Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i Empire Australasia

IT WAS THE moment that nobody saw coming. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige had just one more thing, Columbo-style, to reveal: Blade, the vampire-killing daywalker, was coming back to the fold. But how? Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali picked up the phone and offered himself up for the role. And Feige agreed. It seems like perfect casting, and the kind that even the original Blade, Wesley Snipes, seemed to approve of, calling Ali “a beautiful and talented artist”. The problem now is: how do they introduce Eric ‘Blade’ Brooks into the MCU? Blade’s world is a vampiric one, teeming with pointy-teethed goons. This announcement instantly changes the MCU, retconning to a place where vampires are everywhere. Blade himself is a half-vampire or ‘dhampir’, after his mother was bitten while pregnant, meaning there…

Chris Hewitt (ReView Editor): When this was first announced, I was nervous but also excited about how terrible this film might be. Nobody sets out to make a bad film. But I’m hoping that they’ve made the worst of all time. Nick de Semlyen (Features Editor): Where are the humans? Is Cats a bit like Cars? Joanna Moran (Photography Director): The white cat is played by Francesca Hayward, who is the principal dancer at the Royal Opera House. Nick: I quite like that they’ve got hair inside the ears. That is quite faithful to, er, cats. Chris Lupton (Creative Director): So does she have six nipples? James Dyer (Editor-in-chief, Digital): Judi Dench! Chris L: She looks like Pat Butcher from EastEnders. James: Is she wearing a fur coat? This is…

1941 JIM CROW DUMBO Dumbo included a gang of African-American stereotypes disguised as crows, with their leader named ‘Jim Crow’ in a nod to the South’s segregation laws. These scenes will reportedly be omitted when aired on Disney+. 1992 PRINCESS JASMINE ALADDIN If you were a little brown girl growing up in the 1990s, Princess Jasmine was a thrilling addition. Between that excitement and Robin Williams’ Genie, we may have overlooked the dodgy orientalist ‘othering’. 1995 POCAHONTAS POCAHONTAS Pocahontas was Disney’s first lead woman of colour. Sadly, they also made her a colonial apologist fantasy, based on scant historical evidence and no consultation with the Powhatan Nation. 2009 PRINCESS TIANA THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG From the Grimms’ tale and the cultural setting of 1920s New Orleans evolved Disney’s first…

CLIFFORD McBRIDE AD ASTRA Tommy Lee Jones, unable to sanction Brad Pitt’s buffoonery, finds himself lost in space. A rescue mission is mounted — but does he even want to be found? Or would he rather be left to nap? CLAY BANNING ANGEL HAS FALLEN Gerard Butler’s Mike Banning is back, and this time he’s tracking down Banning Sr, played by Nick Nolte in full wilderness mode. You think your family reunions are fraught? You haven’t been to a Banning family reunion. MUFASA THE LION KING Twenty-five years after first getting caught in a wildebeest stampede, James Earl Jones’ Mufasa gets trampled in exactly the same way — only this time around, more photorealistically.…

THE VOICE “To me, the key to Elvis is the voice. And that’s the thing that Austin’s gonna have to work on the most. My worry with him is that he might not have a deep enough range. Elvis had quite a baritone singing voice. It’s mastering the Memphis accent as well. And the metre is very deliberate — it speeds up and then kind of hangs there. He needs to get the mouth in the right place — it’s quite far forward.” THE MOVES “A lot of Elvis’s moves are derived from classic 1950s jiving and bopping. But he was also a black belt in karate. He integrated a lot of karate kicks and swishes into his movements. He’d do a lot with his hips, of course, riding from…

OUT 12 SEPTEMBER RATED PG / 97 MINS DIRECTOR Thurop Van Orman CAST Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Leslie Jones, Bill Hader, Rachel Bloom PLOT The war of pranks between Bird Island and Piggy Island is raging. Yet when a third ice-capped island threatens the safety of both, pig king Leonard (Hader) suggests a truce so Red (Sudeikis), Bomb (McBride), Chuck (Gad) and Silver (Bloom) join a mission to nullify the danger. IF JUDD APATOW were creating a live-action ensemble dramedy about life and love and muddling through, he could do a lot worse than purloin the cast of The Angry Birds Movie 2: Jason Sudeikis, Danny McBride, Josh Gad, Leslie Jones, Bill Hader, Rachel Bloom, Tiffany Haddish, Peter Dinklage, Awkwafina, Sterling K. Brown, Maya Rudolph (plus a cameo by Nicki…

