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ISSUE 342

NOVEMBER 2017

JUSTICE LEAGUE • STRANGER THINGS 2 • THE DEATH OF STALIN • ANDY SERKIS

NOVEMBER 2017 £4.70 $10.99 USD $11.99 CAN

“Get me the Justice Department, Entertainment Division!”

IN CINEMAS JANUARY WATCH TRAILER GREATESTSHOWMANTICKETS.CO.UK

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THE SUPERHERO MOVIE OF THE YEAR” D A I LY S TA R

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TERRI WHITE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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ILLUSTRATION: DAVID MAHONEY

and Wonder Woman were but twinkles in our eyes, there was already talk of the biggie, the one we were somehow already waiting for before we’d even seen what was to come first: Justice League. There have been ups and downs and peaks and troughs since that point, but after the huge, heartwarming commercial and critical success of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman this summer, we are going into this movie firmly on a high. Actually, we’re going into the last few months of the year on a high. I write this on my way back from the Toronto International Film Festival, where I saw some genuinely incredible films that will be rounding out this year and leading us into the next, including the frankly batshit grindhouse prison drama Brawl In Cell Block 99; the other-worldly, pure-of-heart and deep-of-soul The Shape Of Water, and my personal favourite, the film that I have loved more (so far) this year than any other, by quite some way: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. What they all share is bravery, beauty and complete commitment to telling unusual, surprising, unflinching stories. We’re covering some of those films in this issue and others in the ones ahead. And this is ultimately our pledge to you: we will ensure you know about every amazing film you should see (and yes, those you shouldn’t) and the fascinating, inspiring stories behind them and their creation from those who brought them into the world. Think of it as us sitting next to you in the pictures, a reassuring arm on yours. When you turn, mouth open, eyes like saucers, then we know our job is done. We look forward to doing it again next month.

JUSTICE LEAGUE The coolest superheroes around make their big-screen bow. Why are they the coolest? Because they take their drinks with just ice.

PADDINGTON 2 Director Paul King and star Hugh Grant share shocking tales of the talking bear’s diva demands, including pure grade-A marmalade with a street value of £4.29. here: Justice League; Early Man; The Thing; mother!; Stranger Things 2.

STRANGER THINGS 2 Netﬂix’s breakout sci-ﬁ show returns for a second slice of ’80s nostalgia. Whatever happened to Spangles? Also, you don’t see white dog poo anymore. What’s up with that?

PUMPING IRON Reading this piece on the 40th anniversary of the classic Arnie body-building documentary is as satisfying as coming, you know?

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THE DEATH OF STALIN Armando Iannucci’s political satire, the sweariest ﬁlm comedy since... Armando Iannucci’s last political satire.

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THE EMPIRE INTERVIEW Andy Serkis turns director for Breathe, so we talked to him. Or we think it was him. They can work wonders with CGI these days.

HORSE SOLDIERS Not content with watching Loki saddle up in War Horse, Thor’s at it now too. That family has issues.

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WONDER WOMAN Patty Jenkins tells all, and we didn’t even have to break out the Lasso Of Truth.

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 Vince Vaughn shaves head, goes nuts. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the ﬁrst 98 ‘Brawl In Cell Block’ movies, you’ll pick it right up.

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THE SHAPE OF WATER The Guillermo del Toroiest ﬁlm of all time.

DADDY’S HOME 2 We go bowling with Ferrell and Wahlberg as they aim for a turkey with their comedy sequel. Relax: turkey is a good thing in bowling.

HOW MUCH IS A PINT OF MILK? Grace Jones. Semi-skimmed is the drug.

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CALL ME BY YOUR NAME It’s a peach.

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE If you see one ﬁlm this year featuring John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, make it this one. Or Logan Lucky. Or Alien: Covenant. THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES The Adam Sandler movie it’s okay to like.

THE LEFTOVERS Damon Lindelof on what to do with all the turkey and trimmings post-Christmas. THE THING John Carpenter’s Thoughts About John Carpenter’s The Thing.

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MY MOVIE MASTERMIND Jai Courtney. We didn’t ask him to spell “Genisys”. We’re not sadists.

SPINE LINE ANSWERS ISSUE 341: NEWSSTAND: “COME BACK! IT’S THE LIGHT OF THE MOON. THE LAST MOON OF AUTUMN” IS FROM THE HOBBIT: THE

Clockwise from

DESOLATION OF SMAUG.SUBS: “GET IT IN. THAT’S THE LAST ONE IN THERE NOW, BABY. CHEW. CHEW.” IS FROM COOL HAND LUKE.

HARRY DEAN STANTON Empire’s tribute to the brilliant character actor, who died at 91. Altogether now: “Boys! Avenge me! AVEEENNNGE MEEEEEE!”

Editors Editor-In-Chief Terri White Deputy Editor Jonathan Pile 020 3879 2247

XENO-MOORED It would seem the Nostromo was not actually destroyed at the end of Alien but has actually transformed into a boat currently moored at the Thames in Abingdon! A new franchise looms!

Art Creative Director Chris Lupton 020 3879 2250

MARTIN GILLETT, VIA EMAIL

Incredible. Arguably Alien would have been even more terrifying had it been set on a canal boat. The crew would have had not just an acid-drooling star-beast to contend with, but brown water and the occasional ﬂoating condom. Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse Membership, plus one for a friend! Valid for one year at 23 Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including the flagship Picturehouse Central in London’s West End, each membership comes pre-loaded with four free tickets, and gets you access to priority booking and exclusive discounts on everything in the cinema. When you write to us, please ensure you include your full contact details so we can arrange delivery of your prize.

omission! On the L.A. Confidential TV show

WHY JUST L.A. CONFIDENTIAL ? JAMES ELLROY’S ‘LA QUARTET’ COULD MAKE A MULTIYEAR SERIES ON HBO. THEN AMERICAN TABLOID TRILOGY. DECADE OF TV RIGHT THERE.

Your list of movies with exclamation marks in your mother! article forgot possibly the best of all — the John Wayne-starring Hatari!. This mid-’60s African safari jaunt had everything — the Duke at his fattest, stock animal shots and Elsa Martinelli! (If I may be so bold.) ANDREZ CHOMA, VIA EMAIL

Good! Point!

STEVEN MACKAY

I’ve been stockpiling Empire because I'm awaiting a spinal op and don’t want to get bored, but when I reached issue 340’s article by Francis Lee about making God’s Own Country, I wished I’d got to it sooner. The director’s candour about financing struggles, how the actors were coached and why locations were chosen hit me like a film buff ’s dream, and it’s my favourite article in years.

SURREAL LISTENING TO @EDGARWRIGHT #BABYDRIVER @EMPIREMAGAZINE PODCAST WHILE STOOD IN NORTH FINCHLEY OPPOSITE THE SHOP FROM SHAUN OF THE DEAD .

BEN GREENE, PLYMOUTH

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Words: Simon Crook, Fred Dellar, Jimi Famurewa, Neil Gibbons, Alex Godfrey, Sali Hughes, Andrew Lowry, Dorian Lynskey, Paul Franklin, Olly Richards, James White, Owen Williams. Photography: Fabio Lovino, Jake Walters. Illustrations: Olly Gibbs, Sam Gibley, hitandrun, David Mahoney, Peter Strain. Subbing: Jo Kendall, Lucy Williams. Picture assistance: Mandy Rowson.

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“Au revoir — not adieu — Phil, here’s to the next chapter!”

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P U L S E - QU I C K E N I N G M OV I E A N D T V N E WS

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EDITED BY PHIL DE SEMLYEN

FIRST LOOK HORSE SOLDIERS OUT EARLY 2018

GOD OF WAR Chris Hemsworth swaps mjolnirs for mares in a true-life Afghan war drama WORDS JAMES WHITE

IN THE AFTERMATH of 9/11, a small group of American Special Forces soldiers were dispatched to help local Afghan forces fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, while also faced with the challenge of uniting warring tribes. Complicating things, this involved meshing 21st century tactics and weapons with troops who were using World War I rifles and horses. It was, in the words of one of the new arrivals, “like The Flintstones meets The Jetsons”. Rich with clashes — literal and cultural — journalist Doug Stanton’s real-life account of the campaign forms the basis of director Nicolai Fuglsig’s Horse Soldiers. To prepare, its star Chris Hemsworth, who plays Captain Mitch Nelson, took the chance to quiz some of the US soldiers who were there. “You’re hanging on to every word they say,” he tells Empire, “because half your brain is thinking, ‘That couldn’t have happened,’ and the second half is immediately thinking, ‘How do we put that in the film?’” The result, shot quickly on a tight budget, will see Hemsworth, Michael Peña, Michael Shannon and Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes deal with sandstorms, shelling and, most crucially, steeds. “I think I have the best horse, as in the most docile, well-behaved animal,” laughs Hemsworth. “Because bombs go off, and guns, and he’s half asleep. It’s awesome.” You can lead a horse to war, it seems, but you can’t keep it from nodding off.

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ON-SET EXCLUSIVE FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL OUT 17 NOVEMBER

LOVE AND MERSEY Annette Bening and Jamie Bell pair up for a silver screen romance with a difference

WORDS WILL LAWRENCE

THE WALLS OF Ye Cracke, one of the oldest drinking joints in Liverpool, are festooned with ﬂy-blown prints and nicotine-tinged photos of the Fab Four. Its labyrinth of tiny rooms is stuffed with moviemaking apparatus and Empire is witnessing a scene unfolding in the back bar. Here, sitting side by side behind two pints of mild, father and son — Kenneth

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Cranham and Jamie Bell — are sharing memories of silver screen star Gloria Grahame. She may have been a Hollywood siren, they recall, but she wasn’t half fond of a bacon butty with “tommy sauce”. Bell plays Peter Turner in director Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, the real-life character whose memoir recalls his unlikely romantic liaison with Grahame. Turner met Grahame (Annette Bening) in the late ’70s, when he was an aspiring actor and she a fading Hollywood star. “One of the great things about the film is that it’s about finding out who Gloria was,” Bell says, scene in the can. “It’s about the discovery of an era long gone by, of a person that carried an incredible amount of sadness, and a secret about her life.” Grahame made her name in a string of film noirs, including In A Lonely Place with

Humphrey Bogart and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. She scooped an Oscar for The Bad And The Beautiful and earned fame playing Ado Annie in Oklahoma!. Yet she fell on hard times and wound up in small British theatre productions, where she met Turner. Their relationship didn’t last, but they remained friends, Grahame spending time with her old ﬂame at his home in Liverpool. When Empire visits Pinewood Studios to watch those domestic scenes unfold, Bening is on scintillating form, breathing life into a story that’s fascinated her since The Grifters. As prep for that role, director Stephen Frears asked her to study Grahame’s output. “That was when I ﬁrst became aware of her,” she says. “Gloria’s been percolating in my subconscious since then. I’m the right age now and this seems the right time.” For Bening, it’s a love story with a happy ending.

THE FLIES FILES Everything you need to know about ‘the female Lord Of The Flies’ uproar WORDS IAN FREER

What’s the story? Hollywood’s making an all-female version of Lord Of The Flies, with What Maisie Knew screenwriter-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel bringing it to the screen. But why is that a big deal? There are already women in Lord Of The Flies. Love Galadriel. No, that’s Lord Of The Rings. Ah, right. What’s this about? It’s William Golding’s 1954 Nobel-winning novel that sees a group of British schoolboys crash-land on an uninhabited island in the Pacific and slowly turn into savages. The one we had to read at school with Piggy in it? Exactly.

Clockwise from above: Chin chin! Gloria (Annette Bening) and Peter (Jamie Bell) enjoy

Wait, isn’t the story about masculinity run amok? Will that even work with female characters? Golding certainly wouldn’t have thought so. He often stated that his novel featured boys for a reason — because girls wouldn’t sink to the same levels of savagery as Ralph and co.

the craic; Julie Walters plays Bella, Peter’s mum; The couple share a precious moment; Bell in discussion

And the internet is angry, is it? When is it not? But it has a point here. There’s a gender imbalance in Hollywood, but this feels like a tokenistic way to address it, not helped by the fact that it’s being driven by men.

with director Paul McGuigan on set.

So why is it happening? With gender flips in vogue in Hollywood — see: Ghostbusters and the new Ocean’s movie — the new team claim to have found a female spin to apply to the novel’s primitive behaviour and bullying cliques. Mean Girls on an atoll? Actually, we could get on board with that. What’s Tina Fey’s number?

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THE RENEWED OORDER It’s all change on Episode IX with Colin Trevorrow replaced by J.J. Abrams. Empire digests the news WORDS JAMES DYER

ILLUSTRATION OLLY GIBBS

“I KNEW THAT if it worked, it was the perfect time to step down. And if it didn’t, no-one would want me to do it anyway!” So said J.J. Abrams back in 2016, having announced to the world that he would not be hanging around the wreckage of Starkiller Base to direct Episode VIII. After the better part of a decade in space, relaunching the two biggest franchises in sci-ﬁ, Abrams was owed some long overdue shore leave. The vacation is officially over, however, with the announcement last month that Abrams will be the one to carry the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy over the ﬁnishing line, replacing Colin Trevorrow as director on Episode IX.

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It’s disappointing that we’ll now never see Trevorrow’s vision of the Star Wars universe but, especially considering Rian Johnson will be tied up with The Last Jedi until year’s end, Abrams is the obvious choice to bring the saga home, surfing high on the $2 billion wave that made The Force Awakens the third-biggest film of all time. Episode VII might have cleaved too closely to A New Hope’s schematics for some, but Abrams clearly understands what makes Star Wars tick. With Episode VII he managed to recapture the same magic George Lucas first tapped into back in 1977, which was no mean feat. Having demonstrated that he can pilot a saga through multiple episodes with Star Trek, he also has an attribute that only Johnson has so far seemed to match: a vision of exactly what Star Wars should be that’s shared with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Deviation from this vision has meant that a changing of the (Imperial) guard hasn’t been uncommon fixture for Star Wars lately, Trevorrow’s departure coming just three months after Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were

replaced by Ron Howard on the Han Solo movie. The Jurassic World director hit rocky terrain earlier this year when The Book Of Henry took a critical drubbing along with a smattering over $4 million. But one anaemic box office is hardly cause to be made elevenses for the almighty Sarlacc. The ‘creative differences’ seem to have originated with disagreements over the screenplay, which Trevorrow had been writing until British screenwriter Jack Thorne was brought on in August. With no resolution apparently reached, both Thorne and Trevorrow are now out, with Abrams swooping in, Falconlike, to clear the board and save the day. Episode IX has now vacated its May 2019 release date, opting for a more realistic December slot that allows Abrams ample time to nail the screenplay and attack the production unrushed. After a period of upheaval, it seems strong and stable leadership is the order of the day, and who better to conclude the story of Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren than the man who conceived it all in the ﬁrst place?

the quote quota The month’s most notable TV and movie bon mots

“CAN ONLY VIRGINS SEE THIS STUFF? IS THAT WHY I’M NOT SEEING THIS SHIT?” RICHIE TOZIER (FINN WOLFHARD) IN IT

Bria Vinaite and Brooklynn Prince as

“MARTHA, YOU’RE A FIRST-RATE LESBIAN AND A SECOND-RATE THINKER.”

mum Halley and daughter Moonee. Below: Willem

APRIL (PATRICIA CLARKSON) IN THE PARTY

“HOW CAN YOU RUN AND PLOT AT THE SAME TIME?” KAGANOVICH (DERMOT CROWLEY) IN THE DEATH OF STALIN

Dafoe plays goodguy Bobby.

BEYOND THE FRINGES Tangerine director Sean Baker goes mainstream with The Florida Project. Can he keep his edge? WORDS HELEN O’HARA

“I WONDERED WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE TO GET DRUNK, GIVEN THAT I’M LEGLESS ALREADY.” ROBIN CAVENDISH (ANDREW GARFIELD) IN BREATHE

“HE’S BABY-FACED BUT SINEWY, LIKE AN OLD LOVER OF MINE, WILLEM DAFOE.” MAUREEN (EMMA THOMPSON) EYEROWITZ ST IN THE MEYEROWITZ TZ TZ STORIES

“KINGSMAN IS CRUMPETS… LIKE TOAST, ONLY BRITISH.” POPPY ADAMS (JULIANNE MOORE) IN KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

GIVEN THAT HIS last film, 2015’s Tangerine, was famously shot on an iPhone, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is a major step up. Here he’s working with 35mm and — for the first time — a bona-fide movie star in Willem Dafoe. But Baker has no interest in continuing up the Hollywood ladder to $100 million blockbusters. “I’m absolutely not the type,” he laughs. “I’m not looking to make that Marvel movie.” He has a loftier goal in mind: he wants to use the creative freedom that comes with success and (relatively) bigger budgets to become the United States’ Ken Loach. “It takes three years to make a film — that’s my average — and I see it as my responsibility [to tackle] political issues that I feel strongly about. Yet at the same time, the medium of cinema is rooted in entertainment, so there’s that goal to please audiences as well.” Hence the laughs in his tale of six-year-old Moonee (extraordinary newcomer Brooklynn Prince), her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite, who Baker found on Instagram) and the other ‘hidden homeless’ families who scrape by at the Magic Castle Suites motel near Disneyworld. Moonee is largely oblivious to her poverty, running wild with her friends and scamming tourists for ice cream money under the watchful eye of compassionate motel manager Bobby (Dafoe). Still, the spectre of eviction hovers close.

Like Loach with Kes, Baker proves remarkably adept at directing children. “I didn’t want to make the film until we found the perfect kids,” says Baker of his heroine. “It all rests on their shoulders. I was looking for the new Spanky McFarland, from The Little Rascals, and I really believe we found one in Brooklynn.” Baker calls his lead “one of the most wonderful actors I’ve worked with, of any age”, and marvels at the humour she brought to the film. “[In one scene] the kids are making raspberry noises under the steps, then little Brooklynn leans over and says, ‘Look, a spider! Let’s see if it farts!’ That’s her, 100 per cent.” The kids’ joy, despite their circumstances, gives the film the same lightness that made Tangerine so thrilling. Baker repeats the bright pop vérité approach he used in that film, with glowing colours to communicate the heightened senses of childhood. “There’s a balance between social realism and entertainment that I’m interested in exploring more. A film like Get Out is a perfect example of how the two masters I’m trying to serve can be served properly, and I’m excited to continue along this route.” With The Florida Project, social justice comes with a smile. And a side order of farting spiders. THE FLORIDA PROJECT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 10 NOVEMBER

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FIRST LOOK EXCLUSIVE THE SHAPE OF WATER OUT 14 FEBRUARY 2018

FISH-MAN’S FRIEND Guillermo del Toro introduces his monster romance, The Shape Of Water WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

“I’VE ALWAYS LOVED sea creatures,” says Guillermo del Toro. “I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was growing up.” A ﬁne ambition, but when del Toro stood clutching the Golden Lion award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival in September, he must have been glad he made a different choice. The prestigious award was for his latest movie, The Shape Of Water, which is a tender love story. But, this being Guillermo del Toro, cinema’s premier purveyor of Gothic fantasy, there’s a twist: the love story is between Sally Hawkins’ mute cleaning lady and an amphibian creature (del Toro stalwart Doug Jones) that she frees from the government facility where she works. “I always think that when beauty and the beast fall in love, they should fall in love the way they are,” says del Toro. “Do not expect a transformation. That is an element I ﬁnd very moving.” Del Toro has explored thematic territory along these lines in the Hellboy movies, but never to this extent. It’s an itch he’s been desperate to scratch. “Ten years ago I was pitching the possibility of doing an Amazon adventure with a creature, and said the leading lady and the creature should fall in love,” he explains. “It’s been with me a long time.” Expect it to linger long in your mind, too.

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Main: Sally Hawkins as mute cleaning lady Elisa with the creature, played by Doug Jones. Below: Michael Shannon plays government agent Strickland. Bottom: Octavia Spencer is Zelda, Elisaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s friend and co-worker.

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ON-SET EXCLUSIVE DADDY’S HOME 2 OUT 24 NOVEMBER

PARENTAL GUIDANCE ADVISED

On set with Ferrell and Wahlberg... and their new dads WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

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IT’S MAY 2017 and Empire has come to Lanes & Games, a cavernous bowling alley just outside Boston. It’s seen plenty of strikes over its 75 years, but with its doors about to close for the final time it’s saving the best for last. On the upstairs level Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell and Mel Gibson are showing off their tenpin skills for Daddy’s Home 2. Wahlberg, as the macho Dusty, has a smooth and powerful style. Strike. Gibson, as Dusty’s dad Kurt, is more direct and imposing. Also, a strike. Ferrell, as the kinder, gentler Brad, has a style that somehow incorporates a delicate hop and skip. Not a strike. Their contrasting styles sum up the conflict at the heart of the movie, which is, in case you hadn’t guessed, the sequel to 2015’s Daddy’s Home. That movie pitted Ferrell’s stepdad against the more abrasive Wahlberg, as the real father of Ferrell’s children, and it was a quick-greenlightthe-sequel hit. And with the film ending with Dusty

and Brad as pals, the obvious next step was to bring in reinforcements. In Daddy’s Home 2, there are daddies all over the shop, with Gibson and John Lithgow as Dusty and Brad’s progenitors. “Once Dusty realises Kurt is coming to town, everything is going to get ripped to shreds,” says Wahlberg. “Kurt can do and say anything at any time.” Today’s scene illustrates the point. As Dusty and Brad try to teach their joint son, Dylan, how to bowl, in swaggers Kurt with bad advice. “Kurt is the small brushﬁre that leads to the big blaze amongst us all,” laughs Ferrell. But Ferrell is conscious of the dangers of simply repeating the beats of the ﬁrst movie. The paterfamilias’ patter isn’t going to be too familiar, it seems. “Not everything is as it appears,” he cautions. “Everyone learns from each other in a way. John learns that it’s okay to put his grown son in a headlock every now and again.” Sounds like we could have another strike on our hands.

Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) is a man on the edge.

MAIL BONDING Directors Ben and Josh Safdie’s gripping new crime thriller started with a surprise email WORDS OLLY RICHARDS

Clockwise from above: Like father, like son: Kurt (Mel Gibson) with son Dusty (Mark Wahlberg); Dad’s army: Kurt, Dusty, Brad (Will Ferrell) and his dad Mr Whitaker (John Lithgow); Director Sean Anders with his cast on set; Dads united: Dusty and Brad face the cold together.

A PROPULSIVE CRIME-THRILLER, Good Time wouldn’t exist if Robert Pattinson hadn’t been messing about on the internet. “He’d seen a still from our previous film, Heaven Knows What, online and was so struck by it that he went on a search to find out who’d made it,” says co-director and co-star Ben Safdie. “He sent this email: ‘I need to be in your film. It’s somehow connected to my purpose in life.’” It was unusual, to say the least. “I’d never seen that before, just from a still!” Flattered but a little puzzled, Ben and his brother and co-director Josh considered ignoring him. But, curious, they met the star. Hitting it off, they wrote Good Time for him, handing the actor the best role of his career. He rewarded them with arguably his best performance. Pattinson plays Connie, a trouble-magnet who botches a heist with his mentally disabled brother Nick (Ben Safdie). Nick is caught and jailed; Connie evades capture but tries everything he can think of to bust Nick out, his every plan deepening their woes. The Safdies took much of Pattinson’s real-life persona, and awkwardness with celebrity, and put it into Connie, a man trying to avoid the public gaze for entirely different reasons. “Robert was so manic in where his mind went [when we met him],” says Ben, “always trying not to be recognised; always in disguise.” With a feel that mixes Dog Day Afternoon, Drive and last year’s Victoria, the film has announced the Safdies as major talents. The suggestion they’ve arrived, however, is a backhanded compliment; they’ve been directing for a decade, and Good Time is their sixth film. “That’s very humbling,” laughs Josh Safdie of the ‘new kids’ label. “We take no offence to it at all.” Nor should they, when it puts them under the wing of Martin Scorsese, as firm a stamp of approval as you can get. Scorsese is executive-producing their next project, Uncut Gems. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s always reply to Robert Pattinson’s emails — even the weird ones. GOOD TIME IS IN CINEMAS FROM 17 NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 2017

NEW BLOOD

Adrien Brody is Peaky Blinders’ new Italian-American antagonist. Just don’t call him a gangster WORDS OWEN WILLIAMS

LIKE ITS MORALLY dubious protagonist Tommy Shelby (as played by Cillian Murphy), Peaky Blinders has grown from humble beginnings to become a major international player. Steven Knight’s intricate, violent between-the-wars Brum-gangster saga grew its audience exponentially through far-and-wide BBC and Netﬂix distribution. And as it enters its fourth, penultimate season, it’s raising its already high stakes by introducing a major new antagonist in Adrien Brody’s Luca Changretta. “These days I have the luxury of being patient, and I only work on things that inspire me,” Brody tells Empire. “Peaky Blinders was absolutely one of those.” The last we saw of the Shelby family and the Peaky gang, they’d just been gathered together for a meeting with Tommy, only for him to reveal the police were on site to cart them all away. Picking up sometime later — the usual narrative ellipsis between series is two years — Series 4 ﬁnds the family on fractious interpersonal form, until a mysterious letter warns of an incoming threat,

NOVEMBER 2017

Here: Adrien Brody playing a Blinder as new character Luca Changretta. Below: Director David Caffrey with Cillian Murphy on set. Watch what you say, Cillian... Bottom: Further newbies Jack Rowan (as Bonnie Gold) and Aidan Gillen (as Aberama Gold).

sending them back to the streets of Birmingham. Aidan Gillen is another incomer, as Shelby’s uneasy new ally, the chrysophilist gypsy hardcase Aberama Gold. Changretta, meanwhile, is the interloper muscling in on the Shelby action: an Italian-American in a trilby and a sharp suit. The iconography seems clear but, “I wouldn’t lean too hard on the ‘Mafia’ angle,” Brody wryly warns Empire, preferring to label Changretta “just a very successful businessman who happens to share a lot of interesting parallels of aspiration and vision with Cillian’s character. That was very intriguing to me. Maybe in other circumstances they’d be good friends.” Given the photographic evidence, however, he will admit to a Tommy Gun being a tool of his trade. “I’ve had a lot of fun with Thompsons before,” he grins. “We rattled off a lot of them in King Kong. It’s great to grow up and still be able to play cops and robbers.” One of the perks of Series 4 and 5 having been commissioned together is that, for the first time, it’s allowed Knight to seed elements for guaranteed future instalments. Gold and his boxing champion son Bonnie (Jack Rowan) will continue into 2018’s final episodes. Brody, too, says he’d “happily indulge in a bit more”, although he’s cagey as to whether it’ll be his guns blazing at the Shelbys’ final showdown. What’s certain is that when Knight calls, it’s an offer you can’t refuse. PEAKY BLINDERS SERIES 4 IS COMING SOON TO BBC TWO

AUTUMN 2017 COLLECTION SIZES UP TO 5XL

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november 2017

ON-SET EXCLUSIVE JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE OUT 20 DECEMBER

BUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE

Dwayne Johnson returns for a new take on a family classic WORDS JOHN NUGENT

LONG BEFORE HE became The Rock —

Clockwise from above: Game on: Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan) and Moose Finbar (Kevin Hart) accompany Dr Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson) into the jungle; Ruby makes a decisive move; A Moose has a close encounter with some rhinos; Director Jake Kasdan talks strategy with Johnson between takes.

when he was merely The Pebble, perhaps — Dwayne Johnson was a freshman at President William McKinley High in Honolulu, Hawaii’s state capital. Fast forward 30 years, and Johnson is driving a flame-throwing motorcycle through a jungle half an hour north of his old school, filming the new Jumanji movie as the highestpaid actor in Hollywood. “To be able to come back like this,” he beams, “on a movie of this size, to put a lot of good people to work, it’s very cool.” Johnson is speaking from Kualoa Ranch, Hollywood’s ‘Hawaii backlot’ (it’s recently played host to Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World). This is the jungle we’ll be welcomed to for Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, the follow-up to 1995’s Robin Williams adventure movie. This time the board game has been upgraded to a video game, with Johnson as the lead in-game avatar of a new set of hapless high-school kids (Jack Black, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart). Later that night, Empire ventures on set. Surrounded by monkey pod trees, flaming torches, in-game henchmen known as ‘dragoons’, and the base of what will become (in postproduction) a giant jaguar statue, we see the 5’4” Hart try and fail to fight his 6’2” co-star, Bobby Cannavale. “It’s because he’s so small,” notes Johnson, never missing a chance to rib his co-star. Despite punishing days, the cast are having a blast. Indeed, at the mere mention of his character name, the delectable Dr Smolder Bravestone (“the best name of any character I’ve ever played!”), Johnson bursts into a hearty laugh. In fact, one of the cast wonders if they’re not having too much fun. “Some of the best movies ever made were fucking horrible sets, filled with turmoil and strife,” jokes Black. “Maybe I’ll cause some strife, to make sure it’s one of the best films of all time.”

NOVEMBER 2017

FIRST LOOK EXCLUSIVE EARLY MAN OUT 26 JANUARY 2018

PREHISTORY BOYS Aardman legend Nick Park is back with an ancient football caper boasting an all-star line-up WORDS PHIL DE SEMLYEN

“AN UNDERDOG SPORTS movie with a prehistoric twist” is Nick Park’s elevator pitch for Early Man, his ﬁrst directorial feature since 2005’s The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. This being another helping of Aardman stop-motion goodness, it’s a lot more than that. There are nods to animation god Ray Harryhausen, a sly critique of football overlords FIFA, and all the usual silly visual gags and puns. “We have monitored the number of ball jokes,” reassures Park. The yarn itself pits the dim but cheery Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) and his porcine sidekick Hognob against the warlike denizens of the Bronze Age and an avaricious aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston, complete with daffy French accent). A challenge is set: beat them at football to save their village. A team of no-hopers is assembled — think ‘Bad News Mammoths’ or ‘Bend It Like Cavemen’ — from Dug’s tribe to play Real Bronzio. Well, hopefully. “Surely it’d be hard for a bunch of idiotic British caveman if they had to play football,” explains Park of his idea for a Neanderthal sports movie. “The clay side of it is our forte and the cavemen felt earthy and suited our process. Because they’re always holding clubs, it was rounders, baseball, then it became football.” Also crammed into the voice booth are Maisie Williams as the football-mad Goona, and Richard Ayoade, Timothy Spall and Johnny Vegas as Dug’s fellow tribe members (Park himself provides the grunts and snuffles as Hognob). Expect a giddy game of two halves, and more than a few halfwits.

NOVEMBER 2017

november 2017

Empire showcases tomorrow’s stars today

HARRIS DICKINSON WORDS PHIL DE SEMLYEN PORTRAIT FABIO LOVINO

Age __ 21 Plays __ Frankie, an alienated, sexually confused Brooklyn teenager who starts searching for men on hook-up sites, in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats. “He’s surrounded by all these hyper-masculine expectations in an environment that isn’t so accepting. The story follows him trying to come to terms with it and comprehend who he is.”

Backstory __ “This film came along when I was working in a hotel bar, and I didn’t know anything about it. It was challenging in every way, emotionally and physically, and then the film comes out and exceeds every expectation I had in terms of audience feedback.”

Early Roles __ “I played Victor Meldrew aged six and all I remember is, ‘I don’t believe it!’ I remember really milking it, and loving the adults laughing at a small child playing a grumpy adult.”

The Big Break __ Starring as John Paul Getty III in Danny Boyle’s TV drama Trust. “Danny is so normal, and so incredibly creative, that he just guides you through it with such ease.”

Hobbies __ MMA and painting. “I’m looking at some awful thing I did yesterday. I spray-painted my sunglasses a baby-bluey-green colour.” acting heroes __ “I’m attracted to things that are dark. Christian Bale in The Machinist or American Psycho are major psychology studies of human defects inside narratives that are so interesting.”

Next up __ The Darkest Minds, in which he plays a teen who survives in a disease-ridden US and develops super powers. “I’ve got telekinesis. I had to look like I was doing so many poos. I got a bad stomach in Cuba this year, so I channelled that.” BEACH RATS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 24 NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 2017

From top to bottom: Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) knows how to make an entrance; Widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (MIchelle Dockery) with outlaw Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell); Writer/ director Scott Frank on set with Dockery.

The Very Long riders It’s taken ten years to get Godless to the small screen. Writerdirector Scott Frank explains why

GrooMING: Fedina for Minette. All clothing: Giorgio Armani

words Mark SaliSbury

Harris Dickinson, photographed exclusively for Empire in Rome, Italy, on 25 August 2017.

Scott Frank loveS the old West. “as I got older I realised so many of my favourite films also happened to be Westerns,” explains the oscar-nominated screenwriter of Out Of Sight and Logan. the latter of those, of course, owed as much to Shane as Stan lee. “What I love is that morality is always in the grey areas; there are a lot of classic themes that are fun to write.” and so, in 2000, Frank began writing one of his own, producing a screenplay called Godless that he hoped Out Of Sight’s Steven Soderbergh would direct. But Soderbergh had issues. “He said, ‘I love this script, I don’t like horses,’” Frank recalls. “We talked to other directors and it almost came together with a couple.” at one point Sam Mendes was attached with kate Winslet and Harrison Ford in the lead roles, but when the project fell apart due to budgetary concerns, Godless languished in development hell. a decade later, Soderbergh, who signed on as producer, raised the idea of doing it as a tv series — with Frank, who’d directed his own scripts for The Lookout and A Walk Among The Tombstones, directing. When netflix signed on, Frank expanded his script into seven episodes. this retooled Godless stars Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as an outcast, widowed rancher in la Belle, an isolated town with few able-bodied men

following a mining disaster. Sheltering Jack o’connell’s wounded outlaw, she’s unaware his former mentor, the ruthless Frank (Jeff Daniels), is laying waste to the old West in an attempt to find him and extract his bloody revenge. Filming in new Mexico, says Frank, was “exhausting and exhilarating”, with inaccessible terrain, changeable weather and temperamental horses a daily challenge. although, having ridden since he was young, Frank would occasionally saddle up and ride out into the vast landscape to issue his cast directions. “Sometimes it was easier to get on a horse,” he explains. Unless you’re Steven Soderbergh, of course. Godless iS on netflix froM 22 noveMber

noveMber 2017

FIRST LOOK EXCLUSIVE DARKEST HOUR OUT 12 JANUARY 2018

TRUE BRIT How an unrecognisable Gary Oldman became Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour WORDS IAN NATHAN

IT SOUNDS IRRESISTIBLE. Gary Oldman, arguably Britain’s finest actor, as Winston Churchill, widely regarded as history’s finest Brit. But Oldman’s first reaction was to laugh. “Not because I didn’t think I could do it,” he says. “I knew I could play him, but the physicality was crazy.” This was about more than resemblance, because, at 59, Oldman remains trim. Months of prosthetic tests went into persuading the actor that he could be Churchill. Key was leaving room for the performance. “We went full-on Churchill,” he says. “But the more I resembled him, the weirder it looked. You’ve lost me. So we had to pull it back.” Directed by Joe Wright and written by The Theory Of Everything’s Anthony McCarten, Darkest Hour concentrates on the critical period in 1940 when Churchill took power. Through three rousing speeches, backed by some canny politicking, he inspired a nation and prevented capitulation to that “bloodthirsty guttersnipe” Hitler. Oldman deems Churchill “essential to history”. The ambition of the film, however, is to climb beneath the jowls, words and self-promotion to discover the reality beneath. “There are a lot of people who will go and see the movie who think they know him,” he says, “but I have had the chance to play someone they don’t quite know.” Exactly the kind of big talk that, come February, could well rouse that other iconic baldy — Oscar.

NOVEMBER 2017

BRAN FATES The Three-Eyed-Raven, aka Isaac Hempstead Wright, shares his prophecies for how Game Of Thrones will end WORDS JAMES DYER

Is Bran the Night King? “I’ve seen people putting pictures of my face next to the Night King and saying, ‘Well, that’s confirmed. They’re identical.’ Do I really look like an ancient ice zombie?” Who will end up on the Iron Throne? “It will be [Tommen’s cat] Ser Pounce. The Red Keep will be abandoned and Ser Pounce will wander in and fall asleep on it.” Who will die? “Everyone will die. I think that’s a clear one. Except possibly Tormund, [who’ll be] sitting with a cup of ale going, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’” What can top a zombie dragon? “Zombie Hodor! Hodor must be a zombie. He wasn’t burned alive, so he must be knocking about somewhere. Basically, anyone who’s died beyond the Wall surely has to come back as a zombie.” What will happen to Bran? “Bran will sit on a beach in Essos and wait for it all to blow over.” Will there be a big twist? “I like the idea that there’s a link between Game Of Thrones and Westworld. That Game Of Thrones is actually just one of the worlds within that park. How cool is that? Maybe every single HBO show is a different Westworld place?” What will next week’s EuroMillions numbers be? “Five, seven... actually, no. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, as that’s just as likely as any other prediction. I want half, if you win.” THE FINAL SEASON OF GAME OF THRONES DOES NOT YET HAVE A CONFIRMED AIR DATE

NOVEMBER 2017

Top to bottom: Rebecca Hall’s Elizabeth Marston and Bella Heathcote’s Olive Byrne; Luke Evans (as Dr William Marston) with Hall and Heathcote on set; Hall and director Angela Robinson between takes.

