Empire Australasia by May Catering

THOR RAGNAROK CHOSEN BY JULIAN DENNISON

JULIAN DENNISON: “When Thor ﬁrst meets Korg, I love that scene. It’s really funny. Taika [Waititi] plays Korg, and and it’s got a bit of Kiwi humour in there because of Taika. I love the way Korg talks. Our local library, our sister works at, and she knows people who talk like Korg.”

companion] This is my very good friend over here, Miek. He’s an insect, and has knives for hands. Miek displays some killer moves.

THOR: This doesn’t make any sense. THOR: You’re a Kronan, aren’t you? KORG: That I am.

INT. SAKAAR PRISONERS’ QUARTERS — DAY Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has been taken prisoner and is thrown onto the ground of a circular corridor. Guards shut the door behind him. He picks himself up and bangs on the door. A large blue being, Korg (Taika Waititi), sitting against a wall, speaks to him. KORG: Hey hey hey! Hey, take it easy, man! Thor turns round. He sees the blue being sitting next to a smaller creature wielding blades. KORG: Over here! Pile of rocks, waving at you. Here. I’m actually a thing, I’m a being. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Korg, I’m kinda like the leader in here. I’m made of rocks, as you can see, but don’t let that intimidate you. You don’t need to be afraid, unless you’re made of scissors. [Laughing and standing up] Just a little rock paper scissors joke for you. [He points to his

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KORG: Ah yeah, nah… this whole thing is a circle. But not a real circle. More like a freaky circle.

KORG: Nah, nothing makes sense here, man. The only thing that does make sense is that nothing makes sense.

THOR: How did you end up in here? Thor begins to walk down the corridor. Korg walks with him. Miek continues to display his killer moves. KORG: Oh, well, I tried to start a revolution but didn’t print enough pamphlets, so hardly anyone turned up, except for my mum and her boyfriend, who I hate. As punishment, I was forced to be in here and become a gladiator. Bit of a promotional disaster, that one. Thor, tired of the talk, runs down the corridor to try to ﬁnd a way. And reappears almost instantly, behind Korg, who keeps on talking. KORG: But, I’m actually organising another revolution. Don’t know if you’d be interested in something like that. Do you reckon you’d be interested? THOR: How...? How did you...?

THOR: Has anyone here fought the Grandmaster’s champion? KORG: Doug has. [Shouting] Doug! Ah, nah... Doug’s dead. That’s right, everyone who fights the Grandmaster’s champion perishes. THOR: What about you? You’re made of rocks. KORG: Perishable rock. [A rock falls off Korg] Oh, there you go. Another one gone. Yeah, no, I just do the smaller fights, warm up the crowd and whatnot. Wait, wait… you’re not going to face him, are you? THOR: Yes, I am. [Thor walks off, leaving Korg behind] I’ll fight him, win, and get the hell out of this place. KORG: That’s exactly what Doug used to say. See you later, New Doug!

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THE PREDATOR On set of the ugly mother’s big comeback — not Shane Black, don’t be rude — in the sequel that one of the all-time great movie monsters has always deserved.

PREDATOR: 30TH ANNIVERSARY Screenwriter Jim Thomas writes about the thrills, spills and kills of the sci-i action-horror classic, plus the Predator’s designers talk through their creation.

BLACKKKLANSMAN The cast of Spike Lee’s latest talk working with the iconic ilmmaker on his provocative crime-comedy-thriller.

MILE 22 Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg on their fourth collaboration, wrestling each other, lamethrower accidents, and turkey burgers.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY In 1968, two sci-i classics opened on the same day and changed the game. This one featured a monkey throwing a bone.

PLANET OF THE APES And this one featured monkeys doing so much more. “Bones?” they cried. “This is what we think of your bones!”

THE EMPIRE INTERVIEW Hollywood legend Michael Douglas talks us through his career — from The Streets Of San Francisco to the MCU. Clockwise from top: The Predator; Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald; Ready

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — FALLOUT Someone has double-dared Tom Cruise to do something silly again and ilmed it for your viewing pleasure.

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FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD Newt is back — and no, that’s not the name of one of the beasts — in an exclusive new pic.

DISENCHANTMENT Stop your groaning — Matt Groening has a new animated show coming to Netlix. Medievarama, anyone?

STAR WARS EPISODE IX You can Ren, but you can’t hide: IX things that need answering in Episode IX.

AUGUST 2018

BLACKKKLANSMAN Spike Lee presents the cinematic equivalent of throwing a trash can through a window with his excellent latest. WORKING CLASS BOY Jimmy Barnes’ autobiographyturned-stage-show-turned-documentary promises tears, laughs and tunes.

TRUTH OR DARE Director Jeff Wadlow talks us through crafting A-grade scares in the latest Blumhouse pants-wet-a-thon. READY PLAYER ONE Objective: list all the references from Spielberg’s pop culture opus. THE RANKING Dame Meryl of Streep. CLASSIC SCENE Should’ve used more pamphlets.

Player One; Mission: Impossible — Fallout; BlacKkKlansman.

THIS MONTH AT EMPIRE WHEN I WAS in primary school, there always seemed to be some kid who’d seen way more scary ilms than me. Whether it was due to the fact that they had an older relative unconcerned about scarring younger members of the family or simply parents who didn’t quite understand the ratings system (Hi, Mum and Dad!), these upstarts loved nothing more than to brag about the fact they’d seen [insert A Nightmare On Elm Street, Aliens, RoboCop et al. here] and you hadn’t. (Note: they may not have been bragging, but to my jealous, movie-obsessed ears, they sure as hell sounded like they were.) This is how I irst heard about Predator: through a kid at school named Nathan Kelly (older brother: tick!) who had not only seen the ilm, but was happy to relay all the gory details (and yes, I’m going to bust out a tired ass ‘Spoiler Warning!’ here): The guy who gets skinned alive! The guy who gets his spine ripped out! The cool alien that was an ugly motherfucker! (Arnie’s words, not mine — I don’t go for alien body shaming.) It sounded horrifying… and I could not wait to see it. I can’t quite remember when I did get to watch Predator for the irst time, but needless to say it was as awesome-gross as my friend had described: a blood-splattered action lick full of guys with arms the size of my entire body equipped with a litany of memorable one-liners. This month we celebrate the ilm’s 30th anniversary (okay, it came out in the UK in 1988 and here in 1987, but close enough), as well as take a look at Shane Black’s Predator, which opens in September. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing it and scarring / tantalising anyone not old enough to see it by recounting all the gory, glorious details. It’s a movie tradition worth keeping alive, no?

(...and who we think could beat a Predator in a ﬁght)

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF PAUL MERRILL EDITOR JAMES JENNINGS 02 8268 4621 If Archie can beat one, basically everybody ART DIRECTOR KATIE SMITH My mother-in-law PHOTO EDITOR KRISTI BARTLETT 02 8114 9493 Chuck Norris

CONTRIBUTORS Michael Adams, Liz Beardsworth, Elizabeth Best, Simon Braund, David Michael Brown, Jeremy Cassar, John Catania, Simon Crook, Nick De Semlyen, Phil De Semlyen, James Dyer, Danny Eccleston, Angie Errigo, Ian Freer, Chris Hewitt, David Hughes, Dan Jolin, Luke Lucas, Danny Mackenzie, Ben McEachen, Jim Mitchell, Justin Metz, Anthony Morris, Ian Nathan, Kim Newman, John Nugent, Helen O’Hara, George Palathingal, David Parkinson, Patrick Peters, Nev Pierce, Jonathan Pile, Olly Richards, Anna Smith, Damon Wise, Rod Yates

ADVERTISING Director of Sales Head of Agency NSW Victoria Head of Sales Sales Director VIC, SA & WA Sales Manager Western Australia Head of Sales QLD

MARKETING AND CIRCULATION Marketing Executive Gemma Harland 02 9282 8585 Senior Subscriptions Campaign Manager Ellie Xuereb 02 9263 9839 Circulation Manager Stuart Jones 03 9567 4207

... ALSO THIS MONTH AT EMPIRE:

PRODUCTION Production Controller Alisha Stoddart Production Co-Ordinator Dominic Roy 02 9282 8691

Hanging out with a giant Rock at the premiere of Skyscraper and eyeing off some giant popcorn at the premiere of Ant-Man And The Wasp (spoiler: it tasted terrible).

“You can cut off people’s heads, but the second someone picks up a cigarette the studio will shut your ass down.”

JAMES JENNINGS EDITOR

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“Wim Wenders had better watch out, ’cause I am waiting for his ass.”

p.65

EMPIRE UK Editor-In-Chief Terri White Associate Editor Liz Beardsworth International Director Simon Greves

BAUER MEDIA

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CLASSIC LINES OF THE MONTH

Paul Gardiner 02 9282 8676 Karen Holmes 02 9282 8733 Will Jamison 03 9823 6301 Jaclyn Clements 03 9823 6341 Nicky Simpson 08 6160 8964 Judy Taylor 07 3101 6636

“You’ve shot me in the face with a mortar. You’ve shot me in the back.”

p.70

Publisher Andrew Stedwell Commercial Manager Marena Paul Business Analyst Melissa Tanudjaja

Empire is published in Australia by Bauer Media Action Sports Pty Limited, part of the Bauer Media Group, ACN 079 430 023, 54-58 Park Street, Sydney, New South Wales, 2000. © 2013, under licence from Bauer Consumer Media Limited. All rights reserved. The trade mark “Empire” and certain material contained herein are owned by Bauer Consumer Media. Printed by PMP Print, 31-35 Heathcote Road, Moorebank, NSW 2170, (02) 9828 1350. Distributed by Gordon & Gotch Australia Pty. Ltd 1300 650 666. Empire accepts no responsibility for loss of or damage to unsolicited contributions. ISSN 2205-0183 PRIVACY NOTICE This issue of Empire is published by Bauer Media Pty Ltd (Bauer).Bauer may use and disclose your information in accordance with our Privacy Policy, including to provide you with your requested products or services and to keep you informed of other Bauer publications, products, services and events. Our Privacy Policy is located at www.bauer-media.com.au/privacy/ It also sets out on how you can access or correct your personal information and lodge a complaint. Bauer may disclose your personal information offshore to its owners, joint venture partners, service providers and agents located throughout the world, including in New Zealand, USA, the Philippines and the European Union.In addition, this issue may contain Reader Offers, being offers, competitions or surveys. Reader Offers may require you to provide personal information to enter or to take part. Personal information collected for Reader Offers may be disclosed by us to service providers assisting Bauer in the conduct of the Reader Offer and to other organisations providing special prizes or offers that are part of the Reader Offer. An opt-out choice is provided with a Reader Offer. Unless you exercise that opt-out choice, personal information collected for Reader Offers may also be disclosed by us to other organisations for use by them to inform you about other products, services or events or to give to other organisations that may use this information for this purpose.If you require further information, please contact Bauer’s Privacy Officer either by email at privacyofficer@bauer-media.com.au or mail at Privacy Officer Bauer Media Pty Ltd, 54 Park Street, Sydney NSW 2000.

CONTACT US VIA: EMPIRE MAGAZINE, LEVEL 8, 54 PARK STREET, SYDNEY, NSW 2000 / EMPIRE@BAUER-MEDIA.COM.AU / @EMPIREAUST (#EMPIREAUST) / FB.COM/EMPIREAUST

Writers this month will be the recipients of the terrifying new Blumhouse horror Truth Or Dare, which is available on Blu-ray, DVD and download 15 August.

WE WANT AVENGERS 4 YESTERDAY! Like many Marvel fans, after watching Ininity War I was shocked with the ending and even more shocked with the fact that Marvel expects us to wait a whole year until the ending gets resolved. So I started a petition on change.org in an attempt to save us and put Marvel fans’ minds at ease. We must rebel! Head over to Change.org to sign the petition “Earlier release date for Avengers 4”.

SPINE QUOTE HONOUR ROLE

NOAH KEDDY, VIA EMAIL

We feel your pain Noah, but we’d have to say your chance of success on this one has the same kind of odds Dr. Strange mentions the Avengers have against defeating Thanos in Ininity War...

THE BINGEWATCHER’S TALE Dear Empire, thank you for the heads up on Season 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale (issue #207). When I started watching Season 1, I did so with a certain amount of uncertainty and trepidation as the dystopian genre is not really my thing. However, one of my favourite actresses, Alexis Bledel, was starring in it, and I was curious as to her newest role. And I was not disappointed. Though deinitely hard to watch, it was also gripping and so well told. Plus, the cast — including Elisabeth Moss and Ann Dowd — were incredible. This time around I have patiently waited to binge watch it in its entirety. But, when I heard it was more brilliant and brutal than ever, the fears and uncertainties crept in again. So reviews such as this help. It’s decided. Time to dive in again. I’ll talk to you on the lipside! CHRISTINE ANDERSON, GEOGRAPHE WA

Glad you liked the review Christine. Let us know your thoughts on the show!

ANT-SIZED EASTER EGGS I just got your Ant-Man And The Wasp issue today and saw something very

I love reading Empire and this month I was on an emotional rollercoaster reading Olly Richards’ ‘The Agenda’ (issue #208). One minute I was laughing, the next muttering “If one more person says that to me...” The number of times I have rolled my eyes as someone has shouted “Spoiler Alert!” as a scene from a movie trailer is mentioned... Please tell me it’s safe to say that Ant-Man is in Ant-Man And The Wasp? Sorry! “Spoiler Alert”. Have there been times where I have seen/ heard more info than I’d hoped? Yes, but as Olly suggests, that’s on me, I should have done a digital detox or seen the movie on opening day! I will deinitely be applying the ‘Don’t Be A Dick’ rule when discussing the latest MCU creation. Thanks Olly for highlighting the very simple rule we can all live by. Now, did you see that thing with the guy in the place during Ant-Man And The Wasp? BREE TOZER, RINGWOOD VIC

We know what you mean, Bree. Some people have a funny deinition of what’s a (spoiler alert) “Spoiler Alert!” these days. And we loved that scene! curious. In the poster Ant-Man and the Wasp are under a magniier, which if I am not blind, reads ‘Stark Industries’. Of course, this is a very minor Easter egg, but also under that magniier, is a USB drive with it’s cap reading ‘PYM Laboratories’. And so I ask unto you, Empire: is there a chance Pym and Stark were working on a project together? Or maybe Stark has tech that Pym desperately need? Oh, and in the article about Ant Man And The Wasp, you said Black Panther was the irst solo black lead. May I remind you of Blade? MASON HORSLEY, VIA EMAIL

We said Black Panther was Marvel Studios’irst solo black lead, which is true (Blade wasn’t produced by Marvel Studios). As for your theory, anything is possible in the MCU... or maybe Stark has a sideline selling magnifying glasses?

STOP THE ROCK! I can’t for the life of me understand why everyone loves Dwayne Johnson so much. The dude can’t act!

SPINE QUOTE #208 “A hearty hello to Clegg Holdfast and his Voltec KT9 Wasp.”

THE CONNECTION “From Star Wars Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999). The Wasp, of course, also being on the cover.”

THE WINNERS Congratulations Jupiter Rose! You’ve scored yourself a sweet Empire trucker cap! nd answers to er-med m.a

JOSH R, VIA EMAIL

Blasphemer! They’ll be no trash-talki Dwayne around these parts. We can admit Skyscraper kinda sucked, th

ST 2

A LL THE E XC LUSIV E NEWS ON TH

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EDITED BY JOHN NUG

David Heyman spoke to us on 25 June while overseeing Beasts post-production.

WHERE TO FIND THEM

A darker shade of magic With political allegories and persuasive villains, will Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald disrupt the wizarding world forever?

THE NEW LOCATIONS FOR BEASTS 2

HOGWARTS Unseen in the ﬁrst movie, the legendary school of witchcraft and wizardry makes a welcome return here.

PARIS After his initial adventure in New York City, the French capital will be the primary setting here, with a Roaring ’20s backdrop.

LONDON Glimpsed in the ﬁrst trailer, Newt’s meeting with Dumbledore will take place in a very smoky Big Smoke.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a political edge to Harry Potter, even with all the dragons and broomsticks; Voldemort was nothing if not a fascist. However, the way producer David Heyman talks about The Crimes Of Grindelwald, the sequel to 2016’s Fantastic Beasts, makes it sound like we might be leaping into a political thriller. “It’s about the dangers of absolutism and fundamentalism,” says Heyman. “We see that in Grindelwald.” To recap, he was the dark wizard arrested at the end of the last ilm, revealed to be Johnny Depp in a Colin Farrell disguise. A year on, he’s on the brink of escaping prison and trying to unite the magically powered to crush the merely human. His means to achieving this, unlike those of Potter’s Voldemort, are not just ire and fury. “For me, Grindelwald is a scarier villain,” says Heyman. “He’s very persuasive. One can see the rationale in his arguments — which doesn’t mean his methodology is right.” On the other side are international wizarding governments at odds and in disarray. “Newt [Eddie Redmayne] is refusing to have anything to do with the Ministry of Magic [after the events of the last ilm].” Finding Grindelwald’s weak spot is going to need a new agent, in the shape of Dumbledore, whose shape is now a lot younger and more Jude Law-y. He and Grindelwald have a complicated, romantic history, meaning Dumbledore knows him better than anyone and how to use Newt to get close to him. “An important thing to remember about Dumbledore,” says Heyman, “is that he is a master manipulator. He manipulated Harry.” Magic can solve a lot of things, but sometimes it’s no match for a bit of political manoeuvring. OLLY RICHARDS FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD IS IN CINEMAS FROM 15 NOVEMBER

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Empire spoke to Matt Groening on the phone from LA during a busy day of press.

Some enchanted Groening The creator of The Simpsons is back with his ﬁrst new show in 20 years. What makes his fantasy comedy Disenchantment different?

MATT GROENING IS already responsible for two of the biggest animated series in history. The Simpsons, obviously, is the biggest animated series in history, but Futurama is no slouch, with seven seasons and every chance of one day being revived. His third show, then, comes with assumptions of success. “To have two pretty big shows behind us is conidence-boosting but also daunting,” says Groening, as he prepares for the launch of his Netlix series, Disenchantment. “I’ve seen a lot of animated shows with great ideas misire. But I think we’ve done a pretty great

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job.” Disenchantment is a very Groening idea, in that it upends something we’ve seen a thousand times before — in this case, the princess fantasy saga. Set in the world of Dreamland, Disenchantment follows Princess Bean (Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson). Bean’s father wants to marry her off. Bean would prefer to be out getting drunk and gambling. In her quest to do as little as possible, Bean is aided by a demon, Luci (Eric Andre), who has been sent to curse her but winds up becoming her best friend, and Elfo (Nat Faxon), an elf who has left the ever-happy Elf Wood to experience the wider world. “I irst started thinking about fantasy as another way of storytelling in 2012,” says Groening. “I love creating entire new worlds for people to move around in. The Simpsons was a fairly straightforward template of a conservative family sitcom. With Futurama, we came up with a workplace comedy. This is a grown-up

romantic fantasy. It’s coming-of-age, but not in the same sense as every other fantasy novel.” The original concept revolved around not Bean, but Elfo. “Then I realised we loved Bean most of all. I’ve never had a female protagonist before, so I thought that would be fun.” Another thing that’s new to Groening, in his irst show for Netlix, is making a series designed to be watched in order. “It’s a whole new world of cliffhangers and arcs that we would never do on the other shows, which has been great, as a way of storytelling. On the other hand, it means we have to show them in a certain order. If someone loses an arm in one episode, it can’t grow back in another.” He laughs. “And that is the kind of continuity we really care about on Disenchantment.” OLLY RICHARDS DISENCHANTMENT IS ON NETFLIX FROM 17 AUGUST

Go Homer: the Simpsons’ patriach eyes

a giant can of Fosters.

Top: Princess Bean (voiced by Abbi Jacobson),

MATTVS AUSTRALIA Groening on Disenchantment’s Oz connection and The Simpsons’ infamous visit here

You have Indigenous Australian rapper, comedy writer, and actor Adam Briggs on the Disenchantment writing team. How did you get him on board? Josh Weinstein who developed the show with me and is the showrunner, he knew Briggs from Twitter. He invited Briggs to visit the ofice and he was so funny and he had such a different perspective, so we asked him if he wanted to be a writer [on the show], and he did and he wrote one of the best episodes of the series so far, as well as contributing to all of the other episodes. He’s fantastic. And it didn’t hurt that he had a Simpsons tattoo.

Elfo (Nat Faxon) and Luci (Eric Andre) take a boozy trip out of Dreamland. Right: Make

Briggs is probably most well known here in Australia as being a rapper… I know — talk about giving us hip credentials! There’s not much to say about most writers, but Briggs is a character.

Yeah I was in Australia in November 2016 and spoke at the Sydney Opera House and showed parts of the Australian episode, and wondered what people would think. But they were self-selected Simpsons fans, and they liked it. I showed the best parts though, not the whole thing. We’re gonna have to have the Simpsons come back to Australia some time and do it right! Disenchantment has a strong The Mighty Boosh connection: Noel Fielding, Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher do voice work. Are you a fan of the show? I’m a real fan. I was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival years ago before The Mighty Boosh was a TV show and I saw them perform live. It was hilarious. I couldn’t see how they could turn it into a TV show though! And now it’s a classic.

Bean’s a large one.

Did Briggs ever bring up the infamous ‘Bart vs. Australia’ episode of The Simpsons? Yeah, he gave me a talking to. [laughs] He was fairly nonchalant about it. Let me explain about that episode. The writers decided that “y’know, we don’t know enough about Australia to get it right, so let’s go the other way — let’s get everything completely wrong.” I’m not trying to justify it, but that’s the explanation, however. It was completely ridiculous. You’ve been to Australia since though, right?

Are there any fantasy tropes you’re looking forward to using in Disenchantment Oh yeah. About 10 years ago I started illing this book up with every fantasy trope that I could think of: dwarves, elves, goblins, hobgoblins, fairies, sprites, trolls, leprechauns, harpies, banshees, pixies, fauns, imps, gnomes, ogres, orcs, demons. Those are just the short ones! In fact, a very unfortunate early title for this show was ‘Pointy Ears’. Disenchantment may not be the most commercial title in the world, but it does the trick. JAMES JENNINGS

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SOUNDING OFF ON THIS MONTH’S BIG NEWS

Representation only counts if you actually see it, argues Empire contributor Amy West

SMOOTH-TALKING SMUGGLER Lando Calrissian is pansexual — or so Solo: A Star Wars Story co-writer Jonathan Kasdan tells us anyway. There may not be any clear-cut evidence in the ilm to suggest that’s the case for Donald Glover’s character in the Star Wars prequel, but inclusion’s inclusion and we queer fans should be grateful, right? Well, no. Not really. There comes a time when writers, directors and studio executives have to stop saying they would have loved to have included a more explicitly LGBTQ character in their movie (just like Kasdan did in his recent Hufington Post interview) and actually put their money where their mouths are. It’s time. It was time yesterday. Yet characters are still being given retconned sexualities, rather than being given their own space to be who they are. By including us in this lackadaisical way, it plays into the notion that it’s okay for LGBTQ people to be involved, so long as they keep their sexuality hidden; a notion that has no place in 2018. Worse, it adopts an even more insidious undertone when such characters’ constant omission from

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ilms aimed at younger audiences — such as Star Wars — subconsciously backs that idea that seeing nonstraight people simply existing is not something children should be subjected to. It provides the ammunition for intolerant people to suggest so, at least, because they’ve never had that outdated belief challenged by the very ilms they love. The counter-argument (often to be found in online comment sections) seems to be that unless the ilm in question is about same-sex relationships, then there’s no place for queer characters. It’s not hard to ind reactions from franchise fans along the lines of, “Who cares?” or, “Why does their sexuality matter in a ilm that’s about space battles?” But straight characters’ preferences are constantly being

Top: Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Above: Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.

established through lirtatious moments or even full-blown romances. Being LGBTQ isn’t someone’s story, it’s just a part of what makes them them. Much like teasing Han Solo was Leia’s thing; Maz Kanata has a crush on Chewbacca, and BB-8 loves a tickle. It’s characterisation. It shouldn’t need a subplot to make it into the inal edit. Sadly, there have been recent instances where groundbreaking scenes that could have conirmed a character’s sexuality have been left on the cutting room loor; one involving bisexual Thor: Ragnarok hero Valkyrie, and another involving two Dora Milaje members in Black Panther. And Dumbledore being gay off-screen doesn’t warrant the entire Harry Potter franchise getting Brownie points if Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald glosses over that fact. Dumbledore was supposedly in love with Grindelwald; it can’t be argued it’s not relevant. It’s a cop-out, and it’s not good enough. We deserve to be seen in these narratives and actions speak louder than words. No-one’s expecting every queer character to awkwardly come out while lying the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace; it could just be a few passing comments. But it should never be ‘nothing’, because to some, it could mean everything.

ALAMY

Stop retconning movie sexuality

Forrest Goodluck, photographed exclusively for Empire at The 9 Studios, New York, on 11 June 2018.

SHOWCASING TOMORROW’S STARS TODAY

FORREST GOODLUCK WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER IN THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST ? It’s a fascinating character. Usually I see the character breakdown and it’s “Lakota character”. [The Lakota people are an indigenous tribe of North America.] Reading [the breakdown] further, it says he’s a Winkte man going through gay conversion therapy, in a ilm directed by an Iranian woman. You don’t get that email every day! Adam is a man who identiies in the Lakota language as “man killed by woman”, having had his male spirit murdered and his body inhabited by female spirit. I’d been familiar with Winkte people but not really known about it, so hearing their stories was cool.

WHAT HAS BEEN THE MADDEST MOMENT OF YOUR CAREER SO FAR? Shooting in negative 40-degree weather on The Revenant. I remember very vividly. We got to the point where, halfway through a scene, [cinematographer] Chivo Lubezki said, “Nope, we’re cutting it, the cameras keep freezing up.”

I absolutely would try to be a director. The irst ilm I was ever a part of was Jane Got A Gun, and I worked with Lynne Ramsay for a day. Long story short, she ended up leaving the ilm and I got cut from it, but I took that pay cheque and bought a camera and started making ilms.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST ROLE? We had to come up with a school play in ifth grade, so I decided to direct A Charlie Brown Christmas. I found the ilm on YouTube and watched it line for line, copied it down and wrote the script. Two weeks before the play started, the person playing Charlie Brown got cold feet, and since I’d written the lines, I stepped in.

WHEN WERE YOU MOST EMBARRASSED? 2015 HAWK, THE SON OF LEONARDO DICAPRIO’S HUGH GLASS, IN THE REVENANT

Recently I was shooting a scene in a ilm [wild zombie movie Blood Quantum] where I have to take a shit off a bridge on to a car. I knew it was in the script, but I didn’t think we’d shoot it — and then we did. Nothing is shown, but you’ve got to go through the motions in front of everybody.

2016 THE 15-YEAR-OLD ITERATION OF SAUL IN COMING-OF-AGE DRAMA INDIAN HORSE

WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT: A HORSE-SIZED DUCK, OR 100 DUCK-SIZED HORSES?

2018 A WHITE HOUSE SIT-IN PROTESTOR IN TV THRILLER DESIGNATED SURVIVOR

Above: The Miseducation Of

I feel like a giant duck, because ducks are already really mean, so I assume that would be worse. We should be thankful there are no horse-sized ducks! JAMES WHITE

Cameron Post Here: The Revenant

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 AUGUST

AUGUST 2018

PORTRAIT: KAREEM BLACK

IF YOU WEREN’T AN ACTOR, WHAT JOB WOULD YOU DO?

“Look, this is not a fantasy” ANDY SERKIS HAS been working on his directorial debut for a very long time. So long, in fact, that it’s no longer his directorial debut. In the ive years since taking on screenwriter Callie Kloves’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, he’s made and released an entire other movie (last year’s true-life drama Breathe). The delay was, in no small part, down to Disney rushing out its own Jungle Book in 2016. A movie from which his, Serkis is keen to establish, differs considerably. “It’s all about the positioning of the ilm now,” he tells us just after the irst trailer for Mowgli, as it is now titled, has broken. “Allowing people to know that it is a darker ilm, so they’re not too shocked. So they’re not expecting singing or dancing. The trailer’s saying, ‘Look, this is not a fantasy.’ It’s grounded. Almost like a historical piece. But, honestly, the preconceptions are really hard to get over. Everyone expects the animals to have American accents, for instance. People are really shocked that they have British accents!” Those accents come courtesy of the likes of Christian Bale as mentor panther Bagheera, Benedict Cumberbatch as “agent of chaos” tiger Shere Khan, and Serkis himself as a cockney, battle-scarred Baloo, who all provided vocal and facial-captured performances way back in the summer of 2014. Now, at long last, they are fully present in animal form, opposite newcomer Rohan Chand as Mowgli. Albeit in an intriguingly stylised way. “They are like anthropomorphised visions of a 19th century explorer’s idea of what an animal could be,” Serkis explains. They also subtly share facial traits of their performers, he adds, to make them “emotionally much more real, much more connected”.

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The former Gollum’s experience with performance capture (he runs his own Ealing-based mo-cap studio, The Imaginarium), on top of his second-unit directing work on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, made him the ideal candidate to tackle the technically complex Mowgli. And he’s not lost any enthusiasm for the

Top: Mowgli director Andy Serkis. Middle: Mowgli (Rohan Chand) chats to an elephant. Above: Dreaming

ilm during its long-haul production. “It’s incredibly thrilling,” he says of inally getting it done (just the 3D conversion to go now). “I have to pinch myself that I’m no longer working on it.” In Serkis’ directing future lies another adaptation of a talking-animal literary classic: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “That’s in development,” he conirms. “It will have a more animated feel, but still using performance-capture, à la Tintin.” But before that, he teases, we may see him shoot another ilm which, Serkis apologises, he can’t yet reveal. But, like Breathe, it won’t involve mo-cap. Despite being a proponent of the high-tech technique, he by no means wants it to deine his directing career. “As with acting, I don’t ever want to be typecast. Whether it’s realistic stories or whether it’s stories with heightened elements in them, for me it’s all about putting story and character irst.” CG or live action, talking beast or human, the Serkis maxim remains: keep it real. DAN JOLIN

of escape from his caged existence.

MOWGLI IS IN CINEMAS FROM 1 NOVEMBER

PORTRAIT: STEVE SCHOFIELD

Actor-director Andy Serkis on why his Kipling adaptation Mowgli goes beyond ‘The Bear Necessities’

MARTIN FREEMAN

Aragorn (played by Viggo Mortensen in Peter Jackson’s LOTR ﬁlms): the possible focus of

What are your viewing habits, generally? Do you like to binge-watch? I binge sometimes. I’ve started watching The Walking Dead with my son. I like watching old favourites like Peep Show. I’ve introduced Fawlty Towers to my kids in the last year or two. I seem to watch a lot of cult documentaries. There’s no shortage of cult documentaries, about lunatics that you really want to punch in the face.

the LOTR TV show?

THE KING RETURNS Middle-earth expert Ian Nathan on what Amazon’s Aragorn-centric Lord Of The Rings show might look like

Apocalypse Then During his peripatetic days, Aragorn honed his battle skills by joining up with King Thengel of Rohan and Gondorian forces ighting the growing menace of Sauron’s ranks. Stretching the chronology pre-Hobbit, the great northern campaign against the Witch-king of Angmar (later the leader of the Nazgûl) could provide a central dramatic thrust.

Very Old Friends What about movies? What sort of movies do you like to watch? Netﬂix is good for providing you with things you’ve never heard of. Yesterday, I watched a ﬁlm called Maze about a breakout from the Maze prison in 1983. I’d never heard of it, never seen it, but it was really good! Very good performances, and a story that I think I’d forgotten about.

ALAMY.

Do you have a favourite genre? No, not really. I think we talk about genres way more than we did when I was a kid. We were aware of them — clearly Hitchcock wasn’t making slapstick — but I think we’ve raised the importance of genre to greater heights than I remember. To me, everything should be blurred. I want and expect to laugh and cry in the same ﬁlm, often in the same scene. People love to pigeonhole!

