Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i Empire

AFTER WHAT FELT like an eternity of silence, director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy finally unveiled Episode IX last month, revealing title and trailer at Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, and Empire was on hand to witness it. As you might expect with Abrams, every answer prompted a dozen more questions. Here are the most pressing… 1 IS THE EMPEROR REALLY STILL ALIVE? “No-one’s ever really gone,” intones Luke, before a final, familiar cackle heralds the end of the trailer. After all these years, could Darth Sidious (right) be back to finish what he started? “It’s amazing that he got to walk out here today and no one knew,” Abrams told Empire after the panel. “The reaction that people had to him only made me grateful that all…

MAXINE PEAKE HAS worn many hats. But horror heroine is a new one. The actress — who has played Hamlet and worked with such prestigious directors as Mike Leigh and Carol Morley — has rarely ventured into spooky territory. But probe a little deeper into Gwen, William McGregor’s debut feature starring Peake as a single mother in a mining town, and you’ll see why this Bolton-born actor and activist felt so compelled to take the leap. “It had that folk-horror feel to it — which I’m a big fan of — but there’s also a political message in there for me,” says Peake. “It’s anti-capitalist. It picks up not long after the Industrial Revolution had begun. And it’s about women.” Filmed against the remote landscapes of Snowdonia, Gwen follows Peake’s…

ONE OF THE best ways to build an audience for a new TV show is to confuse the hell out of them. Lost. Westworld. Stranger Things. All hits; all require keeping notes and a post-episode Google to try to keep track of what’s going on. Dark is of that same school. The German sci-fi, about to begin its second season on Netflix, is a time-travelling murder-mystery thriller and one of the most addictive shows currently on TV. Dark begins in 2019, with a boy disappearing in the woods near the small German town of Winden. The search for him leads various locals, chiefly the boy’s teenage brother, Jonas (Louis Hoffman), to a cave that serves as a time-tunnel back to 1986 and 1953. As more people cross between the times,…

START WITH AN EXPERT From the book to the TV show to, now, a movie, the starting point for Horrible Histories has always been the same. “The essential scripting process always begins with Greg Jenner, our historical expert,” says director Dominic Brigstocke. “He’s a walking encyclopedia. We start by asking Greg, “What’s funny about this period?’ So [for the Romans], Nero trying to drown his mother by building a collapsible boat for her is so absurd that you don’t really need to think of anything else.” CREATE COMPELLING NEW CHARACTERS The film features historical figures including Nero (Craig Roberts), Boudicca (Kate Nash), Agrippina (Kim Cattrall), and Claudius (Derek Jacobi, reprising the role 43 years after I, Claudius). But the two young leads — a Roman teenager named Atti (Sebastian Croft),…

THERE AREN’T TOO many production companies in Hollywood who would take a chance on Casa De Mi Padre (a comedy made entirely in the Spanish language) or Tim And Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (giving the notoriously anarchic Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim complete creative freedom) — and almost none who would have rubberstamped Holmes And Watson (although that’s probably a good thing). Gary Sanchez, the company formed by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay in the wake of Anchorman’s success, was all those things. But it will soon be no more, and McKay and Ferrell are going their separate ways. “It was amicable,” says McKay to Empire. “We both felt it had got pretty big and it was time to start up anew. It’s the best time. And all the producers…

★★★★ OUT 17 MAY CERT 18 / 101 MINS DIRECTOR Brian Welsh CAST Cristian Ortega, Lorn Macdonald, Laura Fraser, Neil Leiper, Gemma McElhinney, Martin Donaghy PLOT During the summer of 1994, as the free rave scene is legislated against by John Major’s Tory government, two Glaswegian friends (Ortega, Macdonald) plan a big final night out together, dancing to the music that connects them, before going their separate ways. THE MID-’90S are clearly having a moment. In the past few months, we’ve had Captain Marvel, with all its grunge and Fresh Prince references, Jonah Hill’s skateboarding debut Mid90s, and the Yorkshire-set British indie Pond Life. Hot on their heels and full of pills comes Brian Welsh’s Beats, which is actually set during the exact same summer as last month’s Pond Life…

