Little White Lies 32 - The TRON: Legacy Issue

005

W h at h av e w e learned from the year in film? hat, no Tron: Legacy review?

Unfortunately, as we went to press Joseph Kosinski was still putting the finishing touches to his film. Don’t worry: we’ll be getting into it in a big way online, but in the meantime we’re turning our attention to broader issues.

There are any number of ways to slice and dice the year in film – the best and worst, the winners and losers, the successes and failures. But as we look ahead to 2011,

006 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

what we take with us aren’t the memories of individual films we’ve loved or hated but the lessons we’ve learned from the year as a whole.

It’s been 12 months of frenzied activity, with almost 350 films playing theatrically for a week or more. Getting a read on it isn't easy, but it’s possible to see a defining texture that distinguishes this year from all the others. And though the general feeling is that 2010 wasn’t a vintage year for film, the lessons we can take from it are fundamental nonetheless.

,0000000000< /00000000?

SoCial aCtiviSm haS Come to CinemaS (and it iSn’t WorKinG)

it’S a Golden e r a o f a n i m at i o n

Capitalism: A Love Stor y Crude Fo o d , I n c .

Mugabe and the White Afr ican In the Land of the Free Videocracy South of the Border Budrus Collapse No Impact Man Restrepo

Astro Boy The Pr incess and the Frog B a t t l e f o r Te r r a Ponyo H o w t o Tr a i n Yo u r D r a g o n S h r e k Fo r e v e r A f t e r To y S t o r y 3 The Illusionist A To w n C a l l e d P a n i c Despicable Me Megamind

ood, oil, economics, war, justice, sustainability, celebrity and political ideology – this was the year that the loose array of social activist documentaries in cinema began to feel like a concerted campaign.

onday January 12, 2004, was the nadir of contemporary animation. Beset by failures and eclipsed by the upstart Pixar, Disney closed its animation studio in Orlando, Florida.

At that point, it had no traditionally animated features on its schedule beyond the already completed Home on the Range.

It’s never been easier for audiences to cut through the white noise of media chatter and gain an in-depth perspective on the issues affecting our lives. Released from the ghetto of late-night TV or news bulletin sound bites, these feature documentaries contributed significantly to a global debate on the future direction of our world.

Though the films in question are stylistically disparate (from Michael Moore and Robert Kenner’s use of attention-grabbing visuals in Capitalism: A Love Story and Food, Inc. to the static camera of Collapse), they are united by a common purpose: to affect tangible change through film.

But have they been successful? Though cinema can provide a focal point for the efforts of campaigners, is it enough to raise awareness? The crises of pollution, obesity and the economy are proving intractably stubborn. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are rebranded but ongoing. Will the social activist documentary lead us eventually to a tipping point, or is cinema unable to convert knowledge into action?

Six years later and the old argument about hand-drawn versus CG has been definitively laid to rest – there is room for both in this brave new world of animation, just so long as you’ve got the story to back it up.

While Pixar returned for its annual summer hit with Toy Story 3, and the monster Shrek franchise rediscovered its mojo, what’s notable about 2010 is the breadth of quality animation delivered to audiences.

There was hand-drawn poetry from Sylvain Chomet and Hayao Miyazaki; off-kilter stop-motion from Belgian newcomers Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar; independent 3D in the shape of Battle for Terra; and, of course, the triumphant return of Disney’s traditional animators under the guiding hand of John Lasseter with The Princess and the Frog.

Though animation remains big business, producing some of the year’s highest grossing films, in 2010 there was a renewed respect for the artistic diversity of the medium. In UK cinemas, animation is no longer ring-fenced as a family film genre, but one that can speak to a whole spectrum of sensibilities.

007

,0000000000? /0000000000< the ComiC-BooK movie iS in flUX

t h e P l ay S t a t i o n G e n e r at i o n h a S Come of aGe

G a i n sbo u rg Jo n a h H e x Ki ck- A ss Iro n Ma n 2 The Lo se rs S c o t t Pi lg r i m v s. The Wo r ld Tama ra Dre we Re d

Kick-Ass P r ince of Persia [REC] 2 I nception Scott P il g r im vs. The Wor l d TRON : Legac y

ven as the number of comic-book movies gets set to expand with Captain America, Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class and Thor arriving in 2011, the market as a whole is undergoing a re-orientation.

While blue-chip franchises like Iron Man continue to flourish, fatigue is setting in amongst audiences. As fan reactions to early images from Thor or casting news from Green Lantern attest, familiarity is breeding contempt.

But if the second-tier superhero like Jonah Hex is in trouble, the bigger picture is less clear. Attempts to re-engineer the genre have met with limited success – neither Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass or Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World managed to break out into the mainstream. At least the alternative comics scene, represented this year by Joan Sfarr’s Gainsbourg and, to a lesser degree, Tamara Drewe, offered a more fruitful avenue for collaboration.

The indication is that, creatively at least, the comic-book adaptation is entering a downturn. It’s had a long run of success since Spider-Man broke box office records at the start of the decade, but in cinema years, the genre is reaching its paunchy middle age. Where it goes from here is uncertain.

008 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

ollywood has never understood videogames. The studios have made half-hearted attempts to crack their multibillion dollar box office potential, but they’re yet to capture the visceral excitement of gaming at its best. Prince of Persia is the latest in a line of bloated blockbusters rooted in an oldfashioned vision of videogames, this one from 68-year-old director Mike Newell.

But change is in the air. This year saw the emergence of a longgestating trend: the death of the videogame adaptation and the re-birth of the videogame movie as a unique aesthetic.

Foreshadowed by the likes of the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer, a new generation of thirty-something directors reared on videogames has come into its own, producing films framed by the architecture of gaming – its mutable logic, warped reality and dream-like possibilities – but possessed of an independent cinematic identity.

These filmmakers aren’t trying to mimic videogames; they’re simply immersed in them on an intuitive level. Whether [REC] 2’s first-person perspective, Inception’s levelling up or Scott Pilgrim’s cross-platform fantasy, this is a language that is understood instinctively by audiences. It’s the integration of two very different art forms whose creative convergence has only just begun to be explored.

/00000000? ,0000000000< SomethinG iS haPPeninG in iSraeli Cinema

t h e ‘a’ l i S t i S GettinG yoUnGer

Le ba n o n Eye s Wi de Ope n A j a mi

Al ice in Wonder l and Green Zone The L ast Song Robin Hood Get Him to the Greek The Twil ight Saga I nception Knight and D ay Sal t Char l ie St. Cl oud

ow many films does it take until you’re officially enjoying a renaissance? For Romanian cinema, it took only four films and one Palme d’Or between Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu in 2005 and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007 before critics were talking of the country’s young generation of filmmakers as a new wave.

What, then, should we make of the three Israeli films released in the UK this year? All of them played at Cannes and won awards on the international festival circuit, including a Golden Lion at Venice in 2009 for Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. All of them tackle themes of profound importance to contemporary Israel, from the ongoing impact of foreign wars to homosexuality and identity politics. All of them are, more to the point, very good films.

So where is the talk of the Israeli new wave? Perhaps it’s because the white heat of international attention needs the catalyst of an Oscar or Palme d’Or. But with the film media full of spurious trend stories, it still seems strange that this genuinely exciting moment in a country’s national cinema has passed largely unremarked.

very year Forbes magazine publishes The Celebrity 100, ranking the most powerful people in media, sport and entertainment. Since 2000, the number one spot has been occupied by an actor six times, from Tom Cruise (twice), to Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Mel Gibson and Angelina Jolie.

But those are starting to look like the good old days. There are very few perennials in the high-power world of the Hollywood ‘A’ list. Of the old guard, only Johnny Depp and Sandra Bullock made the top 10 this year, with Angelina Jolie in twelfth place.

Leonardo DiCaprio continues to enjoy critical success working with great directors, but other big name stars suffered. Russell Crowe, Matt Damon and Cruise himself all struggled to meet expectations, while Mel Gibson had a year to forget.

As Hollywood’s version of the age of austerity kicks in, those fat salaries and back-end points are starting to look anachronistic.

Yesterday’s stars are being challenged by a younger generation – actors like Miley Cyrus, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Jonah Hill – all of whom are in the process of proving their commercial viability in films that don’t require a $100 million budget to get them off the ground.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that by turning its gaze inwards, Israeli cinema is developing a powerful and selfcritical new voice.

009

,0000000000? /0000000000< 3d needS to m at U r e to m at t e r

GirlS are harder than GUyS

B attle fo r Te r ra A l i c e i n Wo n de r la n d H ow to Tra i n Yo u r Drago n C la sh o f the Ti ta n s S t r e e tda n ce 3D S h r e k Fo re ve r A f te r Toy Sto r y 3 C at s & D og s: T he Re ve n ge o f Ki tty G a lo re The H o le De spi cable Me T RON: Le ga c y

The Gir l with the D ragon Tattoo Kick-Ass The L osers P redators The A-Team Knight and D ay Sal t The Expendabl es The Gir l Who P l ayed with Fire The Gir l Who Kicked the Hor net’s N est

he future of cinema or cultural vandalism? The debate around 3D crystallised this year as the technology embedded itself in the mainstream. 3D is no longer the preserve of the big studio blockbuster – this year, everything from dance movies to kids animations were boosted by an extra dimension.

hirty years after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley heralded a false dawn for female empowerment, cinema has finally announced its emasculation proclamation. The Expendables, The A-Team, The Losers – these films are a valediction, a eulogy to the era of male muscle. The modern action star has a new face.

The issue is where 3D goes from here. Right now, it’s in the same place as CGI in the years after Jurassic Park, enjoying the first rush of giddy opportunity. 3D is being thrown at films simply because it’s there.

For a powerful indicator of this change look no further than Salt. A role originally intended for Tom Cruise, it was handed to Angelina Jolie with minimal rewriting. Cruise himself was easily matched by co-star Cameron Diaz in Knight and Day, while Chloe Moretz and Zoe Saldana stole the show from the boys in Kick-Ass and The Losers respectively.

The results haven’t always been effective – in its current form, 3D is as likely to detract from the clarity of the image as add an extra element, as both Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans proved. Indeed, Warner Brothers recently announced its decision to axe the 3D conversion process for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The challenge is for the technology to mature, to find its place as an extra weapon in the filmmaker’s arsenal rather than an end in itself.

So far, it’s telling that the real champions of 3D have been the studio owners, who are always on the hunt for a new revenue stream. Unless it’s embraced by the filmmakers themselves, it’ll only ever be a financial crutch rather than a creative statement.

010 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

But the embodiment of this gender transposal is Lisbeth Salander. As played by Noomi Rapace, Salander is the brawn to Mikael Blomkvist’s brains and a cultural icon in the making.

Unlike Ripley, she’s uncompromisingly feminine and not just sexually active but aggressive.

What prompted this change? Perhaps it’s because, after seven years of war, it’s impossible to believe that violence can be untethered from its moral and physical consequences. Whereas the old male stars could shoot first and ask questions never, the new breed of female investigators, secret agents and superheroes offers a more ambiguous interrogation of the cathartic power of cinematic action.

,0000000000< /00000000? horror moveS from SlaUGhterhoUSe to arthoUSe

The Ro a d The Cra zi e s H e a r tle ss [ REC] 2 Che r r y Tre e La n e Fro ze n The H o rde The H o u se o f the De v i l The H u ma n Ce n ti pe de The La st Exo rci sm Le t Me In We A re W hat We A re

fter years in which the high-concept, low-rent exploitation franchise typified by the Saw movies has dominated the genre, 2010 saw horror continue to move in interesting directions.

This year, a number of films emerged that pushed at the genre’s traditional boundaries, whether by subverting the audience’s expectations (as with Matt Reeves’ Let Me In, a quietly effective re-imagining of Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In), or testing their limits (Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, which transformed horror into performance art).

The likes of Heartless, [REC] 2 and Mexico’s indie cannibal film We Are What We Are may have brought new ideas to the table with varying degrees of success, but what they shared was a newfound ambition and sense of adventure that has reinvigorated a tired genre.

And though more traditional subgenres were represented by zombie movie The Horde and home-invasion chiller Cherry Tree Lane, both films came attached with a biting subtext on contemporary social ills. Finally, we’re getting some horror movies that make you want to cover your eyes for all the right reasons.

nothinG iS SaCred

Sex & D r ugs & Rock & Rol l N owhere Boy The Scouting Book for Boy s Centur ion Four L ions Streetdance 3 D Tamara D rewe Another Year

n July 26, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced that the UK Film Council was to be axed as part of a costcutting drive by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

For the past decade, the film council has been one of the country’s main sources of funding for British films, investing an annual budget of £15 million. It wasn’t always popular – after news of the government’s decision broke, there were as many filmmakers happy to celebrate its demise as there were mourning its departure – but it creates further instability in the industry at a time when independent producers are already finding it difficult to raise financing.

The government promised that lottery funding will increase to cover the shortfall when the Film Council is phased out in 2012, yet it is now considering cutting its own direct funding as part of the spending review.

This year saw its share of successful home-grown films from Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll to Four Lions, Centurion, The Scouting Book for Boys and even Streetdance 3D. Nevertheless, filmmakers and producers may come to look back on 2010 as the beginning of the end of an era What are the lessons you learned at the movies in 2010?

Head online and join the debate: forums.littlewhitelies.co.uk

011

Ye s , I a m a c r i m i n a l . M y c r i m e i s t h a t o f c u r i o s i t y. M y c r i m e i s t h a t o f j u d g i n g p e o p l e by what they say and think, not what they look like. My cr ime is that of outsmar ting you, something that you will never forg ive me for.

I a m a h a c k e r , a n d t h i s i s my m a n i f e s t o.

Yo u m a y s t o p t h i s i n d i v i d u a l , b u t y o u c a n â&#x20AC;&#x2122; t stop us all.

T h e M e n t o r, T h e C o n s c i e n c e o f a H a c k e r

015

Associate Editor Jonathan Crocker jonathan@thechurchoflondon.com

Editor Matt Bochenski matt@thechurchoflondon.com

Creative Director Paul Willoughby paul@thechurchoflondon.com

We b s i t e E d i t o r Adam Woodward adam@thechurchoflondon.com

Junior Editor Tom Seymour tom@thechurchoflondon.com

Contributing Editors Ellen E Jones, Kevin Maher, Dan Stewart, Jonathan Williams

Digital Designer Evan Lelliott

Designers Anna Dunn & Angus MacPherson design@thechurchoflondon.com

Editorial Assistant Hannah El-Boghdady

Wo r d s , p i c t u r e s , t h a n k s . . .

Bruce Ackland, Anton Bitel, Jon Boam, Kayt Bochenski, Laura Bushell, Martyn Conterio, Adam Lee Davies, Tom Eagar, Paul Fairclough, Nell Frizzell, Matt Glasby, Lee Griffiths, Nick Hasted, Michael Leader, Stéphane Manel, James Mansfield, Syd Mead, Jonas Milk, Cyrus Shahrad, Emma Tildsley, Cian Traynor, Steven Turner, Jimmy Turrell, Josh Winning, Jason Wood, James Wright

Managing Director Danny Miller danny@thechurchoflondon.com Editorial Director Matt Bochenski matt@thechurchoflondon.com

Published by The Church of London Top Floor 8-9 Rivington Place London EC2A 3BA +44 (0) 207 7293675

016 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Publishing Director Vince Medeiros vince@thechurchoflondon.com

Creative Director Rob Longworth rob@thechurchoflondon.com

Distributed by COMAG Specialist Tavistock Works Tavistock Road, West Drayton Middlesex UB7 7QX andy.hounslow@comag.co.uk

Commercial Director Dean Faulkner dean@thechurchoflondon.com

Digital Director Alex Capes alex@thechurchoflondon.com

Special Projects Steph Pomphrey steph@thechurchoflondon.com

Marketing & Distr ibution Manager Anna Hopson anna@thechurchoflondon.com

Subscription enquiries shop@thechurchoflondon.com Cover illustration by Paul Willoughby

Account Manager Liz Haycroft liz@thechurchoflondon.com

The articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publishers or editorial team.

Made with paper from sustainable sources.

LWLies is published six times a year.

ISSN 1745-9168 © TCOLondon 2010

WINNER

VENICE GOLDEN LION FOR BEST FILM

www.somewheremovie.co.uk

IN CINEMAS DECEMBER 10

suBsCriBer seCtiON LWLies is published six times a year and distributed around Great Britain and the good bits of America. Subscribe at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk and you’ll get a year’s worth of copies delivered to your door for only £20. You’ll also receive:

aCCess tO the digital editiON Of lwlies ON the day that it hits shelves

yOur OwN PersONal lOgiN tO dOwNlOad artwOrk aNd stuff

what’s mOre, yOu CaN take advaNtage Of these sPeCial Offers frOm Our frieNds: lOvefilm

Bfi

staCk magaziNes

PiCturehOuse CiNemas

shOOtiNg PeOPle

the auteurs

the BarBiCaN

CiNemOi

SUBSCRIBERS GET A 30-DAY FREE TRIAL AND TWO FREE CINEMA TICKETS

SUBSCRIBERS GET £5 OFF YEARLY STACK SUBSCRIPTION

SUBSCRIBERS GET 33% OFF SHOOTERS MEMBERSHIP

SUBSCRIBERS GET £5 OFF YEARLY BARBICAN MEMBERSHIP

018 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

SUBSCRIBERS GET £5 OFF ANNUAL BFI MEMBERSHIP

SUBSCRIBERS GET 15 MONTHS MEMBERSHIP FOR THE PRICE OF 12

SUBSCRIBERS CAN WATCH ONE MOVIE AT THEAUTEURS.COM FOR FREE

SUBSCRIBERS CAN ENJOY A 3-DAY FREE TRIAL ON SKY CHANNEL 343

Creative Brief ElecTRONic Paint TRON: Legacy is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a world unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. As a salute to this digital wonderland and its debt to the pioneering 1982 original, this issue’s Creative Brief is all about new age fun with a retro feel.

Our challenge to you is to create a TRON: Legacy masterpiece in MS Paint. That’s right: the original and best art application from a time when your computer had as much processing power as a breezeblock.

Using MS Paint, we want you to let your imagination run riot and create a picture inspired by the wired world of TRON. It could be your take on the light cycle, the logo or some sort of mad collage. The more left-field, the better we’re going to like it.

We’ve already had some amazing entries, and the winner will receive a unique LWLies goody bag full of awesome stuff.

All Windows users should have MS Paint in their programs folder. Mac users can download a faithful emulation at paintbrush.sourceforge.net.

Artwork should be created at 640 x 480 and submitted as a PNG or GIF file to tron@littlewhitelies.co.uk.

Deadline for entries is December 10 020 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

FREE nationwide preview screenings of...

Animal Kingdom November 16 and 23 8 cinemas across the UK Grolsch & Little White Lies Presents is a series of free-to-attend film screenings celebrating the values that make LWLies and Grolsch unique: taste, artistry, craftsmanship and originality. We’re showcasing the very best new films in eight venues around the country – in London, Birmingham, Brighton, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Bath. You’ll also receive a free Grolsch beer, perfectly poured and served with some delicious Dutch Gouda cheese.

To be in the running for free tickets, log on to www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/grolschpresents and sign up to the newsletter for regular updates on the latest screenings nationwide.

On November 16 (Clapham, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow) and November 23 (Edinburgh, Bath, Brighton, Curzon Soho) Grolsch & Little White Lies Presents Animal Kingdom. A brooding Melbourne-set crime thriller from filmmaker David Michôd, Animal Kingdom won the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at this year¹s Sundance Film Festival. When a young man is drawn into the clutches of his extended criminal family, he comes face to face with a desperate choice between loyalty and survival. Starring Guy Pearce in perhaps his finest performance to date as a cop fighting both the criminals and corruption in his own ranks, Animal Kingdom is a modern noir classic and crime drama at its most breathtakingly intense.

Only Open tO UK residents aged 18 years Or Over. exclUding empOyees Of this OUtlet Or Of mOlsOn cOOrs Brewing cOmpany (UK) ltd., their families, agents and anyOne else prOfessiOnally cOnnected with this prOmOtiOn. clOsing date fOr applicatiOn tO nOvemBer 16 screenings: midnight On tUesday nOvemBer 9, 2010. clOsing date fOr applicatiOn tO nOvemBer 23 screenings: midnight On tUesday nOvemBer 16, 2010. Only One entry per persOn, thOUgh yOU may reqUest a plUs One, prOviding cOntact details are sUpplied fOr that applicant. the tOtal amOUnt Of ticKets availaBle natiOnwide fOr this prOmOtiOn is 1350. fOr fUll terms and cOnditiOns visit: www.littlewhitelies.cO.UK/grOlschpresents

022 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

PROMOTION

In cinemas early 2011 • www.animalkingdomfilm.co.uk © 2010 Optimum Releasing. All Rights Reserved

023

FREE nationwide preview screenings of...

The King’s Speech December 14 8 cinemas across the UK On December 14 nationwide, Grolsch & Little White Lies Presents The King’s Speech. Winner of the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival and a huge hit when it screened as the American Express Gala at the London Film Festival, The King’s Speech is rousing British cinema at its best.

Featuring stellar performances from Colin Firth as the stammering future King George VI, Geoffrey Rush as the maverick Australian speech therapist charged with curing him, and Helena Bonham Carter

as Queen Elizabeth, Tom Hooper’s film is an affectionate, witty and ultimately moving account of one of the most unusual relationships in recent British history. A sure-fire frontrunner for next year’s major awards, The King’s Speech is not just the best British film of the year, but the best British film for many years.

Log on to www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/grolschpresents and sign up to be in the running for a pair of free tickets.

Only open to UK residents aged 18 years or over. Excluding empoyees of this outlet or of Molson Coors Brewing Company (UK) ltd., their families, agents and anyone else professionally connected with this promotion. Closing date for application: midnight on TUESDAY DECEMBER 7 2010. Only one entry per person, though you may request a plus one, providing contact details are supplied for that applicant. The total amount of tickets available nationwide for this promotion is 1350. For full terms and conditions visit: www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/grolschpresents

024 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

PROMOTION

In cinemas January 7 • www.facebook.com/TheKingsSpeech © 2010 Momentum Pictures. All Rights Reserved

025

R e w i r e d s o c i e t i e s . r e i m ag i n e d data . rebranded futures. reassembled worlds.

027

Director Joseph Kosinski graduated from architecture school before becoming a filmmaker. Here he discusses his unusual path towards the sacred g r o u n d o f T R ON : L e g a c y .

Words by Matt Bochenski I n t e r v i e w b y J o n a t h a n Cr o c k e r

uilding Better Worlds 028 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

029

rom blasted landscapes to flawless worlds, Joseph Kosinski is a builder of alternative realities. A graduate of the Columbia School of Architecture and a former aerospace engineering student, he was given the tools to realise a purer vision of our lives, and has explored it in short films, commercials and features.

Working for production outfit Anonymous Content in LA, Kosinski made his mark blurring the boundaries between architecture, film and graphics. His work is a seamless combination of the virtual and the real, a kind of photosurrealism that quotes from the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Albert Einstein.

For Apple’s iSPEC spot in 2003, he digitally recreated the Colorado Lounge from The Shining. With Nike, he explored the concept of ‘time dilation’ in Les Jumelles for the brand’s Art of Speed campaign. His work with Halo and Gears of War has advanced the idea of the videogame as a cinematic medium, while his vision of a twenty-first-century Desert H20use led the influential RES magazine to declare the emergence of a ‘Cinema Architectura’.

These digital visions all share a studied minimalism, smooth, flowing lines and the promise that technology will cure our existential ills. But their ascetic design is offset by the speed, power and movement that burst free of the frame. From the light-speed of Nike’s twins to the feline grace of Saab’s Blackbird, Kosinski is a director who knows how to release the explosive energy of cinema.

In hindsight, his commercial work looks like an extended audition for TRON: Legacy, as if this first feature is a culmination rather than a new beginning. Because Kosinski is a man on the brink of something big. His introduction to the world is the year’s most anticipated film, and if the rumours are to be believed there’s more, much more, on the horizon. Remakes of The Black Hole and Logan’s Run, spec script Archangels and his own original story Oblivion all have Kosinski’s name attached. Alongside the likes of Neill Blomkamp, Duncan Jones and Gareth Edwards, Kosinski is ensuring that the future of

030 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

modern science-fiction looks very bright indeed. But right now, his mind is fixed on the global behemoth that is TRON, and it was to talk about his debut feature that we caught up with the director in LA.

LWLies: What does it say about today’s cinema that a guy with your unusual background has been chosen to direct a blockbuster like TRON: Legacy?

Kosinski: I think hopefully it shows you that if you’ve got the idea and a vision for something, you’ve got a shot. It’s not about being connected because I had no connections in the film business. I grew up in the Midwest, so hopefully it will inspire people out there who want to be in the film business to just go out and shoot something. That’s how I got started – making spec films for no money, just making my own shorts, putting them out there and eventually getting noticed. And that’s kind of what I did for this movie. I told Disney, ‘Let me make you a short piece, couple of minutes long, that’ll show you what the movie looks and feels like.’

LWLies: When did you first hear that the project was available?

Kosinski: Sean Bailey, the producer, called me in for a meeting and said, ‘Disney has this property, TRON, they’ve been trying to make it for 15 years, what would your approach be?’ He’d noticed a couple of commercials I had done in LA; I’d done a spot for Halo, for Gears of War, Saab. I said, ‘I’m not interested in remaking The Matrix. I want to make TRON. I want to go back and embrace that aesthetic, update the original film for 2010. I don’t want to make a film about the internet. I want to set this film on a server that’s been sitting in a secret place for 20 years and it’s been evolving on its own.’

LWLies: Have you had any interference from the studio?

Kosinski: No, I wouldn’t say there was any interference.