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE LASSO The story of Wonder Woman is explored in writer-director Angela Robinson’s kinky new biopic WORDS TERRI WHITE

AS A LIFELONG Wonder Woman fan, writer-producer-director Angela Robinson (Herbie: Fully Loaded, The L Word) began working on what she believed was a straightforward biopic of her creator, psychologist William Moulton Marston, over eight years ago. The story she ended up with in Professor Marston And The Wonder Women — how a secret polyamorous relationship in 1940s America led to the creation of one of the most iconic comic-book characters in history — turned out rather differently. “He lived in this unconventional relationship with his wife [Elizabeth] and their student [Olive],” Robinson says. But any presumption that Marston (played by Luke Evans) was in a having-his-cake-and-eating-it relationship with his wife and mistress was quickly pivoted by her early research. “There was this one detail,” Robinson recalls of a book she was reading of his life. “‘Olive and Elizabeth stayed together for 38 years after Marston died,’ and that just blew my mind. I was like, ‘Wait a second here! Hold on.’”

NOVEMBER 2017

Robinson’s shifting interpretation of the nature of their relationship was only reinforced when she discovered Elizabeth (played here by Rebecca Hall) named her only daughter after Olive (Bella Heathcote). “The emotional math [didn’t seem to] add up,” she says. Her film explores a new narrative — that of three people in an equal, polyamorous, sexually adventurous relationship (with hints of bondage which nod to Wonder Woman’s aesthetic and characterisation), though Robinson is keen to stress that “this film is definitely my interpretation”. Story locked, it was still a long process to screen for Robinson. She spent four years writing the script on evenings and weekends (while she worked in television) and then spent another four years getting it made. What undoubtedly helped in those latter four years — that she could never have foreseen — was the re-emergence of Wonder Woman, culminating in Patty Jenkins’ huge critical and commercial hit this summer. Not only did it bring her character to the forefront of culture once more, but it also allowed, she believes, for a “reintegrating of the Marstons into the Wonder Woman narrative”. Robinson stresses the blending of facts and fiction and, though the Marstons do have surviving family, she chose not to reach out to them during the making of the film. “There are a lot of controversial themes throughout the story,” she

says. “And I really wanted the freedom to explore that and come to my own interpretation as an artist as to what the story was.” What she ﬁrmly believes, though, is that it’s their story, reclaimed, and “ultimately a love story to the Marstons”. PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 10 NOVEMBER

PRODUCTION NOTES Movies and TV shows in the works

1 Salma Hayek has joined Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård in financial drama The Hummingbird Project. Written and directed by War Witch’s Kim Nguyen, Hayek plays the ex-boss of two grasping traders. Vince Vaughn goes grindhouse as bruiser Bradley. Below: Bradley takes matters into his own hands.

2 Casey Affleck will play William Stoner, a poor farmer who becomes an academic in the first half of the 20th century, in Stoner. The film will be directed by Joe Wright and produced by horror maven Jason Blum.

ANGRY JAILBIRDS Vince Vaughn surprises in riotous action-thriller Brawl In Cell Block 99 WORDS ALEX GODFREY

3 Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves have signed up for Destination Wedding. The duo, who last acted together in The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, will play a pair thrown together during a lavish nuptials at a luxury resort.

ALAMY

4 Creed 2 will shoot in 2018, according to an Instagram post by Sylvester Stallone. Early word suggests Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Johnson will take on the son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), Rocky’s nemesis in Rocky IV.

S. CRAIG ZAHLER’S DEBUT, 2015’s horror-tinged Western Bone Tomahawk, was a classy tale with superlative dialogue, a leisurely pace and upsetting violence, introducing the director as an uncompromising new voice. His follow-up, prison punch-up Brawl In Cell Block 99, promises more of the same. It ﬁnds former alcoholic and soon to be former auto-mechanic Bradley (a startling Vince Vaughn) up against ever-increasing obstacles. Suffice it to say, it involves more than one cell block, and multiple brawls. “The hope was it was going to be a badass movie, and that it would have stuff that people wouldn’t expect in this kind of movie,” says Zahler. “I knew that on the spectrum of grindhouse and arthouse, this would be a little closer to the grind side than Bone Tomahawk. But both elements are there.” Brawl is a revelation from Vaughn. As a desperate, determined man, he’s a no-nonsense, precise piece of work, the giant cross on the back of his shaved head sending out all sorts of signals. “If you saw this guy and didn’t know he was a comedian, you’d think he looks imposing and possibly a little bit mean,” says Zahler of his unlikely lead. “I wouldn’t look at him on the street and say, ‘There’s the funny man.’ It was

easy to see how he could be a different guy, and he surpassed my expectations.” In his youth Vaughn dabbled in boxing, and fulﬁls that early promise here. Some shots involved 20 kicks and punches, with no camera cuts, no trickery. “It’s a dangerous way to go, and I’m happy no-one got too hurt, but everyone got clocked and nicked all over the place,” admits Zahler. “Vince was really open to it, willing to put himself in harm’s way. For one shot he got hit in nine takes, nine times. He did every bit of it.” The result is fantastically violent — there are things that happen to faces and heads that no person should see — but it’s also deeply felt. While writing, Zahler commits to surprising himself (and us) at every turn. He singles out one particularly shocking turning point, involving a character played by Blade’s reliably unscrupulous Udo Kier. “When he delivers a certain threat, I thought, ‘This is probably wrong and I shouldn’t have it in here.’ So, of course, it is in there, because when it makes me uncomfortable, I hold to it.” His next ﬁlm stars Mel Gibson. The mind shudders. BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 IS IN CINEMAS FROM 20 OCTOBER

NOVEMBER 2017

ON-SET EXCLUSIVE GUNPOWDER AIRS AUTUMN, BBC ONE

ENEMIES OF THE STATE Kit Harington plays with ﬁreworks in BBC drama Gunpowder WORDS DAN JOLIN

NEXT TO DALTON Mill in Keighley, Yorkshire, three men in broad-brimmed hats and capes stand ankle-deep in mud. It’s late March, 2016, and Empire is at the impressively filthy heart of a BBC-funded exterior set, this Victorian textile mill destined to be digitally painted over to represent the House Of Lords as it was in 1605. Though this is Jacobean England, director J. Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) frames his three subjects like shootists in a Sergio Leone Western rather than Catholic plotters just a few moves away from blowing all this to hell. One of the trio is Guy Fawkes. But at Gunpowder’s centre is chief plotter Robert Catesby — played by the three-part mini-series’ executive produceroriginator, Kit Harington. Or, to use his full, given name: Christopher Catesby Harington. “I am playing my ancestor, correct,” he confirms. “My mother’s maiden name is Catesby, so I’ve grown up knowing that he was the leader of the Gunpowder Plot, not Guy Fawkes.” Not that he’s doing this to set any records straight. Harington’s highest-profile TV venture outside of Game Of Thrones was the result of him wondering why “there was no defining drama” about the Plot, despite being such an integral part of British folklore. “I was actually quite reticent to play him — I don’t feel connected to him. And this piece isn’t about heroism in any way. As filming’s progressed, I’ve realised how fucked up he was, bringing all these people to their deaths. It’s a tragedy, really.” Downton Abbey’s Tom Cullen plays a scarred, hardened and taciturn mercenary Fawkes. “Bonfire Night is cancelled in my house!” he says, regarding the annual orgy of effigy-burning. Harington’s appreciation of Guy Fawkes Night has strengthened, though. “We’ll celebrate it big-time,” he smiles. If his producing debut goes down as well as he hopes, he’ll have reason to.

NOVEMBER 2017

Clockwise from above: Kit Harington’s Robert Catesby with Tom Cullen’s Guy Fawkes; Mark Gatiss as rogue nobleman Robert Cecil; Liv Tyler, who plays wealthy Catholic Anne Vaux, gets a touch-up on set; Christopher Catesby Harington steps into the boots, cloak and hat of his anarchic ancestor.

NOVEMBER 2017

HAMILTON’S ENCORE

INTO DARKNESS

The original Sarah Connor is back

Twisted? Maybe. Bleak? Deﬁnitely. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is back with another off-kilter drama WORDS DORIAN LYNSKEY

YORGOS LANTHIMOS KNOWS his work is divisive but he doesn’t quite know why. When The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, the Greek director’s first film since his uncategorisably strange English-language debut The Lobster, debuted at Cannes it was met with both applause (and a Best Screenplay award) and boos. In the reviews, rapturous comparisons to Kubrick and Haneke rubbed up against accusations of sadism. “I’m always surprised when people are scandalised and shocked by things that we’ve been dealing with since the beginning of time,” Lanthimos says amiably, scratching his beard. “We live in a time when there’s a lot of conservatism around.” His first American production is a terrifying, enigmatic psychological thriller with ancient resonances. It began as the story of a troubled teenager who takes revenge on a wealthy surgeon, played by The Lobster’s Colin Farrell. Lanthimos and his regular co-writer Efthymis Filippou took inspiration from the Greek tragedy of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to appease Artemis after he accidentally killed one of the goddess’ sacred deer. “I don’t know if it’s a tragedy in a strict sense of the form,” he says. “But the way we use the word today? I guess it’s a tragedy.” In other hands, the revenge plot might lead to a standard cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller, but every component of Lanthimos’ unmistakeable style — the deadpan line readings, the unsettling use of music, the mysterious elisions in the plot — is designed to create ambiguity. “I make

NOVEMBER 2017

Above: The Beguiled co-stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell reunite. Here: Director Yorgos Lanthimos on set.

films in the way that I like to see films,” he says. “I never like it when things are presented as black and white: this is good, this is bad. I don’t want to be considered an idiot and told what is what. I want to be intrigued.” When discussing his work, his favourite word is “different”. Lanthimos’ reputation attracts big-name talent. Nicole Kidman and Alicia Silverstone star alongside Farrell, while his Queen Anneera period drama The Favourite, currently in post-production, features Emma Stone, Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz. Actors are already attuned to his unique tone and, he says, they have a good time. Even a film as nerve-wracking to watch as The Killing Of A Sacred Deer was enjoyable to make. “It’s basically a comedy when you observe it from afar: all these grown-ups doing weird things,” he says. “It is fun. If the stress of trying to get things done wasn’t there, I’d be having fun as well.” THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER IS IN CINEMAS FROM 3 NOVEMBER

THERE HAVE BEEN many Sarah Connors, but really there’s only been one. When it comes to playing the waitress-turned-warrior who becomes the mother of the fight against the machines in the Terminator franchise, Lena Headey and Emilia Clarke get points for trying. But Linda Hamilton reigns supreme. The original remains the best. So it seems cause for celebration that Hamilton will be reprising the role for the as-yet-untitled ‘Terminator 6’, alongside — yes! — Arnold Schwarzenegger. After the quality of the last few Terminator films, the prospect of a sixth film should provoke plenty of eye-rolling, but this one shows promise. Not only is Deadpool’s Tim Miller on board to direct, but it’s the first Terminator sequel since 1991 to have James Cameron involved, as producer and co-author of the story. Cameron appears to have been the driving force behind Hamilton’s return. “There are 50-year-old, 60-year-old guys out there killing bad guys, but there isn’t an example of that for women,” said Cameron at the announcement. “It’s going to make a huge statement to have that seasoned warrior that she’s become return.” Not least because the Hamilton version of the character is dead. She was last seen in Terminator 2, was represented by a giant coffin in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, and was sorely missed in the lamentable Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys. But this is a franchise where the timelines are so tangled that anything is possible. The future, lest we forget, is not set. Nobody else has captured Hamilton’s unique blend of stoicism and vulnerability in the role, so count us in — we’re intrigued to see how Cameron and company bulldoze past her termination.

ALAMY

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

CHRIS

PACKHA M

B AT M A N B E G I N S AT L I N C O L N

Chris Packham begins his life sciences lectures at the University of Lincoln this Autumn with a bats and owls special on 31st October WHERE WILL YOU BE?

HOW MUCH IS A PINT OF MILK? GRACE JONES

Will it be a view to a spill for the singer-actress?

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

What’s your favourite word in the English language? I have to be corny and just say love. And sex. Both. Together. If you can put one on top of the other and make one word. When were you last naked outdoors? On stage! A couple of weeks ago. In Oxfordshire. How much is a pint of milk? I’d say $2. It depends which milk. Almond milk? Soy milk? Cow’s milk? I assume you’re talking about cow’s, but there’s also breast milk. I don’t know if you can buy that. I’m not so sure! When were you the most starstruck? A long time ago in New York, I bumped into

NOVEMBER 2017

Sidney Poitier. Usually you’re starstruck when you’re not expecting to see someone you admire and look up to as a role model and, all of a sudden, they appear like an angel in front of you. What’s the strangest interaction you’ve ever had with a fan? I was on a plane, in ﬁrst class, and a lady started singing La Vie En Rose. The next thing I knew, she was sitting next to me. Then she got upset with me. She was insisting I sing the song to her. She started acting up badly. When we landed, they had to pretty much remove her from the plane. What scares you? I have a moth phobia. In Jamaica, you have all different sizes. What scares me is the fact they cannot see. Any blind ﬂying thing, for me, is scary. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth? Pee. My brothers were kidding around and peed in a soda bottle and gave it to me. I’ll never forget it! Have you ever knowingly broken the law? Sure. You want me to get arrested? I kicked a police car a long time ago, but that’s not the main one. I could never say it otherwise I’d get arrested.

What’s your favourite animal? The cat. Big cats. Panthers, tigers. I could sleep with a big cat before I’d let a moth near me. What’s your earliest memory? Drinking poison. I was very little. They had kerosene for lamps. I was under the bed and I drank it. My mum said I almost died, I was frothing at the mouth. What’s the best thing you’ve ever stolen from a hotel? Orchids. I just think they’re beautiful and if they’re on the table I wave to the [security] camera, like, “It’s okay, it’s just me! I’m taking your orchids!” And I keep walking. What’s the strangest place you’ve thrown up? In a club in Paris. It was the time when you could just openly have coke on the table, it was no big deal. And somebody put something in it that wasn’t supposed to be in it, I think it was a little heroin. I got immediately nauseous, ran down to the toilet, and just before I got to the bathroom I threw up. That was kind of strange. GRACE JONES: BLOODLIGHT AND BAMI IS IN CINEMAS FROM 27 OCTOBER

GUSTAVO PAPALEO/GUARDIAN

Do you have any scars? I have a scar from roller skating from when I ﬁrst moved to high school in New York, from Jamaica. I went too fast, going down a hill, grabbed onto a tree to stop myself, and got some of the bark in my arm. It healed with all the lumps inside. I kept feeling these things inside, so months later they cut it open to take them out. It was kind of alien.

R EV I E WS O F N E W F I L M S, S H OWS A N D G A M E S ON EV E RY S I Z E O F S C R E E N

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NOVEMBER 2017

EXCELLENT

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GOOD

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OKAY

POOR

AWFUL

EDITED BY JONATHAN PILE

cinema

THE DEATH OF STALIN ★★★★★

OUT 20 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 107 MINS

Armando Iannucci Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko DIRECTOR CAST

Russia, 1953. When Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) has a fatal heart attack, it creates a power vacuum inside the highest levels of government. Cue a pile-up of plotting, as his subordinates scramble to take control.

PLOT

CABINET RESHUFFLES. CAMPAIGN

Red and dead: Adrian McLoughlin takes his role as

funding. Congressional hearings on governmental efficiencies. These are not subjects which naturally lend themselves to mirth, yet Armando Iannucci has long proven himself capable of wringing laughs out of the stodgiest, most solemn topics imaginable. The Death Of Stalin, however, is his most impressive feat yet. After taking on Whitehall and Washington with TV shows The Thick Of It and Veep, the master satirist’s new film tackles not only a slice of real-life Russian history, but a ruthless dictator whose government was responsible for famine, labour camps and mass executions. Incredibly, the results are absolutely hilarious. Moscow in 1953 was not a happy place to be. Under the beady eye of the totalitarian regime, with bugs and secret police everywhere, the mood was one of rampant paranoia. The neighbour someone confided in might be an informant; in a flash, a guard could become a prisoner himself. All of which made it a nightmare to live through, but very fruitful terrain for some incredibly dark comedy. In Veep, the main players were trying to get ahead of each other in order to boost their reputations and win extra perks. The Death Of Stalin’s protagonists, on the other hand, are mostly just trying to stay alive. Even the most seemingly menial exchanges are fuelled by raw panic. In an early, scene-setting sequence, a concerthall attendant played by Paddy Considine is commanded to provide Stalin with a concert recording that doesn’t exist. “Nobody’s going to be killed,” he frantically intones, looking profoundly uncertain that that’s the case. “This is just a musical emergency!” Only the wiliest political operators are able to advance themselves in a climate this

oppressive. And even by Iannucci’s standards, these power-hungry schemers are a vile and venal bunch. Jeffrey Tambor’s Malenkov is a preening, image-obsessed buffoon. Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev is a verbose, nakedly ambitious weasel. Simon Russell Beale’s Beria is the worst of the lot, a slimy monster who’s raped and murdered countless Russians. The Fast Show’s Paul Whitehouse pops up as a bolshy Bolshevik. And this snakes’ nest even has an actual Python, in the form of Michael Palin (Molotov), who brings a dash of Life Of Brian-esque silliness to a tremendously funny speech he delivers at a committee meeting. It’s a huge treat to see this unlikely ensemble interact, and one unhampered in the least by the fact there’s not a Russian accent to be heard — Jason Isaacs’ booming Yorkshire brogue as the macho war hero Zhukov is particularly, gloriously incongruous. The comedy stems from the fact that, in this place and time, every word matters: dropping the wrong name, or laughing at the wrong joke, could result in your swift downfall. Iannucci and co-writers David Schneider and Ian Martin follow the broad plot strokes of the graphic novel the film is based on, but ramp up the sycophancy, cronyism and doublespeak, drawing out the inherent ludicrousness of each scenario. As the members of the Presidium vie to out-scheme each other following Stalin’s demise, there’s an exhilarating precision to the dialogue, and fans of weapons-grade insults won’t be disappointed either. “I fucked Germany,” brags Zhukov at one point. “I think I can take a flesh lump in a fucking waistcoat.” It’s full of absurdity, the kind of situations that only occur when too few people have too much power. But where The Death Of Stalin really hits home is in the moments when it drops the comedy and reveals what’s really at stake. A few scenes with Beria demonstrate, hauntingly, the depths of evil to which some will stoop when there are no checks or balances. And the film’s final ten minutes, as the laughs dry up and it lays out its bleak endgame, is a proper gutpuncher. For all its entertainingly abhorrent characters, it’s a deeply moral piece of work. Just one that has a corpse-moving scene straight out of a Blackpool panto. NICK DE SEMLYEN VERDICT Iannucci’s brand of political satire is applied to one of the darkest chapters in modern history, with sensational results. The Lives Of Others with laughs, it’s farcical, frightening and a timely reminder that things could always be worse.

Stalin lying down.

NOVEMBER 2017

Turner Prize glory

cinema

would surely be theirs.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME ★★★★★

OUT 27 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 132 MINS

Luca Guadagnino Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar DIRECTOR CAST

It’s the early 1980s. Elio (Chalamet) is living an idyllic existence in Italy with his parents. One summer, his charmed life is disturbed by Oliver (Hammer), who comes to spend six weeks with the family, helping Elio’s father. They are six weeks that will change Elio’s life forever.

PLOT

IN HIS LAST ﬁlm, A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino stuck four attractive people in a remote holiday home and set off a sort of lustful Hunger Games, where sex was a weapon in a battle for dominance. Call Me By Your Name is similar in its set-up, but the opposite in how it plays out. It puts two strangers in another impossibly glamorous, isolated home and

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lights the fuse on their attraction, but this one burns long and slow, not fast and angry. Based on Andre Aciman’s novel, it’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst. Elio (Chalamet) is 17 years old and living in the Italian countryside with his artsy parents (Stuhlbarg and Casar). Handsome, but more boyish than he perhaps believes, Elio is confident and smart, liked by everyone who meets him. Every room he enters is his. But he is thrown off balance by the arrival of Oliver (Hammer), a twentysomething who has come to stay to assist Elio’s father in his work. Oliver looks like the American ideal distilled into a single man. And with his charm, looks and presence outstripped, Elio is immediately transfixed. Guadagnino’s telling of the development of this romance, which changes both parties, is like the feeling of getting gently drunk. It’s smooth but a little dizzying. He fills every scene with life. Trees are heavy with fruit; people are always eating; the chirping of crickets a constant soundtrack. He thrusts life at you and wills his characters to live theirs. Long summer days drift away in a gentle routine of swimming, cycling and nothing, but each day that passes with feelings unvoiced is a day lost — they will never have it back.

The screenplay, co-written by James Ivory, is elegant and full of small surprises. The level of attention given to even the smallest of characters means so many of them have an impact even with minimal screen time — Elio’s brief girlfriend breaks your heart with a handful of lines. What few vocal emotional outpourings are present are earned — a paternal monologue by Stuhlbarg in the final minutes is as verbose as the film gets and, good lord, it makes it count (bring tissues). But much is conveyed in the many silences which are entrusted to an excellent cast. Chalamet is the centre and he gives the kind of performance that immediately sends you to Google to find out where the hell this kid came from (he may be familiar from Interstellar or Homeland). All Elio’s teenage emotions are raw on Chalamet’s skin. He plays him as a person still forming, not scared by his feelings but surprised. In a film in which every performance is terrific, Chalamet makes the rest look like they’re acting. He alone would make the film worth watching, but he’s just one of countless reasons. OLLY RICHARDS VERDICT A film that’s at once light, joyful and emotionally devastating, with deeply affecting central performances. A fullhearted romantic masterpiece.

i am not a witch HHHH

OUT 20 october / CERT tbc / 98 minS

Rungano Nyoni Maggie Mulubwa, Henry B.J. Phiri, Nancy Mulilo, John Tembo director caSt

ZAMBiAN-BORN WELSH debutant Rungano Nyoni makes an impressive start with this troubling exposé of the superstition, ignorance and corruption that remain rampant in African countries hamstrung between tradition and progress. Accused of sorcery, nine-year-old orphan Shula (Mulubwa) is sent to a witch camp run by the unscrupulous Mr. Banda (Phiri), who convinces the locals that she can solve crimes and predict rainfall. The elliptical storytelling and oblique ending might perplex some, but David Gallego’s offbeat photography helps Nyoni capture the rhythms of daily life and achieve some memorable images that reinforce both the playful surreality and unflinching trenchancy of this boldly provocative parable. dP

unrest HHHH

OUT 20 october / CERT tbc / 97 minS

Jennifer Brea Jennifer Brea, Omar Wasow, Jessica Taylor, Leeray Denton director caSt

MEDiCAL SCiENCE HAS been slow to recognise the gravity of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (aka ME), which affects millions worldwide. First-time documentarist and sufferer Jennifer Brea seeks to understand this reluctance, using her debilitating condition and her online friendships with fellow sufferers to call for better-funded research and an end to the ignorance that resulted in Dane Karina Hansen being institutionalised for three years because a so-called expert deemed her symptoms to be psychiatric. The unflinching diarist footage of Brea’s attacks is extremely harrowing. But she eschews easy pity in showing what can be achieved by those afflicted and what still needs to be done by society at large. dP

cinema

breathe HHH

OUT 27 october CERT 12a / 117 minS

Andy Serkis Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Hugh Bonneville, Tom Hollander, Diana Rigg, Stephen Mangan director

caSt

Robin Cavendish (Garfield) is newly married to Diana (Foy) and working in Africa in 1958 when he contracts polio. Left paralysed, he and his wife fight to build a life together despite his disease.

Plot

InspIratIonal real-lIfe tales about overcoming adversity have, in recent years, all been lumped together under the heading ‘oscar bait’ — often unfairly. there’s a sneaking suspicion that any able-bodied actor playing a disabled role has hidden an acceptance speech somewhere about the wheelchair. But Breathe, while offering no great innovations in its storytelling, is so sincere that it blasts away such cynicism. this is the story of a couple in love, whose mutual devotion just happened to change the world, told with obvious affection and respect. It’s andy serkis’ first film as director, and though this was produced through his Imaginarium, the only performance-capture-style razzle-dazzle comes in tom Hollander’s portrayal of Diana’s twin brothers, Bloggs and David. Instead of leading with technology, serkis wisely tackles a subject close to his heart (his sister has multiple sclerosis) and handles it with delicacy. like his turn in the Ian Dury biopic sex&drugs&rock&roll, he is sympathetic to, but never patronising of, disability, a stance that should not feel as refreshing as it does. the focus is on what remains possible rather than what’s been taken away. Much of the praise for that pragmatic, humourlaced optimism must go to producer Jonathan Cavendish, robin’s son (played as a young man by Dean-Charles Chapman). He has created an immensely warm-hearted tribute to his parents.

the performances of andrew Garfield as robin Cavendish and Claire foy as his extraordinarily determined wife Diana are key. they start off as your typical late-colonial golden couple, playing tennis with the ambassador and his wife in Kenya. But an apparent flu proves to be a severe bout of polio, one that threatens robin’s life and leaves him almost entirely paralysed, dependent on a respirator to breathe. robin is suicidal, but Diana refuses to give up. When he begs to escape the hospital, she takes on the authorities and makes it happen. In return, robin begins to struggle back against both depression and paralysis. Having been given only three months to live, he thrives as he, his wife and mechanically minded friend teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville) contrive hodge-podge solutions that enable him to sit up, move around and even travel once again. the film is essentially one great tragedy followed by a series of small triumphs, as robin reclaims much of his lust for life and inspires changes in the medical profession around the world. Many like robin at that time were kept in conditions horrifying to modern eyes; one visit to a state-of-the-art Germany facility is an almost surreal hellscape where bodies are stacked in iron lungs like so many safety deposit boxes. the spectacle is arresting, reminiscent of Kubrick or Jodorowsky, and hints that serkis may in the future show a slightly harder edge than this subject matter often allows. It’s a stark contrast to the cosy, Bake Offlike vision of the Cavendishes’ english home, where their ramshackle house welcomes an ever-rotating crop of guests. Good people work almost literal miracles here, and it always seems to be summer. this sunny optimism keeps this from being another misery fest and, without underplaying the harsh reality of robin’s condition, reminds us that life goes on, and love wins — a message, though verging on saccharine, that’s worth hearing. Helen o’Hara verdict there’s a hint of comforting, chocolatebox, Sunday-night tv here, but it’s delivered via such quietly powerful performances and with such hope that it’s hard to resist.

november 2017

Not many know that van Gogh was a big

cinema

fan of Hi-de-Hi!.

LOVING VINCENT ★★★★

OUT 13 OCTOBER CERT 12 / 91 MINS

Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman Douglas Booth, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory, Jerome Flynn, Chris O’Dowd DIRECTORS CAST

PLOT 1891, France. A year after Vincent van Gogh’s death, a young man Armand Roulin (Booth) tries to deliver a letter written by Vincent (Robert Gulaczyk) to his brother, Theo. When Armand discovers that Theo is also dead, it sends Armand on an investigation to find out the truth behind the great artist’s demise.

THERE IS SOMETHING brilliantly bonkers about Loving Vincent. Made over seven years, directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman recreated the paintings of Vincent van Gogh with actors against green-screen, then employed 125 artists to paint over 62,450 frames to reﬂect the artist’s style. The result resembles Richard Linklater’s adventures in rotoscoping, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly,

NOVEMBER 2017

but seemingly painted by the world’s most famous artist. It might not completely satisfy dramatically but Loving Vincent is one of the most beautiful films of 2017, offering a glimpse of life through different eyes. From the opening hand-painted credit sequence — prefigured by van Gogh’s quote “We cannot speak other than by our paintings” — we are pulled into van Gogh’s hyper-sensual worldview, its beauty amplified by Clint Mansell’s gorgeous score. The form is the content here, from a yellow blazer that burns the eye with its intensity to black inky nights, from wild colours to the most delicate pastels. Art historians will have a field day catching references (helpfully pointed out at the end); the rest of us can just wallow in its splendour. The story borrows from another great work of art, Citizen Kane. Set a year after van Gogh’s apparent suicide, a postmaster (a big, beardy Chris O’Dowd) sends his son Armand (Booth) to deliver one of van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, only to discover Theo has also passed away. Armand then takes it on himself to investigate the mystery around Vincent’s death, chiefly why a sane man would be driven to suicide (or was he murdered?). So — and this is where Citizen Kane comes in — he starts

interviewing those who knew van Gogh: his paint supplier (John Sessions), his doctor (Flynn), his doctor’s daughter (Ronan) and a boatman (Aidan Turner) all provide conflicting accounts, creating a fractured portrait that never coheres into a clear picture. The point — that perhaps the only way to know an artist is through their work — couldn’t be clearer. This detective story is the weakest element of Loving Vincent. Ambitiously, Kobiela and Welchman stitch some 130 van Gogh paintings into the narrative but the storytelling lacks energy, hindered by trying to join the dots between the art works. Recreating the paintings also comes with another problem. The rotoscoping process means you now have the likes of Saoirse Ronan and Chris O’Dowd starring in van Gogh’s iconic paintings, and the effect is occasionally jarring or even funny. But if you ever wondered what Bronn off Game Of Thrones would look like painted by a master, this is the film for you. And as such, it is a treat. IAN FREER VERDICT Loving Vincent is a triumph of painstaking technical prowess and stunning visuals over storytelling and dialogue. See it for its nuanced take on a huge cultural figure and to applaud its astounding audacity.

cinema

Bradley mid, er, ÔbrawlÕ.

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 ★★★★

OUT 20 OCTOBER CERT 18 / 132 MINS

S. Craig Zahler Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Don Johnson, Udo Kier, Marc Blucas, Tom Guiry DIRECTOR CAST

When his pregnant wife is kidnapped, newly incarcerated Bradley Thomas (Vaughn) is given only one way to save her — kill a target in a maximum-security prison. And the only way to be transferred there? Extreme violence.

PLOT

VINCE VAUGHN COMES with baggage. It’s unavoidable — that’s what a decade and more of increasingly disappointing comedies will do to a career. But, in his own version of the McConaissance, he’s attempting to change his image — in True Detective, Hacksaw Ridge, and now with Brawl In Cell Block 99. Vaughn is Bradley (not Brad — as he continually corrects people), a recovering

NOVEMBER 2017

alcoholic who, in the same morning, is laid off from his job and discovers his wife Lauren (Carpenter) has been cheating on him. His reaction is to punch a car window until it smashes, then resolve to fix both his marriage and his employment situation. Cut to 18 months later: Lauren is pregnant, and he’s working (very successfully) as a drug runner. Life is good, until a joint job with some Mexican dealers goes wrong and Bradley is caught and sent down for seven years. Given the promise of the title, it’s surprising how long it takes to get to this point — it’s over an hour before we see a prison and even then, it’s not yet Block 99. But now we’re inside, the film starts to mutate from the gritty drama of its first hour, to a balls-out, grindhouse-inspired thrill-ride, where arms can be snapped in two and Don Johnson is a sadistic prison warden. On Bradley’s second day inside, a member of the Mexican cartel pays him a visit to issue an ultimatum: they’ve kidnapped his wife, he needs to get himself transferred to a maximumsecurity prison to kill one of its inmates. If he refuses, they have an abortionist on stand-by. Cue the brawling. Vaughn is undeniably effective here. The script is witty and darkly comedic, which he’s well-suited to, but, at 6’ 5”, with

a cue-ball shaved head and a prominent scalp tattoo, he’s also an impressive physical presence. He has to be — director S. Craig Zahler (whose debut was gory Western Bone Tomahawk) doesn’t employ any fast cuts in the fight scenes, instead happy to place his camera and let his actors get on with it. And get on with it they do, Bradley picking fights with everyone he can to get him closer to his target. These fights are notable for two reasons — their simplicity and their violence. The small moments that seemed out of place early on (such as Bradley’s unlikely ability to punch through a car window) suddenly make sense in this new context. And Zahler continually finds new ways to shock, from the sight of a snapped bone jutting through skin to the horrifying results of a face being ground into the floor. It’s hardly the Oscar-chasing direction McConaughey chose for his career rethink, but it’s certainly more fun. He may be 47, but Vince Vaughn is suddenly an actor to watch. JONATHAN PILE VERDICT Brawl In Cell Block 99 takes its time with its set-up, but that only makes the action that follows all the more effective. And Vaughn as an action hero works surprisingly well.

DOuBle DATe HHH

OUT 13 october / CERT 15 / 89 mins

Benjamin Barfoot Danny Morgan, Georgia Groome, Kelly Wenham, Michael Socha director cast

FOLLOWInG A STRInG of amusing shorts, director-editor Benjamin Barfoot and actor-writer Danny Morgan make an assured transition to features with this raucous Edgar Wright-inflected comic horror. Lured into a double date by cocksure buddy Michael Socha, Morgan’s 29-year-old ginger virgin only realises when being trussed up for an occult ritual that he has badly misread the signals being given off by sinister sisters Kelly Wenham and Georgia Groome. The pace flags around midway and a fair few gags fall flat, but the leads are terrific and Barfoot stages a room-smashing fist fight between Socha and Wenham and an excruciating birthday surprise with Morgan’s wackily Christian family with equal aplomb. dP

cinema

Jungle HH

OUT 20 october CERT 15 / 113 mins

Greg McLean Daniel Radcliffe, Joel Jackson, Alex Russell, Thomas Kretschmann director

cast

In pursuit of the authentic jungle experience, Israeli backpacker Yossi (Radcliffe) heads into the deepest Bolivian wilds with three companions. After supplies run low and in-fighting fractures the group, Yossi finds himself starving and stranded.

Plot

Somewhere in the distant past, Greg

DinA

HHHH OUT 20 october / CERT 15 / 102 mins

Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini Dina Buno, Scott Levin

directors cast

ThE GRAnD JURY winner at this year’s Sundance, Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s documentary follows smalltown couple Dina (a family friend of Sickles) and Walmart greeter Scott, both on the autistic spectrum, as they prepare for their wedding. We observe them as they negotiate the usual bumps in a nascent romance — money spats, occasional black moods, moving in, and thorniest of all, the complicated question of sex (she wants it, he’s terrified). There’s a sweet innocence to their tale, Sickles and Santini finding beauty, tenderness and wry humour in the banal — the work of Miranda July springs to mind — and as their story unfolds, the revelation of past traumas suffered by Dina gives sad context to this second chance. Intimate, breathtakingly candid and hugely touching. lb

mcLean must have had one shocker of a summer holiday. ever since 2005’s Wolf Creek, the Australian director has tormented holidaymakers with tales of vacations gone horribly awry. we’ve had murderous bushmen (Wolf Creek and its sequel), killer crocs (Rogue), ancient evils (The Darkness) and now this tale of four backpackers getting soundly spanked by mother nature. Daniel radcliffe leads the gap year misadventure, all but unrecognisable beneath a scraggly beard and thick israeli accent. As Yossi Ghinsberg (upon whose real-life account this film is based), radcliffe assumes the unbearable smugness of so many student travellers, throwing common sense to the wind in the pursuit of self-discovery. Yet even the most insufferable twatpacker would surely look askance if a mysterious Austrian geologist strolled up to them in a market with the promise of lost tribes and incan gold. not so Yossi. with barely a hat-tip towards seriously questioning his shady guide’s motives, Ghinsberg and his travelling chums (Swiss teacher marcus and American bro-tographer Kevin) hire up their grubby cargo pants and follow their Karl into the Bolivian bush with nary a Lonely Planet between them. it’s at this point that things begin to go guavashaped, surprising precisely no-one except the feckless trekkers themselves.

