in playing to that.” It is not, Empire senses, something he’s really into talking about. However, James Wan, director of the real Aquaman, feels diferently. “Yes, I am familiar with Entourage, and I know Aquaman has been a joke in the superhero universe,” he tells Empire. “I definitely went into this knowing he has that kind of baggage. But that, believe it or not, was part of the reason I picked this movie.”
AFTER SMASHING CARS together on a stupendous scale in 2015’s Furious 7, and making Universal more than $1.5 billion worldwide, Wan could have done anything he wanted. He was already fêted for his success in the horror genre, having launched the SAW franchise and established his own spooky cinematic universe with the Conjuring films. “James was ofered everything under the sun,” recalls Wan’s long-time producing partner Peter Safran. “But I remember him coming in and telling me he wanted to do Aquaman.” As the Australian-Malaysian Wan explains, “I’ve always loved telling underdog stories. I’m an underdog myself. When you come from the horror world, you’re always seen as the bastard ❯ stepchild and no-one ever takes you
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seriously. So in a lot of ways I really related to all the goofiness that is associated with Aquaman. I took it on board. I wanted to take this guy that most people think is a joke and make him super-cool. And when you have Jason Momoa in the lead, the whole quoteunquote badass thing really comes through on its own, you know?” On set in July 2017, at Australia’s Village Roadshow Studios, Momoa is shooting scenes with Amber Heard, who co-stars as undersea warrior queen Mera, but there is no goldfish-orange costume or toilet-unblocking trident in sight. The pair are dressed in surfbum travel gear for a National Treasurestyle, puzzle-solving MacGuinhunt that’s taken them to some ancient temple ruins in a Sicilian town. Momoa comes across less as “badass” than exuding a laidback, rock-star swagger. An image he unselfconsciously massages by strapping on a Fender bass guitar between takes. “Jason’s kind of reinvented Aquaman while still maintaining the integrity of the superhero himself,” Heard tells us. Or, as Wan regular Patrick Wilson (who plays the hero’s half-brother nemesis, Orm) puts it, “He’s a completely diferent Aquaman than your Saturday-morning cartoon guy who rides two dolphins.” Momoa confesses to being surprised when Zack Snyder ofered him the role way back in the Dawn Of Justice days. “I was perplexed: ‘You want me to play who?’ I thought he was going to ofer me a villain,” he says. Aquaman wasn’t part of the Honolulu-born, Iowa-raised Momoa’s comic-book upbringing. He was more a fan of Wolverine and the demonic Spawn. But as he and Snyder talked, the appeal grew and grew. “Zack wanted an outlaw, he wanted someone who’d punch Superman in the face and just stir the pot. And I think we did a good job in Justice League of playing that character. But James has taken it to a whole new level, and it’s got a little bit more intimate, a little bit more vulnerable.” This solo outing dives into Aquaman’s past, exploring his origin as the son of a lighthouse-keeper named Thomas Curry (one-time Jango Fett Temuera Morrison) and Atlanna, the queen of Atlantis (Nicole Kidman, who signed on as a fan of Wan). Raised by his dad, he’s a blue-collar outcast with a kingly destiny, one whose mythical echoes are only emphasised by his real name: Arthur. Yet he’s a reluctant prince, only drawn to the briny depths of Atlantis by a threat to the pollution-dumping surface world from his autocratic sibling, Orm. A threat which requires him to ally
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Top: Willem Dafoe as Vulko; Director James Wan on set. Middle: Aquaman (Jason Momoa) takes on Orm (Patrick Wilson); Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the nefarious Black Manta.
with Mera, who “drives him to the front lines,” as Heard puts it. “She drives him to battle, she engages him in this fight.” Though he bears no physical resemblance to the whitebread, blond sealife-controller of the comics, Momoa — who once intended to study marine biology — feels multiple points of connection. “He’s from one part of the world, has roots in another, and he’s fallen between the two. Coming from middle America and also being born in Hawaii, that’s something I can draw from. And also being raised by a single parent [Momoa’s mother, Coni]. So there’s a lot of good things to play with.” Which is why, he once again emphasises, “I’m not interested in making fun of it.”
EVEN SO, DURING
Empire’s two days on the Aquaman set, we hear again and again that this movie is all about the fun, and steers clear of the stormy, murky atmosphere that hung low over the Snyder-directed movies. “It took the horror guy to bring the light tone to this series,” Wan quips. While showing us around the extensive sets, production designer Bill Brzeski describes it as “a ‘blue-sky movie’. It’s pretty, it’s very colourful. Atlantis is supposed to be a beautiful place. You’re going to want to go there. It’s like The Little Mermaid… on steroids.” We can see what he means. A sunken, barnacle-encrusted galleon, home to Arthur’s mentor Vulko (Willem Dafoe) and
setting for one of the movie’s 18 battle sequences, looks like the kind of place you’d find a doubloon-stufed chest circled by hammerheads. The streets of the Sicilian town (painstakingly based on the real hilltop town of Erice) virtually glow under the azure heavens of Queensland’s Gold Coast. And our stop-of at a Saharan Atlantean forge, a remnant of the ancient culture’s landlubbing past complete with gigantic Greco-Roman statues, brings to mind the dusty haunts of a certain fedorawearing archaeologist. Wan describes the film as “an action-adventure road movie where Arthur and Mera go on a really crazy journey to some very stylised and fantastical worlds.” One that is very much inspired by the films he enjoyed as a kid. “Obviously I loved the movies of George Lucas and Spielberg, and there is a quest here like the quest for the Holy Grail or the Ark Of The Covenant. This movie is my embrace of all the filmmakers I grew up loving; those sort of Spielberg-
Bottom left: Orm revealed; Amber Heard as warrior queen Mera. Here: Momoa’s rock-star take on Aquaman.
inspired wonderment movies from the ’80s. I create worlds in all my films, even my little horror films, but with this one I finally get the chance to design some really fantastic worlds, the kind you’re used to seeing in Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings.” In the sprawling seaworld of Aquaman, Atlantis is merely one of seven watery kingdoms. These include the Xebellian kingdom, lorded over by Dolph Lundgren as King Nereus, Mera’s stern father; the Fisherman kingdom, inhabited by mer-people realised via a blend of prosthetics and visual efects; the kingdom of the Brine, dominated by monstrous crustaceans; and Wan’s favourite, the kingdom of the Trench. “I’ve definitely indulged my Guillermo del Toro passion for cool creature design here,” he says. “Oh man, I’m just going all-out! There’s a lot of tentacles and webbed creatures. It’s my opportunity to delve into my love and passion for Lovecraft.” Wan admits that, with its fundamental emphasis on visual efects, every day on Aquaman has proved “a huge learning curve”. However, he’s insisted on building as many sets as possible and using practical efects whenever he can. Something which Heard certainly appreciates. “While we usually have a lot of green-screen, they’ve also built these incredibly immaculate, immense, immersive sets,” she says. “We have some that are just breathtaking.”