They’ve been amazingly supportive from the beginning and I think a large part of it was because I did that initial test

that gave them confidence. We showed it at Comic-Con two years ago. I did it with a small group of people over a couple of months. I’m the only one they’ve ever talked to for this project, so they let me do my thing. I made the promise that we were going to make a father/son story. Obviously, on a movie this big they’re watching and giving their thoughts and notes along the way.

LWLies: Can you explain how your background in architecture and graphics has influenced your visual aesthetic?

Kosinski: Well, architecture school was actually an interesting preparation for making films. Architecture school teaches you to be self-critical and to be able to take criticism well, which as a film director, you’re getting notes all the time… But also to understand which notes are good ones and which notes are bad ones. And how to keep your eye on making the movie you want to make. The other thing that my architecture school taught me was, rather than giving us T-squares and graphite pencils to do our work, they gave us the same computers and software that Digital Domain uses to do visual effects. So when I came out of architecture school I came out with all these skills on the computer and I said, ‘Why would I be an architect when I can make my own movies?’

LWLies: As an effects guy, what did the original TRON mean to you?

Kosinski: I saw it on VHS in the mid ’80s. I don’t think I saw it in the theatre. It looked like nothing else out there – it was totally unique. And the design was so good.

Even though the effects don’t hold up now, the designs hold up because of the work of Syd Mead and Moebius.

Everyone was trying to copy Star Wars at the time, but it didn’t look like Star Wars. It didn’t look like anything else.

My hope is that TRON: Legacy will look as unique as the first one did.

LWLies: Are you feeling under pressure?

Kosinski: I’m always afraid. But that’s how it is on these projects. We have to finish on time. There’s no choice.

LWLies: How did you get Daft Punk involved?

Kosinski: I met them for breakfast – pancakes and coffee one morning. I knew I wanted to meet them and talk to them about it. I didn’t know what to expect. They were very intrigued by TRON because it’s a huge influence on them in many ways. So it was two people who were intrigued sitting down for breakfast. They were feeling me out as well. We talked about film and great scores, everything from Bernard Herrmann to John Carpenter. And we talked about a desire to create a classic film score that was a combination of orchestral and electronic that felt very natural and integrated. That was three years ago. They’ve been working on this score as long as we’ve been working on this movie.

LWLies: How did you approach the 3D for the film?

Kosinski: I wasn’t interested in being in your face. There are a couple of moments when stuff does come out of the screen but it’s always motivated by a shot that makes sense. If we’re looking down on a motorcycle and a guy flips off it, we’ll use that opportunity to flip out of the screen and flip back into it. But generally it’s inside so it looks like you’re looking through a window.

LWLies: How important was it to have original TRON director Steven Lisberger involved in the sequel?

Kosinski: I saw him as a very Obi-Wan type presence. I was always interested to talk to him about what TRON meant to him thematically.

LWLies: Could you have done it without him?

Kosinski: You know, it’s tough. To me, it felt right knowing he was there. It was a good feeling. I’m glad he’s involved. It would be hard to imagine doing it without him

031

It’s the new technology that h a s H o l ly w o o d ’ s t o p s ta r s running scared, but will virtual actors ever take the place of the real thing?

ctors are cattle’, Alfred Hitchcock once said.

An inflammatory metaphor perhaps, but at the height of the studio system – when actors were treated like commodities to be bought, traded and sold – these three words cut the film industry deep. In his own facetious way, Hitch had a point.

In 2010, movie stars sit comfortably atop the celebrity food chain, with the likes of Will Smith and Johnny Depp taking home anything up to $80 million per film, and the biggest names frequently populating rich lists and power charts.

Since the 1980s we’ve witnessed the rise of the brand actor; dominated by a select few who are able to generate vast personal fortunes through an extensive network of multimedia contracts. At a time when the global economy is in a fragile state of recovery, however, could this breed be about to see its supremacy wane?

032 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

When Disney announced it was plugging back into the TRON mainframe in 2005, many asked whether Jeff Bridges would be reprising his role as ENCOM CEO Kevin Flynn and his digital alter ego, Clu. To the collective joy of TRON fans everywhere, the answer was yes, but this raised an issue: Clu, being a synthetic projection in a virtual world, would not have aged physically. How then do you take The Dude back to 1982? Make-up or some degree of digital restoration would do the trick to an extent. But the makers of TRON: Legacy opted for something a little more radical.

Bridges appears as a digitally rendered version of his younger self; captured by VFX company Digital Domain and leading special effects supervisor Eric Barba, who previously took

the aI list words by adam woodward

033

“a u d i e n c e s w i l l a l w ay s respond to real human emotion” Brad Pitt through the seasons in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “In creating a digital Jeff, we first had to take a life cast,” explains Barba. “We got Jeff into our Nova contour rig, much like we did on Benjamin Button, and we were able to do a library of face shapes from him.

“It’s actually pretty complicated,” he continues.

“There’s a rig made, and that rig is driven by an animator, with everything referencing back to the library of shapes that came off Jeff’s face.

We put a four-camera head-rig [on Jeff] during principle production so he could step in and do the lines, walk out of scene, and then we would get an animator in, who was watching offscreen, who we would shoot the actual scene with. Once we had the four-camera selects, we would pick up the data and those points would be tracked by a computer.”

To all intents and purposes, the Jeff Bridges in TRON: Legacy is not Jeff Bridges.

As Barba reveals, however, Bridges’ presence in the early production stages was essential for the animation team. “Because the tracking

034 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

points live in 3D space, we had to apply them to an algorithm we wrote that we could then compare to the archive of facial shapes. But the algorithm, as sophisticated as it is, doesn’t know the difference between, say, a happy smile or a sad smile or a surly smile. So we had to look at Jeff and just make those adjustments.

The nuances in human expressions are so fine, the little things that you see, and the computer may say, ‘Well this is what the shapes did’, but it may not come across quite the same. You have to manually tweak it. And you keep tweaking it until it feels just right.”

Although the intricacies of this complex motion capture process might not seem entirely novel in contemporary VFX terms, Digital Domain is way ahead in charting the virtual actor frontier. And, as Barba suggests, TRON: Legacy will be looked back on as the first ray of a new dawn. “After working on Benjamin Button, people asked me if what we did with Brad Pitt would open up new avenues. I think TRON: Legacy is the first real step forward in that sense. Much like the first dinosaur we saw walk in Jurassic Park, we’re breaking new ground now.” He continues: “It’s still an incredibly difficult process, particularly in terms of getting

the persona of the character right. It’s still in the artisan stage. It’s not in the push-button stage yet.”

No one can yet predict how far this innovative digital art form can be taken. How close are we to being able to replicate real life actors using CGI? Could we ever get to the stage where virtual actors could replace humans?

Could the two even become indistinguishable?

Perhaps not entirely, suggests Paul Franklin, visual effects supervisor on Inception.

“You can use digital effects to make creatures or whole characters, like in Avatar, but they are driven by a real performance underneath,” he says. “There will always be a role for actors inside that somewhere – whether they are in a motion capture rig or whatever – and audiences will always respond to real human emotion. So whether you’re filming an actor directly or interpreting them through computer graphics, there’s always got to be that emotional core. Computers will never, or at least not for a very long time, be able to spontaneously generate that.”

In the case of the TRON franchise, however, Disney now has an entire catalogue of digital shapes individually assigned to Jeff Bridges’ facial expressions. If additional instalments are greenlit, could the real Bridges potentially be rendered superfluous? “I think that’s the actor’s fear,” says Barba, “but I’ll be the first one to say, ‘I need Jeff.’ Jeff makes Jeff ‘Jeff’.

Jeff does things no one else does; you can’t have an animator doing that. It won’t come across as Jeff. Without the guidance of Jeff’s performance, it wouldn’t look like Jeff as soon as he moves. Jeff moves his face in a particular way. If someone else moves his face, it instantly stops being Jeff.”

At present the technology relies on a physical template, but as animators become more adept at replicating actors’ expressions and gestures, there may be nothing stopping future generations of filmmakers adding entire chapters to familiar stories without an actor inputting information beforehand. “There’s a whole generation of filmmakers coming through who are completely at ease with this kind of work; guys who have grown up in a world of computers and videogames,” explains Franklin.

“They don’t see it as a threat; they just see it as another part of the filmmaking process.”

As Hollywood continues to eat itself, remakes and remasterings are par for the course for studios looking for an extra buck. But what if a studio decides it wants to regenerate public interest in a franchise whose star attraction is now unavailable – be it through death or illness – or simply unsuitable for the part because of age? While MGM looks increasingly unlikely to be able to meet Daniel Craig’s asking price, thus beginning the search for the next Bond, why not turn to technology and restore a younger, fullerhaired Sean Connery to the role? Cine-purists might shudder at the thought, but if a digi-Bond was offered at a fraction of the cost of the real thing, you can bet certain studio executives would at the very least toy with the idea.

With an estimated budget of $150 million (standard fare for a modern blockbuster), the animators on TRON: Legacy had the financial means to realise this new blueprint for the virtual actor. But what happens when the formula becomes more affordable? “Computers

are getting cheaper and more powerful all the time, so you’ve got a straightforward increase in horsepower behind what you can do for the same price,” says Franklin. “This time next year I could do certain things on Inception for a reduced price, which then increases the scope for what the filmmaker can do.”

As the creative process gets cheaper, the possibilities skyrocket. But how might this impact the future of conventional acting? In this post-Brando age, where few working screen actors can claim to be true pioneers of their craft, does the digital medium simply represent the next step? Barba believes so.

“I love humans. I love actors. But I think there’s

“ with today ’ s technology, there ’ s no reason you couldn ’ t bring back some of the great names . ” a place for this technique when you have to bring someone back or de-age them or tell a story you couldn’t ordinarily tell. It might only be an interpretation with today’s technology as it is, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t bring back some of the great names some day.”

Regardless of when the technology arrives, however, are audiences ready to embrace digital reincarnations of screen icons? The success of Avatar and Benjamin Button suggests so, but if computergenerated actors are ever to compete with the real thing, animators like Barba must first overcome a number of obstacles, namely an anthropomorphic phenomenon known as the ‘uncanny valley’.

Coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, this term denotes the point at which the level of verisimilitude achieved by robots and other facsimiles of humans causes a negative emotional response from the human observer. In Mori’s proposed graph, the positivity of human reaction plotted against the anthropomorphism of robots hits a dip – or ‘valley’ – at the point of ‘almost human’ realism.

Put simply, the more realistic a robot appears, the more likely we are to find it unsettling.

Every virtual performance is relative to the skill and artistry of the individual animator, but the more frequently well-recognised actors are copied or digitally resurrected, the higher the likelihood of imperfections, no matter how discreet, being amplified becomes.

As Barba admits, the greatest challenge facing his trade is finding a way to trick the human mind. “From the day we come out of the womb, we see other human faces. Whether it’s a baby in Africa or Indonesia or the United States, the expressions a human face makes, regardless of language or culture, are inherent to our species. A smile is a smile. We learn to read these nuances instantly – we don’t even think about it. The same thing applies with a CG head – you read it instantly. And when it’s not right, you know it’s not right. It comes down to an infinite amount of subtleties, whether you hit enough of them so that the audience instantly buys the performance. When you nail it, it’s magic. When you miss it, you’re back in the valley.”

For now, this phenomenon poses the single greatest threat to the development of virtual acting. But the current rate of technological progress may well dictate a shift in attitudes. As a concept, virtual acting is still very much in its infancy, but this is a science, not a gimmick. It may be hard to imagine a time when flesh-and-blood stars have become completely outmoded, but at $80 million a pop, it’s no wonder Hollywood is so keen to nurture the growth of the virtual actor.

One thing is for certain: the game is changing.

The revolution sequence has been initiated

035

036 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

When

TRON

joined

a

created

tr a d i t i o n

determined modernism

the of

of

films

l oo k a n d

M e tro p o l i s

o n e d ot z e ro , w e W or d s

a vision of

consider

an

that

feel to what

of

the

interactive h av e our

landscape,

defined

f u t u r e wor l d . Fro m

u to p i a n

cinema

by

computer

influenced,

can

visions teach

of

us

and

the

digital

about

James

the

it

even

r e tro -

festival future.

Wright

Future visions ou’re standing in the centre of an open plan room, on the 105th floor of a Googie-inspired skyscraper created using only the finest eco-friendly materials.

To your left, pure white panelling hides a series of invisible touch screen appliances, ready to control every facet of the room. To your right, a long curving wall of glass provides stunning views of the metropolis below your feet. And in front of you, a minimalist interior is complemented by Eero Aarnio-styled furnishings.

You’re standing in the apartment of the future – the future that cinema has promised us.

But it wasn’t always like this. While undoubtedly influential, early science-fiction films like Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis were clunky and crude in their depictions of future worlds. They might have conjured up fantastical images, but they were still very much attached to their industrial roots; teeming with brutal pistons, flickering steam dials, bubbling test tubes and arcs of electricity.

By 1939, the New York World’s Fair might have promised the ‘World of Tomorrow’, predicting wonders that the American public would see in the decades to come, but in reality, that world was light-years away.

037

Ironically, it was not an American event that precipitated the beginning of a new era, but rather a Soviet one, when on October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the Sputnik 1 satellite, igniting the space race with the US. Sure enough, the American public’s fascination with technology intensified with every satellite – and later astronaut – shot into space. Steven Heller, design aficionado for The New York Times, aptly stated that this period saw ‘a longing for the future and a rejection of the past’. Architects and designers embraced Space-Age style as ‘the currency of fashionable design’, according to Sixties Design author Phillip Garner.

In film, one movie stood out above all others, vividly capturing America’s extreme fascination with the Space Age: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The use of antiseptic white lines and stark set design, not to mention Olivier Mourgue’s plump red Djinn chairs, came to encapsulate everything the period – and the future – embodied: a bold new world in which sciencefiction was being transformed into science-fact.

But the mood would only last as long as the allure of the space race itself, and by the late ’70s fascination had turned to disinterest and outright scepticism. Soon enough, what had once been the immediate future of the 1960s had rapidly become the immediate past. Sciencefiction became darker, more corrupt, represented most explicitly by Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, with its squalid streets and run-down architecture. This was a world in which technology’s promises of a better future had been systematically broken.

Yet strangely, cinema’s vision of the future since the late 1970s has barely altered, caught between dark dystopia and ascetic minimalism. Somehow, we seem to have lost the ability to articulate what the future means to us in the twenty-first century.

“I think in some respects we do struggle to define a purely new vision of the future without using the same iconic interiors that Kubrick presented in 2001,” suggests Shane Walter, co-founder and creative director of visionary digital festival onedotzero. “I mean, in some ways, Syd Mead, the concept artist on TRON, created something wholly original, which as a film is perhaps just as much an icon as 2001, but that was influential from more of a tech and games point of view. In truth, most films of the future

“ w h e n w e l oo k at t h e f u t u r e , i t h a s n ow become a bleak p l ac e r at h e r than one of g r e at h o p e .” really take on a combination of both these two aesthetic visions, albeit with some tweaking and degrading at times.”

The sort of experiences that Walter hopes to bring to the onedotzero festival in November offer a more positive image of the future than we’ve become used to, with an emphasis on exploration and utopian visions. “My aim is to distil a serous spirit of positivity because I feel when we look at the future, it has now become a bleak place rather than one of great hope,” he says.

With its citystates strand (a series of filmic responses to urban environments and fast-paced city living, from quirky personal insights to shared global experiences) and the experimental wow + flutter, Walter hopes to restore “a sense of adventure and hope about our shared world. There’s an emphasis on convergence and collaboration – in the work, the programme and, ideally, the audience. In some ways the festival is quite a Bauhaus ideal,” he adds. “Philosophically, the Bauhaus school was built on the idea that design did not merely reflect society; it could actually help to improve it. And that’s what we’re aiming for.”

Walter wants to rediscover the days when science-fiction symbolised a more harmonious and promising time. “Back then I was enthralled by what the future would be like – it was an exciting destination where untold new gadgets and devices would make it both easier and more fantastical. It was a very exciting and perhaps optimistic vision; flying cars, space and time travel. Right now our worldview of the future is so pessimistic, I think it’s vital to inject some positive thinking about our collective future.”

O n edotzero, a sh owc ase of some of th e best i n con temporary an d i n tern ation al movi n g i mages, ru n s from N ovember 10-14 at Lon don’ s BFI Sou th ban k. w w w.one do tzero.c om

038 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

SPINE TV INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENTS WE'VE BEGUN A QUEST TO FIND A TEAM OF CORRESPONDENTS WHO C A N I N V E S T I G AT E G O I N G S - O N I N THEIR LOC AL NEIGHBOURHOODS A N D B E Y O N D F O R S P I N E T V. IF YOU'RE MAKING VIDEOS AND YOU'D LIKE THEM TO BE SEEN BY SPINE TV'S AUDIENCE, SUBMIT YOUR WORK FOR A CHANCE TO B E C O M E A C O R R E S P O N D E N T. SEND US AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR WORK WITH A SHORT DESCRIPTION TO: C O N TA C T @ S P I N E T V. N E T W W W. S P I N E T V. N E T

THE WORLD’S BEST MAGAZINES DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR MAGAZINES THAT MATTER

WWW.STACKMAGAZINES.COM

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Seeing the Light Director Steven Lisberger, conceptual artist Syd Mead and actor Bruce Boxleitner relive the incredible story b e h i n d t h e m a k i n g o f TRON .

W o r ds b y C y r u s S h a h r a d

040 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

ew films came to embody the neon futurism of the 1980s like TRON, yet for director Steven Lisberger it’s a movie rooted in the psychedelic movement of the 1960s in which he grew up.

An only child whose parents died when he was young, Lisberger admits to having spent his formative years “more committed to the fantasy world than to reality.” By the time he went to art school his experiments with LSD had turned his fascination with animation into a spiritual calling, a quest to visually represent the endless inner dimensions that he and his friends had spent so many twilight hours exploring.

Hunt down his Cosmic Cartoon from 1973 on YouTube and you’ll find a 10-minute animated hallucination in which cities alternately melt and are reborn from stars, cosmic children soar through unformed space and a naked woman pulses with light as she dances on a shimmering ocean shore. There’s no dialogue, just a psychotropic synth soundtrack, and as the final image fragments into a series of kaleidoscopically rotating cells, a single word in the lower screen serves as a lone closing credit: ‘Boston’.

“I think a huge part of what made Lisberger Studios so experimental was that it wasn’t started in LA,” explains the director. “The fact that we were outsiders meant that we were crazy and naïve enough to follow ideas that would have been shot down in a Hollywood environment. It was great being somewhere we didn’t have to conform to industry expectations, and where we could pursue whatever was in our heads and think it was brilliant even when it wasn’t.”

Lisberger spent the studio’s early years experimenting with the backlighting animation techniques pioneered by Robert Abel and Associates in the psychedelic Levi’s and

041

“ b ac k t h e n , m o s t yo u n g a n i m ato r s s aw D i s n e y a s s o m e t h i n g o f a d i n o s au r , m ys e l f i n c lu d e d.”

7Up commercials of the 1970s. Soon he had a 30-second clip of his own, set to a cataclysmic backdrop of pulsing synths and wailing guitars, in which geometric lasers give birth to an electronic giant – nicknamed ‘TRON’ – who fires two glowing discs into the surrounding stars. The clip eventually ran as Lisberger Studios’ ident in their first major commission: a pair of animated features centring on a summer and winter animal Olympics to coincide with the 1980 Moscow games.

Only the winter instalment of the Animalympics ended up being aired – a result of the US boycott of the Games following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – but it was a result that had little bearing on Lisberger’s state of mind. Animalympics had been money work, and he’d been channelling the profits into the project that had most captured his imagination: a feature-length film set in TRON’s digital world, and utilising the backlighting animation practices he’d spent every spare hour getting to grips with.

By now a new element had come to bear on the project. The late ’70s saw videogaming culture exert a powerful grip across America, and Lisberger had become obsessed by both the games themselves and the weightless electronic worlds in which they took place. He looked beyond circuit boards and high scores, seeing in Pong a gladiatorial contest timeless in its purity, and, in formative notions of cyberspace, a brave new world without borders.

He knew he would need help understanding this world if he wanted to use it as a backdrop for his movie, so he went to speak to the programmers themselves.

“Meeting those guys shaped the film in ways I couldn’t have predicted. It was an exciting time for programmers, but also one of great frustration.

You had people like Alan Kay pioneering designs for things like the Dynabook, which was essentially the first laptop, yet they were being

042 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

denounced as crackpots and having their funding cut by companies like Xerox because the bosses were afraid of the implications. The commitment of these guys to something so completely unformed was a huge source of inspiration for me, and I saw them all as heroes.”

Through meetings with the likes of Kay, Lisberger began refining the script of TRON to better reflect the evolution of cyberspace and its implications for mankind – from the tyrannical company swallowing up the designs of bedroom programmers (ENCOM was loosely based on IBM), to fears of a mainframe powerful enough to

threaten the men that made it. But the more time and money Lisberger poured into researching the techniques necessary to bring the film to life, the clearer it became that he’d need help in doing so.

He could never have guessed where that help would ultimately come from.

“It’s important to remember that back then Disney wasn’t the powerhouse it is today. The only films they were putting out were the Herbie movies, and most young animators saw the company as something of a dinosaur, myself included. But we desperately needed financial support for the project, so when my business partner Donald Kushner phoned one morning to tell me that a 29-year-old had just been made

head of Disney Studios, I said, ‘Go ahead, give him a ring’. What did we have to lose?”

Kushner couldn’t possibly have expected Tom Wilhite to personally pick up the phone, let alone to display an immediate enthusiasm for the project and encourage the pair to come in and discuss it, but that’s exactly what happened.

Wilhite knew that Disney’s only hope of escaping its current dilemma lay in a calculated risk of the sort presented by TRON, so he had Lisberger run a test shoot to prove that his visual theories would work in practice. For this, the director called in Sam Schatz, then US Frisbee champion, and filmed him blasting down a couple of actors in robot suits left over from Disney’s The Black Hole, released that same year.

The shoot was a success: by backlighting cells individually, Lisberger was able to lend a shimmering strangeness in keeping with the digital world described in his script. The executives at Disney were sufficiently impressed to give TRON the green light, at which point the only thing louder than Lisberger Studios’ celebrations were the howls of dismay from traditional animators on the Disney lot – concerns that would prove to be founded on more than just a fear of the unknown.

Following the go-ahead from Disney, Lisberger set about assembling a cast and crew capable of realising his vision. Foremost in his mind was ensuring a suitably vivid look and feel to the digital world, a job he passed on to two notable artists: Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, the Parisian illustrator who designed TRON’s costumes and storyboarded much of the film; and Syd Mead, whose background in futurist vehicle and architectural design had segued into the film industry that same year, when he cut his teeth designing the spinners and sprawling interiors for Blade Runner, TRON, however, posed a completely different set of problems.

“I read the whole thing over a n d s a i d , ‘ Y o u k n o w, i t ’ s k i n d a l i k e S ta r Wa r s a n d I ’ m S pa r tac u s .”

“I’d never seen a computer at this point,” says Mead. “I spent a long time going over the script before I realised that everything was taking place behind a screen, and the various entities in this world were just packets of electronic information that had no weight. Once I grasped that, the whole thing came together pretty quickly, and the fact that we were working in 3D meant that I was able to make the most of that weightlessness – with Sark’s carrier, for example, which has a floating conning tower on one side that isn’t technically attached to anything.”

Mead quickly completed designs for the carrier, the menacing Master Control Program and the iconic light cycles.

Lisberger used blown up versions of the pictures to plaster the walls of the office in which he began the laborious process of casting TRON. And it was here that he encountered his first real problem.

“It was a complete nightmare,” he recalls. “No one wanted to be in a Disney production – it was basically considered the last stop before retirement. We’d tell people it was a Disney film about a guy that gets sucked into a computer and the next thing we’d hear was the dialling tone.

Which made it all the more amazing when Jeff [Bridges] read the script, showed up at the office and said he really wanted to do it. I told him straightaway that I was thrilled to have him on board.

After Bridges, the rest of the cast slowly fell into place. The part of TRON and his real-world user Alan (named after programmer Alan Kay) was filled by Bruce Boxleitner, best known for his work in westerns. Boxleitner was filming I Married Wyatt Earp at the time, and, as he describes it, read the script “literally sitting on a horse in Tucson, Arizona”, wincing at the incomprehensibility of it all. “I could not make sense of it,” he admits. “I had it in the saddle bag and I’d take it out in between takes and I was reading this thing – TRON, RAM,

ROM, a bit… What is a ‘bit’? The only bit I had was in the horse’s mouth.

“I got back to the hotel room that night and I called my agent in LA and I said, ‘I can’t understand the damn thing. Let’s pass on this.’

He said, ‘You gotta be kidding me. Jeff Bridges is on board.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘Jeff Bridges.’ I read the whole thing over again. I said, ‘You know, it’s kinda like Star Wars and I’m Spartacus…’ This was something I could relate it to. And then I got back to LA and I met with Steven Lisberger and I was no longer reluctant.” Lured to Lisberger’s office for a second round of talks, Boxleitner was finally

won over by the sight of so many otherworldly Syd Mead creations tacked to the walls.

Other principal actors were easier to persuade: David Warner filled the role of Sark and maniacal ENCOM chairman Dillinger after Peter O’Toole dropped out (he’d been disappointed to learn that there’d be no life-size mock-ups of tanks and recognisers on set); Barnard Hughes signed up to play the digital statesman Dumont, despite having never seen a computer; and Cindy Morgan pounced on the role of Uri that countless other women (Debbie Harry included) had refused to even consider.

Yet even the most enthusiastic cast members found themselves reeling from the unreality of the

filming process, which was as complicated as it was physically and emotionally draining. There was the legendary discomfort of the costumes; from the cumbersome helmets (hair couldn’t be mapped against CGI backgrounds) to the constrictive ‘dance belts’, an uncomfortable cross between a jockstrap and a G-string that became a source of much gallows banter for Bridges and Boxleitner between takes.