THE SCRIPT 11 May is GoodFellas Day. Henry Hill’s final 24 hours as a wiseguy is played out in one epic sequence that ends when he’s busted by the Feds. Inspired by the voiceover in Truffaut’s Jules Et Jim, Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi’s narration delineates how the wired Hill can’t differentiate between anything; picking up his brother and making tomato sauce are as important as off-loading guns and the Pittsburgh drug deal — everything’s on the same level to the strung-out gangster. THE CAMERAWORK Stylistically, Scorsese is trying to give the audience the feeling of spinning recklessly out of control on drugs. Much of this is evoked by Michael Ballhaus’ restless camera movement. When Henry takes a hit of coke, the camera flies towards his eyes. Elsewhere, it whip-pans,…

SO ASTONISHING ARE the film’s effects, it’s still hard not to believe that Spielberg and co rocked up to an actual secret tropical island and just filmed the creatures they found there. Five Empire writers select the dinosaur closest to their heart. TRICERATOPS None of the BC beasts is more tangible than the Triceratops. She reacts with astonishing realism thanks to some flawless puppeteering, both convincingly alive and visibly unwell, creating the sort of heart-filled spectacle that Spielberg does best. She brings out the best in the characters — Ellie’s compassion and curiosity, Tim’s excitement, Alan’s bliss as its inhalations lift him up and down. When he calls her ‘the most beautiful thing I ever saw’, I can only agree. She’s one sick Trike. BEN TRAVIS, ONLINE STAFF WRITER VELOCIRAPTOR…

Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, recalls how seeing Wes Craven’s meta murder-thon for the first time blew his mind. WHEN WES CRAVEN decided to — spoiler! — murder Drew Barrymore in the opening ten minutes of Scream, it was just the start of a series of smart and very considered wrong-footings that would play on the common traits of the slasher movies of the past 30 years (from Black Christmas, through Halloween and Craven’s own A Nightmare On Elm Street). But ultimately Scream would draw in a much wider audience than the films it had satirised, leading to a mega meta-franchise and changing the landscape of scary movies from that point on. That point was 1996. I was in my second year of a Theatre Design…

WHAT IS THE Matrix? On paper, it’s high-concept hokum. A cyberpunk thriller soaked in pseudo-philosophy, with a pair of little-known directors pushing camera tricks as the film’s central gimmick. When the Wachowskis pitched the movie to Will Smith, that was certainly his impression, and the reason he turned down the role of Neo to star in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West instead. But the Wachowskis’ first movie, neo-noir Bound, had been critically lauded, and that gave the pair just enough juice to convince Warner Bros. that their sci-fi vanity project, fronted by Keanu Reeves instead, might just be worth the risk. The gamble paid off. And then some. With that flo-mo kick from Carrie-Ann Moss’ Trinity, sending Agent Brown (Robert Taylor) flying across a room in the film’s prologue, the…

FOR A FILM full of stink spirits, faceless ghosts, dragon boys and kimono-wearing frogs, Spirited Away seems oddly real. Sure, Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 Studio Ghibli animation is set in a magical dreamland accessed through an abandoned amusement park, one where parents are turned into pigs and sentient balls of soot scurry around characters’ feet. But to anyone able to recall the emotions of growing up, Spirited Away felt familiar: a fantasy rooted in the reality of being a kid, in an oversized world that at once enchants and terrifies. The film follows Chihiro, a cherub-cheeked 10-year-old forced to leave her friends and move to a new town. En route, her family happens upon a strange woodland and set out to explore. Soon, Chihiro finds herself lost in a supernatural realm…

IT FEELS STRANGE now that, back when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were cast as cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, people thought playing characters in a same-sex relationship would permanently knock their careers out of shape. It was risky, kissing another man on screen when, people seemed to argue, there were plenty of parts going that required you to snog a woman. Fast-forward 14 years and straight actors are more than happy to play LGBT roles — from Rami Malek to Timothée Chalamet via Cate Blanchett — so much so that a higher degree of devotion to understanding queer themes is now expected of anyone signing up to such a project. Wherever you stand on the issue, it’s clear we’ve come a long way. In Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a…

