Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i Empire

GETTY PICTURE THE scene. It’s October 31. You’re in a packed London venue. An old man, who doesn’t look anything like a music star, walks on stage, sits down at a keyboard, and starts playing a familiar melody: the theme from Halloween. The crowd goes wild. Welcome to John Carpenter’s World Tour. ‘Musician goes on tour’ is not usually worthy of note. But when that musician is Carpenter, the great director who also happened to compose some of the most iconic scores of the ’70s and ’80s, it’s time to get excited. Well, some of us are excited. “It’s terrifying,” laughs Carpenter. “But to get to do this late in my life, that’s just sensational.” Of late, the 68 year-old Carpenter has been turning the passion for music that fuelled…

SHORTLY AFTER Moon made his name as a director, Duncan Jones announced plans to make dark sci-fi thriller Mute. But 2011’s Source Code got in the way, and then he devoted years to making fantasy epic Warcraft. But with that movie finally set for release (turn to p.98 for more), Jones is ready to turn up the volume on Mute. We spoke to him and his producing partner, Stuart Fenegan, for the first word on the film and a look at this stunning concept art. What’s the basic story of Mute ? JONES: It’s the story of Leo, who’s mute due to a childhood accident. He’s looking for a missing person in mid-21st century Berlin — the Casablanca of the future. Why set it in the future?…

• (*OkAy, TEN) 1 Although it unfolds in surprising ways across its 12 episodes, Billions essentially sketches the conflict between Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), a self-made hedge fund billionaire, and Chuck Roades (Paul Giamatti), a United States attorney looking to bring him down. “We think of billionaires as nation states, and United States attorneys as kings,” says show co-creator Brian Koppelman. “The show really is about each guy trying to keep his kingdom in order while preparing to do battle with the other,” adds fellow showrunner, David Levien. 2 The clash between ‘Axe’ and Roades is not a simple case of good versus evil, either. “Our goal was to present these guys as 360-degree characters,” says Levien. “We didn’t want to do a thing where it was the bad rich…

SINCE HAYAO Miyazaki retired in 2013, Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation house for which he made so many classics, looked as though it would continue without him. But with the release of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Oscar-nominated When Marnie Was There, it would seem that this is it for the legendary studio. We spoke to Yonebayashi about being the man behind the last Studio Ghibli film. Did you know, while making the movie, that it might be Studio Ghibli’s last one? Yes, I had heard from producer Toshio Suzuki. The decision had been made to release the production staff by the end of 2014. But this wasn’t a surprise for me because I had been told since I joined the studio that this was a possibility. I thought it was very much…

GROOMING: MIRA H. STYLING: KRISTINE KILTY. BEN WEARS: TLSHIRT: WOLSEY; SWEATER: THEORY; COAT: BLK DNM; TROUSERS: JOHN VARVATOS; BOOTS: JOHN VARVATO; SHOT AT TRUMAN BREWERY, LONDON. ONE DAY IN 2002, EIGHT years before a little Australian crime indie called Animal Kingdom swerved from left-field and changed his life, Ben Mendelsohn found himself sitting alone in a make-up trailer wearing a blue pig’s head. It is fair to say that, when he had accepted the Aussie Oscar for his supporting role in coming-of-age drama The Year My Voice Broke 15 years earlier, this was not how he’d envisaged his future in the entertainment business. But now here he was, third space-pig from the left. “It was an episode of Farscape,” he remembers. “So there I am, just waiting alone in a…

JAMESON BEST ACTOR MATT DAMON / THE MARTIN This isn’t the first time Matt Damon has won an Empire Award. Ten years ago, he bagged the Best Actor gong for The Bourne Supremacy, and on the evening of our 2016 show, he’s rushed in straight from a relentless shooting schedule, playing Jason Bourne again. But he’s here to pick up for a very different role this time around: stranded astronaut Mark Watney in The Martian, a character who plays to Damon’s nice-guy strengths, staying chipper in the face of even the most extreme adversity. “It was awesome, one of the greatest experiences of my life,” says Damon of working with Ridley Scott, largely on location in the Jordanian desert. “The best it gets making movies is when you have a…

INDIANA JONES, JAMES BOND, Will Kane. As you count down the top ten of the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Heroes, all is as you’d imagine it would be. But there, sitting quietly at number six, is a rather different character, a very different hero. Not a chest-beating, gun-toting, whip-wielding protagonist, but a softly spoken intellectual who is slight of frame. Twenty-five years on from the release of The Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal Lecter has become a bona fide money-spinning franchise in his own right. Books, films and TV shows have grown up and flourished around the Chianti-sipping serial killer, his “fff fff fff” now more recognisable to the ear than most classic one-liners. And while Anthony Hopkins undoubtedly gave one of the performances of his career in Lambs,…