Past Times at Rivendell High After his father fell foul of orcs, Aragorn was raised in Rivendell, left unaware of his kingly destiny until he was 20. Would Amazon dare a Middle-earth teen drama, as a callow Aragorn struggles with his identity, being an outsider at elf camp, and an inter-species romance with dazzling prom queen Arwen? Tellingly, Elrond attempted to hide Arwen from his human adoptee, sending her away to Lothlórien. There even exists unused Jackson footage of a beardless Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler frolicking between the trees of Lothlórien once due to be a lashback.

Easy Strider By far the likeliest route is Aragorn’s time in the wild. Burdened by his royal blood and tangled romantic life, Aragorn turned ranger. As noted in the Appendices, “for nearly 30 years he laboured in the cause against Sauron”. This includes becoming a regular at the Prancing Pony, patrolling the borders of The Shire, giving ample opportunity to make stuff up.

With all this in mind, the series could conceivably include a young Frodo and Bilbo. At this time, Aragorn bromanced Legolas and Gandalf (Ian McKellen, for one, hasn’t ruled out taking part). Indeed, the allotted time span allows for versions of Galadriel, Théoden, Denethor, Boromir, Saruman and Gimli, and given Aragorn is mentioned as having tracked a certain snivelling wretch, why not Andy Serkis getting his mo-cap back on as Gollum?

New New Zealand While there have been whispers of Amazon ‘reaching out’ to the director, there has not been a peep from Peter Jackson’s Wellington redoubt. Still, the fact Warner Bros. and New Line have partnered in the deal signals as clear as a laming beacon that Amazon wants to occupy the same universe as Jackson’s trilogies. With Aragorn having backpacked through vast swathes of Tolkien’s continent, including far off locales such as the Sea of Rhûn where Sauron kept a fortress, there is ample opportunity to unfurl new areas of outstanding beauty provided by New Zealand and both wings of Weta.

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Empire was on set for one of the ﬁlm’s big set-pieces at Centro Internacional, Bogotá, Colombia, on 10 February.

The running men Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg ditch real-life drama for all-out action in ﬁlm number four, Mile 22

FROM A DISTANCE, Mile 22 looks like Mark Wahlberg/Peter Berg business as usual. Another tense-as-hell thriller with ireballs, gunire, things going south and Wahlberg in the middle of it all, trying to make them go north again. But there’s a major difference. Unlike Lone Survivor, Patriot’s Day and Deepwater Horizon, this is not based on a real-life crisis. A fact which has allowed the fourth-time collaborators to cut loose and go wild.

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“The idea was to get away from the true stories and just have some fun,” says Wahlberg. “This is pure iction,” adds Berg. “Everything’s different. There’s a certain type of pressure that we don’t experience when we’re making something up.” Mile 22, then, is the director-star duo letting off steam with a pumped-up action movie. Shot in Bogotá, Colombia, but set in an unspeciied country, it sees a CIA ground team led by James Silva (Wahlberg) tasked with transporting an informant (The Raid’s Iko Uwais) 22 miles to an airstrip. Attempting to stop them completing the gauntlet: an army of hitmen, thugs and maniacs. Simply put, our heroes are in deeper water than the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

“The pace is aggressive,” conirms Berg, speaking to Empire amid a broad tangle of fake corpses, scattered deep into the city centre beside several downed motorcycles. Today alone, he’s orchestrating a car explosion and a brutal ight sequence in which Uwais, handcuffed to the interior of a Jeep, battles baddies with a seat belt and the vehicle’s door. And this is only mile four. Over the next 18, Berg promises, there will be car chases (“Very fast car chases”). There will be martial arts (“Inspired by my seeing The Raid”). And there will be things blowing up on a regular basis. Untethered by facts for the irst time since 2012’s Battleship, he is going to town, linging drones in the air and moving at such

Clockwise from left: Mark Wahlberg goes full action as intelligence ofﬁcer James Silva; Lauren Cohan — The Walking Dead’s Maggie — takes aim; Raid star Iko Uwais plays informant Li Noor; John Malkovich’s Bishop.

PRIME TIME Meet The Eternals, the cosmic race joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Eternal? Isn’t that another word for… Inﬁnity? You’re not far off. In the Marvel universe, the Eternals (‘Homo immortalis’, to give them their made-up biological classiﬁcation) are a genetic super-offshoot of humans.

ALAMY, DC ENTERTAINMENT

So, Inhumans, then? Mercifully, no. This particular race was created by the Celestials at the dawn of humanity, boasting incredible powers from their ‘cosmic energy’, including god-like strength, ﬂight and near-immortality.

breakneck speed that cast member Sam Medina confesses to having chugged four Red Bulls so far today in order to keep up. It’s been so enjoyable that he and Wahlberg are eager to do it again. In fact, Wahlberg sees this as the potential beginning of his irst proper action franchise. “There are two other cool pieces to this story that I think people are going to want to see,” he says, hinting at a Mile 23 and Mile 24. “It’s just a lot of fun to play this part: a very unapologetic, in-your-face guy. We always looked at him like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.” Farmhouses, henhouses, outhouses, doghouses: get ready to get destroyed. NDS

So they’re making a movie? Yes — though it’s early days. MCU boss Kevin Feige has confirmed that he is having “creative discussions” about an Eternals movie. Screenwriting newcomers Matthew and Ryan Firpo are reportedly working on a script. How do they fit into the Marvel universe? When they were first introduced in the comics by Jack Kirby in 1976, the Eternals were treated as a standalone team, left to their own extra-terrestrial devices; over the years, they’ve been gradually incorporated into the fold. Some Eternals, like the superheroine Sersi, even joined the Avengers — and some found their way onto Titan, such as the mutant Eternal known as… Thanos. Was the Infinity War just the start? JOHN NUGENT

MILE 22 IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 AUGUST

AUGUST 2018

Empire spoke to Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson on 9 November 2017 in a haunted mansion.

Sta e fright Ghost Stories writer-directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson on how to turn a West End hit into a good old-fashioned British horror

1 __ LEAVE IT FOR A FEW YEARS Andy Nyman: “One of the things that made the play work as well as it did was the clichés of horror ilms on stage — we hadn’t seen that before. What felt complicated to us was taking things that had come from horror ilms and putting them back into a ilm without feeling like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that before.’” Jeremy Dyson: “We wanted some distance from it. We deliberately said: ‘Let’s park it for a bit.”

2__ Keep the production as British as the films that inspired it Dyson: “We came of age at the dawn of VHS and Friday night horror double

AUGUST 2018

bills on BBC Two: old ’40s ilms, Hammer and Amicus, all the great early ’70s British horror ilms. That wonderful run of pastoral horror: Witchinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man.” Nyman: “The DNA of this is just so English that we wanted to ind an English production company [Warp Films] who make brave, interesting work. ”

3__ Hire old people who know how to make old films Dyson: “[SFX supervisor] Ian Rowley has literally been in the business for 50 years, so he’s done everything. His library of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work — and also,

HUGH H

Clockwise from left: None shall pass: a sinister presence is not what you want to come across while out for a Sunday walk; Co-directors/ writers Jeremy

KMAN

Are you okay? I’m excellent. I’m thrilled being in London at this time of year. I have a feeling the lighting budget for the city has quadrupled since I was last here. It’s amazing. There’s a lot of lights going on. I’ve been walking around the city every night. It’s incredible. Am I right?

Dyson and Andy Nyman behind the camera on location; Nyman also acts in the ﬁlm, playing

What was the last ﬁlm you saw? Darkest Hour. That is a performance by Gary Oldman, and a part of history I didn’t really know.

Professor Goodman; Martin Freeman has a pensive moment, looking out of a window as brash banker Mike Priddle.

crucially, the fact that it’s repeatable — is extraordinary.” Nyman: “We showed him BBC’s M.R. James adaptation Whistle And I’ll Come To You [starring the ghost bedsheet on a string] and said, ‘This is one of our great reference points in our friendship and in our growing-up inluences.’ He so ran with it. None of the effects in the play were hydraulic, none of them were fancy or expensive — it was simple stuff. It’s so exciting when you hear an audience scream at something you know is literally someone waving their arms about in the wings.”

4__ Keep things real with practical effects Dyson: “Our cast get a particular kind of energy from seeing something actually happen in front of them. The performance has a different feel if you’re having to

react to something that isn’t there.” Nyman: “There’s a purity to that. But we just really love having it alive.”

5__ Ask your crew — nicely — not to

What was your last holiday? We went to Greece this year. Antiparos. Which is beautiful. A friend of mine has been telling me to go there for years. “I have a house!” I always say no, but I rang him and said, “You know that house thing you’ve been talking about?” So technically I invited myself. Do you get jetlag? No. I know how to get over it.

spill the secrets Nyman: “Over half a million people have seen the play and yet you can’t ind out what it’s about. It means there’s only one way to experience it, and that’s to go and see it. We’re not naive, we know that the minute the ilm’s out there it’s out of our control. But we wanted to have a go at saying: it’s part of the adventure of trying to create something that’s surprising and exciting. There are some massive differences and new secrets and surprises that are — if we can pull them off — really quite something.” HAYLEY CAMPBELL

How? I change my watch before I get on the ﬂight. So I start mentally thinking and acting and eating as though I’m in the new time zone. When I get there, no matter what time it is, I have coffee. And I eat. If it’s breakfast, I have breakfast. I try to trick my body. If I’m in Australia, I’ll jump into the ocean. THE GREATEST SHOWMAN IS OUT ON DIGITAL, DVD AND BLU-RAY NOW

GHOST STORIES IS IN CINEMAS FROM 13 SEPTEMBER

AUGUST 2018

Empire had a drink with director Bart Layton in London on 7 June.

True-ish crime Teenage heist movie American Animals blurs the lines between documentary and reality

DIRECTOR BART LAYTON was sold from the start. Reading about an absurd art heist by four Kentucky college students who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, he immediately wanted to tell their tale — and immediately wanted to start playing with notions of truth. Layton has a documentary background — his previous feature was 2012 conman documentary The Imposter — and has long been fascinated with perceptions of reality. Corresponding with the culprits, he based much of his American Animals screenplay on these letters — then decided to put the actual guys in the ilm, interjecting alongside the dramatised versions of events, sometimes even appearing in scenes with their Hollywood counterparts. “I wanted to pull the curtain back on the process of how stories get ictionalised,” Layton tells Empire. “I was trying to be

AUGUST 2018

respectful of the audience and invite them in on the game. In, say, Jackie, Natalie Portman’s playing Jackie Kennedy, we all know the deal. But what if there’s another way of telling a true story where you ha ki ave more skin in the game?” His intentio on was to give us viewers more investment. “If in a documentary som meone pulls out a gun, it’s heart-stopp ping shit,” he explains. “Whereas in movies, that happens all the time. So, can you borrow that thin ng, that visceral heart-jangling thing that a doc can do?” American Animals also has fun with how we

From top to bottom: Evan Peters as heist honcho Warren Lipka; The gang undercover; Director Bart Layton.

experience ilms. At irst it feels like a goofy college drama; then, as the movie-obsessed kids (who watch Ocean’s Eleven and borrow Reservoir Dogs’ nicknames) plan the heist, it begins to feel like the sort of screen caper they’re inluenced by; and as they ind themselves out of their depth, the gloss dissolves, the tropes fall away, and things get decidedly real. “The idea is that we as the audience become slightly complicit in the caper,” says Layton. “You want to know what happens when you cross that line — we want to know what it really looks like.” These young men, says Layton, just wanted to feel special, important — that very modern malaise. “We now i h bit a world where being average inhabi is not acceptable,” he says. “That’s why I put the strapline on the poster: ody wants to be ordinary.’ That’s ‘Nobo what it’s about — the increasing need to be rremarkable. I deinitely feel that it plugs into something.” It’s a ilm full of home truths, reverberating way beyond Kentucky. ALEX GODFREY AMER RICAN ANIMALS IS IN CINEMAS TBC 2 2018

SPOILER WARNING

IX questions for Episode IX Empire’s James Dyer on the nine questions J.J. Abrams must answer after The Last Jedi

Above: Director J.J. Abrams gives Daisy Ridley some tips on handling the

1 __ WILL WE SEE LUKE SKYWALKER AGAIN?

4 __ ARE THE KNIGHTS OF REN STILL A THING?

His life force having drained away by the effort of projecting his image across the galaxy for one last, spectacular show of power, Luke Skywalker is dead. Of course, death is no barrier to a Jedi, so a Force Ghost Luke could still see the return of Mark Hamill. His demise doesn’t bring an end to the Skywalker saga, though. As long as Leia’s son still lives, there is another.

Good question. They came close to being Snoke’s Praetorian Guards, but Johnson thought that would complicate matters. Now that we’re three ilms in and yet to encounter them, Abrams will need to decide whether to quietly shelve thee Knights or double-down and makee them o Ren a signiicant ally (or threat) to Kylo in the inal chapter.

2 __ WHAT HAPPENS TO LEIA? Kathleen Kennedy has (so far) ruled out a CG Carrie Fisher, so it’s likely Leia’s fate will now be handled off screen. Leia may suffer an untimely demise, but it seems more likely that her story will simply diverge from the main narrative, seeing her retire gracefully or undertake missions elsewhere. Her passing the baton to Poe Dameron at the end of The Last Jedi has already set the stage for this.

5 __ WHERE DOES THE RESISTANCE GO FROM HERE? n Judging from the fact that they can now comfortably it into the Falcon’s break-out area, The Resistance are on the back foot. However, with Skywalker’s inal display having lit the spark, the galaxy may rally together and ight back, gathering their allies for a inal offensive. We’d start with the Wookiees.

3 __ WHO WILL CONTINUE REY’S TRAINING?

6 __ WITH SNOKE DEAD, HOW DOES HUX FIT IN?

As the last Jedi, Rey has no-one left to teach her. But Rey has stolen the sacred Jedi texts (glimpsed briely aboard the Falcon at the end). Next: online uni?

Having missed his chance to blast an unconscious Ren, Armitage Hux has h a new boss; one with no compunctions about Force-choking.

Millennium Falcon. Below: Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) kneels before nobody in the brave new world.

Will he fall into line? Does he even have a choice? After all, he didn’t choose the Hux life. The Hux life chose him.

7 __ CAN THERE BE A REDEMPTION FOR KYLO REN? Having turned away from the light at the critical moment and embraced the dark side, is there any way to bring Ben back? It’s to Johnson’s credit that the answer to this is very unclear. Whether he dies, is redeemed or lives on in infamy, any of futures would ring true with how these futur we left him in Episode VIII.

8 __ WHA AT IS THE SIGNIFIC CANCE OF BROOM KID? The Skywalker bloodline is not special, midi-chloriians have been quietly brushed aside and The T Force has spread across the galaxy y. When the daughter of junk dealers and even a Cantonican stable boy can master the Jedi arts, it’s fair to o say that an entirely new generatio on of Force adepts can emerge to repopulate the Jedi order. Or form somethin ng else entirely...

9 __ IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN W WORK IN ANOTHER DEATH STAR? S No, J.J.. No o, there isn’t. STAR WAR RS: EPISODE IX IS IN CINEMAS FROM 19 9 DECEMBER 2019

AUGUST 2018

“Ladylike” seamstress Linda (Michelle Rodriguez).

Empire spoke to the cast on the Chicago set of Widows (two blocks from Barack Obama’s house) on 9 June 2017.

“It’s women getting the job done” Meet the women of Widows, a dark thriller generating serious awards buzz

WHEN DIRECTOR STEVE McQueen won the Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years A Slave, the question was: what’s next? The unexpected answer: a big-screen version of an early ’80s Lynda La Plante ITV series. Adapted by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, this is an honestto-goodness thriller that sees the widows of a criminal gang follow in their deceased husbands’ footsteps, after the men’s initial heist goes fatally wrong. Here, the four leading ladies introduce us to their characters.

VIOLA DAVIS AS VERONICA It won’t come as a surprise to learn that Oscar winner Davis is head of the widows, the outwardly tough but inwardly devastated Veronica. “For me it’s a game-changer,” says Davis. “I would not readily have thought of me for this role, and I don’t know why. Me, with a ’fro, married to Liam Neeson? That’s not how Hollywood works. To me, this is the ultimate chick-lick because it’s women getting the job done. Everyone is an underdog; we’re trying to survive.”

MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ AS LINDA The Fast And The Furious may have fuelled her career in recent years, but Rodriguez is getting back to her seriously

AUGUST 2018

dramatic roots: think Girlight but… ladylike? “This is a way more feminine character than I’ve ever played before,” Rodrigeuz observes. “She has two kids, she’s a seamstress. At irst, I was repulsed by this type of femininity, a woman who relies on her man for everything. But the fact that I had such a strong reaction said maybe it’s worthwhile facing it.”

Crack team: Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), Veronica (Viola Davis), Belle (Cynthia Erivo) and Linda.

CYNTHIA ERIVO AS BELLE Erivo may be new to the big screen, but she already has a Tony and a Grammy for her (mindblowing) Broadway performance in The Color Purple. Her character, Belle, is the newcomer brought into the gang. “There’s no frills about her,” Erivo explains. “She cares deeply about her family and her child, but she’s sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. She’s really special.”

ELIZABETH DEBICKI AS ALICE Debicki, the tallest widow, plays the vulnerable Alice, dominated by her late husband and controlling mother. “She doesn’t have street smarts, but she has the instincts for it,” says Debicki. “It’s such an interesting journey, someone who lived in such a little bubble. And they’re performing this heist as a means to an end, and the end is so much more meta than the money that they’re stealing. I don’t want to give anything away!” HELEN O’HARA WIDOWS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 NOVEMBER

Gang leader Veronica (Davis) gets ﬁtted up.

Alice (Debicki) gets armed.

FILES

Bezzie mates: Steven Spielberg with Attenborough

Richard Attenborough’s personal archive reveals dino secrets galore

on set. Below: Kurt Russell, Robin Wright, Dan Aykroyd and Kevin Bacon.

CASTING COUCHED A memo from talent agency CAA reveals a number of different names for the iconic characters in the frame. Ray Liotta, Kurt Russell, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Kline and Woody Harrelson were all in the running for Dr Alan Grant (at this point named Richard). For Ellie Sattler, Helen Hunt, Penelope Ann Miller, Julie Warner, Robin Wright, Sherilyn Fenn and Kelly Lynch were considered. Dan Aykroyd, a Spielberg vet from 1941, was in the frame for Ian Malcolm. Even more surprising are the names for shifty lawyer Gennaro: Kevin Bacon and Tom Berenger.

RAP ATTACK ATTACKED Attenborough also offers opinions on the work-in-progress fourth draft screenplay.

THIS MONTH’S BIGGEST TRAILER MOMENT

THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS

In terms of the opening raptor attack, he suggests it “is too much of a give-away to have the worker torn to shreds” and may y even be “too disturbing” for a young audience. He also suggests the dig “takess a little too long before we get underway with the main story”.

HOT FUZZ

MORE MR NICE GUY

TR RUE BROMANCE

Attenborough’s thoughts on his character suggests Hammond, in this draft, has an “apparent lack of concern for his grandchildren” and that he feels like a “bystander”. He also feels that Hammond’s philosophy must be deined da little more. Sweetly, he writes, “None of the foregoing is an attempt to increase the size of the part, merely to lesh in a few details.”

e correspondence between Spielberg and Attenborough reveals true affection. a ””I can’t wait for us to start playing together on this!” Spielberg writes, giddy as a schoolboy. He also signs off his emo “All my love”. Bless. IAN FREER

Hammond having a Scottish accent an and a beard were both notions that came fro om o Attenborough. He asks Spielberg, “Shall I start growing a beard? We could ways shave it off if you did not like it.” w alw kept it.

WIITH THANKS TO THE UNIVERSITY SUSSEX

We’re taking the ‘Money

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murders, with Melissa

this month. The

McCarthy playing a

Happytime Murders is

detective — but let’s be

not, as some claimed,

honest, it’s all mainly

the ﬁrst R-rated

an excuse to make

muppet movie (that’s

a muppet movie that’s

Petter Jackson’s 1989

not suitable for kids.

cult classic Meet The

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Feebles), but if this

the beast-with-two-

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felt-backs in

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be the ﬁlthiest. Set in

culminating in a

a world where puppets

silly-string jizz shot for

are second-class

the ages. Which goes

citizens to humans,

on for ages. Nurse!

there’s apparently

Fetch the tissues!

AUGUST 2018

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PAGE 37 GLOW S2

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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT ★★★★★

OUT NOW RATED M / 147 MINS

Christopher McQuarrie CAST Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Basset DIRECTOR

An Impossible Mission Force mission goes wrong, so that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team must protect the world from a fresh nuclear threat. But with the CIA’s Agent Walker (Henry Cavill) sent to keep an eye on him, Ethan will face an uphill battle to show that he can still save the day.

PLOT

Jumping for joy: Cruise feels the need for speed.

THE KEY WORD for this franchise is not “impossible”. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team always ind a way. It’s “mission” because these ilms are all about the job. Ethan Hunt barely ever pauses to let his love life interfere with his work, nor does he take time to swot up on his wine knowledge or choose a new bespoke suit. But each time he chooses a mission, what follows steadily are adrenalin-triggering exploits, loosely strung together by double-crosses and chicanery. And at the heart of it is the biggest movie star on the planet, still, a man who risks life and limb each time he steps up, to accomplish stunts we’ve never seen. Tom Cruise probably climbs the Cliffs Of Insanity before breakfast and rappels back down using his own discarded M:I-2 hair. He’s sort of breathtaking. The plot sees Hunt face a terrifying nuclear threat from the acolytes of imprisoned anarchist baddie Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, still on supremely creepy form). Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust crosses his path again, on a conlicting mission of her own, while CIA agent August Walker (Henry Cavill, with moustache) is foisted on Hunt as a minder. He’s a hammer to Hunt’s scalpel, as CIA chief Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett) puts it, and despite the effectiveness of their partnership the two immediately clash. But while the cast are superb and writer/

director Christopher McQuarrie’s character scenes are quick but effective — Hunt’s personal life gets perhaps 10 minutes in total here, though that packs a punch — the ilm comes alive in its jaw-droppingly effective action. There are car chases, ist ights, rooftop races and a helicopter pursuit against stunning scenery. But such descriptions don’t do them justice: this Paris set-piece is a car chase in the same way that Mad Max: Fury Road is basically a car chase. A bathroom brawl becomes a visceral, bruising struggle to the death. McQuarrie and Cruise push each scene a little further than you think they can, adding an unexpected lourish or upping the stakes in a way that feels fresh, so that you can never quite predict Hunt’s limits. If the irst hour seems a little slow in retrospect, that’s only in comparison to a virtually lawless inale. It’s also really clever. The villainous plot to use the nukes, and Hunt’s response, more-or-less makes sense, as with any of these ilms. But what’s deeply satisfying is the way that McQuarrie layers character moments in the unlikeliest ways: bonding over bomb defusion, or an expression of purest trust when faced with the highest stakes imaginable. Even an escape by boat becomes a moment of delightful ingenuity, and a celebration of Hunt’s ability to plan his way past the creaking limits of his own endurance (and Cruise isn’t scared to show physical and emotional vulnerability here, even as he pushes himself back to his feet and goes after his target for the umpteenth time). Every Mission: Impossible ilm and TV episode poses its hero the same offer: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” is as close as the series comes to having a catchphrase. Here, McQuarrie inally asks what sort of man keeps accepting those missions; what drives someone to put their life on the line again and again? For Hunt, the answer is simple. He can save people, and therefore he has a responsibility to act. For Cruise — and McQuarrie — it’s an eternal quest to outdo the last effort. They’re only making the next one dificult by succeeding this hard. HELEN O’HARA VERDICT A

combination of thrilling stunts, insane daring and clever writing make Mission Impossible — Fallout a stunning piece of action cinema. Just be sure to take your heart meds ﬁrst, and hold on tight. AUGUST 2018

SUMMER 1993 ★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED TBC / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Carla

Simón Artigas, Paula Robles, Bruna Cusí, David Verdaguer CAST Laia

CARLA SIMÓN MAKES a poignant impression with this autobiographical drama, which won the Best First Feature prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Coaxing performances of astonishing naturalism out of Laia Artigas and Paula Robles, Simón deftly uses everyday incidents to capture the darker aspects of childhood innocence, as well as its simple joys, as a six-year-old orphan struggles to acclimatise after moving in with her aunt and uncle in the Catalan countryside after her mother dies of AIDS-related pneumonia. This deeply personal picture particularly impresses in the closing scenes, which are quietly devastating in their intimacy, insight and truth. DP

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ANDRÉ ★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED PG / 94 MINS DIRECTOR Kate CAST André

Novack Leon Talley, Anna Wintour

IF YOU HAVEN’T heard of André Leon Talley, then you aren’t a true fan of fashion, darling. An iconic face on the scene for decades, the larger-than-life character (and perfectly titled Editor-AtLarge of Vogue) has an encyclopedic knowledge of designers and who he doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing. The Gospel According To André strips back the couture and presents us with an emotional look at the struggle of a gay black man born in the segregated south who battled the status quo to become one of the original fashion inﬂuencers of our generation. Add in commentary by industry titans such as Anna Wintour, Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs and you have essential viewing for anyone who loves peeking behind the curtain of the style set. ELIZABETH BEST

AUGUST 2018

BLACKKKLANSMAN ★★★★★

OUT 16 AUGUST RATED MA15+ 135 MINS

Spike Lee STARRING John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Ryan Eggold DIRECTOR

African American undercover detective Ron Stallworth (Washington) attempts to inﬁltrate the Ku Klux Klan by posing on the phone as a racist white man, his Jewish work colleague Flip Zimmerman (Driver) playing “Ron” during increasingly risky meetings with the KKK. PLOT

AS OVER THE TOP as the dramatic conceit that drives BlacKkKlansman may appear to be — that being an African American undercover detective becoming welcomed into the Ku Klux Klan with open arms via his posing as a racist white man on the telephone — this is, as director Spike Lee highlights at the commencement of the ilm via subtitle, “Some fo’ real shit.” Based on retired police detective Ron Stallworth’s 2014 book Black Klansman (which detailed his exploits iniltrating the KKK in late-’70s Colorado Springs), BlacKkKlansman — and the current goings on in the White House, which the ilm touches upon toward the end — really does prove the old adage true: truth is stranger than iction. As Lee unlinchingly displays, it can also be ugly as hell. At the centre of this ugliness is John David Washington’s unlappable, digniied and determined Ron Stallworth: a moral man able to hold his head high regardless of the blatant racism regularly directed at him by fellow (white) police oficers not afraid to let him know that he’s unwelcome at his place of work. Compounding his man-out-of-place status even further is the undercover investigation

he chooses to pursue — iniltrating the Ku Klux Klan — and his blossoming romance with pro-black / anti-cop activist Patrice (Laura Harrier), whom he understandably doesn’t want to discover his occupation. Although Ron boldly gains the trust of the KKK via phone while on the job, it’s (non-practicing) Jewish detective Flip Zimmerman (Driver) who is placed in equally hot water: as the public face of “Ron”, it’s his job to work his way into the KKK ranks by meeting with members Walter (Ryan Eggold) and offsider Felix (Jasper Pääkkönen), a violent psychopath suspicious of Flip from the outset. Although Lee milks every ounce of tension possible from the set-up, he also gives BlacKkKlansman the conident swagger of a blaxploitation ilm: Ron may be victimised, but he’s no victim. The subject matter may be serious — there’s a jaw-dropping scene involving Harry Belafonte recounting an horriic hate crime he witnessed — but Lee delves into how righteous anger can sometimes give way to a sense of grim bemusement. As such, there’s a strain of humour that runs through the ilm that’s happy to laugh at the absurdity of it all: at one point there’s a call between an I-can’t-believethis-is-happening Ron and Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace), the latter promising to personally see to the speedy approval of Ron’s KKK application. Lee doesn’t always strike the right tonal balance between the humour and the harrowing moments, but it matters not — this is easily his most vital and lat-out entertaining ilm in years. And thanks to footage of Trump and the 2017 Unite The Right rally shown during the coda, he saves the biggest gut-punch for last: yes, this shit actually happened — and yes, this shit is still actually happening. JAMES JENNINGS VERDICT A

potent mix that mines laughs and lacerating truths from subject matter sadly as timely as ever, BlacKkKlansman is an incendiary must-see.

Ron (John David Washington) and Patrice (Laura Harrier) ﬁght the power.

Q&A MARK JOFFE

WORKING CLASS BOY ★★★★

OUT 23 AUGUST RATED TBC / TBC MINS

Mark Joffe Jimmy Barnes, Jane Barnes, Ian Moss, Don Walker DIRECTOR CAST

PLOT A cinematic rendering of Barnes’

Working Class Boy autobiography that traces the story of how the boy born James Swan overcame incredible adversity and a harrowing upbringing to become the man we all know today as Jimmy Barnes.

MUCH LIKE THE spoken word stage adaptation of Working Class Boy — the irst instalment of Jimmy Barnes’ two-book autobiography — this ilm is a multi-layered experience. Ostensibly a documentary about the Cold Chisel singer’s life growing up in Glasgow and then Adelaide, his family having immigrated here in 1962, the ilm also incorporates beautifully shot musical performances, as well as snippets of his spoken-word show, captured in Sydney and Glasgow. It’s a documentary, but then it’s also much more than that. As anyone will attest who has seen the spoken word performance or read Barnes’ autobiography — Working Class Boy covers the years up until Cold Chisel’s formation; its sequel, Working Class Man, addresses the decades since — the fact that he’s even alive is something of a miracle. Not just because of his own substance issues, but because of the horriic circumstances of his upbringing which saw him exposed (and fall victim) to domestic violence, alcoholism, abuse, parental abandonment and poverty. It’s a harrowing story, but one that Barnes and this ilm deliver in a candid, matter-of-fact fashion that never once milks

the drama; the gruesome details are actually rendered slightly less shocking by the singer’s poetic turn of phrase. But shocking they are. Case in point is the scene where Barnes is standing outside the house in which he grew up in Elizabeth, South Australia, recounting the night he escaped from a friend’s older brother who was attempting to rape him, only to see his assailant then rape his own brother. He nonchalantly recalls the episode as though it just popped back into his head, just one of a litany of horrifying moments that stained his upbringing. The challenge for director Mark Joffe (Jack Irish, The Man Who Sued God) was to make a ilm that didn’t just mimic the singer’s stage show. Joffe achieves this in a number of ways. Firstly, he welcomes a select group of people to help tell Barnes’ stories, incorporating interviews with his family and members of Cold Chisel. More poignantly, Joffe captures Barnes revisiting landmark locations from his youth, such as the slum in which he was born, the South Australian beach pier that offered solace from the horrors of home, and his childhood houses in Adelaide. Seeing these locales adds gravitas; it brings a grounded, brutal reality to stories so dreadful they seem unreal. Witness the moment Barnes stares at the very road he once ran down as a child, desperately chasing the car containing his mother after she’d abandoned him. Perhaps the best compliment you can pay Working Class Boy is that it’s actually an uplifting tale. To see Barnes perform here with a band made up of family members is to see a man who emerged from his youth bruised and damaged, yet somehow built something he was once starved of: a loving and safe family unit. ROD YATES VERDICT A

beautifully realised work that adds further dimension to Barnes’ Working Class Boy autobiography and accompanying spoken word show. You will quite literally laugh and cry.

Barnes-storming: Jimmy takes it to

Working Class Boy’s director on bringing layers to Jimmy Barnes’ life story

the stage.