Fake-out scares and a macabre monkey roast pepper our time marvelling at the South American foliage (captured with vibrant flair by cinematographer Stefan Duscio), as the quartet yomps further into the jungle, but it’s not long before the stress-lines begin to show. Karl and Kevin begin locking horns with increasing regularity, while marcus’ ailing feet make him the group’s obvious weak link — the speed with which his ‘friends’ suggest abandoning him showering none of them in glory. By the time the group splits up (the events surrounding which being a significant departure from what actually happened) and radcliffe finds himself alone and without provisions, we’re already an hour in and nearly as travel-worn as our protagonist. once the film finally gets going, though, radcliffe acquits himself admirably as nature’s bitch: his wide-eyed panic and widening mental-fracturing never less than convincing. But deep within the trunks there’s little either literally or figuratively for the actor to sink his teeth into. mcLean wheels out an assortment of slithering, creeping horrors with which to torment his hero, ranging from the startling (a grumpy snake) to the stomach-churning (a parasitic head-worm) and the hoarily uninspired (a headlong stumble into quicksand). But it’s all far too drawn out to maintain much tension and any sense of peril is thoroughly defused by the fact that, based on an autobiography, the eventual outcome is never in doubt. As a survival adventure, this ticks the requisite boxes (eating bird foetuses, bludgeoning reptiles, taking on a jaguar with a can of deodorant) and its aesthetic is hard to fault, but unlike mcLean’s more fanciful adventures, this never comes close to seizing us by the throat. to compound the issue, the film’s postscript hints at another, untold story that sounds vastly more compelling, leaving the distinct impression we’d have been far more entertained had we left Yossi to his fate and stuck with the malingering teacher instead. James dyer verdict radcliffe menaced by a hostile bush is far more entertaining as innuendo than actual drama. What might have been Deliverance in the tropics is rather a dan versus wilderness yarn.

november 2017

It’s not often you see

cinema

a three-foot squirrel.

THE RITUAL ★★★

OUT 13 OCTOBER CERT 15 / 94 MINS

David Bruckner Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton DIRECTOR CAST

Luke (Spall) is haunted by his friend’s death during a convenience-store robbery in which he was too afraid to intervene. To mark his passing, he and three friends go on a hiking holiday in Sweden. When one of them sprains his ankle, an ill-advised shortcut through a spooky forest is taken, and very nasty things happen.

PLOT

AN ADAPTATION OF Adam Nevill’s 2011 horror novel, The Ritual is notable — and very welcome — for its commitment to delivering a solid genre experience. With nary a po-mo nudge or wink in sight, it replaces clever-clever games with a welcome commitment to just being a traditional horror movie. There are dark and stormy nights, suggestions of ancient evil, spooky cabins in

NOVEMBER 2017

woods, and the idea that what really haunts us lies within rather than without — all of which you’ll have seen before. But, like somebody doing a cracking Charleston, sometimes there can be pleasure in seeing an old standard done well. In a time when quasi-ironic pastiches abound, when too many filmmakers want you to know they’re smarter than the film they’re making, it’s refreshing to have an old-fashioned spooky forest flick that only wants to have you out of your seat. It’ll get you out of it, too — just not in awe at its ambition. This is a horror film where the characters seem to have actually seen a horror film, but instead of irritating one-liners and ridiculous decisions, this knowledge lets them know that as soon as they see a gutted deer in the trees of antler-handed effigies, they’re in serious trouble. Progressing from plausibly played banter to almost turning on one another as the presence in the woods moves in on them, all four — including Four Lions’ Arsher Ali and Merlin’s Sam Troughton — are solid, with Rob JamesCollier’s benign NCO type standing out. Rafe Spall is his usual dependable self, anchoring proceedings with an unfussy performance as a guilt-ridden everyman — the amount of self-loathing he packs into simply having a fag is impressive, and his nuanced turn classes up

what’s essentially a B-movie. Director David Bruckner has clearly seen a few horrors himself, with slow zooms and lengthy where’s-the-danger still frames showing he’s been taking notes from some of the classics, and his visualisations of Spall’s haunting visions of the murder he could have stopped are smart. However, skilful delivery of familiar stuff is still familiar — there are scenes here that felt old-hat back in The Blair Witch Project, and right from the ﬁrst discovery of runes carved into tree trunks you can probably work out what’s going on. This has clearly been made by people aware of the traditions that lie behind them, and understand horror cinema’s position as a venue where trauma is processed, which is admirable. There’s nothing wrong per se with The Ritual but this feels more like a calling card than a full delivery of Bruckner and his team’s potential. Now they’ve perfected how to use the tools, it’ll be even better when they learn how to make their own machine with them. ANDREW LOWRY VERDICT Straightforward, unpretentious and well-acted, this is a solid if unsurprising genre piece. It may not rise above skilfully delivering horror tropes, but connoisseurs will eat up its refusal to wink at them.

That moment you

cinema

realise you’ve had a dodgy kebab.

THE GLASS CASTLE ★★★

OUT 6 OCTOBER CERT 12A / 127 MINS

Destin Daniel Cretton Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts

DIRECTOR CAST

1989, New York. Jeannette Walls (Larson) has it all: a successful career as a gossip journalist, a swanky apartment and a rich boyfriend — soon-to-be husband. Yet a chance encounter sparks a reminiscence of an unconventional ’70s childhood dominated by her alcoholic father, Rex (Harrelson).

PLOT

ON PAPER, THE Glass Castle is something to get excited about. It marks the reunion of Brie Larson and Destin Daniel Cretton, the star and director of 2013’s Short Term 12 — a mini indie masterpiece that should jump ahead of everything on your must-watch list if you’ve never seen it. And the source material, American journalist Jeannette Walls’ memoir about growing up in an eccentric ’70s family, suggests the kind of interesting character dynamics that made

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Larson and Cretton’s first film together so great. Sadly, The Glass Castle doesn’t totally deliver on its pedigree, an exasperating confection of great performances, meandering scenes, sweet moments, off-the-peg characters and a resolution that is at once trite yet affecting. Put simply, The Glass Castle is Captain Fantastic without the laughs. The film flits between the ’80s with Larson as successful gossip writer Walls — we know it’s the ’80s because her hair is huge — living with a Totally Wrong Fiancé (Max Greenfield) and her unconventional ’70s upbringing with nomadic parents, drunken dreamer Rex (Harrelson) and artist Rose Mary (Watts). As the family — Walls has three siblings — move from town to town, warm moments (a lovely scene with Rex and Jeannette stargazing) butt up against harrowing vignettes (Rex teaching Jeannette to swim by just lobbing her around a swimming pool) in scenes that feel repetitive and don’t move the action on. Surprisingly, given the nuance in Short Term 12, Cretton is unable to find any telling details or insight in any of this; instead there is more of a TV movie feel. This also feeds into his filmmaking, which save a couple of uses of slow motion and a raw handheld camera in a fight scene, is unobtrusive but bland. Where he does

shine, though, is with his cast. Harrelson gives Rex intelligence and a befuddled kind of menace but with enough turn-on-a-dime charm that makes you believe the family would stay together. Watts, too, registers as an artsy Earth mother type but has real bite in a confrontation with her grown-up daughter over noodles. Larson is good, but the flashback structure doesn’t really give her enough to sink her teeth into — it’s a bit like watching a Formula 1 car never getting out of first gear. It’s just as well, then, that Chandler Head and Ella Anderson, playing six-year-old and tween Jeannette respectively, are terrific, playing difficult scenes without being too saccharine or movie-kid wise. By the time the two story strands come together — late teens Jeannette (now played by Larson) resolves to strike out on her own; super successful Jeannette reconnects with her parents living rough in New York — the resolution feels forced, convenient and predictable. But, even forced, convenient and predictable can move you when you have great actors. It just could have been so much more. IAN FREER VERDICT A familiar tale of a quirky childhood is delivered with little in the way of freshness or truth. Still, the performances by Larson, Harrelson and Watts rescue it.

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THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE ★★★

OUT 13 OCTOBER CERT U / 101 MINS

DIRECTORS

Paul Fisher, Charlie Bean, Bob Logan Jackie Chan, Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Fred Armisen, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Peña CAST

PLOT

In the Lego universe, the city of Ninjago is under attack from evil Lord Garmadon (Theroux), and only the Secret Ninja Force, secretly led by Garmadon’s son, Lloyd (Franco), can stop him. But when the Ultimate Weapon is unleashed on the town, the ninjas must join forces with their foe.

LIKE ACCIDENTALLY STANDING barefoot on a plastic brick, 2014’s The Lego Movie sent a jolt up the nervous system of family-friendly animated movies. Early dismissals as a corporate cash-in were quickly quashed when directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller channelled their

NOVEMBER 2017

earlier hits, bringing the energy of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and irony of 21 Jump Street to create something truly fresh: a fun fantasy romp, and a metatextual parenting parable, in a single well-constructed package. Everything was indeed awesome, especially for the Warner Bros. coffers. The lure of a franchise, inevitably, proved strong. The Lego Batman Movie was next in this burgeoning brick-ematic universe, and now hard on its plastic heels some seven months later comes this, the first in the series not to use characters from the original film. Instead the source comes from the ‘Ninjago’ line of products sold by the Danish brick brand, a vaguely Japanese martialarts-meets-mechanised-droids theme which has already inspired a TV cartoon. Since most mainstream audiences will be unfamiliar with the range, we’re introduced to the new world via a whimsical Princess Bride-esque old storyteller played by Jackie Chan, who neatly bookends the film in live action. And, echoing the conceit of the first film, other live-action elements are ingeniously incorporated into the animation. Using Lego minifigures as props, Chan tells the story of Ninjago, a mysterious place far away, existing (like Big Hero 6’s San Fransokyo) in a mid-Pacific approximation of East and West. The

residents of Ninjago live under constant threat from the tyranny of Lord Garmadon (Theroux), who dreams of ruling the town for reasons that may exist but are never quite divulged. Enter the heroic Secret Ninja Force: six teenage heroes each with their own colour, fighting specialism, elemental force and witty identity. Think Power Rangers, only with fewer opposable thumbs. Like its Lego predecessors, the opening act of The Lego Ninjago Movie is fun with a capital F: frantic, fizzing with energy, and furiously funny. It’s beautifully animated, too — if, like previous entries, a little over-caffeinated during the action sequences, bricks flying every which way at such a speed that it might induce motion sickness. After the ‘Ultimate Weapon’ is used to summon a catastrophic (emphasis on the ‘cat’) enemy, our heroes embark on a mystical journey into the wilderness to track down the ‘Ultimate Ultimate Weapon’. The gag rate largely remains, but déjà vu sets in fast. Despite heroic voice work by Justin Theroux, Lord Garmadon is wildly similar to Will Ferrell’s Lord Business from the first film, and the entire story steps down a well-trodden path. Garmadon’s son is the Green Ninja (Franco) in a none-too-subtle echo of the Skywalker family tree, while the daddy

The Hanger Lane Gyratory strikes again.

THE MERCILESS HHH

OUT 27 october CERT 18 / 115 minS

Byung Sung-hyun Yim Si-wan, Sul Kang-gul, Lee Kyoungyoung, Jeon Hye-jin, Kim Hie-won director cASt

Busan’s biggest crime syndicate welcomes a new member, in the shape of young punk Hyun-su (Yim Si-wan). But he isn’t what he appears to be, and the revelations that spill out will lead to carnage across the city.

pLot

Lego ninjas assemble! Or should that be assemble Lego ninjas?

TraiN To BusaN was the South Korean issues that dominate the latter half of the film will feel tired, even to younger viewers. That signature tone — arch, knowing, sheened in puckish irony — sometimes struggles to connect, too. One character mocks the “needlessly cryptic metaphors” of enigmatic sensei Master Wu (voiced by Chan), but it’s not quite courageous enough to entirely subvert the tropes it pokes fun at, seemingly happy to follow a generic template in which characters learn obvious lessons about how the real power was inside them all along (a lesson Dorothy and the Tin Man learnt some eight decades earlier). Still, it’s bright and breezy enough to keep most ages diverted for an hour-and-a-half, and those diminutive minifigures still manage to stand above most of their animated competition (though Pixar, on its good days, might have something to say about that). It’s just a shame that a series which promised so much is already showing signs of fatigue and repetition. The Lego Movie felt essential. The Lego Ninjago Movie, meanwhile, feels disposable. john nugent verdict three films in, and the Lego franchise remains hugely entertaining — though it could do with being less of a chip off the old block.

break-out hit of 2016, an inventive, hyper-kinetic spin on familiar subject matter that no less an authority than Edgar Wright described as the “best zombie movie I’ve seen in forever”. The Merciless is positioned to be its successor: a bleak and noirish crime saga with style to burn, it’s even set in Busan, a port city on the country’s south-east coast. Ultimately, though, Byung Sung-hyun’s film is less successful at finding fresh riffs on its well-trodden material, which is heavy on granite-tough gangsters, nasty torture sequences and dramatic betrayals. The central duo are baby-faced Hyun-soo (Yim) and ice-cool Jae-ho (Sul), who meet in prison during a high-stakes face-slapping contest (you’ve got to pass the time somehow). The pair of criminals quickly bond and make plans for their post-cellblock future, but as an early flashback shows, Hyun-soo is actually an undercover cop, dropped into the pentitentiary as a way to take down the drug-trafficking ring of which Jae-ho is a part. That’s no spoiler: it’s actually only one reveal in a seemingly endless succession of carpetpulls. The Merciless is more slippery than a bowl of oily noodles, pinballing frenetically forward and backwards in time to show how nobody is

exactly who they appear to be. It’s smart stuff, and makes it near-impossible to guess where the story is going. But with a largely generic cast of characters, it also makes for a packed and exhausting two hours, lacking the operatic simplicity of the similarly themed infernal affairs. If the script is overcooked, there’s plenty of compensation in the form of Byung’s highenergy direction, which is all the more impressive given this is his first action film (his 2012 film Whatcha’ Wearin’? was a romcom about phone sex). Here he goes to town with all the enthusiasm of Martin Scorsese, were Martin Scorsese to be locked in a cupboard for a year, then released and given a Panaflex. There are stunning shots (a single-take fight sequence during which the camera tilts 90 degrees and flies through the air with somebody’s body), freeze-frames, wipes, apple-eating montages and a bizarre but wonderful fish-based music video starring a dapper crime boss. Even if the substance doesn’t always match the style, there’s plenty to relish. The shame is that there’s enough good stuff here to make you yearn for the classic it could have been. Characters snarl enjoyably pulpy dialogue such as, “He’s like a caged Jesus Christ,” or, “He’s the whale of all criminals.” There are memorably awful bits of brutality; if you didn’t fancy the idea of having boiling oil poured on you before, this definitely won’t change your mind. And there’s something fascinating about its dark worldview: the title applies as much to the cops as to the robbers. But ultimately it fails to keep the tension ratcheted up, or to satisfyingly develop the relationship between the two protagonists — is it a bromance, or something more, as one character suggests? The filmmakers could have done with being a little more merciless at the writing stage. nicK de SemLyen verdict An ultraviolent Korean crime film with plenty of swagger and visual brio, but still too generic to really stand out from the pack.

november 2017

6 BeloW HH

OUT 13 october / CERT 12A / 96 mins director

Scott Waugh Josh Hartnett, Mira Sorvino, Sarah Dumont, Kale Brady cAst

cinema

Grace Jones: BloodliGht and Bami HHH

OUT 27 october CERT 15 /115 mins

director Sophie

Fiennes Grace Jones, Sly & Robbie, Jean-Paul Goude cAst

pLot

Documentarian Sophie Fiennes observes the legendary Grace Jones in the more intimate moments of her life, hoping to reveal the person behind the construct, contrasting this footage with clips from her spectacular stage shows.

Grace Beverly Jones is, for most, an enigma. There are of course the verifiable facts — born in Jamaica in 1948, grew up in syracuse, new york, found fame as a model, musician and actor — but there’s much that is hidden. The Grace Jones we see is all persona — who is the real woman behind the new wave icon? sophie Fiennes’ documentary — made 40 years after the release of Jones’ first album, Portfolio — attempts to reveal the mother, daughter, lover and friend behind the mask. It’s a point underlined rather literally in the opening sequence — two intercut performances of Slave To The Rhythm showcasing not one but two elaborate masks as the seemingly ageless Grace hula-hoops her way through the song. concert clips (tracks include Pull Up To The Bumper, La Vie En Rose and Love Is The Drug) stud the piece at regular intervals, and watching her on stage is as mesmerising as any Grace fan would expect; Jones is truly a unique entertainer, hypnotic, arresting, challenging. But the thesis here is to reveal the other Grace, and to do this Fiennes opts for candid glimpses of the star through fly-on-the-wall, vérité footage rather than to-camera interviews or talking heads. Much of this is filmed back with friends and close family in Jamaica. We see her

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tucking into grilled fish, licking her fingers as she catches up with the gossip. elsewhere we’re party to a telephone spat with long-time collaborators sly & robbie, as her anxious colleague hisses out of shot, “Find out when they can come; don’t just piss him off!” In these moments, and behind the scenes in Paris as she continues on the publicity trail, there are some hints of chinks in the armour, not to mention flashes of impish humour (“I wish my pussy was this tight”, she says of a particularly tricky oyster). Most revealing are a handful of scenes where she remembers Mas P, her domineering step-grandfather. “We had to read things from the Bible while we were being beaten,” she and her siblings recall. There’s a suggestion that such treatment is in part responsible for the strong, implacable adult she became. yet there are scenes of great tenderness too, not least Grace cradling and cooing to her baby granddaughter — soft as the breeze, to quote closing track Hurricane. However, suggestion is what much of the new insight remains. Fiennes’ position as observer rather than interrogator offers little solid context, and can be distancing and confusing for the viewer, as if we’re overhearing half sentences rather than whole conversations. Which, in fact, we often are. It’s beautifully shot — night-time Jamaican vistas, misty, empty, the crickets chirping, or shots of Paris glittering at night, are hugely atmospheric — but again this adds to the feel of a mood-piece or vignette rather than biography. Without doubt this is a must for fans and an intriguing watch for the more casual viewer. yet come the end, for all the moments of candour and sneak peeks into Grace’s private moments, the impression left is still of that inscrutable, mercurial individual, the mask still firmly in place. Which, you suspect, is just how Grace wants it. Liz beArdsworth verdict An engaging, visually striking attempt to uncover the ‘real’ Grace Jones which is only partially successful in those terms. nonetheless, it’s still a fitting tribute to a music icon.

THiS TalE OF a troubled snowboarder stuck on a freezing mountain gives an actor a chance to flex their muscles: it’s a one-man The Grey, or a sub-zero 127 Hours. Josh Hartnett is that actor and he gives it his all, — shivering, fending off wolves and at one point getting butt-naked in the ice. But he is not well-served by the material. His character is a cipher, prone to quoting the ‘Book Of Romans’ at length, while director Scott Waugh overcooks a relentless string of flashbacks. Based on a real event endured by hockey player Eric leMarque, the film handles its hero’s battle with his demons coyly, and is incident-light, dragging even at a lean 98 minutes. a bear attack wouldn’t have gone amiss. nds

the Party HHHH

OUT 13 october / CERT 15 / 71 mins director

Sally Potter Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall cAst

in a TaRanTinO movie, the arrival of a group of people into a confined space is usually the cue for bloody carnage. in Sally Potter’s peppery dinner party comedy — ‘The Hateful after Eight’, if you will — the shots fired are of the verbal kind, but often equally funny-shocking in impact. Politician-on-therise Kristin Scott-Thomas and her husband, Timothy Spall’s husk of an academic, are the hosts, but the skeletons exhumed belong to an eclectic ensemble that boasts a hippydippy Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy’s seriously coked-up banker and Patricia Clarkson’s scene-stealingly withering friend. Over a quick-fire hour-and-a-bit, Potter’s return to form plays out in monochrone grainier than the contents of Murphy’s nostrils. pds

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the ReaGan show HH

OUT 6 october / CERT PG / 75 mins

Sierra Pettengill, Pacho Velez Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush directors cast

cinema

the mountain between us HHH

OUT 6 october CERT tbc / 104 mins

Hany Abu-Assad Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Beau Bridges, Dermot Mulroney director cast

When their small plane crashes into Utah’s mountainous wilderness, strangers Alex (Winslet) and Ben (Elba) have to work together to survive. But, as the days pass, they also find a mutual attraction brewing.

Plot

Survival againSt the elements is big this month. Daniel radcliffe is lost in a jungle in Jungle, Josh hartnett is battling sub-zero temperatures in 6 Below, and Kate Winslet and idris elba have several mountains, a forest, and a frozen lake between them, and a civilisation in The Mountain Between Us. it’s this two-hander that’s the strongest of the three (check the star ratings), possibly because it’s the only one not hamstrung by having to stay faithful to a true story. any moment it feels as though the energy’s dwindling — boom! Kate Winslet can grab a flare gun to shoot a hostile cougar in the face. Winslet is alex Martin, a photojournalist trying to get back to new York from Salt lake City for her wedding the next day. When an incoming storm grounds all flights out of the airport she recruits similarly stranded passenger Ben Bass (elba), who she overhears telling the airline staff he urgently needs to get back to perform a surgery, to hire a small private plane to take them home. But the plane crashes, the pilot dies and the two of them (plus the pilot’s dog) are stranded on a snowy mountain in utah’s high uintas Wilderness. What follows is a tale of survival and, eventually — between the two human survivors, at least — romance.

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that this doubles as a love story means that the film doesn’t dwell on survival techniques or the grimness of their situation. and the pair rarely focus on their likely deaths. the script, co-written by Chris Weitz (co-writer of About A Boy) and J. Mills goodloe, is instead mostly content to have them bicker, bond or flirt as the situation dictates. that this works at all is down to the two actors. elba has been underutilised as a romantic lead but, with his easy charm and charisma (and, let’s not kid ourselves, incredible looks), he’s ideal for the role. and it’s refreshing to see him paired with an actress (within a couple of years of ) his own age, rather than — as is far more common — 20 years his junior. But there is still peril, and not just from that cougar. Winslet appears to be channelling rose from Titanic — alex’s every instinct seemingly leading the pair into danger, whether it’s wanting to climb down an unscalable cliff face or sending Ben to find where the dog’s run off to. it’s a good job Ben is medically trained, because she’d be dead several times over without him. and every problem is quickly solved, whether it’s a lack of food, a hunt for shelter or alex being unable to walk — Ben simply drags her behind him across the snow as though she’s a sled. it’s an engaging journey, but not unpredictable — moments of adversity are followed by moments of triumph until their journey comes to an end. and, despite alex having a fiancé she was a day away from marrying (who’s presumably frantic with worry for her — although we never see the outside world), you’ll be rooting for them to get together. Whether that’s a good idea or not (Sandra Bullock’s warning in Speed that “relationships based on intense experiences never work” suggests not) becomes moot. there’s a grittier version of this story, with a deeper examination of the morals involved, but that’s not what director hany abu-assad wanted to make. this is a likeable, witty, romantic adventure film and on those virtues, it succeeds. Jonathan Pile verdict two compelling leads and a mix of adventure and romance. it’s a pleasant experience, if not one that will linger long in the memory.

DURING THE EIGHT years of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, White House Television generated more footage than the previous five administrations combined. Using this material, Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez intercut WHTV images with news coverage to explore whether Reagan deserved his reputation as The Great Communicator or was simply a ham actor who was never rumbled. This might have made a fascinating parable for our fake news times. But the directors get distracted by Reagan’s relationship with Gorbachev and opt to chronicle their advance towards nuclear arms reduction. Full of movie clips, bloopers and polished performances, this slickly edited flashback is frustratingly more engaging than enlightening. dP

the niGht is shoRt, walk on GiRl HH

OUT 4 october / CERT 12a / 93 mins

Masaaki Yuasa Gen Hoshino, Kana Hanazawa, Hiroshi Kamiya director cast

IF YOU ENjOYED The Simpsons’ trippy ‘El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro jomer’ episode, prepare yourself for a feature-length dose. This adaptation of Tomihiko Morimi’s novel is a picaresque trip through an otherworldly night out, fuelled by eating and drinking contests. Senpai (Hoshino) is a shy student with a crippling crush on The Girl With The Black Hair (Hanazawa), and follows her through drinking contests and encounters with perverts, gods, student drama, plague and, yes, spicy food. It’s almost aggressively nonsensical, and there’s occasionally a nasty whiff of stalking and would-be domination in Senpai’s pursuit of the Girl, but there’s something sincere hidden under the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper delirium. hoh

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mother! ★★★★

OUT NOW CERT 18 / 121 MINS

DIRECTOR

Darren Aronofsky Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson CAST

PLOT

Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman living in a remote house with her poet husband (Bardem). She’s devotedly restoring their home as he wrestles with his latest work, when an unexpected guest (Harris) arrives, mistaking their place for a B&B. When her husband invites him and his wife (Pfeiffer) to stay, we sense they may have let something far worse into their lives than passing strangers...

LIKE HARD CRACKLING — you know, those most scorched, scratchy bits of pig fat — Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is not an easy ﬁlm to swallow. But, hell, it gives you a lot to chew on. Is it a psycho-horror? Sure, in part. A surrealist satire? Yes, that too. A black comedy? At times.

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A visual metaphysical poem? Oh, go on then. It starts out like a stab at doing Pinter — a jagged chamber piece on why hell is well and truly other people — then metamorphoses into a kind of indoor Children Of Men. There are shades of Ben Wheatley’s take on High-Rise, echoes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s queasy-beautiful The Neon Demon, a wodge of Lars von Trier and a few tonal call-backs to Aronofsky’s own Black Swan. In short, it’s gorgeous, distressing and utterly confounding all at once. Slap-bang at the centre of all its bewildering meta-twists is Jennifer Lawrence — proving she can do what she damn well pleases these days and do it damn well — as the unnamed muse of Javier Bardem’s creatively constipated poet. He’s unnamed, as every character here is, ringing an alarm bell that what we’re witnessing is perhaps a few steps left of what we’d usually consider reality. Every shot of the ﬁlm is either tight in on Lawrence or presenting her point of view. Another alarm bell, that we’re dealing purely with the subjective in this narrative. But it makes for an intense experience, a sometimes disorientating sidecar-whirl around one woman’s nightmare. There’s no better word for it, really. Floorboards bleed. Panic attacks momentarily

turn the house charred and blackened. Every mundane noise, be it footfall, door-knock or the whining judder of the washing machine, is jarring and only amplified by the absence of a music score. Even when she’s (briefly) happy and content in her idyllic abode, Lawrence’s character is a prisoner, never allowed to step outside and performing every domestic, menial task — plumbing, painting, cooking, laundering — while her older other half barely lifts a finger unless it’s to throw open their doors to impolite house guests who only bring mess and discord. Then, when he finally does regain his poetic mojo (via a clumsy burst of tragi-comic melodrama on Aronofsky’s part) he only makes things worse. We’ve got so used to seeing Bardem as a baddie, it’s hard not to have the worst expectations of him here. There’s certainly something strange about the way he’s so protective of the eerily glowing crystal he keeps in his study, and you wonder why he’s so eager to usher disruptive strangers into his home (Harris with his hacking cough, Michelle Pfeiffer rendered a bourgeois cliché with her boozy, snide asides) and blurt out things he must know will distress his wife. “We always talk about how this place is too big for the two of us,” he says to his guests early on, and the

“He’ll soon grow to hate Pooh,” thought Piglet.

Goodbye Christopher robin HHHH

OUT noW CERT Pg / 107 minS

Simon Curtis Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, Kelly Macdonald, Will Tilston director cASt

Suffering PTSD after returning from World War I, playwright A.A. Milne (Gleeson) moves his family to the countryside and attempts to write an anti-war book. But while suffering from writer’s block he begins bonding with his young son (Tilston) and envisages a story for children instead.

PLot

She was having an Ikea nightmare.

look on Lawrence’s face is one of barely contained horror. Yet he’s no villain, at least not in a nice, simple, straightforward movie way. He’s... a man. Aronofsky isn’t one to shy away from metaphor. He’s always liked his fat and ripe (as you’ll know if you’ve seen The Fountain). But in mother! he squishes them to pigment and daubs the bloody walls with them. Religion, history, the media, sexual politics, the crumbling of civilisation, creativity itself — it’s all interior decoration for Aronofsky. It’ll prove too garish for many, culminating in one sequence so fracturingly brutal and awful it’s guaranteed to upset even those who’ve identified (what we’re pretty sure is) Aronofsky’s point. The film definitely earns its ‘not for everyone’ caveat. But at least it has something to say — almost too much, you could argue. For all its discomfiting flourishes and occasional blunders, it’s hardly a hollow construction and far, far from forgettable. Like all our most vivid bad dreams, it snags the mind. With barbs. dAn JoLin verdict A difficult film and one that’s likely to offend in some ways. but as an elliptical, dream-logic infused visual poem, it certainly leaves a searing impression.

CHRIsTopHeR RoBIn WAs real, and he wasn’t happy about it. More specifically, he wasn’t happy to be put in a situation where people discovering he was ‘the real Christopher Robin’ meant something — that his childhood games had been packaged and sold by his father across four books and countless items of tie-in merchandise. When you see him as a six-year-old being doorstepped by reporters or told to stand by a real bear for a photo op (“He’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t make any sudden movements”), you start to see his point. It’s this father-son relationship between A.A. Milne and “Billy Moon” (Christopher’s parents’ pet name for him) that’s at the heart of Goodbye Christopher Robin. Milne returned from World War I a changed man. suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, bright lights, loud noises, even the buzzing of bees transported him back to the atrocities he witnessed at the somme. His solution was a move out of London — swapping his Chelsea townhouse for the peace of a sussex farmhouse so he could concentrate on his writing. Here he began spending time outdoors and, consequently, more time with his son. As a reaction to this, his wife, Daphne (Robbie), upped and left, vowing only to return

when he started writing again. Which, inspired by Christopher’s games with his soft toys in the woods by his house, he soon did — writing a collection of poems (When We Were Very Young) followed by the novel Winnie-The-Pooh. If Daphne’s actions seem unfathomable and heartless, that isn’t the half of it. Her character is, by a distance, the weakest element of the film. In reality, she was also psychologically damaged (not least by her experiences during childbirth) but the script doesn’t give her issues the same credence it gives her husband’s. she’s thinly written, and comes off as a self-centred, one-note villain. Harley Quinn was more likeable. But mostly, everything else works. Milne was a renowned wit, and the dialogue is sharply written (“The midwife says nine pounds. I’m inclined to think midwives are like anglers — exaggerating the size of the catch”). And while real-life events appear condensed, or slightly moved in the timeline to better fit the film’s narrative, the essence is the same. The stories become worldwide bestsellers, propelling his son to a level of fame he can’t comprehend, but which his parents are happy to exploit for monetary gain. even before the books’ success, Christopher was predominately raised by his nanny, olive (Macdonald), and his attachment to her only grows as his parents become more preoccupied. Despite it beginning with Milne’s struggles, the film ultimately focuses on Christopher’s emotional journey. And whether that’s successful comes down to the actor playing him. Happily, Will Tilston (in his first role) is a revelation. naturalistic in a way most child actors aren’t, it’s easy to just accept how good he is rather than shout about it. But shout about it we should. He sells every moment — his joy is ours and so is his sorrow. The ageing of the character means he’s passed the role to another actor (Alex Lawther) by the time the film approaches its heartwrenching finale, but that it lands is down to the work he’s done. not a bad start. JonAthAn PiLe verdict A witty and touching father-son tale. And at its centre: a startling debut from Will tilston, whose compelling performance ensures its emotional moments land successfully.

november 2017

AMERICAN ASSASSIN HH

OUT now / CERT 18 / 112 mins

Michael Cuesta Michael Keaton, Dylan O’Brien, Taylor Kitsch, Sanaa Lathan, Shiva Negar director cAst

cinema

KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE HHHH

OUT now CERT 15 / 141 mins

Matthew Vaughn Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Mark Strong, Pedro Pascal, Halle Berry, Elton John director cAst

A year after saving the world, Kingsman agent Eggsy (Egerton) joins forces with US branch Statesman to take on mysterious narcotics empire The Golden Circle.

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Matthew Vaughn clearly had too much fun making Kingsman to leave its Savile row-based secret service hanging in the wardrobe. a bespoke Bond pastiche, tailored to amplify that series’ preposterous plots, snobbish undercurrents, cold-blooded violence and (to the understandable distaste of many) smutty sexism, it was also such a success that a sequel was positively demanded. But Kingsman wasn’t just about turning up 007 all the way to 11. there was at its core a smart spin on Pygmalion, with colin Firth’s starchy superspy harry tutoring the chavvy eggsy (egerton) in the ways of espionage. with that arc complete, eggsy doesn’t have anywhere so interesting to go here in terms of character development. neither the cultureclash elements — which arise once eggsy seeks out the brash, honky-tonky Statesmen — nor his attempts to stay faithful to his royal girlfriend quite fill that Pygmalion-shaped hole. the return of harry, now one-eyed and amnesiac, at least revives the central relationship; albeit in an inverted form, with eggsy struggling to ease his former mentor back into the spy game. But character takes a back seat to action now. thankfully, though, that action is terrific. From an opening black-cab scrap and chase through london, to the climactic assault on the

november 2017

villains’ base (an ancient cambodian city given a kitsch americana makeover), Vaughn keeps things impressively kinetic and focused. Presented in seemingly single takes, each brutal fight sequence involves a (presumably VFXassisted) single camera fluidly whirling, pivoting and crash-zooming through the carnage. as with the first film, the sexual content is similarly heightened and despite the reaction to that anal gag, which was both coarse and jarring, Vaughn and co-writer Jane goldman are hardly contrite. hence the tracking Device Scene — we’ll spare the details here — which involves some shockingly invasive tactics on eggsy’s part, and seems calibrated to offend. Meanwhile, Vaughn and goldman have a blast as they flirt with cliché introducing the american contingent. where the Kingsman front is a tailor, the Statesmen are hidden in a bourbon distillery and have booze-related codenames to match. we have tequila, played by channing tatum with tobacco-spitting brio (until he’s frustratingly side-lined for most of the movie); ginger ale (halle Berry, not doing much as the equivalent of Mark Strong’s Merlin); whiskey (Pedro Pascal, coming on like Burt reynolds playing Indiana Jones); and big boss champagne — or ‘champ’, as he prefers to be called (Jeff Bridges doing a benevolent Boss hogg). then there’s Julianne Moore as the villain — illegal-drug-trade monopoliser Poppy adams. She’s underused, but provides brief bursts of quality as a ’50s-obsessed psychopath. there are a lot of toys for Vaughn to play with here, and for the most part he plays well, but there’s not quite enough to justify the unwieldy 141-minute run time. harry’s return feels stretched and laboured and the whole “glasto” episode (including the aforementioned tracking Device Scene) is something we could have lived without. But Vaughn clearly can’t get enough of his Kingsmen. after all, he’s having too much fun. dAn JoLin verdict As ultraviolent as the first film, and almost as ultra-smutty, The Golden Circle will leave the fans grinning, even if its characters have less growing to do this time around.

A TONALLy UNEVEN thriller based on one of the 16-strong series of Mitch Rapp novels. Dylan O’Brien is Rapp, who’s recruited by the CIA after he impresses them by infiltrating the terrorist cell responsible for his fiancée’s death. He’s soon part of a team tracking down a former (presumed dead) agent (Kitsch), who’s gone missing with a bomb’s worth of uranium. While the plot is enjoyably loopy, and Michael Keaton (as Rapp’s superior officer) appears to be in on the joke, the film itself leaves the distinct impression we’re actually supposed to be taking it all seriously. Which, when there’s a hotel shootout that spills out into the corridors but fails to rouse even one guest, is a difficult thing to do. Jp

HHHH OUT now / CERT 15 / 135 mins

Andy Muschietti Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Jack Dylan Grazer director cAst

AN ADAPTATION OF Stephen King’s horror epic about a clown-shaped demon terrorising a small New England town. Focusing on half the novel, this plays as a coming-of-age yarn, not unlike a fright-inflected jumble of The Goonies, E.T. and Stand By Me, with the seven members of the Losers Club, the young teens who decide to take on It, all getting their due. It is a horror that isn’t content to just be scary — it’s also romantic and funny and occasionally awkward as these kids stare down the barrel of adolescence. In fact, it’s one of the finest Stephen King adaptations — which, given his pedigree, is no small feat at all. Jn

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TV & streaming

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES ★★★★

NETFLIX OUT 13 OCTOBER

DIRECTOR

Noah Baumbach Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Grace Van Patten, Emma Thompson CAST

PLOT

When a New York sculptor (Hoffman) is offered an art retrospective at his alma mater, his daughter (Elizabeth Marvel) and two sons, high-flier Matthew (Stiller) and struggling Danny (Sandler), gather to lend support. Quickly, though, half-buried jealousies bubble to the surface.