AQUAMAN IS, AS
Brzeski puts it, “about as big as movies get”. If it weren’t enough of a gamble to make a superhero fantasy epic based on a character who’s a pop-culture punchline, then the boxoice disappointment and critical mauling of Justice League only makes it feel riskier. But when we catch up with Wan almost a year to the day after joining him on set, he insists Justice League’s troubles had no panicked-reaction impact on his own film. “I didn’t really have to change anything,” he says. “I’m still making the movie I wanted to make, and the story I’m making is so far from the world of Justice League.” His enthusiasm for showing everyone what he can achieve with this potentially slippery material remains undimmed, not least as the reviews of Justice League were largely kind to Momoa, appreciative of his gruf, occasionally cheeky charm. With this film, Wan hopes to build on that goodwill. “We all know he can play the big, tough guy. But what I want to show the
rest of the world is this guy is funny, very quick-witted, with a great sense of humour. And that all comes back to my inspirations: films like Romancing The Stone, and there’s even shades of Kurt Russell’s character Jack Burton, from Big Trouble In Little China. A bit of a goofball, but his heart is in the right place.” When we later mention this to Momoa he thaws a little on the ‘joke character’ perspective. “James has a good sense of humour about it, and we do poke at it,” he admits. “There’s a little more twinkle in my eye in this film. I’m a little more rascally, maybe.” He’s also amused when Empire tells him that in the Entourage universe, the joke was ultimately on everyone else when Aquaman became the highest-grossing movie of all time. “That’s hilarious!” he laughs. Even if Wan’s real-world version doesn’t manage that, Momoa is certain of one thing, at least: “After this, I don’t think people will be making fun of me anymore.” AQUAMAN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 14 DECEMBER
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was raised family. -class in Athens in a lower-middle He loved cinema, but there’s hardly a filmmaking industry in Greece, so he went to film school and became a commercials director, accruing technical chops and learning how to work with actors. With the money he was making, he did start making films — very low-budget ones on which everybody worked for free, providing their houses, cars and clothes, happy enough if only their friends saw the results. Lanthimos’ debut as a solo director was 2005’s Kinetta, about a group of people re-staging murder scenes, but Dogtooth was seen by people far beyond his social circle, certainly after being Oscarnominated for Best Foreign Film. For 2011’s Alps, about four friends impersonating dead people to give solace to grieving relatives, he had an even smaller budget and, with burgeoning ideas and a need for a support system, decided to make films in the English language, moving to London. With his Greek films, he had instinctively rebelled WOR against the aesthetic sheen he’d had to DS A LEX employ in advertising. “So I just wanted GOD FRE Y to do everything the opposite way,” he says. “No lights, no make-up, no hair stylists. Locations that looked rough.” His films since have grown in resources — The Favourite, certainly, is lush work — but the imperfect spirit remains. Based on a true story, Olivia Colman is Queen Anne, a gout-ridden, , Yorgos impressionable and very shouty n ee u Q t ou ab monarch. The formidable Lady Sarah th century film titles Lanthimos’ 18 h it w rs te ap (Weisz) is Anne’s childhood friend and the outside world. The bored into ch kids . e’ Anne, is divided ey e th in u now, despite her marriage, lover. Then, bark like dogs and kill a cat. I stabbed yo We to isz f , O like ‘I dreamt a. m ra though, Anne’s cousin Abigail (Emma “immensely struck” by it, too gular period d k as It’s not your re h n ee u Q e th Stone) arrives, once aristocratic, now Lanthimos to a pub for a cup eeting, of tea ok , lo an important m ou “Y . fallen on hard times. Abigail becomes enthused at length, and he sai with mascara r, d he so ’d vi experimented ad ical their maid but, hungry for status, wants send her his next script, wh her droll polit ich ended al n io like a badger,” ot em an e, more, thus beginning an operatic fight up being The Lobster. “Lucky lls her. Ann g me in , lk Lady Sarah, te u sk e for Anne’s afections. The film is all right?” she smiles now. most of her tim , od wreck, spends fo g n offi sc , colours of comic: dry, farcical and Actors love Lanthimos. Nic ightgown ole about in her n er h g in vicious, soaked in cruelty, with liberal Kidman similarly sought him oys and feed out after slapping pageb e, ac al p e th in and inventive use of the c-word. seeing Dogtooth, which she ewhere said brought h 17 rabbits. Els it w d te el Initially written by screenwriter her to her knees. Dogtooth wa ed man is p s his sec a laughing nak on d . Deborah Davis, it landed with Lanthimos film, made for tuppence in his ucks are raced native oranges, and d e th g in o d as in 2009 post-Dogtooth, the producers pt w Greece; since then he has mo When the scri ved to to giving him free reign to develop it London and made more, wit Weisz wrote h increasing she rounds, Rachel ch u m ow h im as he saw fit, including rewrites with budgets and ambition, but no lling h Lanthimos, te is is h T . Australian writer Tony McNamara. It’s compromises. 2015’s The Lo y Lady Sarah to t bst u er o had wanted to pla ed h ac very much not what you’d expect from people who couldn’t find a rom Weisz first re 2009 antic is nothing new — h en se g in such source material. “I don’t come from partner within 45 days turne s ago, hav ep d int ke o him a few year o h w le p this tradition or culture,” says Lanthimos animals, while 2017’s The K , about a cou illing Of lind to film Dogtooth b e, m o h at in of the subversion. “It was a challenge for A Sacred Deer, in which Lanth fenced imos cast their children me to see how I could put a twist on the Kidman, was about a young boy with genre, in my own way.” diabolical power instructing a heart As an English actor, Weisz was surgeon to sacrifice one of his ❯ children. excited to shake things up. “It’s not Nothing is normal here.
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a dusty museum piece. It’s anarchic and radical and absurdist and tragic. The tonal shifts, the fish-eye lens — it all adds up to a new way of storytelling.” For all the comedy, it has a huge heart, leaving you somewhat bereft. As for the absurdism, Lanthimos is certainly not odd in person: laidback and mildmannered, you wouldn’t have a clue. “Weirdly,” says Olivia Colman, another acolyte who came back for more after starring in The Lobster, “he is the biggest-hearted, kindest, warmest man, which is hard to imagine when watching his films.” This is true. Take the frankly evil The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and all its child-sufering, a good litmus test if you want to explore someone’s taste. It really is the blackest of humour. Stone met him to discuss The Favourite in 2015 just as he was preparing Sacred Deer, and she practically jumps up, eyes widening, at the mention of it. “Where the girl goes, ‘Dad, Bob’s dying’ — I laughed out loud, and she’s talking about her little brother bleeding from the eyes. How does he do it?! It’s fucked!” Confusing us is part of the plan. Such extreme scenarios give us more room to muse on the behaviour he’s exploring, ‘What is this? Noone wants to see th says Lanthimos. And the behaviour is is.’ But then it’s funn y. I guess somehow troubling. Colin Farrell, who starred that would be in its in The Lobster and Sacred Deer, has absurdity, becaus e life is absurd.” commented that Lanthimos’ characters are selfish, his worlds are cruel, his tastes clearly nihilistic. Does the director agree? “I guess,” he laughs. “I mean, I do actors talk of Lanthimos’ econ omy of communic observe that a lot about people. You’re ation. If it’s not on the pa ge, it doesn’t exis pleasantly surprised when you meet t. “He doesn’t discuss ch aracter,” says Ston people that are selfless. The nihilistic e. “Or plot. Or scenes . Or anything real part of it... I just don’t feel that I need to ly that’s going on. H e doesn’t want to make films that show things eventually break down the motivat ions of each charac in a positive manner, because they ter, he wants to let yo u find it. And it’s so wouldn’t have a function for me. When much more excitin g in a scene when you do things that explore difficulty and you haven’t discussed every element. It do not work properly, that’s interesting ’s much more alive if you don’t know for people to think about, and to try and .” This is what he wants: for actors to be pr improve maybe. The darker, nastier side esent, rather than prepar ed. Spontaneity, he of people: that’s what interests me. I’m feels, gets closer to the truth of things not interested in painting the perfect . To achieve it, he cr picture, which probably doesn’t exist eates physical exercises. In her au dition for The absolutely anywhere.” Favourite, he aske d Stone to pant whi As such, his films are not bound to lst delivering her lin es, to breathe as if one genre. Darkness or comedy by sh e was giving birth. Did he explain why themselves are too narrow to provoke ? “Oh God, no,” she says. “Of course no original feeling, he believes. “When t, it’s Yorgos! He doesn’ t explain.” She be I watch something that’s just tragic,” lie ves he was trying to se e if she could keep says Stone, “it doesn’t feel like life, her English accent re gardless of what el because someone can die and later se she was doing. “I th ink he does those that day someone can make you laugh games to check th at you’re not gonn accidentally. It’s always that balance, a be embarrassed,” sa ys Colman. “If yo and I think he sees that humanity in it. u ca n sense someone ho lding back, it’s no Even in Sacred Deer, which is the most t what he wants.” Before shooting The Favo fucked-up film of all time, when he told urite, he put his key cast through a three-w me what it was going to be, I was like, eek
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rehearsal process, in which they had to repeatedly recite their lines whilst holding hands, walking backwards, crashing into each other and, says Weisz, “making human pretzel shapes where you have someone’s bum in your face and their leg over your ear”. “So you’re right up close to people and not giggling,” says Colman. “We were going [whispering conspiratorially], ‘Why? Why are we doing it?’ But it was so much fun. We got to know each other so well and we had each other’s backs. That’s what he did without explaining it. So we ended up starting the film knowing each other back-to-front, we could not be embarrassed in front of each other. If someone had a poocident, it would be fine.” Stone, sitting with Colman, squeals at this new word. It seems fitting. Lanthimos chuckles impishly when recollecting these shenanigans, especially at the mention of what he put Nicholas Hoult, who plays Tory opposition leader Robert Harley, through. At his audition, Hoult was asked to hum while the actor opposite him was speaking, then to imagine the forcefields around the room and sculpt the forcefield
Clockwise from far left: Newcomer, and the Queen’s cous
in,
Abigail (Emma St
one)
is feeling disturb
ed;
Anne’s advisor/lo
ver
Lady Sarah (Rac
hel
Weisz) lurks in th e dark; Director Yo rgos Lanthimos with cr ew and Stone on se t at Hatfield House in 2017
.
n know around said colleague. “I don’t eve os what a forcefield is,” laughs Lanthim lot a s say now. “Let alone sculpt one.” He ment, of this is him improvising in the mo ing tak m, roo working with what’s in the the actors “out of their reality of the too scene. I just think if you take things so es seriously, whatever you do becom obvious and feels self-conscious.” It’s not in aid of realism — realism says. in film can only be a construct, he s for But he does want truth. His impetu ible red taking on The Favourite was its inc to female triumvirate, and he strived ngle tria love honour it. There is a lesbian seem at the heart of it, but never does it x issue e-se sam like a gay genre film — the lay. er-p is irrelevant. It’s all about the pow h each “They just happen to be in love wit says er,” oth other, and have sex with each g. Weisz. “It’s not about taboo-breakin not is r And the gaze of the directo the salacious. Their passion is hot, but ical.” eye watching it is quite cold and clin to me “It was very important to ome make sure that this is not gonna bec e aus bec the main issue of the film, it’s not,” says Lanthimos. “I’m not lised interested in showing how scanda of people were because they learned such a relationship, or anything like that. That’s why nobody in the film a even comments on the fact that it’s ted wan I . homosexual relationship beings people to view them just as human and and be enthralled by the characters en wom ee their behaviour. And it’s thr rare to that possess such power, which is I was see. It was one of the reasons that n interested in the film, I hadn’t see anything like it.” In so many ways, The Favourite new, shakes things up. It feels startlingly lliant’ and entirely singular. “The word ‘bri or ‘genius’ gets used an awful lot, and man, often for no good reason,” says Col those h bot “but I do think Yorgos deserves s words. I love watching his films. He’ dict pre er nev wired diferently. You can the what he’s going to do.” Weisz says s she’s film h bot ng experiences of watchi of my e made with him have been “outsid ing. wildest dreams. They’re truly surpris The ground is always shifting.” Lanthimos will just keep making lds films, presenting his fully formed wor cal logi as is, rejecting too much psycho k press probing. At The Lobster’s New Yor him ed ask e conference in 2015, someon if what animal he would choose to be d kin me “So io. forced into such a scenar ’re of bird,” he answered. “Because you ator. a free spirit?” suggested the moder like just “I Lanthimos tutted and sighed. flying,” he said. S FROM
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SPOILER WARNING
THE INDISPENSABLE G
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EWITT
THE EMPIRE VIEWING GUIDE
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Director Ol Parker talks us through Here We Go Again’s greatest hits.
