Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i Empire Australasia

MAGNET PLANE FAST & FURIOUS 9 Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the Fast & Furious brainstorming sessions. Somewhere in Vin Diesel’s HQ, with the smell of petrol heavy in the air, there is a whiteboard with the words scribbled: “What if planes, but also magnets?” PLANE -WITHIN-A - PLANE NO TIME TO DIE James Bond has manned helicopters, jetpacks, even spaceships throughout the years. But never a plane within a plane. Here’s hoping he won’t be attempting re-entry this time. HEDGEHOG- POWERED PLANE SONIC THE HEDGEHOG Dr Robotnik (Jim Carrey) uses one of Sonic’s magic blue quills to power his floating Egg Jet. Is he a supervillain or, in fact, an environmentalist who’s found a renewable alternative to jet fuel?…

“WE JUST STARTED a new documentary series on longevity with Chris Hemsworth,” says director Darren Aronofsky, matter-of-factly, as if a Darren Aronofsky documentary series on longevity with Chris Hemsworth is a totally normal occurrence. And yet here we are. Coming later in the year on the National Geographic channel on Disney+, Limitless is produced by Aronofsky and Jane Root, who previously worked together on the same channel’s Earth exploration One Strange Rock, hosted by Will Smith. Limitless will throw six immense mental and physical challenges at Hemsworth to examine how we — or at least the God Of Thunder, which seems like a bit of an unfair advantage — can live healthier, smarter and longer. Indeed, battling age is a big theme of the series, which will investigate how humans…

A CHILLING METAPHOR for the patriarchy, The Other Lamb depicts a remote cult of women who follow a beardy, Jesus-like leader, played by Game Of Thrones’ Michiel Huisman; for British actor Raffey Cassidy, who plays cult member Selah, it meant getting a deeper understanding of the reality of religious sects. “There are so many documentaries out there that I watched and researched,” Cassidy says. “Because this is a real-life story, in a way. Catherine [McMullen, the film’s screenwriter] sent me the documentary The End Of The World Cult , where they follow this one man who was very abusive to the young girls and women.” Cassidy’s research helped kindle a respect for Selah and the women in the camp. “[Selah] has so many dimensions,” she says. “It’s easy from an…

IT COMES FROM A NURSERY RHYME The film shares its title with a popular French lullaby. “I sang it a lot as a kid,” says director Johannes Nyholm. “It’s funny but also a bit scary. [The rhyme] is about a dead rooster which is still alive in a way, living in a limbo land between death and life.” IT’S BASED ON A NIGHTMARE The film depicts a grieving couple trapped in a hellish loop, repeatedly assaulted by a giggling Dutchman in a white suit. The Groundhog Day-esque structure borrows, Nyholm says, from his dreams. “I mean, it’s the way my nightmares work, at least,” he says. “You get stuck in a situation, you try to escape, then end up in the same spot again.” IT HAS SOME OCCASIONAL SHADOW PUPPETRY…

OUT NOW CERT PG / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Dan Scanlon CAST (VOICES) Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer PLOT On his 16th birthday, elf Ian Lightfoot (Holland) is gifted a magical artefact from his mother (Louis-Dreyfus) that will allow him and older sibling Barley (Pratt) to spend one day with the late father he never got to meet. When the spell goes wrong, the brothers set off on a fantasy quest to try it again. CERTAIN PIXAR FILMS — your WALL E s and Inside Out s — change the game. Onward , the animation studio’s 22nd film, doesn’t do anything so lofty as pay homage to silent cinema, or forever change the way we think about our emotions. It’s not even as tear-jerking as Toy Story 3…

OUT NOW (DISNEY+) EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8 SHOWRUNNER Jon Favreau CAST Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog, Nick Nolte PLOT Five years after the fall of the Empire, a Mandalorian gun-for-hire (Pascal) scrapes out a living tracking down strays for the bounty hunter’s guild. After accepting an off-the-books job from a former Imperial (Herzog), he finds himself custodian of a small green child, and in the middle of a whole lot of trouble. IT’S BEEN A full four months since Disney+ and its flagship show, The Mandalorian , launched in this country. Four months during which Baby Yoda grew into an internet phenomenon, and the Mandalorian mantra — “This is the way” — became the mic drop at the end of every third Twitter exchange. If you…