05.14 “Who The Hell Are You?” James Parks has the distinction of playing the same character in two tarantino movies, appearing as sheriff edgar mcGraw in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Death Proof (he also reprises the character in Machete). For The Hateful Eight he learned to drive a six-horse stagecoach. “i had to train for three months,” Parks says. “the horses pull hard, so pretty quickly it can get out of hand. they used to tell me that you can go from hero to zero in one second.” 14.33 Daisy Takes A Hit A controversial scene sees bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) elbow criminal Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the face. “I don’t give a fuck about the fact she’s a woman,” says Tarantino. “She’s a character…

Dark Souls III OUT NOW N PC, PS4, XBOX ONE NOW 30 PER CENT LIGHTER FROM THE DOOM-laden opening to its final, nightmarish boss, Dark Souls III is an oppressive, grim experience that will see you butchered by harmless-looking trash mobs and crushed to bloody ruin by hulking, story-high behemoths. And Dark Souls fans wouldn’t have it any other way. Risen from an ancient grave, you set out to hack and slash your way through Lothric, a dying land where humanity’s works have been reduced to ash and embers. Your aim is to defeat the Lords Of Cinder in an effort to restore the Flame Of Life. As ever with this series, the baffling lore is secondary to the struggle, whereby you gradually explore the city’s crumbling majesty while engaging…

MARTIAN MIX-UP? hey guys! I’ve been a subscriber for some time now and one of the first features I turn to is the Empire crossword. I always scold myself if I have to turn to IMdb for answers. however, this month, I was stumped by 14 across. the answer appeared to be art, as in art Malik, star of True Lies, but the clue listed him as being found “amid The Martian”. at this point, I realised you were referring to his presence in John Carter — the same red Planet, if not the correct film for the clue. am I right? NICK EDMONDSON, SURBITON Actually, Nick, no, we’re afraid you’re not. When a crossword clue uses the word “amid”, it’s an indication that the answer is in the following…

ET PHASERS TO party. Star Trek is turning 50, and it’s doing so in style with Star Trek Beyond. It’s the third Trek film to explore strange new worlds with the rebooted cast, and it might once again change the status quo. “It was important to really deconstruct the idea of Star Trek, the idea of the Federation, and why it’s special,” says new director Justin Lin. “We’ll be poking at a lot of different things.” Following their brush with Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and the crew of the Enterprise have spent two years nosing around the final frontier, and have come to rest at a Federation outpost. There they encounter Idris Elba’s alien nutjob, Krall, who rains fire and scorn on the…

IT’S A VERY different feel, different hero and different set of circumstances to what we’ve seen before,” says Benedict Cumberbatch, star of Marvel’s forthcoming magical mystery tour Doctor Strange. “It’s another moment during Marvel’s evolution.” Back in the ’60s and ’70s, Doctor Strange was the hippies’ favourite. Dr. Stephen Strange, an arrogant Manhattan neurosurgeon who travels to the Himalayas to recover from a career-ending accident and ends up as the Sorcerer Supreme, opened the door to Marvel’s most psychedelic adventures. Under the tutelage of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One, Cumberbatch’s tormented hero learns magic and discovers hidden parallel dimensions. This multiverse was teased at the end of Ant-Man, but Doctor Strange goes the whole nine yards, with major ramifications for all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Ancient One will teach…

ON THE STAGE OF a wood-panelled social club in north London, a band, Foregone Conclusion, is performing an excruciating reggae protest song, Equality Street, at an ironic student event called Aga Do Do’s (“The Shittest Night Around” proclaims a banner). The singer, a goateed middle-aged man, launches into a ragga interlude in a cod-Jamaican accent while his bandmates look as if they wish the ground would swallow them up. David Brent lives. The resurrection of the character that launched Ricky Gervais into the stratosphere was by no means a (sorry) foregone conclusion. After ending The Office on a high in 2003, Gervais left Britain’s most embarrassing boss in limbo as he joined the comedy A-list. “To my mind, and I think to Ricky, Brent was dead and buried,” says producer…

