Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Empire Australasia

WHAT ARE YOU directing next? That’s what we’ve been asking Edgar Wright since June 2017, when Baby Driver was released. In the 18-month interim, he’s filmed a music documentary about cult band Sparks, but news of his next fictional feature film has been restricted to rumours and rumblings. Until now. Speaking exclusively to Empire as part of our 30th birthday celebrations, Wright reveals that his next project is an entirely original film — and his first non-comedy. He describes it as “a psychological thriller set in contemporary London”, a straight horror with a female protagonist bearing all the filmmaker’s hallmarks, minus any comedic elements. “I’ve always been obsessed with movies like Don’t Look Now or Repulsion,” he explains. “The idea of doing something in that kind of realm is really…

THE SUNNY-EYED, apple pie mood of the early parts of the teaser for The Handmaid’s Tale’s third season was not just a random artistic choice. It was inspired by a 1984 commercial for Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign. The Reagan commercial, like the ad, opened with the line, “It’s morning again in America,” spoken softly over gauzy images of children laughing, people going merrily to work and young people getting married. It touted America’s strong economy, calling the US “prouder and stronger and better”, and asked the voters why they would ever want to return to a time before Reagan’s Presidency. The message was that things were great now and to rock the boat could see the country fall back into the economic difficulties of the latter days of the Jimmy…

★★★★ OUT 14 MARCH / 125 MINS / RATED TBC DIRECTOR Anthony Maras CAST Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Tilda Cobham-Hervey PLOT When gunmen burst into a luxury hotel, both staff and guests must struggle to survive a relentlessly brutal wave of violence in this cinematic recreation of the 2008 Mumbai Terror Attacks. “UNFLINCHING” IS THE word that comes most readily to mind when considering Hotel Mumbai, the debut feature from director Anthony Maras. Movie fans are used to terrorist actions being fodder for action movies and thrillers, where square-jawed heroes stand up to and inevitably put down whatever rabid ideologue is threatening the status quo. Here, that’s not an option. In Hotel Mumbai, the only victory is survival. Although the real world attacks were part of a larger…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW RATED TBC / 103 MINS DIRECTOR Chiwetel Ejiofor CAST Maxwell Simba, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Noma Dumezweni PLOT While his father Trywell (Ejiofor) tries to maintain the family farm in the face of a famine, 13-year-old William Kamkwamba (Simba) uses his ingenuity to build a windmill that might just do the trick. WHETHER HE’S PLAYING an enslaved nobleman, a super-powered sorceror, or a bloke who doesn’t see anything strange in his wife going to the front door to listen to dreadful carol singers for what seems like an eternity, Chiwetel Ejiofor has always been an actor of immaculate control and intelligence. It’s not always a given that those qualities survive a transition to the director’s chair so it’s a pleasure to report that The Boy Who Harnessed The…

Fleck took his phone off silent during the intermission of Pulitzer-Prize winning play Sweat in 2017, to see five missed calls and countless texts from his agent. “We were like, ‘What the fuck?!’” he laughs as Empire meets the pair on day 50 of the gig that those five missed calls and countless texts were informing him of — helming Captain Marvel. After they digested the news and sat through the second half of the play (“We didn’t leave, it was really good,” says Boden), they decided to check whether their names had featured in the mix of the churning, whirling online rumour mill. “I remember Googling it,” says Fleck. “And no-one called this one…” Even though Marvel has a habit of plucking little-known filmmakers and placing them at the…

How often do you skip through TV channels late at night, find a film of yours on and nestle down to watch it? And has this happened in the company of people who don’t know you directed the film? STEPHEN LOWE I don’t know in what situation somebody would be round my house late at night that doesn’t know who I am. You’d have to have picked up a young tourist who has no idea who you are. That’s Dennis Nilsen territory. So no, that has never happened. I have sometimes been flipping through the channels and Hot Fuzz or Shaun will be on. And I have watched parts, for sure. Just never with a random person I picked up at a bar. If you could be in any band,…