★★★★★ SKY ATLANTIC/ NOW TV / OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 3 SHOWRUNNERS David Benioff, D.B. Weiss CAST Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke, Maisie Williams, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage PLOT The Wall has fallen and the Night King’s army of the dead has attacked Westeros. With Jon Snow (Harington) and Daenerys’ (Clarke) troops gathering at Winterfell, and Queen Cersei (Headey) massing her forces in the South, the final battle for the Seven Kingdoms has begun. WHEN HBO OPTIONED the rights to George R.R. Martin’s (unfinished) series of novels, A Song Of Ice And Fire, even their most ardent marketeers can’t have imagined the phenomenon it would become. A saga of feuding nobility inspired by the warring Plantagenets of England’s Middle Ages, it was a fantasy that eschewed elves, orcs and dwarves in…

The Wizard Of Oz has taught us much. Wicked witches are vulnerable to water and falling houses, for one thing. There’s no place like home, for another. And that you should always be wary of pulling back the curtain, because you may not like what you see. That said, let’s tug on the tassels just a little bit. As well as getting the first look at an exciting project, or sitting down with a talented actor or director, part of the joy of visiting movie sets is to see the world, to travel to new countries, to experience new cultures. So, when news broke that the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming, the successful Spider-reboot that integrated Peter Parker into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was going to be called Spider-Man: Far From…

“The good guys dress in black — remember that.” The immortal rap of the original Men In Black tie-in single is hard to forget — but times have changed since 1997. In Men In Black: International, the Men In Black are not always men (there are now women leading the charge in the field too); they’re not always dressed in black (regulation uniform is sometimes ditched in favour of more summery fashions); and they’re not always even good (there is a mole among the MIB ranks, and it’s up to our heroes to root him, her or it out). The original 1997 film, based on a little-read Marvel (then Aircel) comic, juggled a curious alchemy of tones and genres, with a crackling Will Smith/ Tommy Lee Jones double act to…

IF YOU'VE SEEN X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, THEN YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION Only kidding. But it’s fair to say that the third in the X-Men series is considered to be one of the weakest entries in Fox’s long-running adaptation of the Marvel comic books. One person, in particular, has been haunted by it ever since. “I’ve lived with the guilt of that for many years,” says Simon Kinberg. Back in 2006, Kinberg, who had just broken through as a screenwriter with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, had been appointed as the co-writer, along with Zak Penn, on The Last Stand. “My intention on X-Men 3 was to tell the Dark Phoenix story,” says Kinberg. A run of X-Men stories written by Chris Claremont and drawn by John Byrne, The…

EVEN THOUGH HE never dreamed of being an actor while studying film in college, Danny McBride has specialised in over-the-top characters, slobs with a heart and man-children who have to grow up a little. Here, he breaks down a varied assortment of the people he’s played from his 16-year career. FRED SIMMONS, THE FOOT FIST WAY (2006) An inept taekwondo instructor struggles in his marriage. “A problem with a lot of comedies is that you create these fake characters so that, come the third act, you don’t really give a shit about what happens or not because you never really felt like they were real. And so when Jody [Hill] was going to make Foot Fist Way and we were working on the script together, it became us wanting to…

BY THE 1960s, World War II movies were typically all-star epics like The Longest Day or ripping yarns like Where Eagles Dare. The Victors — which makes Platoon look like Carry On Sergeant — was overlooked, abbreviated and almost buried. It’s now available in its full-length version. Written and directed by once-blacklisted Carl Foreman, the film boasts scenes which sear the memory. The execution of an American deserter by firing squad is accompanied by Frank Sinatra crooning ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’. The snowy widescreen tableau of ritual murder is the grimmest imaginable Christmas card and the use of against-the-grain music predates Tarantino by decades. Between protracted horrors, Foreman springs nastier shocks. A glimpse of sergeant Eli Wallach’s battle-damaged face is more blood-freezing than any monster movie unmasking. Adapted…

THE SUPERHERO GENRE is so big now, it’s arguably become bigger than a genre. In a constant quest to deliver fresh takes, filmmakers have created superhero movies which have absorbed other genres, too. So as well as some of recent memory’s most thrilling sci-fi action movies, we’ve had superhero comedies (Deadpool, Shazam!), a superhero found-footage film (Chronicle) and a superhero Western (Logan). Messing with the form can hardly be considered a risk; despite (or because of ) its R-rated humour, Deadpool made an astonishing $783 million worldwide. Now comes Brightburn, from director David Yarovesky (The Hive) and producer James Gunn (who knows a thing or two about making superhero movies), which promises an all-new twist. Here’s how they are breaking further new ground... IT SUBVERTS THE BIGGEST HERO OF ALL…