A greater problem concerned the sets themselves. Soundstages were clad entirely in black fabric, with crosses of white tape marking out points towards which actors were expected to run while Lisberger shouted descriptions of the enemy vehicles gaining on them from behind. On top of that, the limited depth of field of the 65mm cameras meant that any scene demanding cast members stand more than a few feet away from each other resulted in them being shot separately and their images composed together at a later stage. It was an isolating and depressing environment in which to make a movie, but one that Lisberger insists eventually brought out the best in the actors involved.

“The whole experience ended up being almost Shakespearean.

The black sets were utterly immersive, the actors were lit up by theatrical spotlights and wearing these brilliant suits with a mythical, toga-like quality, and they were speaking this bizarre dialogue that could as easily have been set in the distant past as the far future. And they were forced to rely entirely on their imagination, which I think awakened their basic thespian instincts and made them tap into their characters to an unprecedented degree.”

If there was one real problem among the cast then it was a fundamental lack of familiarity with the subject matter. Few had ever seen a computer, let alone taken time to ruminate on the philosophical implications underpinning

043

the idea of cyberspace. The only real frame of reference was with videogames, and to help bridge the gap between cast and concept, Lisberger peppered the set with arcade machines and urged actors to play them between takes, hopeful that they might subconsciously absorb some of the pixelated principles of the digital arena. His favourite was the Atari classic Battlezone – it was easy to associate its vector-lined killing field with the planar landscapes of TRON – and it wasn’t long before Bridges was dominating the high score board, in the process edging ever closer to the character of Flynn.

“Jeff comes across as this laidback surfer dude from Malibu, but he’s actually a very competitive guy, and pretty soon he was kicking everybody’s butt on that game,” recalls Lisberger. “He and I developed a pretty serious rivalry on the Battlezone field. After shooting was over I found myself in postproduction for another six or seven months, and eventually I ended up smashing his high score.

But by that point it was a bit of a hollow victory.”

For all the slings and arrows of the filming process, it was in postproduction that TRON truly became the monster that nearly brought down its maker, and an appropriately large part of that was due to computers.

044 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

The reliance of the film on embryonic CGI processes was what had caused so many traditional animators at Disney to view the project as a cinematic equivalent of dabbling in the occult – the movie included around 20 minutes of entirely computer-rendered effects, unheard of at the time. Yet Lisberger had enrolled the services of the best minds in the industry across a handful of pioneering graphics companies, including Richard Taylor of Triple-I, who had helped create the psychedelic 7Up ads that served as an early inspiration for TRON. But though the minds were willing, the mainframes remained relatively weak: designs had to be built around the limitations of the computers themselves, and that was as true of the legendary light cycle scene as any other.

“Bear in mind that computers didn’t have Bézier curves to work with in those days,” says Syd Mead, referring to the infinitely scalable smooth curves of modern vector graphics. “I had to simplify my original designs for the light cycles, which had riders in lobster-style suits, the helmets of which became windshields when they leaned forward astride the machine. I remember another meeting where Steven was tearing his hair out because we couldn’t possibly animate smooth,

curved turns on the game grid. And I reminded him that these bikes had no weight – they were bundles of electronic information displayed on the back of a glass screen – so why couldn’t they just make right-angled turns instantaneously?

It’s a good example of TRON looking the way it did because that was literally the bleeding-edge limit of what we could do visually.”

Nor was there any means of animating CGI at the time: every frame had to be rendered in three dimensions and then the individual images run alongside each other to simulate movement. Add to this the phenomenal rendering times and the tendency of the computers to crash midway through the job, and it’s not hard to understand how the whole CGI experience began to build up like an electronic tidal wave threatening to flood the project.

“As a learning curve it was like nothing we’d ever known,” says Lisberger. “We never knew what things were going to look like, or how they were going to move, and we had to commit to them all in advance – there was no instantaneous feedback like there is today. And it got to the point where concessions had to be made. The Bit, for example, was supposed to go through the whole film as Jeff’s sidekick, and I suppose because he was

“ t r o n w a s a l o n e ly j o u r n e y f o r m e a t t h e t i m e . B u t i t s e e ms f i n a lly to be making sense.”

the smallest he was the easiest to lose. We realised at a certain point that we’d bitten off a hell of a lot, and that sacrifices would have to be made if we were going to get this done in time.”

If anything, however, it was the painted animation and not the computer programming that most threatened to overwhelm TRON in postproduction. The ambitious backlighting techniques meant that every black-and-white cell of the 75 minutes of cyberspace footage had to be blown up as a 14-inch kodalith (a type of photographic printing paper), then fed into rotoscope machines that projected the image onto high-contrast film with opaque areas that light couldn’t pass through – a single frame could use up to 35 such layers for complex shots, from faces and lasers to flashing lights on suits.

These were then painted and backlit individually, essentially turning the live action footage of TRON into an animated movie, a process that was more complex and time-consuming than anyone could have anticipated.

The scale of the problem became obvious soon after filming completed. In October 1981, Lisberger presented two minutes of finished footage to a gathering of financial backers in Las Vegas. The clip greatly pleased the assembled suits, but Lisberger’s relief veiled a mounting sense of dread: those two minutes had only just been scraped together during the three months since principal photography had ended, and on his calculations they’d need another 60 or 70 months to complete the movie at the rate they were working.

Initial panic led to some desperate suggestions – at one point Lisberger considered asking local college students to paint remaining cells for extra credit – until eventually it was decided to ship the cells to a studio in Taiwan. And despite a slew of further problems (the humidity of the Taiwanese transit led to the painted cells returning stuck together in the initial batches), the whole process somehow came together, something Lisberger attributes to those same Disney old-timers who had regarded the CGI elements of TRON with such

dread. Dealing with thousands of cells under impossible deadlines was what they did best, and Lisberger recalls one elderly animator telling him, with a nostalgic smile, that this was exactly what it was like under Walt: in over their heads, terrified that they were up against the one deadline they couldn’t possibly meet.

“Somewhere along the line,” says Lisberger, “we realised that we had this down to a system.

Everybody knew the problems and limitations, but now we had plans for dealing with them. I think we must have made half the movie in the last two months of postproduction. Which was a shame, because just as we felt we were on top of it, the whole process was over. It was a mad dash to the finish line and then we collapsed.”

If the director had hoped for a well-deserved rest in the aftermath of TRON ’s development, he was to be disappointed; the film’s release in July 1982 may have been less physically demanding than its production, but it was no less stressful.

Initial reviews were less than favourable.

Many expressed frustration on the part of viewers infuriated by a fundamental inability to understand what was going on; some denounced the special effects as a series of smoke and mirrors struggling to hide the fact that the film lacked humanity. ‘It’s got momentum and it’s got marvels, but it’s without heart,’ screamed the Canadian Globe and Mail.

‘It’s a visionary technological achievement without vision.’

Nor did the film industry fall on its knees in praise of the pioneering effects; if anything, the reaction was one of jittery unease akin to that of the Disney traditionalists, and the Academy refused to even nominate TRON for a visual effects Oscar because it felt the use of computers constituted cheating. The award went instead to ET, which had been made on half the budget and released a month earlier to a genuinely rapturous reception.

Disney was left feeling decidedly envious: usually they were the ones with the cute family hit, yet here they were punting a complex sci-fi

rollercoaster that no one seemed to understand, themselves included.

Lisberger’s real crime with TRON, like Alan Kay and his Dynabook, was being too far ahead of his time. It took almost another decade for CGI to be embraced by the mainstream: Terminator 2, released in 1991, snatched the same Oscar denied TRON for its digital wizardry. By then many of the kids who had been dragged beaming out of the closing credits of TRON by their baffled parents were programming computers themselves, and many went on to work in special effects largely thanks to the transformative experience of watching Lisberger’s vision brought to life on the big screen. Had they been the ones judging the movie upon its release, and not their parents, there may have been more critical acclaim than condemnation.

As it is, time has been the true judge of TRON, and its ever-growing cult credibility stands as its ultimate legacy. It appears to have aged so well for several reasons: the effects, for example, stand up today for the simple reason that they never attempted to emulate reality, but in mimicking the vectorlined pathways of cyberspace, set a benchmark that remains as resonant as it is pleasingly retro. Another is the increasing relevance of the spiritual implications underpinning the relationship between the real and digital worlds: in an age when most communication takes place electronically, it’s hard not to hear a nagging warning at the heart of TRON. “It’s taken almost 30 years,” says Lisberger, “but people are finally looking to computers to define themselves, and dividing their lives into two separate realities. And I think some of us are already feeling a sense of unease about that, a growing concern that it’s only a matter of time before we start looking for a way to bridge that gap and make ourselves whole again: to live in one world, to have one life. All of that was stuff I tried to get into TRON, and it was a lonely journey for me at the time. But it seems finally to be making sense.”

045

Reality Bites

H y p er va n 2005 Posed i n t h e eq uestri an co u rt of t h e Du pier est ate. Created for T h e Gn om on Wor ksh op.

046 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Nine

years

into

the

For

the

have his

last

work

out as

informed of

a

the

these

our

the

unknown

laid

TRON.

in

making, with

four a

visual

decades,

path

for

concept likes

of

exclusive

lives

to

Sentury

come

us

artist

Alien,

is

futurist his all in

a

v o ya g e

Syd

Mead.

illustrations to

f o l lo w,

and

H o l ly w o o d

has

Blade

previews seen

II

R u nn e r

reveal

t hr o u g h

and

a

taste

his

eyes.

047

Village M achine Launch 2003 C reated for a one-m an exhibition as Artist in Reside nce at the Pasadena C ity College.

048 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Future Concourse 1999 C reated for personal collec tion.

Me ga c o a ch 2006 C reated for p e rson al col lec t ion .

049

Future L i fe st yle S c en a r io : Excite 2008 Created for cor p orate project on a br ie f to i nven t a scen ar io t h at feat ured var iou s p erson al l i fe st yle ar t ifa c ts t h at com plem en ted t h e sce n a r io of ‘exc i te’ .

S yd M e a d’ s Sen t u r y II wi l l be avai l able to bu y n ex t year t h rough Design Studio Press. www.designstudiopress.com

050 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

BILL HICKS THE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION

“Bill Hicks had an unerring ability to find the lie, shine a bright light on it and while doing so, create some of the most incredible and lasting comedy you will ever hear … If Bill were around now, America would be a better place.” – HENRY ROLLINS

2CD / 2DVD BOX SET CONTAINING BILL’S MOST CHERISHED STAND-UP, EXCLUSIVE MATERIAL FROM FAMILY ARCHIVES, SONGS BY HICKS AND LINER NOTES BY HENRY ROLLINS, PAUL OUTHWAITE AND CLIVE ANDERSON. DVDs include rare, never before seen performance footage from Bill Hicks’ personal archives and early years interview footage PLUS the cult short film NINJA BACHELOR PARTY. www.billhicks.com | www.rykodisc.com | www.ada-global.com

As

freed o m

of

inf o rmati o n

v ies

free

capitalism

and

market the

of

rise

with the

o nline s o ciet y , what d o es it

mean

to

be

a

first - cent u r y W o rds

by

Tom

twent y hacker ?

Seymour

acking isn’t about breaking and entering,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said. “It’s about being unafraid to break things in order to make them better.”

A computer, like capitalism, is based on the premise of systems, ownership and security. But security can be breached, property trespassed and systems destroyed. Hacking may conjure an image of a geek in a basement, but in reality it is much more than that.

Hackers are analysts, rebels, entrepreneurs and rejectionists, drawing back the iron curtain of authority and using technology to beckon a better world. In cinema, the hacker has become an emblem; a lone freedom fighter bathed in the grey-glow of a computer screen, fingers whizzing across a keyboard. Hacking is, as the journalist David Leigh describes it, ‘a distinct psychological genre’..

Keanu Reeve’s Neo bursting awake in his grimy bachelor pad and receiving a MiniDisc from the White Rabbit. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt high-wiring into CIA headquarters to steal a list of covert agents. Wayne Knight’s Dennis taking down the mainframe and letting out the raptors in Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith rewiring the alien craft to celebrate Independence Day. Hugh Jackman given 60 seconds to break into the ‘Department of Defense’ in Swordfish. Cinema has depicted hacking in all its guises and quandaries, from the virtuous to the ethically dubious to the egocentric and deranged.

Many of these films exhibit a Cold War perspective of a world defined by the existence of a wall. Today, however, the defining symbol of our interactions is not a wall, but a net.

052 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

T h e R e W i r e d S o c i e t y

053

The internet has filtered into every aspect of our society. As hackers like Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and Pirate Bay’s Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij have become global icons, the significance of the hacker has changed, their identity corroded, its definition clouded.

Zuckerberg, 25, whose work on Facebook has provided a $7 billion kitty, is a self-confessed hacker. When he was still at school, he invented a software package that predicted a user’s music tastes. Microsoft and AOL tried to buy it for millions, but he uploaded it to the net for free and joined the Ivy League. At Harvard, he hacked into the databases of different colleges and downloaded the headshots of female freshmen before inviting users to choose the best looking. He called it ‘Facemash’, and after it received 22,000 hits in a single evening, the seed of social networking was born. Today, he lives in a rented flat with his Chinese girlfriend. Working like any other programmer at the Facebook offices, he seems to have no real connection with the fortune he has earned.

But Zuckerberg’s creation has become a source of concern for a lot of existing hacker communities. Though probably the most successful product of a traditional hack, the social network is not welcomed with particular warmth by those who accuse it of muddying the waters of interaction. McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, is part of this chorus. His polemical book interprets hacking as a re-tuning of Marxist social theory for the modern age. He defines hacking as ‘the gift of time and attention to a project that can be shared with and by others.

That is, and perhaps always was, the vast, invisible part of how social formations get by.’

When asked about Facebook, Wark says: “For those of us in the overdeveloped world, the main game is the subtle overlap of hacking, working, playing and hustling. It is now not clear which is which. Is my Facebook time labour or play or hustling? Am I working for Zuckerberg, am I playing with my friends, am I trying to build an audience to sell my next book? Or am I spending all my time there on Farmville? This ambiguity about social communication time is, I think, the big question our culture will face.”

A century before Silicon Valley, the railroad represented the cutting edge of technological America. In the 1950s, members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s legendary Tech Model Railway Club were instrumental in developing the hacker culture. They built sophisticated train models and complex circuits, pushing the limits of early computer programs beyond their original design specifications. They gave rise to the hacking ethic – a silent doctrine based on the premise of transparency and knowledge.

At MIT, finding the ‘perfect hack’ became an obsession. Back in the ’50s, on a balmy summer’s night, a bunch of students left their halls and broke into Cambridge’s Kendall Square subway station where they set about greasing the lines. The first train to enter the station the next morning hit the grease and slid through to the other side before eventually coming to a stop in a darkened tunnel. When the driver backed up, the train slid through in the opposite direction. Not many people using Kendall Square got to work on time that morning. For several generations of MIT engineers it went down as the ultimate hack – a simple practical joke, but executed with such finesse that it obtained a certain beauty.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Gates’ Microsoft, Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple and Richard Stallman’s free software project GNU are all products,

054 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

and statements, born from that early culture. But these visionaries of information technology are just the tip of the iceberg. These are the hackers known in the game as ‘White Hats’; entrepreneurs concerned with conventional ethics who hack company software with the implicit desire to improve security through exposure, and to create rather than deconstruct.

But the loose network of hackers is as nuanced, and their motivations as varied, as any community. Not every hacker hacks for capital gain or the sake of mankind. In fact, most don’t. For every straight-laced White Hat, there is a Puck-like Grey Hat or an Iago-like Black Hat.

“ j u lian assange ’ s m o rals all o w him t o break internati o nal law with o u t an y acc o u ntabilit y. ”

Grey Hats are hackers unconcerned by the rule of law if it stands in the way of their discoveries. Perhaps the most iconic contemporary hacker is Julian Assange, the controversial face of Wikileaks. Assange – who rarely sleeps in the same bed twice, lives nocturnally, carries a desktop computer in a pack on his back and started his hacking career by heading up a group called ‘International Subversives’ – is a nailed-on Grey Hat. By exposing the human cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his work as a hacker is clearly servicing a thirst for a fact-based, transparent democracy and he has been applauded as a Robin Hood of the Information Age. But to achieve his ideals, Assange has broken every secrecy law ever passed and has been accused of failing his sources.

Bradley Manning, the US private charged with passing top-secret government files to Wikileaks under the online pseudonym Bradass87, is facing life in jail for the theft of government property; property that Assange eagerly published before joining the global lecture circuit. In an open letter to Assange, press freedom campaign group Reporters Without Borders accused him of ‘incredible irresponsibility’ for publishing the Afghan War logs ‘indiscriminately’. Assange’s methods, they said, ‘reflect a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility’. White House spokesperson Robert Gates said Assange had ‘blood on his hands’.

Grey Hats are hackers whose intentions are shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty. Assange’s objectives seem to be rooted in an uncompromisingly moral worldview. But these are morals that allow him to break international law without recourse to any process of accountability. He said recently: “There’s a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there’s a lot of information – information that

organisations are spending economic effort into concealing. That’s a really good signal that when the information gets out, there’s a hope of it doing some good.”

Assange’s assertion that the presence of money compromises the pursuit of information is deeply embedded in the culture of hacking.

Many hackers seem to regard themselves and their work as standing outside of, and rejecting, the worst excesses of capital democracy, with its accompanying trade-offs and equivocations. This is an age-old ideal, as prevalent in the first stories of hacking as in the latest.

For the baby-boomer generation, the world may have been smaller, but most of it was still closed from view. Journalism investigated, but governmental departments and big business remained inviolate.

But Generation Y live in a tertiary marketplace powered by creativity and freedom of information. We were given the internet and we showed them how to make it work. What does this mean for the hacking community? What role does it now have in this brave new world of venture capitalism?

“On the one hand, hacking has become a more widespread and self-aware cultural practice, and not just in computer-related fields,” Wark says. “Lots of people now think about themselves as members of communities that share information, make a gift of their labour, and achieve recognition from others for this. On the other hand, general social production has been more seamlessly integrated into internetbased media, from search engines to games and social networking. All of these portals extract a rent from ‘hosting’ such activity. I say ‘hosting’ because, in reality, they are the parasite – that which siphons off the surplus from its host, the host being social labour and creativity or, in other words, hacking.”

Hacking, in Wark’s world, is an extension of what the guys at the bottom of the pile have always done; adapt to survive. His manifesto places hacking as the only credible and justifiable response to pernicious authority and parasitical enterprise. He views the attempts to police it, or indeed choke it at source, as a classic exercise in wagoncircling self-preservation.

“Hacking is something that certain vested interests want to criminalise,” he argues. “It is exactly like the criminalising of the premodern forms of economy that went with the rise of capitalism. For example, weavers used to always take some of the cloth in exchange for their work. The capitalist putting-out system criminalised this as ‘theft’.

Likewise, culture has always worked by borrowing and adapting. Now the theft is of so-called ‘intellectual property’.”

Back in the day, Black Hats – or self-termed ‘social engineers’ – like Kevin Mitnick (at the time of his arrest the most wanted computer criminal in the US whose rap sheet included hacking the Pentagon) could manipulate the script and jump down the rabbit-hole. Gary McKinnon, a Glasgow-born systems administrator and Aspergers sufferer, is currently awaiting extradition to the US for what one prosecutor termed ‘the biggest hack of all time’, after he broke into 97 different US military and NASA computers. His online pseudonym, SOLO, reflects his working habits.

McKinnon’s motivations, and indeed his grasp of reality, remain unclear. He insists to this day that he uncovered on those machines evidence of alien-life cover-ups, antigravity technology and the suppression of free-energy fuels. The American government has never commented on the veracity of these claims, but successive administrations have tried to enforce his extradition.

Throughout his tour of America’s most secure information repositories, McKinnon would leave his detractors the occasional goading message: ‘US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days… It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11… I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.’

055

T ru t h i s B e au t y Data visualisation brings the raw stuff of information to life.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beautiful and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the truth.

Words by Matt Bochenski

Flight Patterns Aaron Koblin 056 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Photoperiod Piccadilly Rupert Burton

W

e’re surrounded by information.

News reports, governments, websites, social networks – all of them assault us with data on a daily basis. Whether unedited or analysed, in this maelstrom of facts and figures it’s become increasingly difficult to tell what anything actually means.

Data visualisation does to information what Steven Lisberger did to Kevin Flynn’s computer programme – it takes something abstract and brings it to life through motion graphics. But it does more than that too; it takes information into the realm of art. It makes meaning beautiful.

So the paths of air traffic over North America become tracers of light in Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Or the US military budget is turned into a cascade of tanks in Olivier Patté’s Softwar.

Or oscillating ribbons document a day in the life of Piccadilly Circus in Rupert Burton’s Photoperiod Piccadilly.

These films, hosted on Vimeo, take the raw stuff of data and animate it both literally and metaphorically. They imagine the unimaginable, like the US defence budget of $549 billion, or reveal order in apparent chaos, like the moment

Softwar Olivier Patté

in Flight Patterns when the random specks of light suddenly illuminate a perfect map of the US as dawn breaks and the country awakes to its working day.

“The main purpose is to cross illustration or graphic design with the meaning behind it,” says Olivier Patté, whose work is published under the name of his studio, Moustache. Having studied maths and computer programming at university, Patté switched to graphic design and found in data visualisation a perfect admixture of the three.

Like the language of mathematics, data viz is about the intrinsic beauty of information – of language, numbers and systems – only here it exists in the visual world of filmmaking.

But beauty isn’t the end in itself. The information these films present must be accurate, useful, useable. And it’s here that filmmakers have a distinct advantage over their traditional print counterparts. “The classic difference between print and what you can do on the web [is that] you can tell a story,” says information designer Nigel Holmes, whose Vampire Energy, a film about the hidden costs of keeping your lights on, marries data visualisation and the old public service broadcast. “You’ve got words, you’ve got music,

you’ve got silence, you’ve got movement, you’ve got sound effects. The thing that looks incredibly complex on the page can now breathe.”

The father of data visualisation, Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath, famously remarked that ‘words divide; images unite’. And yet underpinning the art of information is a battle of ideas. Meaning is open to interpretation but, in this adolescent age of data visualisation, more often than not it’s beauty that gets the final word, even if it’s only skin deep.

For Patté, ‘beauty’ is something that must exist both within and without the data itself. “The motivation of data visualisation is to cross beauty and facts,” he says. “You have to go deeply inside the truth and unearth the meaning.” As Keats knew: beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that’s all you need to know vimeo.com/aaronkoblin vimeo.com/freresmoustache vimeo.com/user4137048 Head to the Protein Forum at onedotzero on November 12 to see some of London’s finest practitioners of data visualisation showcase their work and share their knowledge.

057

Wo r d s b y C i a n T r ay n o r

058 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

F r e n c h e l e ct r o l e g e n d s D a ft P u n k a r e t r a v e r s i n g a

digital

landscape

that

is

e n t i r e ly

their

own.

059

dismissed as ‘daft punk’ by a review in Melody Maker, but they liked the sound of that. It made them seem abstract, colourful and unique – three things that Darlin’ certainly were not.

By the time Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were old enough to go to clubs, they had become excited by the possibilities of dance music. “We definitely were having more fun at an Orbital show than at a Teenage Fanclub show, even though we still loved their music more,” said Bangalter, who is typically referred to as the taller, more talkative one.

“There was a level of excitement that was not the same.”

Having experimented with samplers and drum machines at home, the pair brought a tape of their first efforts as Daft Punk to a washed-out rave at Euro Disney in 1993.

There, they handed it to Stuart MacMillan of Scottish production duo Slam, who released one of the tracks on their label, Soma Quality Recordings. Though titled ‘The New Wave’, few could have imagined the impact their sound would come to have on French house music, let alone dance floors around the globe.

aft Punk have no need to hide. It’s not difficult to uncover their real identities. Their faces have appeared on a magazine cover, there’s a video of the duo DJing at a Milwaukee rave in 1996 and there’s even a slideshow of every available photograph of the pair: undisguised, aloof, self-conscious.

But that was back in the early ’90s, before they courted an air of mystery, before they reinvented themselves as robots and before their debut album, Homework, guided house music into the mainstream.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have always been shy. They met while at school in Paris in 1987 and bonded over a love of film, heading to the cinema together on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Along with Laurent Brancowitz (who would later join pop outfit Phoenix) they formed an indie rock group called Darlin’ in 1992. Though the band was short-lived (“Six months, four songs, two gigs and that was it,” Bangalter told Mixmag in 1997), they placed one track on a compilation released by Stereolab’s label, Duophonic Records. It was subsequently

060 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

A bidding war between record labels was settled when the pair eventually signed with Virgin, on the condition that they retained control of their image, their release schedule and their master recordings. With some guidance from Bangalter’s father, Daniel Vangarde, a French disco producer in the ’70s, the duo aimed for mainstream success without having to compromise their integrity. “We’ve got much more control than money,” said Bangalter in 2001. “We live in a society where money is what people want, so they can’t get the control.

We chose. Control is freedom. People say we’re control freaks, but control is controlling your destiny without controlling other people.”

Realising the importance of having a unique visual concept to accompany their releases, they decided to be as faceless as the music. They stopped touring; they began declining interviews; in photo shoots, they would disguise themselves with whipped cream, balaclavas and rubber masks. Then, after three years of preparation, 1997 saw the release of Homework, one of the most influential dance records of the decade.

It started with a rumble: a loop of undecipherable words thumping its way towards clarity. ‘Daftendirekt’ was Daft Punk’s introduction to the world, just as it was for their renowned live sets (the track is an excerpt from a performance at a party in Ghent). The title ‘Homework’ not only referenced

their base of operations in Bangalter’s bedroom, but also the fact that the pair had thoroughly studied their influences.