DOLPH LUNDGREN IS RUNNING LATE. When he arrives at the hotel restaurant in Stockholm, he’s in pain. He joins me straight from the chiropractor’s office, still gingerly rubbing his side. Eight weeks ago, he had surgery for an injury sustained doing karate; an injury he then aggravated by hanging in a harness for eight hours a day on Aquaman. So far, so Dolph Lundgren. Model, actor, action star, man of steel (well, iron, technically). The man who has racked up 88 acting credits in the last 33 years, including some of the most memorable action movies of our lifetime: Masters Of The Universe, Universal Soldier, The Expendables. And, of course, the film that started it all: Rocky IV. A film in which he spoke just nine lines of dialogue and…

RELEASED IN THE impossibly small window in 1996 when swing music, bowling shirts and fedoras briefly threatened to make a comeback, Swingers left not one but two lasting marks on the lexicon. The first, the compliment “you’re so money”, didn’t have much in the way of cultural currency, and was killed off completely once it was adopted by an online price comparison website. The second, the exclamation, “Vegas, baby!”, died an extremely long and drawn-out death at the hands of over-excited tourists everywhere. Both phrases now seem incredibly obnoxious in the cold light of day, but they cast a long shadow on Swingers, a film which, despite outward appearances, really had no intention of playing it cool. For starters, it’s not really a movie about Vegas at all: the sharp…

JOE RUSSO: “There’s one scene that always brings tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I cry in appreciation or because I know I’ll never be able to do anything that good. It’s the showdown at the end of Once Upon A Time In The West . I love that scene. It’s so existential, this conflict that’s been brewing between these two characters. Even though they’re at odds with each other, they’re part of the same breed, this dying breed. This is like the last gunfight on the edge of civilisation.” EXT. RAILROAD — DAY Frank (Henry Fonda) rides on horseback through the town of Sweetwater. Harmonica (Charles Bronson), sitting by a tree stump, looks up. He stops whittling a piece of wood, closes his knife,…

1 A SONG OF FIRE Daenerys and Jon Snow, after a protracted campaign and heavy losses, venture forth — she astride Drogon, Jon astride Rhaegal — to bathe the Night King’s army in a sea of dragonfire, before going on to rule the Seven Kingdoms as Targaryen king and queen. The Iron Bank abandons Cersei (paying your debts has consequences), leaving her in the lurch until Jaime (or rather Arya, wearing his face) makes an end of her, thus fulfilling the prophecy that Cersei’s ‘little brother’ would prove her undoing. The Hound carves up what’s left of The Mountain, Theon rescues Yara and retires to the Iron Islands, and Bran, despite knowing everything, proves no help whatsoever. 2 A SONG OF ICE After discovering that Tyrion is, in fact, the…

IDRIS ELBA LOVES music. The young Idris would watch his uncle spin records and dream of being a superstar DJ; the grown-up version would foster a respectable sideline as a DJ and producer, sometimes under the moniker ‘Big Driis’. After years of inhabiting dark, challenging characters on screen (Stringer Bell, Detective John Luther, Nelson Mandela), the actor was looking for something a little closer to home. “It just felt like I owed it to myself to have a job which encompasses what I love in my spare time and what I do as an actor full time,” says Elba, talking to Empire in Ibiza, the day after filming wraps on Turn Up Charlie, a new comedy drama about Elba’s greatest passion. Elba plays Charlie, a frustrated DJ who never escaped…

LONG BEFORE THE likes of Margot Robbie and Nicole Kidman became the Australian (Vegemite) toast of Tinseltown, the young daughter of a Queensland publican named Mary Maguire managed to go from Catholic schoolgirl to international movie star in record time. Although currently not a household name in her home country, new book Australia’s Sweetheart aims to shine a light on a star-studded life that took in everything from attending the 10th Academy Awards to dodging bombs during the The Blitz. Here’s a primer on the forgotten Aussie star that you need to know about... SHE WAS A STAR AT 15 After making her debut in one of Australia’s earliest talkies, 1933’s Diggers In Blighty, Mary (then known as Peggy) landed the leading lady role in Charles Chauvel’s 1935 epic Heritage.…