00:04:18 TEENAGE KICKS __ Here We Go Again’s prequel thread begins with young Donna’s (Lily James) graduation — where she rips off her gown and sings ‘When I Kissed The Teacher’. “The ilm deals with Meryl’s death right up front, to own that moment and the sadness, and this gets us out of there as quickly as possible,” Parker says, adding that he shied away from the obvious song choice: ‘Super Trouper’. “I wanted to have ❯ Lily shake things up like Donna does.”
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COLD CALL __ In the present, Sophie
VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHEZ AVEC MOI __ EMOTIONAL DISTRESS __ Pierce
(Amanda Seyfried) is mourning her mum’s death and relaunching the Hotel Bella Donna in tribute. But a job offer threatens to keep her partner Sky (Dominic Cooper) in NY — cue a tense phone call and heartbroken duet of ‘One Of Us’ that proved challenging for Cooper. “ABBA songs are very dificult for men. You’ll do a great job in the shower, but there’s something tricky about the tonality.”
‘Waterloo’ — used as a mid-credits curtain-call last time — was prime for proper deployment here. “It’s such a banger,” says Parker. In the Parisian Café Napoleon, bumbling virgin rocker Harry (Hugh Skinner) asks Donna if she’ll pop his cherry. “It was, ‘How do I get them into bed by the end of the song?’ The answer is energy and laughter. I wrote: ‘Together they destroy a French restaurant.’”
Brosnan’s no-holds-barred rendition of ‘SOS’ became iconic for all the wrong reasons in 2008 — but his mournful reprise here in the wake of Donna’s death is genuinely touching. “He did the take, and our script supervisor was in tears,” Parker recalls. Brosnan even requested they play it for his mother. “We did, and she cried. It was James Bond, still wanting his mum’s approval.”
00:30:01
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01:16:12
BOATY MCBOATFACE __ “Getting
I’M (NOT) ALAN PARTRIDGE __ More
HELLO, SAILORS __ Mamma Mia!’s
‘Why Did It Have To Be Me?’ in was a massive crowbar,” Parker admits. Donna’s lirtatious sea-bound duet with Bill (Josh Dylan) was no easy shoot either. “Filming on boats is a nightmare. There’s two camera boats, the hero boat, make-up boat, hair boat, director’s boat. You line up the shot and then another boat drifts in, then Josh’s wig falls off. It was endless chaos.”
challenging than the open ocean: doing ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ without conjuring Alan Partridge. “I thought we’d take out the ‘a-ha’s or use a guitar sound instead,” says Parker. “Because of Alan they’ve become something so preposterous.” Alternative takes without them were shelved when Jeremy Irvine nailed it in the studio. “He did them so touchingly that l think we nicked it back.”
freewheeling ‘Dancing Queen’ sequence is its most ecstatic moment. “I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it again,’” Parker laughs. Enter Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) on a leet of colourful boats to save Sophie’s hotel relaunch. “I had the joke about them doing Titanic quite early on — the only dispute was who would be Kate and who’d be Leo.”
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STAR-CROSSED LOVERS __ If one
BAPTISM OF CRIERS __ The emotional
RALLYING THE TROUPS __ It’s back to
moment in Here We Go Again is precision-tuned to have audiences roaring, it’s that twist — Andy García’s hotel manager Cienfuegos is actually Ruby Sheridan’s (Cher) long-lost ex, Fernando. Parker pitched the idea to Richard Curtis in the romcom mastermind’s writing caravan, with a reveal so good that Curtis fell off his chair laughing. “The movie is 105 minutes of pipe to get to that joke.”
climax of prequel and sequel comes in Kalokairi chapel: Donna baptising Sophie in the past and Sophie baptising her son now, with ghost Meryl Streep joining her for ‘My Love, My Life’. “It’s my mum’s favourite ABBA song. Bjorn rewrote the lyrics — it’s about a break-up, and he made it about parents and children. It was very emotional on set; Cher, Andy, Colin, Julie and Pierce all wept.”
feelgood territory for the curtain-call — ‘legacy’ cast and newbies together, belting ‘Super Trouper’ clad in denim, sequins and spandex. “If you’re privileged to have this cast, getting all of them into the same shot is mandatory.” BEN TRAVIS
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MAMMA MIA!: HERE WE GO AGAIN IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD
Titans of comedy Inside Teen Titans Go! To The Movies’ funniest moments
a bit longer,” says Horvath. “For the first two seasons of the show we had a no fart jokes policy. But we ended up getting that reputation anyway, so thought we should do it earnestly.”
THERE’S A GOOD chance that the funniest film of 2018 won’t be a bigbudget studio comedy with, say, a Ferrell or a McCarthy, but a barely feature-length spin-of from a kids’ cartoon. Gloriously absurd and anarchic, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is both clever and wonderfully infantile as it takes no-holds-barred potshots at its own genre: the superhero movie. We spoke to co-director Aaron Horvath and co-writer Michael Jelenic for their take on its finest gags.
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The movie has an abundance of subtle gags for adults, a repayment for bringing the kids. Yet it also caters for the little ’uns with the mother of all fart jokes right at the start, when the evil Balloon Man has his bottom popped, releasing a jet of air that goes on (and on) for at least ten seconds. “I feel like it could have gone on quite
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A central joke of the movie focuses on Hollywood’s obsession with scraping the bottom of the comic book movie barrel. Nowhere is this better illustrated than with a flurry of fake trailers for Batman movies focusing on the Batmobile, the utility belt and, presciently, his butler, Alfred. Pennyworth, a TV show about a young Alfred, is now in production. “I like to think we got the ball rolling on that one,” says Horvath. “As absurd as that is, it’s not really absurd,” adds Jelenic. “There will be a Batmobile series at some point. I guarantee it.”
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The movie is also, efectively, a musical, with a number of cheerful ditties headed up by the biggest earworm this side of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. ‘Upbeat Inspirational
Song About Life’, a “synthy song with ’80s vibes” designed to inspire a downcast Robin to head to Hollywood in pursuit of his dreams, is a thing of beauty, featuring Michael Bolton on lead vocals. As a singing tiger. “He took the song super-serious, a lot more than we did,” laughs Jelenic, who was inspired by his wife, who works in music publishing. “It’s her job to get songs into film and TV. They’re always looking for upbeat inspirational songs about life. I thought it would be a funny song.” He was right.
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In the first real sign that this movie isn’t entirely for little ’uns, ‘Upbeat Inspirational Song About Life’ turns downbeat very quickly, when the Titans run the singing cartoon tiger over, then leave the scene of the crime. The sequence was originally written as a Muppets parody, with the Titans hitting Big Bird at the end. “But as it became more musical, we couldn’t hit Big Bird anymore,” says Horvath. “So let’s hit the tiger. Which is okay, because he’s
Above: The Teen Titans blunder their way back in time. Below: Balloon Man’s Achilles’ heel — or arse
revealed.
BINGEWATCH imaginary.” Jelenic reveals that there was a shot in which the tiger could be seen moving after the impact. “But in the final cut he’s dead.”
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“I’m Stan Lee, and I love making cameos!” declares a literally animated Stan Lee, gatecrashing the movie with one of his patented walk-on parts. And yes, that is the actual Lee, recorded on a laptop in his offices. “We weren’t sure people would recognise the caricature,” admits Jelenic. “But watching screenings, I was surprised by how quickly people knew it was him.”
One writer. Six films. In a row. Pray for them
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“When you’re making a comedy and the audience cracks up, it’s hard for the studio to tell you to take that out,” says Horvath, explaining how a montage where the Titans travel back in time to stop classic superheroes’ origins has some incredibly dark jokes. Here, for example, a baby Aquaman is caught up in a discarded ringpull. “It’s okay,” says Horvath. “He can breathe underwater.” “Yes,” adds Jelenic, “but as he got older the ring got tighter.” “Oh,” says Horvath. “So he did die.”
EIGHT OSCAR NOMINATIONS (two ending up in wins) don’t lie. Denzel Washington is one of the greats, bringing his beaming smile and chameleonic ability to bear across almost four decades. Whether it’s a weighty drama or a piece of action-heavy fluf, Denzel delivers. But has he always been so consistent? Over the course of six films which chart a career, we found out…
10AM GLORY (1989) Denzel was a relative newcomer to the big screen when he picked up Oscar #1. Edward Zwick’s tale of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first American military units to consist primarily of black soldiers, has many faults, not least that it’s a tale primarily told through the eyes of the regiment’s white commanding officer. But amidst all the cheese and the cliché, Washington, as the defiant Private Trip, is mesmerising.
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But there is nothing darker than the moment where, in an attempt to kick-start Batman’s career, Robin pushes Thomas and Martha Wayne into Crime Alley to meet their doom, before giving a young, freshly orphaned Bruce Wayne a big thumbs-up. “It doesn’t mean anything unless you know the origin story,” says Jelenic. “For adults who know what’s going to happen, it’s funny. It’s a benign moment for kids.” Heroes that were cut from the montage included Green Lantern and, at an early stage, Spider-Man. “The Titans beat the hell out of Peter Parker, trying to get the spider of of him,” recalls Horvath.
