Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Empire

YUL BRYNNER. STEVE McQUEEN. Charles Bronson. James Coburn. Robert Vaughn. The Other Two. Beloved of pub quiz movie rounds (liquid prizes if you remembered Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz), The Magnificent Seven are one of the toughest gangs in movie history; courageous, inventive, no nonsense and completely Caucasian. In remaking John Sturges’ 1960 favourite, based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, based on John Lasseter’s A Bug’s Life, director Antoine Fuqua is looking to change things up, not in the name of diversity quotas but as a response to the troubled times. “Terrorism is alive,” he says. “It takes a society to fight them now. It’s not like a group of white guys has to fight the bad guys. We’ve all got to fight together against one cause.” Set just after…

WHEN I WENT TO pitch the movie to Disney, I said, ‘I want him to be a furry dragon,’” says David Lowery, director of the remake of Pete’s Dragon. “‘And that’s all I’ve got so far!’” It’s fair to say since that meeting, Lowery and his design team (which briefly included Brian Froud, who helped shape the look of Labyrinth) have come up with a lot more. As with the 1977 original, Pete’s Dragon follows the adventure of an orphan called Pete whose best friend just happens to be a... well, you’ve probably guessed. The older movie was live-action, save for one component: Elliott, the mischievous, fire-breathing, apple-cooking dragon, who was a 2D animation famous for his bright-green skin and shock of purple hair. Lowery, making his big-budget debut after…

IT’S BEEN NINE years since Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer — aka comedy collective The Lonely Island — made their first film, the supremely silly cult gem Hot Rod. Since then, they’ve been based on TV, in Saturday Night Live’s hilarious Digital Shorts and Samberg’s sitcom, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. That will change with this summer’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a mock-documentary that aims to send up the world of pop-rap, as Samberg’s teen idol, Conner4Real, desperately clings to his 15 minutes of fame. “What we’re edging towards,” says Samberg, decked out on set at the LA Forum in a pure white, Eminem-wannabe tracksuit, “are the ‘real’ moments you get in these films: when Katy Perry’s relationship goes south, or when One Direction sit round a campfire discussing whether…

WE’VE DONE QUITE a dark series this time around,” muses Steve Pemberton of the forthcoming third helping of Inside No. 9. “There are two or three episodes where we’ve pushed the horror element.” Given that he and co-creator Reece Shearsmith have previously brought us The League Of Gentlemen and Psychoville, not to mention the assorted killers, creepy dolls and “Mischief!”-hissing demons they’ve already unleashed in the first two series, we can expect this one to get very macabre indeed. “It’s funny,” says Shearsmith, “because even we started to think, ‘God, is this too much?’” Over two years and 12 episodes, the BBC anthology show has spun darkly comic tales set in and around a single location, all loosely connected to the number nine. Every episode introduces new characters, meaning Pemberton…

WE’VE BEEN ASKED for years,” says Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley, “when are you going to do a film?” Since ending its initial run on BBC One in 1995, Jennifer Saunders’ much-garlanded sitcom has had more comebacks than a Frankie Boyle gig. A two-part special, The Last Shout, followed relatively quickly in 1996, there were two more series five years later, as well as three more specials including a Comic Relief skit, then a six-year break, and finally four more specials for the show’s 20th anniversary in 2012. After that, a film seemed the next logical step, but it only happened when Saunders — who created the show, wrote it and starred in it as PR from hell Edina ‘Eddie’ Monsoon — announced in 2014 she was writing it. And…

UNMISSABLE EXCELLENT GOOD POOR TRAGIE X-Men: Apocalypse OUT NOW / CERT. 12A / 144 MINS. DIRECTOR Bryan Singer CAST James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sophie Turner PLOT When ancient mutant Apocalypse (Isaac) is awakened, he decides to bring down the world. Professor X (McAvoy) and his students must stop him. BEFORE Apocalypse gets going bringing about, well, the apocalypse, students from Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters sneak out to see Return Of The Jedi. “Well, at least we can all agree, the third one is always the worst,” says Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey afterwards, with startling prescience. But whether the remark is a dig at Brett Ratner’s unlamented The Last Stand or a self-deprecating assessment of this lacklustre second sequel to First Class…