How important was it to make this documentary more than just a recreation of the Working Class Boy stage show? The stage show performed the basis of the story, but we had to give it another layer. We wanted to make sure that it gives another experience to the audience. How did you go about adding those layers? Just giving a different perspective to the story, taking it out of the world of the stage show. Taking Jimmy back to Glasgow. We limited the amount of interviews, and we kept it quite speciic about the people involved in these stages of his life. And also, no fakery. No recreations. I said to Jimmy from day one – because he was being hounded to do the biopic – you don’t want some actor running around with a bad mullet playing you. And then, giving it this wonderful cinematic quality with the shooting of the musical elements. We wanted to make that the spine of the ilm, something a little different. Given Jimmy’s ties to Glasgow, was the spoken word gig you shot there emotional? Very much. He did a show in Edinburgh the night before which we didn’t attend, but he said it was a completely different atmosphere to the Glasgow show. Cos he talks about Glaswegians and growing up there. Usually there’s quite a lot of raucous laughter, but it was a much more intense audience. But the end was just a break-out of emotion, a standing ovation. It was quite intense. As Jimmy revisited the places of his youth, did any moments overwhelm him? I don’t think he found anything overwhelming. Probably outside his house [in Adelaide] there were some things that took him back a long way, cos he’s got such a great vivid memory. I wouldn’t say he was overwhelmed, but it affected him. RY

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN ★★★ OUT NOW / RATED PG / 114 MINS

Ol Parker Lily James, Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep, Cher, Colin Firth DIRECTOR CAST

WITH ITS ALL-STAR cast (Streep! Firth! Brosnan!), relentless kitsch, and all-killer ABBA soundtrack, Mamma Mia! might just be the The Godfather of so-camp-it’s-classic jukebox musicals. Kudos, then, to writer-director Ol Parker for pitching the cleverly titled sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again as its The Godfather Part II — part sequel reuniting the original cast, part prequel recounting the summer that first brought Meryl Streep’s Donna to Kalokairi, Greece. In its best moments, Parker recaptures the original’s free-wheeling joy and energy — the young Donna, Rosie and Tanya (Lily James, Alexa Davies and Jessica Keenan Wynn, all excellent) tearing off their graduation robes to reveal stripy catsuits and feather boas in opening number ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’ is gloriously silly, picking up tonally right where Phyllida Lloyd’s original film left off. James, given the unenviable task of continuing a role originated by Meryl Streep, is full of vitality and convincingly channels her hippie vibes. But despite the cast’s energetic efforts, the overlong prequel plot needs tightening — with the first film already recounting the basics of Donna’s string of summer romances you’ll know exactly where it’s going. While the plot of Here We Go Again hits some occasional bum notes, another soundtrack of ABBA classics hits almost all the right ones. With most of ABBA Gold used last time, a little silver and bronze padding has slipped through here (‘Andante Andante’, anyone?), but when the singing and dancing is in full swing — a reprise of the first film’s jubilant ‘Dancing Queen’ sequence, an all-cast rendition of ‘Super Trouper’ — it’s just as infectious as it was a decade ago. The first Mamma Mia! often felt like being trapped on a non-stop rowdy middle-aged all-singing all-dancing holiday (in a good way). Ten years on this second trip feels older and wiser, for better or worse, and despite the odd misstep you’ll still be dancing in the aisles come the end credits. Bring on Mamma Three-a! in 2028. BEN TRAVIS

SKYSCRAPER ★★

OUT NOW / 102 MINS RATED M

Rawson Marshall Thurber CAST Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell DIRECTOR

PLOT Former FBI agent and amputee Will

Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) is hired as security consultant for a state-of-the-art Hong Kong skyscraper called The Pearl. But when this “mile-high Fort Knox” is attacked by terrorists, Will’s family are trapped above a blazing ﬁre on the 96th ﬂoor, with Will himself framed for the raid.

IS IT POSSIBLE to get Rock fatigue? Can one’s enthusiasm for Dwayne ever wane? How much you enjoy Skyscraper — the one-time Brahma Bull’s ifth movie since spring last year (on top of another series of Ballers, no less) — will depend largely on your answer to that question. Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Die Hard/ Towering Inferno cut-and-shut tests how much you can allow Johnson’s eyebrow lexes and pugilistic lair to obscure the physics-defying, plot-hole-punched preposterousness of pretty much everything else. Thurber’s speciality is comedy — primarily of the physical kind, as s hown by Dodgeball and previous Johnson collaboration Central Intelligence — but here he’s written and directed an action-thriller played straighter than, well, a skyscraper. (Although its ugly, titular ediice, The Pearl, looks more like an eel chewing a tennis ball.) It is not a mode that its him well, or his leading man for that matter. The ilm is light on zingers and heavy on ersatz emotionality, primarily expressed through a Taken-ish ‘Daddy’s gotta save his little girl’ intensity once Johnson’s

small-time security whizz is back in the terrorist-lamed super-building of the title, via that ludicrous, trailer-heralded crane jump. The closest the script comes to self-awareness is a moment when Johnson prepares to climb the tower’s smooth glass exterior with duct tape wrapped around his mitts and shoe tips, and says to himself, “This is stupid”. We’re supposed to buy Johnson as a damaged everyman – a past mishap cost Sawyer a leg as well as his in-the-ield self-conidence – yet we also have to swallow CG-reliant set-pieces that imbue him with superhuman capabilities, as well as a nonsensical, overegged plot which boils down to a tiff over a memory stick. For all his charm, Johnson just can’t pull it off, though it’s not like Thurber bothered to craft him any helpful character-building breathers; it’s just a kick-bollock scramble from action sequence to action sequence. Neve Campbell is a welcome presence as his wife Sarah, but aside from a few token scraps (she’s an ex-combat medic) is given little to do but follow her husband’s hurried instructions and argue with the cops. And there’s no worthy nemesis on show, either; Danish actor Roland Møller merely stalks around like a surly alphahenchman in desperate need of a boss. Ultimately, Skyscraper lacks the knowing daftness of Rampage, the frantic self-parody of Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and the balls-out brawn of the last Fast And Furious. We really are back on stodgy San Andreas territory with this one. It’s still hard to imagine ever truly getting fed up with Johnson’s relentless actionadventure antics, but if he signs up for Skyscraper 2: The Next Story, we might just have to call it a day. DAN JOLIN The building may be taller than The Towering Inferno and the stakes may be higher than those faced by John McClane in Die Hard, but in comparison to both, Skyscraper is little more than a cinematic bungalow.

VERDICT

“An eel chewing a tennis ball”: the titular Skyscraper.

WEST OF SUNSHINE ★★★ OUT 23 AUGUST / RATED TBC / 78 MINS DIRECTOR Jason CAST Damian

Raftopoulos Hill, Ty Perham,

Kat Stewart

THE EQUALIZER 2 ★★

OUT NOW / 121 MINS RATED MA15+

Antoine Fuqua STARRING Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo DIRECTOR

PLOT With his mysterious past still haunting

him, Robert McCall (Washington) has chosen a new career path as an undercover cab-driving vigilante. When someone close to him is killed, however, it gets personal and he wreaks his bloodthirsty vengeance.

WHEN DENZEL WASHINGTON starred in the irst cinematic adaptation of ’80s TV crime drama The Equalizer, the result was a stylish, ultra-violent thriller that saw the Oscar-winning thespian ably taking on the role that gave Edward Woodward’s career a new lease of life. Playing Robert McCall, a retired intelligence agent with a mysterious past, Washington got to show off his special set of skills to save Chloë Grace Moretz’s hooker with a heart of gold and take on the Russian mob single-handedly. The sequel, again directed by Antoine Fuqua (this is the he and Washington’s fourth ilm together after Training Day and The Magniicent Seven), sees Washington in no less a vengeful mood — although this time it’s personal. And not as exciting. Losing much of the distinct visual style that was the irst ilm’s point of difference — especially when McCall was eyeing up his victims — the character traits that made McCall interesting are all but lost in a convoluted plot that promises much but delivers very little. His meticulous persona and obsession with timing are present, but treated almost as an afterthought here. The set up certainly has potential.

The killer with a conscience is now a Lyft driver and listens to his fares’ problems like a mobile agony aunt, stepping in to resolve an issue with brute force if needed. When a young female intern sits on his backseat, bloodied and bruised by her “workmates”, McCall heads up to their hotel room and delivers bloody justice to the rich creeps, resulting in death by credit card and the ilm’s best gag. Violence is one area where the sequel easily matches Part 1. The inale sees McCall gets his Rambo on by dispatching the bad guys with a harpoon to the face, a double knife evisceration, eye-gouging and other gory delights. There is certainly a peculiar frisson watching an Oscar winner going postal and Washington, in his irst ever sequel, delivers the requisite star power but is ultimately wasted in a ilm that slowly meanders to its inevitable climatic bloodbath. The crux of the plot, involving McCall’s associates (played by Pedro Pascal, Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo) see the bad guys obsessed with relentlessly tying up loose ends after a family in Belgium is brutally killed. Slim story pickings make way for clichéd subplots about a young hoodlum from McCall’s building who is wasting his artistic talents and an elderly Holocaust survivor. These were no doubt the moments that attracted Washington to the script, but here they hinder rather than help. For a ilm that relishes in its bloodletting, The Equalizer 2 is a queasy mix of the moralistic and the voyeuristic, wallowing, as it does, in self-righteousness and lingering violence. Not that the original wasn’t overly virtuous, but by bookending the ilm with sentiment, the impact of the ilm is diluted. DMB VERDICT Denzel

Washington gives his expected all but cannot save a slow and ponderous thriller that doesn’t know if it is more interested in social comment or bone-crunching action.

Denzel’s golﬁng holiday had gone pear-shaped.

PLAYING LIKE AN urban take on Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves by way of the streets of Melbourne, Jason Raftopoulos’s self-scripted, deftly directed debut is a lean but affecting kitchen sink drama about a father trying to bond with his son while collecting cash to appease a disgruntled, and very violent, loan shark. Belying the rough-around-theedges low-budget aesthetic, the central relationship between Jim (Pawno star Damian Hill) and his son Alex (Hill’s actual stepson, newcomer Ty Perham) brings genuine emotion to the perilous parental predicament while the director allows his ﬁlm to breathe, focusing on those moments in life made magical through the eyes of a child. DMB

C’EST LA VIE ★★★ OUT 16 AUGUST / RATED M / 116 MINS DIRECTORS Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache CAST Jean-Pierre Bacri, Eye Haidara

WITH ITS COLOURFUL characters, gently amusing set-ups and ultimately sweet story, you can see why this ensemble comedy was a hit with both critics and audiences in its native France. Unfortunately for most Australians, its script is often a little too clever for its humour to fully translate via subtitles and it takes too long to get going. C’est La Vie follows a cranky but well-meaning wedding planner (the always great Bacri) and his misﬁt colleagues on the day of a particular job that pushes them to their limits. The ﬁlm is not in the same league as Toledano and Nakache’s much-admired The Intouchables, but as its pieces fall into place it eventually just about charms you into submission. GP

AUGUST 2018

ANT-MAN ANDTHE WASP ★★★

OUT NOW RATED PG / 118 MINS

Peyton Reed CAST Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pﬁeffer

DIRECTOR

Two years after backing Cap in Civil War, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is house-arrested and trying to balance fatherhood with running his security ﬁrm. But Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) need his help once more, wrangling with a ghost from their past — as well as a troublesome Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) in their present.

PLOT

Scuba diving on LSD: the latest in extreme sports.

AFTER THANOS CLICKED his ingers and delivered that gut-punch of an ending to Ininity War, it feels strange to watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe bounce back up off the mat, ighting it, eager and willing to please with another frisky caper. Especially as it’s the sequel to the series’ friskiest and most capering entry to date, the fun but lightweight heist comedy Ant-Man. A movie, lest we forget, that featured Thomas The Tank Engine. It’s like we’ve lipped from the MCU’s hugest epic to, well, as small as it gets. You won’t be surprised to learn that Ant-Man And The Wasp predominantly takes place before Squidward and his giant spinny thing rocked up in Ininity War. The concerns here are not of cosmic calamity, but family matters and survival at the individual, rather than universal, level. On the one hand there is Scott (Rudd), condemned to the ultimate slacker’s lifestyle after his Civil War shenanigans have consigned him to house-arrest. It’s given the rumpled rogue plenty of time to hone his speed drumming and close-up magic skills, but it hardly helps when he’s got a loving daughter to attend to, a security irm to run and old friends to help out. On the other hand, there are Hank (Douglas) and Hope (Lilly), who, inspired by Scott’s survival of the Quantum Realm in the last movie, have developed a Quantum Tunnel by which they can go sub-microscopic and, they hope, bring back the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne — now inally revealed as Michelle Pfeiffer, who gets her own, uncanny ’90s lashback prologue makeover. As plots go, it doesn’t require the most attention, running straight and easy from A to B, almost entirely on the undulating streets of San

Francisco, with a few villains to offer obstruction along the way. Walton Goggins’ predictably smarmy southern gent black-market tech dealer is just out to nab Pym gadgetry for a quick big buck; John-Kamen’s semi-ethereal Ghost, meanwhile, has a more sympathetic motive, putting her on a similarly urgent mission as our heroes. And it is good to see the gang back together. A brisk bit of catch-up exposition reveals that, since assisting Steve Rogers in Munich, Hope and Hank ditched Scott, not least because his actions drew them heat via the Sokovia Accords — making them an off-the-grid, father-anddaughter renegade outit. Not too dificult when you can shrink your state-of-the-art facility to the size of carry-on baggage and drive around in Hot Wheels-scaled cars. The banter izzes with the same old charm, Scott’s apparent inanity still grating against Hank’s curmudgeonliness and Hope’s stilettosharp focus. But a few too many gags lean on call-backs, with a shooed-in repeat of Luis’ (Michael Peña) jabbered monologues, and Scott suffering continuing bad luck with his insect sidekicks (though none will earn your tears like poor Anthony did). And while there’s no giant Thomas, we do get a colossal Hello Kitty Pez — the pink end of the toy spectrum now represented as well as the blue. About damn time. As you’d expect from a Marvel joint, the action comes thick and fast, except now it’s Lilly breaking the most sweat, whether zippily neutralising a clump of goons in a restaurant kitchen (mind the tenderiser, Wasp!) or participating in a Bullitt-echoing car chase around and over San Fran’s pretty hills. Hope is far more capable than Scott, and is a joy to watch in fully suited action. However, Ant-Man does still get his big moments — or should that be Giant-Man, now? (Look carefully, and you’ll see news footage using that name as it reports on his latest, audience-pleasing growth spurt just off Fisherman’s Wharf, so perhaps it’s oficial.) But as massive as Scott grows — or as wibbly as things get in the Quantum Realm — the ilm still feels comparatively minor and light-hitting. There’s no getting away from the fact that Ant-Man And The Wasp, as fun as it is, lacks the sheer, mind-blowing heft of Ininity War. Or, for that matter, the scope and thematic muscle of Black Panther. Or the all-the-way-out-there, inventive deliriousness of Thor: Ragnarok. In this new era of Marvel over-achievement, it really does feel like a lesser work. DAN JOLIN VERDICT While it proves an all-round wellmounted distraction, Ant-Man And The Wasp undeniably lacks the scale and ambition of recent Marvel entries.

AUGUST 2018

JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM ★★★★

RATED M OUT NOW / 128 MINS

DIRECTOR J.A. Bayona CAST Chris

Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, James Cromwell, Jeff Goldblum, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda PLOT When

Isla Nublar’s volcanic foundations become active again, Jurassic World’s former manager Claire Dearing (Howard), now a dinosaur rights activist, reunites with Owen Grady (Pratt) for a rescue mission.

“DO YOU REMEMBER the irst time you saw a dinosaur?” asks Claire Dearing (Howard) in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. We do. When Steven Spielberg’s photoreal prehistoric predators hit multiplexes in 1993, they changed cinema forever. And they were terrifying. But in the three ilms since, the original’s perfectly tuned moments of pure suspense (the tapping velociraptor claw, the water rippling in a T-Rex footprint) haven’t been matched. Enter The Orphanage director J.A. Bayona. But Bayona’s ilm isn’t just limited to the white-knuckle frights — he also goes bigger than any other Jurassic ilm. Where The Lost World and III struggled to deliver convincing motivations for characters to return to dino-illed terrain, Bayona and Colin Trevorrow (director of Jurassic World, who co-writes here) have cracked it: Isla Nublar’s no-longerdormant volcano is about to blow, which sends the park’s former operations manager Claire — now campaigning for dinosaur rights — and Owen Grady (Pratt) on a rescue mission. The island is where Bayona’s disaster movie credentials come into play as he

AUGUST 2018

invokes the relentless intensity of The Impossible’s harrowing tsunami in a stampede sequence as the volcanic eruption escalates. Such mass destruction is a new lavour for the Jurassic series, and the bombast is wisely punctuated with human-scale peril — an underwater sequence in a sinking gyrosphere is a breath-holding highlight. While the Isla Nublar action is cranked up to 11, on the mainland Bayona holds a tight focus on the creepy mansion home of John Hammond’s ex-business partner, orchestrating precision-tuned scares with his scaly new star: the Indoraptor. With such hissable baddies as Ted Levine’s trophy-collecting mercenary Ken Wheatley and Toby Jones’ Trump-wigged auctioneer Gunnar Eversol on site, watching it wreak toothy havoc is a scream. As for our heroes, Howard and Pratt’s characters are developed beyond the archetypes of last time. Claire 2.0 is far more sympathetic — and yes, now wears sensible shoes — while Owen’s chauvinistic edges are rounded off. The pair have real chemistry, best evidenced during a hugely entertaining sleeping T-Rex sequence that delivers laughs, gasps, and top-notch animatronic effects. You wanted more ‘real’ dinosaurs this time? You got ’em. There are niggles — one character’s mysterious identity is telegraphed far too heavily, Goldblum’s cameo is well-conceived but extremely brief, and Michael Giacchino’s score underuses the John Williams fanfare. But despite some familiar echoes of The Lost World, Fallen Kingdom also takes irreversible strides, deriving tantalising logical conclusions from Michael Crichton’s original premise and setting up a brave new World for this trilogy’s inal chapter. BEN TRAVIS A Jurassic sequel that plays it both adrenaline-pumpingly huge and thrillingly small. A summer ride that will drive kids out of their minds, and maybe even give parents nightmares.

VERDICT

THE BIGGER PICTURE

WHAT NOW FOR JURASSIC’S BRAVE NEW WORLD?

SPOILER WARNING

Contributing Editor Ian Freer considers the future of the franchise sans Park

IF YOU DIDN’T stay in your seat to the bitter end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — fair play, there was the World Cup/MasterChef (delete where applicable) to watch — you would have missed out on a post-credits sting: a group of pterosaurs circling around an Eiffel-like tower. Don’t worry, the dinos haven’t reached Paris (yet). Instead, the winged creatures have arrived in Las Vegas (be careful on the slots, boys); a pertinent reminder that — ESTAs/visas be damned — these dinosaurs can now go anywhere. By making the Park extinct, J.A.

Bayona’s sequel to Colin Trevorrow’s follow-on from Steven Spielberg’s/Joe Johnston’s original trilogy has ripped up the Jurassic rule book. After that bit with the volcano and that bit in the old house, the prehistoric critters leg it to the mainland (one goes to the zoo, another goes suring), to allow Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm to intone, “Welcome to Jurassic World.” Perhaps most obviously — and thankfully — this does away with screenwriters trying to come up with plausible ways to get visitors to return to an island which wreaks death and destruction. We’re now in a story space where dinosaurs seem to be inhabiting urban and suburban (house prices will plummet) areas. At the Lockwood Estate, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) releases roughly 20 enclosures. If there were only one of each species — and presuming they

Clockwise from left: Benjamin Lockwood’s granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon); Jeff Goldblum’s cameo as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; Hybrid dinosaur Indoraptor vs Owen Grady (Chris Pratt); Dinosaur rights activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) in action.

are female and unable to reproduce — it doesn’t seem like the stuff of great drama to round them up/stop them, so the next movie will have to look elsewhere for kicks. Elements still in play include Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) looking to reunite with pet raptor Blue who scarpered rather than being locked up. And Blue also had a blood transfusion from a T-Rex courtesy of Zia (Daniella Pineda). Could this come to the fore? Trevorrow could also explore Benjamin Lockwood’s (James Cromwell) granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who turned out to be a clone from the DNA of Lockwood’s dead daughter. Is she some kind of weird half-kid, half-dino hybrid? Perhaps the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo from Ian Malcolm is a precursor of

a bigger role in the next lick. Trevorrow, back at the helm of Jurassic World III, has ruled out any more creature mash-ups and promised a move away from people being chased by dinosaurs, pitching a scientiic thriller that returns the series to its roots. He has also hinted the story could become about the InGen technology becoming open sourced and developed by rival companies, making a comparison between what happened between Apple and PC (slick, user-friendly dinosaurs vs noisier, clunkier creatures). From here, Part III could explore genetically cloned dinosaurs working together with mankind, employed in agriculture, medicine or even as weapons. As such there is much talk in Fallen Kingdom of utilising dinosaurs for military purposes. John Sayles’ rejected Jurassic 4 screenplay even posited creatures wearing armoured jackets and killing drug dealers. So let’s hope the franchise cross-pollinates with Sicario and sees Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro teaming up with a dilophosaurus to take down South American cartels. Or, failing that, give the head-butting Stiggy a ive-picture deal. Like a skateboarding cat on the internet, that shit never gets tired.

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ON CHESILBEACH ★★★

OUT 9 AUGUST RATED TBC / 110 MINS

Dominic Cooke CAST Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Emily Watson, Anne-Marie Duff, Samuel West DIRECTOR

It’s 1962, and Edward (Howle) and Florence (Ronan) have just got married. Spending their ﬁrst night together in a hotel on Dorset’s Chesil Beach, their nerves build as they prepare to have sex for the ﬁrst time. PLOT

IN 1963, A ‘youthquake’ hit Britain. A revolution in art, fashion, politics and music saw young people become a cultural force, and presence, for arguably the irst time. But for those coming of age in 1962, it was a very different story — the decade was not yet swinging. Adapted for screen by Ian McEwan from his 2007 novella, this debut feature from four-time Olivier Award-winning theatre director Dominic Cooke is, at its heart, a deceptively simple tale. Edward

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(Howle) and Florence (Ronan) are a young couple in love, spending the irst night of their marriage in a hotel on Chesil Beach. Theirs is, as we ind out in lashback, a iercely passionate connection, set in motion at irst sight across an Oxford college hall. But, as it turns out, for all their sincere emotion, this is an attaction they will struggle to fulil — thanks to a paralysing ignorance, and fear, of the physical act of sex. Missing out on the cultural revolution by a matter of months, they still live in the stymied, prematurely middle-aged world of clinking cutlery in muted rooms (a recurring trope); it is a ilm punctuated by heavy, ponderous silences, and further lashbacks reveal family circumstances (including Edward’s brain-damaged, stricken mother, played by Duff) that further compound their awkwardness. As the momentous evening progresses, Cooke creates a strange, off-kilter feel — the hotel’s waiters seem to be sniggering at the couple from the other side of their room’s door — and shoots the beautiful scenery in sombre tones of blue, grey and stone. The mood is overwhelmingly melancholy, if punctuated sporadically by humorous

In Chesil Park.

moments with the supporting cast (Watson’s snobby matriarch stands out), and Ronan and Howle expertly convey their characters’ pent-up frustrations through a look or a gesture. However, where the ilm starts to falter is in dialogue that, without the exposition of the novella, is at best stilted, at worst almost a series of non sequiturs. In some scenes it’s almost as if they are speaking in riddles. By the time apprehension turns into outright crisis, it is with a sense of detachment that you watch the calamity unfold. Nonetheless, as time moves on in the last 20 minutes, irst to 1975, then 2007, suddenly the high feeling that’s so long been held back loods the screen. It’s a welcome change of energy that triggers empathy and genuine engagement. In one sense it’s a clever move from Cooke, relecting the characters’ — and society’s — emotional evolution as the 20th century progressed and then turned. However, in terms of audience investment in Edward and Florence’s fate, it’s perhaps just too little, too late. LIZ BEARDSWORTH VERDICT An

opulent, well crafted and acted tale of emotional repression that captures the head more than the heart.

THE METHOD

ALISON BRIE How she transformed into GLOW’s communist heel Zoya The Destroyer

★★★★

NETFLIX / OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL

CREATED BY Liz

Flahive, Carly Mensch Brie, Betty Gilpin, Sydelle Noel, Britney Young, Marc Maron CAST Alison

PLOT After

a long time trying to grapple a women’s wrestling show into shape, the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling now have their own little-watched cable series. They’re going to do all they can to make it a hit, while contending with equally punishing dramas off screen.

EVERYTHING HITS HARDER in GLOW’s second season. The storylines are punchier; the performances are better; the scripts are funnier; even the fake wrestling moves are more elaborate. What was formerly a good show is now a great one. Season 1 did a great job laying the foundations of a story with endless potential: a group of women who want to be stars, but don’t it Hollywood’s preferred mould, get cast on an unpromising, cheapo ladies’ wrestling TV show. It had terriic characters and some solid jokes, but it was a little unfocused. It now sees exactly where it’s going. This season is about turning the show-withinthe-show from a lark in a gym into a real TV hit and its cast inding their places in it. Ruth (Brie) becomes less the lead than part of the ensemble. All the supporting characters step into the spotlight, especially Debbie (Gilpin), who is not adjusting well to life as a single woman. One of the best aspects of GLOW, more developed in Season 2, is how it digs into what a strange time the ’80s were for women. Second-wave feminism had long since swept in and GLOW’s women conidently forge careers, enjoy their sexuality (new character Yolanda, played by Shakira Barrera, is an out lesbian) and

insist on equal footing with men (Debbie demands to be made a producer or she’ll quit, and Ruth turns director). Yet they have ghosts of internal misogyny — one foot is still dragging out of the ’50s. There’s a scene later in the series, a plus-ça-change moment with a sad Weinstein nod, when Ruth is asked to meet a network executive in his hotel room. He is expecting sex. Standing alone as he runs a bath, a look plays across Brie’s face that shows fast debate about the right decision here. She leaves, but is berated by another cast member for not lirting a little, for the good of the show, because that’s ‘how it works’. She feels, awfully, guilt. ‘What is worth surrendering to get what I want?’ becomes the show’s running theme. Tammé (Kia Stevens), who in the ring is Welfare Queen — a stereotype who lives large on beneits — is embarrassed when her Stanford student son sees her playing a “minstrel”, but proud of herself for becoming a success. Debbie makes great career advances but at the cost of her family. Those battles to ind happiness, even if it’s not the exact type of happiness they really want, go to some pretty raw places. Gilpin, particularly, drags her character along rock bottom, giving a performance that makes her the season’s stand-out. All that character drama doesn’t weigh the series down. The heavier battles outside the ring are balanced by the silly ones within. It’s as camp and funny as it ever was. We see an entire episode of the TV show within the show, wooden acting, crap effects and all, and, frankly, it should get a full series commission. The scripts are specked with hilariously odd, sly lines (“What’s Cheers? It’s about an invisible woman named Vera”). The show is no longer just a contender; it’s a hulking great champ. OLLY RICHARDS It’s a pleasure to watch a show that always had the potential for greatness grow to fulﬁl it. As good a drama as it is a comedy, GLOW is now one of the best shows on TV.

VERDICT

1 FOCUSED ON STRENGTH

__ “I think a lot of women exercise to be skinny, so it’s refreshing to do strength training. I’ve been with my trainer for about seven years, but I told him, ‘Let’s up the ante.’ It’s about power and how much weight you can lift. I want my arms and shoulders to be strong so I can lift other women up, and help them to lift me.”

2 __ LEARNED NEW MOVES “Because it’s Season 2, we’re trying to learn bigger moves. We usually go in pairs. It starts with preliminary footwork, then improvisational wrestling, warming up those muscles. Then our coach Chavo Guerrero Jr will show us a new move, and we’ll do it with him in front of everyone. You learn so much from watching others do it.”

3 WINGED THE ACCENT

__ “If this were a serious period piece, I would study the accent for months with a dialect coach. As it is, I do very little prep. I just thought, ‘Eh, I’ll wing it.’ So I watched Eastern Promises, some YouTube clips of Russian men speaking and videos of [Colonel] Ninotchka from the original GLOW. She was my major crutch.” BEN TRAVIS

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ILLUSTRATION: DAVE HOPKINS

GLOW:SEASON2

SHARPOBJECTS ★★★★

SHOWCASE / OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-7

Marti Noxon Amy Adams, April Brinson, Eliza Scanlen, Patricia Clarkson, Matt Craven CREATED BY CAST

PLOT Chicago-based journalist Camille Preaker (Adams) returns to her hometown to report on a murder. But as the present triggers memories from her past, she ﬁnds it difﬁcult to overcome her inner demons.

SHARP OBJECTS HAS all the ingredients for a classic ‘whodunnit’ — a grisly, suspicious death, a small town chock-full of sinful secrets, and a big-city reporter sent in to cover the crime. But, as hinted at in the show’s irst episode (“This isn’t going to be exploitative; more like a think piece on how something like this can affect a town,” says the newspaper’s editor), it plays out rather differently on screen. This is no mere murder mystery — it is, in fact, a bleak, slow-paced

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character study hidden within one. Based on the novel of the same name by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, it centres on Amy Adams’ Camille Preaker, a journalist sent to cover a story in her small hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. Her homecoming, however, triggers memories of a traumatic past, ripping open emotional wounds she’s long tried to hide. Adams — all Midwestern drawl and sorrowful eyes — is predictably superb, effortlessly expressing everything the dialogue leaves out, be it relief, charm or utter devastation. It’s a powerful performance, and one from which we aren’t permitted to escape — the camera rarely strays from her, her emotions becoming ours. And in that process we uncover more truths about Camille than she does about the case. In fact, it soon becomes clear that planting clues to the killer’s identity isn’t the priority. As suspects prove their innocence, tips prove less than fruitful and the crime begins to occupy less screen time. Camille is actually the puzzle being pieced together. It’s a bold choice — viewers lured in by the expectation of a more conventional

Darlinghurst’s latest boho joint hadn’t quite got the usual buzz.

crime drama, one featuring something more like the breadcrumb trail of clues laid down in Gone Girl, perhaps, will ind this adaptation is a very different proposition. Characters are introduced who seem as though they may be important — an out-of-town detective, a family friend, Camille’s rebellious halfsister Amma (Scanlen), her vitriolic mother Adora (Clarkson) — but their appearances are leeting. The focus always returns to Camille, her mental wellbeing, and the secrets she has buried in her past. And on that front, it delivers. Sharp Objects dares not to provide the easy, endorphin-rush thrills of so many murder investigation shows. As thorny as it is unconventional, it’s a hard-hitting, distressingly realistic exploration of both mental health and the heartbreaking reality of being forced to confront scars that haven’t — and may never — heal. AMY WEST VERDICT Character

being prioritised over clues will put some off, but this is a hard-hitting and compelling depiction of how difﬁcult it is to shake psychological trauma.

MEET OUR CRITICS

SACRED GAMES ★★★★

NETFLIX / OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4

Vikramaditya Motwane Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Radhika Apte, Jatin Sarna CREATED BY CAST

In modern-day Mumbai, honest but under-performing cop Sartaj Singh (Khan) receives a call from gangster Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui), missing for 16 years. After Gaitonde tells him he has 25 days to save the city from an unspeciﬁed calamity, Singh sets out to solve the mystery. PLOT

BASED ON A 2006 crime epic by Vikram Chanda, Netlix’s irst Indian Original is an unlinching roll through the grit of Mumbai (and its former incarnation Bombay), which offers a bloody contrast to the crisp, bright cinematic India we’ve become used to via Bollywood’s typically glammy output. This is an eight-part cops-andgangsters thriller with a vicious streak and against-the-clock propulsion, whose two strands simultaneously concern ‘the only straight cop in town’ and an incredibly ruthless mobster who rises to the top of the organised-crime heap. The irst weaves through Mumbai, as Saif Ali Khan’s disgraced policeman Sartaj Singh (suspended for not being corrupt enough) works with an eager intelligence analyst (Apte) to save the city from a major threat, all the while trying to igure out what connection he has to the supposedly ghosted gang boss who alerted him to the incoming disaster. The second lashes back to ’80s Bombay, with the aforementioned gang boss, Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui), relating his deadly evolution from bullied street

kid to underworld overlord. In both its halves, Sacred Games brazenly lirts with crime-genre cliché. There are assassination attempts which explode into bullet-fests; there’s an episode in which a reluctant innocent wears a wire before things inevitably go wrong; there’s a short-fused Mob lieutenant; and there is Singh himself, whose rigid morality is sorely tested. But showrunner Vikramaditya Motwane, who directs alongside Anurag Kashyap (a ilmmaker Danny Boyle cited as a big inluence on Slumdog Millionaire), adds the occasional surreal or almost supernatural touch. The opening shot is of a yelping dog falling to its death from the top of a high-rise, while the character of Gaitonde comes with some Keyser Soze-ish mythical lourishes and an unsettling conviction that he is a god. Which means, of course, he gets to narrate. Both main roles are impressively played. Siddiqui is a small guy with a huge presence and a relaxed, Omar Sharifchannelling charm, which he serves chilled to the point of cold-blooded. His Gaitonde barely even breaks a sweat when beating a man to death with a rock. Khan’s Singh, by contrast, is a study in discomfort: bruised and burly, hardly itting into his straining, sweat-saturated shirts and tight-wrapped turban, so determined to do things right he keeps getting things wrong, and rarely without physical punishment. A sagging, frowning punch bag, he’s less heroic than incurably stubborn. It says everything that when either actor is on screen, you don’t miss the other. Together but separate, they ensure each of this twisted tale’s halves is distinct yet equally intriguing, forming a portrait of a Mumbai we’ve never explored before. DAN JOLIN VERDICT Part

crime epic, part countdown-to-destruction espionage thriller, Sacred Games comes on like a bastard blend of Narcos and 24.

