Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i Empire Australasia

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…

Three things the Dark Crystal TV revival does that have never before been attempted in puppetry “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 10-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…

“SEULE, UNE FEMME pouvait oser faire ce film,” reads the tagline from Agnès Varda’s provocative 1965 drama Le Bonheur. “Only a woman would dare to make this film.” When I learned that Varda had died aged 90, surrounded by family in her home on 29 March, there was only one feeling that could soothe the sharp sting of grief that came with the news, and it was of overwhelming gratitude. It’s a sentiment shared by filmmakers such as Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay and Edgar Wright, who have spoken fondly of her legacy as a true trailblazer. It’s a legacy that stretched far into her final days with us (her last film, Varda by Agnès, is yet to be released), and even in this past year, Varda’s spirit — which belied…

IF YOU’RE TRYING to sell a movie idea based on it being a relatively simple concept requiring a reasonably modest budget, you probably wouldn’t, say, pitch the money folk an ambitious sci-fi thriller set in a vast bunker where a robot tasked with repopulating an obliterated planet Earth is raising a child. Yet that’s exactly what WA-born and bred director Grant Sputore did for his debut feature film I Am Mother, which manages the nifty trick of being both minimal and epic at the same time. (“Epinimal”, anyone?) “We went into the writing process knowing this was going to be a first film and strategised a way for it to work in that capacity, and what that usually equates to is minimal characters and locations,” explains Sputore, who has an…

★★★ OUT 13 JUNE RATED TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTOR Dome Karukoski CAST Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Pam Ferris, Derek Jacobi PLOT Left orphaned in 1904, John Tolkien and younger brother Hilary grow up in Birmingham in care. There John (Hoult) falls for fellow resident Edith (Collins) and, a first-rate student, wins a place at Oxford. However, it is the horror of fighting on the Somme that will shape his life’s work. HE’S SOLD MORE than 250 million books in over 56 languages, and is the genius at the heart of cinema’s most beloved fantasy franchise. Countries from Holland to Canada have streets named after him. So it’s quietly remarkable that Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien (pronounced ‘Tolkeen’, as we are told several times) should be the first biopic of J.R.R. But…

★★★ OUT 20 JUNE / RATED MA15+ / 139 MINS DIRECTOR David Robert Mitchell CAST Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough PLOT Sam (Garfield) is a pop culture-obsessed slacker living in LA, who spies on his neighbours and reads conspiracy zines instead of looking for jobs. When he meets new neighbour Sarah (Keough), the pair hit it off — before her sudden disappearance sends Sam spiralling on a mission to track her down. “DO YOU LIKE the movie?” A minor character poses that question roughly one hour into Under The Silver Lake, and it’s one that viewers of David Robert Mitchell’s latest might be wrestling with themselves by that point. Come the closing credits, they still might not be any the wiser. After delivering an anxiety-inducing contemporary horror classic with It Follows, Mitchell’s follow-up…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 132 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Dougherty CAST Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Zhang Ziyi PLOT In the aftermath of 2014’s Godzilla, the monster-monitoring organisation Monarch studies the various giant “Titans” that have been discovered around the world. When a terrorist group steals a device that can be used to control the giant beasts, the stage is set for a massive monster brawl. 2014’S GODZILLA REDO was fairly well received but caught a bit of flak for simply not featuring enough of the titular behemoth – there just wasn’t enough Godzilla in Godzilla to satisfy Godzilla fans. Now, five years later, lessons have been learned. Godzilla: King Of The Monsters not only features plenty of giant, fire-breathing lizard…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT 7 JUNE RATED TBC / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Grant Sputore CAST Hilary Swank, Clara Rugaard, Rose Byrne, Luke Hawker PLOT After an unknown event wipes out the human race, a young girl is raised in a sealed underground complex by a benevolent robot known only as Mother. When a wounded woman suddenly and inexplicably arrives at their haven, it raises troubling questions about the outside world. CANNY FANS OF science fiction will be able to list the obvious influences in I Am Mother like they were ticking off a shopping list. There’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, Duncan Jones’ Moon, and on and on. The thing is, Australian director Grant Sputore and screenwriter Michael Lloyd Green are aware of this. The playful appearance of a piece…