HERE IS A brief list of perfectly normal things that can be seen in the first trailer for Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw: Idris Elba calls himself “superhuman” [1]. Jason Statham boshes a man in the throat with a champagne bottle then drives a sports car under two moving lorries [2]. The Rock jumps off a skyscraper — and punches someone on his way down [3]. In the Fast & Furious world, it’s all in day’s work. “We’ve always adhered to this rule where we’re willing to push the bounds on action and physics just enough to where it doesn’t break faith with the audience,” says screenwriter/producer Chris Morgan. “As long as the audience cheer and not laugh because it’s so implausible.” He laughs. “We’ve come close a few…

★★★ OUT 21 MARCH / 108 MINS / RATED TBC DIRECTOR Stephen Merchant CAST Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, Dwayne Johnson PLOT The lives of the eccentric Knight family from Norwich revolve around wrestling but the bonds of brother Zak (Lowden) and sister Raya (Pugh) are tested when the WWE comes knocking, but only one sibling makes the grade. Can the family survive the ascension of one of their own? THE WWE, BACK when it was known as WWF and there was no animal-based confusion, was the home of grown men in neon tights and face masks, wrestling other grown men in neon tights and face masks to respectable crowds in modest arenas. The World Wrestling Federation became World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. and, as the ‘inc’…

★★★★ OUT 21 MARCH / 121 MINS / RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Karyn Kusama CAST Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Tatiana Maslany, Sebastian Stan, Scoot McNairy PLOT Seventeen years after being part of an undercover operation that went wrong, police detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) hears that Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of the gang she infiltrated, is back in town. Bell is intent on settling old scores, whatever the cost. WE HAVE, WITHOUT a doubt, never seen Nicole Kidman like this before. But there’s far more to her performance in Destroyer than the remarkable, ravaging make-up job that has already received so much attention, and deserves to draw comparisons with Charlize Theron’s transformation for Monster in 2003. The role of LA detective Erin Bell is the kind you’d expect someone like…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Robert Rodriguez CAST Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Jackie Earle Haley PLOT In the year 2563, cybernetics expert Dr Dyson Ido (Waltz) discovers a 300-year-old trash-heap treasure: the “core” of an advanced cyborg with a surviving teenage-girl brain. He rebuilds her and names her Alita after his dead daughter. But Alita (Salazar) has warrior instincts — and nemeses to fight. JAMES CAMERON IS a filmmaker who’s never failed to surprise us. He gave Alien a kick-ass war-movie sequel and turned an over-budget sinking-ship romance into history’s biggest movie, subsequently outgrossed when we went ga-ga for his nine-foot-tall blue cat people. His cinematic visions have always felt awesomely vast and startlingly original. But what’s surprising about Alita:…

Where is Nick Fury in his career in Captain Marvel ? He’s been out of the army for a while, and he’s now basically riding a desk in the newly created S.H.I.E.L.D., doing threat assessment, trying to figure out where the next war will jump off or where our next threat will come from, never even believing or knowing anything about extra-terrestrials. And what does he see for himself at the point we find him? He’s kind of bored! [Laughs] He doesn’t go in the field and do a lot of stuff. He’s doing threat assessment and there’s not a lot of ways to do that that are exciting. Does he have less of an edge to him — less world-weary, seen it all? He doesn’t have…

At the age when most of us were made to read Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh was obsessed with him. He’s been a fan since he was a teenager and has directed six of Shakespeare’s plays on film, as well as starring in so many stage productions we lost count. Branagh’s latest project, as both director and actor, is Shakespeare-centric but no adaptation. All Is True is a fictionalised biopic, focused on the last years of Shakespeare’s life, after the writing stopped. It’s something Branagh has been percolating for 30 years, since the first time he mentioned it to its eventual writer, Ben Elton. It’s both a domestic drama, dredging up dark family secrets, and a look at how genius can come from very ordinary men. Under transformative prosthetics, Branagh plays with…

00:03:36 NICK OFFED, ER, MAN __“I tend to think in moments when I’m working on a story,” says Drew Goddard, writer/director of Bad Times At The El Royale. “This was one of the first five things that popped into my head.” ‘This’ is the opening scene, in which Nick Offerman’s thief meticulously hides a bag of money in a grubby motel room, while we watch from what we will later understand is a two-way mirror. “Voyeurism is a key theme. I wanted to set the tone for the audience; we’re going to watch these people.” 00:16:26 CHECKING IN __ Shifting ahead ten years, Goddard assembles his characters — Jon Hamm’s vacuum salesman, Cynthia Erivo’s lounge singer, Jeff Bridges’ priest, Lewis Pullman’s bellhop and Dakota Johnson’s mystery lady — in the…