1 THE OPAL Alex Godfrey: The key gem in Uncut Gems is more than a MacGuffin. It’s a divine trick. A test. Howard Ratner, played by Adam Sandler, who’s done all the legwork to get hold of the Ethiopian black opal, hopes it will change his life. It definitely does that. As writer-directors the Safdie brothers were wondering which stone to feature while writing the film, Ethiopia began talking up their black opals, which were said to bring good luck — naturally this made sense for Howard’s story, on top of the fact that the vibrant colours were so visible in the stones. In the film, the Safdies bless the opal with magic realism — perfect for a man who attracts a beautiful, swirling chaos. 2 THE BASKETBALL Nick de…

FOR MUCH OF its running time, Licence To Kill — aka Timothy Dalton’s second and final outing as 007 — does something interesting for a Bond film. It forgets to be a Bond film. Instead, it turns into a very ’80s rip-roaring rampage of revenge, as Bond — miffed because Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) has unsurgically removed the legs of Bond’s BFF Felix Leiter, via sharks without frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads — infiltrates Sanchez’s organisation, waiting for his moment to strike. So it’s not about saving the world. It doesn’t trot the globe, instead largely staying put in the fictional Isthmus City. Yes, Bond sleeps with two women, but his heart’s not really in it. And the action is determinedly low-scale. Certainly there’s…

SCROLL THROUGH THE YOUTUBE comments on your average Marvel movie trailer and you’ll find a mixture of gushing excitement and nerdish pedantry. The October 2017 teaser for X-Men spin-off The New Mutants , however, is a different story. This page appears to have become a training ground for stand-up comedians. “Can’t wait to watch this...in 2030,” chuckles one wag. “I quit smoking to live longer so I can see this movie in 2060,” snickers another. A few lines down, the conceit is stretched to breaking point: “2079: Spider-Man retired, Snyder Cut released, Keith Richards still alive... New Mutants pushed back to 2080.” Yes, if you’ve been following the trajectory of The New Mutants — the 13th and final instalment of the X-Men film series, concerning a group of troubled teens…

Zombieland: Double Tap WRITER-PRODUCERS RHETT REESE and Paul Wernick on the best bits of their zany zombie sequel. LOGO A-GO-GO Ten years may have elapsed since the original Zombieland took a devil-may-care approach to the zombie genre, but the sequel very quickly establishes that nothing has changed by having the Columbia logo lady use that torch of hers to best some undead assailants. “That was the idea of our visual-effects supervisor, Paul Linden,” admits Reese. “We actually wrote it even crazier than it turned out. We had the woman setting a zombie on fire with her torch and wrapping it up in her sash. Discretion was the better part of valour.” The duo, and director Ruben Fleischer, were unsure whether Sony would give them permission at first. “Sony is pretty…

It’s A Wonderful Life Chosen by GURINDER CHADHA GURINDER CHADHA: “I know it’s cheesy, but I’d have to choose It’s A Wonderful Life, when George Bailey [Jimmy Stewart], after all the pain he’s gone through, has got his little girl in his arms and the whole town comes and gives him money. I’m welling up even talking about it. I think it’s that sense of community. It’s hope, isn’t it? That sense that people will do the right thing. Someone once said about my work, ‘It’s quite Capra-esque.’ I’m never going to be as great as Frank Capra, but I do understand where that reference came from. He would always talk about the darkness in characters, but then bring them out the other end. It’s beautiful.” INT. BAILEY HOUSE —…