Blood pressure.

TERRI WHITE @terri_white Is disappointed in any ﬁlm that isn’t unrelentingly grim. Apart from La La Land.

IAN FREER @mrianfreer Loves Jaws and The 400 Blows and Apocalypse Now. Yet to see The Big Lebowski.

NICK DE SEMLYEN @nickdesemlyen Loves ﬁlm noir and Peter Jackson ﬁlms. Can recite the lyrics to Magic Dance from Labyrinth.

JONATHAN PILE @jonnypile Flirts with highbrow ﬁlms, but is happiest in front of a decent thriller.

CHRIS HEWITT @chrishewitt Loves horror and Marvel ﬂicks. Freddy vs Tony would be his best movie ever.

HELEN O’HARA @helenlohara Likes superheroes. And ﬁlms about smart people arguing, ideally while falling in love.

JOHN NUGENT @mr_nugent Big fan of Powell, Pressburger, Pixar and Predator. And other ﬁlms that do not start with ‘P’.

DAN JOLIN @danjolin Favourite ﬁlm is Brazil, director is Nolan, franchise is Planet Of The Apes (the good ones).

OLLY RICHARDS @olly_richards Insists Batman Returns is the best Batman ﬁlm and will (weakly) ﬁght you over it.

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ILLUSTRATIONS: DAVID MAHONEY

JAMES DYER @jamescdyer Evangelical about Aliens and Nuns On The Run. Once had a wee next to Ice Cube.

With a new cadre of soldiers and a beefed-up alien threat, The Predator aims to restore an iconic monster to its former glory. For director Shane Black, it’s all about recapturing the spirit of ’87 WORDS JAMES DYER

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A blushing vision descends from the sky as actors Boyd Holbrook and Trevante Rhodes look on, dumbstruck. A helicopter, pink as a baboon’s arse, whips through the air to settle in a ield next to them, a grinning Keegan-Michael Key waving manically from the lilac interior. On the vehicle’s rosy fuselage, the silhouette of a naked woman reclines suggestively, the words “My Secret” and ”Heaven Sent” wrapped around her curves in lowery script. ”Well, that’s fancy,” observes Olivia Munn, as she, Rhodes and Holbrook shoulder weapons, grab their gear and get to the chopper — albeit one that appears to have been jacked from a sex-toy expo. “What did you expect?” says Rhodes, grinning at his ride between takes. “This is a Shane Black movie, man.” In the early ’90s, Black was the undisputed king of the Hollywood spec script. His screenplays, fuelled by a childhood spent inhaling pulp novels as fast as they were printed, were action-driven rides that refused to shy away from the awkward or absurd, punctuated by dark humour and biting dialogue. It wasn’t long before his words were worth their weight in gold,

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Clockwise from here: The Upgrade Predator, a genetic hybrid that absorbs the DNA of its prey; Boyd Holbrook’s Quinn takes aim; Director Shane Black and pal on set; Keegan-Michael Key as ‘Loonie’ Coyle.

earning him a record $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout, a igure dwarfed soon after when he sold The Long Kiss Goodnight for a ludicrous $4 million in 1994. Black’s calling card, more than wit or one-liners, has been his delight in twisting genre tropes, turning convention on its head. When a Black character plays Russian roulette, there are brains on the wall at the irst trigger pull. When the P.I. breaks a window with his ist, he ends up in the ER. And when the master villain is unmasked, he turns out to be Trevor Slattery, whose Lear was the toast of Croydon. It should come as no surprise, then, that when a bunch of misit soldiers need transport in a hurry, Air Dildo is the only way to ly. Three decades after Black got his big break with the script for Lethal Weapon, his work has lost none of its edge or pep. Off-screen, however, much like Danny Glover’s Murtaugh, the ilmmaker had started to feel a little too old for this shit.

“You hit 50 and you remember thinking all this was gonna be so wonderful when you were 20,” he says, wearily. “And it is, but I wish I still had the same spark, the same friends, the same feeling and enthusiasm that I had when I was young. Basically, I was feeling old. And then someone at Fox mentioned Predator to me.” Midlife crises can take many forms, of course. For some it’s an impractical car. For others a tryst with someone born after Lethal Weapon 4 came out in 1998. For Black, the Eat Pray Love moment came equipped with dreadlocks, mandibles and a shoulder-mounted plasma caster. “I had so much fun making that ilm,” he recalls. “Just rolling in the mud and playing soldier. It’s why I wanted to go back and do it all again. Of all the things I could have chosen to represent a return to a youthful environ, it was the Predator.” Not only was Black being offered a chance to revisit a singular experience from his youth, he was told he could bring on board Fred Dekker, a close friend since school, with whom he’d written Monster Squad back in the ’80s. It was perfect. “I thought, ‘That’ll do it!’” he recalls. “Go back in time to those halcyon days standing in line in Westwood waiting on Raiders at the National Theatre when we were both just kids. The idea of being a kid again, playing in that particular sandbox with Fred — that appealed to me. I thought, ‘This’ll be a lark, an adventure, a chance to feel young again.’”

hottest years they come. And this year it grows… wet. When Empire irst arrives at The Predator set, on a remote farm just outside Vancouver, it’s a far cry from the sweltering Mexican jungle. Deep pockets of icy mud suck at our insulated wellies (a welcome loan from the prop department) as we squelch down the drive, a relentless drizzle whipping us around the head. It’s April 2017, day 35 of the shoot, and the ultimate big-game hunter has been waylaid by inclement weather. Shooting has stalled for the past three days with barely a break in the deluge, and tempers are fraying. “This fucking weather, man,” growls star Thomas Jane, chewing on an unlit stogie the size of a courgette. We’ve had weather they’ve never seen in the history of Vancouver. Guys here who are 50, 60 years old have never seen shit like this. The schedule has been fucked!” Today, though, Team Predator is ighting back. Articulated cranes with giant rain shields have been deployed to keep the torrent at bay and, with a hint of sun at last peering weakly from between ash grey clouds, ilming is back on. Outside a large, burnt-red barn, Holbrook and Rhodes lean against a battered Winnebago. A quick peek inside reveals wall-to-wall irepower. Riles and pistols adorn almost every surface, while jars of ammo line the kitchenette shelves like an anarchist’s spice rack. If you ever fancied holidaying in a conlict zone, this is the RV you’d want to be driving. Black is camped out in a nearby tent, a thick black Puffa jacket keeping out the worst of the chill. He does not, if we’re honest, look particularly rejuvenated. Hunched behind a monitor, he sucks furiously on a vapestick, glancing enviously at Rhodes, who takes long, deep drags on the stub of an honest-to-God cigarette. “He’s the only one in the ilm allowed to fucking smoke,” Black grouses. “You can cut off people’s heads, skin their corpses and blow their fucking brains out, but the second someone picks up a cigarette the studio will shut your ass down.” He takes another hit, a cloud of thick vapour billowing around his head. “I use this thing because I’m desperately trying to quit. But this is a war movie, you know? They’re soldiers. ❯ What else are they fucking gonna do?”

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Led by Holbrook’s Quinn McKenna, Black’s band of brothers is about as far from Dutch Schaefer’s crack unit as it’s possible to get. A ragtag bunch of outcasts and burnouts affectionately dubbed ‘The Loonies’, they’re thrown together by circumstance when the bus taking them to a military psych unit is waylaid by the ornery alien. “The irst movie was all whacking each other on the butt with muscled, cable-like arms,” says Black. “That’s fun and all. I mean, who doesn’t like a good muscular butt slap? But I wanted to go leaner and meaner.” Consisting of Rhodes, Jane and Key, along with Alie Allen and Augusto Aguilera, The Loonies are exactly that: each one as damaged and broken as the next, with inner demons to spare. “It’s basically saying, ‘What if you had the forgotten ones? The marginalised soldiers who didn’t get a chance to win that coveted spot on the elite team with Arnold. What would happen if you took the least likely unit ever to go up against the Predator?’” In the scene we’re watching, The Loonies are tooling up to head off in pursuit of McKenna’s son Rory (played by Room’s Jacob Tremblay), recently abducted by the same shadowy cabal that has covered up the Predators’ existence to-date. There’s no equivalent of Old Painless — Jesse Ventura’s ludicrous megagun — on show but military hardware abounds, with M4s, MP5s and Škorpion machine pistols passed around like candy bars. Even Munn, whose evolutionary biologist, Dr Casey Bracket, wouldn’t seem an obvious poster child for the NRA, cocks and locks her sidearm with quiet competence. “It’s a micro-aggression that women are shown as either Lara Croft Tomb Raiders or the emotional stay-at-home caregiver,” she opines. “Any time you see a man in a movie, nobody wonders, ‘How do they know how to work that weapon?’ So I said, ‘How about she just knows?’” “This isn’t the ’80s movie,” chips in Holbrook. “Which was so stereotypical. You know, the Native American has the headband, the cowboy has chewing tobacco and the smart guy has the glasses. That’s just not relatable now. Hats off to the original but this one’s rooted in reality. We’re letting the story speak for itself, rather than overriding it with those huge guns and oiled muscles.”

1986. A camo-streaked Schwarzenegger raises one ham-sized ist and four men freeze instantly in their tracks. He spreads his ingers and the commandos fan out, taking up defensive positions in the undergrowth. Ahead of him, Sonny Landham stands alone in a clearing, staring into the jungle while ingering the medicine pouch around his neck. He’s rigid with tension; beads of sweat trickle down his face. “What is it?” hisses Schwarzenegger, creeping cautiously up behind him. “What the hell is wrong with you?” “There’s something in those trees…” Landham rumbles, portent hanging on his words. Both men study the foliage with mounting dread. The camera follows their gaze into the canopy, where we strain to pick out a shape among the branches. Without warning, Landham breaks into a run. Fumbling with his belt as he sprints full-tilt for the tree line, the hulking soldier dives into the shrubbery, yanks down his trousers and proceeds to shit his guts out behind a bush. “That’s the part of the scene you don’t see,” laughs Black, remembering the incident. “He’d been barely holding it in the entire time! Bad water at the hotel. Everyone got sick on that movie.” Punishing heat, venomous snakes, and rampant diarrhoea were all ixtures on John McTiernan’s Predator shoot. But

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despite a wide assortment of discomforts, the 25-year-old Black was having the time of his life. Uneasy with the nihilistic tone of ‘Hunter’, producer Joel Silver had ordered a new version with the laughs dialled way up. It didn’t work. So, as the script doctor du jour, Black had been asked to step in. Reluctant to tamper with an already great screenplay, he refused. But, with one eye on the beautiful Mexican resort town where the production was based, he agreed instead to a part in the ilm. It would, he assured Silver, allow him to be easily accessible if script work was required. “I always liked Jim and John Thomas’ original script,” Black says. “I knew the studio would come all the way around the maypole and end up right back at that version, which is exactly what happened.” And so, Black found himself on camera instead; playing soldier with the literal biggest stars in Hollywood. Surrounded by waxed chests and arms the size of trafic bollards, the young screenwriter was like the only punter at SummerSlam ’86. “It would have been extremely daunting were they not all such great fun. There wasn’t a bad one in the bunch,” he says. “Bill [Duke] and Jesse [Ventura] were very imposing igures. Bill was so intense — this huge guy with burning eyes — but he was a gentle giant. And when my mom and dad visited me on set, Jesse took us all out to dinner. He was the sweetest man.” Most of all Black gravitated towards the brooding Landham, though. Infamously volatile, Landham was the production’s wild card. So much so that, legend has it, the studio hired a bodyguard to protect other people from him. “They hired that guy to stop him getting drunk!” Black amends. “Because when he was sober he was great, but he had a short fuse when he drank. I became his de facto bodyguard because, for some reason, I was the only one who could talk him down.” Schwarzenegger spent almost all of his downtime pumping iron, when not challenging Ventura to bicep-measuring contests or dining out with Maria Shriver, who he lew off to marry mid-shoot. Meanwhile, Carl Weathers maintained the iction that he didn’t work out at all, insisting his physique was God-given, while sneaking off to the gym when his co-stars were in bed. “Carl had just done Rocky III. He would take us to disco night in town and get up and dance while they played Living In America. The Mexican crowd would ❯

“You can cut off people’s heads, skin their corpses and blow their fucking brains out, but the second someone picks up a cigarette the studio will shut your ass down.” SHANE BLACK

The Predator shows off its shiny new armour.

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Clockwise from right: Loonies Williams (Trevante Rhodes), Lynch (Alﬁe Allen), Quinn, Coyle and Baxley (Thomas Jane); Jake Busey as the son of Peter Keyes — his dad Gary’s character in Predator 2; Olivia Munn as biologist Casey Bracket; Jacob Tremblay’s Rory, Quinn’s son.

go nuts! They’d just watched the movie and here was the star in their little town, hitting the dance loor.“ Big actors with bigger personalities, Dutch’s commandos were a force of nature onscreen and off, their macho chemistry so effective that half the ilm’s battle seemed already won. The problem was the other half. The monster, the Predator itself, was not working. A reptilian lobster housing a then-unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme, the creature looked ridiculous and everyone knew it. “The decisions that were arrived at were very slipshod and last minute,” Black recalls. “‘What’s the monster look like? Fuck it, this.’ Eventually, they brought in Stan Winston but it was a scramble. Even that was like, ‘Fuck it, get Winston. He’s got two weeks!’” Production shut down while Winston worked and, with a little help from James Cameron, who pitched its signature mouthparts, a very different creature began to take shape.

is when you see the Predator’s face, when it removes its mask. It’s so cool! ’Cause it’s like a bug, but it’s not a bug — it’s a bug man! And then Arnold Schwarzenegger goes hand-to-hand with him and it’s awesome! That was bad… ummm.” Ten-year-old Jacob Tremblay glances nervously at his mother. Mrs Tremblay cocks an eyebrow, indicating the presence of very thin ice. “I can’t say that word or I’ll get in trouble,” he says, sheepishly. “It was bad-A-S-S,” he spells the word out carefully

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and earns a satisied nod from Mum. Spelled or spoken, the sentiment stands. Winston’s badass alien might have been thrown together in a fortnight but it would go on to become one of his most famous creations and a monster movie classic. Now, in a locked room at the back of the costume department, Empire inally comes face to face with it. El diablo que hace trofeos de los hombres — the demon that makes trophies of men. The Predator — or ‘Yautja’, as it is known in the vast expanded universe of comics, books and games — is just as we remember from that irst big reveal: sunken, beady eyes; mottled, reptilian skin and gaping mandibles revealing inner rows of pointed teeth. Aside from its attire — itted armour plating, rather than the ishnet look we’re used to — the Predator is wholly familiar; an old friend. Which in itself represents a problem. “The challenge became to make it frightening,” says Black. “’Cause upon that hinged everything — whether you bought our heroes going up against him and felt a real threat for them. We had to invent a scenario in which the Predators were mysterious and scary again.” Black and Dekker’s handiwork

resulted in the ‘Upgrade’. Predator plus. Bigger, meaner and nasty as hell. Ten feet tall and midnight black, bristling with spines, skin thickened with chitinous organic armour — the product of harvesting DNA from the deadliest creatures on every world it’s hunted. The ultimate expression of Predator dominance. It is, it’s fair to say, one giant, ugly motherfucker. “Our idea was that on Predator World things haven’t stood still,” Black reveals. “It’s not like they congregate and just wait for the next bus to Earth so they can hunt some more. Things have moved on.” The next step in Predator evolution, it’s an escalation for the mythology and one that will, with inevitable tedium, draw ire from certain quarters of the internet. “There are some fans that will say, ‘This new Predator movie sucks. Here’s what I would do.’ And they go into such detail. Like, ‘I want the Black Blade clan — or whatever — to discover that they’re genetically inferior to the Yautja Prime!’ Really? No matter what, There’s always going to be a group of fans who go, ‘Fuck you, Iron Man 3 guy! So, the Predator’s gonna be Ben Kingsley when

he takes off his mask, right?’ No. That’s a funny joke, though. I’ve only heard that one 12 times today.”

catch up with Black it’s on a sofa in the front room of his LA home. It’s June 2018 and the edit is all but done, with only inal visual-effects work to complete. Black reclines on cushions, idly scratching the ears of his bull terrier, Ollie. Still vaping, but with slightly less fervour. Here, surrounded by walnut bookcases lined with his beloved detective novels, Black is at ease, his memory-lane marathon all but complete. “Yeah, I couldn’t have been more wrong about the lark part,” he says, with a rueful sigh. “If I had known how arduous and time-consuming this would be…” It’s been a long slog, longer than anticipated, with the release date pushed from February to September and substantial reshoots taking up the early part of this year. Black’s cheeky chopper has, disappointingly, been replaced by a still garish but less risqué weather-copter (“Clearance issues with Victoria’s Secret, I think”) and large sections of the inale have been revisited. Contrary to internet scuttlebutt, he says, the additional time was not to save a production in crisis. It was for reasons far more prosaic. “The irst time we shot the third act it was daytime,” he explains. “It’s all this spooky stuff but then it’s bright sunlight. It just didn’t work. So I said, ‘Ummm, can we do this again at night?’” Has it made all the difference? “Well, yeah,” Black snorts. “The difference has been night and day.” The Predator has not been the carefree return to twentysomething life that he’d hoped for, but Black is happy with the result. Inspired, he says, by Stranger Things, which milked every drop of nostalgia from ’80s horror, Black has worked a similar trick for action movies. He’s composed a love letter to his youth, illed with callbacks, homages and everything he loved about the ilm he made 31 years ago. “I wanted to make the ultimate conglomeration,” he says. “Roll it all up in this movie, this wild ride with a group of misits who have one last chance to recapture the life they’d previously neglected. To go out in a blaze of glory.” A lark, in other words. An adventure. A chance to feel young again. THE PREDATOR IS IN CINEMAS FROM 13 SEPTEMBER

THIS YEAR THE PREDATOR IS UP AGAINST A 10-YEAR-OLD BOY. BUT THAT’S FAR FROM ITS UNLIKELIEST ADVERSARY

BATMAN VERSUS PREDATOR (1991) Drawn by an unseasonably hot Gotham summer, the Predator goes toe-to-toe with the Dark Knight, whipping him soundly until Alfred shoots it with a blunderbuss.

TARZAN VERSUS PREDATOR AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1996) Predators attack Jane! Tarzan kill Predators! Quite how the Lord Of The Apes takes down the aliens with a knife and a chimpanzee we have no idea. But who cares? It all happens at the Earth’s core!

PREDATOR VERSUS JUDGE DREDD (1997) Dredd ﬁghts Pred in this Mega City One crossover, in which the grimacing lawman teams up with PSI Judge Schaefer, a distant descendant of Dutch, Schwarzenegger’s character in the original ﬁlm.

SUPERMAN VS. PREDATOR (2001) Afflicted by a convenient alien virus that weakens his powers, Kal-El finds himself on the wrong end of a hunt, getting trounced before teaming up with the Predator to take down villains in the final act.

ARCHIE VS. PREDATOR (2015) Archie and his Riverdale chums head to Costa Rica for spring break, only to end up partying with an unexpected alien. Its targets? Betty and Veronica! Archie lures it out using Jughead in drag. Hilarity ensues.

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Original Predator screenwriter Jim Thomas looks back on the unlikely origin story of one of cinemaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest monsters

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It all depends on the point of view of the observer or participant. Mine is just one perspective. But as with all movies it begins with the script. The evolution of Predator should be of interest for the simple reason that my brother John and I, as novice writers, managed to sell a spec-script to a major ilm company without the beneit of an agent or lawyer, and saw it go into production within a year. A rare event in Hollywood. Our story is one of right timing, the right subject matter, perseverance, and certainly a healthy dose of luck. An editor for The Hollywood Reporter recently told me there is a story making the rounds that my brother and I used to sneak onto the 20th Century Fox lot and slide our script under the doors of executives and producers. It’s a myth. But it’s something we didn’t try only because we didn’t think of it. My brother John and I had both been beach lifeguards for Los Angeles City and I was living in a small room of an old house on the beach in Marina del Rey. I had written several scripts and had a good sense of form and style, and I had the basic idea for Predator. My brother was recovering from an accident sustained from jumping out of his tower to make a rescue. I asked him if he wanted to collaborate, he said yes, so we set up shop at the one place most comfortable to us: the beach. With an old cable spool for a table and a beach umbrella for shade, we devoted the next six months to writing and rewriting the script. The conceit of the story was always, “What would it be like to be hunted by some dilettante, extra-terrestrial sportsman, the way we hunt big game in Africa, as trophies?” In fact, the original title of the script was ‘Hunter’. The irst scene of the script, never shot, opened inside an alien spacecraft, focused on a screen revealing a kind of hunter’s guide for Earth. It rapidly lipped through all the dangerous game, coming to focus on a human form. A complete bio-mechanical analysis followed, the human inally dressed and armed as a soldier. The screen then zeroed in on a location in Central America and then we were on Earth with our team.

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Clockwise from top left: Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Dillon (Carl Weathers) with Predator victim Blain (Jesse Ventura); Ventura gets some ﬁnishing touches to his gaping wound; Dutch blends into his environment; The Predator emerges from a lagoon; Writer Jim Thomas in the jungle.

We wanted to avoid as much as possible creating a story featuring a man in a rubber suit. We needed a real character for the Predator, one that had its own arc, personality and, of course, vulnerabilities. The best rubber-suit stories are the ones that keep the creature hidden away as much as possible, revealing it in stages. Jaws is a perfect example. Alien is another, with the metamorphosis element and only brief, terrifying reveals inside darkened spaces and lashes of light. Our approach was to reveal the Predator in stages. The irst reveal, which was never shot probably because CGI was in its infancy, was high up in the jungle canopy. We focused on the soldiers silently moving through the forest. Then, a butterly which landed on a limb, fanning its wings. The butterly lew away, leaving behind an image of itself which slowly faded — and then the limb itself moved. We didn’t reveal the Predator himself until the end of the irst act, and then only his heat-vision POV and his ability to mimic his prey. Then the camoulage effect was revealed when the Predator made his irst attack, on Shane Black. Still later, we revealed that under the camoulage effect was a very complex-looking alien warrior: a thinking, calculating hunter. Saving the best for last was the face reveal of the alien creature itself, which Stan Winston rendered beyond what even we had envisioned. We imagined him as something a bit more lithe and simian-like than was inally rendered, but when we saw Stan Winston’s creation, we had to admit it was impossible to beat. bea As good as it gets for a man in a rubber suit.

a polished draft, my brother and I faced the daunting problem of selling it. Writing it was the da easy part, we so oon realised. With no nepotism available we only had the query letter to turn to. “Dear ___, This is the story of ry le an extra-terrestrial hunter who comes to this planet to hunt the most dangerous species, combat soldiers in the jungles of Central America” — short and sweet and hopefully tantalising. The feedback was overwhelming. I think I had a collection of over a hundred rejection letters from every studio, producer, lawyer and agent that we could come up with. I had been working part-time as a grip, electrician and sound-man on non-union, low-budget ilms and commercials, which made me feel I was at least involved in the industry I longed to be a part of. A cinematographer friend of mine said he knew someone who he believed had a contact inside 20th Century Fox. I met with the guy, who I quickly assessed as being a bottom feeder of the Hollywood scene, gave him the script and agreed to a percentage if it sold. I wasn’t impressed, but the guy was a hustler and what did we have to lose? His inside contact at Fox turned out to be a script reader, but here’s where Lady Luck dealt a card: it turns out that at that very moment a major change was taking place at Fox, one administration replacing another. Our inside contact liked the script but had no-one to submit it to. So she left it behind with a note, “Read this.” A young, ambitious junior executive found the script on his desk, read it and liked it — his irst project. But our real lucky break was the fact that the new studio president was Larry Gordon, a successful producer who had been mentored by Roger Corman, and Predator was just his kind of script. Timing can be everything. A couple of months later, I had just returned from a run on the beach when the phone rang and I raced to answer it. A guy identiied himself as the head of business affairs at 20th Century Fox, saying they wanted to buy our script and hire us to rewrite it. One of those crystalline moments ❯ I will never forget.

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of the script process for many writers is the development phase, which can be a nightmare. Fortunately for us we were spared that element, as a diirecttor was assigned to the project from the very beginning. off Murphy M Geo was known as the Steven Spielberg of New Zeaaland d, and was also new to Hollywood. We hit it off and spent nt the t next several months on the Fox lot preparing the script for production. We were living the dream. Or so we thought. When Arnold Schwarzenegger became attached it all came to a screeching halt, and all because of Conan The Barbarian. Geoff had previously interviewed as a possible director for the next Conan movie, but in his New Zealand wit had referred to Arnold as Conan The Librarian, which Arnold apparently didn’t ind amusing. So Geoff was off the project, and soon we had a new director to work with: John McTiernan. Once a director is attached, what often happens is they have their read and then say, “Now, here’s the way I see it,” which essentially means a rewrite, and sometimes a complete rewrite. Which was to be our fate. The problem was, we seemed to have a complete block when it came to understanding what is was John was wanting to communicate to us about rewriting our story. It just wasn’t going to work. More importantly, we didn’t understand why the script had to be so radically changed in the irst place. But it’s a director’s medium, so reluctantly we took our bow and stepped away from the project. Heartbreaking. It had been a great ride while it lasted. We heard the studio had hired David Webb Peoples, co-writer of Blade Runner, to rewrite the script based on John McTiernan’s notes. Great. Blade Runner. So we made a deal at Disney and moved on with our budding careers in the screen trade. And then another memorable phone call, this time from our new agent at ICM, Bill Block (it’s easy to get one after you’ve sold a screenplay. Trust me, they come out of the woodwork like roaches). “The rewrite is in,” he said, “and the studio hates it. And they want you back, and for more money, and they want you to go to Mexico for production.” Doesn’t get any sweeter than that. We were back, as George Costanza would say...

Clockwise from top left: Going Commando: The elite soldiers are ready to head crew take a breather; Dutch in contemplative mood; Kevin Peter Hall becoming the Predator; Director John McTiernan on location.

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FOX ARCHIVE

into the jungle; Cast and

with Arnold Schwarzeneegger took place at the Beverly Hills mansion of M Marvin Davis D s, the oil billionaire who then owned Fox, and who ose sson, JJohn, was a producer on the ilm. After clearing the Uzii-bearing guards at the gates, we wondered where in this pala atiall mansion would our meeting take place? In the living room, m the den, the library, the billiard room? Nope, in a hot tub, and of course, buck naked, with Arnold’s ever-present cigar. But despite his weird sense of humour, Arnold is a very smart, perceptive guy, and despite the casual setting, seriously wanted our take on the character he was to be playing. I said, “You’ve just done a ilm called Commando, in which you are irst introduced carrying an entire tree over one shoulder with a chainsaw in the other. This Paul Bunyan reference tells us immediately this is going to be a comedy of some sort. There may be action and bullets and explosions but nothing is ever going to ‘happen’ to you. But if you’ll play this soldier more like an Everyman, a real guy who can bleed and die, there will be real, classic jeopardy.” He seemed to have gotten the message, and to his credit I think he did it like a real Everyman, with no self-parody. The last scene of Arnold lying off in the helicopter is not your typical Arnold ending. This is a guy who has truly survived a death-defying ordeal. And still the Hollywood intrigue continued. Reading over the cast we saw the name of a young writer named Shane Black, cast as the radio man, Hawkins. We knew Shane was one of the writers Fox had approached to do the rewrite but had declined for some reason. We soon learned the producer, Joel Silver, had cast Shane in the movie so he’d have a back-up writer on hand in case we gave him any trouble on location. And the irony of that was while we were in Puerto Vallarta, where most of the ilm was shot, Joel slipped us a copy of Shane’s script, Lethal Weapon, Joel’s next picture, with the potential of rewriting it. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and the rest is history. Shane did contribute some colourful jokes to the ilm, I give him credit for that. He’s just inished directing The Predator, and we wish him and the franchise all the best. Anything can and does happen h Hollywood. in H

amazing adventure in Mexico for the next ive-to-six months, an experience I’ll never forget. Hanging out with the fascinating cast of ‘manly n’ in the jungle every day (two of whom would later become men verno gov ors), the stuntmen, the production people from the US,, Au ustralia, and Mexico, the charm and beauty of Puerto Vallarta art as a backdrop. It was a one-of-a-kind experience and I truly enjoyed every moment of it. We had no idea at the time that the ilm would go on to become an icon of sorts, taking on a life of its own and establishing itself as part of the culture. It was at a Comic-Con promoting Predator 2 when I saw my irst Predator tattoo, which was a bit weird. Now if you Google Predator tattoos you’ll ind pages of them, and some pretty remarkable artwork too. But the full impact of what had evolved from our script was only realised when I visited Stan Winston’s shop a few years later. In the entranceway he had a gallery of his creations, on pedestals like Roman statuary: the Predator at eight feet tall, the Alien, and the Terminator. They have become part of our current mythology, much the same as the Cyclops, the Minotaur, Grendel and others that preceded them. Fantastic creatures that came from our primitive fears of the unknown, the darkness beyond the campire.

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The designers of the original Predator on the evolution of their grisly creation WORDS ALEX GODFREY

MONSTROUS MONSTER A company called Boss Film was originally tasked with creating the Predator suit, then a more organic design, and housing none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was a disaster from the start. “Steve Johnson from Boss Film was not happy about that creature at all,” says Steve Wang, who was there as a sculptor. “He kept complaining about how it was a terrible design, but he was forced to build it because the design came directly from the studio. The biggest problem everyone saw right from day one was the fact he had this leg extension, and the technology for it back then wasn’t far along — people couldn’t really walk in it, and not being able to walk on that terrain in the middle of the jungle, it’s horrible. It was just a bad idea.”

When the suit was unveiled in the Mexican jungle, spirits immediately sank. Van Damme, a martial arts star in waiting, hated the experience. “People said he was complaining that they were covering his face,” says Wang, “because he said he was gonna be a big star. People thought that was funny: ‘Had no-one told you that you were actually going to be a monster?’” Besides, being encased in the thing troubled the actor physically. “I heard he was very claustrophobic,” says Wang. “So when they put the suit on him he kind of froze.” Van Damme spent an unhappy two days on set, and was no doubt relieved to escape the experience when, with an unworkable creature, the production was put on hiatus. At least one shot of Van Damme’s invisible Predator remains in the ﬁlm — that of Shane Black being dragged to his death.

T With the shoot on hold, Stan Winston was hired to create a new Predator from scratch, thanks to his success on Aliens and his friendship with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A designer named Alan Munro had painted the Predator as a futuristic, humanoid soldier with dreadlocks, and Winston was asked to draw the face under the mask. “The big emphasis was, ‘This thing has to work,’” says Stan Winston’s son Matt, “because the Boss Film design had been impractical. And Dad said, ‘If we’re dealing with a man in ❯ a suit, let’s really break ground with the face.’”