BROADLY SPEAKING, THERE are two types of Adam Sandler fans: those who love his dramatic chops in Punch-Drunk Love or Funny People, and those who’d just as soon see him trying to knock seven bells out of Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore or sing-choking his way through

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Madonna’s Holiday in The Wedding Singer. With the blue-collar Schmoe roles of that second category often missing the mark of late, The Meyerowitz Stories comes as a handy reminder of what he can do. And, as Noah Baumbach’s wordy, wry slice of New York bohemia proves, he can do both. His turn as Danny, a doting dad and struggling, unemployed son in a family obsessed with achievement, is up there with his best. There’s even a spectacularly hapless Sandler fist fight for the Happy Gilmore aficionados out there. His starriest ensemble, Baumbach has assembled a cast skilled in the specific tone of bruisingly intimate dramatic-comedy he’s been striking since 2005’s The Squid And The Whale. Sandler’s Happy Gilmore alumnus Ben Stiller (returning for a third Baumbach collaboration), Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson could draw laughs from a train timetable and bring poignancy to the most throwaway gags. The machine-gun patter of Baumbach’s dense script (dialogue arriving at a million miles an hour, it often feels like the screenplay must have taken two people to lift) offers them all sorts of opportunities to show that off, as it ruminates on the cracks and

complexities of life in a family of highmaintenance Jewish New Yorkers. Returning to his own spin on the Anna Karenina principle — every unhappy family in a Baumbach film is unhappy in all sorts of hilariously dysfunctional ways — Meyerowitz orbits around Hoffman’s abstracted, self-centred patriarch, Harold. He’s the kind of man who’ll chuck a tantrum because he feels his art has been neglected, while remaining completely oblivious to his own damaged kids. He’d be totally insufferable if he weren’t often laceratingly funny (“$35 for a salmon?” he bellows at a family dinner. “Do you get the salmon to blow you for that?”), and imbued with a strangely childlike charm by Hoffman. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, he becomes so bitter witnessing an artist peer’s successful MoMA show that he literally runs away. Forget Marathon Man — here’s Marathon Man-child. The stories — the film is broken into three chaptered parts — major on the kids, however. Danny and his half-brother Matthew (Stiller), now living in LA as a successful accountant, have little in common bar unresolved anger at their emotionally absent dad. Danny’s gentle bond with his daughter (Grace Van Patten) as she

He hadn’t quite got the hang of chairs.

the deuce HHHHH

Sky AtlAntic TuESDAYS 10Pm EPiSoDES viEwED All

George Pelecanos, David Simon James Franco, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Emily Meade, Dominique Fishback, Chris Bauer, Gary Carr, Chris Coy creAtorS cASt

New York, 1971: a sprawling look at the prostitutes, pimps, cops and colourful characters who work around Times Square as the sex industry tentatively embraces the early days of porn.

Plot

The stakes are raised chez Meyerowitz.

prepares for college is the one good thing in his life, as circumstances drive him back under his father’s roof. For Matthew, those old wounds are exacerbated by the discovery that Harold’s often sozzled new partner (Thompson, having a total blast) wants to sell his boyhood home. This psychological tinderbox has a thousand possible sparks, but when one does come it floors them all in surprising ways. Everyone gets their volcanic moment, even owlish, diffident sister Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), as the family comes together and breaks apart in swells of repressed anger. There are obvious parallels with The Royal Tenenbaums, not least in Stiller’s presence as the family’s insecure scion, but Baumbach’s film is a less whimsical beast than Wes Anderson’s, its characters’ wounds more real and relatable. He’s crafted a deep dive into the neuroses of grown-ups who’ve never quite grown up. Phil de Semlyen verdict candid and funny-awkward, baumbach’s drama of grown-up kids seeking emotional restitution sees Sandler and Stiller at their best. if it feels like familiar turf for the writer-director, the emotions here are rawer than ever.

THErE’S An EpiSodE of The Wire where a reporter’s work is praised for its “dickensian aspect”. That reporter is a phony, but The Wire’s creator david Simon is the real deal, delivering panoramic chronicles of societies and institutions ranging from post-Katrina new orleans to the US Marines, and analysing their power structures with forensic detail. The first season of his new show feels of a piece with his earlier work in its analytical bent, but the throbbing rage has died down somewhat. For The Deuce, Simon and his team go to early 1970s new York and the beginnings of the legal porn industry. They aim to understand and present, not to condemn, and the result is a surprisingly effective mix of a hang-out show, sociology seminar and a look at how it became, in the words of one character, “normal to watch other people fuck”. James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal are the big names in the cast, playing a pair of twin brothers clearly modelled on de niro and Keitel in Mean Streets, and the one working girl on the street who goes without a pimp. However, it’s a brace of unknowns who are afforded both more screen time and more interesting arcs. Emily Meade and dominique Fishback stand out among the sex workers, with Meade fresh

off the bus from the Midwest but smarter than most take her for, and Fishback finding a fresh spin on the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché. That said, singling anyone out from the outstanding ensemble feels inappropriate since, as with all Simon’s work, we’re really watching one big system play itself out — what matters are the connections and individual contributions to one big organism. it’s tempting to mark that organism out as new York itself, but we only really spend time among a few (meticulously recreated) blocks: the real collective narrative here is how everything, even sex, is a business. There’s probably an academic paper to be written on the morality of the events The Deuce dramatises — that transition from fleshy thrills to having your good, dirty fun mediated by a screen. Simon, instead, opts for a more matter-of-fact presentation of a trade that’s so often either idealised or fretted over — showing how, from the shadows, it presents a crystalline reflection of a society that would rather not admit to how often it thinks about it. For all the flesh and fluids on display, this show is essentially a procedural, and while the grimmer elements of pimping aren’t avoided, Simon’s plotting is too sophisticated to hand-wring. The two main criticisms Treme, Simon’s new orleans-set drama, faced were its sprawling cast and willingness to go for yonks with nothing much happening; The Deuce, by contrast, is positively soapy. Maybe it’s nostalgia for the period (the costumes are incredible) or maybe Simon is mellowing with age. The Wire had its charmers, and Generation Kill could be hilarious, but The Deuce’s biggest attraction may well be the revelation that the self-proclaimed “angriest man in television” is actually a big softie at heart. Even when making a show about pornography. Andrew lowry verdict by a country mile the best new tv show of the year, The Deuce both takes on some very big themes and synthesizes early Scorsese with an economics textbook, while somehow managing to stay damn entertaining.

november 2017

Spice up your life:

TV & streaming

GERALD’S GAME ★★★★

NETFLIX OUT NOW

Mike Flanagan Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Henry Thomas, Carel Struycken DIRECTOR CAST

Retreating to an isolated cabin, Jessie Burlingame (Gugino) and her husband Gerald (Greenwood) embark on a kinky sex game. But it quickly goes wrong when Gerald drops dead of a heart attack, leaving Jessie chained to the bed with no apparent means of escape…

PLOT

IT’S A FINE time to be a Stephen King fan. The King Of Horror has always been moviefriendly, but lately there’s been something of a resurgence. In short order we’ve had the rather muddled The Dark Tower and the much more successful (by all measures) It. And now, coming hot on their heels, is an adaptation of Gerald’s Game. Which way does it swing on the ol’ Kingometer? Let’s just say Meat Loaf was right: two out of three ain’t bad.

NOVEMBER 2017

Gerald might want to take a rain check.

A lesser-known King novel, Gerald’s Game is a deceptively difficult proposition to adapt wrapped up in the simplest of hooks: a sex game leaves a husband on the floor, dead from a massive heart attack, and a wife chained to the bed with no possible hope of escape. So far, so similar to any other single-location thriller of recent years. But then the wife — Jessie — begins to hear voices. And see things. And have flashbacks. And it suddenly becomes complicated. Enough to make Hollywood swerve around it for 25 years. Director Mike Flanagan was undaunted by the challenge and, through some slick editing choices, makes it possible for a panicked and tear-stained Gugino to have conversations with a much more together and assertive version of herself, and the hectoring, mocking spectre of Gerald. That’s when Gerald’s Game is at its most effective, when a desperate Gugino is trying to figure a way out of her predicament before the feral dog that has gained entrance to their bedroom decides that she’s got excellent pedigree, chum. Meanwhile, she’s having the mother of all marriage counselling sessions with her dead husband. This isn’t just a tense survival thriller — it’s got the bite and sting of a bitter relationship drama, with plenty of truths hitting too close to home. It does lose some focus, and tension, as those flashbacks to a traumatic experience in Jessie’s

life kick in. There’s also an ill-advised attempt to suggest some supernatural business, with a thing that may or not be Death itself showing up to make googly eyes and go boo every now and again. Pennywise Mk II it ain’t. For the most part, though, this grips tight, and gives Gugino and Greenwood the chance to strut their funky stuff. Literally and figuratively — they are in their smalls, after all. Greenwood is excellent as Gerald, unafraid to be unlikeable. He also delivers an absolute doozy of a heart attack — eyes bulging, veins throbbing. But the movie belongs to Gugino. In another director’s hands, there could have been something lascivious about a movie where its heroine spends pretty much the entire time in a nightie whilst handcuffed, but the camera never dwells on that. Instead, Flanagan and Gugino are much more concerned with Jessie’s mind, and the latter — essentially playing two roles here — is excellent, flitting seamlessly between the dishevelled, drained Jessie and her more stoic dream self, who likes to approach things in an off-the-cuff fashion. You’ll find yourself rooting for her to escape her shackles and win this invidious game. CHRIS HEWITT VERDICT Although it somewhat runs out of steam, this is an often gripping thriller boosted by two excellent performances from its leads.

Marvel vs. CapCoM infinite HHHH

OuT now / pc, ps4, xbox one director Norio

Hirose Brian Bloom, Ashly Burch, Kyle Hebert, Eric Loomis cast

games

destiny 2 HHHH

OuT now FORmATS pc, ps4, xbox one

Luke Smith Nathan Fillion, Lance Reddick, Gina Torres, Neil Kaplan director cast

Alien race The Cabal, led by Dominus Ghaul (Kaplan), mounts an attack on Earth’s one remaining stronghold, kidnapping the Traveller (the source of your powers) in the process. Your mission: to defeat him and take back the planet.

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RemembeR when the first Destiny came out, and it was effectively without a plot? Recall how it took a year, until third expansion The Taken King, for developer bungie to really decide what the game was meant to be? that mistake has been sidestepped this time. Destiny 2 is a fuller, richer and deeper game in every respect, from plot to gameplay mechanics. Picking up one year after the events of the Rise Of Iron expansion, Destiny 2 begins at the end — as humanity’s final bastion, the Last City, falls before Dominus Ghaul (Kaplan) and his Red Legion army. It’s an opening salvo that plays like the original game, but it doesn’t last. All the familiar elements are then stripped away in the wake of Ghaul’s conquest of earth. It’s a choice that works well on two levels, moving the story along for returning players who know the lore, while presenting a gripping beginning for newcomers that doesn’t require them to have ploughed hundreds of hours into the original game. It also ups the stakes — in Destiny 2’s main campaign, it feels as if the future of earth is really and truly on the line in a way that hadn’t come across previously. best of all, the story is actually in the game this time, rather than being revealed through those obnoxious grimoire cards you had to visit the official website to read. while the three core character classes — hunter, warlock, and titan — return, new

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subclasses offer a way to mix up skills and super moves. warlocks, for instance, retain the original ‘Voidwalker’ subclass, though slightly modified, but gains the new ‘Dawnblade’, with a super move that unleashes shards of devastating light-knives from the air. It’s a nice way to diversify your play style, with wild-card attacks that differ from your core proficiencies. the world of Destiny 2 impresses, too. From the wilds of earth beyond the fallen city to space battles of a scale that almost dwarfs the imagination, it’s more imaginative and visually spectacular than anything in the first game. Post-story, you’ll have a familiar array of Strikes and Crucible missions, expanding the co-op and versus gameplay and accessible from the new social area, the Farm. these feel fairly immaterial at present, but this is Destiny — expect the variety of content and challenges to expand as the months go by. thankfully, though, the original post-game’s more onerous tasks have now been done away with, meaning you won’t have to spend countless hours levelling-up new guns or farming helium on the moon. however, a few curious changes from the original do rankle. there’s no more free play of story missions, only ‘meditations’, a curated selection of three missions, playable at a higher level. Your Guardian is now more customisable, with individual armour pieces now repaintable, but the Shaders used to do it are now consumable — and available to buy through microtransactions. most baffling, Sparrows — the hoverbike vehicles synonymous with the first game — are now random loot drops, making exploring the world slower than is ideal. Overall, though, Destiny 2 is a delight, improving on the original’s accessibility and storytelling. the already hooked should prepare to pour another few years of their life into this, and prepare to meet a whole slew of enthusiastic newcomers along the way. matt Kamen verdict Lessons learnt from the release of the original game, Destiny 2 feels fully formed, even at launch. epic sci-fi gameplay at its most compelling, it will surely engender another huge following.

SiDESTEppiNG THE ‘LiGHT-on-content’ issues Street Fighter V had, the latest marvel/ Capcom crossover has a roster of 30 fighters to choose from, plus a single player campaign. Some of the characters are more welcome than others (yes to ultron, no to mega man X) and there are puzzling omissions (all the Guardians Of The Galaxy appear except Star-Lord), but in terms of gameplay it’s simple to get results as a newcomer, but has depth if you’re skilled at fighting games. influenced by the direction the mCu is taking, it also adds infinity Stones, each with a different power, that can be activated during fights to tip the balance in your favour. A decent fighting game, made more enjoyable because of its marvel licence. Jp

Mario + rabbids KingdoM battle HHHHH

OuT now / switch director Davide

Soliani Charles martinet, Samantha Kelly, Kenny James, Yoann perrier cast

pLAYiNG uNLiKE ANY existing mario game, this crossover between Nintendo’s iconic mascot and ubisoft’s anarchic Raving Rabbids is yet another incredible title for the Switch’s small but impressive library. A tactical turn-based combat game (think X-COM, but in the mushroom Kingdom), you control a three-strong team where each member has specific skills. As you go, you unlock more characters who you can sub into your squad if they better suit your play-style or the mission in front of you. unbelievably addictive and frequently hilarious, it has no right to be as good as it is, but it’s a rich, layered experience with a forgiving learning curve that will allow you to master it by the time you’re done. sb

london's hottest ticket

Johan Persson

The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Jez Butterworth, is the show critics are calling ‘the play of the year’

FEW DIRECTORS HAvE a billion-dollar movie under their belts. Even fewer are also capable of selling out theatres. But that’s what Sam Mendes, the man behind the most successful Bond film ever (Skyfall) and the one calling the shots on the extraordinary new play The Ferryman, has managed to pull off. He has collaborated once again with writer Jez Butterworth, with whom he worked on Spectre, to bring to life a gripping tale, inspired by true events. Butterworth has spun a rich, mesmerising narrative, about a reformed IRA activist, Quinn Carney, whose missing brother’s corpse is discovered, followed by the ominous arrival of a powerful political figure at his farm in Northern Ireland. Despite all the tension and grim trappings, at heart The Ferryman is a thrilling story anchored by the delicate relationships between Quinn and the Carney family members.

Here: Laura Donnelly and Paddy Considine as the original cast’s Caitlin and Quinn. Below: Turlough Convery (Lawrence Malone) and Eugene O’Hare (Frank Magennis) from the original cast. Bottom: A lighter moment for the Carney family.

The play’s first run at the Royal Court Theatre sold out in a single day, the fastestselling production in the theatre’s history. It has since transferred to the considerably bigger Gielgud Theatre in the West End, where its scale has been made even more impressive. The farmhouse set is packed with intricate detail, from weathered wooden beams to a rickety staircase, slowly filling up as more than 20 actors pack the stage. Mendes, who was previously in charge at the Donmar Warehouse, masterfully orchestrates not only the large cast, but the immersive sound design and evocative lighting: the production values are Hollywood-standard. As are the cast. The first run starred Paddy Considine, Laura Donnelly and Genevieve O’Reilly as Quinn, Caitlin and Quinn’s wife Mary; taking over are William Houston, Sarah Greene and Catherine McCormack. Altogether the production is a gripping, visceral spectacle which rivals any cinematic experience. The Ferryman is well worth making a journey with. the ferryman is booking to 6 January 2018 at the gielgud theatre. the new cast Join the company from 9 october. day tickets are available from £12

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NOVEMBER 2017

GUTTER CREDIT

FANS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR A JUSTICE LEAGUE MOVIE FOR DECADES. AFTER A PARTICULARLY ROCKY

NOVEMBER 2017

GUTTER CREDIT

ROAD ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FINALLY HERE, BUT AS THE LEAGUE THEMSELVES EXPLAIN, IT MAY NOT BE WHAT YOU EXPECT WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

NOVEMBER 2017

Clockwise from left: Charged up: The Flash (Ezra Miller) is ready to make a speedy exit; Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) gives the camera her best shot; Why so not so serious? Is Ben Afﬂeck allowing a faint smile to appear on Batman’s face?

A wise man — we think it was Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight — once said, “The night is darkest just before the dawn.” And, being Aaron Eckhart, he was right. But if that’s right, then the inverse also holds true. After the dawn comes nothing but light. Bright, bright light. Darkness begone, you’ve had your shot.

NOVEMBER 2017

Which is something for Empire to bear in mind as we travel to Leavesden Studios on a bright August day last year to visit the set of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the fifth film in the burgeoning DCEU (that’s DC Extended Universe for those of you who slept through Acronyms in school), Warner Bros.’ all-star answer to Marvel Studios and their Marvel Cinematic Universe. On paper, it’s comfortably the biggest DC adaptation to date, the film that will really tie the room together and unite the company’s heaviest and most heroic hitters. It’s also, though, the sequel to Snyder’s previous entries in the DCEU, 2013’s Man Of Steel and 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice. Both movies that, for all their collective merits (stunning visuals, great Hans Zimmer soundtracks, Russell Crowe on a giant space

dragon), were fairly intense and even dour experiences, the kind of films that wouldn’t have recognised a gag had it been delivered by the Joker himself. Fun was a four-letter word. To be frank, we expected more of the same from Justice League. And today’s setting would seem to reinforce that notion. We’re in the Batcave — or part of the Batcave — and everything’s suitably bleak and rocky. The specially modified Batsuit that was Batbattered by Superman towards the end of Dawn Of Justice is on display, a permanent reminder to Bruce Wayne of the dangers of hubris. And here’s Jeremy Irons as Batman’s faithful butler, Alfred, in a specially unmodified Barbour jacket, waiting to greet his employer and some new special friends. For the Justice League are here. All of them — Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal

Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher). Well, almost all of them. No sign of Superman, but we’ll get to him later. They’ve returned from an outing battling evil and they’ve had a slight setback. The mood should be sombre. Yet that’s far from the case. “Oh yeah, oh gosh,” exclaims Miller’s crimson-clad Flash as the League descends into the Batcave on a Batlift. “YES!” Clearly giddy to be in the lair of the Caped Crusader, the Flash waves merrily at Alfred, who wasn’t quite expecting this many metahumans to be clogging up his gaff. And, over the course of several takes, that merriment expands until Aquaman is calling Alfred a “badass” and Irons deadpanning a series of responses to his boss. “If you’d warned me, I would have baked a cake”, “I’ll break open

the party hats and the piñata”, and our favourite, “I’ll make some tea. Don’t know where I’ll ﬁnd the cups.” The emphasis here is on the comedic. The actually comedic, not the accidental. And there’s a sense of ebullience all round. After one take, Gadot walks past singing You Are My Sunshine. Miller, a ball of energy, bounces around in a dressing robe. “My best friend got this for me!” he yells. “His name’s Jason Momoa and he got me this robe!” Even the man famously dubbed Sad Affleck by the internet ain’t so sad anymore. “You get to see Batman smile,” promises Affleck. “For the ﬁrst time!” Flashing the old Batgnashers? Now there’s a thing. So, what is happening exactly? Who are these people and what have they done to the Justice League?

ack wanted to make a movie that was more fun, that was a little bit lighter, that wasn’t so encumbered with heavy melodrama,” explains Affleck to Empire in September 2017, just a couple of months before Justice League is finally introduced to the world. In the year that’s passed since we were on set, much has changed — Wonder Woman wowed critics, bossed the box office with an $816 million take, and proved that the DCEU can do light, funny and inspirational. And on a much more serious and sombre note, Snyder has stepped away from the film following a family tragedy, with Joss Whedon drafted in as his custodian. But one thing that doesn’t seem to have changed despite this heart-rending development is the focus on unlocking that friendlier, warmer tone. “Justice League is not a dark or heavy movie,” says Gal Gadot. “It doesn’t have the weight that Batman v Superman had.” It would be easy and cynical to write off this apparent sea change as something of a course correction, a response to the backlashers who were unhappy with Batman v Superman’s stern face and jars of piss. It would also be wrong. “I can understand people saying [Batman v Superman] was too dark, or this was outside the tone of what I’m used to seeing with a Batman story, and I think that’s a fair criticism,” concedes Affleck. “But this was all scripted and set up before that movie came out. The approach was changed anyway for the second one. It was a natural progression.” Apparently Snyder has been playing the kind of long game that would impress Lex Luthor. “The first time I ever sat in Zack’s office, he told me people were mad at him for making things too dark,” recalls Miller, who first met to discuss playing Barry Allen, aka the Flash, sometime in 2014. “He said something that I thought was really true and undeniable, that the world of DC is the world of Batman and everything, including Superman, has to come into the darkness of the world where Gotham exists. From there, Zack always intended for the Justice League to rise out of the darkness, and maybe even bring Batman with them. Maybe an inch.” It’s not the first time Warner Bros. had tried to make the finest League this side of Royston Vasey rise out of the darkness. And no wonder. When it comes to superhero team-up comics, Justice League Of America (the ‘Of America’ part has somewhat fallen by the wayside) is up there with Avengers and X-Men in popularity and, having made its debut in 1960 with issue #28 of The Brave And The Bold, predates both by around three years. As such, a movie version is long overdue. George Miller tried to make a Justice League movie around ten years ago. Entitled Justice League: Mortal, it was intended to shoot in 2008, and be in cinemas in 2009. In fact, Miller had not only cast his movie (see sidebar), but got as far as building sets before the plug was pulled just weeks before cameras rolled, largely due to the writers’ strike of ’07-’08. Having another Batman run around at the same time as Christian Bale might  have confused the heck out of audiences, but

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it’s easy to file Miller’s Mortal in the folder marked ‘Regrets’. That iteration of Justice League would have beaten Avengers into cinemas by a good three years. As it was, by the time Man Of Steel, the tentative toe-in-the-water of a cinematic universe, was released, Marvel Studios didn’t need Thor to steal DC’s thunder. They were already seven films down, owned by Disney, and had assembled the Avengers. And by the time Justice League comes out in November, Marvel will be on its 17th film, with its third Avengers movie, Infinity War, due next April. WB and DC are still playing catch-up. The wondrous reception afforded Wonder Woman has created a swell of goodwill, and a hope that Justice League might continue that upward trajectory. “It maybe takes a bit of pressure off of this movie in terms of needing to define the DC Universe,” admits Affleck of his castmate’s success. “It doesn’t feel like the whole world is riding on our shoulders so much.” The comparisons to the Avengers movies are possibly reductive, but unavoidable. There’s the obvious — both are superhero team-up films based on popular comic books. Then the less obvious — whether by sheer bad luck or, perhaps, because this kind of movie can only really sustain so many stories, the plots of Justice League and Avengers: Infinity War are essentially the same. Here, Steppenwolf — emissary of Darkseid, an allpowerful alien who may ultimately be revealed as the movie’s true villain — decides it would be a simply capital time to pop down to Earth in pursuit of three Mother Boxes. Those are technologically advanced cubes from the planet Apokolips (Darkseid’s home) that were given to three factions (the Atlanteans of Aquaman, Wonder Woman’s Themyscirans, plain old humans) in ancient times for safekeeping. “They can be destructive,” says Momoa, choosing his syllables carefully. “And when the three boxes get together, it’s bad news.” Recognising this, billionaire genius playboy philanthropist Bruce Wayne teams up with some superfolk to stop Steppenwolf from MacGuffining the world to smithereens. Change Steppenwolf to Thanos, Mother Boxes to Infinity Stones, Wayne to Stark, and the two aren’t a million miles away. And, last but by no means least, there’s Joss Whedon.

hedon is the man who cracked the ensemble superhero ﬁlm code not once, but twice, with 2012’s Avengers Assemble and its sequel, 2015’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Both times to billiondollar effect. One of the best dialogue guys in the business, he’s a dab hand at giving characters room to breathe in a setting that could easily get overstuffed, whilst writing them zingers aplenty. So when Snyder announced in May that he and his producer wife, Deborah, were leaving Justice League, Whedon was their choice to step in to complete the ﬁlm — polishing the screenplay, for which he has been given an official writing credit, and overseeing additional

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Clockwise from here: Cyborg (Ray Fisher) has got his eye on you; Wonder Woman and Batman formulate a cunning plan in the Batcave; Aquaman (Jason Momoa) makes his point to a foe.

photography and post-production. It made sense. Track record aside, he was already ensconced at the DCEU, where he was developing a Batgirl movie. The general assumption was that he had been tasked with Avengerising the movie, with giving Bruce Wayne plenty of Batzingers. But you know what they say about assumptions. “I didn’t sense that we were moving towards something that felt like The Avengers,” says Affleck. “Joss is more than just an Avengers director. He’s a good storyteller, full stop. In mid-stream Joss got on and part of what interested him was the puzzle aspect of it, ﬁtting in pieces that weren’t there yet. He put the rest of the pieces in and gave it his own imprimatur.” Gadot is keen to stress that “this is Zack Snyder’s movie. Joss only did a few weeks of

reshoots. He was Zack’s guy and knew exactly what he wanted to get.” That feeling, that this remains Snyder’s vision with maybe just a touch of Whedon, is supported by the rest of the cast. “Joss came in and walked a very ﬁne line between Zack’s sensibility, tone and direction, and his own tone and direction,” says Affleck. “We found a really fun and inspiring synthesis of their two forms of storytelling. I was so glad everyone showed up to work for Zack.” It’s clear that Snyder means the world to his cast, and that the tragedy that befell him and his family has also cut them deeply. The connection is genuine and meaningful. “I fucking love Zack, man,” says Momoa. “I’d do anything for him.” Adds Gadot: “He has a beautiful vision.” Miller is audibly moved by both Snyder’s personal situation and by the presence of mind the

director showed in recognising he would be unable to ﬁnish the movie to the best of his ability. “It’s a heroic act at its root,” he says. “He called each and every one of us and took the time to explain something that deﬁes, in many ways, explanation. He told us exactly how it was going to go down, which was true to course. He fascinates and amazes and staggers me. Zack Snyder, ultimate fucking legend. Forever.”

hatever form Justice League ﬁnally takes, it will deliver in terms of spectacle. That’s a given in a Zack Snyder ﬁlm. “The movie’s bigger in scale than any movie I’ve been involved with in my career,” says Affleck, a man who knows scale, having been involved in the likes of Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and

Clerks II. “It feels massive in terms of the visual elements. That’s something that Zack is really good at. That will be admired.” But there are other elements that will help set it apart in a marketplace that’s coming dangerously close to crowded. “DC’s going to be changing the name to Diversity Comics pretty soon,” laughs Fisher. He’s right — this Justice League line-up is refreshingly representative, with only Affleck’s Batman being the standard- issue ultra-ripped white guy. Of all the characters on the team, Cyborg may be the biggest unknown quantity. He’s a popular character in the comic books and on various versions of the Teen Titans animated series, but for Joe Public he’s this movie’s equivalent of Hawkeye in an Avengers movie — the guy you’re most likely to forget in a pub

quiz. But Fisher, an endearingly earnest actor who has seen Batman v Superman so many times he can quote it chapter and verse, is determined that will change, and sees Cyborg as a role model. “You’re dealing with the only member of the Justice League who is AfricanAmerican. You’re dealing with the only member of the Justice League who is in some ways what some would consider disabled,” he says. “You don’t want to end up telling a story that isn’t respectful of those factors. But he’s going to be cool as hell.” Then there’s Momoa’s Aquaman, a drastic departure from the comic book character. “He’s white with blond hair,” says Momoa, who was born in Hawaii of mixed heritage. “But Zack had a vision. The fact that Aquaman is a brown skinned superhero, I’m pretty stoked about

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Clockwise from here: Trident and tested: Aquaman shows off his weapon; Wonder Woman leads an attack along with Cyborg and Aquaman; The Flash has a rare moment of being stationary.

that. I love being able to set the tone.” There’s been a feeling that the heavy lifting in Justice League would be handled, sometimes literally, by Batman and Wonder Woman, with rumours suggesting that the additional photography sessions would increase the size of Diana’s role, following the immense success of her own ﬁlm. But rumours are just assumptions in a different coat, and we all know what assumptions make out of you and you-know-what. “I did one week,” says Gadot of the reshoots. “Diana serves as the glue of the team. She ﬁnds moments to support every one of the team and make them feel stronger or believe in themselves. But this is not a Wonder Woman movie.” Instead, the movie will offer the chance to get fully acquainted with Cyborg, Flash

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and Aquaman, who made blink-and-you’llmiss-them cameos in Dawn Of Justice (Miller also showed up brieﬂy in Suicide Squad), as they’re recruited to the team by Bruce and Diana. Cyborg is serious and reserved, Miller’s Barry Allen is a really fast-talking kid who can barely suppress his glee at getting to hang out with his heroes. Momoa’s Aquaman is gnarled and grizzly, the kind of guy who’d deck you for spilling his pint of whitebait. If their on-screen chemistry is as potent as it is when the cameras aren’t rolling (at one point during our visit to the set, Miller started advising his co-stars to squeeze their buttocks before a shot as “that’ll be really sexy”), it’ll go a long way towards ﬁlling the hole left in the Justice League by the absence of a certain super man.

et there might be one last surprise up Snyder and Whedon’s collective sleeve. A Kryptonian elephant in the room. The one-word answer to the question of who would win in a ﬁght between the Avengers and the Justice League. There is, quite simply, no Justice League without the Man Of Steel. Except for one small complication: he’s dead. Killed heroically at the end of Dawn Of Justice, giving his life so that the rampaging Doomsday could die, saving the world in the process. He was even given a lavish funeral, which took place at the same time as that of crusading reporter Clark Kent, who also died in the conﬂict. Strange. So, Superman’s snuffed it. And his death is the catalyst for the events of Justice League. “It’s out of his memory that Bruce is trying to put this team together,” says Fisher. “The world is suffering

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN HOW GEORGE MILLER’S 2009 JUSTICE LEAGUE: MORTAL WOULD HAVE LOOKED

D.J. COTRONA WAS… SUPERMAN Cotrona is an American actor who has gone on to star in the TV version of From Dusk Till Dawn as Seth Gecko, who was played in the film by George Clooney, who once played Batman. It’s all connected. ARMIE HAMMER WAS… BATMAN Hammer was in his early twenties at the time and would have been the youngest big-screen Batman. He’s since gone on to star in the likes of The Social Network, Free Fire and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., alongside… Henry Cavill. MEGAN GALE WAS… WONDER WOMAN Mortal would have been the first major film for Gale, an Australian model turned actress. Miller clearly kept her in mind — she makes quite the impact as a Valkyrie in Mad Max: Fury Road. COMMON WAS… GREEN LANTERN The hip-hop star-turned-actor would have played John Stewart, the first AfricanAmerican Green Lantern, part of an intergalactic space corps who wield magical rings. SANTIAGO CABRERA WAS… AQUAMAN The only cast member with some superhero business under his belt prior to being cast, the Venezuelan-British actor had starred in Heroes as tortured artist Isaac Mendez. Like Momoa, his would have been a departure from the Aquaman of the comics.

ALAMY, REX FEATURES

ADAM BRODY WAS… THE FLASH The star of The O.C. was probably the biggest name in the cast around 2008, and would have played Barry Allen. ANTON YELCHIN WAS… THE FLASH Miller’s Justice League boasted more than one Flash, though, with the late Anton Yelchin, who was just 19, pencilled in to play Wally West, better known as Kid Flash.

from the loss of Superman. And the ultimate sacrifice he made brings these people out.” But when the supershit is hitting the superfan, not even the Justice League will be able to handle it. They need the Last Son Of Krypton. And they’ll get him. Batman v Superman ends with a shot of soil beginning to rise from Superman’s coffin, and it seems you just can’t keep a good Christ analogy down. Superman will fly again in Justice League. In which capacity remains to be seen — early rumours had it that he would return somewhat changed by his ordeal beyond the grave, and would end up fighting the League. But that’s too reminiscent of Dawn Of Justice. It’s much more likely that Superman is the cavalry, flying in to save the day. As usual with this sort of thing, nobody’s allowed to confirm anything. “Henry? Rest in piece,” straight-bats Momoa. “He’s

working with Tom Cruise now. He’s doing alright.” One thing cannot be denied: Henry Cavill’s presence on the ﬁlm’s set. And when Cavill came back for the additional photography, he was sporting a moustache that he’d grown for Mission: Impossible 6 and which, legend has it, he was forbidden from shaving, forcing the CG guys to do their thing. “It was a full-on porn-star moustache,” says Affleck. “He looked like a porn star from the ’70s, just with a better body. It’s a different twist [on Superman].” The Man Of Steel with a porn ’tache? Sounds like that newfangled fun this revamped, relaxed Justice League seems okay being in league with. Maybe we’ve ﬁgured out what makes Batman smile after all. JUSTICE LEAGUE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 17 NOVEMBER

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THE FIRST FILM WAS A SURPRISE SMASH. NOW DIRECTOR PAUL KING IS FACED WITH A DAUNTING TASK: HOW TO MAKE PADDINGTON 2 BIGGER, BETTER AND FURRIER WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

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ILLUSTRATION HITANDRUN

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Clockwise from left: “Anyone fancy a marmalade sandwich?” Paddington attempts to endear himself to his fellow prison inmates; Hugh Grant does his best ‘baddie face’ as villain Phoenix Buchanan; Drama! Paddington loses his iconic hat; Meet prison inmate/cook ‘Knuckles’ McGinty (Brendan Gleeson).

esides that time Rick Astley showed up to sing on stage with Foo Fighters, few surprises in recent years have been as pleasant as Paul King’s Paddington. A wonderfully whimsical adaptation of the Michael Bond books about a talking bear from darkest Peru who rocks up in London in search of a home and happiness, it was well-received critically (five stars, said Empire) and went great guns at the box office, raking in over $260 million worldwide, enough to keep its ursine underdog (underbear?) in marmalade for life. Bright, inventive, charming, quaint and imbued with a lovely message about tolerance and acceptance, it’s already something of a family classic. So then, to the sequel. And that usually means one thing: bigger. Rightly or wrongly, sequels are associated with the idea of scaling up, and scaling up frequently means there’s no room for charm, or fancy, or being quaint. Something King had to face up to when he started working on Paddington’s further big-screen adventures. “There is a slight dread of the sequel,” admits King. “How is it not just diminishing returns, really? That inflationary process can spoil what’s special about it.” Nevertheless, King has forged ahead and crafted Paddington 2, attempting to straddle the fine line between retaining the original’s whimsical magic, while giving into the lure of a bigger budget. “He’s packing heat this time,” says the director. And he’s also been pumped up in a number of key areas.

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The TiTle

Once sequels identified themselves with a number after the title. These days, though, it’s more common for a sequel to bill itself with an unwieldy subtitle. But King plumped for Paddington 2 right from the off. “I like the simplicity,” he says. “Though I wish it was called Paddington: Rogue Nation.”

The PloT

Most sequels up the ante. Paddington 2 ups the aunty, building the plot around Paddington’s desire to buy a 100th birthday present for his absent Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), thousands of miles away at a home for retired bears in Lima, Peru. “He finds this pop-up book of London,” explains King. “Aunt Lucy always dreamed of coming to London but gave up her dream to look after Paddington when he was a cub. So this is his way of bringing London to her.” Unfortunately, the book contains clues to

a secret fortune that makes it a target for the film’s villain. Enter actor extraordinaire and all-round rascal, Phoenix Buchanan.