Illustration: Matt Herring What one thing do you do better than anyone else you know? How do you answer that and not seem like an asshole? Well… I’m good at avoiding confrontation. I don’t know if I’m better than everybody else, but it’s one of my more skilful skills. Have you ever knowingly broken the law? I have a couple of times. Laws that nobody really bothers with. I’ve broken a lot of bicycle laws in New York, certainly, and when I was a teenager I hopped onto the Subway without paying a few times. I got caught, too. There was a fine, and it wasn’t insignificant for a young man. What’s your favourite smell? When your kids are very small, I like the way their hair smells. There’s a…

★★★ OUT NOW CERT PG / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Rob Letterman CAST Ryan Reynolds (voice), Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton, Suki Waterhouse, Omar Chapparo PLOT Tim (Smith) may be the only person in the world who doesn’t love Pokémon; in fact, he rejects them. When he learns that his detective dad was killed in a suspicious crash, he’s forced to join forces with Pokémon Pikachu (Reynolds), the only creature who can help him crack the case. FOR THOSE WHO have somehow missed out on the games, cartoons, trading cards, beach towels etc, Pokémon are (usually cute) creatures that wander around with their owners, who sometimes keep them in balls, which they throw at them to catch them (don’t worry, Pokémon are okay with this). They have special powers and can be…

★★★ OUT 7 JUNE CERT 15 / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Nisha Ganatra CAST Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Ike Barinholtz PLOT Fêted US talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Thompson) is losing the ratings war, so demands a woman be added to the all-male writers room. Enter former chemical plant worker Molly Patel (Kaling) whose ideas — and jokes — could save the show, or at least Katherine herself. AS A VETERAN TV comedy writer on The Office (US) and her own The Mindy Project, who better than Mindy Kaling to script a comedy-drama about the pitfalls and privilege of the male-dominated media? Late Night, her feature-writing debut, is a smart piece of work that manages to weave notions of glass ceilings, internalised misogyny and the need for diversity through nearly…

★★★★ CHANNEL 4 OUT NOW EPS VIEWED 2 OF 4 DIRECTOR Shane Meadows CAST Stephen Graham, Niamh Algar, Helen Behan, Frank Laverty PLOT When his ex-wife takes his son to Australia, bereft builder Joseph (Graham) heads to Ireland to confront the demons of a troubled childhood. After reuniting with his sister Anna (Behan), the journey brings Joseph into the orbit of Dinah (Algar) and down an inexorable path to violence. SHANE MEADOWS HASN’T made a theatrical fiction film since 2009’s Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee. Instead, Uttoxeter’s finest has spent the past ten years working on three series of This Is England and a number of music-related projects. Whether it’s for creative or budgetary reasons, Meadows’ migration to TV suits his art — a medium that revels in long character arcs,…

IT BEGAN IN a Humvee, with a billionaire-playboy-genius-philanthropist cracking wise, clinking ice cubes in his whiskey glass. It ended, 15 years later, on a scorched battlefield, with that same billionaire-genius-philanthropist, long having swapped the playboy lifestyle for homespun happiness, surrounded by his loved ones: his wife, his best friend, and the son he never had. All watching as Anthony Edward Stark takes his last breath, having ensured the sun will rise on a grateful universe. He can barely speak — but his eyes say all that needs to be said. And even if they didn’t, we’ve already heard his farewell message to Pepper Potts, at the beginning of the movie. If Tony’s near-death experience there felt like a fake-out, it was anything but. It was there to prepare us for…

IT IS APRIL, llington, New Zealand, sun-kissed in late summer, and the nation’s filmmaker-in-chief is folded onto a sofa in his corner office at Park Road Post, epicentre of his moviemaking empire, only five minutes from home. “I’ve told you this before,” says Peter Jackson on why he still counts Empire as a loyal friend, “but you were one of the biggest boosts we got on set of The Lord Of The Rings, having been surrounded by all this negativity as we were plugging on with the movies. When we were shooting this scene up in Cirith Ungol, when Sam comes to rescue Frodo, Empire came out with Frodo on the cover. It was the first time we had seen our movie on the cover of a magazine.” Jackson glances…