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With the Stan Winston Studio already busy, and Winston focused on his directorial debut Pumpkinhead, a tiny team — Steve Wang, Matt Rose and Shannon Shea — had eight weeks to build the Predator from scratch. “It was insane, we literally weren’t sleeping for three days at a time just to get things done,” says Wang. “Oh my God, I can’t tell you the hours,” sighs Shea. “Years later I was working on Predators, and one of the painters was saying how much he admired Steve Wang and wanted to paint the new Predator with the same passion that he did, and I said, ‘Well, then you can’t leave the studio. Steve and Matt wouldn’t leave the studio.’ They would sleep on the sofas.” Rose still seems scarred. “It was crazy,” he says. “Everyone was really worn out with it. We were all working way too long, we wouldn’t even go home. It was a very different time then. Not as romantic as people think it is.”

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F E C E The Predator’s mandibles came from a surprising source. Flying to an Aliens event in Japan with James Cameron, Winston sketched some early ideas, and Cameron snuck a peek. “James looked over Dad’s shoulder while he was sketching,” says Winston, “and he said, ‘I always wanted to see mandibles on a monster.’ So Dad experimented with that.” With the design signed off, Winston tasked Richard Landon with building the mechanics. “I had no experience of radio-controlled mechanisms,” says Landon. “I’d only built cable-controlled mechanisms. But Stan said, ‘I want you to figure this out.’ So I did.” Tensions, though, were rising. “Stan asked Richard to do that first, then have me sculpt on top,” remembers Rose. “And I said, No!’ I was 21, and I was pissed off. I said, ‘We have no time for this nonsense. I’ll sculpt it, and Richard will make it fit. Take it or leave it.’ The head was already too huge, even with Kevin Peter Hall’s proportions. It was lucky I said no, because the head would have been at least one and a half times too big. It’s still too big.”

Director John McTiernan told Winston he wanted the Predator to be more technological, so Wang set about designing some blades for the creature’s arm — because of his love of a certain hairy mutant. “I was a huge fan of Wolverine and I kind of ripped it off,” he laughs. “I was a big kid, loving superheroes, so I thought: ‘Let’s do some blades!’” Wang would take inspiration from anywhere and everywhere. For the paint job on the armour, he found what he was looking for in... a puddle. “Steve was so frustrated because he didn’t want the paint job to just be chrome,” says Rose. “It was the ’80s and everything was chrome or gold or brass, boring. His head was spinning. We were walking and he stopped and pointed at the ground and said, ‘That’s it.’ And it was this puddle. I thought, ‘That’s it, Steve has gone completely mad.’ But in the puddle was motor oil, which had that rainbow effect. He said, ‘That’s the armour colour.’ That’s how he came up with it.”

A maquette builder called Wayne Sturm had created the first 3D reference model for the Predator, and on the side of the ankle was a claw. Rose, says Wang, then did the fine detailing on it — but the claw’s origins are not steeped in deep lore. “Things happened so fast, a lot of times we just made shit up as we went,” says Wang. “It was literally, ‘A claw would look cool, put a claw on it.’ No-one questioned it. A lot of the iconic things from those days was just people making shit up, and then it’s on screen.” Shea agrees, although he puts such activity down to “sheer panic. Matt watching the hands of a clock move and just doing it. And I don’t recall in the original art that Predator was wearing sandals. I don’t know when that happened. But Matt sculpted him wearing sandals. The Predator can turn himself invisible, he can fly across the universe, and he’s basically wearing Birkenstocks. You’d think he’d be wearing something ❯ a little more substantial”.

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8. H T

THE

Kevin Peter Hall’s height was perfect for the Predator, and the suit was then built to capitalise on his idiosyncrasies. “Kevin was very tall but his upper body was small, compared to his legs,” remembers Wang. “I wanted the Predator to have more of a muscular dancer’s body, and not as big as Arnold, because he needed to climb trees. So I made his upper body a bit bigger to balance off his legs.” Shea recalls how they had to slide the actor into the suit with not a millimetre to spare. “You had to make the suit as tight as humanly possible in order for it to move well and not bunch up in the elbows or shoulders or groin. We had to put KY Jelly on Kevin to get him into the suit. He’d put on this powder blue spandex suit and we would get tubes of KY, slather him up and put him in.”

On set, in the suit, Hall buoyed everybody with his sheer enthusiasm. “Kevin was amazing,” says Wang. “We thought the Predator would be more aggressive, and move fast, but Kevin’s take was more methodical, more graceful.” Fortunately, he also survived certain death when the Predator’s rockets exploded in his face. “The shoulder cannon was supposed to fire at the critter that runs out of the log,” remembers Landon, “but instead of firing a single blast, it unwrapped in a ball of flame that engulfed Kevin’s head. And it let out a cloud of smoke half the size of an automobile. I was 10 metres away and a small piece of exploding shrapnel nicked me in the collar bone and drew a little bit of blood. The gun was completely destroyed, it vaporised like a giant firecracker. All of us shook with panic. But without missing a beat, Kevin stepped forward out of the cloud and said, ‘What happened?’ He’d been wearing the stunt head, so a three-inch thick foam-padded football helmet. He was accidentally wearing protective gear.”

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IMAGES COURTESY STAN WINSTON SCHOOL

One of the first shots on the film was of the Predator emerging from the lagoon. Filmed in sections over two weeks, to grasp the small slither of daily magic hour the jungle provided, they finally got it, divers weighing down Hall each time before he rose up. The bigger problem was creepy-crawlies. “That damn lagoon, it had snakes in it,” emembers Rose. “Killer snakes. Deadly. I’m not joking in any way. They called it ‘two steps’, because they bite you, you take two steps and you’re dead. We came across a baby one that Brian Simpson [creature effects] killed by one of our coolers. He killed it really quickly, just pulled a knife out, slammed it down and chopped it in half. It was spinning around for what seemed like half an hour. And that lagoon was also filled with leeches! I wouldn’t go near that damn lagoon but Kevin wasn’t nervous at all, he would go right in.”

All of the crew speak of Winston with deep affection. “He was really my mentor,” says Wang. “Taught me a lot of good life lessons, shared a lot of his wisdom with me. I worked hard and tried to make him proud.” Shea says similar: “Stan was like a dad to a lot of us. We were young men and we looked up to him and wanted to be like him. He was so charismatic and so generous. He basically said, ‘I’m gonna put this multi-million picture in your lap. And you’re gonna deliver it.’ Us three children.” Winston, meanwhile, remembers how proud his father was of the creature they all created. “Predator stood as one of the titans of the many characters that came out of the Stan Winston Studio,” he says. “It truly became an iconic character — in some ways it was Dad’s Frankenstein. It spawned many sequels, has lived on in comic books and video games. That was the one for him. He drew that guy, and his team made that ﬁrst one. These artists got no sleep and helped Dad make it a reality.” TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ART OF MAKING MONSTER SUITS AND MAKE-UP EFFECTS, FROM THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE PREDATOR SUIT, HEAD TO STANWINSTONSCHOOL.COM

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WHEN TIMES GET BLEAK, SPIKE LEE GETS TO WORK. AND BLACKKKLANSMAN MAY BE HIS MOST INCENDIARY AND IMPORTANT FILM YET INTERVIEWS AMON WARMANN WORDS IAN FREER

n holiday in a sunny spot in Southern Europe, actor Laura Harrier, best known for playing Peter Parker’s super-smart crush in Spider-Man: Homecoming, reluctantly reached over for her buzzing cell phone. “I hear, ‘Laura, this is Spike Lee!’” she recalls. “He asked me to meet him. I told him I was on an island in Greece, and he was like, ‘No, that’s not gonna work for me. I need to see you Thursday.’ And I’m like, ‘Spike, it’s Tuesday and I’m in Greece,’ and he’s like,‘No, see you Thursday — vacation is over. Bye.’ And then he hung up.” Lee’s urgency was palpable. Gifted a script by Get Out ilmmaker Jordan Peele, Lee had a project so zeitgeist-y it needed instant action. With bigots in positions of power going right up to the Oval ofice and horriic incidents of racial hatred erupting on American streets (not to mention equally bilious invective on social media), Lee needed to make the ilm now, and the ilm needed Lee to make it now. Hearing the passion in Lee’s voice, Laura Harrier, slapping on the sunscreen by the Aegean Sea, knew what she had to do. “I was back in New York in a day,” she says. BlacKkKlansman ❯ was gathering steam.

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t the end credits of every Spike Lee Joint is a quotation from Malcolm X: “By any means necessary”, followed by Lee’s whimsical “Ya dig?” and “Sho nuff ”. Malcolm X’s motto — a rallying cry to end racial injustice — has acted as a pre-Twitter hashtag for Lee’s entire career. The 61-year-old ilmmaker hasn’t so much had his inger on the pulse of the African-American experience as plugged in an IV line. There have been fantastic achievements (the still-astonishing Do The Right Thing; Malcolm X), fascinating if lawed misires (Girl 6; Bamboozled) and Oldboy. But taken as a whole (especially factoring in his non-iction ilms), his work forms an essential, often angry, always human mosaic of black experiences, history, concerns and rituals. If a thousand years from now, anthropologists want to ind out what it meant to be black and American in the late 20th/early 21st century, they could do a lot worse than watch Spike Lee’s oeuvre. “We had rehearsals at Spike’s ofice and you see all the pictures from his ilms,” says John David Washington, the lead in BlacKkKlansman. “It felt like a museum. The one sheets, the

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photographs. It did feel like I was a part of history. It felt special.” But, if Lee’s HQ has the feel of a ‘museum’, BlacKkKlansman is as far as you can get from an ancient relic. Part buddy-cop biopic, part comedy, all state-of-the-nation address, Lee’s latest may enjoy a high concept (a black police oficer iniltrates the Klu Klux Klan) and commercial elements (a car chase) but it also seethes with anger. Fierce and furious, it makes Robert De Niro’s “fuck you” to Trump at the Tony Awards feel like a playground taunt. BlacKkKlansman is not Lee’s irst cinematic skirmish with the Klu Klux Klan. In 1980, as a freshman at New York University Film School (along with Ang Lee and Jim Jarmusch), the 23-year-old Shelton J. Lee was exposed to the greats of American cinema, including

Birth Of A Nation. At the time, NYU held up D.W. Grifith’s 1915 epic as a touchstone for technical innovation and cinematic technique, but, for Lee, “They never talked about how this ilm was used as a recruiting tool for the Klan and was responsible for black people getting lynched.” Full of piss and vinegar, Lee made an angry riposte. The Answer is a short satire about a young, black screenwriter who gets hired to write a Birth Of A Nation remake. “The faculty took it like I was attacking the father of cinema, so they kicked me out,” he later explained. Only his prodigious work rate in the equipment room got him reinstated. Twelve years later, making Malcolm X, Lee ilmed a shot of the Klu Klux Klan riding silhouetted by the moon because it tickled him to subvert the

how it continues to progress in different ways,” continues Washington. “David Duke is the new face of hate, the guy next door, the well-spoken man, a guy that’s not necessarily off-putting at irst and you want to listen to him because of how approachable he seems. All of that can still relate to where we are today.” Yet Lee isn’t just hitting the big political targets. He is also detailing the smaller acts of prejudice and bigotry that continue to affect every aspect of African-American life. The moment activists Patrice (Laura Harrier) and Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) get pulled over by the cops is still the reality faced by black youths in 2018. “We shot that late at night and it was really dificult,” says Harrier. “Just to think of how many unnamed black people had been in that same situation — that was sobering and drove everything home in a way.” Washington recalls another scene where an undercover Stallworth acts as security detail for David Duke at a Klan banquet that was a “hard day for me, just being in that environment for 18-plus hours”. A sequence that sees the Klan take shooting practice only for the targets to be revealed as black caricatures sounds like something from an overdone satire. But it’s true. All of it. “We got those online,” marvels Washington. “You can get those today. We didn’t have to make those. So you talk about relevance. That just goes to show you how divided we are.” Yet being angry — however righteous — is one thing. It is something else to turn it into cinematic alchemy.

iconic moment from E.T. The ExtraTerrestrial. Yet BlacKkKlansman is Lee’s biggest engagement with the white supremacist group so far. The story is based on the real-life experiences of Ron Stallworth (Washington), the irst black cop in the snowy white (in all ways) hills of Colorado. In 1979, tired of working inthe records ofice, he calls the local chapter of the KKK and tells them he wants to become a member. Knowingit is impossible to pass as white, hedoes a Cyrano de Bergerac and sends non-practising Jewish detective (great name klaxon) Flip Zimmerman to wear a wire and ‘be’ Ron Stallworth in person. Out of the nifty premise, Lee spins #BlackLivesMatter as narrative, a simultaneously funny and chilling reminder that as much as things have

changed since the ’70s, things have stayed the same. BlacKkKlansman provocatively builds bridges between America’s past and present, piling on the dramatic ironies. “It’s a period piece,but it has such a contemporary feel to it,” says Washington. “There is a scene where Ron is talking to his sergeant and says, ‘Nobody would ever elect [then Klan Grand Wizard] David Duke as President. We’ll never see that in America.’ And now you see where we are today.” Lee has forged his career on depicting disunity, colliding disparate groups together and standing back to watch the sparks ly — it’s just this time the historical conlicts are even more pointed and resonant. “It’s just how divided we are on a lot of issues and how the institution of hate seems to be generational and that’s

Clockwise from left: Police detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and Patrice (Laura Harrier); Spike Lee gives script notes to Adam Driver and Jasper Pääkkönen; The disturbing spectacle of hooded Klansmen; Flip Zimmerman (Driver) and Stallworth hatch a plan.

hen Lee started his feature career with the micro-budget She’s Gotta Have It, ilmmaking was a family affair: his sister Joie appeared in it, his brother David did the still photographs and his father Bill wrote the (stupidly catchy) music. While the budgets have got bigger, it’s part of Lee’s ilmmaking MO to keep things intimate and relaxed. Even when he’s lighting ires, he’s having fun. “He really does a good job in creating an ego-less set,” says Adam Driver, who plays Flip Zimmerman. “He’s very familial. Often the people that he’s working with, he’s been working with them since Do The Right Thing. So there’s a shorthand on set — there’s no go-between, no assistant or PA or anything that you have to go through.” ❯ John David Washington is

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practically a member of Lee’s family. Son of frequent Lee collaborator Denzel, at the age of six Washington Jr played one of the kids who says, “I am Malcolm X.” (“He just told me to calm down,” remembers Washington about ilming the moment. “I was really excited to be there and it took a couple takes to breathe and calm down.”) Breaking out in Dwayne Johnson TV comedy-drama Ballers, he returned to Lee a more seasoned pro — but the ilmmaker soon bashed that out of him. “I was very intense in my approach to the character and wanted to make sure that I accurately portrayed this man. But Spike told me not to be so spot-on and leave room for improvisation, to ind things organically with your partners and the environment that you’re in on set. When I unlocked that, it was a very luid experience for me.” Fresh from a plane from Greece, Harrier, whose Patrice becomes involved with Stallworth, enjoyed a personal masterclass with the director, himself a seasoned actor. “I ended up reading my scenes with Spike, acting with him, and it turned into this crazy improvisation which went on for an hour,” she says of her audition. “It was insane. When I left I had no idea what had just happened.” As well as an actor’s director, for all Lee’s rep as an agitprop master, it is easy to forget what a consummate ilmmaker he actually is. He may be dealing with real-world concerns, but his ilms thrum with cinema — BlacKkKlansman opens with a pointed use of a scene from Gone With The Wind — from a cheeky use of text (“Some fo’ real shit” is Lee’s version of “Based ona true story”) to some of the heightened swagger of the blaxploitation sub-genre. “I love how unpredictable Spike’s ilms are,” says Driver. “Sometimes it’s the story or some other visual element or blocking or acting choice that elicits a response you’re not expecting. When they start, I never know how they’re going to end. That’s just one of many things I love about his ilms.” A key weapon in Lee’s arsenal is his conveyor-belt trope. It’s kind of a free-loating camera shot where a major character is still but moving as if on a conveyor belt. It’s a simple effect — both the camera and the actor are placed on a dolly — giving the characters the effect of loating through the world lost in their own reality. The shot has its roots in the greats — it seemingly started with Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary and was later pinched by Scorsese for Harvey Keitel’s drunken reverie in Mean Streets

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Clockwise from above: Zimmerman (Adam Driver) goes undercover to inﬁltrate a KKK meeting; Lee behind the scenes on BlacKkKlansman; Topher Grace as Grand Wizard David Duke; Sergeant Trapp (Ken Garito) and Stallworth.

— but Lee has made it all its own, be it on a merry-go-round or, in Laurence Fishburne’s case in School Daze, on a crane hovering in the air hollering, “Waaaaake uuuup.” When Lee broke the dolly out on the set of BlacKkKlansman, his cast went bat-shit crazy. “That day, Spike did have to calm me down,” Washington gushes. “He was like, ‘John David, let’s do this, stop it!’ Maybe that was the hardest day for Spike, but I was a freakin’ kid.” That goes double for Harrier, who became one of the few women to be featured in Lee’s signature shot. “It was so crazy because John David and I didn’t even know that’s what we were doing,” Harrier recalls. “And then they started to set it up and I was like, ‘Wait, are we doing the shot?’ and we started freaking out. It feels super-iconic.” Yet it is another side of Lee’s

ilmmaking that concludes BlacKkKlansman. Ever since 1997’s 4 Little Girls, the director has plied a sideline in documentaries, displaying a deft skill in using non-iction footage to powerful ends. For BlacKkKlansman’s closing coda, he cuts together footage of the clashes at a Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 11 August 2017, that resulted in the death of 20-year-old protester Heather Heyer, intercut with Donald Trump’s infamous speech claiming there were “very ine people on both sides”. Lee was granted permission to use the material by Heyer’s mother and the ilm will open in the US to coincide with the irst anniversary of her death. As a inal mic drop, it is stunning. And one that irst shocked and silenced audiences some 7,000 kilometres away.

he Cannes Film Festival hasn’t traditionally been a happy hunting ground for Lee. In May 1989, Lee’s hotly fancied Do The Right Thing lost out on the Palme D’Or to Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape. Lee felt blind-sided and snubbed, blaming jury president Wim Wenders, who described Lee’s lead character Mookie as “unheroic” for throwinga trash can through a window. “Wim Wenders had better watch out, ’cause I am waiting for his ass,” said Lee, promising he had a baseball bat — his Louisville Slugger — with Wenders’ name on it (Lee has subsequently walked back these comments, describing them as “juvenile”). Yet, returning to the festival for the irst time since 1991’s Jungle Fever, Lee felt the love. BlacKkKlansman received a 10-minute standing ovation, great irst reviews and the Grand Prix award. At his Cannes press conference, Lee pulled no punches on America’s current President, going on a two-minute, expletive-laden rant about Charlottesville without ever mentioning Trump by name: “We have a guy in the White House who deined that moment not just for Americans but the world, and that

motherfucker was given the chance to say we are about love, not hate. And that motherfucker did not denounce the motherfucking Klan, the alt-right, and those Nazis motherfuckers.” The international press didn’t need to wait for the translator to understand how Lee felt. BlacKkKlansman arrives at an interesting point in Lee’s career trajectory. He hasn’t had a commercial hit since 2006’s Inside Man and his work since, such as Miracle At St. Anna, Red Hook Summer, Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus, Chi-Raq and Pass Over, has failed to become part of the cultural conversation in the way his ilms regularly did in the late ’80s and ’90s. But the Cannes response and reviews suggests that Lee has got his groove back, once again confronting the

things others are scared to tackle. “It just lays out how people talk and feel in closed doors and in their homes, and in the privacy of their own spaces,” says Washington of BlacKkKlansman. “I love how Spike wasn’t suggestive or judgemental, to me. It’s just the truth.” It’s a high price to pay, but Trump’s election might have just reignited Lee’s mojo. Reputedly next on his dance card is Sony/Marvel comic-book lick Nightwatch, about an AfricanAmerican scientist who steals a super-suit that belonged to an older version of himself. Expect Lee to avoid the cookie-cutter and ight the power. By any means necessary. BLACKKKLANSMAN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 16 AUGUST

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Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg, photographed exclusively for Empire at the Wild Card West boxing club in Los Angeles on 6 June 2018.

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TOR PETER BERG AN D H I S M USE WAH LBERG SPECI ALI SE I N F I LM S ABOUT PEO PLE UN D ER I N CRED I BLE STRESS. TH EY J O I N EMPIRE TO DISC USS TH EI R LATEST, MILE 22 , AN D HOW TH EY â&#x20AC;&#x2122;V E FO RGED O N E O F TH E STRON GEST BO N D S I N H O LLY WO O D WORDS NICK DE SEMLYEN

PORTRAITS SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

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A blue-collar Burton and Depp. Scorsese and De Niro with less pasta sauce and more testosterone. Over a trilogy of blisteringly recreated true-life tales — 2013’s Lone Survivor, about Navy SEALs under attack in Afghanistan; 2016’s Deepwater Horizon, about the crisis on an oil rig nicknamed ‘The Well From Hell’; and the same year’s Patriots Day, about the Boston Marathon bombing — director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg have solidiied a working relationship, and friendship, of an intensity unusual in Hollywood. This summer sees the arrival of their fourth collaboration, a rocket-ride action movie called Mile 22 that casts Wahlberg as a CIA agent trying to exiltrate a witness from an unnamed, far-lung country. This one’s not based on real events, so expect it to be even wilder, louder and more smash-bash brutal than their previous efforts. Fighting is at the heart of every Berg/Wahlberg team-up, whether it’s literal, grenade-tossing combat or a battle just to stay alive. So it’s apt that when Empire meets the duo, it’s at a boxing club: Wild Card West, the Los Angeles training centre Berg co-owns (he used to run it with the late comedian Garry Shandling). Downstairs, on the walls of a large room boasting a boxing ring, are enscribed the slogans “HOPE IS NOT A TACTIC” and “HANDLE YOUR SHIT”, besides a portrait of Winston Churchill, one of Berg’s heroes. Upstairs, beside a large painting of a Colt .45 handgun (“Garry and I used to argue about this all the time,” laughs Berg), the director and the actor sprawl on leather club chairs. One’s from the reined suburbs of Chappaqua, New York; the other’s from the mean streets of Boston’s Dorchester section. But they’ve found brotherhood in moviemaking, a pursuit they love more than anything else on Earth. Except, maybe, napping. If our interview makes anything clear, it’s that they both really like to nap.

Seriously? Berg: Yeah. We’re not commenting on his politics, but the fact he’s able to ly off the handle at any moment. We watched a 60 Minutes interview Steve Bannon did, and you know, love or hate him, the guy is kind of mesmerising. So we borrowed some of his things. Mark does a good Steve Bannon.

What shape is Mile 22 in? Peter Berg: It’s good, and getting better every day. It’s kind of exactly what we wanted it to be: intense, relentless. It was fun for us to shake off the responsibility of our past ilms and really just try to have a good time. I like to joke that Mark plays the irst bipolar action hero. His guy [James Silva] is very articulate and prone to its of strong opinion. Mark Wahlberg: He doesn’t care about right or wrong. He has a job to do and he’s gonna do it. We took stuff from

Going back in time, do you remember your irst meeting? Berg: It was at Gold’s Gym in Hollywood. He was working out with Johnny Drama [Johnny Alves, Wahlberg’s cousin and the inspiration for his Entourage namesake] and some other people. I came up and said hi and worked out with him for, like, 15 minutes. And

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lots of different people. Pete would send me Steve Bannon speeches.

was impressed by how it he was and his crew was. Wahlberg: But our irst oficial meeting was at my house. We shared an agent, who was always trying to get us together. So I invited him out talk about The Fighter. Berg: We don’t want to talk about that. [He turned down the offer to direct and made The Kingdom instead.] Did you get along immediately? Berg: Yeah. When I met Mark I felt like he was someone very much in sync with the way I do things. He works very hard, but also believes in having fun when it’s appropriate. I respected that about him. And we’ve got along lawlessly since then. Wahlberg: I just fell in love right away. We were off doing our own things, but then when Lone Survivor happened we just clicked. Berg: That movie was meant to happen

Left: Mark Wahlberg tooled up as James Silva in Mile 22. Below, top to bottom:

Wahlberg: Like brothers. Berg: Mark got me into this sick choke hold and won the ight. But it wasn’t real combat. People don’t understand — we could ight right now, we could just start wrestling. We do that. He does it with his friends, I do it with mine. We like ighting. [Laughs] But there’s never anger there. Wahlberg: He started it.

Wahlberg with director Peter Berg between takes; Informant Li Noor (Iko Uwais) is deadly serious; Having an explosive time on set.

ALAMY

earlier than it did. I was all set t it, but then the studio asked me Battleship irst, which by the w a movie I think is underrated. S so, and then they started renegin They were nervous about Lone because war ilms hadn’t done s in recent years. Mark stepped u offered to reduce his fee signiic Without him I would never have that movie made. Wahlberg: I don’t do that often. to be something special. There’s a story loating around online that the two of you got into a istight on Mark’s private jet during the Lone Survivor shoot. Conirm or deny? Wahlberg: It wasn’t a ight. Berg: No. It was a bit of drunken wrestling.

Do you remember what sparked it off? Wahlberg: Yeah, I read him a lovely prayer, from a prayer book. I wasn’t trying to necessarily convert him to Catholicism, but he was asking me, “Do you really pray every day?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What do you do? What does that look like?” I read the daily prayer that day, and then he attacked me. Berg: There were two bottles of Italian Super Tuscan with their tops off. So that’s what happened. It’s funny, because people get really mortiied that Mark and I ight. I’m like, “Yeah, we like ighting.” We like hitting people. We like getting hit. Wahlberg: It’s kind of normal to us. Any time we ever got physical, it always brought us closer together. The only time we’ve fallen out seriously was with Patriots Day — I was just over-thinking, dealing with the sensitivities of the families, law enforcement, and especially the families of the victims. There was a lot of pressure there, for both of us. Berg: We’ve not fought each other for a while. But we’ve fought other people. Okay. How about on your sets? Particularly with Deepwater Horizon, the whole second half of that movie looks like it was dangerous to do, though that presumably wasn’t the case. Berg: It was dangerous. Wahlberg: The only non-dangerous moments were when I was sitting on my chair. Berg: All these ilms are dangerous. The type of ilms we make, there’s always inherent risk. But Mark and I produce these ilms also, and we take the safety very seriously. We make sure we’re surrounded by the right people, who are looking out for us, so 12 hours into the day there’s someone who will grab Mark and go, “No, no, put that down.” Because we get so caught up in it. These are complex ilms, with explosions and ire and mud and shrapnel. But we work very hard to be safe. Any especially hairy moments spring to mind? Wahlberg: The really crazy scene in Deepwater was when me and Dylan

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❯

[O’Brien] are trying to turn the lights on and get auxilary power. We put this gel on and said, “Light us on ire. We’ll put each other out.” Berg: Didn’t we ire a lamethrower at you too? Wahlberg: You’ve shot me in the face with a mortar. You’ve shot me in the back. Berg: I did shoot him. Wahlberg: I was just thinking about the amount of times you’ve shot at me. It’s probably up in the low double-digits. Berg: I have hit him with a bunch of stuff. By accident, usually. Did that happen on Mile 22 too? Wahlberg: Mile 22 wasn’t that bad. I just got that horrible cough that lasted six weeks. Berg: There were a lot of explosions, like hand grenades and RPG hits, in conined spaces. So you’re constantly breathing this really heavy smoke, that’s probably not healthy in any way. I put them through quite a lot of that. Mark is game, though. There’s a lot of actors who won’t put ire gel on and be set alight. Mark’s seasoned enough that he understands if we’re going to do it, why it’s worth it. Wahlberg: I’m also not the kind of guy who’s like, “No, Pete, I’ve gotta do this stunt.” I’ve got a couple of guys that look just like me and they’re ready to go — no problem. If we’ve gotta do it, let’s do it. If not, dude, I’ll be in my trailer watching ESPN. Berg: I saw the video of Tom Cruise breaking his ankle. That was just preposterous. If Mark gets hurt, if he breaks a toe and can’t work, there’s a thousand people that can’t work. He’s not going to be like, “Glue me to the bottom of a train and shoot me across Japan at 250 miles an hour.” That’s what we have stuntmen for. Peter, you started off as an actor. Mark, do you have a favourite performance of his? Berg: Good question. Wahlberg: I would have to say Cop Land. I’ve recently discovered him in the Aspen avalanche movie. Berg: Aspen Extreme? [A little-known 1993 drama described by one critic as “Top Gun on the ski slopes”.] Wahlberg: Yeah. And Chicago Hope — that’s probably what he’s best known for. The other Dr McDreamy. You’ve also got little cameos in the ilms you guys have made together. You’re credited as ‘Soldier’ in Lone Survivor, ‘Mr Skip’ in Deepwater Horizon and ‘Guy Opening MIT Door’ in Patriots Day. Berg: What was I opening? Wahlberg: A door, apparently. Berg: I don’t think I’m in Patriots Day. Wahlberg: We cut you out. That was one of the points of contention. Your Boston accent was unconvincing. [Laughs] Berg: I have a big part in Mile 22. Probably my biggest in a while. The guy I play is not a nice guy — he’s a bad husband. Doing those little bits does have a purpose: it makes me remember the pressures that actors are under. It’s a very hard job, especially for day-players, coming in and going up against Mark playing this physically intense, strongly opinionated guy. They’re scared of him. They’re intimidated. Wahlberg: I remember Pete coming up to me and being like, “Hey, be nice, dude. You’re going crazy.” I don’t think I’m that intense. I mostly get in a little recliner and take a nap. You’ve got to ire it up when it’s time to ire it up. But then you’ve gotta be able to shut it down and conserve energy, you know? Peter, you’re probably not able to get as much sleep on set. Wahlberg: Oh, he naps. Berg: I love napping.

Wahlberg: Sometimes he’ll come into my trailer and we’ll nap together. And one day he discovered my special chair. Berg: He’s got the best chair. Oh, it’s so good. Wahlberg: It goes all the way lat to a bed. You just sink into it. Berg: It’s like furniture Valium. A Xanax couch. Wahlberg: If I leave it for a second, he’ll be straight into it.

Below, top to bottom: Patriots Day (2016): Wahlberg as Boston cop Tommy Saunders; Lone Survivor (2013): Director Peter Berg on location with

What do the two of you talk about in your downtime? Berg: We probably talk about sports more than we talk about movies. Football, basketball. A lot of boxing. UFC. Wahlberg: But it always comes back to work. Berg: There’s a subculture of people in LA that I’ve observed. People with

Wahlberg as Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell; Deepwater Horizon (2016): It’s a matter of life and death for oil rig worker M

a similar work ethic and philosophy about the business. Mark, myself, [super-agent] Ari Emanuel, Dwayne Johnson, Mark’s manager Steve Levinson... we all like to get up early and we like to work. And we all push each other, all the time. The idea is that we get one shot on this planet and we’re going for it. We want to get all of it. We’re not interested in running around Hollywood. Neither of us do that. Do you have a favourite moment from your four ilms together? Wahlberg: There are many. I’ve only seen a rough cut of Mile 22 — I’m really curious to see how that shakes out, just because we spent so much time shaping it. Originally my character was going to be a supporting part, more of a bad guy, and then Silva became the driving force of the movie. But most of the moments I love come from Lone Survivor. Berg: There’s one moment in Lone Survivor that was a pure accident. The SEALs are standing on a hill and decide to let this kid go. I told them to start walking up the hill, because the sun was setting behind them. Our camera operator Jacques [Jouffret] started following them, and Mark just instinctively realised that the shot was good and kept telling the guys to keep going. And he kept stopping and looking back, as if he was starting to realise more and more that they’ve made a catastrophic mistake. The sun was laring behind him. Everyone picked up on what Mark was doing — cast and crew — and I remember thinking at that moment, “Okay, this movie’s going to work.” Wahlberg: It’s one of the few movies I’ve made that, if I’m lipping the channels and it’s on, I’ll just watch it. Finally, Mark, you run the excellently named burger-restaurant franchise Wahlburgers. Given Peter’s surname, would you consider adding a Peter-Berger to the menu in tribute to him? Wahlberg: Absolutely. That could work. Berg: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea! Wahlberg: We’ve never actually talked about that. What would it have in it? What do you like? Berg: Well, I like a turkey burger. But I’d probably go for beef and pastrami and bacon. Like, the most unhealthy burger. Wahlberg: The Peter-Berger. I like that. We could do that. [Pause] As long as my brother Paul approves it. MILE 22 IS IN CINEMAS FROM 30 AUGUST

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To boldly go: Dr Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) is on the space mission of a lifetime.