12.15PM MALCOLM X (1992) There are three directorial collaborations that define Washington’s career. Of those, none may be as important as his relationship with Spike Lee, which began here with this epic account of the life of the great African-American activist. Lee has said Washington so embedded himself in the character that he was able to orate as X would have done. That is evident here. The film itself, all three hours plus, is electrifying, but wouldn’t work nearly as well without Washington’s magnetic presence, capturing the idiosyncracies and humanity at the core of this great figure. Blinding stuf, but we’re nearly six hours in and only two films done. Lunch.
TEEN TITANS GO! TO THE MOVIES IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD
Alamy. Illustration: Holly Jose
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The film ends with Robin breaking the fourth wall, and parents’ hearts, with quite possibly the best final line of the year: “Kids, ask your parents where babies come from!” “The original line I came up with was, ‘Kids, ask your parents where your souls go after you die,’” laughs Jelenic. Horvath says the line has prompted many an uncomfortable discussion between parents and kids. “I was at a screening where kids immediately asked their parents. It was immensely satisfying.” CHRIS HEWITT
4PM CRIMSON TIDE (1995) Washington made five films with the late Tony Scott. This submarine thriller is far and away the best. With Gene Hackman’s commander itching to start World War III, Denzel’s second-in-command takes the tricky decision to remove him from power, setting the stage for a genuinely compelling battle of wits and wills. You could make a case that Hackman and Washington are the two greatest
American actors of the last 50 years, and watching them go at each other elevates what could have been a potboiler into a modern classic.
6.15PM FALLEN (1998) I’ve long had a soft spot for this Gregory Hoblit horror, in which Washington’s dogged cop has his life turned upside down by a serial killer who can possess anyone he touches. Genuinely creepy, with a lovely recurring use of ‘Time Is On My Side’ by the Rolling Stones, Denzel anchors the supernatural nonsense wonderfully by playing it all straight. Because he’s invested, so are we.
8.35PM TRAINING DAY (2001) Night has fallen. Time for Washington to fall too. This electrifying collaboration with Antoine Fuqua revealed that, when he wants to, the generally heroic Washington can fix you with that thousand-yard stare and wither your soul. Alonzo Harris, the gloriously showy baddest of bad cops, deservedly bagged him that second Oscar. The movie itself remains a pulsating thriller, with the tête-a-tête between Washington and Ethan Hawke’s idealistic rookie a wonderful subversion of buddy movie clichés.
11PM THE EQUALIZER 2 (2018) Seventeen years on, and Fuqua has become one of those directors who’ve defined Washington’s career. This is their fourth collaboration, and third in recent years, and with its odd outbursts of crowdpleasing ultra-violence, is just what I need now I’m a bit Denzel-delirious. Washington’s transformation into unstoppable action hero began with Tony Scott’s Man On Fire, and he’s good at it, dismantling bad guys with an insouciance worthy of Mitchum or Marvin. He would have owned the ’70s, but I’m going to be selfish: I’m glad he’s around now. This is Denzel’s time. We’re just lucky to be sharing it with him. CHRIS HEWITT THE EQUALIZER 2 IS OUT ON 10 DECEMBER ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD
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Success with flush How Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise and co put together Mission: Impossible Fallout’s bruising bathroom fight
FOR ALL OF the tricks and stunts in Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible Fallout, whether it’s Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane at 25,000 feet, or Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle with no helmet through rush-hour traffic, nothing beats the impact of the film’s showdown, in a Paris nightclub bathroom, between Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, his CIA counterpart August Walker (Henry Cavill), and shadowy underworld figure John Lark (Liang Yang). A clash of contrasting fight styles, soundtracked to a throbbing bass beat, sinks are destroyed, pillars trashed and arms reloaded in the space of four breathless minutes. Here, McQuarrie, Cruise, Cavill, Yang, and stunt co-ordinator Wade Eastwood, tell us how they did it.
Above: Fortytwo seconds and 169 shots of pipe-busting, porcelainpulverising, stall-smashing brilliance.
Christopher McQuarrie: That is, strangely, everybody’s favourite scene. I couldn’t tell you where it came from, beyond my wanting a place where they could go and have a fight. Tom Cruise: That bathroom fight, we always knew we wanted to do a fight like that. Wade Eastwood: We knew there was going to be a scule in a bathroom. It wasn’t as big as it is now. My job is to design the fight and present it. I always shoot an action-vis of the fight, with my stunt doubles. Then I present it. McQuarrie: There’s only so much you can do with a bathroom. We played a lot with, “Where are the toilets, where are the stalls, where are the sinks?” The reason
I wanted it so white is it created a sense of vulnerability and exposure. Eastwood: I designed it with Liang in mind. He’s a member of my stunt team. I wanted a diferent look to Mission: Impossible, a speed and agility. I wanted to combine that with Ethan’s style and then introduce Henry, who’s a bear. Henry Cavill: I worked closely with [fight coordinator] Wolfie Stegemann to create very much a brawler style. We wanted it to be the polar opposite to Ethan Hunt’s style of fighting. Eastwood: Tom’s not scared to not be the superhuman fighter. He wants it to be true. He doesn’t want to win every fight. McQuarrie: Tom and Henry were comfortable with vulnerability. You can’t shoot a scene like that if the actors aren’t willing to lose. They get their asses handed to them in that scene, and that’s the real fun of it. Cruise: We kept talking about Walker and Hunt, and how both of them can be beat. And to do it with wit. McQuarrie: We went about figuring out, “Who’s gonna be John Lark?” We wanted to cast an actor. I said, “You’ve gotta pass a fight evaluation first.” When we did the fight evaluation, it was like, “Somebody’s gonna get killed. We need one of the people in here to be extremely lethal and a stuntman.” Liang Yang: Wade really wanted me to play Lark. My background is wushu and Wade wanted me to use that. We did ❯ two weeks putting the fight together.
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Cruise: I don’t expect actors to do that [fighting]. I really don’t. If they want to, if they’re interested in this, it is another art form. I’ve been doing this, and training for it, my whole life, basically. McQ and I sit down with them and go, look, if you don’t want to do it, then this is not the movie for you. That’s okay. I know how hard it is. Everyone goes, “This is really exciting, I really want to do it.” And then they start doing it and it’s like, “Holy shit, this really hurts.” Cavill: Tom and I would check in on each other throughout the fight, making sure one another wasn’t injured or in pain. In the beginning we would play tough and just say we were fine. By the end, we started being very honest with each other. Cruise: The thing I have with McQ, I never tell him how much things hurt. Ever. I don’t want him distracted. And with Henry and Liang, you never admit when it hurts. But on that last shot, we knew we weren’t coming back. I looked at him and he looked at me and I was like, “This one hurt.” The bruises on my arm. Eastwood: It’s all Tom and Henry. The whole lot. Everything. 100 per cent. McQuarrie: The audience is in that fight because of where we place the camera. The actors, by doing it, allow me to put the camera there, and not have to shake the camera, and not have to hide stuf. So what you end up thinking about is, “Boy, that looks like it really hurts.” And that is because it really hurts! Yang: There were bruises, but I’m used to it. Being thrown over the mirror, it’s
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special glass, but you can still get little cuts. Some little pieces in your skin. You just pull it out. Henry certainly got a bruise on his chest from my kick. That was a heavy whack. Cruise: I got kicked in the stomach and just fell. That was real. Yang: That took over ten takes. And I was wearing very hard leather boots. It was a small room, and it was so hot with all the lights on, and every few takes we had to get into new costumes because we were all sweating. Tom took his shirt of to change his shirt, and I was shocked — my foot had left marks all over his chest. Eastwood: It’s full contact. You’re hitting rubber things, but you’re still impacting, and lifting guys, and falling to the ground and doing dynamic reactions with your neck and your head and your body. Cruise: We wanted the fight to be a little ragged. We had to keep doing it until it looked ragged. So I took the shot and went down. Henry and Liang, all of us have an agreement This is what we’ feel tho whe on s sho on m feel Mc I wa of r to th you
Above: August Walker (Henry Cavill) and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) regroup with agent Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Below: McQuarrie: “I created a sense of vulnerability.”