00:01:16 THE FALL OF CYBERTRON __ Bumblebee stings from the off, with a battle on the planet Cybertron, as the Autobots are forced off-world by the Decepticons. It’s a deliberate call-back to P98S’s animated mini-series that introduced director Travis Knight (Kubo And The Two Strings) to these characters. “We didn’t have all the money in the world so this had to be relatively bite-sized, but we packed as much in as we could,” he says. › 00:08:02 BEE VS BLITZWING __ The animated Blitzwing is a Triple Changer — he’s also a tank — that the movie doesn’t show for “pacing and budgetary reasons”. This incarnation is, for Knight, “the classic Decepticon jet that strikes terror into the hearts of anyone who sees it.” He wanted to stick close to…

Alamy “TO ME, THEY got away,” says Callie Khouri, reminiscing about a light-blue Ford T-Bird soaring in slow motion over the Grand Canyon, one of popular cinema’s most radical farewells. Yearning to write a screenplay, one night Khouri pulled into her Nashville drive and thought, “Two women go on a crime spree.” In a flash, she could “feel” their story: what led to a freewheeling trip across the desert states; who Thelma and her best friend Louise were at the start and who they were at the end; the central theme of liberation a road movie offered. “The other thing is,” she recalls, “I had the image of the car flying into the Grand Canyon. So I knew that was where it was going.” A Ridley Scott-scale budget gave them…

DESTROYER OUT 27 MAY / CERT 15 / 118 MINS This sun-scorched, snakily plotted slab of Pacific noir was underappreciated on release and at the Oscars. But there’s a good chance Karyn Kusama’s thriller will pick up plenty of admirers — no less than Christopher Nolan has professed himself a fan, which makes sense given the parallels between the chronology-skewing Destroyer and his Memento. Much has been said about Nicole Kidman’s sensational performance as Erin Bell, a ruined cop with Theresa May hair and the pallor of someone recovering from a Marvel movie marathon, but equally strong are Toby Kebbell and Tatiana Maslany as two of the scuzzballs she’s tracking down. While it may be genre fare, Kusama never lets it feel generic, shooting in lesser-seen nooks of Los Angeles,…

YOUR AVERAGE MOVIE set is replete with the latest tech, or the most state-of-the-art catering table. On a Quentin Tarantino set, things are a little different. “We had a VHS recorder,” laughs Arianne Phillips, the costume designer of QT’s ninth film, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. “We went old-school to watch these great movies we couldn’t find on DVD or online. Quentin much preferred that.” The latest epic from Tarantino is flashing back to a momentous period in Tinseltown history. Namely 1969, when the traditional studio system buckled as a wave of dark, experimental movies hit big, changing the industry forever. The notion of celluloid-junkie Tarantino directing his first-ever film about films (and TV) is tantalising — and promises to be as textured as you’d hope. “The level of…

“WE ARE WORKING on the hardest thing that’s ever been done,” says Louis Leterrier. Hyperbolic, sure, but as a work of puppetry, The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance is by some distance the most complex production ever attempted. The prequel to the 1982 Jim Henson film — about battle for power between the virtuous Gelflings and the evil Skeksis in a fantasy land — will arrive on Netflix for a ten-episode season later this year. Leterrier promises “things that have never been done before in puppetry”. Here are three latex-based revolutions it promises. 1 CHASE SEQUENCES! Leterrier’s background is in live-action cinema (The Incredible Hulk, Clash Of The Titans), not puppets. He chose not to change his filmmaking style to fit puppeteering, but make puppeteering fit his style. “I wanted…

WITH LAST YEAR’S Hereditary, debut feature director Ari Aster made one of the darkest horror movies of the decade. Family secrets, that decapitation scene, and visuals that rarely let light in made for a film of extreme, oppressive dread. For his second film, Aster is again trying to redefine horror. And making life really, really hard for himself in the process. Midsommar takes place entirely in daylight, the natural enemy of horror. Set in a sun-drenched Swedish village, the film follows Florence Pugh’s Dani, a young woman “at a very difficult time in her life,” Aster says. “She’s clinging to a relationship that’s on its last legs [with a boyfriend played by Will Poulter].” Joining him at a festival in the village, the couple’s romantic problems become the least of…