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On the same day in 1968 — 3 April — two timeless cinematic masterpieces were released. Both were science-fiction. Both featured apes. And both would go on to change cinema forever. Empire chronicles the turbulent, rival productions of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet Of The Apes

had arranged to meet among the ersatz palms and DayGlo punch of a Polynesianthemed cocktail bar. It was never entirely clear why Stanley Kubrick favoured Trader Vic’s, the tacky franchise in the bowels of the Savoy Hilton, but that was where Arthur C. Clarke was bidden on 22 April 1964. By which time the director had read everything that could be considered science-iction and most science fact. Kubrick had been informed Clarke was the best. There was little doubt the British author’s scientiic leanings suited the director’s disdain for bugeyed monsters. Kubrick presented him with a irm handshake and a request for assistance in making a ilm about mankind’s “irst encounter with extra-terrestrial life”. Less a sci-i ilm per se, he declared, than a “mythic ❯ documentary”. Clarke had no idea

They

PART 1:

HOW THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS WON

The strange saga of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a production plagued by technical problems and an elusive ﬂasher

WORDS IAN NATHAN

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what that meant, but he was impressed. Eight hours later they walked out onto the street to witness a silver globe defying gravity in the night air. It turned out to be a weather balloon, but for a moment Clarke wondered if they had arrived to stop the ilm. Kubrick installed the writer at Manhattan’s arty Chelsea Hotel and later they picked up where they left off in his riverside penthouse. The luxury apartment was illed with high-tech tape recorders and cameras, plus a shortwave radio Kubrick was using to monitor Russian broadcasts on Vietnam. Clarke knew he was dealing with a unique presence. Using the author’s 1948 short story The Sentinel as the foundation stone, they would spend two years having a discussion that would become a treatment that would turn into a novel that would provide a script. Clarke calculated that he logged 2,400 hours on what was eventually called 2001: A Space Odyssey. Given the real-life nuclear brinkmanship he had riffed on in Dr. Strangelove, the only hope Kubrick held for mankind was in space exploration — the chance to reach beyond ourselves. Ideas ebbed and lowed: that the aliens would be super-advanced machines that regarded mankind as a disease (“Stanley thought this cute”); that 17 aliens resembling “featureless black pyramids” would take open-top cars down Fifth Avenue; that the computer would be female and named Athena. Kubrick became obsessed with immortality. Clarke would phone Isaac Asimov to talk biochemistry, while William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg would call from the lobby bar and lure him out for some “inspirational” drinking. The glacial pace of completing the treatmentnovel-screenplay wasn’t helped by the fact they kept stopping to argue about Cantor’s Theory of Transinite Groups. By July they had everything but the plot. By Christmas, ‘Journey To The Stars’ had been announced by MGM, and Kubrick had drawn up a 100-item questionnaire about space travel: “Do astronauts sleep in their pyjamas?” Clarke began to experience a recurring anxiety dream that production had started and all the actors were staring at him, waiting for the storyline. He also realised they would now need to ind four

AUGUST 2018

trained warthogs. “Stanley hates movies scripts,” he had come to realise. “I think he would prefer to work without one.” On Christmas Day 1965, Kubrick called to tell Clarke he still didn’t “think much of the dialogue”. But they had a plot about alien monoliths that prompt mankind’s evolution, and a scientiically plausible journey to the moons of Jupiter to locate the focus of a monolith’s signal. During this odyssey, man’s technological advances would turn on him in the guise of a neurotic supercomputer named HAL 9000. Fifty years after its release, many still struggle to fathom the ilm’s elusive heartbeat, but Kubrick never considered it confusing. It was simply a ilm that “postulates a scientiic deinition of God”.

Clockwise from above: Bowman and Dr Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) in the living hub of the spaceship Discovery; The Discovery astronauts encounter a mysterious ‘monolith’; ‘Aries-1B Stewardess’ (Edwina Carroll) in the ingenious revolving interior set; Computer HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain) meets his match in ‘Dave’; Kubrick directs on set.

was more likely to enrage Kubrick than someone touching the monolith. Shooting had begun on 29 December 1965, with the TMA-1 excavation on the moon (the discovery of the second monolith). After sitting for a while on the voluminous Stage H at Shepperton, the slab of incomprehensible alien technology had to be sent back to the paint shop for another coat of the none-more-black matte inish, made from pencil graphite. Between takes, the exasperating thing was swaddled in sheets of plastic wrapping. “The idea was that it had ininite blackness,” recalls photographic-effects artist Bryan Loftus. “When we were putting the master shots together on the optical printer there was nothing there — the colour didn’t exist.” It was MGM who had suggested the upmarket Borehamwood studios, 24 kilometres north of London, as a base for 2001. For a ilm that crossed the Solar System there were surprisingly few sets: just 23. The special-effects team, explorers at the gates of the unknown, were housed in two large shops known as Sausage Factory I and II. The Brains Room was for conceptual artists, the War Room for strategy. Like his beloved chess, moviemaking for Kubrick was a succession of problems leading from one to the next. These weren’t shots, but solutions. “He had this penetrating look when watching something, stroking his beard,” recalls Loftus. “And it would be like, ‘Oh God, he’s thinking…’” With his newly grown beard, Slavic complexion and monolith suits, Kubrick had the countenance of a bohemian poet. “Oh God, those eyes,” says Powell, who served as assistant director at the Dawn Of Man. “He could skewer you with those eyes. I was always a little on the edge of terror, because I tended to wafle, and he would not accept that at all: ‘Ivor, answer me: yes or no?’” To Clarke he was “Stanley”. To close crew-members he was “Guvnor”. To everyone else he was “Mr Kubrick”. The great centrifuge, the most ingenious set ever devised, provided the living hub of the Discovery — the matchstick-shaped ship on a 274-day haul to Jupiter. “Ninety tons of wheel,” whistles Powell, still in awe. “Made down in Cardiff, then shipped up in pieces by road and assembled in the studio.” Built by the aircraft engineers Vickers at a cool $750,000 (the entire budget was

nothing

$10 million), the great rotunda spanned 38 feet. They had to check the foundations of the stage could take the weight. It was like making a ilm inside a Ferris wheel — the set moving through space rather than the actors. Those few crew allowed within were strictly instructed to wear “tennis shoes”. The pristine, Kubrickwhite interior was the result of exacting set decoration and incandescent lighting — the director railed against shadows. Smoking was forbidden; a ire didn’t bear thinking about. Loftus laughs. “When they irst turned it on and the whole set began revolving, all they could hear was the sound of the falling nails carpenters had dropped.” It took them about four days to clean it out. During the painstaking accumulation of shots, the actors often suspended at the apex of the wheel, Kubrick played the part of treacherous HAL. “Good morning,” rang the familiar New York tones. “What would you like for breakfast?” He would eventually work his way through Nigel Davenport (too posh and British) and Martin Balsam (too damn American) before landing on the eerily placid Canadian actor Douglas Rain to dub HAL. On one of his regular visits, Clarke quipped that the cockpit of the Earthorbiting shuttle Orion reminded him of a Chinese restaurant. Kubrick instructed his team to start again from scratch. The new design came from the director himself: he had been walking through the backlot carrying a broom handle (why he was doing that is unknown), tossing it into the air and watching it rotate end over end. Out of this was born the celebrated match-cut across four million years of progress, from a bone lung by an ape to a rotating spacecraft waltzing to Johan Strauss’ Blue Danube. The whole of civilisation presented in a blink (and people say 2001 is slow). And then there was the ilm’s own planet of apes, for the prologue set in prehistoric Africa. While buses grumbled past, Kubrick’s team constructed mock-arid sets on the backlot, frontprojecting backdrops harvested from the deserts of Namibia and mounted on cut-glass transparencies. The intense heat from the projector lamps heated the glass to the point where one cool breath could shatter it, so the operators had to wear facemasks. Cue tabloid rumours that Kubrick had become ❯ a manic germophobe.

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passed. Production and post-production became relative terms. Things simply carried on. The actors departed, but shots were still being done and redone in the model sheds. Or on the 100-foot slit-scanner into which the American whizz Douglas Trumbull fed all manner of psychedelic images to conjure up the timewarp inside the stargate, inspired by the photo-inish cameras at racecourses. Everyone was part of the special-effects department, because everything was a special effect. While they toiled away working three shifts running 24 hours a day, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers and The Dirty Dozen came and went in neighbouring soundstages. The makers of 2001 were stuck in their own timewarp. Space sickness was inevitable. “We got to this place where we all had to have memos,” says Loftus, “because Stanley would tell you something and sometimes you’d forget.” They weren’t all blessed with a photographic memory. Thus Kubrick had a secretary type out a memo for each of his instructions. “Then to make sure he knew that you hadn’t ignored the memo, you had to send a memo back saying you’d received the memo,” Loftus laughs. “It was like

time

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Kafka; these two women typing these memos all day.” Editor Ray Lovejoy received a memo from on high that the Kubrick children’s hamster had escaped the grip of 2001 fever and taken refuge under a kitchen unit. So he had to organise for a leet of carpenters to rescue the critter. He couldn’t very well ignore it. It was a memo. Then there was the Borehamwood lasher. “I think it was a Sunday, but we were shooting,” says Powell. “Suddenly word came round that some guy had exposed himself to Vivian, Stanley’s youngest daughter.” Kubrick had the whole crew down tools and scour Borehamwood for the pervert, with the director co-ordinating the manhunt from his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. “I’m not sure if we ever found him,” admits Powell. “Or what we were supposed to do with him if we did.” People left for other jobs, fearing for their sanity. But they can look back on that time with great affection and immense pride. There was nothing on Earth like being in Kubrick’s orbit. “I don’t want you to show me something you know,” he would tell his eager department heads, stroking his gypsybeard, “but something you don’t know.” Loftus tried attaching a spinning wheel mounted with arcane symbols to the optical printer. The result was a crazy paving of patterns like some alien arithmetic, designed without any human agency. Special effects by higher forces. “Stanley loved that,” he says, the note of satisfaction still in his voice. Kubrick was concerned that any portrayal of a higher intelligence would give away the fact it was the work of a lower intelligence. “The whole idea of photography needed to be readdressed for 2001,” says Trumbull. The prismatic alien landscapes were pure mistakes in the original copying of helicopter shots of the Outer Hebrides and Monument Valley. “We’ll use that,” instructed the director. They had tried to manifest aliens. Trumbull had even built “an alien rig” and was doing loopy effects to embody “completely transparent humanoids” living in cities of light. Time inally gave, and Kubrick decided less was more. “You just got to stop,” he told Trumbull. “We’ve got to have a inal cut.” These were beings that had transcended physical form to become pure energy.

Top: Kubrick in the claustrophobic conﬁnes of one of 2001’s many intricate sets. Above: The Dawn Of Man: an ape uses an animal bone as a tool.

when

2001: A Space Odyssey opened in the US on 3 April, MGM thought they had a planet-sized lop on their hands. But after the ilm’s hesitant reception, slowly, surely, young people starting showing up. It ended up making over $57 million — a massive success. And contrary to popular myth, Kubrick has won an Oscar. He was the sole (non-attending) recipient for the Special Visual Effects award on 2001. None of his team would argue he didn’t deserve the solo credit. He was the great intelligence that had nudged the evolution of an entire medium. He was more furious that Planet Of The Apes had beaten their apes to a make-up award, with John Chambers picking up an honorary Oscar for his faux-simians. Clarke had it on good authority that most of the Academy was convinced the 2001 team had trained real gorillas.

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An actual dead horse was painted to look like a dead zebra, and as the carcass cooked beneath the lights, both the featured leopard and the camera crew became increasingly unenthused about the stench. On another day, Kubrick was dragged outside to meet a black pig. They stared at each other suspiciously before Kubrick poked it. It responded with an irritated grunt, at which the director declared he was perfect. As for the prologue primates, Kubrick insisted that the men in ape suits could not look like men in ape suits: reticulated jaws were designed that could be operated by tongue. Although Planet Of The Apes was creating its own simians on the other side of the Atlantic, he did not regard the production, or any other, as a rival. Instead, the director was in a race to the future with NASA. 2001 was sending astronauts to Jupiter with a degree of credibility unmatched in screen iction, before man had even stepped on the moon. When Neil Armstrong and crew made moonfall in 1969, they remarked how much it resembled scenes in 2001.

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“Doctor, I’d like to kiss you goodbye.” Colonel George Taylor (Charlton Heston) and Dr Zira (Kim Hunter) part ways in Planet Of The Apes.

PART 2:

THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES Coming out the very same day as 2001 was a movie no less ambitious and even heavier on simians. Here’s how Planet Of The Apes beat the odds — and a hellish shoot — to re-deﬁne genre cinema

WORDS DAN JOLIN

Roddy McDowall looked in the mirror, he didn’t recognise the face staring back at him. Heavy-browed, with a round wrinkled snout, it wasn’t even human. McDowall rose slowly from the barber’s chair in which he’d spent close to six hours having this new face applied, one May morning in 1967 at 20th Century Fox Studios. Then, seized by an odd compulsion, the London-born former child actor, star of How Green Is My Valley and Lassie Come Home, started jumping up and down. He let his arms hang loose and scratched manically at his armpits. He stuck out his tongue and jabbered madly. For a full 15 minutes, as Mort Abrahams, associate producer of Planet Of The Apes reported, “he went berserk.” The crew watched in stunned silence while McDowall leapt, shrieked, whooped and chittered until, exhausted, he inally slumped back down in his chair. “I was just lipping out,” he explained

when

later. “It was the strangest experience I ever had.” McDowall had been keen to take the role of chimpanzee archaeologist Cornelius in this strange and daring science-iction adventure because, he said, “you don’t get asked to play a chimp too often.” But after that irst make-up session he had serious second thoughts: “What can I do to get out of this movie?!” As visually remarkable and innovative as the prosthetics were, allowing Cornelius’ mouth movements to directly mimic those of McDowall’s, they made him claustrophobic. But he resolved to deal with it and meet this “tremendous acting challenge”. His co-star, Kim Hunter, the Oscarwinning actor who played authoritydefying zoologist chimp Zira, found that popping a few Valium helped with the gruelling transformation process. For McDowall, the solution was to store ❯ up his frustration and then, the very

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second each shooting day wrapped, cathartically rend that smothering simian visage from his own. Planet Of The Apes was a tribulation for almost everyone involved. Including those responsible for turning McDowall, Hunter and more than 30 other actors into the eerily evolved chimps, gorillas and orangutans encountered by Charlton Heston’s beleaguered astronaut in the movie. Make-up artist Daniel C. Striepeke (pronounced ‘Stree-pack’) worked closely alongside John Chambers, the bluff prosthetics genius who went from engineering new limbs and facial features for US Army casualties, to creating Mr Spock’s ears for Star Trek, to taking on Apes and winning the second ever Oscar for make-up. Striepeke is now 87 years old, one of the few of the 1968 production’s crew members and cast who is still with us. When Empire calls him at his Californian home and asks if he wouldn’t mind sharing his memories of making the ilm, he is happy to oblige. “Okay,” he says, straightaway. “I’ll start off with one word: hell.”

hell was sparked into life by Arthur P. Jacobs, a former Hollywood publicist with big ambitions and an inability to take no for an answer. Since forming his production company APJAC in 1962, Jacobs was desperate to mount something thrilling and fantastical. Something that would blow people away. Something like King Kong. In 1963, he met with a literary agent he knew, Alain Bernheim, in Paris. “Speaking of King Kong,” said Bernheim, “I’ve got a thing here, but it’s so far out, I don’t think you can make it.” It was La Planète Des Singes (Monkey Planet), by Bridge On The River Kwai author Pierre Boulle: a stillunpublished science-iction satire about a Gulliver-ish traveller crash-landing on a distant planet named Soror, where apes are the dominant species — wearing clothes, driving cars — and humans are dumb brutes. Jacobs loved it. “I’ll buy it,” he announced. “I think you’re crazy,” said Bernheim, “but okay.” Bernheim wasn’t alone. Over the next three years, Jacobs failed to win over any Hollywood studio with his vivid pitch for a space adventure about talking primates. Apart from the nuttiness of the concept, which brought to mind men-in-apecostume cheapies like 1954’s laughable Gorilla At Large, science-iction

that

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just wasn’t a lucrative genre. It was ridiculous, niche, unfashionable — like those old lying-saucer B pictures of the previous decade. Undeterred, Jacobs hired Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling to write the script. Self-plagiarising his show’s I Shot An Arrow Into The Air episode, Serling savvily relocated Boulle’s story to a far-future, post-apocalyptic Earth — giving the movie its killer twist ending. Meanwhile, after trying for Paul Newman, Rock Hudson and even Jack Lemmon, Jacobs also secured a big-name star: Charlton Heston. The chiselled front-man of Biblical and historical epics met with him on 5 June 1965, and was impressed. “I usually play formidable authority igures,” he relected at a press event for the ilm’s 30th anniversary. “But this was a part such as I’d never played.” Heston lent Jacobs some valuable heft in his negotiations, as did the fact that he now had another big project (also about talking animals) in production at 20th Century Fox: the Rex Harrison musical Doctor Dolittle. Ensconced on the Fox lot, Jacobs and his right-hand man, Abrahams, focused their efforts on the studio’s boss, Richard D. Zanuck, hectoring him to the point where he told Abrahams, “If either of you ever mentions Planet Of the Apes to me again, that will be the end of our relationship.” In the end, two things turned Zanuck around: irstly, a $7,000 make-up test, which starred Heston alongside 72-year-old veteran Edward G. Robinson, provisionally cast as human-hating ape leader Dr Zaius. The ape prosthetics, designed by Fox make-up head Ben Nye Sr, were rudimentary, but at least proved the characters could be taken seriously. (Though Robinson proclaimed he’d go crazy buried under them and promptly quit, with the role eventually taken by British stage-trained actor Maurice Evans.) Secondly, there was the surprise box-ofice success in August 1966 of Fox’s Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine crew is shrunk to microscopic proportions and injected into a dying diplomat’s body. Perhaps, Zanuck realised, another out-there sci-i adventure wasn’t so crazy. In October, he inally relented, and gave Jacobs the two words he’d been waiting years to hear: “Okay, go.” that it was so simple. The shoot was set to begin in

mid-May 1967, giving Jacobs only seven months of prep on an extremely daunting project. “No movie had ever been made like this before,” says Striepeke. “This was totally new ground. It was absolutely revolutionary. And particularly at that scale, you know?” Before anything else, Serling’s script needed a drastic rework. The hi-tech ape world it described, with monkey-bar crosswalks and ape-piloted helicopters, was inancially impossible given Zanuck’s strict $5 million budget. Also, Jacobs insisted there be no chance any viewer would twig that Heston’s character, Taylor, was back on his home world before the climactic Statue Of Liberty reveal. “Arthur said, ‘I want it to look like nothing on Earth,’” recalls art director William J. Creber. So, inspired by the “primitive architecture” of some early African societies and the ‘troglodyte’ city of Cappadocia in Turkey, he designed an Ape City with a striking, alien, pre-industrial feel. Screenwriter Michael Wilson was brought in to re-envision ape society along these less-modern lines. He also injected a coursing undercurrent of political commentary, emphasising class divisions between the three ape species and adding the trial scene (where Zira is attacked for her heretical assertion that Taylor is a “missing” link who proves apes are evolved from men), based in no small part on his own experience being blacklisted during the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch-hunts. The most important and daunting task, however, was to make the apes themselves believable; to develop the make-up in such a way that the actors beneath it could fully emote and enunciate. This required a specialist. Jacobs’ irst thought was British make-up expert Stuart Freeborn. He’d heard good things about the work Freeborn was doing for the Dawn Of Man sequence on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in England, and made an overture. But, perceiving a conlict of interest, Kubrick ordered Freeborn not to speak to anyone involved with Planet Of The Apes. He wouldn’t even throw Jacobs the bone of allowing Freeborn to consult with Chambers and Striepeke once ❯ he’d hired them.

not

Clockwise from top left: Taylor on the run; Taylor and Nova (Linda Harrison) on the cusp of an iconic ending; Gorillas and chimps give chase; ANSA (the ﬁlm’s version of NASA) astronauts GUTTER CREDIT

Dodge (Jeff Burton), Taylor and Landon (Robert Gunner); Cornelius I (Roddy McDowall).

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an extensive, walk-through set, it was Heston’s turn to suffer. Dressed in little more than a ragged loincloth for most scenes, Taylor’s abuse at the hands (or rather stinking paws) of the apes made for a physically taxing experience, worsened by him coming down with the lu during the shoot. “There’s hardly been a scene in this bloody ilm in which I’ve not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated,” Heston wrote in his journal on 19 July 1967. The question remained, would it all be worth it? The one-time Ben-Hur wasn’t honestly sure. “If the social comment comes off as well as the wild adventure,” he wrote on 10 August, the day the shoot wrapped, “we may get some attention.” But by the year’s end he still regarded Apes as “an unknown quantity”.

need not have worried. Planet Of The Apes would become the actor’s biggest hit since 1961’s El Cid and 20th Century Fox’s most successful movie of 1968, grossing more than $32 million in the United States. Just as Jacobs hoped, it found a broad audience, some appreciating its humour (“human see, human do”) or feeling its political resonance, others simply thrilling to its high-adventure elements and sheer visual novelty — not forgetting, of course, the electrifying jolt of its big twist ending. 2001: A Space Odyssey — released the very same day in the States — would make $14 million more than Apes and is still regarded more reverently as the masterpiece that elevated science-iction to art. But, as well as setting a new bar in make-up effects and world-building ambition, Planet Of The Apes also laid a new template for commercial genre cinema. It was the irst science-iction franchise in the modern, non-serial sense, spawning four sequels of varying quality between 1970 and 1973. Plus a spin-off TV show in 1974, a risible remake by Tim Burton and the recent reboot trilogy starring Andy Serkis. It was also a merchandising phenomenon, with Apes action igures, masks, comic-books, novels, lunch boxes and bedclothes selling out before George Lucas had even thought up Star Wars. “In many ways,” relects Striepeke, “it changed the face of cinema.” Rather like he changed the face of Roddy McDowall all those years ago.

Not that they felt they needed Freeborn’s advice. Where he had engineered mechanical armatures to enable Kubrick’s performers to control their ape facial movements with the poke of a tongue, Chambers pioneered a more direct, organic correlation between prosthetic and performer via foam-rubber appliances. “In 2001, they didn’t talk or show expression, except for grunts and roars,” he said in 1971. Besides, Chambers was affronted by the idea of asking for help. “I’m an Irishman and I said, ‘Any time any Englishman can teach me anything, it’s going to be a cold day,’” he told authors Joe Russo and Larry Landsman in their 2001 book Planet Of The Apes Revisited. “In fact, I taught what most of the English have learned.” Striepeke, meanwhile, remains bemused by the suggestion. Apart from anything else, he says, “there just wasn’t time. It was just head down, you-know-what up and go for it!” Not only did Chambers develop new materials to make the ape make-up work — foam rubber that allowed the skin to breathe; paint and adhesive that didn’t clog the pores — he and Striepeke also had to pare down the application process to around three hours, apply it to multiple actors at a time, maintain it throughout

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14-hour days, and manufacture fresh prosthetics all the way through the shoot. “We had to keep our laboratory running 24 hours a day,” Striepeke says, “and we were only about a day-and-a-half ahead of production almost throughout the entire ilm. I had 47 make-up artists working some days. There was a lot of maintenance, too. I went onto Stage 21 one day after lunch and I saw this gorilla and his chin was hanging off. I looked into it, and the inside part of the chin was full of peas! So we sat him down and cleaned him up and glued him back together.” No amount of care and attention could ease the ape actors’ extreme discomfort during the ilm’s irst three weeks of shooting. Director Franklin J. Schaffner (hired with the approval of Heston, who’d starred in Schaffner’s 1965 Norman melodrama The War Lord) ordered them all to Page, Arizona, a searing desert terrain he chose for its hostile, desolate and alien quality. It was a place where the temperature could rise as high as 50 degrees Celsius. “It was brutal,” said McDowall. “You simply couldn’t remember any lines.” Once the production moved to the Fox Ranch in Malibu Creek State Park, where Creber’s Ape City had been constructed as

Clockwise from left: Buck Kartalian, Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter in full simian regalia; Filming the ﬁnal moments of Taylor’s sinking rocket ship at Lake Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border; Flu-suffering Heston tries to smile for a young-chimp extra’s camera on the Ape City set in California.

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MICHAEL DOUGLAS

HAS BECOME THE ELDER STATESMAN OF HOLLYWOOD, WITH HALF A CENTURY OF MOVIES UNDER HIS BELT. BUT IT’S A CAREER THAT’S BEEN BUILT ON RISKY ROLES AND LEAPS OF FAITH. CHRIS HEWITT MEETS THE LEGENDARY STAR TO FIND OUT HOW HE’S KEPT HIS EDGE

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the empire interview

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MICHAEL DOUGLAS AND I are making post-interview small talk about the World Cup in a fairly crowded elevator when the dudebros make their move. A phone is produced, selies are taken, pleasantries exchanged. The doors open on the ifth loor of the swanky LA hotel and Douglas makes his exit. The lift doors close. Then a young girl, who’s been standing silently at the back, pipes up. “Was that Kirk Douglas?” No. It’s Kirk’s kid. It’s an easy mistake to make, though. They look incredibly alike. And ‘kid’ is something of a stretch. Michael Douglas is 73 years old (his dad, wonderfully, is still with us at 101), and having a blast in the ifth decade of a career that may have started out cloaked in his famous father’s shadow, but now rightly sees him afforded equal status. He is Hollywood royalty, par excellence, one of the most dependable movie stars around for just over 30 years. He’s done so by taking risks, by pushing the envelope. This is the man who, when his acting career was stagnating in the ’70s, decided to produce his irst movie, an adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and ended up winning a Best Picture Oscar for it. He’s continued to produce since, but acting remains his passion, his addiction. And though that took a while longer to coalesce, his choices have remained consistently engaging and surprising. He’s played good guys, but he’s often been drawn to the darker side, exploring toxic masculinity and sexuality with disarming frankness in the likes of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Falling Down, and Wall Street, for which he won another Oscar. This one for Best Actor. These days, following a near-fatal brush with cancer a few years ago, you could forgive him for taking it easy and enjoying life with his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and their children. But he’s still taking chances, whether it’s

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playing Liberace in Behind The Candelabra, or this year’s doublewhammy of Ant-Man And The Wasp (a rare foray into genre movies), where he reprises the role of Quantum Realm explorer Hank Pym, and effervescent Chinese action movie Animal World, in which he shows up, sporting a goatee, to helpfully explain the plot. “I think speaking in a movie is becoming a lost art,” laughs Douglas in that silken voice of his. That “greed, for want of a better word, is good” voice. It’s a voice which gets one heck of an outing during our 90-minute chat in the pool terrace of that LA hotel. Douglas is a talker. And there’s plenty to talk about. How did you wind up making an action movie in China? It’s wild, huh? They came to me relatively suddenly. It wasn’t a large part, and I got just the sides. They didn’t even have a full translation of the whole script. I read it, and as I expressed an interest it all came together. I treated it as an exciting thing. I’ve made pictures in Morocco and South America and Mexico. I’ve worked with crews around the world. Movies bring us all together. I love it. When you do a movie like Ant-Man And The Wasp or Animal World, is part of you looking at it with your producer hat on? To see how they do it at Marvel, or over in China? I go into it with the joy of being a supporting actor, without having either the responsibility as the lead of the movie, or producing the movie, in a world I don’t know anything about. I am happy to contribute if I’m asked. I think I know a fair amount. I’ll throw my two cents’ worth in on structure. Your irst movie as producer was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Not bad for a irst try. It was just a passion. I had read [the novel] and loved it. Meantime my father, before that, had acquired the rights and adapted it into a play in New York, which did not work out the way he had anticipated. He was having a very dificult time getting it made into a ilm. Everybody said, “Who wants to see another The Snake Pit [1948 Olivia de Havilland drama set in a mental asylum]?” It took me years to realise that The Snake Pit had been quite successful, thank you very much.

This was around the time you were starring in The Streets Of San Francisco. I had done a couple of movies. I started out in feature ilms and did a live CBS Playhouse [The Experiment] which came out very well. I was beginning to do episodic television. My father had been trying to sell Cuckoo’s Nest for a little while. I jumped up and said, “I love that book so much. Let me try to run with it and get you the money you’re looking for, and a producing credit. I know you’re trying to play the part.” He said, “Okay.” I’ll be eternally grateful to my father for that, particularly when I failed to get him the part. Which he reminds me of to this day at the drop of a hat. Did you want him to audition? No! [Laughs] But I do remind him that as

my silent producing partner he made more money off that movie than any picture he made in his entire life. It was a great piece of material. The lesson for me was that throughout your life you will not get a good piece of material that often. It won ive Oscars, including Best Picture. How did that impact your career? All of a sudden I had an ofice as a producer. As an actor I couldn’t get arrested in the movies. I was still a TV actor and in those days the separation of television and feature ilms was so big. I worked at making ilms like The China Syndrome, where there was a secondary part I could play. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is emblematic of a career in which you’ve often taken risky decisions. I love the excitement of taking a risk. It’s dangerous. It’s exciting. I like slam dances. To me, the biggest compliment I get is, “When I see your name, I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I know it’s going to be good.” I like the unpredictable quality. I think there’s a bit of larceny in all of us, as well as a bit of humanity. I like that struggle. I like that dilemma.

Clockwise from top: Making a return as Dr Hank Pym in Ant-Man And The Wasp; Playing Liberace in 2013’s Behind The Candelabra; As the

Gordon Gekko, and Wall Street, still seem incredibly timely. Greed is working for a lot of people. Gekko has been embraced by some as a role model over the years. Did you see that coming? No! It was one of the better villains I’ve had in my career. The costume designer, Ellen Mirojnick, made the Gekko character a bit of a peacock. People loved the way he dressed. They loved the style, they loved money, what’s not to like? [Laughs] Though if I have one more drunken Wall Street guy say, “You’re the man, you’re the reason I got into this.” I say, “He went to jail, pal!” “It doesn’t matter!” It’s a little scary.

kingpin of a sinister organisation in Animal World; Picking up Oscars for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in March 1976, with fellow producer Saul Zaentz and stars Jack Nicholson and Louise

Is it easier for you to get your teeth into someone like Gekko? It’s easier when it’s good writing. Gekko is beautifully written. It was a great part, man. When the part’s there on the page, it’s all the difference in the world. On Gekko, because it was so verbal, Oliver [Stone, director] really pushed me.

Fletcher.

What did he do? After the irst couple of weeks, he came into my trailer and said, “How ya doing?”

I said, “Okay.” He said, “You doing drugs?” I said, “No, I’m not doing drugs.” He said, “Because you look like you never acted before in your life.” I never go and look at rushes, because all I see is the bad stuff, but I went into the editing room to look at the seduction scene in the back of the limousine with Charlie Sheen, and the scene at [New York nightclub] 21. So I look and I look and I go back to Oliver and I say, “I thought it was pretty good.” He said, “Yeah it is, isn’t it?’” [Smiles] He wanted a little more of an edge from me. He was not afraid, for the rest of the movie, for me to be pissed off at him. How do you decide which projects to take? Which risks to pursue? If I read something and I’m emotionally moved. If I’m laughing, or scared… and this is where the producing part comes in, because I’m looking at it as a movie. I’m not looking at my part. Then you break it down and sometimes you’ve got the great part. Sometimes Sharon Stone’s got the great part and you’re carrying the plotline in Basic Instinct. And then of course, who are the people involved? When they send you a Richard LaGravenese script for Behind The Candelabra with Steven Soderbergh directing, and a pretty impressive co-star with Matt Damon, and Jerry Weintraub as your producer, this is gravy, man. It doesn’t get better than this. That one was deinitely a risk… I had just come out of remission from my cancer. It was a time when I thought I was never going to work again. This project came to me and I was so excited. Then I went to meet Steven, and he said, “I’ve got another project I’ve got to do. I’m going to postpone this for a year.” Then Matt said, “I got a problem too, schedule-wise.” I was sure it was never going to happen. In reality, I was just so excited I was alive. They took a look at me and I was in no position physically. I was still way under weight. Liberace was a big guy. Your voice, I presume, wasn’t… My voice was not there. Rather than putting it on me, they took the hit. I got a year to prepare, a year more practising the piano, a year more to kill it. Are you feeling good these days? Yeah, thank you. I go in every six months for check-ups. Both head and neck check-ups.