BIG-HEARTED, PACKED with visual effects, a family blockbuster... In theory, The BFG should place Steven Spielberg right slap bang in his comfort zone. And when Empire meets the director in New York, he does prove to be in a very relaxed, confident mood. He shows us videos of The BFG’s recording session on his iPhone, looks forward to Indiana Jones V (“We have a MacGuffin, that’s all I can say”), and muses on his inability to make comedies; “I developed Meet The Parents for myself to direct,” he says, “but I realised, ‘If I direct this I’m going to screw it up.’” Yet his affable demeanour belies just how tough the past three years have been for him. Making The BFG has turned out to be a journey full of…

• kObA- (2), PhOTOfEST (2) WHEN SELF-PROCLAIMED “SUPERSTAR publicist” Howard Bloom started working with Prince in December 1980, the first thing he did was ask to spend some time with the rising pop star. Bloom specifically wanted to discover, as he puts it, “the things that had shaped Prince emotionally”. To that end, he flew to the Shea theatre in Buffalo, New York, where the then 22-year-old was rehearsing for his Dirty Mind tour, and the two talked through the night. He finally found what he was looking for around dawn. “He told me this story of his mother taking him, at the age of five, to a big theatre,” says Bloom. “All the seats were pointed at the stage and there was a spotlight on the centre of the…

EMPIRE IS SITTING in a darkened room in Soho watching the opening sequences of Mad Max: Fury Road and not quite believing our eyes. It’s a film we’ve seen and loved before, but not like this. The power of George Miller’s dystopian imagery has been transformed. You can see every ripple on the surface of the tyre and veils of dust hovering in the air. Sunlight bounces off a metallic surface with almost blinding intensity. As Furiosa climbs into the War Rig, all the dials on the dashboard are completely legible. The screen in question is Panasonic’s 65” 4K HDR DX902 television, their flagship screen for 2016, and a thing of beauty. Connected to a UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player, in which the 4K disc of Fury Road spins, the…

Special Correspondents OUT NOW / CERT. 15 THE FUGITIVES CHARACTERS DON’T have to be likable to make great comedy. Some of the finest comic creations are bastards (Malcolm Tucker), weirdos (Pee-wee Herman) or nincompoops (Inspector Clouseau). But even the worst have to have some redeeming feature, and it’s that spark of grace that’s missing from Ricky Gervais’ latest movie as writer, director and star. A remake of 2009 French film Envoyés Très Spéciaux, it sees two radio journalists convincing the world that they are reporting from a war zone, when in fact they have lost their tickets and are stuck at home, faking the broadcasts and, when that gets too tiring, their own kidnapping. Gervais is Ian, the hapless tech responsible for their predicament. Eric Bana is Frank, the too-cool…

Beverly Hills Cop “IT’S SHOWTIME, OKAY?” SETTING THE SCENE When it came to casting the small but juicy role of Inspector Douglas Todd, the superior of Detroit lawman Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy), director Martin Brest went with Gil Hill, an actual ex-detective and veteran of the Detroit homicide division. It was a smart move. Every scene between Hill and Murphy crackles with hilarious energy, especially this first encounter following a disastrous attempt at a bust by Foley. Hill sadly died this year, but his legacy as cinema’s greatest angry police chief lives on. INT. LOCKER ROOM — DETROIT POLICE HEADQUARTERS — DAY Axel is being warned by fellow cop Jeffrey (Paul Reiser) that his boss is on the warpath. Suddenly, the last voice Foley wants to hear rings out. Inspector…

RESIDENT EVIL. DOOM. SUPER BLOODY Mario Bros. The path from video game to film is paved with disappointments. But it would be a huge surprise if Assassin’s Creed wound up in their company. Consider the talent attached. Fresh from their bracing take on the Bard in last year’s Macbeth, Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard and director Justin Kurzel have reteamed. Then there’s the hit game franchise; a sprawling, blood-soaked historical epic. The film, however, starts in the present day, where loner Callum Lynch becomes caught up in a centuries-long conflict between the Knights Templar and the Assassin Order. He is forced by corporate villains Abstergo to enter the Animus, which transports him into the body of his 15th-century Spanish ancestor, Aguilar: “He’s a single-minded warrior — similar to a samurai,” says…