“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…

Daniel Myrick (director, writer, editor): Ed [Sánchez] and I met in the University of Central Florida (UCF) film programme, in Orlando. In our senior year, we talked about how we were disillusioned with horror films of the day, which were becoming more self-referential and campy. We missed the feeling we had when we saw films like The Shining and The Exorcist. We wanted to come up with something genuinely scary. Eduardo Sánchez (director, writer, editor): “It’s not quite reality.”In which a bunch of film-school graduates hatch a plan to take horror back to its properly scary roots. We had this idea of a documentary crew that goes into the woods and disappears. But the initial idea was that it’s 20, 25 years later that the footage gets found. Michael Monello…

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 1985’s animated 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, “the classic Decepticon jet that strikes terror into the hearts of anyone who sees it.” He wanted to stick close to the “engineering marvel”…

LET’S CLEAR THIS up first. Just because a film makes you laugh — even if it is outrageously funny throughout — even if it’s full of comedy — it is not necessarily A Comedy. Or even a horror comedy. Half an hour into An American Werewolf In London, after backpackers Jack (Griffin Dunne) and David (David Naughton) have first encountered the creature on the moors, after Jack has been viciously torn to death, and after David, himself mauled, has already suffered a series of vivid nightmares in hospital, he has the worst one of all, and the least abstract: on YouTube the scene is entitled Mutant Nazi Massacre, because it is a mutant Nazi massacre. A suburban idyll — David and his Jewish, family at home before dinner — is…

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 [Emperor actor Ian McDiarmid] 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…

DUCKY AND BUNNY Voiced by: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele Two carnival toys, sewn together at the hand, who have have lived their lives as prizes in a rigged game. Then they encounter Buzz Lightyear. “If you’ve ever [won] a toy at a carnival, you’ll know they’re going to last an hour-and-a-half. They’re barely held together. They’re the worst-coloured fabrics and fur. The painted-on eyes. We really wanted them to be truthful to that. They’re literally sewn together. They have a plastic hook that they hang from. All those things that anchor them as a carnival toy. Key and Peele are incredible improvisers, great storytellers and structuralists. They would follow the lines, but then breathe life into it. They’re saying what we asked them to say, in such a unique…

PRE.VIEW FORGET “NETFLIX AND chill”. If Apple gets its way, we’ll all soon be saying “Apple TV+ and no fuss”. (Maybe.) Last month’s keynote announcement was stuffed with A-list talent (Spielberg! Abrams! Oprah!). But there were some huge shows Apple didn’t talk about. TIME BANDITS What is it? A small-screen adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s properly bonkers 1981 time-travelling fantasy film, which had knights, ogres, giants and encounters with Robin Hood and Napoleon. Why should we be excited? Taika Waititi — a Gilliamesque filmmaker if ever there was one — has signed up to write and direct the pilot episode. And Gilliam has given the project his blessing. FOR ALL MANKIND What is it? An alternative history space drama, imagining a time in which the space race never ended, and the…

★★★★ OUT 27 JUNE RATED TBC / 116 MINS DIRECTOR Danny Boyle CAST Himesh Patel, Lily James, Kate McKinnon, Ed Sheeran, Ana de Armas, Lamorne Morris, Sophia Di Martino PLOT After he is knocked unconscious during a worldwide power cut, pub singer Jack (Himesh Patel) wakes up in a world without The Beatles. He reconstructs their songs from memory and soon worldwide fame beckons. But can he live with the lie? And will his relationship with best friend Ellie (Lily James) survive? FEW STORIES TIPTOE a line between horror and wish fulfilment as nimbly as this high-concept tragi-comedy. There’s something profoundly disturbing about the idea of a world without The Beatles, whether you’re a die-hard fan or someone known to drunkenly chant the “la la” bit of ‘Hey Jude’, and…

★★★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 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 see,…

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…

IT IS APRIL 2019, Wellington, New Zealand, sun-kissed in late autumn, 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…

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…

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…

REC (2007) Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s tower-block-set horror movie took a 28 Days Later…-style infection and gave it a found-footage spin, as a news reporter (Manuela Velasco) follows a fire-fighter call-out that goes ragingly wrong. Three sequels and a US remake (Quarantine) followed. PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007) Oren Peli’s franchise-spawning, haunted-home-video movie was, he admitted, very much inspired by The Blair Witch Project. When he saw it, he said, “It got me thinking if I ever had an idea for a movie that I could shoot in that style, then I could just buy a video camera and make my own movie.” CLOVERFIELD (2008) Matt Reeves’ New York-trashing monster hit was described by The Hollywood Reporter as “the Blair Godzilla Project” and with good reason. It didn’t…