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❯

I think I used anger a lot, earlier in my career, to keep me going. I’m happy to say that it’s something now that I look back at in the past and can smile at.

Was there a point when you thought you might not make it this far? Oh yeah. I was stage four. During the time when I had the cancer, Nick Ashford, of the group Ashford & Simpson, who was a friend of mine, he died. He had the same cancer I did. And Larry Hagman, from Dallas. So there were people I lost, and stage four is not good, man. It went misdiagnosed for almost a year. I brought it to the attention of my doctor and we went through a couple of ear, nose and throat guys, and they didn’t get it. They didn’t ind it.

Basic Instinct was another risk for you. At the time, it was a notorious movie. Remember what the times were like. I was looking for trouble. You found it. Yeah, we did! In Paul Verhoeven, I found the right guy, man. We knew what we were getting into, kinda. He just couldn’t cast the picture. He was Dutch and would interview the actresses: “Ja, there vill be nudity, a lotta nudity!” The girls were like, “Jesus!” God bless him. I was away when he found Sharon. He did a test screening with her and she was magniicent. Absolutely magniicent.

When you recovered, you didn’t think about retiring? You once said that your father attacks life. And I get the sense you’re the same. That you have to have things to attack, things to achieve. I like to be enthused. I like to be excited and motivated about stuff. If it’s not this, it would be golf. I attack golf, too. I want to get better at my golf. I just feel so blessed. I love making movies and the fact you can still be doing ’em in your seventies and eighties, and they still have parts for you. My big motto right now is, “No dickheads.” I don’t work with dickheads.

Even on Fatal Attraction, there were battles. Brian De Palma, the original director, didn’t want you. Yeah. I will be forever grateful to Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe, our producers. After working on the picture for a while,

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It’s always the bad reviews that stay with you. We were full out there, man. That so-called Fuck Of The Century scene, that went on for seven days. These days, are you still looking for trouble? No. Well, politically, I’ll maybe see what’s going to go on here. Producing-wise, I’m reverting back to the beginning. We’ll just have one-offs. I’m so passionate, but I’m not going to be developing multiple things. Acting, right now I’m in Sequel City, and I’m quite happy with that. We’ll see what happens.

the only director they could ind was Brian. Who immediately said, “I’ll only do it without Michael.” [Adrian Lyne eventually directed it.]

From top: As Detective Nick Curran in Basic Instinct’s infamous interrogation scene; Crunching numbers as

Did you ever ask him why? I did. Years and years later, at some screening. At a party afterwards he came up to me and blurted something. I said, “Brian, this really is not the appropriate time. Too late. It’s too late.” A trait I inherited from my father was anger. Anger is a false sense of energy. Anger can carry you, it can be very useful, but eventually it becomes debilitating.

Gordon Gekko in Wall Street; Dan Gallagher (Douglas) ﬁghts off Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction; As Jack

Finally, I have to ask about the time you, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito showed up in the video for Billy Ocean’s ‘When The Going Gets Tough’. Was that the biggest risk of your career? [Laughs] Oh, you’ve been doing your homework. Yeah, we loved that. Danny [DeVito] said, “Get me that bass saxophone that’s as big as I am. I’m going to play it.”[Laughs] When the going gets tough…

Colton in Romancing The Stone alongside Kathleen Turner’s Joan Wilder.

The tough get going? The tough get going. ANT-MAN AND THE WASP IS IN CINEMAS NOW

ALAMY, PHOTOFEST. PORTRAITS: AUGUST

When you were starting out, was there a reluctance for people to take you seriously because you were Kirk Douglas’ son? There was deinitely an element. First of all, I probably had a lot of my father’s expressions. You would hear that a lot early on. “That’s just like your dad.” This is the worst business to hear that in. I was relatively dismissed as an actor. There were many pictures where I was not approved. I produced a show called Starman, which starred Jeff Bridges. He got nominated for an Oscar. That’s a picture I would love to have played in, but I wasn’t approved. Even though I was producing it. On Romancing The Stone, we went through a whole line of other actors who turned it down. It was really based on if they could get the woman they wanted before I played the part. It was the double whammy with Fatal, which was a huge hit, and then the Oscar for Wall Street when inally I got out of the shadows. No longer the sensitive young man.

There was some controversy that Sharon was fully nude, while you weren’t. Did you think about going the full Monty? Sharon was never fully… well, the skirt thing. She wasn’t fully nude. I was fully nude in a scene with her partner, her girlfriend. I got accused of a saggy ass.

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SPOILER WARNING

T H E IN DISP E NSA B L E GUIDE TO HOME ENTERTAIN M EN T

AUGUST 2018

THE EMPIRE VIEWING GUIDE

TRUTH OR DARE Director Jeff Wadlow talks the big scares in his Blumhouse horror

00:01:05 ANYONE GOT A LIGHT? __ Director and screenplay co-writer Wadlow had a fiery idea in mind when cooking up Truth Or Dare’s first scene, where someone quite literally cooks up. “When Jason Blum pitched me Truth Or Dare he had nothing besides the title,” says Wadlow. “I immediately pitched out the idea of this opening scene. He asked me if I had anything else, I said, ❯ ‘not yet, I’m just riffing… but let’s get started.’”

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00:13:36

00:26:07

00:28:30

THE GAME __ “When I signed on to write and

THE LIBRARY __ “I wanted something surreal

RONNIE’S DEATH __ “I always thought this

direct I contacted Chris Roach, who wrote Non-Stop for me,” says Wadlow. “He asked if Jill Jacobs could jump in as well. Given the number of characters, I ﬁgured the more the merrier. It also helps that Jill is incredibly smart and wickedly clever. It took a lot of work to craft the ﬁrst game scene, and the credit goes entirely to Chris and Jill. It needed to be fast, funny, emotional, and real. No small task!”

to happen at the end of act one, but still ground it in reality,” says Wadlow. “If you did this with a group of people it could happen, but it’s still so bizarre. My hope was it would shock the audience as much as it does Olivia [Lucy Hale], so they’d be with her when she blurts out Markie’s [Violett Beane] secret. Every audience I’ve seen the movie with has audibly ‘oohed’ after Olivia tells Markie’s truth.”

scene was problematic on the page,” admits Wadlow. “Ronnie [Sam Lerner] was such a douche! And I’m the one who wrote the terrible dialogue. I’m sure Chris and Jill would’ve come up with something better. I assumed we would ﬁgure out something better on the set, but as soon as we cast Sam, I fell in love with the scene. There’s nothing Sam can’t make hilarious… including my awful dialogue.”

00:36:12

00:43:06

01:50:00

HAND BREAK __ “Even though the ﬁlm is

THINGS GET SURREAL __ “Believe it

THE ROOF __ “We had a construction crane, two

supernatural, I wanted the dares to be grounded,” explains Wadlow about the ﬁlm’s central conceit. “Like, what if you had a really warped friend who had the power to make you do things you didn’t want to do? Being forced to break your best friend’s hand is certainly twisted… but it’s also grounded. It could happen... unfortunately for Olivia.”

or not, this death scene was inspired by Luis Buñuel’s [1929 French silent surrealist short ﬁlm] Un Chien Andalou,” Wadlow tells us. “I saw that ﬁlm when I was nineteen years old and it made a huge impression on me. The visceral feeling of watching that woman have her eye sliced up by a razor blade is something I’ll never forget.”

camera cranes and a drone,” says Wadlow about one of the movie’s most technically complicated scenes. “Rick Osako, the line producer on all the Blumhouse ﬁlms, told me they’d never attempted a sequence as big as this with a budget this small. But we did it! Thankfully Sophia Ali was not scared of heights. Without her stamina and emotional performance none of it would have mattered.”

01:03:30

01:28:42

01:36:42

THE HOOK UP __ “I imagine almost every

TONGUE TIED __ “This sequence is bonkers,”

THE GAME GOES ON __ “I wanted the ﬁrst

game of ‘Truth or Dare’ has involved daring someone to kiss someone else,” says Wadlow. “So how do you push that further? Dare your best friend to hook up with your boyfriend! The scene is so uncomfortable and funny and squirmy, but also really emotional. Lucy and Tyler [Lucas Moreno] played it perfectly. They were in on the meta quality of scene, while still staying true to their characters.”

laughs Wadlow. “I love that even though it’s a ritual, it amounts to just another dare. Olivia is being dared to make someone cut their tongue out. Tyler Posey also has a great moment when he gives up his life to save the women he loves. My favourite book is A Tale of Two Cities, so for me, it’s his Sydney Carton moment. Yep, that was a Dickensian allusion. Got to justify that college degree somehow.”

and last line of the movie to be ‘truth or dare?’” says Wadlow. “My hope was once we set up the idea the game had spread to the world, that the next time someone was asked to play ‘Truth or Dare’ they may wonder if the game may cost them their life.” JJ

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TRUTH OR DARE IS OUT 15 AUGUST ON DOWNLOAD, DVD AND BLU-RAY

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EMPIRE MASTERPIECE

MULHOLLAND DRIVE David Lynch peaks again

RAW PLOT HAS, in recent years, become the mortal enemy of pop cinema. Like Japanese knotweed it coils under its foundations, growing uncontrolled and at a ferocious rate, choking off all life. Great ibrous clods of indigestible narrative have sunk the Pirates Of The Caribbean. Indiscriminate backstory and drive-by lore have fatally constipated Ridley Scott’s once narratively svelte Alien and left James Cameron’s formerly singleminded Terminator bewildered and terminally on the fritz. It’s pleasingly ironic, then, that the era that birthed this tsunami of story gave us at its very beginning a ilm that can be taken as an enthusiastic jeremiad against the centrality of, or even need for, conventional, coherent, yarn-spinning. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, his inest ilm and still, 17 years later, a contender for the greatest of the

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millennium so far, is supericially teeming with action. Femmes fatales rub up against inept hitmen. Corpses pile-up in darkened apartments and dingy ofice buildings. The Mob apply the screws to a harassed movie director. There’s a gumshoe cop and a whispering cowboy. Billy Ray Cyrus turns up. And none of it matters a jot. Supericially it is a mystery, the kind of movie in which you can have any colour of herring as long as it’s red. Betty (a wondrous Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced ingenue and jitterbug (just when is this set?) competition winner from the sticks, arrives in La La Land with hopes of stardom only to ind a mysterious young woman already inhabiting her aunt’s apartment. A car crash has left ‘Rita’ (Laura Harring) with that most soapy of aflictions, amnesia, the only clues to her identity being a handbag stuffed with dollars and a mysterious blue key that looks like it came from outer space. The pair begin to try to piece things together. But the rapidly snowballing plot

machinations are like a deliberately inlicted overdose, designed to wrench us loose from the need to track characters, who seem to merge at one point anyhow, and assign motives, freeing us to fully inhabit Lynch’s world. Once you inally surrender — perhaps when the dwarish mobster in a strange, soundproofed room begins issuing orders to a hood with an espresso fetish — Mulholland Drive (or Mulholland Dr., as the initial marketing materials would have us call it) reveals itself as a thrillingly strange fever dream, an abstract tone poem, and a heartfelt, horriied love letter to The Dream Factory. Its own production history is appropriately nightmarish. Lynch had, by the late ’90s, established a fragile relationship with television. Though Twin Peaks had been a critical hit, his subsequent series, On The Air, had lasted a mere three episodes before network ABC brought down the axe. But by 1998 relations had improved enough for him to be given $7 million for a pilot for a new

Naomi Watts’ Betty ﬁnds LA is a city of secrets.

ALAMY, ALLSTAR, LANDMARK, PHOTOFEST

series, with the rider that he shoot an ending, giving the studio beancounters the option of releasing the pilot as a feature in Europe and thus recouping some cash if what Lynch delivered failed to adequately delight. “Basically they hated everything about it,” a despondent Lynch reported after he delivered the irst cut. The subsequent tussle with ABC had him recutting the pilot, reluctantly hacking half an hour out. The changes failed to appease the studio, which shelved the project, with the vague threat that it might take it upon itself to broadcast this butchered cut as a standalone TV movie at some undisclosed future date. Lynch started to investigate the possibility of taking his name off the project, but then French studio Canal Plus bought the pilot and threw in an additional $2 million, giving him an extra nine days’ shooting time, to produce a fully ledged feature. A double helix of dread and seduction coil their way through Mulholland Drive. It’s as alive to the sultry, seductive glamour of Rita Hayworth and Raymond Chandler as it is to the town’s rancid undertow, which hides in broad daylight, like a monster behind a diner dumpster. There’s an indeinable, irresistible magic to the Los Angeles Lynch conjures, one of tinkling fountains in bougainvillea-entwined apartment courtyards, and of the halogen grid of the city glimpsed from the hills through thin, enveloping smog. Peter Deming’s luminous cinematography paints the town in broad, blazing sunlight and then in shadow and rich, saturated colour (you have never seen a yellow cab so yellow)while Angelo Badalamenti’s score, alternating sunny pop with quietly sinister thrumming soundscapes, hints at barely submerged horrors. It’s what keeps ilm lovers coming back to Mulholland Drive. It’s a ilm about the strange, narcotic allure not of stories or plots, but of cinema itself. What’s it about? Who knows. But who’s it about...? “And now here I am in this dream place...” is one of the irst things that Betty, fresh off the plane, says. Switch that “I” with a “we”, and you have the nearest thing you’re going to get to Mulholland Drive’s enduring secret. As we sit in the darkened theatre, dreaming Lynch’s wonderful, terrible dream, it turns, at least in part, to be a movie about us. ADAM SMITH

MOVIE MASTERMIND

DOUG JONES Does he shape up?

In Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, what is the Silver Surfer’s real name? Ah! Norrin Radd! That was my ﬁrst, and only, time playing a Marvel character so far. Stan Lee has said it was his favourite superhero he ever helped create. The responsibility felt quite heavy and yet quite exciting! Correct.

What is written on the side of the Ice Cream Man’s truck in Legion? Oh... Don’t tell me... Frosty Treats! I could see the “T” and the “Y” in my head! Correct.

How does John defeat the creature Roger North attaches to his chest in John Dies At The End? Oh my gosh... It was from the back seat of a car, I put this slug-like thing on him? Did he shoot that thing off? [Hears answer] Okay! I remember a gun under my chin, but oh curses! The correct answer is he burns it with a cigarette lighter.

What song do Hellboy and Abe sing in Hellboy II: The Golden Army? I was so excited when I found out what we would sing together. It was Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You. Here’s the thing: Ron Perlman is a fantastic singer and I have been a soloist at my church for many weddings and funerals. So we can both carry a tune. After the ﬁrst take Guillermo del Toro told us to dumb it down! Correct.

How many human hearts must the Gentlemen collect in the Buffy episode ‘Hush’? It’s an odd number and I always get it wrong... But I’m going to say seven. People ask me about it all the time. I had zero dialogue but lots of visual work. There was a creep factor to them unlike anything I’ve ever played before. They were so gentlemanly and polite while eviscerating human beings! I did not know it was going

to become one of the fan-favourite episodes of all time. Correct.

In Pan’s Labyrinth, what does Ofelia take from the Pale Man’s table? She is told not to eat anything. And she ended up being enticed by a juicy grape! Correct.

In which movie do you play a character called Pencilhead? A very funny movie that I love watching called Mystery Men! It has an all-star cast and is one of my earlier forays into the superhero world, even if he is a fake, made-up hero at somebody’s backyard barbecue party. It counts! Correct.

What was the ﬁrst creature you played for Guillermo del Toro in Mimic? I was a Long John bug guy. I think the credits might have me as number four? [Hears answer] I gave myself a demotion! Correct, though he’s Long John Number 2.

Complete this Star Trek: Discovery Saru quote: “An oppressive regime is…” Oh... it’s “a something regime”... It’s... This is terrible, the Trekkies are gonna hate me if I don’t get this right! Um... Wait... “a violent regime.” The correct answer is, “by nature, a fearful regime.”

Name the ﬁlm the creature sees at the cinema in The Shape Of Water. Arrgh! I have no idea! [Hears answer] Of course! I think one of the proudest moments of my career was watching Guillermo’s proudest moment, standing on that stage, holding his Best Director Oscar and then holding a Best Picture Oscar. I did not expect that to happen! The correct answer is The Story Of Ruth. JAMES WHITE

FINAL SCORE

MULHOLLAND DRIVE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

THE SHAPE OF WATER IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

AUGUST 2018

Easter egg hunting Writers Zak Penn and Ernest Cline list all the references in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One ILLUSTRATIONS BILL MCCONKEY

THERE ARE MORE Easter eggs in Ready Player One than on your average supermarket shelf in the week after Christmas. Hardly surprising, given Ernest Cline’s source novel was drenched in pop culture references, but watching Steven Spielberg layer scenes with nods to both obscure and obvious was quite the treat. So we tried to list every single reference in the movie, with a little help from Cline and his co-screenwriter, Zak Penn.

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WADE’S VAN 1. Wade’s van boasts Q*bert stickers. 2. And Gremlins stickers. 3. And a Garﬁeld sticker. 4. And Garbage Pail Kids stickers. 5. And a Watchmen smiley face. 6. Plus A Nightmare On Elm Street poster. 7. And a Labyrinth one-sheet. 8. Not to mention a He-Man lunchbox. 9. And a Transformers lunch b bo How ? much lunch can one kid have? 10. Wade’s visor has a Joust s . 11. And a Space Invaders logo

WELCOME TO THE OA ASIS 12. Welcome to Planet Minecrraft use 13. It’s Dorothy’s spinning hou from The Wizard Of Oz. 14. 1989 Batman climbs Mount Everest.

Below: Back To The Future’s Doc Brown.

15. RoboCop’s in the OASIS. 16. So is Marvin The Martian. 17. And Battleborn’s Attikus. 18. Great Scott! It’s Doc Brown. 19. It’s war on Voltron’s Planet Doom. 20. Ultrabots’ Scorpion rides into battle. 21. Freddy Krueger, fingers and all. 22. Bow before Duke Nukem. 23. That’s a MA5B assault rifle from Halo. 24. Aech uses the EM-1 Railgun from Eraser. 25. Keep ’em peeled for Friday The 13th’s Jason Voorhees. 26. Street Fighter’s E. Honda climbs a hill. 27. 27 Finc Fi hy from The Office chooses StarCrafft’s Jim Raynor as his avatar. es Halliday (Mark Rylance) has a Trek funeral. James Halliday sports a mon pin.

THE RACE 30. Contender avatars include El Dragon from Battleborn. 31. And Ryu from Street Fighter. 32. R2-D2 and C-3PO in the race crowd. 33. That’s the cup from the end of Highlander. 34. The Back To The Future DeLorean has a Knight Rider grill and Ghostbusters logo. Ernest Cline: “When I sold Ready Player One, one of the ﬁrst things I did was buy a DeLorean so I could use it in my author photo. I drove it on my book tour.” 35. Art3mis rides Shotaro Kaneda’s motorcycle from Akira. 36. With a Wonder Woman sticker. 37. And a Ms. Pac-Man sticker. 38. And a Sega sticker. 39. And a logo for The Greatest American Hero. 40. The star of John Carpenter’s Christine — a 1957 Plymouth Fury. 41. It’s the original Lara Croft! 42. And the Mad Max Interceptor. 43. The Simpsons’ family car. 44. Transformers’ Megatron and Sentinel Prime on the race track. 45. Aech drives a Bigfoot Monster Truck. 46. Pity the fool! It’s the A-Team’s van. 47. Speed Racer Mach V.

48. There’s a Tron light cycle. 49. Jack Slater III, from Last Action Hero, which Penn co-wrote, is glimpsed on a marquee. Zak Penn: “I didn’t know there was a Last Action Hero reference in the movie. Ernie had gone to the ILM guys and convinced them to do it. I was really choked up.” 50. Spielberg ahoy! Jurassic Park’s T-Rex. Cline: “Steven didn’t want any references to his work. The only thing he signed off on was Back To The Future and the T-rex, because he was like, ‘Okay, I don’t have a monopoly on dinosaurs.’” 51. Daito drives The Bandit’s 1977 Pontiac m. As in, Smokey And Firebird Trans Am The Bandit. 52. Pole Position cars take up position. 53. The jack-kni ng truck is fr Big Trouble In Little China. 54. Na na na na n na na, Batman! The ’60s Batmobile goes over the edge. Cline: ““Before it gets knocked off a cliff by Aech’s monster truck, it screeche es out the old Batman theme song. You don’t pick it up unless you are listening for it. It cuts off right before you would recognise it.” 55. King Kong! Cline: “There is also

Below: The Iron Giant.

a bit of Max Steiner’s King Kong theme in the race.” 56. Back To The Future Part II’s hoverboard enters the fray. 57. ACE Chemicals is a reference to the Joker from Tim Burton’s Batman.

AECH’S PAD 58. ED-209 from RoboCop. 59. Yes, it’s The Iron Giant. Cline: “I will always be sad Ultraman didn’t make it into the movie from the novel, but happy that led to Iron Giant getting a bigger role. At the premiere, Tim McCanlies (who co-wrote The Iron Giant) told me it was the ﬁrst time people were asking for The Iron Giant stuff to be signed.” 60. Old school Battlestar Galactica laser blaster. 61. Aliens’ USS Sulaco. 62. Dune’s Harkonen Drop-ship. Zak Penn: “I happen to be one of those rare people who really likes the David Lynch version of Dune. I was glad to see that in there.” 63. Aech keeps her miniatures in a Fraggle Rock tin. 64. The Eagle 5 space RV from Spaceballs. ❯ 65. Battlestar Galactica’s

AUGUST 2018

Colonial Viper spaceship. 66. ED-209 from RoboCop. 67. Cameron’s dad’s 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 68. The EVA Pod from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 69. The Valley Forge from Silent Running: Cline: “That was Steven’s idea because it’s made by his old friend, [effects legend] Douglas Trumbull.” 70. Exosquad’s exo-skeleton robot. 71. A Thunderfighter from Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. 72. Cowboy Beebop’s Swordfish II spaceship. 73. The Peltzer Peeler Juicer from Gremlins. 74. The missile that comes out of the floor from Weird Science. 75. The “Cocktails & Dreams” sign from Cocktail. When he reigns… 76. There’s a Mad Max poster. 77. And a cabinet Pac-Man game.

PARZIVAL VS ART3MIS 78. Parzival reveals Halliday’s favourite racing game. Cline: “Steven used to have a little arcade at Amblin of his favourite video games. His favourite racing game was Turbo, so we made it Halliday’s

AUGUST 2018

favourite racing game.” 79. A GoldenEye game discussion. Zak Penn: “Anyone who is a serious gamer of my age or a little bit younger, if you don’t bring up GoldenEye when talking about a death match type game, then you are a noob.” 80. Halliday’s favourite song is The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. 81. Halliday’s favourite music vid: A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’. 82. “Some people can read War And Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story; others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.” That’s dialogue from Superman The Movie. 83. Art3mis says, “Later, McFly,” from Back To The Future.

THE MALL 84. Wade Watts’ moniker is a nod d to Peter Parker/Bruce Banner. 85. He also wears a Thundercats belt. 86. Hello, Hello Kitty as Wade enters the OASIS. 87. Anorak refers to Wade as “Padawan”, from Star Wars.

Below: Bill and Ted have an Excellent Adventure.

88. Composer Alan Silvestri nods to John William’s 1941 score. 89. Daito looks like actor Toshiro Mifune: Cline: “Steven directed Mifune in 1941, was friends with him, and asked his family if we could use his likeness. He is the only person in the world who could do that.” 90. A Halo add-on lets you become Master Chief (not MasterChef). 91. Look, there’s a Borderlands stall. 92. And an Overwatch stall. 93. And a Rubik’s Cube stall. 94. Not to mention a Looney Tunes shop. 95. And a Street Fighter store. 96. All hail The Zemeckis Cube, complete with Alan Silvestri’s Back To The Future theme! Cline: “In the novel, there’s a Planet Zem meckis where you can go and re-enact various Bob Zemeckis ﬁlms. Steven like ed the idea of paying tribute to his frien nd by being able to go back in time rela ating to the big shoot-out we have in the nightclub.” 97. The Holy Hand Grenade fro om Monty Python And The H Holy Grail. Cline: “Die-hard Python fans have made it very clear to me they are pissed off he doesn’t say ‘1, 2, 5!’ in honour of the Holy

Deathstroke, two major DC characters, are in the club. 123. It’s Gandalf in zero-G! 124. Street Fighter’s Blanka and Chun-Li. 125. Lara Croft shows up again. 126. Bartenders wear Devo’s ‘Whip It’ video hats. 127. Battleborn’s Miko appears. 128. As does Hagar The Horrible. 129. Plus the Joker. 130. The tune they dance to is, of course, ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Penn: “That was amazing, that’s from the book. The Travolta playlist software.” 131. Overwatch’s Reaper. 132. Is that a M41A pulse riﬂe from Aliens? Yes. Yes, it is. Penn: “The references that were most meaningful to me were actually the things that I as a gamer would want to use in the OASIS at that age. I would want to use the Pulse riﬂe from Aliens, I would want to use the weapon from Eraser, even though nobody notices it.” 133. Sorrento teases the Millennium Falcon. 134. Wade tries to catch Sorrento out during a trivia test with a question about Faber High School, the school from both Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club. 135. Wade also mentions Fast Times At Ridgemont High. 136. Sorrento likes Robotron. 137. Sorrento likes Duran Duran. Wild boy. Hand Grenade. I suggested he should and then Shoto should correct him and say. ‘Three, sir.’ Too nerdy.” 98. George Pal’s War Of The Worlds spaceship (plus sound effects).

THE ARCHIVES 99. Beetlejuice hounding Parzival. 100. Battleborn’s Ambra hounding Parzival. 101. Arkham Knight Batman is seen in Halliday’s journals. 102. As is Resident Evil 3: Nemesis’ Jill Valentine. 103. Lara Croft again. 104. Art3mis wears a Goro suit from Mortal Kombat. 105. And that’s the chestburster from Alien. 106. Here, Wade looks like Clark Kent. 107. Halliday mentions Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. 108. Halliday has a Space Invaders T-shirt. 109. Galaga poster in Halliday’s ofﬁces. 110. And a Beastmaster poster. 111. Another Spielberg reference: a Raiders Of The Lost Ark poster. 112. Young Halliday’s computer is IMSAI 8080 from War Games. 113. Halliday’s wife is nicknamed Kira

Dark, à la The Dark Crystal. 114. There’s a “Re-Elect Mayor ‘Goldie’ Wilson” poster from Back To The Future. Cline: “One Easter egg I asked for was a re-election poster for Wil Wheaton. He’s a friend of mine and reads the Ready Player One audio book. So there is a poster hanging on the wall that looks like a Mayor Goldie Wilson poster, but it’s actually an aged Will Wheaton to make him look like he is in his sixties.”

THE DISTRACTED GLOBE 115. Wade dresses as ‘Purple Rain’ Prince. 116. Then as ‘Thriller’-era Michael Jackson. 117. Then as a Duran Duran type. 118. Wade’s punk outﬁt boasts a Donkey Kong logo. 119. Wade lands on Buckaroo Banzai. As in, Peter Weller’s character frrom The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension. 120. A drop ship from Aliens is waiting to get into The Distracted Globe. 121. As is an X-Wing. 122. Harley Quinn and

Below: Heeere’s Johnny!

THE SHINING SEQUENCE 138. We see posters from The Fly and Say Anything. 139. Floating VHS covers include Batman and Full Metal Jacket. 140. A red Return Of The Jedi poster. 141. The gang find themselves in a re-enactment of The Shining. Spielberg chose the film as a nod to his great friend, Stanley Kubrick. Penn: “In the first draft, that was Blade Runner. It had a similar form. There was a chase across the rooftops like the one with Roy Batty, things got shot, cars crashed then they realised they ultimately had to get to the Voight-Kampff test.” Cline: “Being superfans of The Shining we had to narrow down the most familiar elements of the story, like Room 237 and the ballroom. We went very deep then pulled it back so it would still work for people who had never seen The Shining.The strange side-effect of that is, I have all these parents telling me over social media their kids leave Ready Player One desperate to see The Shining. I have to tell them, ‘No!’” 142. “Am I being Punk’d?’ ❯ says Aech. How Noughties.

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154. Sorrento’s battle bot is Mechagodzilla. Cline: “When Mechagodzilla appears, which made it all the way from the book, listen out for the old Toho Godzilla theme.” 155. Firefly’s Serenity shows up. 156. Daito chooses the form of Gundam. 157. It’s the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! (Michael Bay era). 158. Ripley’s Caterpillar P-5000 Work Loader from Aliens. 159. RoboCop’s ED-209. 160. All hail Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops from The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad. 161. Madballs are used as a bomb. 162. We see Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard. 163. Bloody hell, it’s Lara Croft again. 164. Jason And The Argonauts’ skeletons fighting Superman II’s General Zod. 165. And Conan the Barbarian. 166. Evil Dead Deadites. Groov vy! 167. Chappie! From that film! 168. BioShock’s Big Daddy. 169. Street Fighter II’s Chun-Li. Again. 170. Overwatch’s Tracer. 171. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Nitro Zeus all transform the battle. 172. Halo butt kickers. 173. I-R0k says to Sorrento, “No man m is

Below: Chucky, the source of Ready Player One’s pottiest-mouthed moment.

THE END 194. Young Halliday’s bedroom is a treasure trove. He’s playing Gorf. 195. There’s a Simon game. 196. A Joust poster. 197. And Big Trak. 198. Plus a Dungeons & Dragons poster. 199. A toy Godzilla. 200. Devo’s Freedom Of Choice album. 201. A Robbie The Robot toy from Forbidden Planet. 202. A Lost In Space robot toy. 203. And a Pac-Man poster. 204. Ladyhawke one-sheet. 205. A poster for 2112, the Rush album. 206. And a poster for War Games, whi h played a major part in the book. which 207. H Halliday’s, “Thank you for playing my game,” is a valued tradition among game-makers. n Wade and Samantha’s ﬂat we 208. In see Ro obby The Robot and R2-D2. 209. A Klingon Bat’leth. IAN FR REER REA

PLAYER ONE IS OUT NOW ON

DOWNL LOAD, DVD AND BLU-RAY

ALAMY

THE FINAL BATTLE 143. I-R0k brings the Orb of Osuvox in a Mogwai box. 144. The chant from Orb of Osuvox is from Excalibur. 145. Reference to “The Gold Mines Of Gygax” — Gary Gygax is the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. 146. Battletoads! (Zitz, Rash and Pimple.) 147. Swordquest is an Atari 2600 game. 148. Spielberg ahoy! Stripe from Gremlins is seen running with Freddy Krueger. Cline: “Steven realised that someone had sneaked in a Gremlin in one of the shots without asking him. By the time he spotted it, it was too late to take it out.” 149. Wade holds Lloyd Dobler’s Say Anything ghetto blaster. 150. Batman from Arkham Knight is listening to Wade. 151. There’s a Joust knight on an ostrich. 152. Street Fighter Chun-Li, Sagat, Ryu. 153. “It’s fucking Chucky!” The Child’s Play doll prompts the ﬁlm’s only F-bomb. Penn: “This was a velociraptor for a long time. It was too big to ﬁt theoretically in the car. Then the Chucky idea came along.” Cline: “I never in my life imagined Steven Spielberg was a Chucky fan. It was also his idea to drop the F-bomb.”

a failure who has friends.” Which is from It’s A Wonderful Life. 174. Chocobo from Final Fantasy II. 175. StarCraft Marines. 176. Artemis lancer from Gears Of War. 177. Street Fighter’s Sagat and Ryu. 178. The rail gun from Quake. 179. It’s It’s Pennywise. 180. And a Lord Of The Rings cave troll. 181. Spawn rocks up. 182. And some Star Wars stormtroopers. 183. IOI research material includes DC Comics Presents and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. 184. Atari 2600 games referenced here are Defenders. 185. And Centipede. 186. And Pitfall. 187. And Swordquest. 188. And Motocross. 189. The glaive from Krull shows up. 190. Thumbs up! It’s a nod to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 191. Adventure: An Atari 2600 game — the final challenge. Cline: “Adventure is the one challenge that remained the same all the way from the book to the movie. The creator of that game, Warren Robinett, who didn’t get any credit for the game, is now mentioned three times in a Steven Spielberg film.” 192. Aech’s truck has a Batman poster. 193. Aech name-drops Mario Kart in the final chase.