SARFRAZ MANZOOR WROTE a memoir about his Bruce Springsteen-obsessed childhood in Luton; a memoir he then adapted for the big screen. The resulting film, Blinded By The Light, was a smash at Sundance in April, landing the biggest deal of the festival. Here he writes exclusively on the biggest surprises along the way. 1 __ THINGS WILL MOVE VERY SLOWLY — AND THEN VERY FAST My memoir, Greetings From Bury Park, was published in 2007. I always hoped that my story — of being a working-class British Pakistani teenager from Luton, whose life is transformed by the music of Bruce Springsteen — might have the potential to make a movie, but it wasn’t until 2010, when I met Springsteen and he told me how much he loved my book, that…

★★★★ OUT 7 JUNE CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Sebastifln Lelio CAST Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Rita Wilson, Michael Cera, Jeanne Tripplehorn PLOT Living with her furless cat, stuck in a dull job, unable to fit into her grown-up kids’ lives, fiftysomething divorcee Gloria (Moore) is lonely. Yet her romantic fortunes seem to change when at a disco-themed singles night she meets Arnold (Turturro), an ex-Marine with a paintball business. JOINING THE RANKS of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Mann and Michael Haneke as Directors Who Have Remade Their Own Films, Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s cover version of his 2013 Gloria hits all the same beats with a few extra flourishes. Lelio, who proved a sensitive biographer of inner female lives with Disobedience, once again is attuned to a woman in…

★★★★ OUT 8 MARCH CERT 15 / 92 MINS DIRECTOR Jim Cummings CAST Jim Cummings, Nican Robinson, Kendal Farr, Jocelyn DeBoer PLOT With his marriage and his mother now dead, Officer Jim Arnaud (Cummings) finds himself on the edge, trying to forge a stronger connection with his daughter (Farr), and repeatedly messing up at work. Attempting to find light in the darkness, he keeps getting in his own way. THUNDER ROAD, LOOSELY inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s paean to smalltown struggles and dreams, is an odd fish. New Orleans native Jim Cummings, who wrote and directed it (as well as playing ukulele on the score), trades in uncomfortable comedy and dominates the screen as all-American moustachioed cop Jim Arnaud, both a wide-eyed innocent and a moderately frightening livewire: Ned Flanders with…

★★ OUT 11 APRIL CERT 15 / 121 MINS DIRECTOR Neil Marshall CAST David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Sasha Lane, Thomas Haden Church, Sophie Okonedo, Daniel Dae Kim, Brian Gleeson PLOT In fifth-century England, King Arthur defeats The Blood Queen Nimue (Jovovich). When she returns in the present day, it’s up to Hellboy (Harbour) and his pals in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) to stop her. THE FIRST THING we see in Hellboy is a rotting corpse, its dangling eye being chewed on by a crow. This pre-credits prologue, setting up the Arthurian tale that follows, describes an era “known as the Dark Ages, and for fucking good reason”, as Ian McShane’s dry voiceover puts it. Then, Milla Jovovich is decapitated. More gore, more cursing, more…

★★★★★ OUT 27 MAY CERT 15 / 102 MINS DIRECTOR Olivia Wilde CAST Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Billie Lourd, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, Jason Sudeikis PLOT The day before graduation, straight-A students Molly (Feldstein) and Amy (Dever) realise they could have spent more time partying than studying — while still getting into impressive colleges. With less than 24 hours to change things, they embark on one first, and last, wild high-school night to remember. IN 2019, ‘HAVING fun’ involves a crucial mission to make sure the entire world sees you having fun. Shy students make sure cool kids can take notice, and it’s a truly euphoric thrill to experience this anxiety deployed with so much joy in Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. Faking it sometimes works, as shy pre-teen Kayla learns from…