They had cleverly synthesised distorted ’70s disco grooves with the style of early electronic music pioneers such as Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, matching the infectiousness of ’80s pop hits with the relentless thump of early ’90s acid house. Although only 50,000 copies were printed initially, demand was such that the album quickly sold over two million units in 35 countries.

This was the moment Daft Punk’s anonymity allowed their artistic vision to take centre stage. With Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Roman Coppola and photographer Seb Janiak enlisted to direct videos for the album’s four singles, the music almost became secondary. Though nothing connected the videos conceptually (Jonze turned the bawling ‘Da Funk’ into a short film about an earnest dog-man hybrid who limps through the city; Gondry created a visual representation of ‘Around the World’ through colourful choreography), the tinted hues of each hypnotic vignette earned them more exposure than any biography could have done, eventually warranting their own release as D.A.F.T. – A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes.

“When child

you’re you

judge

or

don’t a n a ly s e

music. not

You’re concerned

with it’s

a

whether cool

or

n ot. ”

Another by-product of Daft Punk’s independence is their habit of going on hiatus indefinitely. It took four years to deliver their second album, Discovery, and the difference in sound was jarring. With blasting horn samples, warped bass lines and pitch-shifted hooks as catchy as they are cheesy, the album’s Auto-Tuned synth-pop was not what people expected. It was too glossy, some said; too reliant on barelyaltered loops of George Duke, The Imperials and Edwin Birdsong. Yet almost unnoticeably, they had drawn from the same eras of music as Homework while managing to sound completely different.

“This album has a lot to do with our childhood and the memories of the state we were in at that stage of our lives,” Bangalter said upon its release. “It’s less of a tribute to the music from 1975 to 1985 as an era, and more about focusing on the time when we were zero-to-10-years-old.

When you’re a child you don’t judge or analyse music. You just like it because you like it. You’re not concerned with whether it’s cool or not.”

Given the album’s reception, it was a fair point. Only recently has the critical consensus been revised in light of its durability and influence. Taken along with Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ – a one-off side project

061

for Bangalter in 1998 which inspired the direction of Discovery – tracks such as ‘One More Time’, ‘Aerodynamic’, ‘Digital Love’ and ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ perfectly encapsulate the sound that propelled club music into the twenty-first century.

An anime musical may not have been what most people envisioned when they heard Discovery, but Daft Punk had been serious about the idea from the album’s inception. With a story arc fleshed out, the duo travelled to Tokyo in the hope of persuading one of their childhood heroes, manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, to supervise their take on the kind of space opera he was known for. Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, released in 2003, centred on alien rock band The Crescendolls, who are brought to earth, brainwashed and made to resemble humans. Exploitative record executives force the group through all the clichéd rigours of the manufactured pop industry until they become exhausted from over-exposure. With no dialogue and sound effects kept to a minimum, Interstella 5555 represents a simple allegory of music’s cult of celebrity, which Daft Punk have always defined themselves in opposition to.

By now Bangalter and de Homem-Christo had settled on a look that only reinforced this point: futuristic robot helmets created by special effects designer Tony Gardner. The artificial image protected their identities in a way that was compellingly enigmatic, but also formed the perfect vehicle for what the band’s musical message, based on a style and sound that feels entirely alien.

“The music has never been the most important thing,” said Bangalter in 2007. “What we are trying to do is put it in a way [so] that people can understand it’s not a marketing ploy. It’s just a general universe that we can create from fiction and reality.” That was the reasoning behind Daft Punk’s directorial debut, Electroma – the tale of two robots that have human makeovers only to be ostracised by their cyborg community in picket-fenced Middle America. Without dialogue or even Daft Punk’s music, the 70-minute film appropriates the extended, drifting shots of Gus Van Sant’s Death Trilogy as the robots stagger aimlessly through the desert, while rewiring the sentient delinquency of Michael Crichton’s Westworld.

The film was originally intended to be a video for the title track from their third album, Human After All. Once again,

062 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

the release followed a four-year hiatus from music and, once again, it initially disappointed fans and critics. The duo gave themselves just six weeks to create the album, and its dry, repetitive minimalism seemed uncharacteristically timid.

But then they unveiled the album’s visual accompaniment: the long-awaited resurrection of Daft Punk’s live show. Since their debut in 1997, the duo had performed just once – a charity gig in London back in 2001. At California’s Coachella festival in 2006, Daft Punk finally reappeared with an 11-tonne pyramid, their robot costumes simplified to leather bobsledding outfits, their album highlights merged into a multimedia extravaganza.

“We feel that people can’t have a relationship with someone who is above them,” de Homem-Christo told Paper magazine in 2007. “Robots don’t make people feel like there’s an idol on stage. It’s more like a rave party where the DJ isn’t important. This is what we do: we are two robots in this pyramid with this light show, but everything is [designed] for you to have fun and enjoy yourself.”

The success of the subsequent tour was captured in live album Alive 2007, contextualising a career arc that was now being embraced and reinterpreted by hip-hop artists like Kanye West and Busta Rhymes, as well as electronic acts such as Justice and LCD Soundsystem. “We come from a generation that wanted to make electronic music accepted, at a time [when] it was not,” Bangalter told Pitchfork. “It is now everywhere and it has been totally accepted. Consequently, there is now a younger generation that is more focused on making great electronic music, good parties and having fun, where there is [no longer] so much need for cultural and ideological statements in electronic music itself.”

Though it’s been five years since Human After All, for once in Daft Punk’s career everyone knew what was coming next. In March 2009 it was announced, with a hint of glee, that Daft Punk would score TRON: Legacy, and anticipation has been building ever since, causing fake leaks to surface several times this year. The authentic tracks that have emerged are brooding, menacing and magnetic transmissions – all you could want a mysterious circuit-board universe to sound like. The hardest thing for Daft Punk, however, is not measuring up to people’s expectations, but communicating an overall vision. This is why they’re willing to spend years ensuring that every career move slots together cohesively, while knowing that sometimes people can easily forget that they are, in fact, human after all

THE MOJO VISION AWARD WINNER 2010 Best Music Documentary

STARRING DR FEELGOOD WILKO JOHNSON LEE BRILLEAUX

CANVEY ISLAND MADE IN ESSEX DVD FEATURES

16 page booklet / postcard 1 hour of unseen interviews Directors commentary

“A rip-roaring account of Dr Feelgood, one of the best bands Britain ever produced, by Julien Temple who looks increasingly like our very finest rockumentarian.

A cinematic genius”. Mark Kermode

DVD OUT NOW www.oilcityconfidential.co.uk

Subscr ibe to our weekly newsletter and all these reviews will be delivered to your inbox on the day of release, along with those we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t squeeze into the mag. Read, watch then head t o w w w. l i t t l e w h i t e l i e s . c o . u k a n d p o s t your opinion online.

Miral Directed by Julian Schnabel S t a r r i n g H i a m A b b a s s, F r e i d a P i n t o, Wi l l e m D a fo e Released December 3

"M

iral is more than just a film,” said actress Yasmine Elmasri to a packed press conference at the Venice Film Festival in early September, where the movie had its world premiere. Directed by Julian Schnabel, Miral traces both the arc of the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the life of the eponymous Palestinianborn journalist, played by Freida Pinto, who was defined by it. “It is,” continued Elmasri, gagging with emotion, “a universal agreement between artists who share a vision and who share values, and who decided to get together and represent these values to the world.” The speech received a spontaneous and hearty round of applause from the globe-spanning collection of journalists who filled the Lido’s cavernous conference hall. But, strangely, nobody there that day quite had the courage to mention the fact that Miral is also a great big pile of shit.

Even as the title sequence rolls, you know you’re in trouble. As maps of the region dissolve endlessly over each other and syrupy strings wail on the soundtrack, you get a taste of the movie in microcosm: over-long, over-simplistic, overblown.

And then it begins. We are introduced to Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), a kindly and wealthy Palestinian who founds an orphanage in 1948 and

is made to say clunky self-describing sentences such as, “My goal is to educate these kids and to give them hope!”

From the gardens of Hind’s orphanage and the girls who pass through it, we get glimpses of the Six Day War, the occupation of East Jerusalem and the radicalisation of formerly peaceful Palestinian women who now say, “Grr… I want them to suffer as we do!” Things really kick off, however, in 1987, with the arrival of Pinto’s Miral. The latter, bizarrely sporting a full-throated Indian accent, is quickly radicalised by a sexy freedom fighter called Hani (Omar Metwally), and the pair display an unerring penchant for hot romantic clinches during which, mid-smooch, one will say to the other, “There is a fracture in the PLO. I really believe that Partition can work!” To which the other, still sucking face, will reply, “Why can’t there be one country for everyone?”

You really couldn’t write this. But then, someone did – and in this case it’s the ‘real Miral herself’, Rula Jebreal, who wrote the book on which it is based, and is Schnabel’s oft-snapped squeeze. Of course, the cinematic annals are littered with politically naïve Western-made movies about the region. And yet, say what you will about Paul Newman as a blueeyed, blond-haired Jewish freedom fighter in Exodus,

or the slick action thrills and spills in Spielberg’s Munich, but at least these movies were competent pieces of filmmaking.

The real crime of Miral is not just that it is politically sophomoric, but that it is formally inept. The performances are unanimously weak (Pinto, in particular, is simply too inexperienced to shoulder an entire movie), and the writing verges on execrable. All the while Schnabel’s direction – imbuing the movie at every turn with a cure-forcancer righteousness – is unduly pompous. On the positive side, at the same Venice Film Festival press conference, Schnabel announced that he wasn’t going to direct another movie for at least two more years. So it’s not all bad news. Kevin Maher

Anticipation. T h e

man behind Basquiat does the Middle East.

Intriguing.

Enjoyment.

Is this a joke?

Or a film art ‘happening’?

In Retrospect.

The horror!

065

Gareth Edwards

Filmography Gareth Edwards M o n s t e r s (2010)

M o n s t e r Ta l e n t I n t e r v i e w b y S t e v e n Tu r n e r

F

irst-time director Gareth Edwards is in uncharted territory. Word of mouth on his debut, Monsters, has seen the 35year-old Brit caught in a whirlwind of festival screenings in Brazil, Toronto, Korea, Spain, Holland, and of course the UK, to present his story of a stranded couple heading home through an alien-infested landscape.

At first glance the story seems straightforward, bearing all the standard marks of a giant monster movie; post-rampage destruction, stranded couple and alien spore. But look a little closer and you’ll see the threads of class commentary, US immigration policy and military intervention abroad, which makes us wonder what type of film this actually is.

“Even now I find it hard to explain,” Edwards says.

“It’s a road movie, and then at the heart of it is a love story. But it’s definitely a monster movie, I was adamant about that. That’s the main reason I kept ‘Monsters’ as the title, otherwise it might be too easy to take the creatures out at a later point and make it a romance drama.”

The other interesting aspect is that the film starts where most movies end, after the initial panic, when the aliens have become part of everyday life.

“People aren’t running and screaming anymore,” Edwards explains. “These things are in the world and it’s absolutely normal. It’s kind of like if Godzilla is September 11, this is Afghanistan.”

To fully capture this ideal, Edwards and crew decamped to Guatemala, Belize and Mexico for the majority of the filming, to show the street-level effect of such an alien intrusion. On the limited budget (reported to be a scarcely credible $15,000), this meant utilising every available resource at his disposal, including using ‘real’ people and locations.

On more than one occasion though, this led into

066 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

some uncomfortable territory. “Shooting over in South America was really exciting, but really scary at times, and there were lots of crazy things that were dangerous in retrospect,” he recounts. “But I was more scared of fucking up the film and it being rubbish than anything else.”

Adding to the gonzo approach, Edwards chose to film without a full script, preferring to give his actors scene treatments and the freedom to improvise, which was not an inconsiderable task seeing as leads Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able are onscreen for the entire movie. “It was all very much the actors randomly talking and putting stuff out there, but when you tell people that you don’t have a script, they interpret that as not having a story. We had a story with all the beats and the major turning points,” he explains. “It didn’t say something like, ‘We learn that Kaulder [McNairy] has a six-year-old’, or, ‘He met this woman in such and such a place’. It would say that we learn about Kaulder’s past, and that he’s actually got a child, but I’d leave it to Scoot to decide what the name of his wife was, how they met. That was completely up to him because I wanted them to own it.”

This creative freedom meant that the director could adopt a more fluid approach with the expectation that his film could branch off in unforeseen directions, much like the characters’ journey. Free from big-budget constraints, Edwards could choose to push as many boundaries as he could get away with.

“Every time I was presented with a choice, whether it be what is going to be my next shot, what should the actors do, where should we shoot, I would purposely ask myself, ‘What about this is so extreme that it’s shit?’ I’d see if I could break the

shot,” he recounts. “What you find is that as you try and destroy the work it takes you somewhere that is more interesting than you were trying to go.

“And when you pull back from destruction, when you’ve gone too far, when you pull just a little bit, it gives you something where you’d never have gone, never have had the balls to go. I think because of that open-mindedness, I’d say 70 per cent of the film is stuff I never pictured before we left. A lot of the shots and the little moments in the film had all been born out of this sort of strange attitude to fuck up the film.”

So with Monsters on the verge of general release, it’s worth asking if Edwards broke the original concept, or if it is the movie he had in mind when he began the journey. “It’s not the film I set out to make at the very beginning,” he reflects.

“But what I set out to make in a way was a film that would surprise me and would be unplanned.

Whatever the film was I’d set out to make, at the end of the process I wanted it to be unrecognisable to me from at the start. So I wanted to let this all unfold, roll with the strengths and whatever starts becoming interesting, let that take over the film.”

Edwards continues: “The story was always going to be about these two people that go on this journey and fall for each other but can’t do anything about it. On that point we did make the film we’d set out to make, but I wonder if you sent the film back in time two years ago and I had to watch it, whether I would recognise it as my own film. And I think what I would say is, ‘Wow, I would never make that movie but I wish I had’, and that’s how I feel about it.”

Check out the full transcript of this interview online in the week of the film’s release.

Monsters Directed by Gareth Edwards Starring Whitney Able, Scoot McNair y Released December 3

M

arketed as a British sibling to Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Monsters is in fact an entirely different creature altogether.

An intimate character piece set within a sciencefiction framework, it prizes mood, atmosphere and personality above action or spectacle.

When a US probe carrying extraterrestrial specimens crash-lands south of the border, Central America is transformed into a quarantine zone. As the eponymous monsters emerge from the jungles, America’s response is both typical and ungenerous – sending troops into the infected regions while literally walling itself off from the problem.

Trapped on the wrong side of the fault line between rich and poor, rescued and damned, is Samantha (Whitney Able), whose magazine publisher father is desperate to secure her safe passage back to America. He instructs one of his employees – photojournalist Andrew (Scoot McNairy) – to accompany her across the blighted and dangerous country. What follows is an introspective road movie across a landscape that is as alien to their American eyes as its unearthly occupiers.

Monsters is a masterclass in misdirection. First time writer/director Gareth Edwards may have a background in visual effects, but inventive framing,

smart editing and a suggestive soundtrack allow the audience’s imagination to do the heavy lifting. When Edwards does showcase his special effects expertise, the results are impressive given the film’s limited budget – the monsters themselves are convincing, if a little unimaginative.

In the absence of expensive CG baubles, Edwards is free to focus his camera and energy elsewhere.

Gradually, Monsters emerges as an allegory of, well, almost everything. Mexico’s drug wars, Plan Colombia, Hurricane Katrina, immigration, cultural imperialism, military adventurism – all are evoked in the film’s scattergun subtext. Evoked, that is, but never really interrogated. Ideas and images float around the periphery, but it’s not clear that Monsters has anything considered to say beyond a general impression that the West’s abandonment of the Third World is as futile as it is inhumane. These monsters will eventually come home to roost.

Indeed, the monsters of the film’s title might just as easily be the corrupt bureaucrats, the cynical privateers or trigger-happy grunts encountered by Samantha and Andrew in their journey through the hinterlands of human morality.

Amidst some excellently conceived alien sequences and expansive shots of America hunched behind its concrete barricade, it’s to the faces of

these protagonists that the film constantly returns.

Able and McNairy – a couple in real-life – have an unforced chemistry that manifests itself most clearly in their moments of quiet tenderness. And yet the odd clunky scene makes you wonder whether a higher profile pair of actors might have added an extra dimension to their roles.

But if Monsters lacks the revelatory excitement of District 9, it is certainly a success on its own terms.

Perhaps the better comparison is with Duncan Jones’ Moon, another intelligently conceived UK science-fiction film that points to a bright future for its director. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation.

An even lower budget Distr ict 9 from the UK? As if.

Enjoyment.

Never less than impressive but never quite as good as it threatens to be.

In Retrospect. C o n t e m p o r a r y British sci-fi is evolving into an exciting new genre.

067

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale Directed by Jalmar i Helander S t a r r i n g O n n i To m m i l a , J o r m a To m m i l a , I l m a r i J ä r v e n p ä ä Released December 3

D

eep beneath the Korvatunturi mountains in the heart of Lapland’s frozen wilderness, something evil is lurking. Suspended in an icy tomb 468 metres underground lies a creature so unspeakably wicked, local townsfolk have sworn its existence to secrecy for centuries. Now, thanks to a team of unwitting American geologists, it’s about to be woken up.

Adapted from writer/director Jalmari Helander’s 2003 short of the same name, Rare Exports is Eurohorror at its most feral: an enchanting and ambitious riff on feel-good seasonal cinema, dripping with menace and old-fashioned scares.

The hero of this anti-fairy tale is Pietari (Onni Tommila), a typically cherub-faced Finnish pup who craves nothing more than the respect of his toughloving father Rauno (Jorma Tommila). The more Pietari tries to help, however, the more he gets in the way. And so while Rauno prepares for the annual reindeer hunt, Pietari is confined to his room, where

he feeds his wild imagination with ancient fables of indigenous demons.

As it happens, Pietari’s knowledge of nightmare creatures is about to come in very handy. Why? Santa Claus is coming to town. And he’s not bearing gifts and spreading festive cheer. Indeed, this notso-jolly St Nick has an insatiable bloodlust that promises to stain this perpetually white wonderland an unsettling shade of crimson.

Rare Exports works not just because it is crisply shot, sincerely acted and profoundly chilling, but because it taps into a part of the human psyche where magic and make-believe are at their most tangible and untamed. No matter what age you stopped leaving mince pies and sherry by the fireplace, Helander returns you to a place fixed with the memory of childhood innocence.

And yet its intensely visceral nature marks Rare Exports as one of the more adult children’s

films in recent memory. As an antidote to whatever Tim Allen-faced turkey Hollywood is serving up this holiday season, however, this is an enriching story that will no doubt thrill and charm younger audiences. Just be prepared to start looking for a good therapist. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

F i n n i s h Yo u Tu b e hit goes feature length. Could be an unexpected gem.

Enjoyment.

One of the best ( a n d m o s t b r u t a l ) f e s t i ve k i d ’s films in years.

In Retrospect. I t ’ s g o n n a b e a fright Christmas.

Machete Directed by Robert Rodr iguez S t a r r i n g D a n n y Tr e j o , Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal Released November 26

T

he film of the trailer of the best B-movie you’ve never seen arrives onscreen in a sun-baked blur.

But stretched to 105 minutes and stunt-cast to within an inch of its life, surely it could only ever disappoint?

A tongue-in-cheek preview from Rodriguez and Tarantino’s ill-fated Grindhouse, Machete showed Danny Trejo as a blade-wielding badass, lopping limbs, loving ladies... you know the drill. We’ve seen this film so many times before we can fill in the blanks – dead wife, angry police chief, trail of bloody vengeance. For some reason, Rodriguez has seen fit to join the dots for us, but he’s competing with a fantasy and not, as it turns out, very well.

The film begins brilliantly with – you guessed it – the old dead wife/angry police chief/trail of bloody vengeance combo, plus Steven Seagal (looking like his own alcoholic uncle) and a lady with an unusual

068 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

secret in her vagina. But then it really flatlines. The overcomplicated plot involves Trejo being duped into shooting Texan senator Robert De Niro over Mexican border-control issues, but Rodriguez also makes time for Jessica Alba’s immigration cop, Michelle Rodriguez’s freedom fighter, Jeff Fahey’s slimy aide, Don Johnson’s evil Elvis-alike, plus Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin and Tom Savini in extended cameos. That’s a lot of muscle with not an awful lot to do, and you can’t help feeling Rodriguez has overstuffed the taco.

In fact, whenever Trejo’s not disembowelling someone, the movie struggles. Preachy, speechy and inexplicably pleased with itself, it zigzags between okay action scenes and terrible talky ones. But there are more serious issues at play here. By elevating humble B-movies into event cinema, Rodriguez (and Tarantino for that matter, whose Deathproof is by far

the worse culprit) grafts on tricks, ticks and pointless longueurs that have no place in exploitation cinema.

When it works, as in Kill Bill and Planet Terror, it pushes their films to the next glorious level; when it doesn’t, we’re left stranded in the gaudy neverwhere between good fun and empty fetishism. Matt Glasby

Anticipation.

Should be a bit of a laugh.

Enjoyment.

All set up and no punchline.

In Retrospect. T h e j o k e ’ s not funny anymore.

onedotzero_adventures in motion festival 2010 10-14 november | BFI Southbank + BFI IMAX a thrilling mix of innovation, inspiration and convergence across arts, culture and entertainment

the return to london of the internationally renowned festival onedotzero_adventures in motion presents a scintillating array of audiovisual and cinematic experiences, highlighting the future of moving image.

showcasing the most progressive new short films, exclusive previews, feature films, music videos, animations, motion graphics, playful interactive installations, eye-popping performances, inspiring talks, director q+as and bar parties.

book your tickets now!

BFI Southbank box office: 020 7928 3232 www.bfi.org.uk/onedotzero www.onedotzero.com

supported by:

in partnership:

media partner:

“IS THIS THE GREATEST WAR FILM EVER?” The Independent on Sunday

A FILM BY TIM

HETHERINGTON and SEBASTIAN JUNGER

ONE PLATOON, ONE VALLEY, ONE YEAR

★★★★★ LITTLE WHITE LIES ★★★★ THE GUARDIAN ★★★★ FINANCIAL TIMES ★★★★ METRO

ON DVD 29 NOVEMBER

COMPOSITE IMAGE © TIM HETHERINGTON

★★★★★ ★★★★★ FHM UNCUT ★★★★ ★★★★ EMPIRE TIME OUT ★★★★ ★★★★ THE TIMES THE INDEPENDENT ★★★★ ★★★★ EVENING STANDARD DAILY MIRROR ★★★★ ★★★★ DAILY EXPRESS THE SUNDAY TIMES ★★★★ ★★★★ DAILY TELEGRAPH THE SCOTSMAN

restrepo.dogwoof.com FILMS

The Be All and End All D i r e c t e d b y B r u c e We b b Starring Neve McIntosh, Josh Bolt, Eugene Byr ne Released December 3

V

irgins. We’ve all been one. Although, judging from cinema, you’d think this affliction only affected teenage American boys in coming-of-age comedies.

Even though they’re in Merseyside, the two protagonists of The Be All and End All are in the same boat. Robbie (Josh Bolt) and Ziggy (Eugene Byrne) spend their caravan holiday larking around on the beach, guzzling vodka behind the local pub, and, in Rob’s case, trying to cop off with university-age barmaid Sophie (Bryony Seth). Imagine his disappointment when a late-night liaison back at her digs is scuppered by the discovery that, no, he can’t hold his liquor after all.

His misfortune doesn’t end there, as Robbie is diagnosed with a fatal heart condition and is placed, much to his dismay, in the hospital’s children’s ward.

Things are bad – almost as bad as when Liverpool were beaten by Man United. How will he lose the big V now, when he’s surrounded by toddlers and coddled daily by his parents?

Thankfully, Ziggy is on point. He devises various schemes to help his chum pop his cherry, starting by propositioning every girl at school, and ending – with heist movie bravado – with a wheelchairaided jailbreak to a nearby massage parlour. Bolt and Byrne exhibit an endearing, untrained streak of naturalism, buoying the film with their deliciously Scouse tones. And the script, from Steve Lewis and Tony Owen, flashes with cheeky humour that, for a time, undercuts the dour nature of the narrative and pokes fun at the exaggerated earnestness with which we approach death.

But once the drama hits, it does so bluntly.

Bruce Webb proves a subtle director when letting the boys’ chemistry develop over uncomplicated, static shots, but an overbearing acoustic soundtrack pushes the proceedings towards tear-jerking manipulation. And an awkward subplot, featuring Ziggy’s search for his estranged father, desperately

attempts to nail down the over-arching themes of love and companionship. It is all far too heavyhanded; those concerned should have had more faith in the leading pair. Michael Leader

Anticipation.

A q u i r k y, distinctive genre mash-up, beloved by second-tier festivals.

Enjoyment. A c o n f l i c t e d , u n e v e n experience: sugary kitchen-sink realism with wank jokes.

In Retrospect.

The central duo is memorable, but the f i l m d i v e s t h e w r o n g w a y.

Into Eternity Directed by Michael Madsen Starring Timo Äikäs, Carl Reinhold Bråkenhjelm, Mikael Jensen Released November 12

D

oom mongering eco-docs everywhere are telling us the earth is dying and we’re to blame.

Whether the hot topic is oil, food or population growth, the message is almost unanimously clear: the human race has to act, and it has to act now.

Into Eternity, then, is the other side of the coin: its focus not on what we should be doing, but what is already being done.

In 2004, just a few miles from the remote Finnish town of Olkiluoto, a team of engineers and nuclear physicists started digging a tunnel. Boring deep into the bedrock, they’re building the world’s first permanent nuclear waste repository. The project is codenamed ONKALO, and it’s forecast to be completed in the year 2120, when the facility will be filled up and sealed shut for 100,000 years; the time it takes for radiation to lose its toxicity.