one spectacular shot after another. And then Henry Cavill reloads his arms — how are we even saying that expression? — and everybody’s going, “Whooooo! Yeah!” Cavill: The arm reload! That was an of-the-cuf occurrence. Cruise: The stuf Henry brings in that scene, pumping his arms, reloading the arms. He’s a great actor. Cavill: I tried it for one take just because it felt right, and then heard nothing about it, so stopped doing it. Then McQ said, “Do the arm thing again a few takes later.” I said, “What arm thing?” Yang: That was cool. When we were rehearsing, he didn’t do that ever. But when we were shooting — poom poom! Very nice, good for the character, good for the moment. And then he comes in and smashes me. McQuarrie: He’s cocking his arms, for God’s sake. Tom Cruise is flying a helicopter! For real! Into mountains! It’s the power of Cavill. Eastwood: The fight was meant to take five days, but we came back and did another two days. It took seven days. McQuarrie: We shot it in eight days. We were scheduled for four, we shot it in eight. Cruise: I would have said 20 days. McQuarrie: It was 169 shots, for a scene where there’s not a lot of cutting. It’s shot largely in masters. All those other pieces came from the stuf in the bathroom stalls, the mask machine, the inserts. All the storytelling. Cruise: It’s classic storytelling. You know where you are. Eastwood: I’m not interested in awards or accolades, but to be appreciated by your peers in film, to have an iconic fight, makes everything worthwhile. That’s all we try and do. It makes all that blood, sweat and tears worth it. Cavill: I’m hyper-critical, so after I was done judging myself and swearing to be better next time, I thought it was incredible. Watching it with an audience was the real treat, though. McQuarrie: I was so amazed by the response to the fight scene. The Tom and I can erything and go, een better.” We’re throom fights and wesome. Fuck, e as good as that t.” But that’s what ntly striving for. TT AND ALEX GODFREY MPOSSIBLE FALLOUT W ON DVD, BLU-RAY NLOAD
THE CULT
MOVIEDUNGEON Kim on the latest DTV must-sees
Author and critic Kim Newman explores the dark corners of cinema
THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW
Alamy
WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDY Mitton’s The Witch In The Window — one of the most talked-about films at this year’s horror festival FrightFest — sounds like a conventional ghost story, but has a lot more going on under its surface. Placid Simon (Alex Draper), separated from jittery wife Beverly (Arija Bareikis), takes their troubled son Finn (Charlie Tacker) out of New York for a few weeks. In a vivid first scene, Beverly throws a fit about Finn’s recent behaviour — looking at gory news on the internet — which shows how fragile she is herself, and how her desperate need to shield the boy from perceived threats is on the verge of smothering him. Simon takes Finn to rural Vermont, where he has bought an old house by the lake for renovation — ostensibly to resell for a profit, though he might really be creating the perfect fantasy home (complete with stables) Beverly once imagined would be her mental fortress. Simon tells Finn no-one was ever ‘chopped up’ in the house because the vendor would have to disclose that, but local electrician/ neighbour Louis (Greg Naughton), who is reluctant to set foot in the place, tells them the property has a bad reputation because Lydia (Carol Stanzione), its previous owner, died sitting in an old armchair staring out of the window. Soon, father and son see Lydia
lurking like a matter-of-fact Woman In Black, and a pervasive air of dread begins to consume them. Simon struggles to protect Finn from ghosts the way his mother does from reality, but thirdact developments prompt a radical assessment of what a haunted house is and movingly addresses the lengths parents will go to keep a child safe at home. Draper, who has the presence of a slightly more presentable Paul Giamatti, is outstanding as the soft-spoken lead, positioned to go down the AmityvilleShining route of the father falling under the house’s malign influence, then taking a diferent tack. Even Stanzione, who essentially has to sit and stare, gives the witchy ghost unusual depth. Underlying the slow-burn spookery is a sense that everyone (living or dead) is blinkered about their situation, perhaps to a tragic extent. The New York we see isn’t the hellhole Beverly thin montage reinforcing this incl the best single shots of ghostl movies — and the Vermont re chilly as it is idyllic. The film h locations and conveys a calm through subtle sound design, visuals, nuanced long-take pe and understated dialogue. On of this debut, Mitton is a creat
Above: Carol Stanzione gives her best sinister stare as “matter-of-fact” Woman In Black, Lydia. Below: Charlie Tacker as the variously beset Finn.
Bryan Bertino’s THE MONSTER (above) and Justin P. Lange’s THE DARK announce their minimalism with simple, blankly generic titles — frankly, they could swap and work just as well. Both are set in a wooded wilderness and highlight strange, compelling relationships. Both are creepy, scary movies with old-fashioned fangings and proper creatures, but also offer dramatic meat and compelling performances. Bertino (best known for The Strangers) strands irresponsible mom Zoe Kazan and fed-up daughter Ella Ballentine in the woods when a wounded wolf lopes in front of their car. Intent on their arguments, it takes them a while to wonder what could have hurt the wolf — then the title creature (perhaps a werewolf-cum-Bigfoot) starts playing with them, and they have to set aside their differences to survive. Lange (inluenced by Let The Right One In) has blinded kidnap victim Toby Nichols rescued from a paedophile by Mina (Nadia Alexander), a vampirezombie waif with her own tragic story. “Our viewers don’t care about tension, Brian, they just want to see contestants die horribly.” On a nearfuture reality TV hit, Death Row convicts play Crystal Maze games in a virtual reality prehistoric landscape while trying not to get eaten — with the sole survivor winning a full pardon. Ryan Bellgardt’s THE JURASSIC GAMES has some cheek in its mash-up premise — it’s not just Jurassic Park and The Hunger Games scrambled on the cheap, but The ing Man too — and its dinos are y more convincing than the Toy ry plastic T-Rex. But its decent interesting characters and solid ting put it a thousand per cent ad of The Predator, which had housand times the resources. his level of ripoffery, it qualiies as an unexpected treat.
THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW IS AV NOW ON SHUDDER
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THE RANKING
OUR CRITICS
CHRISTMAS MOVIES Four Empire writers bring you the greatest gift of all: the top ten festive films of all time
CHRIS HEWITT Is grateful for Shane Black’s love of Christmas. His top ten relies heavily on it.
TERRI WHITE Thinks John Waters’ Female Trouble is one of the best Christmas films. Explains a lot.
JONATHAN PILE A festive pedant, he feels most Christmas movies are actually Advent movies. Fun at parties.
JAMES DYER Empire’s very own Grinch. Hates fun. Loathes joy. Loves Love Actually. Go figure.
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Chris: First of all, ‘Christmas movie’. That’s a bit nebulous. What’s a Christmas movie for you? Terri: So, snow. Or talk of snow. Heartwarming moments. Presents. Trees. Dolph Lundgren. Chris: Wait a second… You’re zeroing in on one particular movie here. James: Also, you just described Cliffhanger up until that point. Terri: I looked for a common theme throughout my ten. And most of them, with the possible exception of Female Trouble, there is some sense of a parable or some sense of there being a story about goodwill, about love, about community, about the true spirit of Christmas, which is giving. Chris: Receiving is also good. Terri: It’s hard to define, but I have to feel like a better human being after watching that movie. Chris: Does it have to be set at Christmas? James: Set at Christmas is kinda key, I would say. There should be an element of festive cheer. There is a cockle-warming, warm and fuzzies-type thing that many movies people wouldn’t consider to be Christmas movies do have. Terri: Rocky IV. James: Like Rocky IV. Chris: There aren’t that many nailed-on Christmas classics. It’s A Wonderful Life is one. But how many are actually great? Jonny: Seven. Chris: What are they? Jonny: Whatever my top seven are. The thing with Christmas movies is you’re given free rein to have nostalgia. Movies that mean a lot to you, but which aren’t very good, can rank quite highly. Santa Claus: The Movie is third on my list. I assume that to people who haven’t seen it every year since they were four, it’s not a good
movie. But it’s a wonderful movie to me. Chris: When was the last time you revisited it? Jonny: I see it every year. And my son is just about old enough that I’ll show it to him this year. Chris: That was a big movie for me growing up. I had the novelisation. I loved David Huddleston as Santa Claus. I hated Dudley Moore as Patch The Elf. Jonny: Even as a kid? Chris: Even as a kid. He was taking the attention away from Santa Claus. It’s called Santa Claus: The Movie. Not ‘Sodding Patch The Elf: The Movie’. Terri: I think we have diferent standards when it comes to Christmas movies, right? I want something diferent from a film I watch at Christmas, with a QC on the go, and I don’t really care so much about cinematic quality. Chris: I’m going to alight on Love Actually. It’s on a lot of people’s lists. It’s not on mine, because it’s one of the worst movies ever made. But a lot of people overlook its flaws. James: It’s a film Terri and I love. I love Love Actually. Terri: I watched it six times last Christmas. James: Okay, that’s just psychotic. Terri: That scene with Joni Mitchell playing, where Emma Thompson’s discovered the gift Alan Rickman’s going to give to the strumpet, when she cries and straightens the bed... one of the most devastating moments in British film. Chris: I’ll grant you that. And it has Hugh Grant. I’ll Hugh Grant you that. But by and large, it’s an awful movie. I liken it to being repeatedly stabbed in the eye with a marshmallow. It’s awful, but you don’t feel the pain. James: Like boiling a frog. Chris: What’s the first Christmas movie you remember seeing? James: Scrooged is the first one I remember seeing. It’s certainly the most salient Christmas movie I remember seeing. To me, that is A Christmas Carol. Chris: It has been superceded for me by
Illustration: Jacey
THE TOP TEN
To listen to the full Christmas film debate as a podcast, go to www.empireonline. com/podcast.
The Muppet Christmas Carol. We revisit that every single year. James: I have no love for Muppets. Chris: That’s because you are a muppet. James: That may be true. But I just don’t like them. And I’ve done a podcast with Pepé the Prawn and Kermit. Jonny: I think it’s a wonderful telling of that story. It’s full of imagination and retains something of the original novel but takes it in another direction. James: Muppets. Chris: Terri, was it Rocky IV for you? Terri: I wore that tape out. Not in the way that that sounds. Chris: When that robot butler came on, my word. Terri: You know I’ve never seen Muppets? Jonny: You’ve never seen Muppet Christmas Carol? Terri: Why would I watch it? Not bothered. James: I’m with Terri on this. Chris: “Not bothered”. Jonny: It’s everything you claimed you want from a Christmas movie. Terri: Is it? It’s not people. I want people. Real people. A man puts his hand up a puppet’s arse and I’m supposed to think that’s good cinema? Chris: Are we still talking about Rocky IV? Okay, what is the greatest Christmas movie of all time? Terri: It’s A Wonderful Life. Chris: Why? Terri: It’s about sacrifice, it’s about having a family, it’s about discovering the greater meaning. And there’s loads of snow. Jonny: There are very few films that can make me cry regularly. It’s A Wonderful Life is one of them. It always gets me going at the end when George Bailey realises he’s loved. I think about this film a lot. Chris: Jimbo? It’s Die Hard, isn’t it? James: Yes, it obviously is Die Hard. I love Die Hard because it’s among the greatest films ever made. It’s the greatest action film ever made. It’s set at Christmas, therefore it is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. It is just the greatest across the board. Chris: This is impeccable logic. James: I could watch it every day of the year. But definitely at Christmas. Chris: What about Die Hard 2? James: I’ve got a lot of time for it. It’s not as good as Die Hard, obviously. But you do get to see William Sadler’s extraordinarily chiselled posterior, which is a festive treat. Chris: You get to see the outline of his testicles. If you pause it just right. Terri: Merry Christmas! Chris: Right. Enough squabbling. Let’s vote!