The Villain

Raising the stakes in the bad-guy department was not an easy task for King. After all, Nicole Kidman, a bona fide Oscar winner, held that position in the first movie as the terrifying taxidermist, Millicent Clyde. So in the end he, and producer David Heyman, went for an honest-to-goodness national treasure in the shape of Hugh Grant. As it happened, their choice was in the shape of Hugh Grant because it was actually Hugh Grant. “It’s tricky casting a slightly over-the-hill actor on the downward path of their career, desperate for one last shot at glory,” says King. “So we reached for Hugh. And miraculously he could see himself in the role.” Grant laughs when Empire relays that description to him. “It’s all true,” he says in that patented tone of

Grantian self-deprecation. “But he’s a theatre actor rather than a film actor. That’s the tiny difference between him and me. He’s considerably more of a fruity, theatrical luvvie than I like to think I am.” King describes Phoenix as both aptly named (“He’s down on his luck and wants to rise from the flames”) and an absolute fiend, who won’t let anything, even a cute talking bear, get in his way. “He’s a rotter. He wants to put on a one-man show. This is how we’ve gotten bigger and better. Other films have villains who want to blow up the world. We’ve got an actor who wants to put on a one-man show.” That one-man show, an evening of music and monologues, sounds like anyone’s worst nightmare. “I’m not sure that would be my favourite evening out,” agrees Grant. “But I’m ashamed to say that I go to the theatre maybe once every ten years. I know that makes me a disgrace as an actor, and that I should go and I should love it. But I can’t bear it.” Extra points for the pun.

The Prison

A bear — albeit a talking one — buying a book for his aunt is a deliberately small-scale start. “We tried to make a snowball story where it starts with a little thing and then gets bigger and bigger,” says King. “By the end you should feel like you’ve been on a journey, but the emotional journey is about getting his aunt a birthday present.” And that journey takes Paddington to the one place nobody expected: prison. Framed for a crime he didn’t commit, the bear winds up in the big house, where he meets Brendan Gleeson’s Knuckles McGinty. But anyone expecting this to suddenly become Scum 2, with Paddington beating the shit out of fellow prisoners with a sock filled with marmalade jars, might be disappointed. “We tried to channel a lot of Hunger,” laughs King. “But that piss-sweeping scene just had to go. No, Paddington’s very blasé and manages to turn the place into a ridiculous tea room. It’s slightly � ludicrous, what he does to the place.”

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The Scale

Almost everything on Paddington 2 is bigger than the first. With the possible exception of King’s own trailer. “There was literally no trailer,” he protests. “My stature is still minuscule. It’s very good to bear that in mind.” But this escalation of scale is reflected in the size and ambition of the movie’s sets. There’s the prison, of course, while another sequence, set in a Russian travelling fairground, required an actual fairground to be imported and set up in the grounds of Knebworth House. “That was great, although it was fucking cold,” says King. “We were able to build big sets, which is lovely.” One of the sequels that King studied forensically before writing Paddington 2 was Pixar’s Toy Story 2. “A lot of what they did were things they sort of wanted to do first time around. There’s an element of that with Paddington 2. Suddenly you have this magical land for Paddington to walk around in, which would probably have been beyond us last time.”

The Train chaSe

Paddington didn’t exactly skimp on the setpieces, whether it was a slapstick-filled trip to the bathroom or a Mission: Impossible-inspired climb up the chimney of a huge furnace. But the emphasis was still on whimsy. Nowhere is the increased ambition of Paddington 2 more evident, then, than the climactic set-piece involving, according to Grant, “two steam trains racing along the countryside and people jumping between them, and me doing evil things”. It’s become cliché to reference that famous old Orson Welles quote about moviemaking — “This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!” — but in the case of King and Paddington 2 it’s particularly relevant. “We literally had a full-size train on set every day,” he says. “They brought in this Pullman train on a truck. They were on remote control, with five carriages on rigs and they just moved the trains back and forward. It was pretty fucking cool.”

The effecTS

From the off, CGI has played a hugely important part in the Paddington movies. Without it, the Browns would be having a series of marvellous adventures with a tennis ball on a stick. But Grant’s recollections suggest that King has increased the pixel power this time around. “I walk along the top of a train going a hundred miles an hour, and you can’t even notice that it’s not me but my avatar,” says the actor. “That’s modern filmmaking. They create a digital me who can do anything, so I don’t know why I bother anymore. He’s awfully good in Paddington 2. Better than me.”

The Bear

“Obviously he’s got an anti-gravity duffel coat now, and a propeller in his hat which allows him to fly around,” jokes King of his title star. “Otherwise, he’s the same old bear.” With a little more cash in

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Clockwise from left: Mary Brown (Sally Hawkins) and Jonathan Brown (Samuel Joslin) find themselves in a spot of bother on a Pullman train; The Brown Family: Henry (Hugh Bonneville), Jonathan, Mary, housekeeper Mrs Bird (Julie Walters) and Judy (Madeleine Harris) are hanging on the telephone; Paddington makes himself useful; Director Paul King shares a laugh with Paddington creator, the late Michael Bond, while on set.

the coffers this time around, King has been able to ask a little more of the pixelated Paddington. “When he’s window-cleaning and covered in suds or walks into a window, that kind of thing can happen now in a way that was prohibitively difficult and expensive last time.” In truth, the most serious upgrade to Paddington took place relatively late in the day on the first film, when Colin Firth stepped aside as the voice of the bear to be replaced by the more youthful, optimistic tones of Ben Whishaw. “Ben being on from the off changed things enormously,” admits King. “You can use him to bring it to life much earlier in the process.” So King wasn’t tempted to go all Hollywood and replace Whishaw with, say, The Rock? “That’s Paddington 3. Or Paddington 7, realistically, when we have run out of ideas.”

The MarMalade

Paddington was possibly cinema’s most heartwarming movie about substance abuse, with the bear mainlining marmalade like there was no tomorrow, or no such thing as type 2 diabetes. That thread has been amped up. “It’s fair to say that marmalade has a fairly key role in the film,” says King. “There are also cakes and sticky buns. Fans of sweet treats will be satisfied.” The streets will be paved with yummy gold.

The Message

One of the sweetest surprises to come from an already sweet surprise was Paddington’s warm and welcome themes of inclusivity and tolerance of others. With a clear pro-immigration stance (Kidman’s character and Peter Capaldi’s nosy neighbour, Mr Curry, were decidedly Nigel Faragey), the film also functioned as a doe-eyed love letter to London and the very concept of Britishness itself. Much has changed, of course, since the first film came out. “There’s been a worldwide collective fail to learn the lessons of the first Paddington,” notes King, ruefully. “Hopefully those themes of kindness and seeing the good in people and understanding are universal and, sadly, universally needed throughout time.” So those themes are reinforced this time around. “It’s pretty much a long, intensive debate about the merits of Article 50,” laughs King.

The Big Bang

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can’t call yourself a sequel unless you have an explosion. Preferably multiple explosions. Ideally with the hero walking away from said explosion(s) in slow motion. Sadly, this is one area on which King didn’t get the memo, it seems. “There is no explosion,” he says. “There’s an explosion of joy?” Metaphors aren’t allowed. Sorry. “Oh bugger. I’ll get on the phone to [VFX house] Framestore now. We’ll get one in for you.” You’ve heard of Bayhem — now prepare for Bearhem. Paddington 2 is in cinemas from 10 november

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Actor, singer, drinker, philosopher, poet, fallen angel, icon.

WE CELEBRATE THE LONG AND WINDING LIFE OF HARRY DEAN STANTON, HOLLYWOOD’S ULTIMATE OUTSIDER WORDS IAN NATHAN

Harry Dean Stanton was 91 when he passed away, but it still landed a painful blow. Much like Sam Shepard, who had provided his friend with the role of a lifetime as desert drifter Travis in 1984’s Paris, Texas, Stanton was proof that America could summon forth the extraordinary. He collected no major awards and had few starring turns, but with him goes an unquiet gift, a restlessness that speaks to the human condition. He was one of the great actors of his generation without the need to prove it. Age did not wither Stanton; he came pre-withered. Adulatory obits have competed to capture those eroded features: the rail-thin ﬁgure, the gaunt, hollowed-out face, the yearning, hungry eyes, the crooked smile and the Deputy Dawg jowls. Somehow the camera adored him. “Kind of raggedy” is how Shepard described Travis, as if it was preordained Stanton would ﬁll his broken shoes as he wandered, mute and memoryless, out of the  bone-dry Southern badlands. “I always played

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myself,” was Stanton’s explanation of his uncanny talent. Jack Nicholson had given him the only piece of advice he’d ever followed: “Let the wardrobe do the acting.” In other words, you put on the clothes: what’s underneath is still you. Travis, his signature role, was seeded by a lifetime of unspoken woes. “That opening scene parallels my own personal quest for the grail,” he recalled. Afterwards, he claimed he could contentedly stop there. But he never did. He was still working in the months before he died. He has another indie, Lucky, in which he plays a jaded atheist awaiting the end, still to be released. Stanton was drawn to playing outsiders, grifters and eccentrics. “I felt very nomadic, like a warrior or a hunter,” he claimed of himself. There was always something adrift in him, his thoughts far away, or deep within. “I’d rather spend my life searching,” he said, immune to the draw of riches and celebrity, the smart car and big house, although he enjoyed his fame when it came. In the ’80s he was ordained as the patron saint of the edgy set, living in a frugal cabin on Mulholland Drive — mattress for a bed and a fridge stocked only with beers — nestled between the fortified estates of Nicholson and Marlon Brando. The location served as a metaphor for his place as actor and icon: a humble rebel. In late life Brando and Stanton would talk for hours about Shakespeare and Buddhism. There was no better actor in Stanton’s eyes, unless it was Montgomery Clift. “He was the macrocosm of a human being,” he said of Brando. If so, then Stanton was its microcosm, the whole universe held between his thin shoulders. Nicholson was a lifelong friend. In the ’60s, they shared a house, and a lifestyle: drugs, booze, and womanising. But Stanton didn’t relish the good life as much his friend did. He liked to stop and think — to ponder what the hell was going on. He had the restless heart of a Beat poet, the mind of a philosopher. Nicholson described him as “one of the truly unpredictable entities on the planet”. The trio of laconic American neighbours would unite for Brando’s untethered 1976 horse-wrangler Western The Missouri Breaks. Nicholson claimed in the making of that film he saw “Harry Dean make one of the bravest and most inspired moves” he’d ever witnessed. For reasons best known to Brando, he donned a dress for the scene in which his deranged lawman impales Stanton’s outlaw on a stake. Brando, Nicholson recalled, had briefly turned his back when Stanton jumped on his hero, ripping off the dress. “Marlon knew what an honest thing Harry was doing,” said Nicholson. “The whole time Harry was wrestling him down, he was smiling.” Asked once for his recollection of the episode, Stanton simply shrugged his bony shoulders and said, “I just couldn’t stand the idea of getting killed by a man in a dress.”

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Here: Stanton in the still-to-be-released Lucky, part of this month’s BFI London Film Festival. Below: Posing (far right) with Frederic Forrest and John P. Ryan (standing) and Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid (seated) for The Missouri Breaks. Below right: Taking the lead in Paris, Texas, here with Dean Stockwell. Bottom: Bringing Alien down to Earth.

Stanton made no effort to be cool. He possessed the gravity of the self-sustaining spirit. It was the glamorous who fell into his orbit, seeking him out at parties as he sat in the corner, cloaked in cigarette smoke. These included a young Sean Penn, firebrand du jour, who pulled up a pew at an Emmys aftershow. Within days, the pair jetted to Cannes, where Paris, Texas would sweep up the Palme d’Or, and Penn crashed on his hotel room floor for five days. In a bizarre cultural nexus, Penn, Stanton and Elvis Costello all show up in an episode of Charlie Sheen’s smug sitcom Two And A Half Men, playing harder-drinking (if possible) versions of themselves.

PREVIOUS PAGE: DUDLEY REED/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES. ALLSTAR, GETTY

BORN IN 1926 in West Irvine, Kentucky, Stanton was raised in the Depression. His father, fittingly for an unrepentant smoker, was a tobacco farmer, his mother a cook. It was a loveless marriage, which Stanton puts down as a root cause of his troubled heart. He spoke little about his stint in the navy in World War II, stationed on a landing boat in the Battle Of Okinawa, where he gained a commendation for “coolness under fire”. He came to acting at college and the Pasadena Playhouse, before two decades of hard graft. Asked about his career, Stanton recently mused that he might have made 250 films: “I lost count a long time ago.” He was a very late bloomer, caught up in the rigours of making a buck in Hollywood. After 20 years of psychos and petty crooks, he got frustrated. There was no room for humanity in these sideshow villains. “Give me a break for a change,” he remonstrated in the early ’80s. “I know I’ve got the ability to bring a sense of menace to the screen.” It wasn’t until he was in his fifties, when his age finally caught up with his looks, that Hollywood discovered his gentleness and range. His best work comes in a middle-aged reel of hip movies: Dillinger, The Godfather Part II, Rancho Deluxe, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Monte Hellman’s cult classic Two-Lane Blacktop, Alex Cox’s madcap Repo Man. He played Molly Ringwald’s self-centred pop in Pretty In Pink, Paul the apostle in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and a Death Row inmate in The Green Mile. He was way too earthbound for science fiction. Which was entirely the point with Alien. Stanton’s Brett epitomised the script’s “truck drivers in space” dynamic: a mechanic in a Hawaiian shirt who has been soaking up fumes in the belly of this beast for years. Only a film as perverse as Alien would cast Stanton as comic relief — the below-decks parrot to Yaphet Kotto’s righteous sonofabitch Parker. On the day they were to film the chestburster sequence, as offal was loaded into pumps, Stanton stood in the corridor, gently strumming on his guitar. Likewise, John Carpenter brought his dishevelled humanity and wiry wit to his cool, dystopian joint Escape From New York and

Stephen King horror movie Christine. Stanton made genre real. The yearning for a lead role would finally be answered by fate. The story carries an appropriately mythical ring, where one evening in 1983, Sam Shepard had glanced across a Sante Fe barroom, thronged with film festival wannabes, and seen the Easter Island magnificence of ‘Harry Dean’. They bonded over tequila and a struggling actor’s woes. “I told him I wanted to play something of some beauty or sensitivity,” recalled Stanton. He had no idea that Shepard was right then sizing him up for just such a role. Paris, Texas is the bared American soul, a work of majestic heartbreak. Driven by indefinable furies, lead character Travis has abandoned his wife and child. Years later, he returns as if called to an act of repentance, and over the course of Wim Wenders’ beautifully meandering film Stanton slowly reassembles a man. It is a performance of stunning vulnerability. Is there a more emotionally devastating scene in cinema than the climax, in which Travis finally tracks down his lost love (Nastassja Kinski), working in a scuzzy peep show? They talk unseen through the one-way

he does in-between takes is incredible.” Stanton knew that is where the work is done. Between takes is when you see the actor thinking. In a life of few regrets, ones he’s willing to own up to at least, he said he wasn’t “wired” for marriage. There might, he admitted, be children out there. Various claims have been made of paternity. “One kid I am pretty sure is mine,” he tells Lynch, but goes no further, swiftly returning the admission back to the vault. “Everybody evolves in their own way and that is all there is to it.” He does confess to the pain at losing Rebecca De Mornay to Tom Cruise. She was half his age, but they were together for a year-and-a-half, the closest he had come to permanence. Damn fool that he was, he had actually recommended her for Risky Business. “That wasn’t the best idea,” he smiles half-sorry, half-wry into the documentary’s camera, and begins another song. Stanton’s unhappy mother had taught him Irish folk songs as a child. “I began singing before I could even talk,” he liked to tell an audience when he performed live. His voice is surprisingly smooth, only cracking gently on the high notes, the midpoint between the anguish of Roy Orbison and the introspection

“It’s all a movie,” Stanton often said, meaning life and art. glass, he with his back turned, telling his tale — their tale — pouring out an ocean of sadness. Wenders just let the camera roll, the actors beyond direction, the divide between life and acting gone.

STANTON’S MYSTERIES WERE ready-made for Lynchland. In Sophie Huber’s ruminative, rambling 2012 documentary Partly Fiction, David Lynch drops by Stanton’s house to drink coffee, smoke and talk. The director ﬁshes a sheet of paper from his pocket on which he has listed the six times they had worked together. “We’re a team,” Stanton responds. To wit: The Cowboy And The Frenchman (a short ﬁlm for Figaro magazine), Wild At Heart, Hotel Room (a three part mini-series from 1993), The Straight Story, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Inland Empire. Since the documentary, aged nearly 90, Stanton returned as Carl Rodd in Twin Peaks: The Return. He even turned down the part of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, claiming he couldn’t feel those feelings. “Go get Dennis,” he had instructed Lynch. While the actor cringes, Lynch extols what he sees as Stanton’s great quality of innocence. “It’s just real,” he marvels. “What

of Johnny Cash. In Cool Hand Luke he plays the crooning inmate, strumming a chorus to Paul Newman’s rebellion. He was both singer and inspiration. Debbie Harry, another old ﬂame, and Kris Kristofferson, another lifelong friend, both wrote songs about him. Travis, the band, purloined their name from Paris, Texas. Stanton regularly accompanied Dylan over the years, and even recorded a duet that has never come to light. He and Dylan shared an impish streak. One of Stanton’s favourite stories involves the two icons goading one another on the set of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. The volatile director had spent the day readying a shot for magic hour — sunset as sunrise — but as he called action, ﬁrst Dylan and then Stanton dashed into frame and the day was lost. Peckinpah screamed blue murder as Stanton claimed he was trying to stop the miscreant troubadour, lying through his teeth. Peckinpah narrowly missed him with a Bowie knife. “It’s all a movie,” Stanton often said, meaning life and art. And now, with his work done, he has disappeared back into the midnight dark of the desert from whence he came.

NOVEMBER 2017

november 2017

How a pair of unknown, identical-twin filmmakers spawned a pop-culture pHenomenon, and How tHey aim to top it witH stranger tHings 2 Words DAn JoLIn

illustration SAm GILbeY

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A TWeeT By by Stephen King started it. Shawn Levy, executive producer of Stranger Things and director of four episodes, remembers seeing it the day of the show’s “small premiere” in LA. The legendary novelist, one of the biggest inspirations for the Netflix show, described the 1983-set, eight-part series as like “watching Steve King’s Greatest Hits. I mean that in a good way”. Then came the email from Steven Spielberg — whose early output was another huge influence. Levy received it, knowing the director from making Real Steel with him, and happily reports Spielberg was “positive and supportive”. Levy suggested he share his thoughts with “the brothers”. Spielberg did. “It blew their minds,” the producer confirms. “The brothers”, of course, are Matt and Ross Duffer, creators of Stranger Things, the It-via-Amblin sci-fi horror which last summer hurtled out of nowhere like a flying BMX to become one of Netflix’s most popular shows, and earn a cult following overnight. eggos became a meme, Dungeons & Dragons became cool (well, sort of ) and ill-fated support character Barb (Shannon Purser) inspired touched fans to post pics of themselves as her, hashtagged #WeAreAllBarb. A year later, the Duffers’ minds are still blown. “you hear from people whose work you’ve looked up to, going, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing,’” says Matt proudly. Though he and Ross are coy about who else contacted them, Empire knows Pixar’s Andrew Stanton was among them — because, when we speak with the siblings in July, they’re about to start soundmixing the two episodes Stanton directed,

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having eagerly offered his services. “We learned to write screenplays by watching Toy Story on loop,” says Matt. Given the quality and incredible success of Stranger Things, few would deny the 33-year-old twins from Durham, North Carolina, deserve such adulation from their peers. But they don’t sound so sure themselves. They recall attending the Directors Guild of America awards in February (having been nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement In Dramatic Series) and finding themselves in a room with the likes of Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and Peter Weir. “I was just embarrassed,” cringes Matt. “I didn’t have the courage to go up to any of them. I remember just staring at Michael Mann. He’s a little scary.” It’s been a lot for them to process. Hard to believe now, but they were once worried that, with so many great long-form dramas already screaming for attention, theirs would get lost amid the noise. “I remember Mr. Robot

whether it be a film audience who likes the ’80s references or a younger audience who get a glimpse into a world before the internet.” Not bad for something that, says Matt Duffer, wasn’t calibrated for widespread consumption. “You’re just trying to write something you would wanna see, so I was amazed that it was embraced by the mainstream.” Yet, as overwhelmed as they were by the response, the brothers could have done without it at that precise moment. “It was a little distracting,” admits Matt. “As the show was finding its audience we were already knee-deep in writing the next season…”

Clockwise from above: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is back, here suffering one of her nosebleeds; Ross and Matt Duffer marshal their young cast on set; Newcomer Max (Sadie Sink, second left) alongside Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Joyce (Winona Ryder).

Season 2 was a week before us,” says Ross. “We were like, ‘No-one’s gonna care about our show.’” The morning after Stranger Things launched, he risked a peek at Twitter. “It was shocking. People had already finished watching it. So we were like, ‘Well, some people are gonna like this.’ Then it just snowballed.” The show’s stars were similarly surprised. “I thought it was going to be a disaster,” chuckles David Harbour, who plays punchy sheriff Jim Hopper and, presumably in part due to the show’s success, is cinema’s new Hellboy. “We were just nervous and exhausted the entire time and didn’t think it was going to work. I always loved it, but I thought it would be kind of a niche show that certain nerds would like.” Winona Ryder, aka heroic mom Joyce Byers, was bewildered by the scale of its success. “I still don’t think I understand how big it’s become,” she tells us. “I’ve been told it’s a phenomenon, but it’s hard to say that myself. I think the show appeals to people on so many different levels,

the Duffers started on Stranger Things 2 before even knowing how well the first season had gone down was not, Matt insists, an act of overconfidence. “At that point Netflix had never not done a season two. They’d never cancelled anything, so we thought, ‘Even if we’re a modest success, we’ll get to do a season two.’ And then they might cancel us.” If he sounds hesitant to embrace success, it’s with good reason. In 2012, Ross and Matt shot their debut movie Hidden, a post-apocalyptic thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård and Andrea Riseborough which they hoped would be their big breakthrough. “And then they end up dumping the movie and not even giving a shit about it,” says Matt. “We know what it’s like to put something out, put everything into it and have no-one care. It’s painful.” They turned away from cinema and took � a gig on M. Night Shyamalan’s mystery series

november 2017

Clockwise from above: Former Goonie Sean Astin joins the cast as Bob, love interest for Joyce; Dustin holds court with Lucas, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Will (Noah Schnapp), newly centre-stage; Something’s got

Wayward Pines, learning how to do TV through that and earning enough to spend half a year off developing Stranger Things — a show they describe as their attempt to capture the feeling they had reading Stephen King books in their bedrooms. “We liked the idea of what one of his bigger novels would feel like if adapted into this sort of modern television layer-scape,” explains Matt. At its origin point, says Ross — long before Netflix bought it — it was designed as “an eight-hour movie, or limited series. And then at some point we realised it could go on.” Even so, he adds, the second season is intended to work as “a stand-alone season, where it feels like if this is the end, people will be satisfied”. Just as the twins paid close attention to ’80s movies for the first season (E.T., Firestarter, A Nightmare On Elm Street…), here — as well as paying obvious tribute to the likes of Ghostbusters and Gremlins — they kept in mind great movie sequels from the era. “James Cameron is the master of the sequel,” says Ross. “You take what works and you don’t just repeat it, you expand upon it and make it grow. We came up with a lot of ideas that excited us and a lot of them didn’t end up making it in. But it is a bigger season. And it helps to get the resources we needed to pull that off.” As we know from the Season 1 finale, something came back from demonic shadow-

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dimension the Upside Down with poor little Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). Something which, if the apocalyptic visions Will now suffers are to be believed, will make the Demogorgon look like a narky Venus flytrap. “There are definitely new elements of evil and the threats are more intense,” says Levy. “It’s a bigger story with far more dynamic and cinematic visuals.” He recalls being frustrated while directing the scene in the first season where the Demogorgon emerges through the Byers’ wall, and having some shots “where it’s clearly a tall, skinny man in a suit”. Being immersed in the aesthetics of the ’80s, the Duffers were keen to do as many practical effects as possible, regardless of budgetary requirements. “Now I think the brothers recognise the value of digital wizardry when it can sell the reality of a huge, unworldly…” Levy pauses as if realising he’s about to say too much, before settling on: “… thing.”

, when Empire visits the supernaturally afflicted town of Hawkins, Indiana — or rather EUE/Screen Gems Studios in south Atlanta — we spot nothing huger or more unworldly than heartthrob Steve Harrington’s quiff (though you have to admit actor Joe Keery wears that Flock Of Seagulls cut well). However, there is a huge hint to what that “thing” might be

in a typically crazy Byers household decorative touch, Stranger Things 2’s equivalent of the first season’s Christmas lights. Plastered all over the walls, floor and ceiling of Chez Byers are winding, branching trails of paper: A4 drawing sheets, ripped-out phonebook pages, gift-wrapping scraps. Each is covered in intensely scrawled grey, blue and red crayon in such a way that together they form a vast, monstrous pattern which curls and wends around the entire interior. There’s something parasitically vine-like about the artwork, but it also looks disconcertingly wormy. It’s all the result of some furious creative endeavour by Will who, though it’s been a year since he was rescued by his mother Joyce and Sheriff Hopper from the soul-sapping Upside Down, doesn’t seem particularly recovered from his experience. In this scene he’s pallid and prone on a tatty settee, with big brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) crouching over him and weeping, “I’m sorry, bud. I’m sorry I wasn’t there…” Most of the gang are here, too. Nancy (Natalia Dyer) places a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, with boyfriend Steve standing next to her. Harbour’s Hopper is on the phone, bellowing angrily at whatever poor sap’s at the other end (“I am the police! Chief! Jim! Hopper!”). And monster-battling kids Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo)

tina rowden/netflix, jackson lee davis/netflix

Eleven’s goat.

and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) sit at a dining table, rolling eyes at each other with a new pal named Max — a new-to-town tomboy from California, played by Sadie Sink. She’s not the only addition to the cast. Australian actor Dacre Montgomery (Power Rangers) joins as Max’s older brother, Billy — “The antagonist,” he says, who brings some “Jack Nicholson-esque qualities” to the mix. “Billy’s unpredictable, puts people on edge — very much like Jack in The Shining.” Paul Reiser, meanwhile, fills another antagonistic role as Stranger Things 2’s Brenner replacement, Dr Owens. “I’ve been a fan of his for a long time,” says Matt Duffer. “Diner’s one of our favourite movies, and then of course there’s the Aliens connection…” Originally he and Ross envisioned the part as “a Paul Reiser type”, even naming the character ‘Dr Reiser’ in early drafts. Then they figured they should try asking the real Reiser. It turned out he’d watched the show with his teenage son, so knew it well. “When we had lunch with Paul he was like, ‘I’m in.’ It was awesome,” says Matt. They also now have a bona fide Goonie on the roster. “Matt and Ross said they were really hesitant to hire me because of my ’80s cache,” reveals Sean Astin, who takes the role of kindly RadioShack employee Bob Newby (“A love interest for Winona,” he confirms). “There is

definitely a doff of the cap to that era, but it has to work on its own terms. Bob’s authentic and optimistic and responsible.” According to Matt, they definitely did not want Astin’s casting to be “kitschy or self-aware”, or something that would “take you out of the world”. It was simply that, “For whatever reason, he fits in nicely to the cast.” As much as things are expanding, Levy promises they’ve not lost sight of the show’s “core principals”, by which he means “this cast of series regulars, their relationships and their struggles. Above all I love these characters, and I think our viewers feel the same way.” It all comes back to that gang gathered tensely among Will’s creepy drawings in the Byers living room — along with Joyce and the powerfully psychic Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who, though absent from today’s scene, has certainly returned (the precise manner of her apparent resurrection remains tightly under wraps). For Brown, this ‘sequel’ feels very different from the original. And she’s not only talking about how much taller the child actors are, or how some of their voices have deepened. “It’s a lot darker, a lot more gripping,” she tells Empire. “We’re going into the characters’ backstories, really digging deep into them, so it gets a little bit more emotional.” Perhaps the most significant shift is the movement of former abductee Will to centre

stage. “Last year I was only in some episodes,” says Schnapp, “but this year I’m here fully. Season 2 explains how the Upside Down has affected Will. It shows the aftermath of what happens.” When the Duffers originally cast Schnapp, they knew they’d need him to take a central position in the new season, so were sure to, as Ross puts it, “audition the hell out of the role”. Even so, he says, he performed way better than expected. “He blew us all away, in the same way that Millie did in Season 1; we knew she was good, but we didn’t know she was that good. This time Noah came in and just shocked everyone with his performance. I think that’s the biggest difference between seasons.” Of course, it’s not just Will who’s been affected by the dimensional rift-based madness of last season. Natalia Dyer confirms that Nancy has hardly forgotten about the tragic, grisly fate of her closest friend, Barb — something backed up by the presence in the studio’s prop room of a lovingly arranged collection of Barb photos: a full-on Barb shrine. “We still find Nancy coping with what happened last season,” she says. “For sure, we do deal with Barb.” #JusticeforBarb was another hashtag inspired by Nancy’s short-lived confidante, and Dyer’s not above quoting it. “I think of Barb and � I think… justice,” she says, smiling.

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had a similarly huge impact on the real lives of its young cast. “Early success is deadly,” thinks Harbour, worried about his youthful co-stars. “I just worry for them that they get so famous.” Not that McLaughlin gives much cause for concern. “It’s kind of cool,” he assures us of the attention he’s received. “I haven’t seen too much hate.” “I’ve found people can be pretty aggressive, though,” chips in Matarazzo. “I really appreciate the support from everyone, but when you’re in a very public area and someone screams, ‘Hey! You’re Dustin from Stranger Things!’ I’m like, ‘You’re blowing my cover, man!’” Wolfhard tells us a story of how he was accosted in a Whole Foods Market by a fan who

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wanted a selfie with him. After hustling him to a better-lit area and taking seven different shots, she turned to him and said, “Man, I wish I could’ve met Eleven.” The other boys collapse into gales of laughter. “Oh my God,” splutters Matarazzo, “that’s the best story on the planet! That’s hilarious!” The gang seem as close in reality as they do in Hawkins. And with stories of on-set pranks (Brown and Schnapp being the two prime offenders, once faking a call to the costume designer with the news that her wedding venue had been cancelled), they don’t appear to have lost their quintessential innocent kid-ness. “When they were casting us, they were looking for the perfect chemistry and they found it,” says Schnapp. As Brown puts it, “We’re such a bunch of energy.” For the Duffers, these kids are the reason their show instantly went from zero to, well, 11 — more than the ’80s nostalgia, more than the ice-cool synth score, more than all the retro-cinematic deep-cuts. “People connected to Gaten and Millie and Finn and Caleb,” says Matt. “That’s why I think it’s successful. Because of them.” Surprisingly, when first pitching the show, the fact that their main characters were children turned off several potential buyers. “I hadn’t seen anything on television starring kids that

wasn’t aimed at kids,” Matt points out, “and everyone was like, ‘You can’t do this.’” They wanted them to cut the kids entirely and make it “just the sheriff character”. The brothers stuck to their guns. Empire wonders if that was partly because these kids are essentially them — Matt and Ross, as they were in their pre-teen years. “The reason we fell in love with The Goonies was because those kids on screen behaved exactly how we behaved with our best friends,” Matt says. “They felt like real, authentic kids. So that’s what we tried to do when we were writing it and casting them. At that age we hung out mostly with other boys, playing nerdy games, so those scenes were not particularly challenging to write.” He laughs. “I never thought I’d spend so much time with 12- and 13-year-olds again in my life. They’re different in some ways, because they have their smartphones, but they’re still very much how we were at that age. So I think it’s very healthy to be around them constantly. It improves the show.” Exactly how much more of their lives the Duffers will need to spend with these SnapChatting versions of their younger selves has yet to be decided. But there are certainly Stranger Things to come. “I don’t think we can wrap it up in Season 3,” says Ross when we ask if this might, in classic movie-sequel style,

ALAMY, COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ARENAPAL

For Ross, though, the wider fallout is a little more complicated. “A lot of what we wanted to feel with this is how a real person would react to the events that happened the previous year,” he says. “People are trying to sweep it under the rug and pretend like this terrible thing never really happened — not just the government baddies but our main characters, too. They’re trying to be normal and move on with their lives, but they’re not really dealing with it. We see how that catches up to them.”

There’s no shortage of Things in movies. But which are the most peculiar?

TOTAL MIND-JOB THE THING the thing (1982)

King of the Things — a parasitic and horrifically mutable alien nasty that gives Huskies tentacles, stomachs teeth and heads spider-legs. Brought to fantastically queasy life by Rob Bottin and Stan Winston.

MAN-THING Man-thing (2005)

Shambling plant-monster whose viney touch burns anyone who feels fear (huh?). It’s actually a Marvel Comics character — though, despite the presence of Rachael ‘Trish from Jessica Jones’ Taylor, very much pre-MCU.

SWAMP THING SwaMp thing (1982)

Another boggy comic-based plant-person, this time based on a DC title and directed by Wes Craven. Starts out as Ray Wise (Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks), turns into avenging mulch via an accident involving science. Clockwise from left: Ghostbusters gear — yep, it’s 1984; Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) — with a new ’80s perm?; David Harbour returns as Hopper.

be a trilogy. “There’s a little too much. But we really start laying the groundwork for what we see as the arc of the full show in this next season. We probably need at least four seasons to wrap it up. It could be longer. It’s hard to know. We don’t have these grand plans.” Yet they don’t want their creation to outstay its welcome. “What’s nice about TV now is you can tell much more contained stories,” Matt reasons. “Even if you’re successful, you don’t have to go to seven seasons if you don’t want to. And I don’t think we could sustain that. We just want to tell as many stories in this town as feels right, and then get outta there before it starts to nosedive.” Not that they’re in a rush to leave their own eerie Indiana, even if, as Levy says, “The brothers could be making movies now” — perhaps even on the level of the filmmakers they admire most. “They know that the degree of authorship they have on Stranger Things is almost unparalleled in the movie business. They are mature and clear-eyed enough to recognise it.” The producer, who describes himself as “big brother to these twins”, gives a big, bright, million-dollar grin. “They’re not going anywhere soon.” Stranger thingS 2 is on netflix from 27 october

BEN GRIMM, AKA ‘THE THING’ FantaStic Four (2005)

Big, orange and rocky, Ben Grimm is the muscle (or should that be masonry?) for Marvel’s family-unit superteam. Here played by The Shield’s Michael Chiklis, suffering the prosthetics with relative panache.

THING

the addaMS FaMily (1991)

Give a hand to the hand that’s just a hand. Part family pet, part dexterous servant, its full name is Thing T. Thing, and while disembodied in the film, in the TV show it was attached to a hideously unseeable off-screen monster.

THING 1 AND THING 2 the cat in the hat (2003)

Mischievous, blue-haired identical twins. They live in a crate and are oddly successful police impersonators. Played by disturbingly prostheticised children, they have the voice of Dan Castellaneta (aka Homer Simpson).

PRETTY WEIRD november 2017

IN 1977, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND LOU FERRIGNO WERE MERE BODYBUILDING CONTESTANTS, JUST A COUPLE OF BIG BLOKES COMPETING IN A FRINGE SPORT. THEN CAME PUMPING IRON â&#x20AC;&#x201D; AND EVERYTHING CHANGED

WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

NOVEMBER 2017

High deﬁnition: Upstart Lou Ferrigno goes up against older vet Arnie in 1977’s Pumping Iron.

NOVEMBER 2017

It’s been 40 years since Pumping Iron dragged bodybuilding out of dank basements and onto the world stage. It launched the screen careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, changed what a leading man looked like, and started a fitness craze that had gyms popping up all over America. Here, with fresh insights from Schwarzenegger, Ferrigno and the film’s makers, are 14 things you need to know...

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1.NOBODY CARED ABOUT BODYBUILDING IN 1977

In the early 1970s, amateur bodybuilder Charles Gaines wrote Stay Hungry, a novel about a guy who befriends a group of iron-pumpers. Sports Illustrated then commissioned him to write about the sport, which was about as mainstream as midget wrestling. After a couple of articles, Gaines knew there was a whole book in it: he would be like David Attenborough reporting on some strange anthropological phenomenon. “Bodybuilding was a non-subject,” he tells Empire now. “Nobody knew anything about it and the few people who did had a lot of misconceptions; that they were all musclebound homosexuals. It was relegated to the back closet of American subcultures.” Watching Pumping Iron in 1977 was like watching Tod Browning’s Freaks, only these men had built themselves. We got to see how they did it and what they ordered in the restaurant to maintain it (a big steak, six eggs, three hamburgers).