070 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Enchanted by the thought that the world’s largest man-made structure is under construction in his backyard, director Michael Madsen poses some weighty questions to the chiefs of this ambitious operation, and he gets some pretty weighty replies.

Not just an engineering marvel, ONKALO is also one almighty logistical and ethical head fuck, and the more Madsen probes, the more he turns to philosophical chin scratching.

The problem is, not a soul Madsen speaks to has the answers he’s looking for, even if they do try their best to keep his spiritual musing well fed.

When it’s revealed that, when finished, ONKALO (as the only facility of its kind currently under commission) will only be able to hold a fraction of the world’s nuclear waste, Madsen passes on the opportunity to put existing global nuclear waste

management policy under the microscope.

What would have been better capped at the half-hour mark reveals itself as a 75-minute postcard to the future, which Madsen autographs with sanctimonious relish. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

Both film and t u n n e l s o u n d d e e p.

Enjoyment. Wa s t e f u l a n d largely unengaging.

In Retrospect.

Extract the core issue and Into Eter nity becomes endlessly fascinating.

On Tour Directed by Mathieu Amalr ic S t a r r i n g M i ra n d a C o l c l a s u r e, S u z a n n e R a m s e y, M at h i e u A m a l r i c Released December 10

B

est known to UK audiences as an actor of ferocious intensity whose performances in films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly earned him a call up as a Bond villain, Mathieu Amalric is also a filmmaker with several shorts and a number of accomplished features to his name. He carries off with panache his role as the Renaissance man of contemporary French cinema.

On Tour may have been derided by critics when it screened in Cannes, but it went on to secure a Best Director prize. The nucleus of the negativity was the perception that the film is too freewheeling and digressive. It is, but this approach suits the material perfectly and gives On Tour its considerable charm and dissolute character.

Joachim (Amalric), a former Parisian television producer, has left everything behind – children, friends, enemies, lovers, regrets – to start a new life in America. He comes back with a team of burlesque performers to whom he has fed fantasies of a tour of France and, most enticingly, of Paris.

Travelling from port to port, the curvaceous showgirls invent an extravagant fantasy world of warmth and hedonism, despite the constant round of impersonal hotels and lack of money. The show gets an enthusiastic response from men and

women alike, but the performers’ dream of a last grand show in the capital goes up in smoke when Joachim is betrayed by an old friend.

Inspired by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s The Other Side of the Music Hall, a candid account of the writer’s experiences performing in the provinces as part of a repertory group putting on a scandalous pantomime, On Tour’s closest cinematic forebear is John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The two films share a familiarity with the underbelly of showbiz and a pronounced sense of melancholy, specifically regarding their central character.

Like Ben Gazzara’s hapless nightclub owner, Joachim has grown accustomed to failure. A man who has made a hash of his personal affairs, Joachim has also made some unfortunate choices in business. An essentially good-natured soul who dreams of regaining the power and prestige he once commanded, he is a prince without a kingdom.

Reluctantly directing himself for the first time after a suitable leading man couldn’t be found, Amalric is magnetic.

A road movie of sorts that follows its own idiosyncratic itinerary, On Tour offers a warts-andall portrait of the showbiz lifestyle and yet still

manages to be tremendously sensuous and at times transcendent. A fleeting nocturnal connection between Joachim and a lonely garage cashier (played by the luminous Aurélia Petit) is incredibly touching, while the film’s conclusion at the empty swimming pool of an out-of-season hotel is amongst the finest and most thrillingly executed sequences in recent French cinema. Jason Wood

Anticipation.

The film comes with a major prize from Cannes but also trails some negative comments from the press.

Enjoyment. A n i m m e d i a t e and thrilling experience.

The jukebox soundtrack perfectly complements the tremendously assured sense of character and place.

In Retrospect.

Strangely liberating, the ending alone is wor th the price of admission.

071

Anton Corbijn

Filmography Anton Corbijn T h e A m e r i c a n (2010) C o n t r o l (2007)

Private Gentleman Interview by Matt Bochenski

P

hotographer, music video director and feature filmmaker Anton Corbijn has a habit of being in the right place at the right time. He arrived in England in 1979, drawn by the sounds emerging from Manchester’s newly minted music scene. He captured an iconic image of Ian Curtis, six months before the Joy Division singer committed suicide. He came to the attention of U2 as they transitioned into megastardom, designing the covers for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

He went on to photograph the likes of Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Miles Davis and Björk, before making his own transition into filmmaking with 2007’s Curtis biopic Control.

“Everything in my life has been accidental,” says Corbijn uncertainly. In person, the phlegmatic Dutchman evinces the same quiet introspection as his films. “I guess I’m open to situations offering themselves up to me.”

When the opportunity to tell Ian Curtis’ story arose, Corbijn seized it. Here was a film he felt compelled to make. “Control had a lot to do with my own life,” he admits, “and it had to do with death. I put all my money into this film and sold my home – it was a lot of stuff emotionally.”

The film’s critical success was fuelled by a promotional tour that Corbijn found “gruelling”.

He lost a year taking time off to recover. For a while, he considered whether or not he wanted to make another film at all. “At the time, I thought Control was going to be my only film,” he confesses.

“It wasn’t a career move. But when I looked back a year later I realised it was one of the most beautiful times in my life, and I’d gained experience that it would be a shame to throw away. That’s when I decided I should make three films in total and then see where I was as a filmmaker – to see if I was a filmmaker and if it’s the life I want.

“I’m getting into this game very late in my life and I have no experience – I never learned anything about filmmaking so I need to learn,” he continues.

“I think, after three films, I’ll probably get an idea

072 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

what I’m capable of. That’s important for me – to find out what I’m capable of.”

The evidence so far is positive. The American is another hugely impressive piece of filmmaking, oozing atmosphere and – despite the presence of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars – a distinctly European cool. “My film is called The American but it’s a totally European film in almost every regard,” agrees Corbijn. “The ’70s is where the film is rooted for me in terms of pacing and look. In the new way of filming where it’s edited quite fast, you’re not allowed to observe anymore. But it’s interesting for me to see somebody walking. I’ve always found it interesting because everybody walks in a different way. It’s interesting to observe that.”

The American is spiritually and aesthetically aligned with The Day of the Jackal; more concerned with its protagonist’s interior life than the demands of modern action fans. Although Corbijn is proud of his film, he admits to having a few nerves about how it will be received by those expecting a typical George Clooney vehicle: “How it plays in the bigger world is anybody’s guess, you know?”

But Clooney, certainly, has risen to the occasion. Rather than rely on that smirking charm, here he gives a nuanced, full-blooded, even tragic portrayal of an assassin living with the regrets and consequences of a lifetime’s misdeeds. “There’s very few actors who could play that role well,” Corbijn says, “who you can look at for five minutes without them opening their mouth and not get bored.

When we first talked about it, George understood from the word go that what I needed was a darker character, and he’s interested in playing that. It’s not something I had to remind him of very often on set – a little steering is all you have to do.”

But the dynamic between the two men can’t have been easy. As Corbijn himself points out, “We have an actor here who has directed more films than the director.” As Clooney also has a producing credit, you can’t help but wonder about the balance of power on set. “Sometimes we could apply the expertise he has to situations, so, you know, I asked

him for advice on certain things, we discussed scenes and George’s take as an actor was quite often the right direction,” he says before adding with finality, “The film is directed by my gut feeling for things. All that matters is that you get the film you want. People accept how you do it – that’s the other thing, there’s no rules.”

Corbijn’s control over the project has its limits, though. He’s used his influence to help create one of the more arresting posters of recent years – an orange-tinged throwback to the European cinema art of yesteryear – but it isn’t exactly what he wanted. “I definitely steered it,” he agrees.

“I made a poster myself, which I knew they would hate, but I knew they would immediately think, ‘We need to think differently.’ If I was to do the poster, it wouldn’t be this one. But given the way these things get done, I think we came out with a great poster.

“It’s the same with the name,” he adds. “The American is not my name. I didn’t like A Very Private Gentleman [the name of the novel from which the film is adapted] so I came up with the name Il Americano because that to me immediately has this western vibe, like a spaghetti western about an American that tries to fit in and doesn’t because ‘Il Americano’ is incorrect Italian. But of course that went too far so it became The American. But it is closer to what I wanted.”

Fortunately, Corbijn’s perfectionism is able to manifest itself on screen, in the seductive composition and meditative rhythms of his film.

The American may evoke the great European cinema of the ’70s, but it suggests a bright future for the Dutch filmmaker. If he chooses to be a filmmaker at all.

Check out the full transcript of this interview online in the week of the film’s release.

Head to the National Portrait Gallery on December 3 to see a Q&A with Anton Corbijn in which he’ll be discussing his film and photography work.

The American Directed by Anton Corbijn S t a r r i n g G e o r ge C l o o n e y, Vi o l a n t e P l a c i d o, Pa o l o B o n a c e l l i Released November 26

T

he American is a moody, textured, meditative drama that evokes the austerity and poise of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Indeed, in its forensic intelligence and unforced pace, it’s a glorious throwback to an era of 1970s European cinema when films had the time to brood, to breathe and to grow in the mind.

George Clooney is Jack, a taciturn hitman forced to lie low in a small town in the beautiful countryside of Abruzzo, Italy. Though unsure whether he can trust his employer, he accepts one last job – preparing the ground for the arrival of a second assassin. In the meantime, he will attend to the frayed edges of his conscience in the company of a priest (Paolo Bonacelli), find redemption in the arms of a prostitute (Violante Placido) and survive the machinations of enemies both seen and unseen.

Photographer Anton Corbijn made a startling filmmaking debut with 2007’s Control, but The American is in another realm altogether. It is painstakingly assembled – scene by scene, step by step, just as Jack fetishistically engineers the individual elements of his trade. But more than that, there’s a fearless conviction on display in the way Corbijn refuses to make any concessions to the expectations

of modern cinema. There is no spectacular pay off, no fireworks, just a slow, steady accumulation of tension, of connection with the characters which, by the film’s finale, will prove shatteringly effective.

It is, of course, a beautiful thing to behold.

Corbijn and regular cinematographer Martin Ruhe do full justice to their surroundings, playing with colour, shade and texture – from gun-metal blacks to molten gold raindrops and a brothel’s red-lit eroticism.

The expansive open air of the landscape contrasts the tightly wound interiority of Clooney’s performance. It is unclear whether Jack is experiencing a slow unravelling or a gradual coming together, or perhaps there are elements of both in a man who has experienced too much of the world while connecting with too little in it.

It is another intelligent turn from an A-lister who seems determined to lead a more interesting professional life than was once prescribed for him. This is Clooney the murderer, Clooney the ageing star, but more than that, this is Clooney the committed actor, stripped of the usual twinkle, discovering something emotionally raw at the heart of his character.

Though The American isn’t quite the edge-ofthe-seat thriller it might have been, there is a sadness running through it that is both tragic and seductive.

It is sparse, unusual, somehow unknowable, but it has the unmistakable air of conviction, of confidence and mastery of its own elements. It pushes past the confines of genre and in its quiet elegance becomes something bigger, grander and more impressive altogether. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation.

At this point in their careers, both George Clooney and Anton Corbijn inspire faith.

Enjoyment. I n r e t u r n i n g t o t h e cinematic grammar of an earlier era, the filmmakers have crafted something richly rewarding.

In Retrospect.

Haunting and insistent, The American is one of the best films of the year.

073

T

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Directed by Daniel Alfredson Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Georgi Staykov Released November 26

he beginning of the end of The Millennium Trilogy sees Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) being rushed to intensive care. The Girl has bullets in her hip, shoulder and, more pressingly, her brain.

She needs surgery, stat, but what about her haircut?

Fear not: Lisbeth may be restricted to spending half of the film on a hospital bed, she may be accused of murder, facing a court trial and some serious lockdown, but that asymmetric bob survives. And she’s still able to give her doctor shit while getting him onside with some clever flirtation. Good job, because a dodgy, all-male network called ‘The Section’ is sniffing around, scared of what she knows.

A bogus medical diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia from a slimy doctor named Teleborian should deal with this plucky pest.

The most notable aspect of The Millennium Trilogy has been its insistence on upsetting both our idea and our ideal of Scandinavia. What was once an Eden of renewable energy, nudist blondes and over-priced pints is now defined by sexual violence, institutional corruption and rampant misogyny.

Stieg Larsson’s first novel was originally titled Men Who Hate Women, and this reductive attitude to twenty-first-century gender politics hasn’t matured as the series has unfolded. Indeed, with its noir archetypes and patriarchal power structures, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest has scarcely moved on from the era of Polanski’s

P

The Hunter Directed by Rafi Pitts S t a r r i n g R a f i P i t t s , M i t r a H a j j a r, Ismaïl Amani Released October 29

074 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

otently addressing the situation in Iran today, and the question of whether the generation that includes director Rafi Pitts has had the Revolution stolen from it, The Hunter sits alongside Persepolis as a remarkable cinematic portrayal of Iranian society.

And yet the film also feels incredibly universal; in its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places it has much in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.

Recently released from prison, Ali (played

by Pitts himself) returns home amidst talk of the upcoming elections and promises of change. When not spending time with his wife (Mitra Hajjar) and young daughter, he retreats to his favourite pastime of hunting in the secluded forest north of town.

But after tragedy strikes in a police shoot-out with demonstrators, Ali is pushed over the edge. A series of violent events returns him to the forest alongside two police officers, but when his warring captors lose their way in the woods, the line between hunter and hunted becomes difficult to define.

Shot during last year’s presidential election campaign in an attempt to capture the energy in the country and to convey, as it most explicitly does through its tightly wound central character, the notion of a ticking time-bomb society, The Hunter also makes fantastic use of its two distinct environments: the urban and isolating Tehran and the forests near the Caspian sea where Ali forages and hunts, eventually finding something of himself after the trauma he has suffered.

Chinatown. There may be fewer orange groves and more Blackberries, H&M knitwear rather than linen suits, but the two films are thematically indistinguishable.

Except Polanski is a much, much better director than Daniel Alfredson. Despite the presence of Noomi Rapace’s glowering, post-feminist maneater, all of The Girl films have suffered from a lack of intrigue, scope and development. Each has revealed its cards too early and none has possessed a decent action sequence. This final instalment is as irritating as that other great Swedish export, the flat-pack wardrobe: going through the motions until it inevitably falls to pieces. The lesson? If you want well-made noirs, stick to the specialist retailer – Hollywood. Tom Seymour

Anticipation.

The Girl Who H a s A l r e a d y Wa s t e d E n o u g h Of Our Time.

Enjoyment.

The Girl Who Makes U s W i s h We We r e A n y w h e r e E l s e .

In Retrospect.

The Girl Who Really Doesn’t Deser ve To B e A L i t e r a r y I c o n .

Shot during the winter months, the film’s muted tones perfectly reflect Ali’s subdued mood as he shuttles back and forth in his matte-green car.

Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue, Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s The Driver.

And yet for all its obvious intellect, the success of The Hunter as a quietly effective if existentialist piece of suspense should not be underestimated.

This is a nuanced, multi-layered and effortlessly cool work that deals not only with politics and the moral order, but also interrogates the notion of censorship, social mores and religious values in contemporary Iran. Jason Wood

Anticipation.

The follow-up t o t h e c o n t e m p l a t i ve I t ’s W i n t e r from a modern master of the Iranian new wave.

Enjoyment. E x e r t s a v i c e - l i k e grip from the ver y first frame.

In Retrospect.

Seemingly destined to go largely unappreciated, this is a work o f p r e c i s i o n a n d c o m p l e x i t y.

5â&#x20AC;&#x201C;23 NovEmbEr

The annual festival of the best of Korean Cinema returns to London for 2010 www.koreanfilm.co.uk

Matt Reeves The Let Me In director gives us the inside stor y of how he came to remake a moder n classic.

Filmography Matt Reeves L e t M e I n (2010) C l o v e r f i e l d (2008) T h e P a l l b e a r e r (1996)

Inter view by Jonathan Crocker

"I

t’s sort of a long story but I finished Cloverfield in January 2008, and there was this project that I had been desperate to get made since before Cloverfield called The Invisible Woman, which was a very personal project that I had written. I brought it to Overture but they thought that the film was too small and too dark for them at that moment in time. They liked the script but they said, ‘We really want to do something with you. We’re pursuing the rights for this film and we’d love you to see it. It’s a Swedish film and we think you might really connect to it. We’d give it to you with the caveat that we’d probably want to age the kids up a little bit. Take a look at it.’

“So I went home and watched the film and I was completely blown away. And the strange thing was, it covered very similar emotional terrain to the movie I was trying to get made. My story for The Invisible Woman started when JJ [Abrams] and I did this television series called Felicity. We also had to develop other projects and I developed this project that eventually became this script. It basically started from the point of view of this 11-year-old kid and it was a coming-of-age story that took place in the late ’70s or early ’80s. It was about a family that had moved into this apartment complex, and it was about the coming-of-age of the boy and how the family was in tumult and maybe on the verge of coming apart. And we have these scenes throughout the story where he had these encounters with an 11-year-old girl who lived next door, who was also the product of a single-parent family. They have these halting encounters in the courtyard. So when I was watching [Let The Right One In] I was blown away. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly the world that I imagined and wanted to create.’

“Then as the film went on and I saw that it was this brilliant genre story where [John Ajvide]

076 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Lindqvist and Tomas Alfredson were using the vampire genre as a metaphor for the pain of adolescence. I was like, ‘This is amazing.’ Because this was much more brilliant than what I was hoping I could do and yet it was exploring the same terrain. And I was so taken with it.

“The thing about it is – it was the thing about Cloverfield for me as well – when I was much younger, these are the kind of movies that would have scared the hell out of me. The Exorcist I saw when I was much too young and to this day I have a visceral reaction when I see it. If there’s an image of Linda Blair and I’m unprepared, the blood seeps from my body. As I’ve gotten into doing genre films I’ve really enjoyed it because it’s been a way to explore those things that you’re afraid of and those things that are painful.

“The interesting thing for me, and what I so responded to about this story and what I think is the strength of genre stories, is that you can sort of smuggle in another story that is actually quite personal and meaningful.

“I read the novel after having seen the movie, and I ended up reaching out to Lindqvist because he knew that I might be getting involved. And so I said, ‘I wanted to tell you first and foremost how much I’m moved by your story, and it’s not just that I think it’s a brilliant genre story, but it’s really that it reminds me so much of my own childhood.

And I just think that it’s so beautifully told. And that’s what won’t let go of me.’

“He wrote back and he was very, very kind.

And he said, ‘I’m actually a big fan of Cloverfield,’ because he loves horror films and he thought that it was a new spin on a very old story. So he was actually excited to know that I was getting involved. But he said the thing he found much more gratifying was to know that I connected to it on a personal level. He said, ‘This story is my semiautobiography. I grew up in Blackeberg,’ and aside

from the vampire aspect, obviously, the story was very true to his childhood.

“I completely understood. I was, like, ‘Of course it is. How could it come through this vividly if it wasn’t that personal to you?’ And so despite my better instincts, it kind of wouldn’t let go of me. I said to Overture, ‘Here’s the thing: I’m not sure you should remake this film because I think it’s absolutely brilliant. But if you do, I really think it would be a huge mistake to age up those kids, because that is what the story is about.’ That’s the thing for me that really resonated so deeply and that made me want to do it. And they were like, ‘Yeah, okay, we respect that.’

“It was one of these things where I thought, well, the idea would be, how would I keep the essence of that story and keep true to that story and honour Lindqvist’s story but put it into an American context and put it into an American landscape? He grew up in the ’80s… It’s sort of the same period of childhood. That was ’80s Sweden and I grew up in the United States in the ’80s. And in the US, it was the Reagan era, he was the cowboy who came in and talked about the ‘Evil Empire’ and the idea that evil was something that was outside of us and not within us. The Soviets were evil and America was fundamentally good. And I just thought, well, there’s something very interesting about the idea of a 12-year-old boy growing up in a world where he’s bullied so mercilessly that he deserves revenge but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s so helpless, and how could he not be? He’s only human. He has those feelings. And yet the world around him is telling him that those are evil thoughts and that they must mean he’s evil. Because there’s none of that within us, we’re fundamentally good. And wouldn’t he feel lost and not understand any of that?”

Check out the full transcript online now.

Let Me In Directed by Matt Reeves Starring Chloe Moretz, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Richard Jenkins Released November 5

O

n a winding, snow-banked highway in the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Let Me In opens with a statement of intent from director Matt Reeves. As the whir of police sirens yields to Michael Giacchino’s relentless, looming score, the tone is ominously and conspicuously set. This is a horror film, bloody and unabashed. What else did you expect?

Understandably, though perhaps unfairly, Reeves has been at the mercy of the bloggers’ wrath ever since his name was attached to this adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel and remake of Tomas Alfredson’s anti-horror masterpiece, Let the Right One In. Of all the doubts cast over Let Me In, one issue recurred more than any other: the director, whose only previous feature, 2008’s Cloverfield, was hardly renowned for its subtlety and restraint.

Such qualities would be indispensable for anyone looking to capture the serenity and emotional maturity of Alfredson’s original. But Reeves’ film isn’t about holding back. It’s about classic archetypes – victims, suburban tedium and high-school politics.

It’s about bloodshed, revenge and unleashing the beast within.

Superficially, then, Let Me In is a full-blown genre flick: the eerie quietude so deftly composed

by its predecessor is here ousted by bloodcurdling screams and eye-watering violence. It’s explicit, but somehow this change of tack works.

It’s easy to condemn Reeves for trying to spoon-feed the uncultured masses, but Let Me In isn’t aimed exclusively at audiences who find slowburning Swedish drama a hard sell. Under the newly resurrected Hammer banner, even the most ardent critic would be hard-pushed to brand Let Me In the cinematic sacrilege it might have been.

In truth, the more you draw comparisons between the two films, the more incomparable they become. Shot-for-shot reconstructions of several iconic scenes may reaffirm Let the Right One In’s unequivocal brilliance, but Reeves never concerns himself with trying to better perfection. Instead, he simply tells his version of a bittersweet coming-of-age story that, in essence, could take place on any street, in any neighbourhood, in any town.

His task is eased by the presence of Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who, after staving off supervillains and the apocalypse respectively, are superb as the more anglicised Abby and Owen. While Moretz and Smit-McPhee are likely to receive most of the plaudits, however, it’s Reeves’ development of several fringe characters (notably Richard Jenkins’

Father and Elias Koteas’ Policeman) along with the odd personal touch that gives Let Me In its own voice.

Swapping rural Scandinavia for small town USA and background pop culture references – Ms. Pac-Man, Bowie, televised seeds of Reaganomics – textures the film with nods to Reeves’ own adolescence. Fans of the book and Alfredson’s film will no doubt pore over each and every borrowed detail, but this is Reeves’ own vision and it has a tragic grandeur all of its own. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

A refined Swedish masterpiece gets a Hollywood makeover. What could go wrong?

Enjoyment. A s u r p r i s i n g l y personal reimagining that ought to shake up mainstream horror cinema.

In Retrospect.

After all the talk about the director, it’s the perfor mances of Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee that really linger.

077

The Kids Are All Right Directed by Lisa Cholodenko Starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo Released October 29

T

he Kids Are All Right is a searingly funny and heartwarming cocktail of middle-age anxiety and adolescent frustration. Sharply written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, the filmmaker announces herself as an assured talent with a keen eye for character and cultural observation.

Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are a hardworking couple who prize freethinking family values. Like all devoted parents, their primary concern is what’s best for their children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), and as a result their relationship has begun to show signs of wear. Crisis is compounded when Joni turns 18 and is convinced by her younger brother to track down their previously anonymous sperm donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a commitment-phobe whose paternal instincts extend about as far as his organic veg patch.

Despite initial reservations, Paul is welcomed into the family home and afforded space to bond

An Ordinary Execution Directed by Marc Dugain S t a r r i n g A n d r é D u s s o l l i e r, Mar ina Hands, Edouard Baer Released November 26

078 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

with his estranged offspring. But while Nic maintains her wariness of Paul’s apparent flakiness and breezy machismo, Jules proves to be slightly more open to his charms. The kids might be all right, but true to life, it’s the adults you have to worry about.

Tackling the complexities of marriage, parenthood, growing up and getting old head on, Cholodenko has hand-crafted a sincere portrait of domestic life that is compassionate, well observed and never condescending. The film’s most significant triumph, however, is that while universal in scope it is intimate in its focus: note perfect performances all round allow Cholodenko to give each character’s private concerns their own space and merit.

This is real life; authentic and uncompromised.

Fits of spiky humour are delicately balanced with moments of betrayal and repentance, while the central lesbian subtext is neither obscured nor exploited to some socially pragmatic end. Indeed,

F

ocusing solely on the first section of authorturned-filmmaker Marc Dugain’s 2007 novel of the same name, An Ordinary Execution paints an uncomfortable portrait of life in the Russian police state under Joseph Stalin.

Anna (Marina Hands) is desperate to fall pregnant by her husband Vassilli (Edouard Baer), yet spends most of her days working in the local hospital, where she is both adored and despised by fellow colleagues due to her mystifying healing powers.

One day, to her terror, Anna is escorted to the Kremlin to relieve the aches and pains of an aged and deteriorating Stalin (André Dussollier) who has just purged his own group of physicians. Although frightened, Anna goes about healing the menacing dictator while under the constant threat of having her loved ones arrested.

Despite some promising festival chatter, the film is weighed down by redundant subplots, which could quite easily be removed without impairing the narrative. These needless additions, such as crowbarring in the arrest of Anna’s mother and father (characters who are neither seen, heard or spoken of at any other point), suggest that Dugain is perhaps trying too hard to transfer as much of his novel onto the screen as possible.

And yet in the face of these transgressions, his film

the emphasis is very much on the collective strength of this particular unit, as opposed to individual insecurities or weaknesses.