On 24 August, 2007, Empire’s Dan Jolin met Heath Ledger on the Chicago set of Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film. Less than five months before Ledger’s tragic death by accidental overdose of prescription drugs, it was the first time he’d ever talked about playing the Joker. LEDGER WAS IN civvies, a battered grey trilby pulled low over his head. He’d never seemed comfortable talking to the press, and that day he seemed more nervous than usual. Understandable: he’d never taken a role in such a big movie before, let alone one so tightly shrouded in secrecy. At the time I suspected we’d see something very different from Ledger’s Joker — this was Nolan’s ‘play it for real and make it for grownups’ take on Gotham, after all. But nobody outside of the production…

BRIDESMAIDS LANDED LIKE an oestrogen-studded bomb in 2011, blowing apart almost every single assumption about female-fronted comedies. That they were too big a risk. That they wouldn’t make any money. That men wouldn’t buy a ticket (because, ewww, women making jokes). That women would be too busy buying a ticket to the latest romcom, (with the emphasis firmly on rom). Because, you see: women didn’t want to watch funny women; men certainly didn’t want to watch funny women, so what sense would it make to produce a film that relied on both these maxims being dead wrong? It’s fair to say that cinema oftentimes likes its comfort zone. But Bridesmaids challenged the softness under its arse — even if it did so in the Trojan horse of a ‘wedding movie’. The wedding, as…

THE FIRST BEST Picture winner to win with a parenthesis in its title, Alexander G. Iñárritu’s Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) is perhaps the magic trick of Empire’s lifetime. The 119-minute movie — about fading movie star Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), who attempts to reclaim his fame (and himself) by mounting a Raymond Carver play on Broadway — is constructed to look like one seamless shot, even though the action takes place over three days and numerous locales. Here’s how invisible tricks delivered Iñárritu’s virtuoso vision... MAN IN THE MIRROR As befits a film about ego run rampant, mirrors abound in Birdman. To free up the camera, a lot of effort went into removing the crew’s reflections digitally. A 2.5D digital matte painting of the reflected environment was created replacing everything…

IT SPEAKS TO the phenomenal staying power of Get Out — a rare horror movie that’s told from the black perspective — that its writer-director Jordan Peele picked up the Best Screenplay Oscar over a year after it first debuted in US cinemas. The Academy hadn’t been able to get the film out of their head, and neither, it turned out, could the rest of us. There are few films which have infiltrated the public consciousness quite like the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer who discovers some terrifying secrets when he visits the parents of his white girlfriend. It didn’t take long for terms like ‘The Sunken Place’ to become part of the vernacular, or for jokes like, “I’ve watched Get Out three times” — a…

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD Set five decades ago, in the year Manson’s followers committed their notorious murders, Quentin Tarantino’s Pacific Coast epic shares its Manson with Mindhunter (actor Damon Herriman). Tarantino recreated the cult leader’s ranch close to its actual location, calling the set “kinda spooky”. THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE Starring Hilary Duff as the doomed star, this film was inspired by a quote in an interview Tate gave a year before her murder, saying that she’d had premonitions of her death at the hands of a satanic cult. Tate’s sister Debra has called the endeavour “classless”. CHARLIE SAYS Matt Smith plays Manson in flashbacks, but this indie drama is focused more on his followers, putting three of them (played by Sosie Bacon, Marianne Rendon and Game…

1 Bonanza’s Dan Blocker was offered the role of bomb commander Major ‘King’ Kong, before it went to stuntman Slim Pickens. 2 The film marks the feature debut of one James Earl Jones, who played Kong’s crewmate, Lt. Lothar Zogg. 3 Kong was inspired by a real-life pilot, Alvin ‘Tex’ Johnston, who flew for Bell Aircraft and Boeing, and was famous for his cowboy boots, Stetson and daredevil attitude. 4 In the film’s source novel, Red Alert, the chief bomb was named Lolita. Which, of course, was the name of the movie Kubrick directed immediately prior to Dr. Strangelove.…

ED WOOD (1994) Dan: “Everything came together in just the right way here: Burton’s sense of humour, his visual flair, his love for quirky cinema, his chemistry with Johnny Depp. A film so good it’s, um, good.” BATMAN (1989) Nick: “Martial-arts minions, Prince jams, Jack Nicholson’s all-caps acting: the most fun Bat-film ever.” EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990) Helen: “Arguably Burton’s most personal film, the story of a Goth outsider with uncontrollable hair.” BATMAN RETURNS (1992) Helen: “The finest depiction of Batman’s rogues’ gallery to date and his best romantic match.” SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999) Nick: “Burton at his liveliest, it’s also thick with both dread and fog — a stylish Gothic hoot.” MARS ATTACKS! (1996) Helen: “A gleefully apocalyptic B movie that plays like Gremlins on a worldwide scale. Ack ack ack.”…