COSTUME My costume from Submarine. I’d go and buy a coffee in that outfit, with my long leather coat, all in black, with that hair, and I was extremely confident and smooth. I enjoyed Graham. He’d go into a Greggs and light the place up, man. I’m not particularly vain, I like to think. But maybe some of the stuff they put me in for In America, purple vests and that, now I’d go, “That’s coming nowhere near me.” Earlier in my career I submitted, and now I’m a little more picky. MOMENT Directing Journeyman. The fears I’d had about filmmaking and acting, I confronted them all. I’m not saying they’re totally erased, but they don’t have the potency they did. I took a film called The Backwoods, knowing there…

FORTY-SEVEN films into his glorious career, and Woody Allen may have finally found the new Woody Allen. Over the years, the Woodster has employed a number of hot young things, including John Cusack, Kenneth Branagh and Jason Biggs, as thinly veiled stand-ins for the real thing, but most have simply plumped for Woody impressions, while none have quite captured the blend of wit and existential panic of the real thing. But with his latest movie, Café Society, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in May, Allen’s search for a surrogate may have hit the mother lode in the form of Jesse Eisenberg. As Bobby Dorfman, a young man from the Bronx who seeks his fortune, and possible romance with Kristen Stewart, in the Hollywood of the 1930s, Eisenberg ploughs his…

TODD PHILLIPS IS GETTING OUT OF the Hangover business, and into the arms race. Specifically, he’s written and directed War Dogs, an international gun-running “comedic drama” shot in six countries. “I love travelling for movies,” Phillips tells Empire, “and the whole idea of the movie circus. I find that energy and freneticism always finds its way into the film. There was a lot of running around, but we were trying to tell a pretty big story.” Based on an article Guy Lawson wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011, the premise involves two young Miami stoners, David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli, who, with little more than an internet connection and a mobile, penetrated the “grey world” of international arms dealing in 2007 and ended up with The Pentagon for a client.…

LET’S WAIT FOR this guy to buy his gas bill, then we can go again...” In a cramped Costcutter corner-shop in Newcastle upon Tyne suburb Fawdon, Empire looks on as Ken Loach directs his latest feature, I Daniel Blake. Any other filmmaker would secure a closed set. Not Loach. The shop, incredibly, is still open. If you’ve ever wondered how his films feel so life-rich and authentically raw, here’s your answer. Loach is stealing takes in-between the ringing of the shop’s doorbell. “Stealing” being the operative word. The scene being shot today — all day, as it turns out — is a grimly tense shoplifting sequence involving actress/ playwright Hayley Squires as the luckless Katie Morgan. After paying at the till, she’s confronted by a guard, marched to the stockroom…

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO. AUGUST 2015 In a vast, bluescreen-bedecked hangar on a blazing hot morning, Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner) is giving an impassioned speech. The chief scientific advisor to Earth Space Defense (ESD) — and apparent survivor of his mauling-by-extraterrestrial in the original Independence Day movie — closes the presentation on his strategy for dealing with the latest interstellar invasion of our home world. “... And then we’ll ram it right up her royal wazoo!” he yells, his greying hippie locks flying about impressively. This, it has to be said, is a suspiciously familiar plan — the ramming of it wazoowards being a tactic instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen Independence Day. But then, it all adds to what is becoming, for Empire, an undeniably pleasing sense of…

1 M.A.S.H (1970) a) Military Asshats Spread Hilarity b) Mobile Army Surgical Hospital c) Multiple Audio-track Soundclash Horror 2 F.I.S.T. (1978) a) Forgotten Italian Stallion Tale b) Fighting Is Stallone’s Trade c) Federation of Inter-State Truckers 3 C.H.U.D. (1984) a) Cinematic Happenings Under Development b) Crappy Horror Unless Drunk c) Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers 4 D.A.R.Y.L (1985) a) Data-Analysing Robot Youth Life-form b) Diddy Android Rascal Yearns for Life c) Dandy Austrian Rangers Yodel Loudly 5 B.A.P.S (1997) a) Black American Princesses b) Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha c) Tee-hee, “Baps” 6 JCVD (2008) a) Jesus Christ Venereal Disease b) Jasper Carrott Venereal Disease c) Jean-Claude Van Damme…