Going against the grain of formulaic Hollywood conveyor-belt rom-coms, The Kids Are All Right is a refreshingly adult twist on the day-to-day dysfunctions of the modern family. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

Cracking cast and healthy buzz from Sundance and Berlin. For mula looks familiar, though.

Enjoyment. I n t e l l i g e n t , s h a r p a n d e x t r e m e l y f u n n y.

In Retrospect.

Family-centr ic comedy has never felt so fresh.

is tremendously shot in grim and disquieting shades to reflect the oppression of the period. Amidst the proliferation of minor characters, it’s André Dussollier who undoubtedly steals the show as a dictator who is at once comical and intimidating. With a performance that offers a lively contrast to past depictions, he makes the most of what is also a terrific script packed with moments of dark humour and unexpectedly touching melancholy. James Wright

Anticipation.

Festival chatter has been ver y positive.

Enjoyment. T h e i n c r e d i b l e w o r k of cinematographer Yves Angelo is a delight to behold, as is the incredible performance of Dussollier.

In Retrospect.

At times overcomplicated, but with no previous filmmaking experience Dugain has produced a taut and thoroughly enjoyable historical drama.

RoboGeisha – Part of Japanese Halloween Schlochfest Double Bill

Aspects of Japanese Cinema 19 Oct – 19 Dec 10

A season of films complementing the Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion exhibition in Barbican Art Gallery.

Featuring three of the finest Japanese directors: Kenji Mizoguchi, Takeshi Kitano and Akira Kurosawa; plus special seasons including GirlsWorld: Women in Contemporary Japanese Cinema, Japanimation and a Japanese Halloween Shlockfest Double Bill.

Sat 6 Nov Join us for Barbican LATES, featuring Cosplay parades, a Goth Loli fashion show, gaming tournaments, DJs and more.

Book online from £8.50

barbican.org.uk/japan

The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

I

My Afternoons with Marguerite Directed by Jean Becker Starring Gérard Depardieu, Gisèle Casadesus, Sophie Guillemin Released November 12

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Directed by Apichatpong We e r a s e t h a k u l Starring Natthakar n Aphaiwonk, Geerasak Kulhong, Thanapat Saisaymar Released November 19

080 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

f you are hoping My Afternoons with Marguerite is a racy prequel to Eric Rohmer’s 1969 film My Night with Maud, prepare to be disappointed. Jean Becker has lately built a reputation repurposing sentimental novels for the big screen, including 2007’s Conversations with My Gardener with Daniel Auteuil. The French director is probably best known in the UK for 1995’s Elisa, which stars Vanessa Paradis as a waif desperate to track down her father, played by Gérard Depardieu.

Depardieu is once again the draw here as Germain Chazes, a man who’s not quite the village idiot, but is nonetheless the butt of everyone’s jokes. It’s difficult to shake the image of Depardieu as Obelix each time his rotund form fills the screen, dressed in blue overalls. This is a role Depardieu could play with his eyes closed, and often he does just that; he’s not so much phoning in this performance as texting it from the cellars of one of his vineyards. You wonder how he has the gall to criticise Juliette Binoche when he happily appears in such undemanding fare.

There are a couple of performances to admire though, notably from nonagenarian Gisèle Casadesus as sweet old Margueritte, who befriends Chazes in the park. They form a friendship as she reads to him, and slowly they work to overcome his illiteracy. But as is the way with these things, greater

O

riginally conceived as part of the wider Primitive Project, a series of works all set in the Isan province in northeast Thailand, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives resists reduction to a simple synopsis. Almost impossible to describe, you simply have to see it.

The essentials? Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk) appears to care for him, and his long-lost son (Geerasak Kulhong) returns home in non-human form (as a cuddly monkey-type figure with pulsating red eyes, which looks like it may have escaped from a 1970s Bigfoot hoax photograph). Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave – the birthplace of his first life.

Cast using a combination of professionals from the director’s earlier features and local non-actors (Saisaymar is a roof welder), the film was originally conceived as an homage to the influences of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s youth – television shows shot on 16mm in studios with strong, direct lighting, actors mechanically repeating lines of dialogue and monsters clothed in darkness to hide cheaply made costumes.

Operating like a stream of consciousness with distinct shifts in tone, Uncle Boonmee is by

knowledge doesn’t necessarily elevate him in the regard of his fellow villagers.

The primary attraction, however, is Sophie Guillemin as Chazes’ much younger lover, though Becker provides no clue as to why this pretty woman should want a baby with the doltish, if kind, Chazes. Becker does show his unhappy childhood with a vampish, hysterical mother, but the scenes are so cartoonish they feel as if they come from another film. Little better is the astounding anti-Belgian prejudice that sees Margueritte’s nephew from north of the border place her in a home that looks like a First World War field camp. Jonas Milk

Anticipation.

Yo u h a v e t o g o b a c k t o 1 9 8 3 ’s O n e Deadly Summer for a Becker film with some ver ve.

Enjoyment.

A s e n t i m e n t a l i s t ’s e d u c a t i o n .

In Retrospect.

A saccharine prose poem over the closing credits underlines the nausea.

turns ironic, poignant, profound and languidly sensuous and erotic. As the film gently unfolds we realise that we are witnessing an incredibly moving and quite transcendent experience about life’s passing and the transmigration of souls between humans, plants, animals and ghosts.

For Weerasethakul, filmmaking remains a necessarily mysterious practice – one which mirrors the frequently unexplainable mysteries of both the universe and the human mind.

However, the film is not purely sensory.

For the director, Boonmee and his beliefs act as an emblem of something that is disappearing in the face of a new Thai state resistant to cultures and beliefs that do not match its own ideologies. Jason Wood

Anticipation. A

sur pr ising Palme d’Or winner. The question is whether it was justified.

Enjoyment. A f i l m s o entrancing, original and hypnotic that the moment it finishes the immediate impulse is to watch it again.

In Retrospect.

A truly singular cinematic experience.

Chico & Rita D i r e c t e d b y J a v i e r M a r i s c a l , F e r n a n d o Tr u e b a Starring Eman Xor Oña, Limara Meneses, Mar io Guer ra Released November 22

T

he streets of Havana are awash with cigarette smoke, white rum and Latin jazz. This is Cuba, 1948, long before La Revolución and the Bay of Pigs – a time when the seeds of civil disobedience had yet to sprout. As alluring as this virile young Havana is, however, Chico & Rita, as the title suggests, is not the story of a city, but a tale of two lovers.

Off a rutted street we slip into a postcard cabaret club where Chico (Eman Xor Oña), a renowned local jazz pianist, and his bosom buddy Ramón (Mario Guerra) are on the prowl. Not for skirt, but for a singer. The drummer’s four-count gets the house band started before a heavenly timbre fixes the room in hushed rapture. As Rita (Limara Meneses) lets fly, Chico’s eyes widen in reverie as lust swells and bright lights beckon.

If this clichéd overture fails to get your cardiac cords strumming, Chico & Rita probably isn’t for you. Little of what follows secedes from the romantic melodrama formula, as our eponymous couple’s fairy tale fling is defined by acts of unfaithfulness and remorse, bitter farewells and affectionate reconcilement. Avoiding the obligatory would certainly give Chico & Rita greater resonance,

but with tone and texture accented so emphatically, it’s no surprise to see the narrative take a nosedive.

As stardom sets Chico and Rita on separate paths, we drift through the years on airwaves ignited by a dulcet bolero that declares their love eternal.

But as we leave the rattle and hum of Havana for the notably more pallid reaches of New York, Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas, do we actually care where our lovesick duo will end up? Just about, perhaps.

But Chico & Rita never quite feels like the product of a decade-long artistic relationship.

And yet that is what it is. One of Spain’s most established and celebrated designers, Fernando Trueba, met Javier Mariscal after being asked to create a poster for the director’s 2000 Latin jazz doc Calle 54. After years of close and fruitful collaboration, the idea of co-directing an animated feature presented Trueba and Mariscal with the perfect platform to showcase their mutual passion for Latin culture and Cuban jazz. Somehow, however, this passion doesn’t quite come across as it should, even with the aid of an infectious soundtrack courtesy of legendary Cuban composer Bebo Valdés.

The animation plays some part in this. While

each and every frame drips with the rhythm and spirit of Cuban life in the mid-twentieth century, crude line-work means that our protagonists’ emotions are never conveyed as profoundly as they are pledged.

Havana might be little more than a backdrop, but in truth the film is at its most enchanting when this intoxicating city takes centre stage. For all their attention to detail, Mariscal and Trueba obscure the one character that might have made Chico & Rita the classic it strives so hard to be. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

An animated valentine to Latin jazz? Lead t h e w a y.

Enjoyment.

Likeable enough, b u t l o v e d o n ’ t c o m e e a s y.

In Retrospect. L o o k p a s t the crude lines, vivid colours and dynamic score, and this is middle-of-the-road romance.

081

Lukas Moodysson Man Maelstrom

Filmography Lukas Moodysson Mammoth Container A Hole in My Heart Lilya 4-Ever To g e t h e r Fucking Åmål

(2009) (2006) (2004) (2002) (2000) (1998)

I n t e r v i e w b y A d a m Wo o d w a r d

"M

y entire career is built on confusion and curiosity,” asserts Swedish writer and filmmaker Lukas Moodysson. “We all share a basic instinct in trying to understand the world around us, and for me that comes from being totally confused by the world and in turn being fascinated by how we, as human beings, live together and ultimately how we exploit each other.”

As an aspiring poet growing up in the sleepy suburbs of Åkarp, this inquisitive obsession led Moodysson to ponder the world in its myriad forms and structures. But poetry, by its introverted nature, could only feed his fascination for so long. In his early twenties, despite having already been published, Moodysson began to expand his artistic horizons.

“When I started as a writer I spent many years thinking that it was my one and only calling,” says Moodysson. “I saw films just as entertainment and literature as the only serious art form. But as I got older I started to see things that got me more and more interested in moving images. The first thing to really change my mind in that sense was Twin Peaks; it opened my eyes in a way I never imagined possible.”

Shortly after, in 1992, Moodysson enrolled in the Dramatiska Institutet, then Sweden’s only film school. It was a life-changing decision made “purely in response to [my] growing frustration with writing”. But, as Moodysson explains, it also came at a time when Swedish cinema was in desperate need of some young blood. “When I was making my first short films it was a dark time for Swedish cinema. Most filmmakers were trying to imitate a Hollywood style; everyone was just interested in making comedy or romance, it was all very shallow, very simple and conventional.”

Since making his feature debut with Fucking Åmål (later renamed Show Me Love after the Robyn song at the end of the film, following pressure from a US distributor), Moodysson has been the single most influential force in re-establishing Sweden on the world cinema map, rekindling the refined craftsmanship of Ingmar Bergman and

082 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Victor Sjöström by championing a progressive, intellectually-stimulating narrative style. Yet for all his critical and commercial success at home (Fucking Åmål out-grossed Titanic domestically in 1998), Moodysson admits that his stake in the future health of Swedish cinema is minimal. “I’m not involved in that industry at all, I very much do my own thing and I will always continue to work that way,” he reveals.

Popularity is trivial to Moodysson. “If people like what I do then I’m very happy about that, but I try not to think about what people think too much,” he says. “As a human being I’m always very happy when people like my work, but as an artist it’s better if people don’t like what I do because it forces me to think about what I really want to do. When I get a lot of positive reactions it becomes easy to make the same film again because you want to have that same feeling of appreciation. But at the same time you’ve got to make sure you don’t deliberately go and do the opposite of whatever you’ve done before.”

This need to distance himself from the flock and defy expectation has allowed Moodysson to carve out a distinctive niche. It has also earned him his fair share of enemies. At 41, however, Moodysson exhibits little of the hostility once reserved for his peers and critics. Today he is widely regarded – even revered – as a provocative freeform filmmaker whose work consistently seeks to deconstruct audiences’ perceptions of modern social habits. From observing contemporary society through the stark prisms of child abuse and human trafficking in 2002’s Lilya 4-Ever and the amateur porn industry in A Hole in My Heart, to the stripped-down black-and-white existentialism of 2006’s Container, Moodysson’s work is raw, uncompromising and unpredictable.

Comparatively, Mammoth is his most overtly commercial film. It is shot primarily in the English language, fronted by two prominent international leads in Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal, and has a conventional narrative structure.

Is Moodysson edging closer towards mainstream filmmaking? Quite the opposite, he suggests.

“At the moment I am very much not a

filmmaker. I’m very tired of making films to be honest. It changes from day to day, but sometimes I wake up and it feels like it’s over, like it’s time to take a new direction completely. And there’s no sadness in that.” He continues: “I’m thinking of taking a long break from filmmaking because it’s very difficult to make films. As a director you have to react to things quickly, to change things in a split-second, and I don’t feel like I have that speed right now. I find that very difficult at the moment. I’m writing the whole time and I’m really focused on that at the moment.”

While it might sound as if Moodysson has fallen out of love with cinema, this revelation is merely an acknowledgement of the creative strain that comes with the territory of independent filmmaking. From page to screen Mammoth took more than three years to complete, with Moodysson spending almost half that time “writing, rewriting and changing my mind about the script, probably more so than ever before.” With this in mind, perhaps it is little wonder that Moodysson is now looking to refocus on his original passion.

For Moodysson writing is a “totally immersive” process through which he is able to nourish his fascination with what he describes as “cultural schizophrenia: the schizophrenia of being human; how our ideals often clash with our needs and how difficult it is to be the person you want to be.” With such outspoken personal ideologies – he counts himself as a vegetarian, spiritualist and feminist – this self-imposed obligation to learn about and to educate the world means that Moodysson’s harshest critic is ultimately himself.

Through his writing, however, Moodysson will always have a means through which to exercise his philosophical soul. “When cinema works it can be like a tidal wave hurling itself at you, and it is wonderful to sometimes be able to achieve that as a director,” he says. “But in order to achieve that I have to focus on my writing first. That has always been the basis of everything I do. That is my main interest. It always will be.”

Check out the full transcript online now.

Mammoth Directed by Lukas Moodysson Starring Gael García Ber nal, Michelle Williams, Mar ife Necesito Released November 5

'M

ammoth’ means ‘mother’ in Tagalog, a native tongue of the Philippines, where one fibre of Lukas Moodysson’s multifaceted film is intricately thread. It’s also a superficial reference to a $3,000 fountain pen presented to the film’s male protagonist Leo (Gael García Bernal) that’s finished with ivory cut from the fossil of some long-extinct Siberian beast. And it’s an allusion to a line from one of Moodysson’s own poems: ‘Our Savior buried like a Mammoth’.

Multilingual, impulsive, sprawling, Mammoth does little to dispel the view that Moodysson is a maker of purposely ‘difficult’ films. Here, however, the Swedish writer/director marries tangible real-life drama with jarring narrative incidents – death, infidelity, child rape – in a way that is both mature and sincere and never unfaithful to his carefully honed nihilistic style.

This could so easily have been cut from the Babel or Crash cloth, but Moodysson knows better than to bully his audience with overwrought sentiment and sugary musical cues.

In Mammoth, the characters are more human, the narrative less hollow and the moral nuances less emphatically rubber-stamped onto the audience’s soul.

The plot hinges on an ill-fated juncture in the lives of a cosmopolitan New York couple. Leo, a videogame nut-cum-dotcom entrepreneur, is flown to Thailand to pen a lucrative business deal, leaving wife Ellen (Michelle Williams), a surgeon, to look after their whip-smart young daughter Jackie (Sophie Nyweide).

On hand to help is Filipino nanny Gloria (Marife Necesito), who’s taken up expat status to provide a better life for her boys back home.

What plays out is a sombre ballet of sacrifice and suffering as Leo feasts on forbidden fruit, Ellen witnesses her maternal bond fade, and Gloria questions whether the course she has chosen is truly best for her family. While these latter fixes are circumstantially justified, Leo’s behaviour is shamefully uncharacteristic. His dramatic shift in principles after just a few days away from home is a bolt from the blue that shatters the authenticity of our wedded pair’s relationship. But does Moodysson actually want us to care, or does he simply relish leading his characters (and audience) through hell?

Much like 2002’s Lilya 4-Ever, Mammoth is a declaration of Moodysson’s contempt towards the affluent and the immoral. The patent cultural disparities that flavour each narrative arc are a thinly veiled stab at capitalist-driven globalisation,

embodied by the juxtaposition of Leo and Ellen’s opulent SoHo penthouse against the bleak paradise of Thailand and the Philippines.

This is Moodysson’s first English-language film, and for it he has crossed oceans and explored new worlds to put Western ills to the sword.

Yet while restoring Leo and Ellen’s equilibrium in the final act smacks of generic conformity, the reality is that Moodysson is simply telling it like it is. True to life, while the privileged comfortably slip back into routine, the vulnerable must lick their wounds and the poor are left to count the cost. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

Controversial and unconventional Swedish director meets heavyweight indie stars.

Enjoyment. Ve r y l i t t l e .

Mammoth is a masterclass in feel-bad cinema.

In Retrospect.

Moodysson

is a rare breed.

083

Of Gods and Men Directed by Xavier Beauvois Starring Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, Olivier Rabourdin Released December 3

S

et in the copper foothills of the Atlas mountains in northern Algeria, Of Gods and Men follows a French Cistercian brotherhood that lives by the earth and dies by the word of God. Civil war has ravaged the country, but throughout the chaos this holy order has stood firm, selflessly offering aid and sanctuary to the Muslim villagers who till the cracked clay beyond the grounds of the Tibhirine monastery. It’s a delicate harmony – one that’s about to be broken in devastating fashion.

From the first communal hymn, it’s clear that director Xavier Beauvois is well versed in the ideologies of monastic life. Authenticity is paramount, and as such Beauvois exhibits his protagonists’ beliefs intimately and sincerely. It’s a bold move that could have backfired; turning off viewers made uncomfortable by the slightest whiff of religious dogma. And yet Beauvois’ aim is not to

sanctify this altruistic brood. For all the romanticism in the displays of evensong and strolls through sunbleached olive groves, the meat and gristle of this harrowing true story are never overlooked.

From the intrusion of cutthroat fundamentalists – come to spill blood and pollute the air with fear in the name of another divine father – to the humbling Last Supper scene, Beauvois captures the gravity of the monks’ sacrifice without compromise. This is, however, subjective filmmaking at its most flagrant: our brethren’s good deeds are starkly juxtaposed to the shrieking irrationality of their AK-waving foe.

Beauvois’ conviction means there is never a grey area when it comes to picking sides.

Enabling this is Lambert Wilson’s Abbot Christian, who serves as ambassador, educator and peacemaker. But Christian’s efforts to ward off the guerrillas are in vain. As a tired remnant of

Outcast

W

Directed by Colm McCarthy Starring James Nesbitt, Niall Br uton, Kate Dickie Released December 10

084 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

ith the newly reanimated Hammer Films releasing movies on both sides of the Atlantic, and the noughties giving birth to committed British genre directors like Neil Marshall and Christopher Smith, there’s a sense that indigenous horror could return to something like its ’60s and ’70s heyday.

The latest effort is writer/director Colm McCarthy’s Outcast, which creeps into cinemas under the heavy burden of being marketed as the most original horror since Let the Right One In. This heady mixture of kitchen-sink drama, Celtic creepiness and ancient witchcraft transported to present day Scotland manages to be both refreshing and a little too familiar all at once.

The story centres on Mary (Kate Dickie) and her sullen teenage son Fergal (Niall Bruton) who are living a transient life on the run from someone or something. When they come to rest in an Edinburgh council estate, Fergal catches the eye of local strumpet Petronella (Hanna Stanbridge).

Meanwhile, a remarkably hirsute James Nesbitt is introduced as Cathal, a brooding figure with magic powers assigned to track and kill the pair for reasons unknown. And so the scene is set as we essentially jump between Cathal’s ham-fisted hunt and Mary’s desperate attempts to keep her son safe from harm – and the attentions of Petronella.

For all that Outcast takes itself very seriously, there are times when it slips into The League of Gentlemen territory. It’s an uneven exercise in which

post-colonialism, he is the last good shepherd in a land scarred by the hands of men. In this bleak light, faith has never felt so hopeless and yet so precious. Adam Woodward

Anticipation.

Picked up the Grand Prix in Cannes.

Enjoyment.

Moves at its own pace, luring you in before delivering an ice-cold hammer-blow of an ending.

In Retrospect. A l i t t l e n a r r o w i n its scope, but cinematically Of Gods and Men is near faultless.

the different story strands don’t always mesh and the film’s younger cast members are hard to connect with emotionally.

Nevertheless, the atmospheric direction suggests McCarthy could be one to watch, while Nesbitt and in particular the wonderful Kate Dickie (Red Road) give strong, committed performances. The use of special effects is also extremely effective. Bruce Ackland

Anticipation.

The comparison to Let the Right One In is unhelpful but at least promises something a little different.

Enjoyment. A z i p p y r u n n i n g time, well-handled direction and another top-class Kate Dickie performance are just about enough to counteract an indifferently acted ‘yoof ’ storyline.

In Retrospect.

By no means a c o m p l e t e s u c c e s s b u t t h e r e ’s enough here to make you keep a t l e a s t o n e e ye o n M c C a r t hy ’s next project.

The UK’s first film festival exploring English identity in film Featuring an opening discussion event including Kwame Kwei-Armah, David Morrissey (tbc) and Professor Jeffrey Richards Call the box office on 01332 290606 for more details

cine-city.co.uk

tHe BRiGHton FiLM FeStiVAL 18 noV – 5 Dec 2010 NEW FEATURES include: tHe kinG’S SPeecH; tHe AMeRicAn; oF GoDS AnD Men, Le QuAttRo VoLte; neVeR Let Me Go; BiutiFuL; SoMeWHeRe; WeSt iS WeSt; SuBMARine.

DREAMING IN COLOUR: Derek Jarman’s BLue, live remix performed by Simon Fisher turner with narration from Black Sifichi; Len Lye pioneer of ‘Direct cinema’; HAnD eye ViSionS cameraless Film; the Magical World of SiLent coLouR + cAPtuRinG coLouR: Film, invention and Wonder, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (4 Dec 2010 – 20 March 2011).

SMitH & WiLLiAMSon Brighton & Hove’s own film pioneers. + MASkA Quay Brothers; coMinG AttRActionS Peter tscherkassky; Gustav Deutsch; Grant Gee; SWAnDoWn Andrew kotting and iain Sinclair.

BookinG noW 0871 902 5728

Jim Broadbent National Hero I n t e r v i e w b y A d a m Wo o d w a r d

O

n a brisk mid-August morning, Jim Broadbent sits in an allotment on the outskirts of Derby. Mike Leigh is about to call ‘action’ on Another Year, putting months of careful script preparation and character development into motion. Of the trusted few handpicked to be a part of this intimate and organic artistic process, Broadbent is perhaps the most erudite. With a professional relationship with film and theatre that stretches back 30 years, you might think Another Year would be meat and drink to him. He admits, however, that Leigh still knows how to keep him on his toes.

“Working with Mike seems to get harder because the process, after a while, is so familiar. He doesn’t change really. When I first worked with Mike I was 30 and playing a younger character, the backstory didn’t take that long to build up. But now I’m over 60, and that’s a lot of backstory to invent; different jobs, different relationships, different events. Suddenly I’ve got 60 Christmases to think about.”

Twenty Christmases ago Broadbent got offered his first Mike Leigh gig – in 1990’s Life is Sweet.

It was the film that announced Broadbent to an international film audience, yet as he explains, getting the part came by way of a conscious career move, not a moment of chance. “I used to do a lot of theatre, and I think it was about 20 years ago that I thought, ‘I’m not going to do as much anymore – I’m going to get used to film, being up close to cameras and lenses.’ It was important for me to get relaxed with all that because that was something that scared me when I first got into acting.”

Since overcoming this early insecurity, Broadbent has become one of the most distinguished faces in British film. Today he is regarded as a highly versatile character actor who has mastered stage and screen over the past three decades – a level of repute reflected by a myriad of prestigious awards and nominations, including the 2002 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of John Bayley in Iris.

As previously hinted, however, it was on stage that the acting bug first bit. “I was never very academic,”

086 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Select Filmography Jim Broadbent A n o t h e r Ye a r Har r y Potter and the Half-Blood Pr ince A n d W h e n D i d Yo u L a s t S e e Yo u r F a t h e r ?

Hot Fuzz Ve r a D r a k e G a n g s o f N e w Yo r k Iris Moulin Rouge!

B r i d g e t J o n e s ’s D i a r y To p s y - Tu r v y L i t t l e Vo i c e Bullets Over Broadway Life is Sweet

says Broadbent. “At school I was always quite arty and my mother was very keen on amateur dramatics.

We went to the theatre a lot, and after I left school I actually worked in a theatre for a little bit before auditioning myself. Suddenly I found that being on stage felt very natural and I stuck with it.”

Since making the transition to screen, Broadbent has become a more infrequent fixture in West End circles. But has his passion for stage acting faded, or simply been supplemented? “Mike’s films are a lot like plays,” reveals Broadbent, “you’ve got the company and the community around you, so there’s a social element that reflects the way you’d work on a play rather than normal films where you just go in, do a scene and don’t really socialise as much. With Mike, it’s great knowing how each other works and knowing you’re on the same page, especially when there isn’t necessarily a script.”

Having such a strong creative bond with one of British cinema’s most authoritative voices has helped earn Broadbent work with the likes of Spielberg, Scorsese and Woody Allen, as well as a new generation of British talent. “The older you get, the more new experiences you want to have,” he says. “So it’s great getting the chance to work on something huge like Harry Potter, or with guys like Edgar [Wright] and Simon [Pegg], who are so brilliant at what they do with their style of comedy.”

For all the recognition he receives for his dramatic performances, Broadbent keeps comedy very close to his heart. In fact, he insists it has been something of a driving force throughout his career.