What was your role in your first-ever school play? When I was living in the Cayman Islands, I did a nativity play and played Joseph. Sometimes you just come out of the gates swinging, I guess. When in your life were you most starstruck? Probably the first time I ever met Tom Cruise. I know him now and we’re very friendly, but when that guy enters a room there’s an appreciable difference in the atmosphere. He changes the air in the room. It’s an amazing quality. Have you ever sent fan mail? If I really enjoy a performance by an actor I don’t know personally, I will sometimes reach out to them. I think most recently I emailed James McAvoy to say I loved a performance of his. He replied!…

ON HIS CAREER AS AN AMATEUR BOXER “I had my first fight when I was 12. I had 27 fights in total; it was something I thought I wanted to do professionally for a long time. I picked up an injury and was out for 16 months; during the injury break, I joined a drama class on Saturday mornings and started to take it more seriously. After a couple of losses, I didn’t return to the ring.” ON HIS FIRST DAY FILMING PEAKY BLINDERS “I was sandwiched between Tom Hardy, Aidan Gillen and Cillian Murphy. I was nervous, but used that as fuel. I thought: ‘You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t earned it.’ Watching them was a masterclass.” ON PLAYING SAM, A CHILD PSYCHOPATH, IN CHANNEL 4’S BORN TO…

FOR MANY COMIC-book fans it looked like a dream that would never come true. Since Neil Gaiman’s (below) The Sandman debuted in 1989, it was arguably the greatest comic book to remain unadapted, deemed too expensive, too expansive, too uncommercial and too damned weird to ever work on the big screen. All of which was probably once true. However, it is ideal for the new golden age of longform TV — a fact Netflix, which greenlit an adaptation, has woken up to. It centres on Dream, aka Morpheus, lord of the realm of dreams, and one of The Endless, a dysfunctional family of metaphysical beings who each represent an aspect of the human condition: Destiny, Despair, Desire, Delirium, Destruction and Death. Spanning aeons, and with guest appearances from Lucifer, Loki,…

OUT 26 SEPTEMBER RATED TBC / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Rachel Griffiths CAST Teresa Palmer, Sam Neill, Sullivan Stapleton, Magda Szubanski, Sophia Forrest PLOT The uplifting story of jockey Michelle Payne (Teresa Palmer), the youngest of 10 children brought up by single father Paddy (Sam Neill), who became the first woman to ever win the prestigious Melbourne Cup in 2015 after overcoming a serious fall that saw her put into an induced coma. FOR A RACE that stops the nation, the Melbourne Cup has not been a prolific source of cinematic inspiration for Australian filmmakers. And a quick glance at the form of previous runners reveals why. While rare winners like director Simon Wincer’s beloved Phar Lap have won audience favour, lame nags like The Cup, starring Steven Curry, often stumbled…

Marvel Studios VFX supervisor Jake Morrison remembers how seeing the morphing-machine madness of Terminator 2 changed his life “I WAS 16 or 17 when I first saw Terminator 2, at the ABC in Ewell, Surrey. This was well before visual effects was a focus or interest, because in those days it didn’t exist as a thing you could aim for. I remember walking out with my mate Fergus, and saying, ‘Anything’s possible now.’ Which, looking back, was true. Terminator 2 fundamentally did things that absolutely could not be done before. “To me, the most exciting thing about visual effects is when it’s applied intelligently to storytelling and isn’t just spectacle for the sake of it. That moment when the T-1000 [Robert Patrick] dissolves through the bars is extremely effective. As was the scene where the knife…

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, to adapt a line from its narrator, is a film that crawled through a river of shit and came out on the other side. Commercially ignored upon release, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of a little-known Stephen King prison-set novella has become widely considered one of the greatest films of all time: beautifully acted, uplifting, a film that makes you believe in the power of hope. Here, director Darabont reflects on the long journey of his beloved debut film. Shawshank is one of the films of our lifetime. How does that make you feel? Buoyant and delighted and extremely grateful. Gosh, it was so long ago now. Twenty-five years. Twenty-six, I guess, since we shot it. To know that it’s had this kind of lasting effect on people is exceptionally gratifying. It’s…