DIE HARD (1988)
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Jonathan: “Hard to believe, but some people don’t believe it’s a Christmas movie — yet we’ve just voted it the greatest festive ilm of all time. So who’s right? We are, of course.”
IT’SAWONDERFULLIFE (1946)
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Terri: “Yes, it’s essentially the tale of one man’s path to suicide, but it has fantasy, a good moral lesson and loads of snow.”
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Terri: “You don’t like this funny, moving tale of a (giant) boy desperately looking for where he its in the world? You sit on a throne of lies!”
ELF (2003)
LOVEACTUALLY (2003)
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Terri: “Nine interconnected stories that run the gamut of human emotion. Will thaw any icy heart.”
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Jonathan: “The highest-placed version of the classic story. Which means, basically, Richard Donner improved on Dickens.”
SCROOGED (1988)
THEMUPPETCHRISTMASCAROL (1992)
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Chris: “As Kermit says, ‘There’s magic in the air.’ Endlessly charming, with cracking songs, great gags, and a brilliant Michael Caine.”
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James: “What says Christmas better than a comedy with a dead body, a severed inger, and RDJ with electrodes on his bollocks?”
KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005)
CHRISTMASVACATION (1989)
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Chris: “Clark’s epic rant. Peerless physical comedy from Chevy Chase. Cousin Eddie. And a dash of genuine Christmas spirit too.”
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James: “A perfect metaphor: a delightful present on Christmas Eve that opens the door to an unmitigated shitshow by Boxing Day.”
GREMLINS (1984)
IRON MAN 3 (2013)
10
Chris: “Shane Black again, smuggling his Christmas obsession and offbeat weirdness into a Marvel movie, to glorious effect.”
AGREE? DISAGREE? WRITE IN AND TELL US AT: LETTERS@EMPIREMAGAZINE.COM / @EMPIREMAGAZINE
JANUARY 2019
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Breaking Good VAN WILDER (2002) Wasted Guy — he is what he sounds like
“My friend was casting that film and she sent me the script and asked if there was a supporting role I would like to play. And there was Wasted Guy. I chose him because the first film I ever booked for was called Whatever It Takes. I read for the role of Wasted Guy but during the table read they asked me to audition for one of the leads, which I then got. So I had to say goodbye to Wasted Guy. Cut to Van Wilder coming to me and even though it was a tiny role, I had to take it. It’s like a little Easter egg in my own life.
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BREAKING BAD
(2008) Jesse, the drug-dealing associate of meth-chemist Walter White
“Jesse transformed in front of all of us. He wasn’t supposed to make it past Season 1; he was going to introduce Walt to the drug world and then see his demise. He was this druggy burnout. Then, after the pilot, [creator Vince Gilligan] rethought his fate. I loved how Jesse became the moral compass of this show — although he’s still a drug dealer and a murderer. That moral compass is spinning wildly.”
THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009) Francis, a murderer who gets his comeuppance
“That was one of the toughest projects I’ve ever been part of. I was playing this
evil guy and back then I’d try to stay in the character’s skin as much as possible. I watched very depressing documentaries and read terrible books. I was in a horrible headspace that I couldn’t wait to get out of. That’s why I didn’t jump into another genre movie until Welcome Home.”
SMASHED (2012)
Clockwise from above: Bad vibrations from Mr Paul; With Garret Dillahunt and Riki Lindhome in Last House On The Left; Cheerily depressing voicing Todd in BoJack Horseman; On military
Charlie, one half of an alcoholic couple trying to get sober
ops in Eye In The Sky;
“I related to that script on an incredibly honest human level. Years ago, I started dating this girl who turned out to be an extreme alcoholic. She couldn’t stop. She wrecked her car. I pulled her out of a burning apartment. When I read this script I thought about that and knew I had to dive in. I definitely felt extremely connected to that role.”
in Welcome Home.
Creeped out on holiday
Alamy, Allstar, Landmark, Photofest
Aaron Paul talks through the roles of his career
KIDS WATCH CLASSICS Big films tackled by little people
BOJACK HORSEMAN (2014) Todd, the stoner housemate of BoJack, a depressed horse
“I think it’s the first animated series unafraid to be utterly depressing and just rip your heart out. I think a lot of people didn’t understand what they were watching in the first season — ‘Why aren’t I laughing and instead want to crawl in bed and cry?’ Then people started to get it. In Todd they didn’t want the typical stoner, slacker guy. They wanted the voice to have energy and fun; I wanted him to be playful and naive. I love that he has this mysterious past that we glimpse each season.”
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS (2014)
LOUIS & JACK SALAKO — 11 & 8 ON THE TOWN
Joshua, a slave freed by Moses
“I remember I fell madly in love with my horse. I was really sad to say goodbye, because I spent four months with him and he became a friend of mine. Christian Bale and I were the only ones in the main cast who had to do the fake beard thing, taking two to three hours each morning. They’re gluing yak hair on your face piece by piece, then burning it a little so it has this pube-like texture. I could not wait for the day to be done when they could finally rip it of. Anything for you, Rid!”
What’s the story of the movie? Louis: A boat of sailors arrive in New York. They’ve got one day off and these three friends, one of them has to visit all the monuments, one wants to see nice girls, and the other wants to do both of those things. So they take the Tube — well, the Subway — and go to all the museums to ind a woman one of them likes. Jack: After they meet girls, they go to the pub.
EYE IN THE SKY (2015)
What did you like about the movie? Jack: It was funny. I liked how they sing. The actors were funny. Louis: I liked the ilm, though I don’t really like musical comedies. The ilm was a bit short, but it was good.
Steve, a military drone pilot involved in a morally shaky terrorist mission
“That was a rough shoot for me. We shot everything with the camera right in front of me, so I’m acting of nothing but a lens, from the beginning of the script to the end. It was a great experience but it was just sitting in a big tent. I never got to act with Helen Mirren but I did have dinner with her and the moment I met her she was sitting and drinking a whisky and just exactly as I hoped she’d be.”
Which character did you like most? Louis: The men. Which men? Louis: The sailors. They sang a bit better. They were funny. Jack: I preferred one of the sailors. The one that has the girlfriend.
WELCOME HOME (2018) Bryan, one half of a couple spied on by a creepy stranger while on holiday in Italy
WELCOME HOME IS OUT NOW ON DOWNLOAD
Illustration: Olly Gibbs
“I stay in these vacation homes all over the world and now it’s not possible to avoid having that thought that someone is lurking in the shadows, which is terrifying. Shooting in Italy was the icing on the cake. My Italian is terrible. I learned how to say, ‘I hate mosquitos.’ I was mercilessly attacked by one the night before shooting and I’m allergic to the bites, so arrived at work having had no sleep and with these giant lumps all over my face like I got hit with a baseball bat.” OLLY RICHARDS
Which scene was your favourite? Louis: When the dance teacher was serving herself some tea. She got a bottle of whisky out and it was empty. She said, “I need to go somewhere,” came back with another bottle and put it inside the teapot. Jack: I liked that as well. It was very funny. It may be my favourite. Can you describe the movie in three words? Louis: I can think of funny. And musical. And I think of the sea. Jack: There was a lot of dancing in it. And that’s all I have to say.
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Floorplan of attack Writer/director Drew Pearce guides us through a handy map of the Hotel Artemis
ILLUSTRATION DOUG JOHN MILLER
THE HOTEL ARTEMIS is dark and dingy, and even though it’s a hospital for criminals, you’re more likely to sustain a fatal injury there than you were before you arrived. Yet the hotel, as designed by Hotel Artemis writer/director Drew Pearce and his production designer Ramsey Avery, is a meticulously planned thing. “I was building shapes for what the floorplan might look like before I started writing,” says Pearce. Here, he talks us through the hotel’s key areas — and the horrible things that happen therein.
1 _ IT’S ALL GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE GETS HURT
“You needed Switzerland,” says Pearce of the games room, which in theory is a neutral zone in the hotel. “Casablanca was a huge inluence. You need areas like Rick’s Bar.” It’s also the scene for a showdown between Acapulco (Charlie Day), Nice (Soia Boutella) and Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown), who come close to killing each other despite the Artemis’ ban on weapons. “Yet Nice and the others could kill each other with anything in this room,” explains Pearce. “So any potential weapons, if you look, they’ve been strapped down with nail guns.”
Drew Pearce directs Dave Bautista (Everest) and Jenny Slate (Morgan).
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2 _ A POWERFUL LOBBY
It’s here where The Nurse (Jodie Foster) makes any ne’er-do-wells she doesn’t want running around the Artemis wait, behind impregnable iron bars. “That gate weighed hundreds of pounds,” he says. Pearce, who conducted meticulous research into downtown Los Angeles hotels, based it on a number of real-life venues. “Penthouse loors often have their own mini-lobby; that’s how the nurse chose this penthouse. It had a funnel she could control.” It later becomes the scene for a bloody battle between kind-hearted brick shithouse orderly Everest (Dave Bautista) and a bunch of goons. “I wanted it to feel like a last stand. We had three hours to shoot the Everest ight, and what we could afford was two stunts with the axe.”