“Those guys in Hot Fuzz were extraordinary to work with; totally at ease with the whole thing and very clever and savvy about how film comedy works,” he says. “It’s very exciting what those guys do; taking that sort of exciting British comedy on a more professional level. I’ve done a lot of comedy over the years, and I try to bring some comedy into everything I do. I’m fascinated with the relationship between comedy and drama.”

He continues: “My first real breakthrough came on this epic, eight-hour science-fiction play

(2010) (2009) (2007) (2007) (2004) (2002) (2001) (2001) (2001) (1999) (1998) (1994) (1990)

called Illuminatus with Ken Campbell. That was a huge, life-changing job for me starting out, but there’s one line I always remember from it: ‘It’s only true if it makes you laugh.’ I’m not quite sure if that’s completely true, but I like to think that’s where comedy comes from. If it’s an accurate observation of life, then it makes you laugh because there’s an instinctive response to that. So I like to get that mix of observation whenever I’m doing something that requires some comedic element, so that it’s spontaneously amusing to some of the audience who recognise it.”

Broadbent’s love of sharp, observant humour is certainly evident in Another Year, and it is interesting that his comedic proclivity has been so readily informed by a comparatively newly established group. Indeed, Broadbent understands how important it is to nurture this budding crop at a time when the British film industry is in a state of flux. “There’s a lot of very clever young actors and directors coming through right now who are really pushing for their films to be made.”

He elaborates, reflecting on the current health of the British film industry as a whole: “At one point you could count the amount of truly British films made a year on one hand, and some of those were Confessions of a Window Cleaner or On the Buses: The Movie. Terrible, really, really poor stuff. But I think it goes in cycles – we think we’re going through a bad spell at the moment, but really when you put it in context, we could be a lot worse off.

“When I started out theatre was dying, and it’s felt like it’s been dying ever since, but really it’s just been changing. It’s the same with the film industry.

It’s still here; it’s just had to adapt to survive. When you look at the whole context of everything, it’s been in far worse states, and as long as you’ve got these young guys coming through, British film will find a way to survive. I just hope there’ll still be room for us older guys as well.”

Check out the full transcript online in the week of release.

Another Year Directed by Mike Leigh Starring Jim Broadbent,Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville Released November 5

A

nother year, another Mike Leigh film. It’s a funny thing. Every time you walk into a new movie by the grandfatherly filmmaker, you’re never sure whether you should bother. Every time the credits roll, you’re so glad you did.

With a title that sounds like a tired sigh, Leigh’s film promises another payload of the Brit auteur’s well-worn trademarks: a talented but unsexy cast flexing their improv muscles in a bleak, talky, slimline story about how hard life is. The kind of film you admire but never get excited about.

Watching Another Year reminds you just how unfair this is on Leigh. Through his workshop scriptsculpting sessions, he’s found a way to capture real life (or something like it) in a way few other filmmakers in the world can dream of. He’s some kind of cinematic magician, but his films are no trick.

Robert De Niro wouldn’t survive in a Mike Leigh film. They’re not about throttled powderkegs of rage, they’re about ordinary, real people – the hardest kind to portray. They’re really about the tiny, precious things in life – the most difficult ones to dramatise.

Here, we’re in North London, in the home of an aged and happily married couple, geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and therapist Gerri (Ruth Sheen).

They’re not perfect but they are deeply in love.

Orbiting around them are family and friends who are all searching for what they have.

Their son Joe (Oliver Maltman) is a tubby lawyer who’s kind and hard-working but still hasn’t found a partner. Childless divorcée Mary (Lesley Manville) is a friend of Gerri whose cheery facade feebly masks loneliness, desperation and a taste for booze.

Like Ozu, Mike Leigh possesses the priceless ability to hit you with the unseen hook. Nothing seems to happen, but suddenly it’s all there. The little everyday moments are actually the big things in life – hope, disappointment, love, loneliness, sadness, joy, birth, death. They’re all right here as the plot unfolds over the course of four seasons.

Beautifully, sensitively photographed by Leigh’s long-time collaborator Dick Pope, it’s a film without a false word: the dialogue is witty, natural, musical, quiet, quick-fire, subtle and very British. Broadbent and Sheen are beyond wonderful, etching their

marriage with decades of kindness, tolerance and understanding. Manville, meanwhile, pitches her own turn at just the right side of frazzled.

If anything, their performances are so gentle, clear and truthful they scarcely seem like real acting at all. Leigh, coming off the back of Happy-GoLucky, is on a late career roll here, one that hardly requires the further embellishment of awards for us to recognise just how important he is to our country’s filmmaking canon. Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation.

Another Mike Leigh film. Haven’t we seen all these?

Enjoyment.

O h . We a p p e a r t o b e c r y i n g .

In Retrospect. T h e f i l m t h i s year you’ll want to miss but mustn’t. See it. Thank us later.

087

Easier with Practice

Red & White

D

T

Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez Starring Brian Geraghty, Marguerite Moreau, Kel O’Neill Released December 3

Directed by Yadi Sugandi Starring Doni Alamsyah, Rahayu Saraswati, Lukman Sardi Released November 5

avy Mitchell is an aspiring writer travelling across Middle America to promote his unpublished book of short stories. But his trip takes an unexpected turn when a phone call from an anonymous woman leads to some intense dirty talk in his motel room. Davy develops a passionate phone sex relationship with the mysterious stranger, and his unconventional infatuation soon turns into obsession. Easier with Practice has all the makings of your archetypal indie – small budget, static camera and a hip soundtrack.

But Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s movie stands out as one the year’s as-yetundiscovered gems. Davy, played by Brian Geraghty, is an intriguing character who manages to rouse sympathy thanks to the actor’s pained and poetic allure.

This could well be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between director and star. Lee Griffiths 2 3 4

hough sporting an impressive budget and no doubt aiming to emulate the kind of emotionally stirring melodrama that recent Korean and Chinese cinema has done so well, Yadi Sugandi’s Red & White is let down by a whole platoon of war movie clichés. We get everything from the grizzled drill sergeant, a fat private suffering on the assault course and a rousing score. It is as warmovie-by-numbers as one could imagine. The Indonesian fight for independence post-World War II should make a fascinating story but unfortunately it isn’t told here. Instead we get a Boy’s Own adventure involving a ragtag militia with an upper-class bully, a middle-class peacemaker and a spirited farmer taking on their imperial oppressors. A moonlit jungle battle boasts some great visuals, but the narrative offers little emotional investment. In the end it resorts to slow-motion violence, confirming its mediocrity. Martyn Conterio 2 2 2

Adrift

Dream Home

I

T

Directed by Heitor Dhalia Starring Vincent Cassel, Laura Neiva, Camilla Belle Released November 17 s there nothing Vincent Cassel can’t do? Here the French actor assumes the role of a Portuguese father whose relationship with his adolescent daughter (Laura Neiva) comes into focus over a fractious summer in Brazil. Filipa is a young woman coming to terms with the power of her own beauty and the moral and sexual repercussions that follow. Mathias is her father, the rock in her life eroded by the realisation that he is having an affair with a stunning American tourist (Camilla Belle). All pouty lips and Bambi limbs, Neiva is a terrific find as Filipa – her seductiveness underpinned by the attendant callousness of youth. Director Heitor Dhalia gives the film a glossy sheen (with the slightest undercurrent of Oedipal tension), but Adrift never really moves beyond the tale of one little rich girl’s awakening. It’s The OC with great production values. Matt Bochenski 3 3 2

088 T h e C a r l o s I s s u e

Directed by Pang Ho-Cheung Starring Josie Ho, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Eason Chan Released November 12 he skyrocketing prices of Hong Kong property add a semblance of social relevance to this slasher film, but ultimately its woolly psychological trauma is just an excuse for cock-chopping, eye-poking nonsense. Josie Ho does her best playing Sheung, an overworked young woman who longs to buy a new apartment to retrieve the perceived idyll of her youth, a neat encapsulation of how her happiness can only be conceived within the system that causes her distress. But Pang Ho-Cheung’s cold and clinical direction is depressingly rote. Dream Home is trapped within an increasingly formulaic industry that sees horror as synonymous with excess, where any semblance of psychological or social realism is obscured by a high rise of gross sensationalism and shoddy gender politics. Is it possible to expect any kind of worthwhile social critique from a film that is as market-driven as the crooks that blight Sheung’s life? James Mansfield 2 1 1

Loose Cannons

Leap Year

F

M

Secretariat

The Thorn in the Heart

'S

T

Directed by Ferzan Ozpetek Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Nicole Grimaudo, Alessandro Preziosi Released December 10 erzan Ozpetek’s latest is a typical Italian tale of dynastic change. Tommaso (Riccardo Scamarchio) is an aspiring writer who returns from Rome to his provincial southern hometown where his father is planning to hand the family pasta factory to him and brother Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi). Tommaso plans a dramatic confession that he’s gay to escape such drudgery, but is beaten to the punch by his equally closeted brother. One paternal heart attack later and family ties are snapping. Ozpetek takes these men and women as they are, revealing deep emotions in broad strokes. Everyone here is a disappointed misfit, not just the loose cannons in the clan. But where a Fellini would also include hard barbs of human nature at its worst, Ozpetek’s deep belief in family and friends sees these bonds soften the conflict. Loose Cannons has the all-embracing, crowd-pleasing virtues of a daytime soap, but a bigger, truer heart. Nick Hasted 2 3 3

Directed by Randall Wallace Starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Scott Glenn Released December 10 chmaltz’, as every good Jewish girl can tell you, literally means ‘chicken fat’.

Who knows exactly what the Yiddish would be for ‘boiled up ham and horse bones’, but ‘Secretariat’ seems a very likely candidate. This tale of wealth, horsebreeding and good old faith is just about as hammy as a study of commodified horse sex can be. Faced with bankruptcy, a senile father (who seems no more mentally impaired than any other character in this American pastoral), a dead mother and a farm full of horses, Penny Chenery (played by Diane Lane and her amazing immovable face) decides to buck up, grab her new foal by the fetlocks and make dreams come true. What results is the most amazing 31-length win in American horse racing history, which, thrilling as it sounds, is far more gratifyingly realised in the original Belmont Stakes footage freely available on YouTube. Nell Frizzell 3 1 1

Directed by Michael Rowe Starring Monica del Carmen, Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Armando Hernández Released November 26 ichael Rowe’s impeccably performed debut focuses on 29 days in the life of Laura Lopez (Monica del Carmen), a lonely freelance journalist who spends her evenings drifting from one meaningless sexual encounter to the next.This routine leads Laura to Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), and as their sexual relationship gradually intensifies, his increasingly demeaning requests tap into a traumatic event in her past. But will an important day marked on Laura’s calendar bring her life of pain, sex and alienation to an end? Set entirely in the confines of Laura’s small apartment, Leap Year is a raw and claustrophobic study of loneliness and isolation.

Key to the film’s hypnotic appeal is del Carmen’s tender and restrained performance, which makes it all the more affecting when we watch her slowly lose her grip on life.

LeapYear isn’t a movie for a sunny afternoon, but Rowe’s small tale of sex and despair is a tough trip worth taking. Lee Griffiths 2 3 3

Directed by Michel Gondry Starring Suzette Gondry, Jean-Yves Gondry, Michel Gondry Released December 10

he Thorn in the Heart catalogues the career and family life of Suzette Gondry, matriarch of the Gondry family and aunt of Michel, the celebrated director behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind. We learn about this retired schoolteacher through intimate interviews and fly-on-the-wall scenes as she reconnects with former colleagues, pupils and family members. These interactions serve as the backbone of the film, complemented by old Super 8 footage of the family, originally filmed by Jean-Yves Gondry, Suzette’s son.

The exploration of the complex bond between mother and son provides the film’s most compelling and emotionally grounded moments. But insightful as The Thorn in the Heart may be, soporific pacing and lack of drama limit this documentary’s potential. The impression it creates is that we’re intruding on little more than a glorified home movie. Tom Eagar 3 3 3

089

Back Section The

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY jon boam

092 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Centenary Cinema Brighton’s Duke of York’s cinema celebrates its one hundredth birthday. t is late September, and summer has just delivered its last stand.

In Brighton’s Preston Circus, bouquets of blue and white balloons garnish a red carpet outside the Duke of York’s Picturehouse. Regional press crews and clusters of local residents are gathered to celebrate the life of a beloved guest of honour. Inside, the staff, silhouetted in ball gowns and dinner jackets, usher guests to their seats while a pianist fills the room with chimes from an old Steinway upright.

One hundred years ago on this day, the Duke’s opened for business. Its doors have remained open ever since, officially making it the oldest purpose-built, continuously functional cinema in the UK. In 2010, on the evening of this centenary gala, the audience is being taken on a tour through the cinema’s long history, experiencing the Duke’s as it was a century ago and discovering how it has withstood the stern test of time. A lot has changed since former stage actress and founding owner Violet Melnotte-Wyatt cut the ribbon to launch her £3,000 venture, but on this night it’s easy to picture the scene in 1910.

Back then a ticket stub would set you

back threepence (sixpence for the back stalls) and a full house meant 800 men, women and children crammed into the cinema’s one and only screening room.

Behind the rear balcony a 35mm projector would run black-and-white film aside a magic lantern show. Nowadays digital prints cover 80 per cent of the Duke’s listings, but spools of dust-scratched celluloid summon the cinema’s golden youth from time to time.

From the advent of the talkies through two world wars, the cinema boom of the mid ’40s, right up to the birth of the UK’s first multiplex in 1985, the Duke of York’s has always changed with the seasons. Yet aside from the odd cosmetic lift, the building stands relatively unaltered: the columned frontage and crimson and magnolia décor give the place a warm, distinguished character, while the fibreglass showgirl’s legs that have reached 20-feet above the site since 1991 are a cherished local landmark.

To generations of loyal patrons from Sussex and beyond, the Duke’s is more than just a cinema. To one man, in fact, it’s been like a second home. As head projectionist at the Duke of York’s for 30 years and counting, Jimmy Anderson has an especially strong affinity with this grand old building.

“It’s a bit of a Cinema Paradiso story,” says

Anderson. “My mother worked as an usher in a local cinema when I was at school, and I used to go down there and she’d sneak me and my mates into the X films. I hung out in the projection box a lot and would pester the projectionist; ask him questions about how everything worked. Then one day when I was about 16, the manager came up to me and told me the projectionist hadn’t turned up and he’d give me £5 to run the film. I did and he offered me a job when I left school. I’d learnt my way up to head projectionist by the time I was 18, and I’ve been here ever since.”

The dedication of Anderson and the rest of the Duke’s staff has made it one of the most distinguished arthouse cinemas in the UK, but as Anderson explains, it’s the customers that have been crucial to its survival. “It’s always been the people.

There’s a real atmosphere here that you don’t get in many places these days. And that’s why we get so many people visiting us from London and even further. I don’t know of another cinema that means so much to so many people. There really isn’t another place like it.” Adam Woodward A special book commemorating the centenary, The Duke’s at 100, will be launched at the CINECITY Brighton Film Festival in November.

093

The godfather of video art, Nam June Paik paved the way for the MTV generation.

f you were watching TV in 1963 you’d have witnessed Kennedy’s demise, got to know an English fop in a Tardis and seen your favourite band lip-sync for their lives on Ready Steady Go! The chunky box in the corner of the living room stood for comfort and familiarity – at least, in most places it did. In Wuppertal, Germany, something quite new was happening.

It was here that Nam June Paik installed his ‘Exposition of Music – Electronic Television’, where TV sets absorbed audio feeds from cassette recorders, live broadcasts were warped with magnets, and TVs

094 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

screened a horizontal line. The materiality of television was being scrambled in a German art gallery, and its repercussions would reverberate around the world.

Later, in New York, the Koreanborn Paik bought a consumer grade video camera and pioneered video art, recognising video’s expressive and conceptual capabilities and its position at the epicentre of popular culture. He intercepted TV as it became a global phenomenon and subverted society’s early perceptions, scrambling then throwing them back, still familiar but definitely a bit strange.

“Nam June humanised technology,” says his nephew Ken Hakuta. “He was a cultural terrorist who broke all

conventions with his very sophisticated wit and humour, intelligence, sarcasm, global and cross cultural thinking. His artworks reflect all of this.” Citing Paik’s ‘TV Buddha’, a closed circuit TV piece in which a Buddha watches his own videoed image on a monitor, Hakuta says: “He made society talk to the TV. [It was] a two-way conversation, instead of what had been a one-way conversation.”

In New York, the father of video art had also befriended the godfather of the avant-garde, Jonas Mekas, who recalls Paik as “a far out, wacky kind of guy, very funny most of the time, never too serious and very, very irrational. He practically single-handedly brought video and TV art into existence just with a piece of

magnet – it was that simple. Actually it wasn’t. But he was a genius, so he made it look simple.”

Fellow artist Rebecca Allen, now a professor at UCLA, recalls their struggle: “The art world was snubbing us because artists couldn’t work with computers, that wasn’t art. Video was barely thought of as any kind of an art form.” Although society was embracing technology, it wasn’t without suspicion, especially regarding creativity. As Allen says: “It’s like claiming a piano’s going to kill music because it’ll start creating all the musical pieces.”

With multi-screen works including ‘Positive Egg’, in which the image of a white egg was enlarged and abstracted

over a series of TV screens, or his stack of over 1,000 TV monitors for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Paik approached video art with a sense of humour, humanism and entertainment value. He built his famous robots from TVs in his nephew’s bedroom. “It was a funky robot, even as a 10-year-old, I knew that,” recalls Hakuta.

“This was not a Sony robot, this was a Paik robot – one that was designed not to function well nor look good. This was genius. This was fun.”

Paik later extracted this robot from the Whitney Museum and walked it down the sidewalk, only to have it felled by a yellow taxi. He called the event ‘a catastrophe of technology in the twenty-first century’. Playfully, he

reminded us that we should humanise technology, not be dehumanised by it.

Paik looked into the future and understood not just the power of technology but its creative potential, coining the phrase ‘information superhighway’ back in 1974. As Mekas concludes: “His mind was always a few miles ahead of himself and of all the others around him.” Paik aimed to be the ‘TV version of Vivaldi’ and as such, our technology is his orchestra.

S ee the first m a jor UK retrospective of Nam J une Pa ik’s work at Tate Liverpool from December 17 2010 to March 13 2011.

095

Marty, Michael & Me interview by Tom Seymour

96 TTh he e CTaRr O 096 l oN s :I sLseugea c y I s s u e

Legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker t a l k s M i c h a e l P o w e ll a n d M a r t i n S c o r s e s e .

In 1969, Thelma Schoonmaker met Martin Scorsese at a six-week filmmaking course at New York University. She began to edit his student films before gaining work on Michael Wadleigh’s influential Woodstock in 1971. It was her first feature film and she was nominated for an Oscar. Twelve years later, Scorsese employed her to cut Jake La Motta’s fight scenes in Raging Bull . This time she won the golden statue.

She has worked on every Scorsese film since and has been nominated on another winning four occasions, twice (for The Aviator and The Departed ).

Through Scorsese, she met and married Michael Powell, the British director famous for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Schoonmaker is now dedicated to honouring her husband’s legacy and preserving his films.

You’ve spent a life editing some pretty amazing movies. Can you explain how it happened?

I never thought I was going to be a film editor, it was really accidental. But once I fell into it and started to learn so much from Scorsese, I just found it to be the most riveting, wonderful experience. It’s such a creative job. You’re taking the work of 200 people who have been killing themselves through three or four months laying down their performances and their art on footage that I then get to take and begin to shape and give pace and rhythm.

What is the weight of responsibility like to bear?

There’s a tremendous amount of responsibility.

An editor can make or break an actor’s performance. You can use all the wrong takes and cut away from them all the time. I think the reason why Marty and I have been able to work together for so long is because at a certain point he began to trust me to search and drive things and fix problems. I think all great talent needs a lot of support behind them and I think he gets that from me.

How has your relationship with Scorsese changed over the years?

I didn’t know anything about editing when I first met him – he taught me everything so his taste is my taste, but we both have a great love of all forms of art and we can talk about that all the time and share it. Now maybe he relies on me more heavily than he did at the beginning when he was teaching me, but it hasn’t changed. There was always a feeling we had the same commitment, the same attitude, the same passion.

You were married to the late Michael Powell, and yourself and Scorsese have been influential in restoring his films with Emeric Pressburger.

We have an intense occupation with the preservation of films; it is something that unites us, and in particular the films of Powell and Pressburger. We’ve been deeply devoted to The Red Shoes restoration and now we’re doing The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and we’re determined to do many others. [Marty’s] great love for my husband was a wonderful thing that we share every day. People don’t understand how unusual their films were, and that’s maybe why they weren’t very well received at the time. You have to engage with Powell and Pressburger films. They’re very profound, they’re very committed to human beings and they stretch you emotionally.

My generation of filmmakers was a lot more neurotic.

Stylistically, how have Powell and Pressburger influenced your work with Scorsese?

For Scorsese it was about the amazing camera work and set design and the daring nature of what they were doing within a studio system.

It struck him when he was five and he saw the films on television. He’s very jealous of how much they got away with. They made a lot of their films during the war, and no one was paying any attention so they got away with murder, and he wishes he could today. He has to fight to the death for everything.

Is there one sequence within Scorsese’s oeuvre that you watch and think to yourself, ‘That’s as good as we’re going to get; that’s the pinnacle’?

There are many, but because Raging Bull was the first major feature film I ever worked on… The final fight sequence took us a very long time to edit because we had so much range and so many options, and we fussed and fretted and spent a huge amount of time making it right. I think that’s the most stunning thing I’ve ever worked on.

097

Words by Anton Bitel, Tom Eagar, Liz Haycroft, Tom Seymour, Adam Woodward

A V A I L A B L E NOVEMBER 1

In The

A V A I L A B L E NOVEMBER 8 T h e

T i m e

That Remains

D i r e c t e d b y El i a S u l e i m a n ( 2 0 0 9 )

The Time That Remains is a sprawling piece of humanist cinema that maps the fortunes of Nazareth, the biblical town now situated in the Palestinian territories. Based on diaries written by Elia Suleiman’s father yet almost entirely silent, this is a coolly oblique film embroidered with the kind of ironic physical comedy reminiscent of Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton. TS

Le Refuge Directed by François Ozon (2009)

French director François Ozon returns with the story of a beautiful, rich French couple who indulge in a dangerous attraction to drugs.

When the boyfriend ODs, his spirit survives in his girlfriend’s newly discovered pregnancy.

Moving to a house in the country, she is joined by the brother of her ex-lover in a seductive story that explores the roles of family in a subtle but engaging way. TE

The Secret Land of the Free of Kells I Am Directed by Vadim Jean (2010)

Directed by Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey (2010) Kids these days. We had The Magic Roundabout, they have a French/Belgian/Irish animated adventure story about a bunch of marauding Viking warriors. There is, however, a certain lyrical traditionalism poking through. The animation is hand-drawn and many of the action sequences, most notably the underwater ‘Beowulf’ fight, recall ancient mythological stories. TS

This Prison

Where I Live D i r e c t e d b y R e x Bl o o m s t e i n ( 2 0 1 0 )

British filmmaker Rex Bloomstein met Burmese comedian Zarganar (aka Maung Thura) shortly before he was imprisoned for 35 years for criticising the ruling junta. With the help of German comic Michael Mittermeier, Bloomstein’s feature-length documentary explores Zarganar’s motivation to challenge the government and make his people laugh, even while confined to a remote prison. LH

098 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Documenting the plight of three African-American Black Panthers who between them have spent over a century in solitary confinement in the largest prison in America for a murder they didn’t commit, In the Land of the Free is an impressively balanced and provocative feature that shines a light on the history and present state of the American penal system and the endemic racism that exists within it. TE

Flesh of the Orchid

a Camera

Directed by Henry Cornelius (1955)

The subject of Flesh of the Orchid matches the gaucheness of its title. Aspiring to fairy tale stature but with very ’70s production values, this story of a young, emotionally disturbed woman on the run from her evil family is elevated to the preposterous by a quandary of the bizarre and grotesque, with plenty of pathetic fallacy smeared on. TS

Based on the autobiographical novel of Christopher Isherwood, and telling the story of Sally Bowles pre-Cabaret, I Am a Camera was directed by Henry Cornelius a couple of years before his premature death. But although its credentials are rock solid, the film is an unfortunate affair caught up in the amoral debauchery of its show-off heroine. Lacking a real sense of place or any sensitivity to character, it’s a study of decadence devoid of depth. TS

and the Blue Cat

D i r e c t e d b y S e b a s t i á n S i lva ( 2 0 0 9 )

In this feature-length outing for Serge Danot’s The Magic Roundabout, Eric Thompson’s voiceovers convert French family fun into English eccentricity.

There is nostalgia for the middle-aged, lysergic visuals for the very young or the very high, and enough witty lines and surreal digressions to charm just about anyone. AB

The eponymous maid, played stoically by Catalina Saavedra, has been looking after the same house for generations. She’s getting old and she’s getting slow. Cue feisty new assistant and resulting power battle. Director Sebastián Silva shifts gears fluidly from gritty realism to dark comedy to weepy melodrama, but never really gets the engine to full throttle. TS

Directed by Patrice Chéreau (1975)

Dougal The Maid Directed by Serge Danot (1972)

Pray The Devil

Back to Hell

Directed by Gini Reticker (2008) To most readers of The Evening Standard, Charles Taylor is just the man who inconvenienced Naomi Campbell with golf-ball sized blood diamonds.

And yet Taylor was one of the most destructive and violent warlord/presidents in African history.