1997 WAS A cool year for cinema. What were the auteurs doing? L.A. Confidential. Boogie Nights. Jackie Brown. Lost Highway. This was independent spirit writ large, the indie boom having blossomed big-time. Even the blockbusters — Face/ Off, Men In Black, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Con Air — were postmodern, satirical and hip (as always, let’s forget Batman & Robin ever happened). But the biggest film of them all? It was so wonderfully uncool. Until this point, James Cameron had been pretty cool himself — all of his directorial output was genre work, sometimes sci-fi, sometimes action, mostly both. Now, though, he wanted to make an old-fashioned romantic drama. Nobody expected this to work, including, eventually, Cameron himself: as the troubled production dragged on (160 arduous days), the budget…

MOST ICONIC MOVIE monsters are not renowned for their grooming. You wouldn’t seek moisturising tips from Frankenstein’s Monster, or ask Pinhead if you can borrow his lip balm. The exception to the rule is Patrick Bateman, the immaculately turned-out and dispassionately homicidal protagonist of American Psycho. Mary Harron’s 2000 satirical horror movie, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, is a character study of a man who isn’t really a man; as he explains in chilling voiceover, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory... I simply am not there. He’s all soulless surface — but the hands of Harron and star Christian Bale, it’s a surface that’s endlessly hypnotic. THE FACE Even now, in…

THERE WERE BIGGER films in 2003 — this was the year of Finding Nemo and The Return Of The King — and those more garlanded, the final Lord Of The Rings film winning a whopping 11 Oscars. But while in January of that year, if you were to overhear film connoisseurs discussing Coppola or Scarlett they likely meant Francis Ford or O’Hara, come December, chances are they’d be referring to Sofia or Johansson. Lost In Translation is a film both timeless and deeply of its time. A vignette on loneliness and the craving for genuine connection, it was released just two months after the launch of MySpace in August 2003, arguably the gateway to this newfangled thing, ‘social media’. You’ll see no smartphones on the bar at the Park Hyatt,…

AS GUILLERMO DEL TORO stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in February 2018, holding his Best Picture Oscar aloft for The Shape Of Water, it’s important to remember that this wasn’t his first awards rodeo. Eleven years prior, he had already shattered the glass ceiling of fantasy films and rode roughshod over the notion that the Academy has disdain for genre pics when Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars, including a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Not bad for a deeply personal Spanish-language film featuring fairies, fauns and fascists. Here, Doug Jones, del Toro’s long-time friend and collaborator, who played two roles in the film — the Faun and the chilling Pale Man — reflects on del Toro’s masterpiece. ON ITS ENDURING APPEAL: “The convention fan circuit is quite…

HAVING ALREADY SPENT $100 million on Avatar, James Cameron was three years into the four-and-a-half-year production before he saw a completed shot that gave him any confidence it would work. The first trailer didn’t give the public much confidence either, treated with about as much positivity as the recent Cats unveiling. People mentioned FernGully. They mentioned the Smurfs. How goofy it all looked. What a joke this would be. Right? Titanic had consumed Cameron. For years after he explored the deep. When he finally emerged, he set to work on something that seemed even more ambitious than the biggest film of all time. This was unprecedented world-building, in which we would all virtually visit a 22nd century jungle moon. He would pioneer the medium to get there. Cameron wanted the experience of…

IN 2012, THERE was an idea. An idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could create something more than just a regular sequel. To see if multiple superheroes could work together without making one almighty mess. It was the The Avengers Initiative, and it changed the game for good. Here’s how. SUPER-SIZING THE CAST Marvel Studios had already risked frontloading its less well-known (Iron Man) and goofier (Thor, Captain America) characters through Phase 1, but that was nothing compared to the risk of bringing them all together — to have Tony Stark rubbing shoulders with a literal Norse god, while fighting hordes of space aliens. But thanks to a sharp script from geek god Joss Whedon — who knew a thing or two about ensemble…

ASK ANY ACTION director worth their salt — your Edgar Wrights, your Gareth Evans, your Chris McQuarries — about George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and chances are a strange, beatific smile will cross their face. A single tear may even roll down their cheeks. For them, and for us, Mad Max: Fury Road is the movie that raised the bar on action filmmaking. And it’s all down to the genius of a quiet, septuagenarian Australian doctor who had spent the last couple of decades making movies about dancing penguins, talking pigs — anything but rollicking, high-octane, desert-set chase movies. But when he came back to action, Miller knew exactly what he was aiming for. “I wanted to do virtually a silent movie with sound and music,” he says. “And on a…