MAD ABOUT MAX One of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen was 1973’s The Exorcist, but what elevated the film from B-grade horror schlock was the superb acting of Max Von Sydow as Father Merrin. I was surprised to learn of the Swedish thespian’s recent passing at age 90, mainly ’cos I thought he was an old man even back in ’73. MOLLY, BURWOOD, NSW While his best-known movie is probably William Friedkin’s tale of possession and pea soup, we also loved him in many other films, including Woody Allen’s Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). Anyone for chess? FEELING DIZZY Regarding March’s Ranking on Alfred Hitchcock, I put Rear Window at No.1... because Vertigo doesn’t have Grace Kelly (sigh!!!). I’d also include…

IT’S BEEN 34 years since Tom Cruise and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (plus director Tony Scott, and producer Don Simpson) first felt the need…the need for speed, and made Top Gun , the movie that propelled Cruise’s already-rising star into the stratosphere. Where he’s remained since. Thirty-four years, during which time they felt the need again…the need for speed again by essentially remaking Top Gun as the car-based Days Of Thunder in 1990. And then, after that, while they both continued to feel the need…the need for speed, they also felt the need…the need to work with other people. Now and again, their orbits would cross and, now and again, the notion of getting back together one more time for another high-altitude adventure would come up. But every time that happened,…

NIA DaCOSTA GREW up loving horror. She counts Alien and Jaws among her favourite-ever movies, while The Fly and The Thing are “hugely important” to the Harlem-raised director. Yet they were all, for the most part, missing something: people like her. In 1992, that changed with Candyman, Bernard Rose’s adaptation of a Clive Barker short story, relocated to the Chicago projects and featuring the first Black horror icon: the hook-handed, bee-wrangling phantom played by Tony Todd. “It was awesome to see Black people in horror that didn’t all die immediately,” says DaCosta. “And Candyman lived in the projects. I lived near the projects my entire childhood, so it felt really close to home.” Rose’s film received some flak for its portrayal of racial stereotypes and DaCosta recognises that “when you…

WHAT DO YOU do after winning four Oscars in one of the biggest shocks in Academy Awards history? “I will drink until next morning,” Bong Joon-ho said while accepting his Best Director gong (he also picked up Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film) for Parasite at the ceremony in LA earlier this year. But Bong has post-Oscar plans beyond boozing. As he revealed to Empire , the filmmaker has a string of movies already in development. “It’s confidential, but what I can tell you is that it’s half-located in London,” the auteur told us before his Oscars win, discussing one of these next projects: an English-language drama based on a news story that circulated in 2016. Bong wasn’t willing to be drawn on story details, but did…

AT THE LA PREMIERE of The Mandalorian , Werner Herzog went rogue. Director Jon Favreau was on stage with the cast of his Disney+ Star Wars TV show when the maverick filmmaker suddenly grabbed a microphone and started excitedly shouting about the revolutionary new technology used during the series’ shoot. “He was telling the audience, ‘You have to understand, this is something incredible! You see this world around you, you forget where you are!’ He couldn’t contain himself,” laughs David Morin, one of the people responsible for getting Herzog so worked up. Morin is head of the Los Angeles Lab of Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine. You might have heard of it: since 1998, it’s been the software behind more than 500 blockbuster video games, including current hit…

STEVEN SPIELBERG IS THE HEART AND SOUL OF INDY IAN FREER STEVEN SPIELBERG HAS walked away from projects before. The filmmaker spent five months developing the screenplay for 1988’s Rain Man , working closely with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise before exiting to make Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade instead. In 2012, he was all set to shoot Robopocalypse , actors cast, location locked — when scripting issues halted things. From Jaws onwards, he has always been the most mercurial filmmaker, letting his heart choose his art. While there could be any number of factors that caused Spielberg to hang up the fedora — perhaps he was dissatisfied with a script that’s bounced around different writers; maybe he didn’t fancy the year-away-from-home commitment it takes to make a blockbuster…