LIAM NEESON WILL never forget shooting outside the gates of Auschwitz for Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. You’ll remember the scene. It’s the moment Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is remonstrating with a Nazi guard to save a little girl from the camp because her small hands could fit inside metal shell casings to clean them (this is a Schindler improv — there’s no reason to clean inside metal shell casings). Fearing the site would turn into a “Hollywood backlot”, The World Jewish Congress denied Spielberg access to shoot inside the concentration camp, so the production evocatively utilised the exterior gates and train tracks. Waiting for the busy scene to be set, Neeson peered through the fences. “I was looking at the huts we were denied entry to,” says Neeson on the phone…

OUT NOW RATED M / 105 MINS DIRECTOR Paul Dano CAST Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould, Bill Camp PLOT When 1960s dad Jerry (Gyllenhaal) is let go from his golf-course job for being too friendly to customers, a chain of events unfolds that rocks his whole family, not least wife Jeanette (Mulligan). AT THE RIPE old age of 31, Paul Dano decided to direct. And the indie star didn’t make things easy for himself, either: he took on a book by Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose spare, haunting prose has been compared to that of Raymond Caver. Wildlife is the tale of a 1960s nuclear family — mom, dad, teenage son — whose lives blow up like an atomic bomb. We see things through the eyes of…

J.C. CHANDOR IS a director who knows how to turn his hand to genre movies and come up with something unexpected. In his new action-drama Triple Frontier, a group of hardened American combat veterans — played by a starry ensemble that includes Pedro Pascal, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam and Garrett Hedlund — join forces to plan an audacious heist of a Colombian cartel kingpin, set in the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. “We have a professional warrior class doing all the fighting in the US,” says Chandor, who co-wrote the script with Mark Boal (co-writer of Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker). Chandor shares with Boal an interest in the role of American military veterans today. “When you see the movie, it’s not like it’s on…

DURING THE SHOOT of Tim Burton’s Dumbo, Colin Farrell (who plays the nominal human lead Holt Farrier) caught himself watching his director enraptured by what was playing out in front of him. “When Tim comes in to give his notes, he is a 60-year-old. [But] watching the monitor, he is just a child. It was lovely to see that level of engagement,” laughs the actor. “I swear to God, if we can get a reaction off a seven-year-old that is anywhere in the neighbourhood of what Tim’s reaction was in front of the monitor, we’ll be doing well.” Yet, for all the innocence that Burton is bringing to his updating of Disney’s 1941 baby-elephant-with-big-ears-flies classic, Farrell confirms that, “Tim is suspicious of things getting too sweet.” The story sees Dumbo…

Do you have a nickname? I hate nicknames. And I’ve always been a bit jealous of people who have them. Vanessa Kirby’s [Mission: Impossible Fallout] is Noo. We became friends later, but in the beginning we were sitting in make-up and she said “Becky” or something, and I said, “My name is Rebecca. Don’t shorten it. I’m happy we caught it on the first day.” That was the first time I met her! After that we hugged and kissed — we’re good friends now — but I remember thinking, “What a bitch I am.” When have you been most starstruck? I’ve just finished shooting a film called Doctor Sleep with Ewan McGregor. And every bloody time I met him I made a fool out of myself. A fool, I tell…

★★★★ OUT 21 MARCH RATED PG / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Mike Mitchell CAST Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Alison Brie, Nick Offerman, Tiffany Haddish, Maya Rudolph, Stephanie Beatriz PLOT The Duplo aliens have left Bricksburg a wasteland. When General Mayhem (Beatriz) and Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi (Haddish) kidnap the residents, Emmet (Pratt) and new friend Rex Dangervest (also Pratt) have to save the day. FOR A BRIEF time in 2014, you couldn’t throw a plastic brick without it landing on someone singing ‘Everything Is Awesome’, the absurdly catchy song at the centrepiece of The Lego Movie. Sugary and energetic but also witty and ironic, it whittled all of the achievements of that expectation-defying movie down to two minutes and 43 seconds of earwormy joy. Fitting, then, that The Lego Movie…