Empire went on set of Black Panther in Atlanta in 2017 for a cover story the following year. Producer Nate Moore had developed the story in the Marvel writers’ programme and was key in the film making it to screen. This excerpt from a second interview with him, just before Black Panther’s release, revealed the personal, cultural and cinematic significance of the film that would go on to gross a billion dollars in just 26 days. Can you remember when you first encountered Black Panther? It was as a kid. There was a Captain America cover with Captain America in the foreground, flanked by the Falcon and Black Panther. That was the first time I saw Black Panther and he was awesome. The character design was really unique. When I started getting into comics,…

“THIS IS THE END” a voice rang out over a sky full of burning palm trees. In fact, it was just the beginning. When Apocalypse Now blazed into cinemas 40 years ago, it opened with a scene that’s as mesmerising today as it was in 1979. A jungle engulfed in flames blurs into a face haunted by untold terrors, his head — and seemingly, world — turned upside down. The noise of distant helicopter blades accompanies the sight of a spinning hotel ceiling fan, as strange visions of ancient relics fade in and out of frame. All the while, that voice carries on, the sorrowful sound of Doors singer Jim Morrison: “This is the end…” It was the start of not just a cinematic masterpiece — director Francis Ford Coppola’s…

“IT’S SCARY,” SAYS Duncan Jones. “I’ve been making movies long enough that I’m celebrating the tenth anniversary of something.” That something being Moon, Jones’ 2009 debut, a lo-fi sci-fi which focuses upon Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a lunar technician ploughing a lonely furrow 380,000 kilometres from home. Until things change when he discovers that he’s actually a clone, part of a long line of clones, and — along with a new version of himself — starts planning a way out. Moon stood out for its spare atmosphere, its stunning Rockwell performance(s) and Jones’ eye for detail, but over the last 10 years it’s become a modern classic. The director took time out from prepping new movie Rogue Trooper to tell us 10 things about his first film. 1 It wasn’t…

JUST LIKE DENNIS, the mud-gatherer played so memorably by one Michael Palin in Monty Python And The Holy Grail, The Missionary is now 37. Often overlooked in Palin’s CV, The Missionary is a charming character comedy about an English missionary, the Reverend Charles Fortescue (Palin), who becomes involved with Maggie Smith’s adventurous Lady Ames, and establishes a mission to try to save a group of prostitutes. Empire spoke with Palin about the film that saw him write for the first time without his long-time writing partner, Terry Jones. Not wishing to age you, but The Missionary is now 37 years old. Almost everything ages me now, really. I don’t feel any older mentally. Probably I feel less old, so I always tend to be slightly taken aback by the fact…

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER The first Disney+ Marvel show, written by John Wick’s Derek Kolstad, will feature returning Civil War villain Zemo (Daniel Bruhl). LOKI The Tom Hiddleston-starring series will continue the Loki storyline directly from Avengers: Endgame’s 2012 flashback. Mewling quims are not yet confirmed. WANDAVISION The Scarlet Witch’s 2021 TV show sets up her appearance in Doctor Strange 2 later that year — and also includes a grown-up Monica Rambeau from Captain Marvel. HAWKEYE Jeremy Renner has confirmed that Clint Barton will explore his Ronin moniker from Endgame — while introducing new Hawkeye Kate Bishop.…

JENNIFER KENT DIRECTOR, THE BABADOOK AND THE NIGHTINGALE “I wasn’t aware that you could be nominated to be a voter for the Academy, so it was a real shock when the email came in. I woke up in the morning and I had this email congratulating me and I didn’t know what was going on. To know that I was nominated in both writing and directing categories — it was so special. My manager said, ‘That’s not bad for a director who’s never made a film in America!’ I think the Academy’s push for diversity is important because if you’re only representing a small portion of the planet then you’re only pushing forward films with that small focus. We need to see ourselves mirrored back to us on screen. It’s important…

THE SUMMER OF 1989 saw madness erupt all over the globe, and it was all thanks to a nocturnal mammal. “It was crazy, weird and bizarre,” says Sam Hamm, co-writer of Tim Burton’s Batman and one of the people responsible for the ensuing Batmania. “There’s nothing you could do but disassociate from it. To be honest, I found it kind of scary. I was grateful when things calmed down a little bit.” The project, a fresh big-screen spin on the 1930s-created Caped Crusader, had been in development throughout the ’70s and ’80s, nobody quite sure how to make it work. CBS considered shooting a film where Batman went into space. Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy were, at one point, suggested for Batman and Robin. Peter O’Toole was in talks to play…