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THE RANKING

CHRIS HEWITT Empire’s Associate Editor. Prefers Meryl’s comedic roles — her ‘later, funny ﬁlms’.

HELEN O’HARA Empire’s EditorAt-Large. Thinks Streep is the best actor on the planet. Controversial!

IAN FREER Empire’s Contributing Editor. He’s met Streep. His in-depth report? She was lovely.

NICK DE SEMLYEN Empire’s Associate Editor. Went on a Streepathon in preparation.

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Four Empire writers argue the toss about the greatest actor on the planet

Chris: So, this is our irst actor Ranking. Meryl Streep holds the record for most Oscar nominations with 347. Where do we stand on her ilmography? Is she overrated, underrated, or just rated? Ian: I don’t think you can overrate Meryl Streep. I think she’s the best actor in the world, without doubt. Helen: I think she’s stunning. Ian: You could do another top 10 other than the one we’ll come up with and it would still be as strong. Strength in depth. Chris: That’s interesting. One of the things I found when I was putting this together is that there aren’t that many stone-cold classics. I think sometimes her performances are considered, years later, to be better than the ilms in which they belong. Nick: Have you seen The River Wild? It’s the ilm Deliverance could have been. Chris: It’s not in my Meryl Streep Top 10. It is in my David Strathairn Top 10. We’ll be doing that Ranking in October of 2034. Ian: There is something in that, though, in that she’s the best thing in the things that she’s in. There might be a sense that she overshadows things. Helen: [Doubt director] John Patrick Shanley talked about it once in an interview. He talked about how she likes to win the scene. This was his take on it. His perception was that she likes to win the scene and [co-star] Philip Seymour Hoffman had no interest in playing the game. Nick: May I quote Cher? Helen: Always. Nick: Cher said in the ’80s, “Meryl Streep is an acting machine in the same sense that a shark is a killing machine.” I don’t entirely know what Cher is talking about, but that seems to it what you’re saying. She is ferocious. She prepares to an insane degree. On a technical level, she’s phenomenal.

Chris: All she does is eat, sleep, and make little Oscars. Helen: One of the things I struggled with in putting together a top 10 was deciding how much weight to give her comedy roles. I think she’s great fun in Death Becomes Her, I think she’s astonishingly good in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Yes, I said it. I just love her in that. I think she’s so funny. But I went a bit Oscar-y and didn’t give them as much prominence as I maybe should uld have. Nick: There are not a lot off laughs in the late ’70s/early ’80s Meryl ilmography. I added them u up. There’s half a laugh in totall. I spent the last four or ive days d watching as many Meryl Streep ilms as I could, mostly from m that early period. And they are depressing as hell. Chris: Sophie’s Choice. Nick: The most depressing by far. The plot for that is almost ludicrously depressing. Helen: Sophie is so delicate. When you irst see her, she looks liike a harsh wind could blow her away. That’s not what I associate w with Meryl Streep. It’s a very diffferent role to The French Lieutenant’s Wo oman or Out Of Africa. The only thing th hose three have in common is acccents. She was famous for her accent work at one point. Ian: Which does her a disservice. She’s brilliant and nuanced and real, and all sorts of things that go beyond accents. Nick: But I can’t think of any ny other actor who has done Australian, Polish, Irish, British, Danish, which she learned from Jeremy Irons’ nanny. The list goes on and on and every single accent she nails. Ian: Her Margaret Thatcher is very good as well. Chris: Her comedy work was a reaction to being pigeonholed as this Oscarhoovering dramatic machine, I think. She’s been nominated for 21 Academy Awards, winning three, most recently in 2012 for The Iron Lady. Before that, a long barren streak.

ILLUSTRATION: JACEY

OUR CRITICS

MERYL STREEP MOVIES

TH E TOP TEN Helen: “Barren”. It was punctuated by regular nominations, which many actors would kill for. Chris: It was 29 years between Oscars. She won Best Actress for Sophie’s Choice in 1983, and her irst one in 1980 — she won for Kramer Vs. Kramer, in which she plays Kramer. Ian: You’d swear that she would have won for Out Of Africa. Chris: The Post, most recently. Ian: Deserved. Chris: I feel very strongly that’s a ‘well done for being Meryl Streep’ nomination. Helen: Absolutely not. Ian: Could not be more wrong. Chris: 2007, she was nominated for The Devil Wears Prada. I can’t think of many more iconic Meryl Streep roles. Ian: It’s a brilliant use of her persona. When they’re getting ready for Miranda Priestly to come into the ofice, they’re also getting ready for Meryl Streep to come into the ofice. It feels like that. Helen: It’s a terriic ilm, and signiicantly better than the book on which it’s based. The ilm feels like Wall Street with girls. That’s why that performance works as well as it does. She’s basically Gordon Gekko for a different generation. Nick: I’m surprised there hasn’t been a sequel. She hasn’t done many sequels. ‘The River Wilder’, come on! Chris: ‘Kramer Vs. Kramer Vs. Godzilla’? Nick: In fact, Mamma Mia! will be her irst sequel. Here We Go Again. That’s a good title. Helen: I don’t think she’s in it much. Ian: She’s dead. Nick: That won’t stop her. If anyone can play a singing ghost, it’s Meryl Streep. Ian: You can argue she’s the auteur of a lot of these ilms. Even if she did not initiate the project, you feel the juice of the project is coming from her. Chris: Her irst [Oscar] nomination was in 1979 for The Deer Hunter. Ian: She’s not in The Deer Hunter a lot, but what I like about that is it’s Meryl Streep playing ‘normal’. Nick: Silkwood, she plays someone pretty normal. I really like that ilm. It’s really naturalistic. Chris: Ian, I know you like Manhattan. Do you consider that to be a Meryl Streep ilm? Ian: No. But she’s terriic in it. She’s in a couple of scenes and that’s enough to warrant inclusion. Nick: I wouldn’t include Deer Hunter or Manhattan because she’s not in them enough. Helen: I felt, like Nick, that they weren’t Meryl Streepian. Chris: Okay. Enough squabbling, let’s vote!

SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982)

Nick: “A near-impossible decision, but ultimately the top Streep ﬁlm had to be this devastating drama about an Auschwitz survivor. Contains her greatest ever scene — you’ll know it when you see it.”

OUT OF AFRICA (1985)

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Ian: “A rare romantic lead, Streep effortlessly transforms into a Danish gentlewoman. It’s a poised, graceful, powerful performance.”

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006) Helen: “One of the best villains (or is she?) of the 21st century, and a fascinating portrait of a complicated, brilliant woman.”

ADAPTATION (2002) Chris: “If it were up to me, this would be top. Streep’s loosey-goosey portrayal of Susan Orlean gives the ﬁlm an emotional punch.”

SILKWOOD (1983) Nick: “One of her most naturalistic performances, her malfeasance-investigating power-plant worker is endlessly watchable.”

THE DEER HUNTER (1978) Ian: “This should be higher, but my esteemed colleagues don’t count it as a ‘Meryl Streep ﬁlm’. Nonsense. She packs a hell of a punch.”

FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (2016) Helen: “Not enough people saw this. She turns a character who could have been a buffoon into someone digniﬁed and sad.”

KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979) Chris: “This bagged Streep her ﬁrst Oscar as a mother wrestling with a legal process that might cost her her son. Incredible stuff.”

DEATH BECOMES HER (1992) Ian: “Meryl at her silliest. A ﬁne showcase for her comic chops. She’s so committed she actually turned her head back to front.”

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981) Helen: “She plays the same role across two time periods and deploys two accents! What more do you people want?”

AGREE? DISAGREE? WRITE IN AND TELL US AT: EMPIRE@BAUER-MEDIA.COM.AU / @EMPIREAUST

AUGUST 2018

103

David the Goliath From MLK to 007, David Oyelowo on his eclectic CV

DAVID OYELOWO IS a man of many voices. In recent years, he’s assumed the accents of upper-class British assassins, Nigerian middle managers, Americans aplenty, and even the odd alien. It can seem as if the only one he hasn’t used is his own (middle-class north Londoner). “I think the last time may have been Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes,” laughs the 42-yearold. “I almost never use my own accent, to the point where I’m concerned I may need a dialect coach if I’m playing a Brit!” The accents have come in handy for Oyelowo in building an impressive, groundbreaking, career. Here he talks us through seven of his most memorable roles.

Yardley Acheman The Paperboy (2012) Lee Daniels spent years trying to make Selma, with Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr, before giving up in frustration. He turned to this sleazy, sweaty potboiler and brought Oyelowo with him to play a journalist who is much more than he seems. “One of the unexpected choices we ended up making was that initially you think Yardley is British,” laughs Oyelowo. “Then, in a very bizarre twist, you realise he’s been faking the whole time and he’s actually African-American!” Oyelowo based his hybrid accent on ’60s Bonds like Connery and Lazenby. “I thought, ‘Yardley’s watched a lot of Bond movies.’ It was a mindbending thing.”

Corporal Ira Clerk Lincoln (2012) In a ilm dominated by its title character, Oyelowo made an impact in one scene: as the soldier who recites the Gettysburg Address to Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) on the battleield. “It was the

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most nervous I’ve been since drama school,” he admits. Oyelowo prepped hard, learning the Gettysburg Address inside out, and watching Day-Lewis (“my favourite actor”) at close quarters. “In that one scene with him, I got part of the blueprint to play Dr King. I could feel the investment he had put in to play Lincoln.”

even get to read a script. “So I had no idea why there was dust all over the classroom!” Since making the movie, he and Nolan have become friends. “He’s someone I get to talk to about ilm. That was a very good investment as far as I was concerned.”

Agent Kallus Star Wars Rebels (2014)

Top: David

School Principal Interstellar (2014)

When Oyelowo signed on to voice the evil Kallus in Dave Filoni’s Star Wars cartoon, he didn’t expect to be still around by the time the show inished this year, let alone for Kallus to have morphed into a good guy. “I would never know which direction the character was going to go until I went into the recording session,” he says. Star Wars passed him by as a child; something George Lucas, with whom Oyelowo worked on 2012’s

pharmaceutical rep

2014 was something of a breakthrough year for Oyelowo. Buried among the lead roles and car chases with Tom Cruise, though, is a one-scene appearance as a concerned head teacher in Christopher Nolan’s sci-i epic. “I’ve always believed the way you learn as an actor is to be around people who are much better than you,” he says of a role so small, he didn’t

Oyelowo as hapless Harold in Gringo. Above: Turning in a career-deﬁning performance as Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 2014’s Selma.

BINGEWATCH

Red Tails, rectiied. “He sent me boatloads of DVDs and toys for my children. I felt bad that my new boss had found out I didn’t know anything about it.”

Dr Martin Luther King Jr Selma (2014)

HORROR ANTHOLOGIE

At last, Oyelowo got to play MLK, after Ava DuVernay took over the directorial reins from Lee Daniels. And while his layered, humanising portrait of such an iconic igure was shamefully ignored by the Academy, it’s the deining role of his career. “It had to be from the outside in, because the outer shell, the speeches, the preacher, the icon, we all know that on a very surface level.” Seven years had passed between Oyelowo irst reading the script and saying his irst words as Dr King. “That afforded me the time I needed to go deeper, to the point whereby it became more about existing than depicting.”

How many movies is too many?

ANTHOLOGY HORRORS ARE a sneaky way of translating the short story format to the big screen. Tonight, I am about to feed myself with six of them. That’s 12 relentless hours of uncut darkness, and upwards of 30 stories, which would be taxing at the best of times, but ills me with fear today because I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in a week and, due to an administrative error (ie fafing about), my marathon begins at the ungodly hour of 3pm. Well done, me. It’s gonna be a long night.

James Bond Trigger Mortis (2015) Much has been made of whether Idris Elba will become the irst black Bond after Daniel Craig quits, but Oyelowo has beaten him to it by narrating the audiobook of Anthony Horowitz’ 007 novel. “I know what it feels like to swill that particular role in my mouth a bit,” he says. A Bond fan, Oyelowo decided to bring his own perspective to the role. “The challenge was to not go in and do a Connery or a Roger Moore or a Daniel Craig impression.” And he’s open to the idea of giving it a go on the big screen. “I love that it’s no longer such a far-fetched notion, that a black actor could be considered. That’s a wonderful thing to know has happened, let alone be one of the names thrown into the hat.”

3:04PM DEAD OF NIGHT This 1945 Ealing Studios compendium is the father of the format. Stories include a ghost boy kissing a teenager and a fellow who sees a parallel world through a mirror (“Did you buy it in a joke shop?” he asks his wife). I am not particularly terriied, although the climactic reveal of our hero stuck in an endless loop is moderately upsetting. Why, though, do oldendays posh people speak so loudly? They are all shouting, “HOW DO YOU DO?” at each other.

5:10 BLACK SABBATH

“If it’s not speciied in the script the assumption is it’s a white male,” admits Oyelowo of Hollywood’s usual approach to casting. So it was something of a turn-up for the books that the bouncy, twisty screenplay for Gringo came his way, and that he was able to suggest Harold, the patsy at the middle of the labyrinthine plot, be Nigerian. (Oyelowo’s parents are from Nigeria). “That’s part of my experience. I didn’t want anything about that to feel pat,” he says. “We’ve seen this kind of character before but not wrapped in the skin of a Nigerian immigrant.” CHRIS HEWITT GRINGO IS OUT ON 29 AUGUST ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

ILLUSTRATION: WANT SOME STUDIO

MAARTEN DE BOER/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

Harold Soyinka Gringo (2018)

Mario Bava’s 1963 triple bill is light on plot but heavy on atmosphere, all screeching cats, wailing dogs and evil wind. (Weather wind. Not fart wind.) “What’s the matter, woman?” asks Boris Karloff’s vampire. “Can’t I fondle my own grandson?” Maybe not. The music is rather hysterical, and I ind the original Italian score was replaced by one from American composer Les Baxter. I have investigated this Les Baxter — he also scored Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, How To Stuff A Wild Bikini and The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini. Now that’s a legacy.

7:24PM DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS Christopher Lee! Peter Cushing! Donald Sutherland! Roy bloody Castle! Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman! Hang on… what? Indeed,

Radio 1’s inest inds himself up against a diabolical plant in this. Sutherland is married to a vampire. Castle comes undone after triling with voodoo. His irst line of dialogue is about being shat on by a bird. I’ve started drinking.

9:15PM CREEPSHOW We’re getting self-aware now, with George A. Romero and Stephen King’s homage to the EC and DC horror comics of the 1950s. I grin and bear it as King, playing a dumb hick, turns into a tree, and Leslie Nielsen terrorises Ted Danson. It’s fun — Danson as a zombie ish-man is obviously fun — it’s just not the classic team-up you’d want from two titans. Like when Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder did ‘Just Good Friends’.

11:25PM V/H/S This one is immediately nasty, straight in with a sexual assault. All of 2012 release V/H/S is horrible — every bit, I think, includes dismemberment — but the six found-footage shorts are executed creatively, and some of it is really great. For the irst time in eight hours I am actually scared. I must say, it’s woken me up. It’s past midnight now, which is exactly the right time to watch this, alone and in the dark. Joe Swanberg’s alien ghosts gave me proper chills.

1:20AM GHOST STORIES If V/H/S brought the horror anthology format into the 21st century, Ghost Stories is an affectionate tribute to its roots — writer/directors Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson grew up on all this, and love it to bits. And in context, where this one excels is with its framing device, transcending its function, deeper and more disturbing than the stories within. And that’s that — it’s 3am and I must sleep. Lord knows how with all this muck in my head. ALEX GODFREY

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TheCaine scrutiny Michael Caine has had more iconic lines than you’ve had hot dinners. He talks us through eight of the ﬁnest

ACTING IN FILM, Michael Caine’s revered 1990 tutorial book for wannabe thesps, contains such hot tips as, “Less is more,” “Don’t blink,” and, “Don’t dribble butter down your chin or trail your trouser bottoms in the mud.” Another piece of advice he could have added is, “Pick scripts where you get to say at least one memorable line.” Over his 62-year career, Caine has delivered dialogue so deftly that it has become eternally lodged in the pop-culture zeitgeist. He’s also manfully struggled with words that should never have been uttered by a human being (yes, in Jaws: The Revenge he really does say, “When I come back, remind me to tell you about the time I took 100 nuns to Nairobi”). We asked him to reminisce about his most legendary lines, the ones that have kept Michael Caine impersonators busy for decades, and he was happy to oblige. Oh yes, he bloody was.

“I am going to cook you the best meal you have ever tasted in your life.” THE IPCRESS FILE, 1965

“I’m a very good cook. My mother was a cook, and I grew up in kitchens in rich people’s houses, watching what she was doing. Mostly I do British roasts, Yorkshire puddings, turkey and stufing. I’m very good at all that. That line really sets Harry Palmer apart from James Bond, who you’d never see making a meal — he’s always at a very posh restaurant with a beautiful girl. Harry is a sort of working-class hero. Though the producers in Hollywood said I looked ‘effeminate’. Because there’s this guy with glasses doing his own shopping and cooking a meal for a girl. I think they were trying to suggest that I was gay or something. In fact, I was just making an effort.” “So what’s the answer? That’s what I keep asking myself. What’s it all about?” ALFIE, 1966

Michael Caine photographed in 1965, the breakout year of The Ipcress File. Right: With Shelley Winters in the following year’s Alﬁe.

“That’s a line that’s stayed with me. I was going through a period of soul-searching myself when I was making Alie. I was single then. I’d been in the Army, as an infantry soldier in Korea, which is the worst thing to be in a war. And I’d been through some other things. I’d nearly died ❯ of maleria. Life had been very

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rough, you know? And then inally I got The Ipcress File and Alie, where I was paid handsome sums of money and got some fame. Ipcress File made me a star in England. Alie made me a star in America, depite the fact they had to dub it because they couldn’t understand what I was talking about. “At the age Alie is, young men typically don’t know what life is about and get themselves in lots of trouble trying to ind out. And eventually the world will show them what it’s all about. For me, the answer is family. I’ve always been a very deep family man, and even more so now. I have three grandchildren, and we’re always together doing something or going off somewhere. I love my family.” “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody door off!” THE ITALIAN JOB, 1969

“I’m writing a book at the moment called Blow The Bloody Door Off, which is about what happens if you become a star. I’m always amazed by new things about fame. I met Cara Delevingne and we had a picture taken together. She put it up [on her Instagram] and it got about 600,000 or a million hits in a day. I was watching the Brit Awards and there was someone on there who got six billion hits on one of his things. I regard myself as very young, technically. I have iPads and computers and all that. But when you get into things like six billion hits, I ind it hard to believe. “That line from The Italian Job, everyone says it. Even my grandson, who’s nine, has said it. And Tom Hanks, who did an impression of me which is the best one I’ve ever heard. It’s funny it’s that line that’s endured, one about cars, because I couldn’t drive when I made the picture.”

Clockwise from above: 1969’s The Italian Job,

“You’re a big man but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full-time job.”

and one ill-fated bus;

GET CARTER, 1971

Get Carter (1971);

The toughest of guys in With Dirty Rotten

“In the book the ilm’s based on [Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis], the line is longer. [It reads, ‘Cliff, you’re a big bloke. You’re in good shape. But I know more than you do.’] We boiled it down. We made it a bit tougher. “Carter is the toughest man I ever played. I based him on a real gangster I knew around Elephant And Castle. He saw the movie, without knowing he was the role model for the character, and I asked him what he thought. He said, ‘Load of crap.’ I said, ‘Really? Because it got very good reviews and it’s been very popular.’ And he said, ‘You weren’t married. You had no responsibility. That’s what was wrong with it. Why do

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Scoundrels’ (1988) Glenne Headly and Steve Martin; As wise father ﬁgure Alfred in The Dark Knight

you think we do all these things? To take care of our families.’ I’d been told he had killed several people, so I didn’t argue with him. I agreed with everything he said. “One thing I’m proud of about that performance is that I cry. All those men are emotional, you know? To go out and rob or smash somebody up, you are always in extremes of emotions. So they’re very susceptible to bursting into tears. Especially if they’re drunk.”

(2008).

“We’ve been ﬁghting a losing battle against the insects for 15 years, but I never thought I’d see the ﬁnal faceoff in my lifetime. And I never dreamed that it would turn out to be the bees. They’ve always been our friend.” THE SWARM, 1978

“As you can imagine, it was very dificult to deliver that dialogue. I mean, we had to do a couple of takes because I couldn’t

keep a straight face. I regard The Swarm as one of the worst ilms I’ve ever made. But I was new to Hollywood and was so impressed by the stars who had signed up for it. This great producer [Irwin Allen] had just done a bit hit movie with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman [The Towering Inferno] and offered me the chance to co-star with Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland and José Ferrer. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve got to be in this.’ “Once we started making it, I quickly realised the picture wasn’t going to be Gone With The Wind, you know? But it was still a good lesson for me. I never sat in my dressing room when I wasn’t in a take. I used to watch these veteran Hollywood actors at work. And I learned so much from it. I have a phrase which I use a great deal: ‘Whatever situation you’re in, no matter how bad it is, use the dificulty.’ The Swarm taught me that.

“Carter is the toughest man I ever played. I based him on a real gangster I knew around Elephant And Castle.” MICHAEL CAINE “Hank Fonda [Henry to everyone else] became a friend. And funnily enough, I did end up making friends with the bees. A couple of years ago a horde of them made a nest in a tree in my garden. And my neighbour, who was a beekeeper, put them in a hive, had labels made and it was known as ‘Caine’s Honey’. The bees become your friends. Wasps never do.” “Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff?” DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, 1988

“That’s one of my favourite ilms. And it was a very happy eight weeks. Because I was in one of my favourite places, the South of France, on the Riviera, you know? And they rented me a villa between two of my closest friends, Roger Moore and Leslie Bricusse, the composer. The problem with that ilm, and especially when Steve [Martin] was doing Ruprecht and waving his trident around, was that I couldn’t stop ruining takes by laughing. I remember we did about 30 takes on one scene because I couldn’t get the line out. Fortunately for us, we weren’t the only ones who laughed. The audience laughed too.” “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.” DUFFY/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY, REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL, 1992

“I just watched that at home. It holds up. I love Dickens — and that line is straight from the Dickens book — but the reason I made the ilm is that my youngest daughter, who was seven at the time, had never seen me in a movie. I couldn’t exactly show her Ipcress File or Alie, you know? So I made this ilm for her. And now my grandchildren love it too. We get a bowl of popcorn and sit and watch it at Christmas when it comes on. A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest Christmas stories ever, isn’t it? And it’s even better with Muppets. The secret to acting with them is to treat them like people. Not like dummies with people below them with arms like bloody weightlifters.”

“There are only two things I can’t stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch.” AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER, 2002

“I thought that was a very funny line. You know, I hope they didn’t get offended by that in Holland. Because the last bit comes out of nowhere, doesn’t it? Why does he say that? I thought about it and couldn’t igure out why he hates the Dutch. But that’s just Mike [Myers], the way he writes. “It was a lovely movie to do. There was this young African-American girl there when we started and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ She said, ‘Beyoncé Knowles.’ And it was Beyoncé. She was only 18 then. I said, ‘What do you want to do in life, Beyoncé?’ She said, ‘I want to win an Oscar for acting.’ And I think she could. She could.” “Pull my ﬁnger.” CHILDREN OF MEN, 2006

“What a wonderful death scene. Very touching and beautifully written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. And that line, ‘Pull my inger,’ just struck me as so strange and touching. It’s an odd thing to say when you’re about to be killed, but that’s why it’s so wonderful. I based Jasper on John Lennon. I knew John very well and so it was interesting to copy him and have that long hair and everything.” “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” THE DARK KNIGHT, 2008

“Did I know that this line would become iconic? Yeah. Oh blimey, yeah. Because it’s true, you know? All those dictators we’ve had all over the world in recent years, they just want to watch the world burn.” NICK DE SEMLYEN SHERLOCK GNOMES IS OUT NOW ON DIGITAL, DVD AND BLU-RAY

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THE STORY OFTHE SHOT

LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE GUILLERMO DEL TORO was attached to the 2017 Disney Beauty And The Beast, eventually directed by Bill Condon. Given the Mexican auteur once called Jean Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête (1946) the “most perfect cinematic fable ever told”, he might have just been plain old intimidated. Intoxicating, poetic and immensely moving, the ilm was made as an escape for a war-ravaged France and has survived to become the deinitive version of Beauty And The Beast. Del Toro didn’t abandon the idea completely: The Shape Of Water is nothing if not La Belle Et La Bête with gills. This ilm’s magical charm is encapsulated in the stunning moment Beast (Jean Marais) carries Belle (Josette Day), who has fainted at the sight of the creature, through his enchanted castle. The scene relies on primitive (even for the time) in-camera effects or, as Cocteau wrote, “Tricks but honest tricks, the only ones I can get excited about.” The most iconic of these is the candelabras held up by arms that light up on their own. Achieved simply by actors hiding behind black drapes, this bargain-basement surrealism is key to the ilm’s power. Shot at Saint-Maurice Studios in Paris, the lo-i look was also a necessity, the troubled production plagued by antiquated equipment and power failures — aptly enough, the set movers worked by candlelight. The problems were compounded by tension between Cocteau and his new cameraman, Henri Alekan. Throughout the shoot, Alekan wanted a soft, diffuse The women’s fairytale look; Cocteau wanted a more hard-edged costumes were made look to ground the fantasy in reality. “I drive Alekan by Paris couture house to the opposite of what appears poetic for fools,” he Jeanne Lanvin. Pierre wrote. Cocteau won out in the end. Cardin supervised the To play the Beast, Jean Marais had to undergo ive men’s threads. hours of work each day for the transformation, with every visible part of his body covered in animal fur and fangs ensuring he could only eat mush during the day. At one point, the Bizarrely the director could empathise with his star make-up for the Beast — during the shoot, Cocteau was hospitalised with was intended to eczema. “On my face there’s plenty of cracks, wounds resemble a stag. and itches and my hands are bleeding, but the face and This was Marais’ hands of Jean Marais are covered with a so painful initial idea. crust, removing it is similar to my treatments.” The inished ilm was so good it discouraged Walt Disney from making his own version and also While this scene was inluenced the two later Disney adaptations in a shot on a soundstage, signiicant way. This sense of a castle coming to the Château de Raray, life was a Cocteau invention not present in Jeannenear Senlis, doubled Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s fairytale. No for the Beast’s castle Cocteau, no sentient candelabras, singing teapots in exterior shots. or dancing dishes. If you want to thank M. Cocteau, be our guest.IAN FREER

Instant Trivia 1_

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HOME SCREEN

UNSANE

LOVE, SIMON

OUT 29 AUGUST / RATED MA15+ / 98 MINS

OUT NOW / RATED M / 110 MINS

At this point, Steven Soderbergh is basically showing off. His second theatrical release since the shortest-lived retirement this side of Obi-Wan Kenobi sees him fashion this psychological thriller using nothing more than the iPhone in his pocket. (And decent sound and editing equipment.) Claire Foy leads a quality cast as a high-flying exec who finds herself committed to a mental health institution against her will, only to find that she might be trapped alongside the unhinged stalker who’s been after her for years. Delightfully dark, with twists of which Hitchcock would have approved, I was nervous that the film would be dominated by the iGimmick. But Soderbergh keeps things classical in composition and construction, while not being above shoving it into Foy’s face for a full-on wig-out. See it and feel shame that all you do with your phone is tweet and play that game you’ve been meaning to delete for ages. CHRIS HEWITT

The pitch for Love, Simon could sound a little like You’ve Got Mail for Millennials: two strangers fall for each other via (e)mail without revealing their true identities. The kicker is why: they’re gay. So, this is a film about coming out, but it’s perhaps as much about the awkward glory of school romance — a film for anyone who ever felt like an outsider (that is to say: all of us). Even the ostensible villain (Logan Miller) is transparently acting out of hurt rather than pure malice, while the title character (Nick Robinson) is believably gauche and, in his own way, insensitive. The film may dissolve some prejudice as well as provide a positive picture for anyone who wants to be open about who they really are. But don’t watch Love, Simon because it’s important (although it undoubtedly is). Watch it because it’s really, really good. Warm, funny and compassionate — it’s a hug for the heart.

PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING

KODACHROME

BLOCKERS

OUT NOW / RATED M / 111 MINS

OUT 29 AUGUST / RATED M / 105 MINS

OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 102 MINUTES

It seems that there was just one person who spent five years anticipating the Pacific Rim sequel: me. Guillermo del Toro’s epic 2013 robot-vs-monster mash has its fans (there are dozens of us, dozens!), and while his absence is felt in Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel, there’s still goofy Saturday breakfast cartoon entertainment to be had. The action never matches the Hong Kong brawl of the first film, but the human cast gets some welcome upgrades. Charlie Hunnam’s dull Raleigh Becket is out and John Boyega is in, injecting Uprising with a rowdier energy as Jake ‘son of Stacker’ Pentecost, while Cailee Spaeny is an instant hit as the scrappy and resourceful Amara. There’s even a deliciously bizarre reason for Charlie Day to return. Bring back Ron Perlman’s dapper gangster Hannibal Chau for Pacific Rim 3: Beyond Shatterdome and I’ll be first in line. BEN TRAVIS

Irascible photographer Ben (Ed Harris) has long been estranged from his son Matt (Jason Sudeikis). But, in the last stages of terminal cancer, he pressures Matt into joining him and his nurse (Elizabeth Olsen) on a road trip to get his last rolls of Kodachrome ﬁlm developed at the only place that does it, before it — and he — shuts up shop for good. Harris is the ﬁlm’s secret weapon, playing the curmudgeonly Ben with gleeful misanthropy while staying short of caricature. Sudeikis proves an able counter-point too, carefully walking the line as a man whose sensitivity is masked by barbed defences. Olsen is served less well by the script, having little to work with as peacemaker between the pair. This is a story rife with contrivance, but like its namesake, Kodachrome is concerned about capturing humanity in the moment. As a snapshot of familial tensions and connections, this is well worth your time JAMES DYER

Don’t be fooled by the trailers. Or that generic title. Or the fact that John Cena chugs beer with his butt. Blockers is a rarity: a coming-ofage sex comedy that is anything but generic. Focusing on three girls (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, Gideon Adlon) who make a sex-pact to lose their virginity on prom night and the parents (Cena, Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz) who go to increasingly ludicrous lengths to stop them, Kay Cannon’s perfectly cast feature debut is endearingly progressive when discussing female sexuality while being consistently hilarious, with Cena making the most out of emoji-related gags alongside the typically great Mann. That it manages all this in addition to a touching coming-out arc is stealthily groundbreaking, and the fact that all the characters are inherently good people (there are no villains here) matters. What’s the emoji for pleasantly surprised? AMON WARMANN

EVERY NEW RELEASE YOU NEED TO OWN. NOW

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NEV PIERCE

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COMPETITION ENDS 4 SEPTEMBER FOR A CHANCE to win these prizes, email us at empiregiveaways@bauer-media.com.au, write the prize in the subject line, your preferred format if there are both DVD or Blu-ray options and complete the answer in 25 words or less, not forgetting to include your contact details. All competitions are open to both Australian and New Zealander Empire readers. For conditions of entry visit www. bauer-media.com.au/terms/competition-terms

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