ONE MAN'S BIG break is… another man’s big break. John Boyega had long been attached to Race, the story of legendary sprinter Jesse Owens, but then got an offer he couldn’t refuse from a galaxy far, far away. Exit Boyega, flanked by stormtroopers. Enter Stephan James, grabbing the role with both hands. “John was really up for it, but he couldn’t turn down the opportunity he got,” concedes the film’s director, Stephen Hopkins. “I am not disappointed. Stephan is an extraordinary athlete as well as an actor. He is probably more like Jesse. He is a very Zen kind of character, which is how I see Jesse Owens.” Owens is one of the greatest athletes of all time, famous for winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, where he…

COLOSSI OF COMEDY they may be, but it’s unlikely that Paul and Barry Chuckle — the Chuckle Brothers — will ever be featured in an Oscar acceptance speech. Unless, that is, Marc Coleman ever wins an Oscar. For he was the winner of this year’s Jameson Empire Done In 60 Seconds, the short film competition that challenges you to remake any film you like, but with a running time of only one minute, with his unique reimagining of Brian Helgeland’s Legend as a vehicle for the Chuckles. Featuring custard-pie fights, great gags, and “to me” and “to you” knuckle dusters, it was the unanimous choice of this year’s DISS panel. Congratulations on winning DISS 2016. Has it sunk in? It hasn’t. It still feels pretty mad. I’m over the moon.…

Indie horror Green Room is a “riotous, rough-hewn and rousing punk reinvention of ’70s-style grindhouse exploitation-with-a-brain cinema”. And they aren’t just anyone’s words. They’re ours, and we gave it four stars (see p.44). Directed by Jeremy Saulnier and starring Patrick Stewart as a neo-Nazi gang leader, we recommend you see it. So much so, that on May 1 we’re putting on screenings at 21 Picturehouse cinemas across the country. Hope to see you there. HEAD TO EMPIREONLINE.COM/ GREENROOMSCREENING FOR FULL DETAILS AND TO CLAIM YOUR TICKETS.…

“I CALL THIS THE TORTURE PIT” Shane Black has invited Empire to his LA home, an elegant townhouse in the old-money neighbourhood of Hancock Park, and led us past bookshelf after bookshelf of detective novels (from Chandler and Hammett to the lowliest pulps) to the very spot where he now works on his scripts; a fitting place, he feels, for us to discuss them. Fortunately, it doesn’t look at all torturous: a pair of deep velvet couches face each other across a sturdy, wooden coffee table. But Black, the man who gave us Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and Iron Man 3, takes the business of screenwriting very seriously — and has done for most of his life, with incredible success. Black was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in December…

DUNCAN JONES WAS ALWAYS A WARRIOR. He’d wear the heaviest armour, strap on a shield and, as he fondly recalls, “just stand out front and whack things”. His business partner and producer, Stuart Fenegan, preferred to be a paladin, smiting his foes with holy power. Bill Westenhofer, appropriately enough for an Oscar-winning visual-effects supervisor, was a fireball-hurling mage. And British actor Robert Kazinsky, the most dedicated Warcrafter of all the cast and crew of Warcraft, favoured the runesword-wielding death knight. “I was in the top ten DPS for my class for three years straight during Wrath Of The Lich King,” he tells Empire proudly. If that last sentence made complete sense to you, then you are likely as excited about the imminent arrival of Jones’ adaptation of Blizzard’s 22 year-old…

• TRUNk ARChIvE She may depict one of the X-Men universe’s few non-mutant characters but, in real life, Rose Byrne is adept at shape-shifting. Here is an actress who has effortlessly sold everything from a flinty lawyer navigating the cool, cruel world of corporate attorneys (Damages) to an aggressively backcombed comedy villainess (Spy). And now, perhaps most impressive of all, on a brisk New York morning, she is doing a pretty convincing impersonation of a new parent who has had a decent night’s sleep. The 36 year-old Australian recently gave birth to her first child, a boy called Rocco, and she is still adjusting to her new normal. “He’s two months old so the sleep’s not great,” says Byrne brightly, in a sing-song Sydney accent that has audibly withstood nearly…

* (okay, we’ve included gorillas, orangutans and other assorted primates) 1 Hey Good Lookin’ (Tom Hiddleston and the Saddle Spring Boys) i am prone to irony. hank (Tom Hiddleston) sings this song on hank williams day just as his relationship with his wife audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) is coming to an end. 2 Move It On Over (Tom Hiddleston and the Saddle Spring Boys) this was the first song that hank recorded that actually became a hit. it’s a song about a guy getting put in the doghouse. 3 Anytime (Eddy Arnold) 4 Field Hand Man (The Delmore Brothers) 5 Jambalaya (Tom Hiddleston and the Saddle Spring Boys) this plays over the credits. tom had done such a good job with this, it would be a disservice not to have it…