Five years ago, David Yates might justifiably have taken a very long holiday. The director had just said goodbye to Harry Potter with the series’ final instalment, The Deathly Hallows — Part 2. After four films, half a decade and north of $4 billion at the box office he’d certainly earned a break, but his thoughts instead turned immediately to his next project. Unsurprisingly, stacks of screenplays had come his way — “Lots of sci-fi, lots of things blowing up,” he says. The director who’d just brought one of cinema’s most successful series to a spectacular conclusion had his pick. But one in particular called out to him. A surprising one. “The Legend Of Tarzan felt the most enjoyable of everything I’d been reading,” Yates tells Empire. A film based…

10:28 Little Duke One Rocky stalwart who doesn’t appear in the movie is Duke, trainer of first Apollo Creed and then Rocky. Although the character was in early drafts of the script, actor Tony Burton had health problems that prevented him being able to travel; sadly, he died earlier this year. Director Ryan Coogler fashioned a solution by casting Wood Harris as ‘Little Duke’, Duke’s son. “It’s a real Easter egg, but Wood grew his moustache out and even spoke like Tony Burton,” says Coogler. “And when he loses his temper with Donnie (Johnson), it’s a family affair.” 17:53 We Have A Winner At the end of Rocky III, Rocky and Apollo Creed have one last fight behind closed doors. We never found out the winner — until Rocky tells…

OUT NOW / PS4 COVER-BASED LOOTER THE RETURN of charismatic, adventuring mass-murderer Nathan Drake has been long awaited. It’s four-and-a-half years since Drake’s Deception — an age in video games. No doubt aware of this, Sony released a remastered version of the previous three last year — part stopgap, part education. Uncharted is its flagship franchise and this game needs to deliver. Given that, it’s oddly slow to get started. The game begins with Nathan as a kid, breaking out of his orphanage with his older brother, Sam, then shows them as young adults on a mission that ends in Sam’s “death”. Skip forward 15 years (past the events of previous Uncharteds), Nathan’s in scuba gear and the adventure proper is ready to begin. Except it isn’t. He’s working for…

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Civil War packs a lot in over the course of its running time, from major character reveals to minor Easter eggs. All will end up having an impact on the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Be warned: spoilers abound! 1 CAPTAIN AMERICA NO MORE At the end of the movie, when Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), now a fugitive from the US government, rescues his former Avengers buddies from the floating Raft prison, he does so in civilian duds, having left his iconic shield behind after his battle with Tony Stark. “Ultimately, dropping the shield is a rejection of the Captain America identity,” says co-director Joe Russo. This opens the door for Chris Evans to appear in Avengers: Infinity War as Rogers, while allowing someone else to don…

“HE DIDN’T FIT. WOLVERINE WAS never a big part of the formation of the X-Men, so he can’t be in this story.” So said Bryan Singer last year when we asked him if Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine would be in X-Men: Apocalypse. Well, if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that Singer was telling porkie pies, and that Jackman does show up — for the final time in a full-blown X-Men movie — in a sequence, filmed in secret, which showed the character in all his Weapon X glory. So we just had to speak to Singer about the year’s most clandestine cameo. How did Hugh Jackman get involved? I called him up and pitched it to him directly. He said, “Mate, it works brilliantly. Count me in.” You shot it…

AN ACTOR’S NEXT move after winning an Oscar is always fascinating. Some continue to hone their craft in a string of indies, searching for that second golden guy. Some see it as a licence to have some big-budget fun, like Nicolas Cage, who made The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off after winning Best Actor for Leaving Las Vegas. The first movie Matthew McConaughey signed up for, Free State Of Jones, would appear to be a bit of both. On the one hand it’s a prestige movie, written and directed by Gary Ross, the man who first brought The Hunger Games to the big screen. It tells the true-life story of Newton Knight, an ex-Confederate soldier who turned against his former allies and, along with his wife Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), founded…