IN 2019, WHAT the layman calls “special effects” — more properly visual effects or VFX — are no longer “special”. The state of digital art has progressed to the point where we can no longer see the seams. Digital apes walk effortlessly through physical forests, while everything from cities to alien landscapes are routinely conjured for real actors to inhabit. In that, Alita: Battle Angel is no different from any other blockbuster out this year. But in Alita herself, we find something different. In her, we’re presented with a primary, digital character who boasts photorealistic human features that are entirely believable — features our subconscious accepts so readily that, bar her enlarged, manga-inspired eyes, you might never realise she was artificial at all. With such glut of digital imagery comprising…

THE DREAMER Lesley Wright (mother): One week he said, “Mum, I want to be a film star.” So I said, “To be realistic, you’re going to have to think about television first.” This is a five-year-old we’re talking about. He said, “No, that’s not famous enough.” Then the Two Ronnies were filming down on the beach. We went and met Ronnie Corbett and saw Ronnie Barker directing. We came back and I said, “Do you still want to be a film star?” Edgar said, “No. I want to be the director.” Because he’d watched Ronnie Barker all day. Edgar Wright: I grew up in Swanage, and Bournemouth was our nearest town showing first-run movies. Star Wars was my first film at the cinema. Lesley Wright: It was his brother Oscar’s…

It started on the toilet. In January 1977, nursing a hangover one Sunday morning, Donner sat there as the phone rang, listening to the Hungarian voice down the line. Producer Alexander Salkind, whom he’d never met, told Donner he had the rights to Superman and was making an origin story and sequel back to back. Donner was only half-interested; hot off the success of his breakthrough, The Omen, he was gearing up to make Omen II. Salkind told him he’d secured Marlon Brando as Superman’s father, Jor-El, and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, had a script by The Godfather’s Mario Puzo, and would pay Donner $1 million. Donner’s interest increased. Someone else could deal with Damien. “It’s so hard to talk about it,” says Donner, now 88, after lunch in…

Neil Marshall (Director of The Descent , Game Of Thrones episodes and the upcoming Hellboy ): In 1981 a fantasy adventure movie came out that was unlike anything we’d seen before — certainly unlike any Disney movie before it. Produced by Disney in conjunction with Paramount Pictures, Dragonslayer was written by Matthew Robbins and his long-term collaborator Hal Barwood, and brilliantly directed by Robbins. And this movie did for dragons what Jurassic Park would do for dinosaurs 12 years later: it made them seem entirely real. Nothing else has come close to depicting a world in which dragons feel like an integral part of the ecosystem, and sorcery part of the furniture. The movie pushed boundaries on many levels. It…

OUT 27 MARCH / 112 MINS / RATED MAI5+ DIRECTOR Boots Riley CAST Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Danny Glover PLOT Cassius ‘Cash’ Green lives in his uncle’s garage, frustrated with his life and prospects. Getting a job as a telemarketer for shadowy company RegalView, he is exposed to dazzling individual opportunities — but at what cost? “HEY YOUNGBLOOD,” SAYS novice telemarketer Cassius’ (Stanfield) cannier colleague Langston (Danny Glover). “Use your white voice. Like being pulled over by the police.” If the African-American Cassius wants to succeed, he needs to play the system, as well as some dirty tricks. More significantly, he’s got to be someone — something — he’s not. If he even knows what he is to begin with. Sorry To Bother You is a dialled-up, adrenalised…

THE SCENE ISN’T in the screenplay. Perhaps writer Frank S. Nugent knew what his frequent collaborator, director John Ford, was going to do to elevate the ending, but on the page it simply has our (anti?)heroes trotting up to the Jorgensen ranch, with Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) balancing the long-missing Debbie (Natalie Wood) “on the pommel of his saddle, his arm supporting her, and she is asleep”. This is only a few moments — in screen time — after we’ve feared Ethan was going to kill his niece, because she has spent years living with the Comanche, the Native American tribe who kidnapped her after murdering her parents. The Searchers is an extraordinary story of family and, really, hate. And the final scene is remarkable for how it compensates somewhat…