Back in 1992, Empire met an excitable unknown director named Quentin Tarantino. These were our first impressions of the man who’d soon conquer Hollywood. TALL, RANGY AND sporting an unkempt thatch of hair, Quentin Tarantino is not your immediate idea of a “man of the moment”. Tucked away in the corner of a Whitehall pub, he is more interested in this, his third pint of draught Guinness, than buying into the Next Big Thing malarkey. Probably because he wolfed down too many E numbers as a child, Tarantino is extremely animated. He is also eminently likeable, which probably explains how he got away without a dressing-down from the world’s number-one female recording artist [Madonna], having described her as a “regular fuck machine” in his script. Speaking quickly in a voice not unlike…

IT COULD’VE BEEN just a chilly, technical exercise in computer-generated imagery, but instead Toy Story became one of the most heartfelt, resonant films of the 1990s. A hellish production period, forging a path into untested territory, taught the studio the essential elements they would need to establish the most successful animation house in history... THE AMBITION Pixar had been a software company for its first decade of existence, with John Lasseter’s short films designed chiefly to showcase the company’s image-rendering product. Stepping into feature animation required an untested team to do something that was — at least when they started — impossible. So, inspired by the success of the short Tin Toy, Pixar chose a story that their technology could (theoretically) handle: toy characters composed of mostly hard, shiny surfaces.…

A MAN DONNING a baseball cap shouldn’t be significant. But when Mahershala Ali walked on stage in Hall H at the tail-end of Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con presentation just a couple of months ago, and nonchalantly placed a cap on his head with a logo that revealed not only that Marvel was planning a Blade movie, but that he — a two-time Academy Award winner, no less — was going to play the title role, it was laden with significance. Because Blade is where, in a roundabout way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe began. When discussing the origins of the MCU, and the larger comic-book movie bubble (which still shows no signs of slowing its expansion, let alone popping), the ill-informed will often cite Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. And yes, that film was…

In 2001, Empire ran its first major report on Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. This excerpt gives a sense of the scale and intensity of the high-risk endeavour — not to mention the passion that was being poured into it. AS THE SHOOT wore on and the pressure mounted, Jackson could be seen cycling from set to set at the Wellington studio on an old bicycle, eager to save time. Orlando Bloom remembers one miraculous day when he traversed the whole country by helicopter to get to his next shot, complete with stick-on ears and blond wig. Promised breaks came and went, six-day weeks of 14- to 15-hour days became the norm. And somehow throughout it all, spinning every plate, Jackson just kept going. “I’m totally unfit,…

EDGAR WRIGHT AND Simon Pegg’s romzomcom is that rarest of things: a universally beloved British horror comedy. Perhaps it connected because of its whip-smarts and its whip-pans. Or its emphasis on character work amidst the gore. Or maybe because it’s really, really funny. Either way, it launched Wright and Pegg’s movie careers, and established the former as a significant new directorial voice. But it wasn’t always thus. As Wright explains, it took a while for the first flavour of the Cornetto Trilogy to be hailed as a classic. NIGHT OF THE SHAUN Coming off their sitcom Spaced, Wright and Pegg struggled with scepticism, and a low budget. “People would be dismissive of us to our faces. I remember vividly being in the reception at Pathé, and the receptionist said, I…

THE COEN BROTHERS and Cormac McCarthy are not an obviously heavenly match. The directors, even at their most serious, are poets of absurdity, while humour is about the last thing you associate with the black-souled characters of McCarthy’s gorgeous, violent novels. But look closer and there are common threads between the two works. Both McCarthy and the Coens delve into the tragic ironies of human existence and the universe’s lack of concern for our little plans, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the match turned McCarthy’s book into a Best Picture Oscar-winner and fuelled a trend for warped, reimagined Westerns. We know what to expect from this story, or we think we do. Josh Brolin’s resourceful, basically decent Llewelyn Moss is clearly our hero, so he’s probably going to…

WHEN VISUAL-EFFECTS supervisor Paul Franklin first read the script for Inception (in a locked, guarded room in LA, late February 2009), he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “I was left reeling,” he admits. He was expecting it to be another modest, relatively low-budget film, like 2006’s The Prestige. Then Christopher Nolan revealed there would be 800 VFX shots — more than in either of his Batman movies to date. “I thought, ‘Ooh, what have I gotten myself into?’” Franklin says. “It was an extraordinary confluence of all different types of filmmaking, with a genius director given full rein to do whatever he wanted.” As these four gobsmacking set-pieces prove… THE “BALLET OF DESTRUCTION” When Ariadne (Ellen Page) realises she and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) aren’t in a Parisian café but a constructed…