Zombieland “BILL MURRAY, YOU’RE A ZOMBIE?” SETTING THE SCENE Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who most recently brought us Deadpool, knew they wanted a big cameo in their zombie horror-comedy. More specifically, they wanted a movie star who would happily play a funhouse version of themself, as one of the last survivors of the undead apocalypse. They tried to get Kevin Bacon, Joe Pesci, Sylvester Stallone and many more, before landing the biggest fish of all: Bill Murray. The resulting sequences are giddy fun, as Murray apologises for Garfield, acts out Ghostbusters with a vacuum cleaner and scares our heroes by pretending to be a walking corpse. INT. MANSION — DAY In a vast drawing room, Wichita (Emma Stone) hits golf balls with a club, while Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson)…

BLACK-CLAD stormtroopers staring impassively as something burns in the background. AT-ATs clomping around on a tropical beach. And not a lightsaber in sight. Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One is Star Wars, alright, but viewed from a whole new angle. We’ve known for some time that the first in the Star Wars Story anthology, which will fill in the blanks around the Skywalker-focused Episodes, would centre on the Rebel mission to steal the plans to the first Death Star, and that it would be more of a war movie than any Star Wars yet. When the movie’s stunning first trailer hit in early April, it was a surprising and pleasing mix of classic references (not one, but two Gonk droids) and things we haven’t seen in Star Wars before. Although we know,…

PIECE OF DIRECTION BEST On Dean Spanley, a scene with Peter O’Toole took three days to shoot. It was me talking and I was terribly nervous. I said, “Peter, I’m sorry, you’ve had to listen to this crap for three days.” He said, “Dear boy, I’m enchanted.” I thought, “I’ll be okay now.” WORST On Possession, there’s a scene where I slap Isabelle Adjani and (director) Andrzej Zulawski said, “You just have to slap her.” I said, “I can’t hit a woman.” He said, “You’ve got to do it,” and Isabelle said, “You’ve got to do it.” I was in tears afterwards. AUDITION BEST I’ve hardly done any auditions but I did audition for Pretty Woman. I thought I was pretty good, but obviously not good enough! It was fun…

THERE ARE FEW sequences in cinema history as spectacular as the chariot race from 1959’s Ben-Hur. Remaking it seems like an act of folly, but Timur Bekmambetov, the brave soul who’s giving it a go with the new Ben-Hur, has an ace up his sleeve. And, surprisingly, it’s not just a CG ace. “Our technology is now far away from what they had previously,” the Russian-Kazakh director tells Empire, “and the rigs we have are unbelievable. The goal for me is to shoot these action scenes so realistically that the audience feels that they’re in the chariot, driving.” Empire bears witness to the filmmaker’s ambition, from the stands of a newly constructed Circus Maximus built at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The story’s two great rivals, Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and Messala…

IT’S A BIG JOB,” SAYS Steven Spielberg, appropriately enough, about The BFG. “There are thousands of effects shots. I think it’s the most ambitious motion capture of a character that any film has ever done.” Just one look at Mark Rylance, working with Spielberg again so soon after bagging the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Bridge Of Spies, confirms that. As the towering beanpole at the heart of Roald Dahl’s classic 1982 children’s book, this is Rylance as you’ve never seen him before. This is a Rylance big enough to give Frank Stallone, who famously railed against the British actor pipping his big brother Sly to that Oscar, pause for thought. This is a Rylance almost entirely composed of pixels. The BFG — Big Friendly Giant if we’re being formal…

IF YOU’RE surprised that 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot has earned a sequel, that’s okay: so are the filmmakers. “We were finding our way through that movie all the time we were making it,” says producer Andrew Form. “Finding the tone and the design and the visual effects was very hard…” Even the decision about whether to split Shredder and Eric Sachs (William Fichtner) into two separate characters was only made in the edit suite. Happily for all involved, it worked out, earning a not inconsiderable half-billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Energised by that success, it’s a more confident Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael who will step forward in Out Of The Shadows. Which is just as well, since they’re facing a greatly increased line-up of the…