3 _ A LINE IN THE SAND Next door to the lobby is a secret corridor, with an elevator The Nurse uses on a personal basis. It’s also the scene of another showdown, between assassin Nice and more of the Wolf King’s disposable henchmen. “Soia is so physically adept that there’s only one shot in the entire sequence that isn’t her,” says Pearce. “We gave her a week to train, and in the end she only trained for a day-anda-half. All the stunt guys were like, ‘Fucking hell, she’s good’.” Again, Pearce took inspiration from actual hotels for the corridor. “When prohibition hit, hotels needed a secret way to supply gin and booze.”
5 _ NIAGARA (AND ACAPULCO) FALLS Although all ive suites in the Artemis are ostensibly the same in terms of layout (each one has a giant wall mural to differentiate it), the Niagara suite is the daddy of them all. This is the one designated for The Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum), the crime boss who owns the hotel outright. And it’s here where not only he, but sleazy arms-dealer Acapulco meet their maker. “It’s almost the operatic Italian death room,” laughs Pearce. “It’s full giallo. That was very much by design.” As with all the rooms, it’s dominated by a mural — here, of Niagara Falls. “Water equals power to imply that Niagara’s room was the most powerful,” he explains. “The Niagara waterfall ended up working on tons of levels. And no-one else has ever spotted it!” CHRIS HEWITT HOTEL ARTEMIS IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD
4 _ CHECKING OUT OF HONOLULU
The Honolulu suite is where Waikiki’s grievously wounded brother Lev (Brian Tyree Henry), codenamed Honolulu, passes away, after a bomb triggered by Nice cuts power to vital life-support systems. It’s also, in a way, the most important suite in the hotel. “The Honolulu Suite is the ur-room in a way,” says Pearce. “The shot of Waikiki looking up as he cocks a gun in that suite is one of the irst images I had for the story. Now I have it as a still frame in my ofice.”
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HOME SCREEN
PICK OF THE MONTH THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Just dropped in to see what condition the edition is in? Although the striking 4K picture quality will probably be wasted on Dudeism’s bleary-eyed worshippers, The Big Lebowski scrubs up well in Ultra HD — and of course, that script remains as sharp, and quotable, as ever. There aren’t many ilms that can balance elements of stoner comedy, detective noir and surrealist farce this
deftly, and it’s testament to the movie’s enduring appeal that we’ve still not seen anything quite like it in the two decades since The Dude irst had his rug peed on — even the Coens themselves can’t match it for character. Whether it’s your irst time or your thousandth, there’s something to be enjoyed anew every time, whether it be a priceless Steve Buscemi line that gets stepped on, a micro John Goodman freak-out or a deliriously daft Jeff Bridges facial expression. Truly, The Dude abides — here’s to the next 20 years, man. ALI GRAY
OUT 3 DECEMBER / CERT 18 / 118 MINS
EVERY NEW RELEASE YOU NEED TO OWN. NOW
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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT
A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES
LOOK BACK IN ANGER
OUT 3 DECEMBER / CERT 12 / 147 MINS
OUT 3 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 270 MINS
OUT 26 NOVEMBER / CERT PG / 98 MINS
Ethan Hunt was never a character it was easy to feel. He was a bit like Bond, with an obscured backstory and little motivation other than defeating this instalment’s new spy-villain, yet lacking 007’s English gent idiosyncracies. Sure, with J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible 3, he got a private life and an other half. But, despite the ilm’s charms, it never quite sunk in. So Mission: Impossible Fallout is a triumph not only in the sense that it’s a stunt-driven, practical-action masterpiece (all bow before Christopher McQuarrie), but also because it inally makes Hunt a character you properly care about, with anxieties and internal conlicts and laws. Tom Cruise shouldn’t just be lauded for his ankle-breaking, chopper-piloting cojones, but also for one of his inest performances in years. One that’s somehow delivered while perpetually on the move: emotion in motion, if you like. DAN JOLIN
Let’s be absolutely clear: A Discovery Of Witches is not, strictly speaking, good. A tropetacular tale of witches, vampires, forbidden love and magical books set in and around Oxford’s Bodleian library, it plays out like a kind of Twilight for academics. However, beneath all the smouldering glances and earnest embraces there’s something strangely compelling about this adaptation of Deborah Harkness’ YA novels. It all starts when Theresa Palmer’s reluctant witch stumbles across a long lost grimoire stashed away among the Oxford stacks, causing the city’s ‘creatures’ (an uneasy alliance of witches, vampires and demons) to take an interest. Among them is sexy, millennia-old vampire Matthew (Matthew Goode), whose attentions evolve into a supernatural romance that proves more believable and compelling than a dozen Bella and Edwards. Cheesy, daft and oh-so-very emo it may be, but there’s a bewitching guilty pleasure here for those of a mind to ind it. JAMES DYER
Not to be confused with Oasis’ (arguably) most famous song, this is a ierce ilm adaptation of the 1956 play by John Osborne, the original ‘angry young man’ of British theatre, which singlehandedly launched the ‘kitchen sink realism’ movement. Richard Burton stars as disaffected market stall confectioner Jimmy Porter, who rages impotently against the establishment machine, leaving the women in his life (Claire Bloom, Mary Ure) reeling from the cruelty and bitterness of his existential disillusionment — or perhaps, when seen through a more modern lens, his undiluted toxic masculinity. Burton’s leonine performance makes his American counterpart, Marlon Brando, seem like The Mild One by comparison, and at times the ilm seems incendiary enough to set your Blu-ray player on ire. Yet Burton conveys Jimmy’s painful vulnerability, too. A groundbreaking and important ilm. DAVID HUGHES
JANUARY 2019
Alamy
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP
OUT 10 DECEMBER / CERT TBC / 98 MINS
OUT 10 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 101 MINS
OUT 3 DECEMBER / CERT 12 / 118 MINS
You’ve never heard of The Magnificent Ambersons? To paraphrase Alan Partridge, it’s only the ilm Citizen Kane could have been. There’s certainly a whiff of Dificult Second Album to Orson Welles’ Kane follow-up, which was famously beset by studio interference (40 minutes of deleted scenes are lost to the ages). But it is today correctly regarded as a masterpiece, entirely worthy of rubbing shoulders with the sled-loving billionaire, and now inally given the Criterion treatment. At irst glance a stuffy period piece about rich people, it is in reality a lyrical and melancholy epic that takes in romance, the meaning of family and community, and the brutal, unstoppable march of progress. Spanning generations at the eve of the 20th century, it’s tied together by Welles’ grand, austere, narration — and his preternatural eye for dazzling, innovative cinematography is all there. JOHN NUGENT
From the headscarves and halter-tops to a dinner guest complimenting some “astonishing” gazpacho, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is very much a product of 1969. The directorial debut of Paul Mazursky (Enemies: A Love Story, Down And Out In Beverly Hills), this gentle social satire captures the era of sexual liberation through the eyes of four people in their thirties. Natalie Wood and Robert Culp play the kind of couple you’d be trying to avoid at a party — their trip to a therapy camp has meant that feelings are the only topic on the table — but they’re balanced out nicely by Dyan Cannon’s straight-laced yet likeable Alice and her husband Ted (Elliott Gould). Mazursky, himself 39 at the time of making the ilm, catches the air of cautious promiscuity perfectly, guiding his foursome through steamy territory with the sort of honest humour and awkwardness that feels timeless to this day. BETH WEBB
In a world where every superhero pic is bigger, louder and, er, explode-ier than the one that came before, here’s a sequel that proves a little Marvel can go a long way. The ilm has been knocked in some quarters for having relatively small stakes, but we need to be saved from superhero movies that want to save the world — when a person can be just as important. This is a story of family and friendship, with an insanely charismatic cast — and still no little spectacle: Wasp’s hotel-set ight and the size-swapping car chase careering around San Francisco are all-timers. I’d put them next to any other action set-pieces this year. It’s like spandex supremo Kevin Feige daydreamed, “What if Peter Bogdanovich made a comic-book movie?” — with rat-tat-tat comic exchanges and ramshackle humanism, via the psychedelic danger of the Quantum Realm. ‘What’s Up, Doc (Strange)?’ NEV PIERCE
BLACK ’47
BLACKKKLANSMAN
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
OUT 26 DECEMBER / CERT 15 / 100 MINS
OUT 26 DECEMBER / CERT TBC / 135 MINS
OUT 10 DECEMBER / CERT PG / 104 MINS
There are few revenge thrillers where someone starts slashing and bludgeoning on behalf of an entire nation. But that’s what director Lance Daly has achieved here, making one vigilante into a satisfying proxy for Anglo-Irish relations. Feeney (James Frecheville) is an Irish veteran of English wars who returns home amid the Great Famine. His family have been starved and evicted and, as one of the few remaining able-bodied men, he sets out to get revenge on the whole rotten system. It’s a simple and largely predictable plot — the only wild card is Hugo Weaving’s Hannah, Feeney’s former commander — but it’s gripping all the same, as Feeney works his way up from the corrupt local enforcers to the landowners who see people as chattel, at best. Like its hero, this isn’t a subtle ilm, but there’s something immensely satisfying in the sight of an oppressed people ighting back. HELEN O’HARA