OUT 19 JUNE / RATED MA15+ / 122 MINS DIRECTOR Jacques Audiard CAST John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rutger Hauer PLOT In 1850s Oregon, a pair of sibling blackhats (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are looking for their next target (Riz Ahmed), a man en route to California who is harbouring a potentially lucrative secret. STEP ASIDE, THE Man With No Name, for here come The Men With Silly Names. At first glance the Sisters Brothers, aka Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), are tough, fleabitten prairie assassins, as fearsome as Clint Eastwood’s iconic, laconic anti-hero. But the more time you spend with them, the more you realise that this pair of firearm-packing fortysomethings are actually childish, bickering improvisers who rarely know what…

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…

“IT SOUNDS LIKE a good daydream but actually doing it is too weird,” says the wide-eyed, innocent Sandy (Laura Dern) to seemingly button-down everyboy Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan) of his plan to break into the apartment of mysterious chanteuse Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). She has no fucking idea. How deeply odd and disturbing David Lynch’s fourth film remains, especially this scene — which if you’ve seen you’ll never forget and if you’ve not seen there’s little hope of explaining how peculiar and troubling it is. Having been discovered by Dorothy, Jeffrey hides in a wardrobe from the arrival of Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), at this stage an unknown figure, but soon to prove one of cinema’s most terrifying antagonists. The script describes him as having “a raw, mean sexuality —…

I have to admit that I was surprised when John Wick Chapter 3 - Parabellum got awarded the most memorable trailer moment in the April issue of Empire. I was expecting Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to take out the title considering it’s the final movie in the saga and is so anticipated by nerds everywhere, but I just played it off to be a timing thing and that it hadn’t been released in time to be in the issue. But I’ve just read the May issue and there is still no coverage on the massive updates in the Star Wars community! Surely that INCREDIBLE trailer and title reveal deserved some type of comment by Empire? I’ll be buying every issue until The Rise of Skywalker comes out to…

★★★★ OUT 13 JUNE RATED TBC / 100 MINS DIRECTOR Tom Harper CAST Jessie Buckley, Julie Walters, Sophie Okonedo, Jamie Sives, Ashley Shelton, James Harkness PLOT Rose-Lynn Harlan (Buckley) is an ex-con and a wannabe country singer from a Glasgow housing estate. Clashing with her mother (Walters), can she reconcile reality and mundanity as a mum with dreams of reaching Nashville? AFTER LAST YEAR’S feature film debut in the bleak psychological thriller Beast, there is little doubt that Jessie Buckley is more than just another new actor with star potential. She is the real deal, capable of a depth of dramatic delivery that actors stretch their entire careers for. The question is this, though: is the material worthy of Jessie Buckley? Wild Rose is not an entirely definitive yes, but…

★★★★ OUT NOW / RATED MA15+ / 131 MINS DIRECTOR Chad Stahelski CAST Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Mark Dacascos, Asia Kate Dillon, Anjelica Huston, Ian McShane PLOT Now excommunicado and with every hitman, hitwoman and hitchild on Earth hunting him for the $14 million bounty, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is starting to break a sweat. Can he somehow win back the favour of the assassin aristocrats of the High Table? And who’s going to look after his dog while he does it? JOHN WICK, RELEASED back in 2014, was the story of an all-powerful contract killer who executes 86 bad people in retribution for the demise of his puppy. With its main character a cross between Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer and Shaggy in Scooby-Doo, at the time…

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…

“ON YOUR LEFT.” These are the words that signal the triumphant return of the vanished heroes in Avengers: Endgame, but it’s also a fitting call-back to the first meeting between Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Their instant, easy rapport has been an MCU highlight ever since, and it was exciting and emotional to watch an elderly Cap gift Sam his iconic vibranium shield and make him his successor in Endgame’s final moments. But that wasn’t always a given. Steve has passed the baton to both Falcon and Bucky in the comics, and arguably the latter is more of a fan favourite on the big screen. The movies seemed to be headed that way too, a deleted scene in Captain America:…

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…

ROBERT ZEMECKIS: “I love the Steve McQueen motorcycle chase in The Great Escape. The Great Escape is one of my favourite movies of all time. The reason I loved it so much when I was a kid is that it felt like a movie about school. The prisoners were the students and the guards were the teachers and you could identify with those guys, who were just trying to escape. They were constantly giving their guards a bunch of attitude. That’s why I would pick that scene. It’s the school doors bursting open.” EXT. GERMAN COUNTRYSIDE — DAY Hilts (Steve McQueen), in a stolen German uniform, is tearing along a road on a motorcycle. He stops as he sees the Alps in the distance. Switzerland. Safety. HILTS: Switzerland. He opens…