This extraordinary documentary follows a group of Liberian women who, with unimaginable bravery, stood up to his regime and helped to bring a degree of peace to the ravaged country of their birth. TS

Little Big S olider Directed by Sheng Ding (2010) Ever the acceptable face of onscreen violence, Jackie Chan goes kung fu fighting on home soil in this epic action hybrid. Martial arts protégé Wang Leehom plays Little to Chan’s Big; a peasant warrior who comes across a stricken prince in battle and schemes to collect the reward promised upon the heir’s safe return. Mixing slapstick humour with heart-stopping stunt work, Little Big Soldier sees Chan kicking ass and cracking wise at the top of his game. AW

A V A I L A B L E NOVEMBER 1 5

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron (2009) Only a year old, already Avatar looks dated, and the extra nine minutes of largely redundant footage in this Blu-ray release can’t hide that. Avatar was event cinema, a spectacle that cloaked a derivative, over-simplified message about human greed. And don’t expect it to look good in your living room. One day, Cameron’s ego may allow him to employ a writer. Until then, enjoy another three hours of ball-busting environmentalism and grunts shouting ‘Get some pain!’ TS

Journey of the Children D i r e c t e d b y Ol i v e r R a lf e ( 2 0 0 9 )

Immersing himself in the surreal and subversive world of The Mighty Boosh, director Oliver Ralfe intimately documents the cult frenzy surrounding Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt on their exhausting six-month Future Sailors tour. Candy for Boosh fans, but the uninitiated are unlikely to be converted by this self-indulgent art-doc. AW

Hammer and Tongs C o l l e cti o n Directed BY Garth Jennings, Nick Goldsmith (2010)

Living and working on a canal barge in northeast London, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, aka Hammer and Tongs, have crafted some of the noughties’ most memorable music videos. The lovedup milk cartons in Blur’s Coffee & TV, the evolving man in Fat Boy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now and the subtle tragedy of Pulp’s Help the Aged are among our favourites. This is a great way to trace Hammer and Tongs’ burgeoning career in features, as well as recall a departing youth. TS

A V A I L A B L E D ECEMBER 6

La CiÉnaga

Directed by Lucretia Martel (2001) La Ciénaga is the debut film from director Lucretia Martel, who recently brought us the universally celebrated The Headless Woman . Its genesis is clear in this shimmering, simmering portrait of middleclass decadence and decay, in which a family struggle through a ceaseless storm (literally and metaphorically). This isn’t easy or smooth but it’s compelling viewing. TS

F i t Erasing D i r e c t e d b y R i k k i B e a d l e - Bl a i r ( 2 0 1 0 )

Funded by the LGBT charity Stonewall, and an adaptation of the play the group toured around secondary schools in an attempt to raise awareness and invert stereotypes of homosexuality (while maybe also reinforcing them), this is the gay equivalent to patriotism. Street dancing, considered humour and ‘identity’ monologues abound, but it brings nothing new to the party. TS

Shadows

of Progress C o l l e c t i o n Directed

by

Various

(2010)

The product of hundreds of hours of meticulous restoration work from the craftsmen at the BFI archive in Berkhamsted, Shadows of Progress is an exhaustive collection of British documentaries made in the years following the Second World War. It was a vanguard movement; filmmakers determined to capture a society emerging from the dust and ashes of war and building on the promise of welfare and universalism. These values are now under threat, and as such these films should be embraced. TS

A V A I L A B L E NOVEMBER 2 2

L e av i n g

Directed by Catherine Corsini (2009) Kristin Scott Thomas, sneaking bitchy glances at Tilda Swinton at every minor awards show, continues her campaign to become impervious to all critics by taking on another French, independent, middlebrow romance-drama. It has medium-budget, high-taste production values lathered on, but it’s so soapy you start craving a bit of dirt. TS

Dav id Directed

by

David

Bond

(2010)

As a protest picture exposing New Labour’s cavalier attitude towards its citizens’ privacy and liberty, Erasing David can claim to be the most successful campaigning doc on record. Conversely, it may mean this film has a dwindling half-life. When David Bond released this at the fag end of the great social democrat experiment, it was pressing and pointed.

Released on DVD with a libertarian coalition now in government, it suffers from being too intimate with its foe. TS

The Silent

Army

Directed by Jean van der Velde (2008) Half an hour shorter than its original, Jean van der Velde has significantly re-cut his 2008 release Wit Licht (White Light) and pegged it with a new title for its international release. After a warlord abducts his son’s friend with the aim of transforming him into a child soldier, a white restaurateur from an undisclosed African country sets out to save him. Although an improvement on the original, the clichéd and at times implausible screenplay sees it pose no threat to Blood Diamond and its ilk. TE

099

Doin’ Time tatesville; Greystone College; the County Hotel: like schooldays and active service, prison life is a duck-press in which the most colourful argot is forged. As intimate, lifelong friendships are cast, enemies shared and disappointments conjoined, the cryptic and endlessly evolving word-jazz that rat-a-tats through those calaboose bars carries a sense of community most law-abiding citizens will never truly know – a hard-luck language sired by circumstance and nursed by the knowing self-pity of the chain-gang lament.

Little wonder, then, with all this purple patois floating around, that Hollywood scriptwriters should continue to dig around for prison yarns through which to parade their repertoires of purloined prose. But although it has proven endlessly tempting to all manner of writers and directors down the years, filmmakers looking to transcend prison movie diktats have found themselves stymied by the burden of ministering to the genre’s compulsory cast of new fish, kindly old lags, bent screws and wicked wardens, necessarily grim settings and the limited set of achievable goals for which their protagonists can reasonably aim.

Of course, none of this high-minded balloon juice mattered one jot to the producers of recidivist caper

100 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

Doin’ Time ; to them, prison was just another backdrop to crud up with bush league spoofery. And so, from what the credits insist is an ‘original’ story by Franelle Silver and Ron Zwang, comes the most unbalanced, incautious bit of business committed to magnetic strip since Tricky Dicky’s Lee Harvey Oswald impression turned up at the end of the Nixon Tapes.

After porking the Governor’s wife, diminutive door-to-door cryogenics salesman (no, really) Duke Jarrett (Jeff Altman) is looking at some serious limbo time. Quite which law he is adjudged to have actually broken is never made entirely clear, but five minutes in his company does more than enough to convince one that whatever the inequities surrounding his incarceration, the bastinado is most definitely the correct place for the little turd. Add to his constant toadying a loud mouth, a lofty demeanour and a line in sarcasm that’s about as subtle as a burning cathedral, and it’s safe to say that Duke’s spell in the Bastille is going to be short, gruelling and more than eventful.

Things initially look up when he arrives at the prison to find the convicts merrily cooking burgers on the electric chair, performing skits on their own in–house TV channel and enjoying regular Friday night mixers with the women’s prison across the road.

But after running foul of the prison’s Mr Big (John

Vernon), Duke finds himself challenged to a knockdown-drag-out boxing match with Vernon’s henchman – a white, middle-aged Mr T manqué known simply as ‘Animal’. Such madcap mobocracy promises to be firmly stamped out when ludicrous popinjay Richard Mulligan takes over as warden, but when he in fact turns out to be stone-hatchet mad the prison spirals yet further out of control and the remainder of the movie veers off into a boxing picture rudely pasted together using cutaways from other films.

Attaining a level of humour nudging pre-school and with the production values of a Central American snuff movie, DT ’s shortcomings give one abundant leave to idly marvel at the unyielding power of the video juggernaut to so marmelise the careers of the likes of Mulligan and Vernon under its rancid wheels.

Mulligan at least throws himself into proceedings with the vim and brio he applied to every role. He does, admittedly, display frequent signs of having heavily self-medicated to reach such a state, but at least he gets behind the mule. Point Blank and The Outlaw Josey Wales veteran Vernon, on the other hand, seems so utterly mortified by the grievous slip road onto which the VHS 18-wheeler has muscled him that his despair seeps from every frame and oozes down the screen. Adam Lee Davies

(1985) Directed by G e org e M e nd e luk

Starring

Je ff A ltman , Ri chard M ulligan, J ohn Vernon

Tagline

‘ T h e most o u trag eo us , hi lari ous , bi zarr e pr ison mov i e ever to escap e.’

Trailers

Parker , She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas, Magic & The Goose

Cherrypick

“ I th i n k I fo u nd h i s w e ak ne ss .

Ev ery ti me you pu nch h im in the balls he goes down! ”

101

T h e A r c h i v e No 12

102 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

T h e A r c h i v e No 12

FAT CITY

(1972) W o r d s b y J A S ON WOOD

John Huston’s best film in over two decades – retrospectively viewed as one of the very finest of his illustrious career – Fat City takes its place alongside Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Robert Wise’s 1956 Somebody Up There Likes Me as one of the most honest and unflattering depictions of the boxing world.

Adapted by Leonard Gardner from his novel of the same name, the film features a terrific central performance from Stacy Keach as Billy Tully, a once-promising amateur boxer who lost the biggest fight of his budding career, and then stood by and helplessly watched his life descend into divorce, further defeat and alcoholism.

Tully has shacked up with fellow barfly Oma (Susan Tyrrell) and is eking a meagre living as a farm labourer while still harbouring unrealistic dreams of a comeback.

Hooking up with a promising young teenager (Jeff Bridges), proffering both his wisdom and his wily old trainer (Nicholas Colasanto), Tully begins to live his life vicariously through the younger man.

Given a harsh lesson in his opening bout, the teenager, who fears for his good looks, quickly realises that a career of beatings and disappointment is not for him and so the downward spiral of Tully’s life threatens to continue.

Shot entirely on location in Stockton, California, by the great Conrad Hall, Fat City is, like Leonard Gardner’s novel, relentlessly downbeat and grimly realistic, which perhaps explains its abject failure

at the box office. Set amidst a motley community of dropouts, losers and couldabeens, the film unfolds in dimly lit bars and poorly furnished apartments.

The sense of poverty, apathy and failure is pronounced. Escape and success is presented as an illusion, but one to which the flophouse denizens still precariously cling.

And none more so than Tully, whose narrow and thoroughly unremarkable victory in his comeback fight is unromantically presented

by Huston as merely the inevitable prelude to more physically and psychologically debilitating setbacks.

A former amateur boxer, Huston’s sympathy for his characters and his feel for the poorly equipped gyms and tawdry fight halls they frequent is acute, while his presentation of the action inside the ring is brief and brutal. There are no carefully choreographed fight sequences, just outof-condition men some way past their prime grunting their way through pain and humiliation. The use of sound is incredibly effective (particularly the thudding noise of flesh on flesh), as is the adoption of Kris Kristofferson’s doleful ‘Help Me Make it Through the Night’ as an anthem for this drowsy-eyed collection of punchdrunk desperates and lonely losers barely surviving between one drink and the next.

An unforgiving film that strips away fantasy to reveal a quietly sobering reality, Fat City found critical favour, reviving Huston’s reputation at a time when the young guns were beginning to take over Hollywood.

103

CULT

No12

HERO

Jacques Tourneur & Val Lewton How the men behi nd C at P e ople a nd I Wal ked With a Zom bie c re ate d a ne w ci ne m a of f e a r .

here’s a scene in Vincente Minnelli’s proto-yuppie Hollywood satire The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) in which Jonathan Shields, the ruthless young producer played by Kirk Douglas, realises that the costume budget for his B-screamer Doom of the Cat Men will run to little more chilling than some clip-on furry ears and a moth-eaten tail. His solution is ‘atmosphere’: to use the shoddy lighting and ageing film stock at his disposal to enhance the shadows and suggest barely glimpsed terrors lurking in the dark places. Douglas’ character is usually thought to be based on Orson Welles but this scene refers to the less well-known Val Lewton who, along with fellow misfit immigrant Jacques Tourneur, brought noir to horror and gave audiences a whole new way to enjoy being terrified.

The pair were boys when their parents joined the vast wave of European migration

104 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

to the US in the early twentieth century, but neither were immigrants of the ‘huddled masses’ variety. Tourneur’s father was a French director, and the Ukrainian Lewton, or Vladimir Leventon as he was then, was the nephew of a Broadway star.

Nevertheless, by the time the two met in 1935 on David O Selznick’s A Tale of Two Cities, they were both well-versed in the bargain basement end of showbiz. Tourneur had been forced to spend years as a script clerk before he got near a film camera.

Lewton’s beginnings were even more humble – churning out novelisations of hit films for MGM’s New York publicity office.

Around the time Tourneur released his first short back in France, Tout ca ne vaut pas l’amour (1931), Lewton tasted success with his pulp novel No Bed of Her Own. With characteristic impulsiveness, he quit his job and rattled off a further three books

in the space of a year; they bombed, and Lewton headed to Hollywood just as Tourneur was steaming across the Atlantic, disillusioned with the financially straitened French film industry.

Mercilessly exploiting the most tenuous contacts, Lewton got a job on Selznick’s staff, and when he was thrown together with the equally young Tourneur to direct the Bastille sequence in Two Cities, he realised he was working with a unique talent. Lewton was a smart operator – a clever story editor adept at sniffing out marketable ideas – but Tourneur had the vision and the ability to create a unifying atmosphere in his scenes that was born, not made. Over whisky sours in the Mahiki Lounge at Venice Beach, the two bellyached over their contracts as MGM second-unit men and high-balled harebrained ideas. But Lewton’s tireless legwork for Selznick hadn’t gone unnoticed, and when

RKO set up a horror B-picture unit in 1942, he was offered the job of running the lessthan-salubrious operation. His choice of director for the first movie was both obvious and inspired.

Jacques Tourneur’s debut feature for Lewton was Cat People (1942), the story of a Serbian fashion designer who’s loath to get it on with her new American husband, just in case she turns into a panther and tears his throat out. The script, from the pen of potboiler-merchant DeWitt Bodeen, was serviceable but no masterpiece.

Tourneur’s genius was to visually emphasise the noirish, psychosexual elements over the supernatural, mapping a journey into a tortured mind that used monster movie imagery as a disturbing backdrop. Cat People is the moment a filmmaker began to suspect that whatever he could put on screen had nothing on

the squirming demons haunting the imagination of American audiences. In turn, Lewton’s genius was to understand how well that set-up fitted his contractual obligation to bring in all his productions at under $150,000.

Tourneur and Lewton quickly followed Cat People with another atmospheric tour de force, I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

With its hokey title and perfunctory plot involving a Caribbean planter, his cursed wife and her pretty nurse, on paper the film was no more than meat to the Saturday fright-night grinder, but Tourneur again wove his dark magic, teasing out a sweaty, mangrove swamp chill from the unpromising source material. Chiaroscuro, both visual and metaphysical, is once more key to the film’s appeal and the director’s startling style leaves his strange, half-real imagery lingering long in the memory. With

their follow-up, the derivative but no less visually striking The Leopard Man (1943), Tourneur and Lewton had put together three pictures in a couple of years that forged a bold, less-is-more ethos that influenced cinematic shockers up to and including Jaws, Alien and Shutter Island.

Sadly, the cigar-chomping RKO brass broke up the team the year The Leopard Man made a critical and commercial hattrick for the studio, aiming to double their money with both men helming pictures simultaneously. Lewton enjoyed some success with Karloff/Lugosi creep-outs like The Body Snatcher (1945) and Tourneur brought his dark style to westerns and straight-up noirs. Though neither ever again captured the power of their earlier works together, they ushered in a cinematic era in which manufacturing fear became an art. paul fairclough

105

S u pp o r t i n g t h e UK ’ s n o - b u d g e t film m akers .

Interview by Liz Haycroft ovelist Stephen King has long supported student and up-and-coming filmmakers through his ‘Dollar Babies’ scheme, granting non-commercial rights to his short stories for about the price of a can of Coke.

With King’s permission, filmmaker Gerard Lough has faithfully adapted The Boogeyman into a short psychological horror in the vein of The Shining and Manhunter, set in his native Ireland.

exist, or is he just a deeply troubled individual and is it all in his head? This film, and certainly King’s short story, is really about parental neglect. It’s also about guilt and the past catching up with you. The wicked creature in the closet is just a metaphor for the guilt. That’s pretty complex and dark stuff – I don’t think you’d see that in Saw.

LWLies

What kind of experience do you have?

Lough

Where I live, in terms of making day-to-day money, people like myself make professional wedding videos. I know other directors break into commercials or advertising… In other parts of the country you’ll do things like weddings and conferences to make money.

film with a very limited marketing campaign, that’s actually quite a result.

LWLies

Tell us about the highs.

Lough

The best success is that the end result looks actually as I imagined – the film is exactly the type of film that I wanted to make. It cost about ¤2,000 but it looks like it cost more because I know a lot of tricks and I had a really talented team. My visual effects supervisor worked on The Dark Knight and my make-up artist worked on The Tudors, plus we have great actors and a great composer.

LWLies And the lows?

LWLies

Who are you and why are you making a film?

Lough

I’m based in Ireland. I lived in London for two years trying to break into the film industry and it didn’t quite happen. I think this is my seventh short film and I’ve also done about eight music videos.

LWLies

LWLies

What will make your film stand out?

Lough

It’s 27 minutes long and for a short film, it’s very ambitious. It’s got very elaborate make-up, special effects, CGI effects and it was shot in locations from one end of Ireland to the next. We aimed very high because I have a great dislike for the current crop of horror movies, which are just blood and gore and are quite sadistic and, frankly, misogynistic, while this film is a lot more sophisticated.

What’s your pitch?

Lough

A very troubled man goes to see a psychologist for a one-off therapy session. He has a theory that a creature lives in his closet and is responsible for the death of his three children, who all died from natural causes. By the end of the film, it’s very ambiguous and you really have to make up your own mind as a viewer – does this creature actually

106 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

LWLies

Where are you in the process?

Lough

It’s finished. It has been screened and there’s a trailer online that has been watched almost 6,000 times since July. For a low-budget short

Lough

The Irish Film Board declined to be involved.

Basically they demanded to have the rights to the film and wouldn’t cough up any cash, so the film was made independently with my own money.

LWLies

What advice would you pass on to new filmmakers?

Lough

I think independence is a great thing, certainly if you’re financing the film yourself. You can make it on your own terms and put your own stamp on it. Also, remember that James Cameron and Peter Jackson made short films first. They didn’t just roll out of bed and make a feature – they all had to start somewhere.

Check out the trailer for The Boogeyman on YouTube now.

Celebrating the best new films by our 35k+ members “ an opportunity to view new film created by the rising stars of tomorrow, as hand-picked by the leading talents of today.”

—Aesthetica Magazine

300 films are cast and crewed each week using Shooting People

Highest voted films will receive a personal review by judges.

Previous include Werner Herzog, Sally Potter, Larry Charles, Christine Vachon, Michael Nyman

shootingpeople.org/watch

Cowboys and Aliens

Directed by Jon Favreau ETA July 2011 Filming has now wrapped on Iron Man director Jon Favreau’s latest big-budget offering, destined to be next summer’s biggest blockbuster. A bunch of cowboys led by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford battle extraterrestrials in the Wild West. Sounds disconcertingly like Wild Wild West to us.

Super 8

Directed by JJ Abrams ETA Summer 2011 The Lost creator’s follow-up to Star Trek sees him team up with Steven Spielberg for a mystery project that is rumoured to be an homage to the legendary director’s 1980s-era sci-fi movies. Kyle Chandler (of TV’s Friday Night Lights) and Elle Fanning are the leads.

Bill and Ted 3 Transformers 3 Directed by TBC ETA Probably Never

Directed by Michael Bay ETA Summer 2011

Excellent! Keanu Reeves recently said he would be willing, if not necessarily keen, to take the role of Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in a third instalment of the late ’80s/early ’90s slacker time travel comedy series. Rumour has it Alex Winter is available.

The notoriously combustible Bay has seen disaster after disaster unfold on the set of the third Transformers movie.

An extra was seriously injured when a stunt went wrong, and Bay irritated Chicago residents by effectively shutting down the city centre for a month. Shia Labeouf recently admitted that they got a lot wrong with the second film in the series and promised to put it right this time round. We’ll believe it when we see it.

For Colored Girls Directed by Tyler Perry ETA January 2011

Best known for directing weepy melodramas, Tyler Perry has taken a big risk with this adaptation of an iconic 1975 feminist play by Ntozake Shange. Will it end up as Oscar bait, or simply anger the many fans of the film’s source material? Early US reviews suggest the latter.

Gravity

The Dark Tower

Fresh from her marquee turn as the lead in Black Swan, Natalie Portman has tied down the lead role in Alfonso Cuarón’s existential sci-fi pic. Portman will play an astronaut stranded in deep space after her husband and fellow astronaut Robert Downey Jr dies.

Stephen King’s epic fantasy/sci-fi/ western series will get a Lord of the Rings-style treatment from director Ron Howard – a trilogy of movies accompanied by a network TV series which together will encompass all seven books.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón ETA 2012

Directed by Ron Howard ETA 2012

Untitled Freddie Mercury Biopic Directed by TBC ETA 2012

Peter Morgan has gone from The Queen to, er, Queen with his latest project. It’s a retelling of the legendary rock band’s formative years with none other than Sacha Baron Cohen playing the band’s flamboyant frontman, presumably in a bid to crossover from comedy stalwart to serious leading man. Mercury’s early years in 1960s England should offer rich period pickings. Fingers crossed it’s not an adaptation of We Will Rock You.

109

110 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

The Fighter

Directed by David O Russell ETA February 2011 Six years after I Heart Huckabees, David O Russell returns with the same star (Mark Wahlberg) in a boxing drama that looked, on the evidence of the first trailer, like a by-the-numbers Rocky-style underdog-makes-good movie. Given the talent involved, we have no doubt it’ll be much, much more than that, and a more recent US TV spot suggests it could be very special indeed.

The Cabin in the Woods

Directed by Drew Goddard ETA January 2011 Buffy impresario Joss Whedon penned this 3D horror movie, which is currently shrouded in mystery but promises to subvert the Friday the 13th slasher formula. Like no one’s done that before. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford head up an eclectic cast.

Restless

Directed by Gus Van Sant ETA Spring 2011 Mysteriously absent from the autumn movie festivals, Gus Van Sant’s latest tells the story of a terminally ill teen (Mia Wasikowska) who communes with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Ryo Kase). Early word says the auteur has firmly returned to arthouse territory after the mainstream Milk.

The Eagle

Directed by Kevin Macdonald ETA Spring 2011 In what sounds like a Scot-infused Gladiator remake, vacant pretty-boy Channing Tatum stars as a Roman centurion who travels into the wilds of Caledonia to seek his father’s long-lost legion in second-century AD Britain. Jamie Bell and Donald Sutherland co-star, but the film’s delayed release doesn’t inspire confidence.

Sherlock Holmes 2

Directed by Guy Ritchie ETA December 2011 Some interesting casting for Guy Ritchie’s quickie sequel to the surprisingly entertaining reboot of the famous detective. Mad Men fans will be overjoyed to hear that Jared Harris (Lane Pryce in the TV series, and son of Richard) is playing Moriarty, with none other than Stephen Fry as Holmes’ brother Mycroft.

Then We Came to the End Directed by Lynn Shelton ETA Summer 2011

An adaptation of Joshua Ferris’ acclaimed novel has been on the cards for a while now, but Focus Features is reportedly pushing ahead with it having cherrypicked Humpday director Lynn Shelton for the director’s chair. No word yet on how they’ll tackle the book’s unique first person plural narrative, though.

World War Z Directed by Marc Forster ETA 2012

Fans of Max Brooks’ inventive geopolitical zombie novel might be excited to learn that a movie adaptation is now officially in pre-production. Brad Pitt will produce and may also appear in the film. We’re betting the army-sized hordes of zombies will no doubt be the real star.

True Grit

Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen ETA January 2011 The long-awaited trailer for the Coens’ straight-faced remake of the vaguely campy 1969 John Wayne pic premiered in September, and it looks like the brothers are firmly back in No Country for Old Men territory. Awards glory awaits. Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon star.

The King’s Speech

Emily the Strange

After taking home the audience award at the Toronto Film Festival, this Brit flick was pegged as next year’s Chariots of Fire. Colin Firth is on top awards season form as King George VI, with Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist and Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen Mum. The trailer brings a patriotic lump to the throat.

Fresh from landing the lead role in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret, Chloe Moretz will now reportedly play the iconic graphic novel character-turned-skate brand in a movie adaptation of the Dark Horse comics. The film itself looks like a mix of live action and animation.

Directed by Tom Hooper ETA January 2011

Directed by TBC ETA 2012

111

Paul

Directed by Greg Mottola ETA March 2011 After what seems like years in the making, Simon Pegg’s third outing with Nick Frost is almost ready to be unveiled.

The trailer, which dropped in the autumn, suggests a sprightly, anarchic vibe as the pair play a couple of UFO geeks helping out an alien in need. This could be a spring highlight.

Hereafter

Directed by Clint Eastwood ETA January 2011 Is there a genre the newly octogenarian Hollywood legend hasn’t dabbled in? This time, Eastwood takes on a supernatural drama written by Peter Morgan with (the somewhat ubiquitous) Matt Damon as a troubled psychic. The trailer looks a bit too syrupy for our tastes, though.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Directed by Tomas Alfredson ETA Autumn 2011

Could we be any more excited about this? The Let The Right One In director has lined up a top notch British cast (Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth and Mark Strong, just for starters) for this Joh n le Carré adaptation.

Given Alfredson’s résumé, we can expect an icy Cold War drama.

127 Hours

Directed by Danny Boyle ETA January 2011 Boyle’s follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire wowed film festival audiences over the autumn, and the trailer gives a good idea why. The scene where climber Aron Ralston (James Franco) finally cuts his arm off with a penknife after 127 hours stuck beneath a rock has reportedly caused moviegoers to faint with shock.

Superman: Man of Steel Directed by Zack Snyder ETA 2013

As we went to press, rumours were flying as to who Christopher Nolan is lining up to direct the long-mooted reboot of the Man of Steel that he’s producing. Names in the frame included Darren Aronofsky and Moon director Duncan Jones, but it’s ‘visionary’ filmmaker Zack Snyder who’s been handed the tough task of making the big boy scout relevant again.

112 T h e T R O N : L e g a c y I s s u e

113

“Gary Barlow is our generation’s John Lennon.”