Clockwise from left: Arnie impresses the locals in Sydney in 1976; Lou Ferrigno, set to Hulk up after the success of the film; Franco Columbu

Ohio — only had three months to train. The movie, which was shot over the 100 days leading up to the Mr Olympia competition, portrays its two stars’ very different prep sessions: Ferrigno lifts weights in a dimly lit basement in Brooklyn, while Schwarzenegger flexes his copious muscles in the legendary Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, California, or on Muscle Beach, glinting in the sun like a god and invariably surrounded by beautiful women. “When I saw the film I was disappointed because it was showing me going against him and I wasn’t in my best shape,” says Ferrigno. “Later on, I realised that people really sympathised with both of us.”

(Mr Olympia 1975) hanging with Arnie and pals at Muscle Beach in 1975; Scenes from 1977’s Pumping Iron, with Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno together and in opposition. “That was the point; to make up rivalries...”

5. DADDY ISSUES WERE RIFE

Ferrigno’s main beef with the movie was the inclusion of his father Matty, his on-screen trainer, a confident, grey-haired guy who came off like a Scorsese character. Recalls Ferrigno: “When the movie first came out, a lot of people said, ‘I wish I had a father like yours. He was the greatest supporter.’ It was all bullshit. He was never involved before, ever. He only did it because he wanted to be in the film. I was introverted and he wanted to dominate me. It was a tough ordeal.” Years later, Ferrigno wrote him a letter about it, too upset to confront him face-to-face, and their relationship remained fractious until his death in 2003. “We rarely spoke. I couldn’t talk to him about it because he was a very defensive person. I kind of forgave him and moved on. I just kept my distance.” Dave McVeigh, who watched 100 hours of Pumping Iron cut footage while producing the ‘making of’ feature Raw Iron with his brother Scott, says, “It came across to me like Lou’s dad was just enamoured of Arnold. So not only is he a stage father, dominating his kid, he’s also a fan of his kid’s opponent. That had to be rough for Lou.”

GEORGE LONG/GETTY, GEORGE BUTLER/ CONTACT PRESS IMAGES, ALAMY, GETTY

2. FERRIGNO WAS THE UNDERDOG 3. ARNIE WASN’T JUST MUSCLE The throughline of Pumping Iron, which was co-directed by Robert Fiore and George Butler, is the David-and-Goliath rivalry between Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ferrigno, who had been left partially deaf by a childhood accident, was determined to best his gargantuan rival. “I knew Arnold was planning on retiring,” he remembers. “I wanted to beat him because to be the best, you have to beat the best. He was my idol.” In Gaines’ 1974 book Pumping Iron: The Art And Sport Of Bodybuilding, Ferrigno was a minor character the writer described as having “one of the best unfinished physiques in the history of bodybuilding”. In the movie, while Austrian ex-pat Schwarzenegger was at his peak, having already become the youngest-ever Mr Universe in 1967, Ferrigno came off as a hulking neophyte. “It’s impossible not to like Louie,” says Gaines. “He was a bit of a dolt at that time, though not as much of one as he is portrayed in Pumping Iron. A sweet man, very generous to other bodybuilders and everybody he came in contact with.”

Schwarzenegger’s charisma was a rarity, says Gaines. “Our great gift was Arnold’s intelligence and his adaptability and his metaphorical capacity. With bodybuilders, it’s not that they’re unintelligent — it’s just that they’re intelligent in a very fixed and limited way.” The star himself believes this is what the sport needed: someone to hype it up from the inside. “I think the time was right for bodybuilding to have a personality like I have,” Schwarzenegger tells Empire. “It was just a vacuum there. And so all of a sudden it was, ‘Wow, Schwarzenegger can be out there promoting bodybuilding and talking about it eloquently.’ That’s what was needed.”

4. NOT ALL TRAINING REGIMES ARE EQUAL

World-class bodybuilding competitors usually prepare for at least a year. But Ferrigno — who had been working in a sheet-metal factory in

6. BREAKFAST IS A GOOD TIME FOR PSYCH-OUTS

Ferrigno admits that he lacked the motivation he needed to beat his idol. “To be a champion you have to be hungry and I wasn’t as hungry when I was in Pumping Iron.” Schwarzenegger sensed this and pounced, cheekily psyching him out at breakfast by telling Ferrigno he was not in the right frame of mind to beat him, that he hadn’t trained as hard as he needed to train, that Schwarzenegger had already phoned his mother in Austria and told her he’d won. “Arnold was always smarter than all of his competition,” says Gaines. “Always psychologically acute and ruthlessly willing to exploit any weakness he felt a competitor had, particularly in the warm-up rooms before competitions. He’d go over and say, ‘Ah, too bad you didn’t get those biceps up a little bit more than you did.’ Those things really accrete, especially in bodybuilding where you’ve got to show yourself off. A big part of the pose-offs, which are the finale to the competitions, is an � exhibition of confidence.”

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7.BUT THERE’S NO BAD TIME FOR A PSYCH-OUT

In 1970, Mike Katz, one of Pumping Iron’s star bodybuilders, was in New York City on the day Schwarzenegger first won Mr Olympia, stealing the title from favourite Sergio Oliva. Katz tells Empire that the victory was down to another bit of world-class mind-messing. “The crowd was cheering, ‘Sergio! Sergio!’ They’re posing and posing and Arnold looks over to Sergio, and Sergio is getting tired. So Arnold whispers to Sergio, ‘I’m tired, let’s get off and rest.’ Sergio goes to the right of the stage, Arnold pretends he’s going to the left. When Sergio is threequarters to the backstage, Arnold jumps back on the stage and starts posing. He hand-gestures, ‘Sergio quit! I’m the winner!’ and all the people changed from chanting, ‘Sergio! Sergio!’ to ‘Arnold! Arnold!’ Poor Sergio got psyched out.”

8. THERE WAS SOME SNEAKY EDITING

Dave McVeigh, director of Raw Iron, 2002’s documentary on Pumping Iron, says that crafty editing shaped how Schwarzenegger comes across in the film. “Arnold was definitely a trash talker, but I don’t think he had any malice towards Lou,” he says. “Taken out of context, you can make anybody look any way in a documentary. It wouldn’t have been as interesting if everyone was holding hands and singing Kumbaya. That was Butler’s point: to make up rivalries.” Ferrigno admits that he was upset about how he came off when he first saw the film. “In the beginning I took it the wrong way,” he says, “because I thought I was being exploited, looking like the loser.”

9.THE INFAMOUS T-SHIRT SCENE WAS FAKED ENTIRELY

Mike Katz objected to one of Butler’s fabricated scenarios in which bodybuilder Ken Waller steals his lucky blue T-shirt, with Katz left wandering the backstage corridors looking for it. It never happened: six months after Katz misplaced his T-shirt, Butler filmed Waller saying to camera that he was going to steal it, then edited the footage to tell a funny story. Katz was so angry he walked out of the New York City premiere. “It wasn’t edited right, it made me look like a loser,” he says. “It took me years to get over it. They made me sign the release [before I saw the movie] and I got a stupid 600 bucks — at the time a lot of money, being a teacher. I wasn’t going to sue anybody, because that’s not the way I am, but I was hurt because they promised me I’d be the hero.” Waller didn’t come out of it well either: he was booed at bodybuilding shows for years after, for what the film claimed he did to Katz.

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PUMPING GOLD __

ARNiE’s gREAtEst quOtEs __ To fans at a bodybuilding show: “Milk is for babies. When you grow up, you have to drink beer.” __ On the perks of lifting: “The most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is ‘the pump’... It’s as satisfying to me as coming is, you know? As having sex with a woman and coming. Can you believe how much I am in heaven?... I am coming day and night.” __ On Franco Columbu: “Franco is pretty smart, but Franco’s a child. And when it comes to the day of the contest, I am his father. He comes to me for advices. So it’s not that hard for me to give him the wrong advices.” __ While posing under spotlights: “I don’t have any weak points... I would never just make one muscle increase or decrease, because everything fits together now, and all I have to do now is get my posing routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know? It’s perfect already.”

10. ARNIE DIDN’T DO EMOTION

In a deleted scene, Gaines walks through an amusement park with Schwarzenegger, trying to get him to open up emotionally instead of being his usual cocky self. McVeigh tells Empire: “It’s very obvious when you watch all the footage that he was a nice guy, but not what Gaines wanted him to be, which is a ’70s nice guy — y’know, touchy-feely. Gaines says, ‘Don’t you think it closes you off to human connection?’ and Arnold’s like, ‘So what?’ He’s laughing. Butler and Gaines are both smart, sort of intellectuals, and they tried to get to the core of these bodybuilders. But sometimes people are just what they are.”

11.PUMPING IRON CREATED THE HULK

The success of Pumping Iron caught the eye of TV executives and gave Ferrigno a job outside of his old factory. “It received tremendous attention, and six months later I received

a phonecall to audition for The Incredible Hulk,” he says. “Since then I’ve done stage plays, five TV series, over 40 films. I’d always wanted to be an actor but never told anyone. The film put me on the map, and now I’m very proud of it. The only part I didn’t like was my father.”

12. AND THE TERMINATOR, TOO

Unlike Ferrigno, Schwarzenegger, who wins the Mr Olympia title at the end of the film and celebrates with fried chicken and a joint, had voiced his desire to act to Gaines and Butler. Gaines recalls a car journey where the Austrian laid out his whole life plan: “Arnold was in the back, George and I were in the front and we asked him what he planned to do next. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got a life chart made out for myself. I want to be the world’s best bodybuilder, I want to win Mr Olympia seven times and then I want to get into the movies, marry an American princess and get into politics.’ All of that turned out to be exactly what he did.”

13.IT CHANGED THE SHAPE OF A-LIST STARS Clockwise from top: Schwarzenegger became friends with Stay Hungry co-star Jeff Bridges; Arnie psychs out Lou at the 1975 Mr Olympia contest; Ferrigno as The Incredible Hulk in 1978; Arnie in the Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden, for the 1974 Mr Olympia, contest; The Austrian Oak is pretty clear who’s number one; Ferrigno’s father Matty appears in Pumping Iron.

In the 1970s, leading Hollywood hard men were Steve McQueen and James Caan: not your regular guy in the street, but not far off either. But in the run-up to Pumping Iron, the makers of Stay Hungry needed someone to play bodybuilder Joe Santo, and Gaines suggested Schwarzenegger. It wasn’t an easy sell. “I took Bob [Rafelson, director] over to Gold’s Gym,” he says, “and introduced him to Arnold. He said, ‘It’s never gonna work: the guy’s got this awful Austrian accent, he doesn’t know anything about acting.’ We read a dozen guys and they were all hopeless, and finally Rafelson said, ‘Maybe we should at least bring your buddy in for reading.’ He wasn’t a great actor, but he had a wonderfully developed sense of himself and the camera was good to him, so Bob said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a shot.’” Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for New Male Star Of The Year, and when Pumping Iron was released his film career really took off.

14.GYM OWNERS OWE IT A MAJOR DEBT

In Stay Hungry, which co-stars Jeff Bridges, there’s a scene where Schwarzenegger and dozens of bodybuilders — including Pumping Iron’s Franco Columbu, Ken Waller, Ed Corney and Robby Robinson — spill out of the weights room and run through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, in their brightly coloured underpants. When it was released, a year before the success of Pumping Iron, before a painted green Hulk was on TV screens, before Conan The Barbarian swung his sword, this scene was a comedy freak-show. Now? Now that’s just a fitness Instagram on a Tuesday afternoon.

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itting in the back room of a London restaurant, soft jazz piping in overhead, Armando Iannucci sifts through the photographs on his phone. There, amid the happy snaps of sons and daughter, of love and laughter, lies a grainy black-and-white image of a mass murderer: Lavrentiy Beria, the former Marshal of the Soviet Union and the chief of the secret police (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin. Beria was a sadistic torturer and sexual predator, a paedophile, and a man responsible for the murder of countless innocents. Stalin dubbed him “my Himmler”. The picture’s presence is not, however, as incongruous as it may appear. Iannucci, the man who along with Steve Coogan brought us Alan Partridge, and who created caustic political TV series The Thick Of It and Veep — not to mention the former’s spin-off ﬁlm In The Loop — has spent the last three years immersed in the world of 1950s Soviet politics, of the Presidium and the Politburo, researching, writing and directing his most recent movie, a biting satire called The Death Of Stalin.

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Adapted from the French graphic novel of the same name by Fabien Nury, the film finds the funny amid the machinations, murder and mayhem that followed the unexpected death of the “man of steel” in March 1953. Drawing on the real-life situation, albeit working within a truncated time frame, it follows Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) and other members of the political elite as they jostle for position in a bid to fill the power vacuum. Working in this cutthroat realm is a logical progression for a man who has carried us through the blundering, back-biting and bullying that pervades both Whitehall and the White House, although looking for laughs in the Kremlin is an even more challenging experience. After all, each of the main characters has blood on their hands. On set a few months back, Buscemi had described the story as by far the darkest of Iannucci’s works and “quite horrifying” — not the most obvious hard sell for a comedy. When we repeat the quote to Iannucci, the writer-director nods in agreement. “This didn’t feel like writing Veep or The Thick Of It,” he concedes. “It felt like a whole new world: a different stage, a different texture, a different colour. It was small men in big rooms. I also wanted to get a sense of the whole of Russia and the Soviet Empire out there being affected by what these thugs were up to, a sense of a city that’s about to

Left: Joseph Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) lies in state, thus triggering yet more venality and back-stabbing. Right: Jason Isaacs as war hero Georgy Zhukov. Below: Armando Iannucci (centre) briefs his cast of Soviet schemers.

go up in flames of anger, people taken away and brought back.” The production process was different, too. In contrast to his TV work, each scene in The Death Of Stalin was carefully choreographed. “A lot of it was storyboarded,” he says. “On TV it is usually very verbal, with little music. With this I knew there would be scenes with few words, or no words, and it’d come down to the visuals and the music.” Any reticence about unearthing the humour among murderous types was tempered by the reactions of many of those that actually suffered through Stalin’s myriad purges. Gallows humour is as old as the gallows themselves, and it certainly ran rife during the Stalinist era. There is a mass of Stalin joke books, many of which Iannucci studied during his research. “There were a lot circulating at the time, with jokes about Beria raping people,” he says. “The specific jokes were too dark to include and, of course, if you were found saying these jokes or having one of these joke books on your person you’d get shot. But they were a response to what was going on because everyone knew someone who was taken away. It was a case of, ‘They can tell us what to say but they can’t tell us what to laugh at.’” Picking through some of these contemporaneous gags, Empire comes upon this joke about three prisoners in a Siberian prison. The first explains that he has been condemned to the gulag for saying that

Communist leader Karl Radek is a counter-revolutionary. The second responds with surprise: “I am here for saying Radek is not a counterrevolutionary.” They turn to the third man and why he has been punished. His reply? “I am Karl Radek.” Karl Radek does not appear in the film — Beria ordered his execution years before Stalin popped his clogs — but the joke highlights the everchanging climate in which the Soviets lived. “That insecurity was everywhere,” notes Iannucci, and as his film demonstrates, it haunted members of the Presidium and those close to Stalin. That anxiety seems to be a through-line linking so many of his characters across the years. “And here that insecurity is so heightened because it’s not a case of if you make the wrong move you’ll be dismissed. You’re dead. And they’re all thinking that.” Alongside Khrushchev, Beria and Malenkov, other senior political figures from the Presidium, including Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan — played with great verve by Michael Palin and Paul Whitehouse, respectively — are drawn into the fray, as well as Stalin’s children Vasily (Rupert Friend) and Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough). Insecurity runs rife. “The film is tense,” smiles Iannucci. “Basically, it’s an eight person Mexican standoff.”

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ur attention returns to Iannucci’s smartphone and the photograph of Beria, his chubby face squashed between a big hat and a chunky coat. It was captured during Stalin’s funeral addresses in Red Square. “When I showed this picture to Simon Russell Beale,” laughs the director, “he went, ‘Oh my God!’” And well he might. The Red Square addresses play a part in the film, and in this scene Beale looks exactly like the man in the photo. The film might be a comedy but its authenticity is palpable. Although, Iannucci’s script, written with long-time collaborator David Schneider (who fans would recognise as Alan Partridge’s on-screen nemesis Tony Hayers) and Ian Martin (who worked with Iannucci on The Thick Of It and Veep), draws just as much from Nury’s graphic novel. “[The book] is not full of gags,” says Iannucci, “but it deals with the absurdity of the situation.” Like the film, the book opens with a concert, a recording of which is presented to Stalin. He keels over, Beria comes in first, and then the gaggle of politicos argues about getting him a doctor. As the absurdity takes hold, it is Malenkov as Stalin’s deputy who is nominated to stand in his place, although no-one in the Presidium (with the gradual exception of the man himself ) expects him to rule. Rather, Beria begins pulling his strings until, as history attests, Khrushchev emerges victorious thanks to the intervention of the victorious World War II hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov (played with gusto in the film by a bluff Jason Isaacs). The film does make some key tweaks to both history and its source material. “I conflated everything to take place over ten days,” says Iannucci. In truth, the plot against Beria unfolded several months after Stalin’s death. “There were all sorts of committee meetings going on, but that doesn’t work for a film. In speeding things up we also decided that Khrushchev could use the funeral as a way of getting back at Beria.” It is Stalin’s lying in state that Empire observes during our visit to set, watching a hilarious moment as Khrushchev is invited by the funeral arranger to choose ruched or non-ruched drapery. Things become even more farcical when Beria, Khrushchev and Malenkov, who are standing as rigid as statues around Stalin’s open casket, begin jockeying for position, shifting around nervously, eager to continue their whispered manoeuvres. The graphic novel’s author, Nury, watches with Empire from the side lines, and is clearly enjoying himself. “The lying in state is matched not only to the book,” Iannucci says, “but we looked at archive footage and tried to replicate that as much as possible.” His main co-writer is also well versed in the era. Schneider recently wrote a play called Making Stalin Laugh about the last Yiddish theatre in Moscow, which Stalin shut down just before World War II. The play bids to be both dramatic and funny. As with The Death Of Stalin, a lot of people get shot. “David had spoken to some Yiddish actors and I instantly felt he’d be familiar with this material but also very familiar with the tone, and [know] how to write jokes that may well have been written at the time.” Perhaps the greatest feeling of authenticity, however, comes through the characters’ accents. Not a single soul speaks with a cod Russian brogue. “When you are watching the film, you have to think you’re there, and you don’t when people are talking like this,” Iannucci explains, finishing his sentence with his own version of a cod Russian accent. “There would be times when we’d let rip, and I didn’t want the actors worrying about their accent.” A Child 44-like vocal disaster was swiftly sidestepped. Stalin speaks like a cockney, Beria like a middle-class Englishman. Khrushchev sounds like Buscemi in Fargo, while Malenkov has an American twang. It is Zhukov, though, whose tones delight the most with his no-nonsense Yorkshire. “I wanted him to come in halfway through with a punch,” says Iannucci. “He is a war hero and he knows it.” Zhukov’s chest brims with medals. “He was almost immovable,” the director adds. “But anything that looks ridiculous in this film — Zhukov’s medals or Malenkov’s unusual outfits — is actually a perfect recreation of what there was.”

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Left: Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Kaganovich (Dermot Crowley), Bulganin (Paul Chahidi) and Mikoyan (Paul Whitehouse). Below: Andrea Riseborough plays Svetlana Stalin. Bottom: Iannucci preps the scene. Bottom left: Iannucci offers direction to Simon Russell Beale (Beria), Isaacs and Jeffrey Tambor (Malenkov).

t The Death Of Stalin’s test screenings, viewers often approached Iannucci after the film rolled, eager to know if he’d been influenced by contemporary American politics. The answer, perhaps surprisingly given the parallels between the intrigues on screen and Trump’s conniving White House, was no. Iannucci’s work on the script pre-dated the US election and the Russia investigation. “Maybe I was drawn to this because of Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage and the rise of UKIP,” he offers. “Farage is interesting because the Brits tend to go for the slightly quirky, not-military-type figures... We go for the eccentric.” He also wanted to do something European, having spent five years in America working on the first four seasons of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus Presidential sitcom Veep. “And I wanted to do a film; it’s been eight years since In The Loop.” When the French producers who had optioned Nury’s graphic novel approached him, he was already percolating ideas about despots, reading up on Mao and Lenin, and sketching ideas about a fictional British dictator who takes control of the UK after a civil war. “So the French coming in with a book about Stalin, there was a perfect alignment to it. I read the graphic novel and thought I could see exactly how to do it. I was still doing Veep. I was on Season 3 at the time, though I knew Season 4 would be my last and I told them. They agreed to wait.” Iannucci hadn’t envisaged Veep running for so long — it is now on its sixth season, its second without him, and will finish after its seventh — and he was keen to return home to be close to his family. “I was happy for Veep to carry on but I knew that I really had to come home,” Iannucci says. “And I’m glad I am away from American politics.”

He once described Bush as “the worst person ever; and yet not as bad as Mike Pence”. He smiles, when reminded of the quote. “I can make jokes about it, but I don’t find the situation funny. As a job I wouldn’t want to spend my time trying to make people laugh at the current situation. You need to do something about it, not make jokes and laugh about it. And in regard to Veep, it’s been great to watch that show with fresh eyes. I love seeing the cast at work, not knowing what’s coming next.” Neither will he be returning to help out with the new adventures of Alan Partridge, the character he co-created in 1991 with Steve Coogan. “It’s the best Alan for a long time,” he says of the current manifestation of the Norfolk broadcasting titan, who is finally heading back to the BBC. Instead, Iannucci is taking another unexpected turn, and one that could be his most ambitious yet: a big-screen adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which he is currently in the middle of writing. “It feels like the next step up,” he says. “It’s a big world, although I want it to feel intimate, not like a lush costume drama. I want it to be something that could be happening now. It will be set in that time but the story, characters, emotions and comedy will feel everyday and common and contemporary. It is my most ambitious piece, in terms of scope and budget.” The Death Of Stalin, though, hardly lacks ambition, certainly considering the brutal backdrop against which it plays out. When it comes to political satire, Iannucci is clearly in a class of his own. “My rule in writing all these things is that if it’s not funny it has to be interesting,” he says. The Death Of Stalin is both of these things, from the first anxious moment to the last. THE DEATH OF STALIN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 20 OCTOBER

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the empire interview

AFTER 15 YEARS OF REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN ACTOR, ANDY SERKIS IS DIRECTING HIS OWN MOVIE: BREATHE. EMPIRE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DAN JOLIN MEETS WITH HIM AND WONDERS, WHERE ARE ALL THE CG ANIMALS?

PORTRAITS JAKE WALTERS

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Breathe. Despite the fact it’s early in the day and he’s recently quit coffee, he’s animated and upbeat. No surprise: he’s finally in the place he’s always dreamed of reaching.

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When did you first realise you wanted to be a director? When I went to college, I studied visual arts — theatre studies was my subsidiary course. I started out designing posters for shows, working behind the scenes. Then I started acting, and went into that full-bore. But when I was in my mid-twenties I started painting again: figures in abstract spaces, all fairly political, with a sort of narrative. Then I thought, “These paintings are storyboards, really.” I realised, “I wanna start making films. How am I gonna do that?” So Lorraine [Ashbourne, Serkis’ wife] and I started writing this script — which we’re still developing — based on the story of her brother, who got fired from his job as a printer because he stood up for a fellow employee and then got work as a Clark Gable lookalike. I also made a short film. reflects Andy Serkis during an agreeably sprawling conversation in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. “A door will open and if you’re willing to take that journey, it can open up incredible things.” He’s talking about the lead character of his directorial debut Breathe — Robin Cavendish, the father of his friend and producing partner Jonathan, who, as a young man in 1958, was paralysed from the neck down by polio (in the film Cavendish is played by Andrew Garfield). But Serkis could just as easily be reflecting on himself. When I first met him 15 years ago, he was a hard-working British actor who’d just achieved sudden international recognition in a groundbreaking role: Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. Though hidden beneath the wretched creature’s photo-real CG form, Rings master Peter Jackson had opened a door for Serkis and sent him on his own unexpected journey. It took him to Skull Island as Jackson’s King Kong, and from there to San Francisco as brainy chimp revolutionary Caesar in the Planet Of The Apes reboot series, before appearing in Star Wars’ far-far-away galaxy as dark side chief Supreme Leader Snoke. Along the way, he founded his own studio, The Imaginarium, which specialises in performance capture, and directed second unit for Jackson on The Hobbit trilogy. All that time Serkis nurtured the desire to create movies of his own. Finally, after a bit of a false start with his still-unreleased, mo-capdriven take on The Jungle Book, the small(ish), personal Breathe arrives: a film which, but for the duplication of Tom Hollander as Robin’s identical-twin brothers-in-law, comes raw and unprocessed by the visual-effects machine. Over the years I’ve got used to seeing Andy in mo-cap gear, either going ape as Caesar or bearing all as Baloo on the set of The Jungle Book. But he doesn’t strike me as a conjurer missing his tricks when we meet to discuss

When was this? I’d made short films at college, but my first proper one was called Snake, which I made after I did 24 Hour Party People [in 2002]. It was based on a Chechen trainee doctor I met while filming in Russia who paid for his education by working for the Chechen Mafia, fixing up the guys who got shot. It’s been brewing for a while, then. But the real crucible of learning for you was directing second unit on The Hobbit, wasn’t it? Fuck, yeah. I thought I was gonna be starting my directing career doing a small, independent movie. But Pete wanted someone on second unit who could take care of performance, because of the sheer amount of characters. So I took myself down to New Zealand for a year-and-a-half. It was the most extraordinary experience. We shot for 200 days, shooting 3D native, 48 frames a second, out on location... I was in a helicopter for about eight weeks, just shooting aerials. It was a nuts job. I learned everything. And now, oddly, you have made a small, independent movie. As someone who is so associated with VFX, did it feel strange to be doing Breathe — stripped of all the things that have come to define you? Do you know what? It was thrilling. It was about visceral, raw performance. It was so delicious to come away from a day’s filming knowing that what you had was in the camera. It was like, “Oh my God! What is this?!” Directing Jungle Book for the most part was like, “Well, in a year-and-a-half I’ll be able to see roughly what we’re doing here...” Ah yes, Jungle Book. That was supposed to be the directorial debut, wasn’t it? Yeah, but I’m glad it’s happened this way around. It’s funny, because while we were shooting The � Hobbit I talked to Pete about Jonathan’s story

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and the Breathe script — which is brilliantly written by Bill Nicholson — and he said, “This is absolutely perfect for your first film.” Then, while we were recce-ing locations for Breathe in South Africa, Jungle Book came along and suddenly took over. And then Disney’s Jungle Book came out so there was a sort of hiatus, and everything miraculously fell in to place with Breathe at the beginning of last year. Why did Peter think Breathe was perfect for you? Just because of the spirit of the story, I suppose. That you set out in life to do one thing and then the adjacent possible happens and you have to go with that. I’m really excited by that idea. And then there’s the fact that it’s a beautiful love story, and I’m a bit of a sucker for love stories. And also knowing the people it’s about, knowing I’d be able to research it very thoroughly and get under the hood of the whole story, was really appealing. Did you have fun making it? It was a wonderful experience. Of course, we were highly pressurised because it was a short shoot, but working with Bob Richardson was just delightful because he’s such a fantastic DP — he’s worked with Tarantino and Oliver Stone — and to have my good friend and producing partner Jonathan sitting next to me by the monitor while we told his family story was extraordinary. And Andrew [Garfield] and Claire [Foy] were magnificent together as Robin and [his wife] Diana. What Andrew did was extraordinary as for 95 per cent of the movie he can’t move anything apart from his face. When he was on set he was immobile the whole time and Claire looked after him throughout, which was amazing. She has this ability to just turn up and get on with it: “Right. We’re doing this now.” Which is absolutely Diana, to a tee. Has the real Diana Cavendish has seen the film yet? Yeah. Her comment after the whole thing was, “Well, I never would have worn that hat.” [Laughs]. Such a Diana thing to say. What’s happening with Jungle Book? We’re in a really good place with it now. Obviously we’re in post-production — we’ve been in post-production for fucking all my life. Thanks to the Disney version. There was a race. And because we’re performance-capture, and because we wanted to not rush it, and because Disney were very intent on getting theirs out, we decided not to go head-to-head and just take our time. Obviously there hadn’t been a Jungle Book for a while, so it’s a shame, but I don’t think ultimately it’s gonna damage the audience that we’re after — a slightly older, Life Of Pi, PG-13 audience. So we’re practically locking picture, the animation’s starting to come in, and I think it’s gonna be pretty good. We’ve got a really good

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cut. We did our first test screening two weeks ago in Pasadena and it’s going well. Is Alfonso CuarÓn involved? There was an announcement in April 2016 that he’d been brought on as a consultant... No. He came on board, but was developing another project and went back to that after a few weeks. So he never really actively did anything. Unlike in Breathe, you play a role in Jungle Book. What can we expect from your first ever non-ape animal performance, as Baloo? I’m assuming he doesn’t sing... No, he’s sort of a cross between the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. [Laughs] He’s described in the book as “Iron Paws”, damaging wolf cubs accidentally through his teaching methods… So yeah, a bit like those guys and the PE instructor in Kes. You get where I’m coming from. He’s tough on Mowgli, but it’s tough love, in order to ensure his survival. You do see chinks of warmth. But he doesn’t sing. And how does it feel to have finally said goodbye to Caesar after War For The Planet Of The Apes? Very strange, actually. There are certain characters you carry with you, and I’ve not shaken off Gollum entirely. Caesar is another. Because there was this whole thing of playing out an entire life — it’s something you don’t get to do as an actor very often. Least of all if it’s an ape. And he’s quite a noble character, who stands for something I really admire. I don’t often play characters like that! [Laughs] You learn from those characters, so hopefully I’m a better � person for having played him. Certainly in

Above left, from top to bottom: On set with Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy in Breathe; Serkis as Sméagol in The Return Of The Ring; In his groundbreaking role as the full-CG Gollum.

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Roddy McDowall played Cornelius, then his son Caesar in the original Apes movies. Would you consider doing that in reverse, playing Cornelius in the next Apes? Look, I love the Apes franchise and that metaphor for the world. And if Matt [Reeves] was to do another one, or someone like-minded to Matt... If it was a great script, a great character and a great director, then I’m not averse to it. There’s certainly much more story mileage to be had between now and arriving back in 1968. Aside from Breathe, you’ve got Black Panther coming up, returning as Ulysses Klaue. I had a brilliant time working with Ryan Coogler and the gang, and Chad Boseman. Just brilliant. Martin [Freeman]... That was a nice reunion. Klaue is a unique character in the sense that he’s driven by this obsession for vibranium but he’s got this rather leftﬁeld, oddball sense of humour. He’s a really fun character. And you’re also returning this Christmas as Supreme Leader Snoke in The Last Jedi. So tell us: who is he really? That... I can’t tell you. But we see a lot more of him, right? Not just as a giant hologram? We see... We do see a lot more of him. Not just as a giant hologram. I’ll give you that! Okay, okay. Way back in 2002, after The Two Towers, some people said you should have received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for playing Gollum. Fifteen years later, there’s talk of bringing back the Special Achievement Oscar for the ape performances in War — but still no acting award for you. Does that kind of recognition remain your white whale, so to speak? What is crucially important from here on in is there’s a full understanding of what we do. And if it means awards recognition — and it probably does because that’s how people measure things — to clarify that what we do is acting. My beef is that, from an acting point of view, I’m doing nothing different as Caesar than if I was playing a live-action character. That’s the bit that needs recognising: that the authorship of the role isn’t done by the visual-effects company. They do not create the character of Caesar. I create the character of Caesar. They create how Caesar is manifested on screen. That’s it! It’s very simple. In a recent interview with The Guardian you said that you wouldn’t want to be just

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remembered as the bloke who played Gollum. That’s true! Would that really be that bad, though? No, it’s not bad! Gollum is the most incredible character and I’m not being ungrateful in any way for saying that. That was the most incredible episode of my life. I just suppose I always feel like I’ve got more to offer in lots of different areas. The brilliance of performance capture is you can become anything, and I do have a degree of anonymity. But Gollum is a potent character. You must get tired of being asked to do the voice. It’s a difficult one because I love giving people the pleasure of that. But... okay, this is interesting. And pertinent. When I was doing the Apes press tour one of the interviewers said, “Here are some cards with all your characters and I want you to answer as the character.” So I pick a card and there’s a picture of Ulysses Klaue. And I’m like, “What other fucking actor gets this? Would you ask Meryl Streep to answer a question about The Iron Lady as her character from The Devil Wears Prada?” With Gollum I don’t want it to become is a sort of freak show, a party piece gone mad. Now, I’m completely part of that making, so I can only blame myself. But when the time comes to talk about Breathe, I’m just hoping people won’t say, “By the way, can we just end this interview with a Gollum impression?”

STYLING: Abena Ofei. GROOMING: Lindsay Bown using Perricone Md and MR. Jamie Stevens Haircare. ADDITIONAL IMAGES: Alamy

terms of leadership. Because one of the things about becoming a director — and actually the great thing about Caesar as a character, tying these things together — is you have to make decisions that you stick by, but you also have to listen. Caesar was such a great, empathetic character who was able to see lots of different people’s points of view.

Above left, from top to bottom: Performance-captured up as Caesar with Karin Konoval (Maurice), Terry Notary (Rocket) and

God forbid. So, last question: how would Gollum have directed Breathe? [Laughs] You get my point.

Michael Adamthwaite (Luca) in War For The Planet Of The Apes; ApesÕ ﬁnished VFX; As

BREATHE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 27 OCTOBER

Supreme Leader Snoke.

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SPOILER WARNING

T H E I N D I S P E N SA B L E G U I D E TO H OM E E N T E RTA I N M E N T

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EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT

THE EMPIRE VIEWING GUIDE

WONDER WOMAN Diving deep with director Patty Jenkins into DC’s breakout hit

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

THE VERDICT WONDER WOMAN

★★★★ CERT 12

What we said: “A big, goofy grin-on-your-kisser blast that could teach caped crusaders and men of steel a thing or two.” Notable extras: Jenkinsled looks at the film’s key creative areas; an epilogue called ‘Etta’s Mission’ where Lucy Davis gets a chance to shine; extended scenes.

00:15:30

FULL STEVE AHEAD

__ As meet cutes go, this is a doozy: Diana encounters her great love, dashing World War I spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), when he crash-lands a stolen German plane through the invisible bubble that shields Themyscira from the world. “Steve crashing onto the shores is straight out of Wonder Woman lore,” explains Jenkins. “It was fun to do an epic version, with her on the cliff,  happening at a vulnerable moment for her.”

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__ It’s followed by a gutpunch for its young, idealistic hero Diana (Gal Gadot) — the death of her beloved Amazonian aunt, Robin Wright’s Themysciran warrior, Antiope. “There’s a reason why death finds its way into Disney films and superhero films alike,” says Jenkins. “For Diana, who had not experienced death, she needed to experience the cost of war through someone we really related to.”

in London to take part in the Great War, Jenkins constructs a sequence where the Amazonian warrior reveals her clumsy side to comic effect. Steve gives Diana a pair of glasses in an attempt to disguise her. “It’s a nod to Clark Kent, but she wears glasses in her comic too,” says Jenkins. “The second she fights, they fly off and get crushed; a way to say, ‘This isn’t practical, let’s move on!’”

glimpse of David Thewlis as Sir Patrick Morgan, ostensibly a good guy but actually the film’s stealth villain. What with him being Ares, God Of War, whom Diana has sworn to kill. Except Jenkins doesn’t see him as a villain. “Everything he says at the end of the movie is true,” she says. “He was never the God Of War. All he is is the God Of Truth.”

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Danny Huston, as the villainous General Ludendorff, betrays his own people. Intriguingly, Ludendorff was a real World War I general, who died in 1937, not at the sword of an Amazonian warrior but from liver cancer. “I was thoughtful about it,” says Jenkins of incorporating a real-life figure into the film. “But it was great to have that bit of reality from World War I to ground it a little bit.”

__ “It’s the moment of the movie to me,” says Jenkins of the sequence where Diana casts off her robes and, revealed as Wonder Woman, strides into No Man’s Land. It’s a powerful and inspirational moment, but could easily have been tasteless. “Tone was the hardest thing on this movie,” admits Jenkins. “But we’ve been watching the birth of a superhero, and this is the moment when that superhero decides to be a superhero.”

to German soldiers in the Belgian town of Veld, composer Rupert Gregson-Williams unleashes the Wonder Woman theme created by Hans Zimmer for Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, with Tina Guo on an electric cello. “Through every scene leading up to the fight where the song kicks in, you can hear little building blocks,” says the director. “We had to be careful about not overusing it.”