★★★★★ OUT 25 APRIL CERT 12A / 181 MINS DIRECTOR Joe Russo, Anthony Russo CAST Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan, Josh Brolin, Linda Cardellini, Tessa Thompson, Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Pom Klementieff PLOT Following the Thanos (Brolin) snap that wiped out half the life of the universe at the end of Infinity War, the surviving Avengers must find a way to come back together and put right what once went wrong. But with The Mad Titan still very much a threat, it will not be easy to regain the stones and undo what he did. LAST YEAR’S AVENGERS: Infinity War was as finely calibrated a piece of action cinema as you’re ever likely to…

It’s been 11 years and 22 movies in the making and, several viewings later, we’re just about starting to process just what the hell happened in all three hours and one minute of Avengers: Endgame. When we left the pictures — crying, whooping, cradling each other gently — we assembled a burning list of questions, wonderings and what-the-fuck moments. And over the next eight pages we’re going to dive into the most burning ones of all, with a little help from some very special filmmaking guests… 1 OPENING ON HAWKEYE’S LOST FAMILY Alamy Christopher Markus: We shot it with the intention of putting it in Infinity War. You’ve been wondering where Clint was? Here, we’re going to use him to illustrate what just happened with the snap... It worked like…

AS I SAT in the packed auditorium, with my family and my partner Jason to one side, and my co-writer Katie Silberman to the other, I could barely breathe. I was having an out-of-body experience. The movie playing on screen sounded slightly out of sync. The theatre we were in — the Paramount at SXSW — wasn’t designed for films: the seats start 50 feet back from the screen and aren’t stadium-tiered. There was a slight delay in the audio that was driving me insane. Why? It was my film. In the place I had always dreamed of for premiering my debut. I almost stopped the screening three times, but somehow forced myself not to move. And of course, literally no-one else noticed. Instead, I watched 1,100 people cheer for…

If you were able to become one of your characters for a single day, who would it be? TOM HARDMAN Well, it would be quite good being King Kong, because I would get to see dinosaurs and stuff. As long as it’s not the New York part of the story, as long as it was just beating up Tyrannosauruses. If I was Kong, I would be in charge of keeping the dinosaurs in order on Skull Island. How often do you abandon a concept or a screenplay because you can’t make it work? MATT GRIFFITHS I don’t think that has ever happened. There are scripts we have written that have never been made, but that is not because we have abandoned them. We wrote a script for a thing called…

Alamy, RGA WHO IS THE real star of Imitation Of Life, the crowning glory of director Douglas Sirk’s long-misunderstood Hollywood career, Lana Turner’s biggest pay day and for a long time Universal’s highest-grossing film? Turner, who shared top billing with the now mostly forgotten John Gavin (the poor woman’s Rock Hudson) seems the obvious answer. By 1959, however, the 38-year-old Turner was ‘The Sweater Girl’ no longer. At least a decade past her 1940s heyday, she’d been dropped by MGM after a series of flops, and though her career briefly revived with a 1958 Best Actress Oscar nomination for Peyton Place, her personal life was mired in scandal. A matter of months before production began, Turner’s Mafioso boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, was stabbed to death by her 14-year-old daughter, and the…

AT THE END of filming Roger Corman exploitation flick Boxcar Bertha in 1972, actors David Carradine and Barbara Hershey gave young, beardless director Martin Scorsese a novel. The Last Temptation Of Christ by Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis described a reinterpretation of Jesus from the Gospels that posited a battle between Christ’s divinity and His humanity. Speaking to the filmmaker who swapped the priesthood for cinema, Scorsese nurtured the project for over 15 years in the face of one false start, studio nervousness, budget cuts, switching actors (Willem Dafoe for Aidan Quinn) and pressure from religious fundamentalists as the movie opened to controversy; 25,000 protestors marched on Universal Studios, four major exhibitors refused to show the film, and in Salt Lake City a screen was slashed and a print stolen. Over…

KEVIN COSTNER: “This is how John Wayne’s reputation was solidified, with The Searchers and Liberty Valance. It also reminds people that if you want to be good in a movie, make a really good bad guy. In the instance of Lee Marvin, he was as formidable as anybody ever on screen. The scene takes place with Lee Marvin humiliating another of our greatest actors, Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart is a man not of the West, he’s a man destined to be a lawyer. And he’s serving in an apron. Like a bully in a high school, Lee Marvin trips him. And what is Jimmy Stewart going to do? You don’t want to see the great Jimmy Stewart humiliated by this piece of shit. But he is. About the time he’s…