BlackKklansman, about an undercover black cop iniltrating the Ku Klux Klan, is a mutt of a ilm. Ron Stallworth, Colorado Springs’ irst African-American police oficer, wrote a memoir about his exploits, and after a pair of screenwriters (Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz) adapted it, it landed with Spike Lee, who extensively rewrote it. Unevenness permeates it. Fact blends with iction, broad comedy sits, sometimes awkwardly, alongside heavy drama, drastic creative licence is taken, and Lee throws in all sorts of archive and documentary footage. Yet despite the mammoth mish-mash, it works — it is Lee’s angriest ilm in years, the director brazenly on the warpath, taking no prisoners. It’s a ilm that can emotionally latten you — there is raw power at play here, and if you don’t feel furious when the credits roll, you might want to question your life choices. ALEX GODFREY
There’s a deeply goofy moment towards the end of Christopher Robin where, thanks to the literal and metaphorical presence of co-writer Simon Farnaby, Marc Forster’s ilm feels like the Paddington knock-off it must have been so tempting to make. And that might have been very rewarding, in its own way. Instead, Forster’s live-action Winniethe-Pooh sequel forges ahead in a different direction. Shot like a Sundance release, this often melancholy oddity follows a detached, emotionally numb Christopher Robin (a winning Ewan McGregor), having long since forgotten the lessons imparted to him by Winnie-the-Pooh and chums back at Hundred Acre Wood. When Pooh and co reconnect with him, there’s plenty of mirth to be made. But this is, at its core, a bittersweet and often moving examination of a man’s battle with depression. But, y’know, for kids. CHRIS HEWITT
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crossword
competition
A49” SMART TV, BLU-RAY PLAYER AND COPY OF KIN
ACROSS
DOWN
1 3 9
1
10 11 13 15 17 20 21 22 23
Christian who won an Oscar for The Fighter (4) Damien Chazelle’s great lunar leap (5,3) “The hunt is on” ran the tagline for this 2008 C. Thomas Howell starrer (3,4) The — Sanction (Clint Eastwood) (5) She was, unforgettably, Roberta in The Railway Children (5,7) Kim Basinger went on the run with Jeff Bridges in this 1987 release (6) Steve McQueen’s Chicago-set Lynda La Plante update (6) World champion wrestler/Drax The Destroyer (4,8) — Of Wax (Paris Hilton) (5) Director whose ilms include Pariah and Mudbound (3,4) This 2000 comedy involved an 1,800-mile collegiate car caper (4,4) Need changes for a Beau Bridges ilm (4)
2 4 5 6 7 8 12 14 16 18 19
The former child star portrayed by Bette Davis in 1962 (4,4) Hugh Jackman in X-Men superhero guise (5) In which John Leguizamo voiced Sid the sloth (3,3) Age that inspired an award-winning movie by Ken Loach (5,7) Comic-book villain portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Ian McKellen etc (7) In which Ewan McGregor was cast as author James Joyce (4) This was Frank Sinatra’s second outing as PI Tony Rome (4,2,6) American — (Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton) (8) A role for Gary Oldman to get his teeth into? (7) This title role brought Sir Ben Kingsley an Oscar (6) “Get ready for rush hour” ran the tagline for this Keanu Reeves starrer (5) Superhero movie found amid Lost Horizon (4)
STARRING JACK REYNOR, Dennis Quaid, Zoë Kravitz and James Franco, Kin sees Myles Truitt’s Eli, just 14 years old, drawn into the world of dangerous crime after stumbling on the aftermath of a shootout and finding a mysterious weapon which he promptly nabs. To complicate matters further, older brother Jimmy (Reynor) is just out of prison, and with a different set of villains on his trail. With a soundtrack from Mogwai, Kin is a slick thriller that blends sci-fi and action while also dealing with the complex bonds of family. To win a copy — and a huge telly and Blu-ray player to watch it on — crack the crossword, solve the anagram and text your answer to the number below. KIN IS OUT NOW ON DOWNLOAD, AND OUT ON 26 DECEMBER ON DVD AND BLU-RAY
COMPETITION ENDS 24 DECEMBER HOW TO ENTER Take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange them to form the name of an actor, actress, director or character. Text ‘EMPIRE’ to 83070, followed by your answer, name and address (with a space between each element of your message!). Texts cost 50p plus standard operator costs. Lines close at midnight, 24 December. Winners are selected at random. See below for terms and conditions. DECEMBER ANSWERS ACROSS: 1 Coco, 3 The Alamo, 8 Amistad, 10 Twice, 11 In The Bedroom, 14 Ted, 16 Ashes, 17 Ash, 18 Austin Powers, 21 Hulce, 22 Daniels, 23 Festival, 24 Eyes. DOWN: 1 Chariots, 2 Clint, 4 Hud, 5 A Star Is Born, 6 Arizona, 7 Owen, 9 The Last Jedi, 12 Ethan, 13 This Is Us, 15 Douglas, 19 Enemy, 20 Chef, 22 D.O.A. ANAGRAM JOSH BROLIN TERMS AND CONDITIONS: One entry per person. Texts cost 50p + standard network rate. Ask the bill payer’s permission before entering. Entries must be received before 25 December or will not be valid (but the cost of the text may still be charged). One winner will be selected at random. Competition promoted by Bauer Consumer Media Limited t/a Empire (“Empire”). Empire’s choice of winner is final and no correspondence will be entered into in this regard. The winner will be notified, by phone (on the number the text was sent), between seven and ten days after the competition ends. Empire will call the winner a maximum of three times and leave one message. If the winner does not answer the phone or respond to the message within 14 days of the competition’s end, Empire will select another winner and the original winner will not win a prize. Entrants must be over 18, resident in the UK and not be employed by Empire. The prize is non-negotiable with no cash alternative. Empire is not responsible for late delivery or unsatisfactory quality of the prize. Entrants agree to the collection of their personal data in accordance with Empire’s privacy policy: http://www.bauerdatapromise.co.uk/. Winner’s personal details will be given to prize provider to arrange delivery of the prize. Bauer reserves the right to amend or cancel these terms or any aspect of the competition (including the prize) at any time if required for reasons beyond its control. Any questions, please email empire@bauermedia.co.uk. Complaints will not be considered if made more than 30 days after the competition ends. Winner’s details available on request (after the competition ends) by emailing empire@bauermedia.co.uk. For full Ts&Cs see http://www.bauerlegal.co.uk/competition-terms.html.
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MILLER’S CROSSING CHOSEN BY STEVE PEMBERTON
STEVE PEMBERTON: “One of my absolute favourites is the Danny Boy sequence in Miller’s Crossing. I remember seeing that in the cinema at Notting Hill Gate and being open-mouthed at the beauty of it, the audacity of it, the use of music. That’s been a big influence on me. I love allowing a piece of music to score something. That sequence, which is wordless, is perfect. It fits the song from start to finish. It puts a smile on my face, just thinking about it.”
The hitmen walk up the stairs, Tommy guns lowered. Leo puffs on a cigar, content. Then he notices something amiss. A smell. He takes off his glasses and looks at the floor. Smoke is slowly rising through the floorboards. The hitmen continue to climb the stairs. Leo, thinking, looks at his bedside table. A gun rests on it. He looks at his bedroom door. The hitmen are now on the landing.
INT. LEO’S HOUSE — NIGHT Through billowing curtains, we track across a room as two things play out on the soundtrack: ‘Danny Boy’, by Frank Patterson, and the sounds of a violent struggle. We come to rest on the body of Leo’s bodyguard, freshly murdered, as an assassin walks out of the room. A cigarette in the bodyguard’s hand touches a newspaper, and sets it alight. The assassin crosses to the front door, and opens it to reveal a second assassin, holding two Tommy guns. He hands one to the first assassin. We next see the source of ‘Danny Boy’. A record on Leo’s gramophone. Leo (Albert Finney) is sprawled on his bed, in pyjamas, a paper across his lap.
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Leo, cigar in mouth and eyes fixed on the door, sits up and places his feet into his slippers. He stubs out the cigar in an ashtray. The door bursts open. Leo grabs his gun and rolls under the bed. The hitmen start firing their guns into the floor, towards Leo, who fires his revolver once, into the leg of the first assassin. He drops to the floor, where Leo puts a second bullet into his head. The other assassin turns and runs. Leo scrambles out from under the bed, picks up the Tommy gun from the fallen hitman, and sprints out of the bedroom, across the corridor, dodging a burst of gunfire. He races to the window, and throws the Tommy gun out onto the ground below. We see flames billowing from the downstairs window. Leo
climbs out of the window, onto the roof. We see that the entire ground floor is ablaze. Leo swings down off the roof, and drops onto the ground. He picks up the Tommy gun, and walks backwards until he can see the second assassin framed in the upstairs window, cluelessly looking for his prey. Leo fires up, bullets thudding into the back of the second assassin, who fires his Tommy gun as a reflex. Leo continues to fire. So does the assassin, bullets slamming into the floor, into a painting on the wall, into a chandelier. Leo continues to fire, his Tommy gun blazing. Finally the assassin, body riddled with lead, collapses. Leo hears the squeal of tires. He turns to see a car carrying two more goons, trying to make a quick getaway. From the back seat, one goon fires a Tommy gun at Leo. Leo returns fire in staccato bursts. He follows the car down the driveway, firing all the while. The goon’s bullets miraculously whizz around Leo, but nothing hits. But his do. We hear the breaking of glass, and then the car swerves on the driveway, and into a tree. Flames immediately leap up inside the vehicle. Then it explodes. Leo stands in the road, smoke rising from his gun. He takes another cigar out of his dressing room pocket and chews on it.