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have their picture taken in Veld; a picture we’ve already seen in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice. “It was the first thing we shot, and then they put it in their movie,” laughs Jenkins. That movie’s director, Zack Snyder, was even on set to watch the photo being taken. “We did it together, which was great because it was like a crossover of his world and the movie I was making.”

__ After batting eyelashes at each other for most of the movie, Diana and Steve finally act on their feelings in a love scene that, amazingly, doesn’t collapse the building they do it in. “That would have been hilarious,” says Jenkins, who initially didn’t want to show the duo getting together in such an overt way. “I wanted this movie to be a great romance. But I was surprised how much I loved it in the end.”

__ A vengeful Diana shows up at Ludendorff’s gala with nowhere to hide her sword, so she shoves it down the back of her dress. “It was a half sword,” reveals Jenkins. “We didn’t want Gal to sit down and cut herself, so it stops at the hilt.”

BELOVED ANT

HUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM __

SAY CHEESE __ Diana, Steve and their team

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DIANA KENT __ After Steve and Diana arrive

OVER THE TOP

THE WONDER OF SEX

WHAT AN ARESHOLE __ Our first

CELLO CELLO __ As Diana takes the battle

HAVE SWORD, WILL HIDE IT

WONDER WOMAN IS OUT NOW ON DOWNLOAD AND ON 9 OCTOBER ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

THE EMPIRE MASTERPIECE A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

Powell and Pressburger’s existential examination is much more important than that

1946 / CERT U WORDS JOHN NUGENT

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ON THE SURFACE, A Matter Of Life And Death is the most English of ﬁlms — a wartime romance between a plucky pilot and his rosycheeked sweetheart, bursting with afternoon tea, cricket on the village green, and unironic uses of the phrase “What ho!” But it is also, inversely, the most un-English: co-written by a Hungarian, it boasts a cast of international players, and cinematic ambitions that are pure Hollywood — and all the result, indirectly, of a few rowdy Americans. In 1942, the US Army landed in Britain. Three million GIs would pass through Britain’s borders during World War II. Many were fond of a drink, or more; their conservative, warweary British hosts soon came to describe the visitors as “overpaid, oversexed and over here”.

Dismayed at this downturn in morale, the Ministry Of Information’s Head Of Film turned to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the filmmaking duo known collectively as The Archers (after their production company), and asked: “Can’t you two fellows think up a good idea to improve Anglo-American relations?” That “good idea” became A Matter Of Life And Death, a war movie elevated beyond mere propaganda (it was never officially funded or endorsed by the government) to become a sparkling philosophical examination of love, mortality and — yes — Englishness. By the time it was released in 1946, the war was over and most of the Yanks had made the return journey across the Atlantic — but Powell and Pressburger, two fiercely intelligent filmmakers

KIDS WATCH CLASSICS

Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven), on the stairway to heaven with Conductor 71

RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE

(Marius Goring).

of immense depth and vision, had their sights set on loftier aims than Anglo-American relations. The first shot of the film depicts no less than the entirety of existence, with the immortal opening words from an unseen narrator (an uncredited John Longden): “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” Then the focus narrows to the foggy English coast, where we find Squadron Leader Peter Carter in a spot of bother. Played by David Niven — who had been an officer in the British Army during the war — Peter is the epitome of Englishness: pencil-moustachioed, unfailingly polite, the most received of pronunciations, the stiffest of upper lips. In the cockpit of a shot-to-hell Lancaster bomber, he stares certain death square in the face yet remains

positively chipper. Over a crackly radio, he begins a conversation with June (Kim Hunter), an American radio operator on the ground he’s never met. Sparks fly, in every sense. With a romantic flourish typical of The Archers’ work to that point, he cites the poetry of Marvell and Raleigh, and hearing the last voice he thinks he’ll ever hear, falls in love with it. “I love you, June,” he states, matter-of-factly. “You’re life, and I’m leaving you.” But he doesn’t leave her, and what follows is a fight for that love, in this world and another. Peter jumps from his plane without a parachute and miraculously survives. Meanwhile, in an audacious afterlife (filmed in hyper-real monotone to distinguish from real-world Technicolor), the “Department Of Records” wonders where the bally hell Peter is. Conductor 71, a farcically foppish Frenchman played by Marius Goring, attempts to correct the clerical error of his survival. As the title card is at pains to point out, this Other World is not heaven. In the US, the film was renamed Stairway To Heaven by prissy distributors fretting over the word “death” in a title so soon after the war. Powell and Pressburger were infuriated. This was not some fanciful fantasy folly. “No artist believes in escapism,” affirms the Archers’ Manifesto, their de facto artist’s statement, and indeed, The Other World is a fully realised realm all of its own, governed by its own fictional rulebook, and granted real-world logic as the “organised hallucination” of Peter’s brain injury. It’s visually jaw-dropping, too, exquisitely filtered through the keen eye of legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who summons an Art Deco vision of paradise in a Buckinghamshire film studio. The effects still inspire awe today. Exhibit A for those who demand proof that British cinema is anything other than kitchen sink miserablism and cuddly inoffensive romcoms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, A Matter Of Life And Death baffled critics of the time; a sniffy Daily Mail review called it “an elaborate joke that doesn’t quite come off”. A celestial escalator, a French angel, and a cosmic courtroom drama might have seemed all a bit far-fetched for audiences used to war movies of straightforward heroism and derring-do. But for Emeric Pressburger — a Hungarian who sought refuge in Britain from Nazi Germany — it was an opportunity for an imaginative and rousing defence of his adoptive homeland. For Michael Powell, on the other hand, it was an argument against the austere, unambitious British films of the time, and a treatise on death, love and sacrifice. It remained his favourite Archers film. From the wreckage of a devastating war, a Brit and an immigrant conjure reassuring familiarity and dazzling possibility. You can’t get much more English than that.

Big ﬁlms tackled by little people ILLUSTRATION OLLY GIBBS

ELLA BERRY — 11 RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK What was the movie about? It’s about Indiana Jones, who is a kind of secret agent/archaeologist/teacher, which I think is awesome. Imagine if your teacher found treasure and killed people at the weekends. In this film, he’s trying to find the Ark Of The Covenant, which the Germans want as well, and it’s a race to see who can get it first. And when you open the box lightning and ghosts come out and you melt. Did you like the main character? Indiana Jones is really cool and he never goes anywhere without his hat and his whip. He looks really good in glasses. He gets beaten up a lot and can ride a horse really well, too. Tell me about the opening scene. It’s full of stunts which I like. He’s trying to get some treasure and he switches it for a bag of sand and thinks everything is okay but then everything starts falling and he gets chased by a massive boulder and only just escapes in time. Was it a scary ﬁlm? It wasn’t scary but it was gruesome and the music added to the tension. Did you like Marion, Indy’s ex? She was okay but she drank and smoked a lot and was a bit rubbish at looking after herself. The goodies in this film weren’t so different from the baddies. They all seemed pretty messed up. What did you make of the ending? I can’t believe after all that work to get the Ark it ended up a big warehouse. It didn’t seem the safest place to leave it. Would you recommend the ﬁlm? It was very clever and witty and had loads of stunts. I’d definitely recommend it to my friends. I’d give it four stars.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

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EXTRA SPOILER WARNING

OVERS AND OUT The Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof on his show’s ﬁnest moments WORDS JAMES DYER

FEW TV SHOWS of recent years have confounded expectation and subverted convention as deftly as Damon Lindelof’s HBO series, The Leftovers. The show charts the emotional, social and spiritual fallout of ‘The Departure’: a phenomenon where two per cent of the world’s population vanished without a trace. After being burned by fan reaction to his Lost ﬁnale, Lindelof bid adieu to The Leftovers with a send-off as resonant as it was unexpected. Here, he talks us through some of the best moments from the show’s three-year run.

THE BABY VANISHES SEASON 1, EPISODE 1: PILOT

The Departure, which both Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (co-creator and writer) agreed never to

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explain, is dealt with to devastating effect in the ﬁrst scene. “We asked what would be the most deeply profound loss that someone could suffer?” says Lindelof. “The loss of a baby.” And so, in a parking lot, a mother turns to discover why her bawling child has suddenly fallen silent, blind terror creeping over her face. “It was a way to start the show with a clear and dramatic representation of this event that was at the core of everything.”

8,000 B.C.

LIV AND LET DIE

SEASON 2, EPISODE 1: ‘AXIS MUNDI’

SEASON 2, EPISODE 3: ‘OFF RAMP’

There are several junctures during The Leftovers’ run where it’s hard not to wonder if Lindelof and Perrotta are actively trolling their audience. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Season 2 premiere, which begins with a ten-minute detour to the Palaeolithic era. “My favourite ideas are when everybody thinks I’m joking, and I’m not,” says Lindelof. “It’s actually a recap of Season 2: a baby is born, the mother loses it and then it ends up in the arms of another woman — we just play that out as a parable.” With Season 2, the show unshackled itself from the conﬁnes of its source material and this prehistoric palate-cleanser formed the perfect statement of intent. “We felt free to do whatever we wanted at that point.”

“People have an idea of what Liv Tyler does as an actor: she’s this representation of ethereal beauty. Would anyone ever think of Liv Tyler as a villain?” There can be little doubt of that in this particular scene, where cult leader Meg (Tyler) straddles a handcuffed Tommy Garvey (Chris Zylka) and forces herself upon him, before dousing him in petrol and taunting him with a Zippo lighter. “With non-consensual sex on television, you almost never see it where the genders are swapped, where the woman is the aggressor. It felt bold and risky, especially because it was Liv. It was one of the most disturbing scenes we ever did on the show.”

KIM NEWMAN’S VIDEO DUNGEON None shall escape his gimlet-eyed gaze

PERFECT STRANGER SEASON 3, EPISODE 2: ‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS’

“We realised the show’s bandwidth for absurdity was almost inﬁnite,” says Lindelof. It’s a sentiment rarely as well illustrated as when Mark LinnBaker, star of ’80s sitcom Perfect Strangers, appears as himself to sell Nora (Carrie Coon) on a machine that can reunite people with their dearly Departed. “She’s a cynic and was never going to believe in it, so we were like, ‘What if the delivery mechanism for this idea was even more absurd than the idea itself?’” Enter Linn-Baker: the only Perfect Strangers regular who didn’t Depart. “While it started as a troll, once we started to take it seriously, something special happened.”

KING DONG SEASON 3, EPISODE 7: ‘THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN

The Break-Out: Alone

THE WORLD’

For a show concerned with grief, madness and survivors’ guilt, The Leftovers features a surprising amount of knob gags. Thanks to Justin Theroux’s commando jogging scene in the pilot, Little Justin made tabloid headlines. “Whenever he was on a talk show, he would get asked about his penis. I found that hilarious, so we started writing that Kevin has a huge dong.” The well-hung humour comes to a head when Kevin, reimagined in an alternate universe as President Of The United States, has to conﬁrm his identity by slapping his member onto a scanner. “The culmination of it all is that scene, where he puts it onto what we lovingly referred to as ‘The Dick Shelf’.”

BIG LITTLE LIE

Moreau, whose debut was the IN DAVID MOREAU’S Alone (originally influential little horror film Ils (They), tells entitled Seuls), slightly troubled French/Arab the story with confidence and gets good teenager Leila (Sofia Lesaffre) sneaks out performances from the young cast. after dark to work off steam at a funfair The premise owes something to the and wakes up to find the small city where underrated New Zealand apocalypse movie she lives bereft of people. While rushing The Quiet Earth — this city is around and trying not to panic, Leila eerily empty, not littered with runs into four other kids. Dodji QUOTE OF THE MONTH corpses or overrun by (Stéphane Bak), who is in a “Well, the meek shall zombies, which makes for police station, and Yvan (Paul not inherit the Earth. striking images of lone Scarfoglio), who is hiding They wouldn’t know figures trudging through in his billionaire father’s what to do with it.” unpeopled streets or kids high-tech apartment, while Blood From The huddling together in an the younger Terry (Jean-Stan Mummy’s Tomb anonymous luxury hotel. The Du Pac) and Camille (Kim nicely characterised teens relish Lockhart) are torn between the chance to drive fast cars, drink despair at adult abandonment and alcohol, play with guns and crossbows, and sudden bursts of enthusiasm for bond in interesting ways. Even the stalker opportunities afforded by a town full of is unexpectedly interesting. As opposed to grown-up toys. Besides the central mystery, the hard-bitten future warriors in American there’s menace in the form of a knifedystopia franchises, these kids act like throwing masked comic-book character kids — sweet or irrational or impulsive as who stalks the quintet, seemingly intent often as tough, practical and wise. on becoming the sole survivor.

The Round-up: Genre Homages

SEASON 3, EPISODE 8: ‘THE BOOK OF NORA’

Lindelof and Perrotta pulled one last switch in the ﬁnale, unexpectedly explaining everything as an older Nora sits down with an equally grizzled Kevin, and lays it out over a nice cup of tea. But did she make it up? “Can we just take a moment to appreciate the irony?” Says Lindelof. “I spent six years of my life on Lost saying, ‘We’re gonna give you mystery resolution,’ and many people feel like we didn’t. This time around we spent three years telling people they were gonna get no mystery resolution and this time they do. There’s something incredibly mischievous and satisfying about that.” THE LEFTOVERS SEASON 3 IS OUT ON 9 OCTOBER ON DVD

THE SUCCESS OF American superhero movies has been noted by every film industry on the planet; expect Justice League Of Luxembourg soon. Sarik Andreasyan’s Guardians is a Russian stab at Avengers-style action. A Nick Furyesque blonde dominatrix reassembles an exSoviet superhero team consisting of Bearhulk, Flashverine, Invisible Gymnast Woman and Rockneto (NB: not their actual character names) to tackle a baddie, his clone army, mind-controlled tanks, spider killbots and an orbiting death-ray to save Moscow. At 90 brisk minutes, it hasn’t got the self-indulgence of American comic

book movies, but hasn’t time for much plot or more than token character business either. The CGI battles are worthwhile, though — and there’s quality heroic posing. Every country in the world is also obliged to homage Shaun Of The Dead — remember the Cuban Juan Of The Dead? — but somehow the Welsh version missed out on being titled ‘Dai Of The Dead’. In Tudley James’ Granny Of The Dead, the elderly succumb to a zombie virus. Shaunlike Ed (Marcus Carroll) is chased around the house by his drooling cannibal nan (Abigail Hamilton). Not very funny, not very scary, but sort of amiable and very Welsh.

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GUTTER CREDIT

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BEST OF TIMES |WORST OF TIMES JASON FLEMYNG

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT WORD

COSTUME There’s a real thing actors have which is called prosthetic depression. So the best costume is any costume you just throw on. Probably Jamestown, where I look like a pirate. It’s a little silk shirt and a leather jacket and I’m away. Dressed in ﬁve minutes.

I did all these great movies, but there was a massive but: eight hours of make-up. X-Men: First Class, we’d ﬁnish dinner at midnight and I’d go straight to set. League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen was seven hours. People go, “The CGI was amazing.” That was all me in a big rubber suit.

MOMENT For years I was flattered to be asked to do massive studio movies. But if you’ve only got three lines a week, the worst moment is when you’ve finished on a Wednesday and they say, “We’ll see you a week on Thursday.” And you’re in Jordan. And you can’t go in case they need you. You can go to a dark place when you’re away from home on your own.

My wife said to me, “What’s the happiest you’ve been in your life?” Obviously the answer is, “When I married you, darling.” But what I said was, “Sitting on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain on The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt acting with me in a scene, being directed by David Fincher.” The truth? Yes. But not the right answer.

LOCATION There was a time when I’d rather do a bad film in India than a good film anywhere else. India is amazing. The first thing I did there was The Jungle Book for Disney [in 1994]. I was in the jungle with John Cleese and he’s doing the Parrot Sketch and I’m 21 years old and staying in a big palace. I love right up north, in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Bucharest. The people are lovely. The city is, without doubt, the grimmest place I’ve ever been. It also completely marries with the worst performance I’ve done. When times were really tough I ended up being dressed as Santa and being killed by Chucky in Bucharest in Seed Of Chucky.

ALAMY, ALLSTAR, REX FEATURES

AUDITION Wuthering Heights, which Ralph Fiennes eventually got. They had me dye my hair black, I was wearing a white shirt and I was going, “CATHY!” And I pushed my head back and cracked it on a mirror. My nose started dripping blood down my shirt. I finished and they were looking at me in silence, stunned.

Any audition I do for Lucinda Syson is great. LXG. Clash Of The Titans. Lock, Stock. She cast my movie Eat Locals. She likes actors. When you go in, she wants you to do the best you can do. Whereas some other casting directors are frustrated directors, and they put you through the mill and make you feel like shit.

DEATH DEAT EAT EATH SCENE It’s in a pretty dreadful ﬁlm called Ironclad about a small group of Knights Templar, set in 13th-century England. They had these Hungarian stunt guys who were just brilliant. It’s my little Statham moment. I have an axe, I kill six people before I die and it made me feel like a bit of a hero.

I’ve done 127 movies and I’ve got killed in about a hundred of them. Getting stabbed to death by Chucky was up there. They had a knife and blood and it didn’t work. I just sat there, dressed as Santa, covered in claret, going, “Why am I not Jude Law?” EAT LOCALS IS OUT ON 30 OCTOBER ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

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It’s the end of the world as we know it: musician Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) in the midst of carnage. Below

THE EXTRA MILE

Writer/director Steve De Jarnatt on his little-seen ’80s gem that couldn’t be more timely WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

A MAN STANDS outside an LA diner at 4am, having a cigarette. He’s had a heck of a day — he met a woman, pretty much fell in love on the spot. He’s happy. Then, the payphone outside the diner rings. He picks it up. And the world ends. Literally. On the line is a panicked soldier who thinks he’s calling his father. The message: the missiles are flying. Mutual Assured Destruction is coming. Harry has 70 minutes to find the woman he thinks he loves and get the hell out before mushroom clouds ruin everyone’s day. That’s the moment when Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile — one of ’80s cinema’s best-hidden secrets — stands on its head, and everything changes. For the first 20 minutes of Miracle Mile are a completely different movie, in which the man (Anthony Edwards’ trombone player Harry) meets the woman (Mare Winningham’s waitress Julie) at La Brea Tar Pits, they spend the day together and fall for one another. Then, out of nowhere, the movie turns into a frenzied fight for survival as word of the impending attack spreads and the world falls apart. “It was always meant to be a detour from the film you started watching,” explains De Jarnatt to Empire. “I think that’s how it’ll be when the world comes to an end. It might be in your peripheral vision and then it’s there.” De Jarnatt had the idea for Miracle Mile — named after the stretch of LA in which the movie takes place and, as it turns out, a deeply ironic title — at the end of the 1970s, fuelled by his own personal fears of nuclear Armageddon. “It was something that haunted me. I imagined the world was going to end without us knowing it. There had been so many accidents that nearly happened.” Determined to direct the movie himself, it took him ten years to get it off the ground, at one point selling it to Warner Bros., where it was briefly intended for use as Twilight Zone: The

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right: Harry helps love interest Julie Peters (Mare Winningham). Below left: Writer/director Steve De Jarnatt behind the camera.

Movie, then buying it back off them. Pitching up at Orion, he nearly got the movie made with Kurt Russell, then Nicolas Cage as Harry. “It was for the best,” says De Jarnatt. “The character Nic had in mind for Miracle Mile was the same character he did in Peggy Sue Got Married. I think that would have been a little strange.” When he eventually got it over the line in May 1989, with the now-defunct Hemdale stepping in to finance and Anthony Edwards, then channelling post-Top Gun heat, as Harry, Miracle Mile was met with the sound of crickets. Critics liked it, but it made just over $1 million at the box office. Nobody wanted to see a movie about the end of the world, it seems. Even one as accomplished and unsettling as De Jarnatt’s. Miracle Mile is, and is likely to remain, the last movie De Jarnatt would ever direct. The natural assumption is that he found it hard to get work in Hollywood afterwards, but that’s not entirely true. “I did have projects I was trying to get off the ground, but I didn’t have another film project I wanted to put as much into as Miracle Mile.” Instead, he went into TV, directing episodes of shows like ER (with Edwards once again), and wound up doing several seasons of the Disney kids’ show Lizzie McGuire. “I was an arrogant auteur when I started out,” he admits. “I never thought I would end up like that, but it was fun.” Now, De Jarnatt teaches screenwriting and has been able to watch from afar as Miracle Mile underwent something of a renaissance. Cloverfield is almost a stealth remake, for instance, right down to the ending. “I’ve heard that,” says De Jarnatt. “But I haven’t seen it.” And now Miracle Mile is more timely than perhaps at any point in its history. Nukes are back on the menu, and the unthinkable is becoming all too thinkable. You could set Miracle Mile today and, bar the phone booth, not change a thing. “It’s sad that it’s resonating the way it is today rather than just us talking about an ’80s curiosity,” admits De Jarnatt. So, does he feel the movie should be screened at the White House, perhaps as the most cautionary of tales? “I don’t know if he’s a movie fan,” says De Jarnatt of the current incumbent. “I don’t think he’d have the attention span to sit through the trailer.” MIRACLE MILE IS OUT ON 16 OCTOBER ON DVD

COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ARENA PAL

AND BLU-RAY

THE VERDICT MIRACLE MILE

★★★★ CERT 15

What we said: A movie original, confronting the End Of The World with a mix of black humour, anger and honest sentiment. Notable extras: De Jarnatt commentary, new interview, his short ﬁlm Tarzana, plus a featurette where cast reunite at the diner in the movie.

LISTEN TO YOUR FRIEND BILLY ZANE He’s a cool guy. He’s trying to help you Hi Billy The other day, I picked up my wife’s phone to hand it to her and noticed a text on the home screen from a friend of hers. It was referring to me, in a negative sense. I guess we’d had an argument and maybe she’d unloaded to her friend. But it upset me — should I say something to my wife? Or are texts between friends off-limits? Yours, WS WS, I’ve got to give it to you straight, no chaser. You didn’t notice, you read it. You “guess” you had an argument? Please. Stop kidding yourself or think you can kid her. I bet the text was about how you don’t take responsibility for your actions, how you whitewash everything and blame her for it all. Just a “guess”. Sorry for the tough love, but don’t get yourself into these situations. And if you do see such a thing, don’t bring it up. Hold that ace until you really need it. Otherwise you’ll forever be the guy who reads her texts. That powder never gets wet, bub. It will keep ﬁring, so pick your battles wisely. Remember, the secret to relationship longevity? These two phrases (inner voice please): DON’T SAY IT. DON’T DO IT. That said, was the friend a man or a woman? Dear Billy How are you on ﬁnancial advice? Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to recommend stock options. I’ve always been one of those ‘you can’t take it with you’ types. But lately I’m beginning to think I should square some cash away for a rainy day. What would you recommend? Spend it while I’ve got it, or squirrel it away? Cheers, RE Sandwiched in the back seat of a Rolls Royce, on a rainy night in Milan, Fashion Week 1994, Diana Ross turned around in the front seat, looked me square in the eyes and

said, “Cash, baby. And a little gold.” I didn’t ask her opinion on such matters. Nor have I ever heeded it. She was merely answering a vague aside by a model who was banking more than her family made in a year by simply walking that evening. Why Ms Ross fixed my gaze and imparted with this pearl I never knew. Perhaps I was merely banking it for you. Do with it what you will. Hi Billy Love the column, sir. Huge fan. Long story short — I’m in a well-paid job, but the long hours and the neverending grind are getting me down. I’d like to quit, but I’m worried that I’ll never get a job that pays this well again. What should I do? Yours, FH Don’t quit, FH. Well-paid jobs have long queues of people who would sell their souls and grind their fingers to pulp on keyboards to land them. Management knows this and rides you like a dog because of it. Bastard scum. Don’t let them win. Try integrating yoga and meditation into your routine. Seriously. Shake it up and learn the benefits of counter posture and reprogramming your brain from that tedium that pays you. Take the dosh. Do the job to the best of your ability, advance within the structure, and resist the predictable schoolyard habit of shitting on everyone else because you were. Be the exception. Flip the narrative and really advance. But first, be grateful you have a job, let alone a well-paid one! And thanks for the support! (I am currently holding my hands in the shape of a heart in front of my chest. However, it looks like I’m crushing a hamburger.) SEND YOUR QUESTIONS TO BILLY ZANE VIA BILLY@EMPIREMAGAZINE.COM. BILLY HAS DONATED HIS FEE FOR THIS COLUMN TO CHARITY

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MOVIE MEMOIRS Sali Hughes on the ﬁlms that shaped her life

#17 THE FIRST GROWN-UP FILM — PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

ILLUSTRATION DAVID MAHONEY

THEY SAY THAT when it comes to raising children, every parent has a ‘natural age’. Some bond blissfully with the baby in months, some are in their element during the funny and unpredictable chaos of toddlerhood, others with brooding, complex teens. I’m loath to play favourites, but must confess that I only truly found my groove when my two sons could ﬁnally watch ﬁlms containing, to paraphrase DJ Simon Bates’ caution at the start of every rental VHS, “explicit language and sexual swear words”. I remember the moment the worm turned. “What’s this about?” asked my eldest son, then

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11, proffering a pretty self-explanatory DVD of Planes, Trains And Automobiles. I explained it was a classic comedy about two men — an uptight ad executive played by Steve Martin and a brash, shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy — thrown together for an agonising and calamitous trip home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, in which they are constantly thwarted by various methods of transport. He and his slightly younger brother were keen, and I, so delighted they’d finally graduated from DreamWorks, completely forgot about the iconic scene in which Martin rants at an inattentive car-rental desk clerk, using the F-word no fewer than 18 times in 50 seconds. It’s one of life’s defining moments when, as a parent, you sink into the soft furnishings, cushion creeping towards your blushing face, and realise that during all those moments you spent as a teenager, squirming at sex and nudity on the family telly, your nearby parents had also wanted the shag-pile to swallow them whole. As my sons giggled hysterically at Martin’s machinegunfire profanity, and I failed to reach the fast forward button in time, I guiltily accepted that something had changed permanently, and to the ultimate benefit of our family viewing. Pixar movies aside, I’d spent over a decade enduring Saturday morning kids’ screenings, trying to stay awake through cartoons, Harry Potter and slapstick comedies. Now, suddenly,

As journeys go, it’s been pretty pants.

our film viewing was a truly shared experience, each of us active participants, laughing like drains and crying like babies at exactly the same moments. I introduced them to old favourites Wayne’s World, The Jerk and Weird Science, while they brought home scratched copies of Blades Of Glory, Austin Powers and Hot Fuzz. Having lost them in the intervening years to Minecraft and FIFA, now they wanted to bask with me in the glow of the plasma screen. It proved more bonding than the first, wobbly steps on a baby walker. But perhaps even more than I want my children to enjoy grown-up films with me, I want my 12-year-old son to watch films with 12-yearold me. The person who wasn’t secretly hoping the sight of Judd Nelson skinning up in The Breakfast Club didn’t look too alluring (who am I kidding?). I want them also to experience the unguarded love of occasional age-inappropriate films, the illicit adrenaline rush of a flash of actor boob, a previously unheard swear or off-colour joke they’d get expelled for making themselves. Because as much as our parents, our school friends, books and television, film will broaden their worldview, hone their senses of humour, alter their perspectives and spark empathy for people they might not otherwise meet. Films helped to build me. I feel unmitigated joy that all these years later, they’re helping to raise my family.

Paul (Joel Edgerton) — the fear is real.

what did i miss?

Below: A victim of the mysterious pandemic makes his

rick and morty: season 3

presence known.

Inside the ace animated sitcom

1 The Double-Rick bluff

The WTF adventures of an elderly genius scientist and his 14-year-old grandson, Rick And Morty is as inventive as it is stain-yourkecks funny. The season opener involves Rick breaking out of galactic prison via body-swaps with alternate-dimension selves, ending in a stand-off with another Rick. Told you.

night watch

Decoding It Comes At Night, the year’s most cryptic horror WoRds simon crook

2 Pickle Rick RaTs uP

Fourth episode ‘Pickle Rick’ has a go at being the most fucked-up, as Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy. After rolling down the drain, he constructs a combat exoskeleton out of eviscerated rat remains, and drill-bits, then goes Oldboy gore-splurge crazy on a bunch of sewer rodents.

AlAMy

3 PosT-aDvenTuRe sTRess

Few shows cram so much into their precredits set-ups. In ‘Rest And Ricklaxation’, we witness a “20-minute adventure” turn into a six-day ordeal, culminating in Rick and Morty destroying a space monster, before slumping back into their flying saucer and suffering a hilariously extended meltdown. Cue titles... Rick And MoRty is on netflix now

Trey edward ShulTS’ It Comes At Night depicts a family scrabbling for survival in the aftermath of a pandemic. although its horrors are universal, the film was born out of a private apocalypse. “In 2014, I had a breakdown after my dad died of cancer,” says Shults, who spewed out the script in three days, “so it’s a reflection of my personal fears of death, disease and regret.” here, he decodes the dark inspirations behind the movie...

The PainTinG

hanging in the house is a sinister canvas of a skeleton army that alludes to a devastated world we never see. “It’s called The Triumph Of Death [and is] by Bruegel, my favourite artist,” says Shults. “he painted it in 1562, during the Black death. It was a major inspiration: the entire movie’s my interpretation of Bruegel’s hellscape.”

The ReD DooR

sTaYinG alive If the film’s painstaking portrait of survival feels realistic, that’s because Shults lived it. “a family member’s a ‘prepper’, convinced we’re on the edge of economic collapse,” he says. “I thought he was insane until I lived with him on his Texas ranch. I helped stock food, farm animals, buy weapons, even install a gun safe. everything I learnt is in the film.”

an oblique emblem of dread, the portentous front door’s sparked considerable debate. does it symbolise death? a prophecy? a supernatural portal? Shults won’t commit, but adds that its role is always shifting. “Open it, and you enter into the unknown. Close it, and you’re trapped in a room where terrible things happen. Most importantly, it acts as a gateway to Travis’ [Kelvin harrison Jr.] nightmares.”

The MillenniuM buG

The skeTches

while the pandemic is never explained, the virus was inspired by the bubonic plague: black boils, bleeding eyes and oil that gushes from the mouth. “The FX guys tried every variety of edible fluid — it tasted of cough syrup,” says Shults. “we did endless takes of the scene where someone climbs on top of someone else and leaks black mucus into his mouth. It’s a horrifying image but hysterical to shoot.”

Travis’ eerie charcoal doodles were all created by production designer Karen Murphy. “Travis’ sketches are a way of seeing what’s going on inside his head,” says Shults, “much like his nightmares visualise his subconscious. Pay close attention, and you realise his dreams double up as a premonition.”

it coMes At night is out on 30 october on DvD, blu-ray anD DownloaD

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“RAILROADS ARE A great prop,” Buster

STORY OF THE SHOT

THE GENERAL WORDS IAN FREER

Keaton once said. “You can do some awful wild things with railroads.” The General, Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece, proves his theory ten-fold. Based on a real incident in the American Civil War, Keaton plays locomotive engineer Johnnie, whose train, The General, and girl, Annabelle (Marion Mack), are stolen by Northern soldiers. At one point, giving chase on a stolen locomotive, Keaton jumps off the train, picks up a wooden sleeper from the track, lies back on the cow catcher then throws it at another sleeper to get both out of the way. It’s a stunning mixture of cinematic bravura and Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor accuracy. “When I watch it at home, I go, ‘Wow, that is so precise,’” says Patricia Eliot Tobias, President Emerita of The International Buster Keaton Society. “But if I see it on a big screen with an audience, they gasp and burst into applause. How many movies now does something happen and people just burst into applause?” The gag was captured in Cottage Grove, Oregon, during the summer of 1926. It is not known whether Keaton mounted the camera on a train or a car stripped of tyres so the rims could run on rails. With co-director Clyde Bruckman keeping an eye on Keaton’s performance, the stone-faced daredevil pulled off the gag in one solitary take. “It was too dangerous to do it more than once,” says Eliot Tobias. “If he had missed, the sleeper would have knocked the train off the track or it would have crushed the cow catcher and him with it. Fortunately, he tended to know what he was doing.” Astonishingly, Keaton didn’t edit on traditional editing equipment. Instead he edited by hand, eye and scissors. But for this joke, Keaton eschewed cuts, playing the action out in one continuous shot. “The gag is nothing special but the execution is sublime,” Have I Got News For You legend and Keaton aficionado Paul Merton wrote in his book Silent Comedy. “The joke could have been created by a mixture of close-ups and medium shots… The trouble is, it is not so funny. Authenticity — that’s what Buster was after. The gag is only genuinely funny when you see him do it for real.” Contrary to Merton’s enthusiasm for the gag’s effectiveness, there is debate among silent film scholars about whether The General amazes more than it amuses. “They laugh,” Keaton himself once said about the moment, “but a little bit later.” The General became Keaton’s favourite of his own films and, after a mixed reception on release, is now considered a landmark in silent cinema. In fact, you could even call it a sleeper. THE GENERAL IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD AND FREE ON YOUTUBE

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www.greatmagazines.co.uk/christmas OR CALL 01858 438884 QUOTING HOL1 Terms & Conditions: The amount of issues for £24.99 will vary by title, you cannot renew any existing subscription on this offer. Payments can be made by credit/debit card or PayPal. Offers close on 27th December 2017. Offers cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer. Calls from a BT landline will cost no more than 4p a minute. Call charges from other landline providers or mobile phones may vary. Order lines open 8am-9.30pm (Mon-Fri), 8am-4pm (Sat). UK orders only. For overseas orders please phone +44 (0)1858 438828. Calls may be monitored or recorded for training purposes. For our full terms and conditions go to http://www.greatmagazines.co.uk/offer-terms-and-conditions.