THIS IS HOW YOU ANNOUNCE A CAST for a TV show — not with any great fanfare or hoopla, but with a simple list of 217 names in alphabetical order. Or at least, that’s how you do it if the show in question is Twin Peaks , which will return to our screens next year. Here, we pick out the most intriguing names, old and new, on the list... KYLE MACLACHLAN The last time we saw MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper, the ostensible hero of the show when it first ran from 1990-’91, he was banging his head against a mirror and laughing maniacally, having been possessed by the spirit of Killer Bob. So he pretty much had to come back to close the loop on an all-time great TV…

[1] A BOTTLE OF WATER Destroys: those nasty, gangly green men in m. Night shyamalan’s Signs (2002). burns ’em right up like a wicked witch from Oz, and stops them leaving annoying crop circles all over the place. [2] HEAD & SHOULDERS SHAMPOO Destroys: the super-evolving aliens of Evolution (2001). the hair-care product’s active ingredient, selenium sulfide, is poisonous to these nitrogen-based beasties, you see. [3] SNOTTY TISSUES Destroys: martians. as in the heat ray-wielding horrors of The War Of The Worlds (1953). just wave those crusty snot-rags about and they’ll fall dead... Well, eventually, after several days of worldwide destruction. [4] SALT Destroys: the admittedly unthreatening Newcomers in Alien Nation (1988), though you need to add it to water first, as brine is like acid to them. (Or pack…

• PORTRAIT: KIA HARTE-IUS0 FOUR YEARS AGO, NICOLAS Winding Refn had the movie world at his feet. The then-41 year-old Dane hit big with his pulsating LA-set neon-noir Drive, and the offers came rushing in: a remake of Logan’s Run, a big-screen Wonder Woman, a mini-series based on Barbarella. He met with Harrison Ford about a possible spy thriller, and was hired to direct Sony Pictures’ The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington. Yes, the movie world was at his feet. And Nicolas Winding Refn stepped right over it. He and Ford didn’t see eye-to-eye over the fate of the thriller’s main character (who, says Refn, Ford didn’t want to kill off) and went their separate ways. Three months before it was set to shoot, he quit The Equalizer. And his next…

IN NOVEMBER 1942, ROALD DAHL ARRIVED IN Hollywood. A party had been thrown in his honour at The Beverly Hills Hotel, by Walt Disney himself. Here, for Dahl’s benefit, Spencer Tracy and Charlie Chaplin acted out portions of a story the 26 year-old RAF pilot had recently cooked up about gremlins, mischievous imaginary critters blamed by airmen whenever there were technical difficulties. The story had dazzled Disney after he’d received it from the RAF (which needed to approve anything Dahl wrote while in its service), and he was determined to adapt it into an animated feature. Dahl was far from becoming the celebrated children’s writer we know him as today, author of such wildly popular adventures as James And The Giant Peach, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and The BFG;…

TRUNK ARCHIVE ETHAN HAWKE CAME CLOSE TO playing Chet Baker 16 years ago. He’d been hooked on the influential jazz trumpeter’s music since high school, and when his friend and regular collaborator Richard Linklater suggested they give him the biopic treatment together, he naturally jumped at the chance. That it never in the end came together has, all these years later, proved to be a blessing in disguise. In Born To Be Blue, Hawke portrays the ‘James Dean of jazz’ at a later, more fragile stage in his life, when he suffered both from heroin addiction and losing his teeth in an assault. It’s earned the 45 year-old actor rave reviews. (“Everything that makes Ethan Hawke an extraordinary actor... is on view in Born To Be Blue,” wrote Peter Travers…

INDOMINUS MAG I recently showed my five year-old son my 16-year collection of the finest-ever film magazine, granting him unbridled access to my library so he could learn about films. Off his own back, he decided to make his own Empire magazine, based on Jurassic World. Inside he revealed intricate plot details of the new LEGO Batman Movie and reviewed all the Star Wars films. I am very proud, but aware that my collection seems to be getting thinner and out of order. DAMON CARTER, VIA EMAIL This is amazing work, Damon. But don’t take it from us: we were so impressed by your son’s efforts that we sent it on to Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow. Colin says: “We spent months working on our Empire cover and this artist…