The Ghostbusters are back in business. Empire can testify to this, since we’re standing outside the supernatural exterminators’ iconic Hook & Ladder 8 firehouse HQ, next to not one but two parked Ectomobiles. Walking in, we clock gleaming white surfaces, a Terror Dog head mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy, and a receptionist behind a vast desk. Although she doesn’t yell, “We got one!”, it’s enough to make us wonder if we’ve accidentally stepped through a portal to the seventh dimension. This, though, is not on a New York street but the Sony lot in Culver City, Los Angeles. There’s no sign of Ray sliding down the firepole or Egon inspecting spores, moulds and fungi. Instead, we’re greeted by Ivan Reitman, director of the first two Ghostbusters movies.…

Ghostbusters was something I grew up with. Besides being a dentist, my great-grandfather Sam was a spiritualist and a researcher. He would visit all the psychic acts that came to Kingston, Ontario, and decide whether something was for real or a hoax. He had a live-in medium, named Walter Ashurst, to channel spirits in the old farmhouse where I still live in Canada. One time Ashurst crawled up on the chair, hunched over, gnarled his hands and began to speak in a German accent about physics and fission and atomic energy. A little research was done afterwards, and it was discovered that Dr. Charles Steinmetz, the famous inventor, used to crawl up on his chair like that when he worked. It became a family business. My grandfather, a Bell telephone…

SOUTH PARK Widely regarded as one of the show’s best episodes, Season 10’s Make Love, Not Warcraft saw Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny suffering a full-blown WoW addiction. Partly created from game footage (developer Blizzard proved surprisingly amenable), it saw the gang brave scorn, obesity and RSI to take down a super high-level player in-game. THE BIG BANG THEORY No surprises that a show about übergeeks should have its own Warcraft-themed diversions. Not only do Howard and Bernadette split after she catches him “doing the cybernasty” with Lucinda the troll, but Sheldon’s level 85 blood elf gets hacked and the thief makes off with his gold armour and Wand Of Untainted Power. LEEROY JENKINS Of the countless Warcraft memes, Leeroy Jenkins (Google it) is by far the most famous. Revolving…

TO DESCRIBE AXEL BRAUN as prolific would be a grave understatement. Over the last two-and-a-half decades, he has produced, written and directed more than 500 pornographic movies, immortalising on video every carnal activity you can imagine, and probably a great many you can’t. He is most famous, however, for the hardcore parodies of sci-fi, comic-book and superhero movies that he has been producing under the Axel Braun Productions banner since 2002. Porn parodies are hardly new. Yet there’s a big difference between Axel’s movies and the likes of Big Trouble In Little Vagina, Charlie’s Anals and In Diana Jones And The Temple Of Poon. Where these were simply regular porn movies which capitalised on their (sometimes brilliantly) pun-tastic titles, Braun’s parodies are relatively big-budget affairs, boasting elaborate sets and costumes,…

Spotlight FROM MAY 23 N CERT. 15 IT’S THE GLOBE WOT WON IT THE REVENANT had seemed the surer bet, with its raw, suffering-star turn and its extreme-wilderness cinematography, filling every frame with roaring, pounding, storming drama. But after the Best Picture envelope was torn open at this year’s Oscars, another, very different film’s title was read out. One in which there was no dominant performance, and which let its drama unfurl steadily in boxy, beige-and-grey interiors, to the sound of file pages being flipped and pens scratching on notebooks. Spotlight bagging the big award may have been a surprise but, for all The Revenant’s visual genius, there were some — including industry mag Variety — who saw justice in the quieter film, which directly tackled real issues, prevailing. Tom…

The Black Stallion out MAY 1 N cert. U DARK HORSE THE MISTS OF time have obscured The Black Stallion, a big Oscar-nominated hit in 1979, yet now largely forgotten. It’s worthy of rediscovery, though — a film that glides from hypnotically beautiful, wordless art film to fist-pumping sports movie. A transition you don’t see very often. It begins with a boy (Kelly Reno) on a cruise with his father. It’s a place where nobody notices him — in a perfect, playful introductory shot, the boy is only revealed as a speck in the distance after someone steps out of the camera’s way — and he wanders freely, developing an interest in a wild horse being kept on board. A storm hits the ship and it sinks, the boy and…

Your Movie Sucks (Roger Ebert) Ebert’s most gloriously scathing reviews. The title is his takedown of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. Scorsese By Ebert (Roger Ebert) Contains interviews with his director pal and reviews of his work. Ebert was the first to review a Scorsese film. Life Itself: A Memoir (Roger Ebert) His memoirs, published two years before his death in 2013, is great on his relationship with wife Chaz.…