BINGEWATCH Each month, our marathon man bonds with box sets on a molecular level. Child’s play, really

this month:

CHUCKY WORDS SIMON CROOK ILLUSTRATION PETER STRAIN

CHUCKY IS HORROR’S Duracell bunny: he keeps going and going. As his 30th anniversary approaches, the devil doll has spawned seven movies of erratic quality but what’s surprising is there are no standalone sequels: all the films are written by Don Mancini, and connect into a saga about a kid called Andy and his sentient doll. A bit like Toy Story for psychopaths. Unleashed in 1988, Tom Holland’s Child’s Play is, pardon the pun, ‘Chucky For Dummies’. Gunned down by cops in a toy store, serial killer Charles Lee Ray voodoos his soul into a Good Guy doll, which is gifted to six-year-old Andy. Cue babysitter massacre and Andy’s mum suspecting her son’s to blame. Voiced by Brad Dourif, Chucky’s brought to cackling life via still-brill animatronics — much of the horror is psychological but what’s striking are the bleak, stark Chicago locations that make its ridiculous concept tangible. Mum in the nuthouse, Child’s Play 2 (1990) finds Andy lodging with foster parents. Enter Chucky, rebuilt by toy company Play Pal. A stalkand-slash replay of the original, it’s slicker and gorier, but with Chucky now cracking wise, he’s about as scary as a potato. Still, the finale in a toy factory is a novelty-death hoot: Chucky gets melted into soup, inflated like a Zeppelin then popped to smithereens. Glued back together, he

hunts down a teenage Andy at a military school for Child’s Play 3 (1991) in a truly awful slasher remix of Full Metal Jacket. The acting’s so plastic the whole cast appear to have been Chuckified, but arming the doll to the teeth is a baffling clanger. We’re only three films in, but already I can’t take Chucky seriously and, seemingly, neither can the franchise. Radically rebooting from studio slasher to horror-comedy, and dropping the Child’s Play stamp, Bride Of Chucky (1998) teams him with Jennifer Tilly as his rubbery dollfriend, Tiffany. Face now a Scalextric of scars, the all-new Chucky looks more menacing; the tone, however, is trashy splatstick. It ends with Tilly giving splatty birth, and Seed Of Chucky (2004) opens with Chucky’s gormless son Glen (Billy Boyd), who looks like Ziggy Stardust on meth, visiting Hollywood to find his movie star dad. With the ‘real’ Tilly menaced by the ‘real’ Chucky, Seed is Don Mancini’s spin (now he’s graduated to director) on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare — a selfaware satire that flips the bird at its own legacy. Tilly’s a riot sending up her sexpot persona and the gags are crude (Chucky wanking off to Fangoria) but the film winks so hard it breaks an eyelid. I can feel my brain congealing into rubber when, five sequels in, the best entry lands. It’s pretty obvious by now that Chucky’s remoulded

every few years to ﬁt the era’s horror trends. Conﬁned to one night in a haunted house, 2013’s Curse Of Chucky feels like a James Wan movie: all slow-creep, sharp jumps and a bare-bones plot that sees Chucky terrorising a survivor from Lee’s serial-killing days. Okay, so it’s blatantly ‘Chuckabelle’, but, thanks to a nervy turn from Fiona ‘daughter of Brad’ Dourif, it actually makes the killer-doll concept scary again. After Curse’s post-credits sting yanks an adult Andy (played by the original model, Alex Vincent) back into the saga, this year’s Cult Of Chucky doesn’t just come full circle: it swallows the entire Chuckyverse. Set in a clinical asylum with Ms Dourif’s Nica declared insane, Cult returns to the original’s mind-games, questioning whether Chucky is real or imaginary. Featuring Andy, Tiffany, three Chuckies and call-backs to every previous entry, if, like me, you’ve just binged the series, watching the saga link up is insanely satisfying. Newbies, however, will feel blitheringly confused. God knows where the demon ginger will end up next but here’s a thought: Chucky’s a Universal monster. Lob him into the studio’s Dark Universe and set him loose on Tom Cruise. CULT OF CHUCKY IS OUT ON 23 OCTOBER ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

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EXTRA SPOILER WARNING

TALKING TO A MAN ABOUT A THING As John Carpenterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Thing turns 35, Empire grills the Horror Master about his masterpiece

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT PORTRAIT COREY MILLER

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When it came out in 1982, John carpenter’s The Thing boasted the tagline, “man is the warmest place to hide.” as it turned out, the best — if not warmest — place to hide for any alien bastard hell-bent on assimilating the human race would have been in a cinema showing The Thing, for nobody turned up. carpenter, who was coming off a hot streak that included Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York, had been drawn to Bill Lancaster’s script about a group of scientists at an antarctic research facility who unfreeze an alien that can imitate living things. a remake of one of carpenter’s favourite films, christian nyby and howard hawks’ The Thing From Another World, it seemed like it would be another hit for the director. alas, no. mauled by critics, shunned by audiences, it was carpenter’s first flop. thirty-five years later, The Thing’s fate has transformed. now widely regarded as carpenter’s masterpiece, this sombre, bleak, wonderfully paranoid film is enjoying a new lease of life. this year alone will see a prestige art book about the movie, a mondo board game, and the UK debut of a bells-and-whistles steelbook. We spoke to carpenter about the making of the movie, its resurrection, and that unforgettable ending. The Thing is having a cultural moment. Are you pleased by this, or is part of you thinking, “Where were you guys 35 years ago?” most of the people who are doing all these things weren’t even born then. i’m very pleased. it’s delightful that the movie is finally getting, if not financially, some of the critical recognition that it did not get at the time. it was damned and hated at the time. now, not so much. Up until that point in your career, you’d had a series of home runs, and then this was largely shunned. Was that tough to take? it was very tough to take. none of that stuff felt like home runs to me. the reaction to The Thing was extremely tough. my career would have been different had it been financially successful. i’m not saying it would have been better or worse, it would have been different. Back then i was worried. i was a young guy and i hadn’t experienced anything quite like that. Was it character building? it has to be. You have to gain some sort of a hide and build your character a little bit and survive it. You can’t take that stuff too personally. But i did.

The VerdicT THe THInG

HHHHH CeRt 18

What we said: “Back in 1997 Carpenter told Empire that, “You’ll never, ever, see anything like The Thing again.” Like MacReady and Childs, we’re still waiting.” notable extras: John Carpenter/Kurt Russell commentary, two documentaries, outtakes, featurettes, trailers, stills.

You didn’t retreat into your shell. You pretty much went straight into Christine. it wasn’t as quick as it seemed, but i needed a job and that was the job i took. Did it knock you back? Was it difficult to get jobs after The Thing? Sure. i lost lots of jobs because of The Thing. i lost a movie called Firestarter, which could have been just great. it was a great script. But � that’s all in the past.

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The Thing is really bleak and dark and nihilistic. Was that a reflection of where you were at that point in your life? It wasn’t about me at the time. It was the story. We got into the story and went back to the original novella, Who Goes There, by John W. Campbell Jr [published under the pseudonym, Don A. Stuart]. If you start exploring what it really is, it’s kinda like the end of the world. It’s the end of everything. The first movie was much more heroic. That was made back in the early ’50s and it was a Cold War type of movie. This was a whole different thing. I had a choice. I could have had these men heroically destroy the creature, but that wasn’t the nature of this thing. This thing was you. It took you over and imitated you. That’s a whole different ballgame. My editor at the time [Todd C. Ramsay] told me to embrace the darkness. So I did. I embraced it. The original film is a movie that means a great deal to you. It pops up briefly in Halloween. Is it something you had wanted to remake? No, not at all. Never thought about it. Never wanted to get near it. But it was sitting out there, and it was a chance to make a studio film, and I couldn’t resist. It was a bigger budget than I’d ever had before. In doing that, I thought, “What am I going to do that’s different than Hawks and Christian Nyby?” They did a good job with it back then for what it is. It’s a movie of its time. So is my film. It’s just looking at a different side of things. It’s about the lack of trust between human beings. It was your third film with Kurt Russell, after Elvis and Escape From New York. I didn’t always think of him for this. I wanted to do something new. But Kurt wanted to do it, the studio [Universal] wanted to do it, so I thought, “Aw hell, why am I fighting it?” Elvis was a take on a famous person. Snake Plissken was a Clint Eastwood impression. There’s nothing artificial about R.J. MacReady. I had trapped Kurt. There was no way he could imitate anyone else in The Thing. He had to be that guy. He’s capable of doing anything. He doesn’t think about it. It’s just in there and it’s instinctual. Nobody else has it. Nowadays it would probably be shot in a studio, the snow would be fake. But it was important to you to shoot it authentically. Yeah. We wanted to find a place that was the real thing. There were a couple of choices. The original ’51 movie was in North Dakota, which can be pretty cold. But with this, there were three different locations. There were the Juno ice fields, above Juno, Alaska. We shot second unit up there. We shot on the set, the interiors and a few exteriors. We shot the rest of the movie and the end of the movie on this glacier in Stewart, British Columbia. There was a mining camp up above us. We built the set in the summertime so when the snow came it snowed on the set, and looked real, and it was great up there to be real and to be there, but it was rough.

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What was the atmosphere like on set? When we got up on location, it was tough. But I’ve never seen a cast of actors drink more than those guys on a Saturday night. You’d have people passing out. It was unbelievable, the amount of liquor going down. Because they were so cold? Bored? Far away from home? Everything. Everybody turns into a child when they go away on location. Especially this one. It was remote and grim. This place was kind of lawless. I’m sure it’s peaceful now, but it was like the Old West. So these actors roll into town and they start drinking and they’re trying to keep up with the locals and they can’t do it. Nobody could do it. The people are tough up there. They’re tough.

“IT WAS DAMNED AND HATED. NOW, NOT SO MUCH...” John Carpenter

How did you handle it? I slept. The director and the producer and the production designer, we were all in a nice hotel. The crew was in a barge that they parked at the bay. It was pretty raw. Perhaps the movie’s key scene is the bloodtest sequence, where MacReady tries to work out who’s the Thing. I remember wanting to do the movie because of that dang sequence. It presented a great chance for me to strut my stuff. It doesn’t appear to be showoffy, but it is. It’s all done in cutting. The big reveal in that sequence is that Palmer (David Clennon) is a Thing. He’s very shifty and quiet here, which is not like that character. Was that your direction to him? No, it wasn’t. That’s all David. Palmer doesn’t want to give away that he’s this creature. He wants to remain hidden until the last second. You say shifty. It depends on how you look at it. He’s not usually cast in that kind of a role. David Clennon played somewhat evil, vicious people and this was a chance for him to play against type. Did you give different direction to people who were the Thing? No. The imitation is perfect, so nobody’s going to know. Don’t play it any differently than how you would play it. What would one do? Would you indicate to the audience that you’re the Thing?

Opposite, from top to bottom:

JOHN CARPENTER’S FAQ

Nauls (T.K. Carter), MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Garry

Five directors. Five questions. Five answers

(Donald Moffat) are left out in the cold; The Thing in all its grotesque glory; Keith

CORIN HARDY: Which single moment in The Thing are you most proud of and why? I don’t know if there’s a single moment. I’m proudest of the blood-test scene, but that’s not a moment. I would say, rarely in movies is there a single moment of anything. Movies are a stream of images, you cut them together into a whole, so I don’t know that there’s ever any one moment that I’m proud of. That’s a cheesy answer, but it’s the one I’m gonna give.

David and Kurt Russell on set with director John Carpenter; Storyboard illustrations for the Thing as it sprouts legs from a decapitated head.

CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE: Is your work in horror inspired by your own inner fears, or the joy that comes from instilling fear in others? More to the point, what scares you? I’m scared of the same things everybody’s scared of. Death, loss of a loved one, disfigurement, loneliness. It’s always the same in every culture. But I think I make horror movies because I loved them in my youth. I loved the darkness of them, what they did. There’s something about them that I loved. When I was a kid I was scared of everything. But I’m less scared now.

What would be the performance? I don’t know. So just act like this character. That’s what they would do. They would imitate you perfectly. There’s been lots of speculation about when certain characters become the Thing… It’s ridiculous. We don’t know. We don’t know. You must know. You directed it! I know, but I’m not going to tell anybody. It’s not going to happen.

ALAMY, COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL, LANDMARK

Well, let’s ask anyway. At the end, only MacReady and Childs are left. Is one of them a Thing? One of them is the Thing. But I’m not going to tell you who it is. Where did that ending — with MacReady’s last line, “Let’s just sit here for a little while and see what happens” — come from? Another ending was written. It wasn’t very satisfying. In a sense I wanted to leave a little room for some hope. Maybe they’ll get out. Maybe they’ll live. There’s no way they can, really. What’s going to happen is that the two of them are going to end up sitting on the snow until the one of them who is the Thing is going to make its move. Rather than show that, I just left it off. It just seemed right. You use your instincts and it was a great last line. Kurt came up with that line.

They start playing chess together and then it cuts to McMurdo Base. A helicopter lands and we see they’ve rescued the two of them. “Which way to a hot lunch?” says one of them, meaning they’re now both Things. I thought, “No, I don’t think so.” I think maybe we’ll be classy here and do it this way. Did Universal have a problem with the ending? They wanted me to change it, so it was more heroic. And we even cut a version for them but it didn’t make any difference, so they let me keep my ﬁnal cut. I have to give it to them. Not everybody is so generous. What was different about the heroic cut? When Kurt throws the dynamite and dives, the creature blows up and that was the end. It was ridiculous. Ta-daaaaa! We win! What’s the weirdest theory you’ve heard about the ending? There’s one where you can’t see somebody’s breath at the end, and they’re passing the bottle to each other, so does that make you a Thing? Childs doesn’t seem to breathe. It’s just the way the lighting was. It means nothing. THE THING IS OUT ON 23 OCTOBER ON

What was the original ending? There was a scene after the scene you see now.

STEELBOOK BLU-RAY AND ON 20 NOVEMBER ON STANDARD BLU-RAY.

MATTHEW HOLNESS: With the exception of MacReady, the male characters are realistic and unheroic. Was there studio pressure to reduce the numbers of the cast and make them more heroic? No, there was never any studio pressure to do anything. I couldn’t believe it, it was great. They said, “Go and make your film.” It’s a big cast. It was a little intimidating, but when you have actors this good who can bring their own characters to life, I wasn’t worried. It was great working with them. They made the movie what it is. BEN WHEATLEY: Did you have any contact with Howard Hawks or Christian Nyby about either Thing? Not really. When I was in film school, Hawks came and spoke to my class. I met him then and talked to him about the original film but not in terms of this production. I don’t remember what I said, but he was a very impressive guy. NEIL MARSHALL: There’s an early publicity still that shows someone sticking a screwdriver into Bennings’ (Peter Maloney) ear outside the dog kennels. What the hell was going on there? That was a scene I shot, sort of as an experiment, just to see how it would fit in the movie. It was nothing we ever used. It was a murder scene, Bennings’ murder, and it was a different way than he dies now. I just wanted to try it out. It didn’t work because it was too human a situation. It wasn’t alien enough. It was too much of Michael Myers. I thought, “We’re not going to do this.” Finally, we set him on fire.

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MY MOVIE MASTERMIND JAI COURTNEY Will he take exception W to the questions?

LEADER BOARD

WORDS JAMES WHITE

Ben Kingsley

9.5

Christopher Lee

9.5

David O. Russell

9.5

Quentin Tarantino

9.5

Paul W.S. Anderson

Werner Herzog

Franco Nero

Robert Rodriguez

9 9

Guillermo del Toro Bryan Singer

In the ﬁlm of the same name, Jack Reacher threatens your character, Charlie, over the phone in a colourful way. What is it? He says, “I mean to drink your blood from a boot.” [Hears full answer]. Come on! Surely I get a point there, I got the money phrase! It’s a bloody good line, so maybe I’ll start using it! ½ point. The line is, “I am going to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot.”

In I, Frankenstein, what item of Adam’s does Gideon offer to trade for Leonore’s life? It’s a book... um... Is it Doctor Frankenstein’s notes on him? Correct. The book is Victor Frankenstein’s scientiﬁc journal.

In A Good Day To Die Hard, how does your character, Jack McClane, kill the chief villain, Komarov? I throw him off the fucking top of a building into a chopper rotor. It was an awesome scene to shoot. And that was a crazy movie, it was just carnage. We trashed upwards of a hundred vehicles shooting the car chase. Correct.

ALAMY

What are Varro’s last words in Spartacus: Blood And Sand? I have no idea, dude. [Hears answer] I have fond memories, but it was gruesome, with a blood contraption that made shit spurt out of my

shoulder. Andy [Whitﬁeld, who played Spartacus] and I, we got very close. It’s actually the anniversary of his death today, strangely. The correct answer is, “Live… and see my family provided for. And know I would have done the same.”

In Felony, where do Carl, Mal and Jim meet? It’s the back of a pub, but I couldn’t tell you the name of it. [Hears answer] Oh! Tambourine’s! Of course. My bad. ½ point. The correct answer is Tambourine’s.

What’s Cup’s full name in Unbroken? It’s Hugh Cupernell. He has a ﬁrst name? Oh God, that’s so disrespectful. What was his ﬁrst name? To get it wrong would only be worse than not knowing. [Hears answer] Of course! Charlton. I apologise to him and his family. A few guys had the privilege of getting in touch with the families of those they played. But I just came up and worked a couple of weeks, shooting a bunch of missions in the plane and then left. ½ point. The full name is Charlton Hugh Cupernell.

Complete this line of dialogue from Divergent: “You got three options…” I vaguely remember. It’s when they’re ﬁghting... I don’t know! [Hears answer] It’s weird, those lines bounce in my head all the time and yet I couldn’t remember them when I needed them most! The correct answer is, “Hang there and I’ll

8.5

forget your cowardice. Fall and die. Or give up… But if you give up, you’re out.”

What day does Kyle Reese ﬁrst travel back to in Terminator Genisys? Ah, you’re killing me! It’s in 1984. It’s... June 7? [Laughs] I’ll take a half a point! ½ point. The full date is 12 May 1984.

In Suicide Squad, Captain Boomerang takes a surreptitious swig from a can of beer. What is the name of the beer? The name of the beer is... Don’t tell me! What is it? [Hears the answer] Gurgler’s! Fuck! When you drink a lot of Gurgler’s, you forget what it is. The correct answer is Gurgler’s Ale.

You’ve played, in three different films, a captain, a lieutenant colonel and a first lieutenant. Name the films. I’m a captain in The Exception. I’m a lieutenant colonel in... wait, I don’t want to get these wrong. I think I’m a lieutenant colonel in The Water Diviner. And first lieutenant is Man Down...? NO! It’s Unbroken. Correct.

JAI COURTNEY SCORES 5

“I feel like that’s where I’ve been most of my life! That’s the way I roll in general. So, I’m happy with that.” THE EXCEPTION IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND DOWNLOAD

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THE FIRSTTAKE CLUB

Filling in those ﬁlmic blind spots, one person at a time

#17 PAUL FRANKLIN ON EYES WIDE SHUT

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The idea behind the First-Take Club is simple: we ask a notable someone to watch a film they haven’t seen before (chosen from our 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time list, published in 2014), watch it, and write about it. This month’s inductee is Paul Franklin, who’s won two Oscars, for his work as visual effects supervisor on Inception and Interstellar, and is about to make the leap into directing. But even an Oscar winner can miss a classic, and Paul had never seen the final film from Stanley Kubrick. So, would Eyes Wide Shut leave his eyes wide open? Let’s get something straight: I am a huge, huge Stanley Kubrick fan. I have spent endless hours watching and analysing his films (and happily

pinching any clever stuff I can put into my own work as a visual effects designer). So why have I never seen Eyes Wide Shut? The answer is simple: it’s the last one. Once I’d watched it there would never be any more Kubrick films to look forward to. But there it was on the list, tempting me… To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know much about Eyes Wide Shut other than it was set in New York, featured two of the world’s biggest movie stars, and there was a huge orgy scene at the heart of it all. When it first came out it got a bit of a mixed reception, with some critics clearly wanting to be meaner to the film than they felt they could be in the light of Kubrick’s sudden death just after he completed his final cut. But over time it has gained in stature — perhaps it just needed a bit of

distance from all the hype surrounding its release. After watching it, I really, really wish I’d seen it in 35mm in a proper big cinema rather than on my computer, but even on a digital screen the mesmeric power of Kubrick’s filmmaking is plain to see. Eyes Wide Shut is long and languid, but you have to pay attention as every second counts. It’s not a film that gives up its secrets easily — is Tom Cruise’s character, Dr. Bill Harford, as naive as he appears in the opening scenes or is the crazy adventure he subsequently embarks on something he’s done before and will do again? Does Nicole Kidman’s pot-fuelled confession reveal what her character, Alice Harford, really feels about married life, or is she just stoned? And just what is going on in the infamous orgy scene? Are these people

actually the sex-crazed Satanists they appear to be or is it nothing more than titillating theatricals for the benefit of Manhattan’s jaded mega-rich? The visual palette of the film is sumptuous: saturated warm tones define the elegant interiors (as well as the acres of naked flesh on view) and deep moonlight blues hint at something dark and threatening outside. The production design is exquisite. Despite its US setting, Eyes Wide Shut was filmed entirely in the UK (save for a few establishing shots of New York City) with the usual explanation being that Kubrick didn’t like air travel, but really I think he just wanted the total control that shooting on stages and a backlot afford a director. Nothing is left to chance, whether it’s the placement of the items in an

apartment kitchen or the distribution of cars on the completely convincing New York street sets. One of the key stylistic signatures of the film is the use of Christmas lights (the film takes place over three days in the festive season) which suffuse almost every scene with an ethereal, multi-spectral glow. But its not a ‘Christmassy’ film — there’s no warmth or togetherness in this tale. Eyes Wide Shut casts a dark, hypnotic spell over the viewer as the camera glides through Kubrick’s world which, whilst grounded in an observed reality, is stylised and heightened in all manner of ways. I need to go there again soon. EyEs WidE shut is out now on DvD, blu-ray anD DownloaD

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A TRUE ONE-HOFF Knight Rider. Baywatch. Starcrash? David Hasselhoff looks back at his glorious career

WORDS JAMES WHITE

THERE AREN’T MANY performers so well-known that they can be boiled down to one word. Madonna. Prince. Hoff. Well, The Hoff… From bestriding ’80s and ’90s TV like a coiffed colossus, to a stream of cameos in hit movies, David Hasselhoff has secured his place in the cult pantheon. Never a man to take himself seriously — which is good, as there’s a lot of material to poke fun at — The Hoff returns in this month’s comedy Killing Hasselhoff, which gave us the perfect excuse to run through his stellar CV…

STARCRASH (1978) An early role as a heroic space prince in a lovably cheap Star Wars rip-off

“It’s the worst movie ever made! I thought Piranha 3DD was the worst movie, but no, I was wrong. There’s Starcrash. For that one, people actually waited in line at Comic-Con with the poster and I said, ‘What kind of medication are you on?’ We shot in Bari, which is in southern Italy, in a cave, and I got food poisoning. So, for two weeks, I was really ill. It was an all-Italian crew, and even when I watch it to this day I don’t know what it’s about.”

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KNIGHT RIDER (1982-1986)

BAYWATCH (1989-2001)

The show that made him famous as Michael Knight, the justice warrior with a chatty car

The other big Hoff role: intrepid lifeguard Mitch Buchannon

“When Knight Rider happened, it was like a dream come true. I called my father and said, ‘I’ve got [an audition for] the next new huge role and I’ve got to get this, Dad.’ He said, ‘What’s it about?’ I told him, ‘A talking car...’ He said, ‘Have you been drinking? ’ We had fantastic ratings, but the industry looked at it like it was a gimmick. I have the respect now, 30 years later! There are about a hundred of the cars out there and I’ve owned two or three of them.”

“After it was cancelled by the network [NBC], we bought it and we lasted 245 episodes and went into the Guinness Book Of World Records as the most watched show of all time. I knew that when I got the role, it was going to be the same thing as Knight Rider. That you’re not going to get the ‘respect’ so you can move on to better things, but you’re going to make a shitload of money. So, I said, ‘I’ll take the money. And go to the beach!’”

NOVEMBER 2017

MAN ON TRAIN Saluting the scene-stealers

THIS MONTH: UNCLE JACK’S CELLMATE, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE

“Best thing I’ve done. When I got it, I immediately went to the comic book stores and bought about ten books. And when I met Stan Lee he said, ‘You are the consummate Nick Fury!’ He’s a tough guy with a cigar and he had the best lines in the movie. [Nick Fury voice] ‘Guys like you tend to cling to the bowl no matter how many times you ﬂush...’ I loved that John Wayne, pissed-off character.”

DODGEBALL (2004) Hasselhoff, who’s huge in Germany, showed up for a hilarious cameo as the coach of a German dodgeball team Clockwise from left: The shy, retiring Hoff; With Caroline Munro in Starcrash; Teamwork as a German coach in Dodgeball; Life’s a beach with the rest of the crew

CAMERA PRESS/ALISA CONNAN, ALAMY

in Baywatch.

BAYWATCH NIGHTS (1995-1997)

Baywatch, but... much weirder. In the second season Mitch battled vampires and aliens

“I loved a show called I Spy. So, I said, ‘Let’s do it like that.’ And it just didn’t get the same numbers as Baywatch. We tried everything, from making it like a cop show to making it like Twin Peaks, to having monsters. I didn’t care, I was getting a shitload of money anyway. It was an amazing time.”

NICK FURY: AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. (1998) Before Samuel L. Jackson, The Hoff played Marvel stalwart Nick Fury in a one-off TV movie

“My stunt double was working on the movie, and they had a picture of me with the German team. He says, ‘I know him…’ Ben Stiller asked if he could get me, and I said, ‘Only if I can do it in German.’ He goes, ‘Oh, you speak German?’ ‘No, I don’t. Get some chick behind the camera to read the lines and I’ll mimic her.’ We went to the set and there’s a girl from East Germany and the ﬁrst words out of her mouth were, ‘I’ve been looking for freedom.’ Which is my big song over there!”

KILLING HASSELHOFF (2017) Spooﬁng his public image and his career all in one for a wacky comedy about a guy (Ken Jeong) who has Hasselhoff in his celebrity death pool and decides to cash in

“I had fun making it. We’ve got Rhys Darby from Flight Of The Conchords, Howie Mandel, Jon Lovitz. Jon is one of my best friends and he’s the funniest man alive. The ﬁrst day he came to set, he had a dog with him that looks just like him! He said Killing Hasselhoff was probably the funniest movie he’s ever done.”

“IT’S NOT EVERY day you get to hang out with a Beatle,” says Darcy Laurie of the day when he, well, hung out with a Beatle. Laurie played Uncle Jack’s Cellmate in the most recent Pirates Of The Caribbean movie; Uncle Jack just happened to be one Sir Paul McCartney. Macca replaced Keith Richards, who was meant to return as Jack Sparrow’s dad. But out went a Stone, in came a Beatle as Sparrow’s uncle, and an out-offocus Laurie played poker with McCartney as the latter bantered with Johnny Depp through the bars of a cell. “I wouldn’t swap the experience for anything,” says Laurie, who found that Paul was dead cool. “We improvised and chatted a bit,” he recalls. “I made a little joke when he asked what we should play poker for, and I said, ‘Maybe concert tickets?’ He replied, ‘Unfortunately, they’ve given me the winning hand every time!’” So Laurie switched the hands when McCartney had his back turned. “He called me a ‘little rascal’ for that, which was pretty great.” Laurie, who will star as Pablo Escobar in TV movie Cocaine Godmother, didn’t ask for a pic: “I just have the memories.” Not least McCartney recording Uncle Jack’s intro, where he sings the Scouse standard (and track on The Beatles’ Let It Be) Maggie Mae. “They needed to get some ‘wild lines’ [audio recorded to be synchronised later], so they had him sing,” says Laurie. “He did Maggie Mae and Molly Malone, and improvised a song of his own — so I basically got a private concert from Paul McCartney!” Two thumbs up. JW PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: SALAZAR’S REVENGE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

KILLING HASSELHOFF IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND DOWNLOAD

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THE GUIDE Everything else coming your way this month

PICK OF THE MONTH

FRESH INSIGHTS BEWITCHED BLU-RAY THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION SEASON 1 DVD BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA BLU-RAY CHURCHILL DOWNLOAD (DVD, BLU-RAY 16 OCTOBER) DOCTOR FOSTER: SEASON 2 DVD GENIUS DVD GIFTED DOWNLOAD (DVD 23 OCTOBER) GRIMM: SEASON 6 DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD THE HOWLING BLU-RAY

BLOOD SIMPLE

(30 OCTOBER, DVD, BLU-RAY)

The debut feature of Joel and Ethan Coen, Blood Simple plays like a template for their later output. This re-release includes a new interview with the Blood brothers, plus fresh chats with stars M. Emmet Walsh and John Getz.

NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER DVD, BLU-RAY THE PARTY BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD ROCK DOG DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD THE SHACK DVD, DOWNLOAD SPACE 1999: THE COMPLETE SERIES DVD, BLU-RAY

TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT DOWNLOAD (DVD, BLU-RAY 30 OCTOBER)

THE VIKINGS (1958) BLU-RAY THE VOICE OF THE MOON BLU-RAY GREAT FEATURES

23 OCTOBER

THE AKI KAURISMÄKI COLLECTION DVD, THE AGNES VARDA COLLECTION BLU-RAY A stunning collection comprising eight of the Belgian-French ﬁlmmaker’s work, from debut La Pointe Courte to The Beaches Of Agnes, bedecked in features including a brand-new 30-minute interview with Varda herself.

BLU-RAY

ALONE IN BERLIN DVD, BLU-RAY ASH VS EVIL DEAD: SEASON 2 DVD, BLU-RAY BERGMAN: THE COLLECTION DVD BUÑUEL BOX SET BLU-RAY BUSHWICK DVD, BLU-RAY CARNIVAL OF SOULS BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD DEAD AGAIN IN TOMBSTONE DVD, BLU-RAY,

THE LURE BLU-RAY A MAN CALLED OVE DVD, BLU-RAY MASTERS OF CINEMA: BUSTER KEATON BLU-RAY

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DVD, BLU-RAY

EVIL UNDER THE SUN DVD, BLU-RAY FRAGMENT OF FEAR BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD FROM A HOUSE ON WILLOW STREET DVD HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR: THE COMPLETE SERIES BLU-RAY IN THIS CORNER OF THE WORLD DVD, BLU-RAY THE MIRROR CRACK’D DVD, BLU-RAY THE MUMMY DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD SCARS OF DRACULA BLU-RAY A SILENT VOICE DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD TORTURE GARDEN BLU-RAY UPSTART CROW: SEASON 2 DVD VAMPIRE DIARIES: SEASON 8 BLU-RAY THE WAGES OF FEAR DVD, BLU-RAY, DOWNLOAD

WARGAMES BLU-RAY WEDDING IN WHITE BLU-RAY

30 OCTOBER DOWNLOAD

16 OCTOBER

DVD, BLU-RAY

DIARY OF A WIMPY KID 4: THE LONG HAUL

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7 It was plane crazy for Nicolas Cage and John Cusack (3,3) 8 Will Smith’s 2004 sci-fi actioner (1,5) 9 Could be Ian or maybe Celeste (4) 10 Marvel TV series that stars Anson Mount as Black Bolt (8) 11 He directed Repo Man and Sid & Nancy (4,3) 13 This starred Keith Carradine — and a seal (5) 15 This Robert De Niro film was originally titled ‘Bus 657’ (5) 17 Charlize Theron’s portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos (7) 20 This TV-related comedy won Kevin Kline a Golden Globe nomination (8) 21 Don’t Look Now director Nicolas (4) 23 Actor Chloe, cast as Sophie in The Transﬁguration (6) 24 More eager, like Catherine (6)

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1 Ian Hart and Harold Pinter are among the stars of this Soho-set rock/gangster mash-up (4) 2 Beyond Thunderdrome and Fury Road are sequels (3,3) 3 This 2008 actioner linked Don Cheadle with Guy Pearce (7) 4 Bill, winner of a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA in 2004 (5) 5 Czech directorial genius Milos (6) 6 Fern Robe shuffles around for this encounter with a lioness (4,4) 12 Tommy seen in No Country For Old Men (3,5) 14 Halle Berry/Penélope Cruz 2003 thriller (7) 16 Okonedo who became an OBE in 2010 (6) 18 Meryl discovered in Elstree picture (6) 19 The River — (Cicely Tyson) (5) 22 Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman starrer Secret In Their — (4)

THOUGHT IT WAS safe to go back in the water? Think again. Intense thriller Cage Dive sees three friends from California head to the rugged Australian coast for a reality-TV cage-dive encounter with deadly great white sharks. But having attracted a swarm of the vicious beasts, their tour boat is then — no! — destroyed by a massive rogue wave. As darkness descends, the friends find themselves alone and defenceless, afloat in the chilly ocean as hungry man-eaters circle... Written and directed by Gerald Rascionato and starring a fresh young Aussie cast including Joel Hogan and Megan Peta Hill, it’s a cautionary tale about the perils of ocean predators — not to mention the pursuit of fame. To mark its release, we have a 49” smart TV to give away, plus a copy of the film. If you fancy the loot, crack the crossword, solve the anagram and text your answer to the number below. CAGE DIVE IS OUT ON 9 OCTOBER ON DVD AND DOWNLOAD

COMPETITION ENDS 30 OCTOBER HOW TO ENTER Take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange them to form the name of an actor, actress, director or character. Text ‘EMPIRE’ to 83070, followed by your answer, name and address (with a space between each element of your message!). Texts cost 50p plus standard operator costs. Lines close at midnight, 30 October. Winners are selected at random. See below for terms and conditions. OCTOBER ANSWERS ACROSS: 1 McShane, 5 Evans, 8 Name Of The Rose, 9 Pan, 11 To The Bone, 13 Jackie, 14 Storks, 16 Nosferatu, 17 MGM, 19 A Rage In Harlem, 22 Melfi, 23 Everest. DOWN: 1 Man Up, 2 Sam, 3 About Time, 4 Estate, 5 Eve, 6 A Hologram, 7 Stevens, 10 Nick Stahl, 12 Entourage, 13 Jon Hamm, 15 Macnee, 18 Mamet, 20 Eli, 21 Lie. ANAGRAM MARK HAMILL TERMS AND CONDITIONS: One entry per person. Texts cost 50p + standard network rate. Ask the bill payer’s permission before entering. Entries must be received before 31 October or will not be valid (but the cost of the text

may still be charged). One winner will be selected at random. Competition promoted by Bauer Consumer Media Limited t/a Empire (“Empire”). Empire’s choice of winner is ﬁnal and no correspondence will be entered into in this regard. The winner will be notiﬁed, by phone (on the number the text was sent), between seven and ten days after the competition ends. Empire will call the winner a maximum of three times and leave one message. If the winner does not answer the phone or respond to the message within 14 days of the competition’s end, Empire will select another winner and the original winner will not win a prize. Entrants must be over 18, resident in the UK and not be employed by Empire. The prize is non-negotiable with no cash alternative. Empire is not responsible for late delivery or unsatisfactory quality of the prize. Entrants agree to the collection of their personal data in accordance with Empire’s privacy policy: http://www.bauerdatapromise.co.uk/. Winner’s personal details will be given to prize provider to arrange delivery of the prize. Bauer reserves the right to amend or cancel these terms or any aspect of the competition (including the prize) at any time if required for reasons beyond its control. Any questions, please email empire@bauermedia.co.uk. Complaints will not be considered if made more than 30 days after the competition ends. Winner’s details available on request (after the competition ends) by emailing empire@bauermedia.co.uk. For full Ts&Cs see http://www.bauerlegal.co.uk/competition-terms.html.

146

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CAT BALLOU CHOSEN BY BRYAN CRANSTON

Bryan Cranston: “It’s going to sound odd to most people, but it has emotional relevance to me. When I was 11 years old, my parents were going through a nasty divorce, and in order to avoid being around that kind of energy, my brother and I were allowed to go next door to this movie theatre to see whatever was playing. One day, it happened to be a movie called Cat Ballou, with Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda. In it, there’s a scene where Cat, played by Jane Fonda, is about to be hanged. Dwayne Hickman plays a priest, and Michael Callan plays her love interest. As soon as the noose goes down, the rope breaks — boom! — she escapes, there’s a horse underneath the gallows, and away they go. I saw it dozens of times over a couple of months. It was my introduction to the power of storytelling as a way of distraction, of adventure, of magical experiences.”

SHERIFF: Quiet, please! Quiet! Quiet! [To Cat] If you have any last words, say ’em now. CAT: Let’s get on with it. SHERIFF: By virtue of the authority invested in me, I order this hanging to proceed. The noose is placed around Cat’s neck. Nearby, the cofﬁn waiting for her opens — Clay Boone (Michael Callan), Cat’s beloved, is inside it. We see Shelleen (Lee Marvin), the drunk gunslinger, propped up against a wall. The sheriff raises his hand. Jed opens his Bible and grabs a knife. The sheriff drops his hand. The executioner pulls the lever and as Cat falls... Jed cuts the rope, and Cat is caught by Clay Boone (Michael Callan).

Shelleen ﬁres his gun, shooting down bunting. He ﬁres again, spooking some horses who pull away with a carriage loaded with barrels, tipping them into the street. Booze explodes from the barrels as the posse pull up just in time. Shelleen laughs, and looks at his gun in disbelief. Another barrel pops, startling his horse. As it rides off, it passes Sam The Shade (Stubby Kaye) and the Sunrise Kid (Nat King Cole) sitting on a carriage. They sing to camera. TOGETHER: “So she rode away. Just where now is a mystery. But Cat rode into history. And her legend grew.” Now we see Cat’s carriage ride into the distance.

JED: Thank you, Sheriff! God bless you!

TOGETHER: “She was a queen of the outlaws!” [Shelleen’s horse is seen pursuing the carriage] “Her highness, Cat Ballou! Cat Ballou. Cat Ballou.”

Clay whisks Cat into the back of the funeral carriage alongside driver Jackson Two-Bears (Tom Nardini).

Jed and Jackson look back to see Shelleen gaining. They laugh and cheer.

JED: Go, Jackson! Go! [As they career through the streets] Where’s Shelleen?

TOGETHER: “Well, our story now is through. Cat Ballou. Cat Ballou. We’ll say farewell to Cat Ballou.”

At that, Shelleen careens around the corner on his horse. The carriage races past him as he whirls around in a daze. The posse is in hot pursuit.

The camera tilts down to reveal Cat and Clay in the back of the carriage, blowing kisses at each other. Clay howls in joy and kisses Cat on the lips.

EXT. TOWN SQUARE — DAY Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda) is being escorted through a mob to the gallows by faux preacher Jed (Dwayne Hickman). The mob sing and cheer as she passes. Cat walks up the stairs to the rope. The sheriff (Jay C. Flippen) begs for calm.

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