IT’S THE FILM that puts the ‘pace’ into ‘space’. Ten minutes into the 91-minute runtime of Gravity, debris travelling faster than a speeding bullet hits the Space Shuttle Explorer, and our heroes, Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Lt Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), are almost immediately in the gravest peril. Latecomers will not be admitted. Things hardly slow down after that, director Alfonso Cuarón barely stopping for whatever breath is left in the astronauts’ fast-fading oxygen tanks. That opening sequence runs an astonishing 17 minutes without cutting, and in fact, the entire film has just 156 shots, far fewer than most conventional films. Cuarón loves a long, uninterrupted take — his filmography, from Children Of Men to Roma, is full of them — and watching Gravity is like bearing witness to an immersive, incredibly stressful…

“CAREER SUICIDE” IS a phrase Barry Jenkins heard a lot during the eight-year struggle to get Moonlight made. “We are going to follow a young black boy struggling with his sexuality and his mom is addicted to crack cocaine,” Jenkins told Empire in 2018 about the pitch. “We’re going to cast three actors to play him and the last actor looks nothing like the other two.” The finished film not only gifted Jenkins the most famous Best Picture win in Oscar history, but became a cinematic rarity. Brokeback Mountain had tackled homosexuality and masculinity, while Crash highlighted the hardships of growing up black in America. Moonlight, though, is the only Best Picture to hang a lantern on black/queer intersectionality — and do so in such delicate, nuanced ways. It also consigned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to the dustbin. The film…

David Fincher is issuing instructions to a moustachioed man, who is gazing into a mirror, adjusting the shoulder strap on the woman’s slip he’s wearing. The crew, similarly delicately, adjust the lighting for this moment of self-fulfilment — one of a series of episode-puncturing vignettes of Dennis Rader (played by Sonny Valicenti), aka The BTK Killer. Bind. Torture. Kill. And do it quickly. Fincher is on a tight schedule for these late additions to the lengthy shoot. While the scene is set, he sits at the monitor with lead writer Courtenay Miles, adjusting dialogue, as the art department present him with crime-scene photographs and mementos of victims for sign-off. Multitasking can be murder. Camera set, they shoot. Once. Twice. “That is fucking creepozoid,” says Fincher, after the third take. If…

Apocalypse Now belongs to an extremely rare echelon of films. This might seem odd, but to talk about it I need to evoke Chinatown. It’ll make sense in a minute… If a filmmaker ever pitches you a character relationship that attempts to approximate the Möbius strip filled with obsession and madness embodied by Willard and Kurtz… trust me, when I say — it won’t work. Likewise, if someone pitches a Jake Gittes-esque arc of a guy who makes it his business to not get involved, but he gets involved along the way — it won’t work. These are films that are referenced frequently (by me included), but the reference is meaningless because they are singular entities that can never be recreated. The elements within cannot be transferred into another film…

1979 1941 Spielberg might have refused to do Jaws 2, but he was happy to go back in the water to spoof himself during the opening of his World War II comedy flop, when a skinny-dipping swimmer (Jaws victim Susan Backlinie) falls afoul of a Japanese submarine — all to the iconic John Williams theme. 1983 JAWS 3-D Sadly, all of Joe Alves’ shark-based experience didn’t make the second Jaws sequel — to this day Alves’ sole directing credit — a success. The SeaWorld Orlando setting made the shoot more bearable, but a low budget and a penny-pinching producer (Alan Landsburg) meant there was little substance to match the 3D novelty. 1987 JAWS: THE REVENGE The nadir of the franchise. In this deservedly ridiculed stinker, Lorraine Gary returned as Ellen…

BY 1992, HEAT auteur Michael Mann had made a name for himself with a series of visually stylish contemporary crime thrillers steeped in the legacy of Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Pierre Melville. Thief, Manhunter and L.A. Takedown traded the emotion drenched tropes of the genre with a cold, procedural reality punctuated by shocking moments of visceral brutality. Not only that, he had changed the face, and the pastel-shaded sartorial stylings, of the TV buddy cop series as executive producer on Miami Vice. And then he turned his attention to the period drama – albeit an action-packed period drama. Not that he was a stranger to historical storytelling. Mann’s expressionistic 1983 adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep, his self-proclaimed “World War II fairy tale,” had already seen him…