OUT 21 MAY / CERT TBC / 98 MINS DIRECTOR Lorcan Finnegan CAST Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Jonathan Aris Director Lorcan Finnegan’s second feature is a bizarre and often grotesque parody of human ritual that leans into artificiality. The focus of the horror lies in the domestic space, as central couple Gemma (a fierce Poots) and Tom (Eisenberg, subverting his usual nerviness) are given no discernible way out of a creepy maze of starter homes. The film doesn’t do quite enough to move beyond its simple skewering of the ideal of the nuclear family. The point is mostly made about halfway through the film, and the dialogue handed to Eisenberg and Poots is often superfluous but Vivarium at least partly makes up for that with a string of unpredictable set…

OUT 9 APRIL CERT MA15+ / 90 MINS DIRECTOR Craig Zobel CAST Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts, Hilary Swank PLOT Awakening as prey in a deadly game of class warfare turned real, a dozen confused Americans find themselves stalked by vicious, self-styled “godless elites” who seek release for their political rage. Crystal (Gilpin), a resourceful survivor with hidden skills, has a different endgame in mind. IN THE SPIRIT of John Waters, we’ll say that no film deserves to be banned, least of all by a disgruntled Twitter critic (or American President) who hasn’t even seen the darn thing. In the case of Blumhouse’s The Hunt , shelved by distributor Universal last August in the wake of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings, the controversy turns out to be more sizzle…

OUT 23 APRIL CERT TBC / 104 MINS DIRECTOR Michael Winterbottom CAST Steve Coogan, Isla Fisher, David Mitchell PLOT Retail-fashion tycoon Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ McCreadie (Coogan) is preparing for his 60th birthday party, a gaudy debauch on a Greek island that’s designed to show off his wealth and power. But potential problems keep arising, from a recalcitrant lion to a band of immigrants ruining the view. And there might even be some more serious trouble before the night is through. STEVE COOGAN AND Michael Winterbottom are no strangers to scenic views and fancy canapés — on their long-running show The Trip the comedian and director, along with Rob Brydon, have mooched from one sun-drenched luxury location to the next, including, in this year’s fourth series, Greece. But while the central…

1 BAD DATE Amon Warmann: While Queen and Slim are at one point called “the Black Bonnie and Clyde”, that label feels reductive. The couple don’t start the movie as lovers, and by the end of the opening scene it’s hard to even see them becoming friends. Their first date is freighted with zingers (“Did you pick this place because it’s all you could afford?” asks Jodie Turner-Smith’s Queen. “It’s Black-owned,” is the fast reply from Daniel Kaluuya’s Slim), and the less-than-subtle shading doesn’t end there. Indeed, Queen’s harsh put-down of having only agreed to the Tinder date because Slim “had a sad look” on his face and she “felt sorry” for him is not exactly the kind of repartee that will lead to the post-date activity Slim is hoping…

SPECTRE , SAM MENDES’ second 007 film following Skyfall , sets out its stall with a ballsy, bravura pre-credits sequence taking place during Mexico’s Day Of The Dead festival, a celebration honouring the journey from life to death. As well as providing the kind of window on an exotic world Bond films are famous for, it plays into the heart of the film’s story: Bond being haunted by a figure from his past — Franz Oberhauser/ Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) — he long thought dead. The sequence takes in a collapsing building and a helicopter dust-up, but begins, like a dry run for 1917 , with one continuous shot following Bond (Daniel Craig) tracking an assassin through the Mexico City streets. THE LONG WALK After a title card announces “The dead…

ON THE SURFACE at least, The Limey made sense. Having turned out a slick crime caper with 1998’s Out Of Sight and belatedly delivered on the debut-movie promise of 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape , Steven Soderbergh encored with a taut, irreverent, culture-clash revenge thriller starring ’60s icon Terence Stamp. To the delight of critics, the film took a “cubist” (his word) editorial approach that filtered its events through the emotion-racked memory of its main character, Wilson (Stamp), a cockney criminal seeking revenge in LA for the death of his daughter. However, audiences stayed away, and the film earned a paltry $3.2 million off a budget of three times that. Yet The Limey is pure Soderbergh, strikingly inventive and intriguingly playful, and remains his greatest overlooked movie. Albeit one which,…

The Graduate IT’S ONE OF the most famous shots in movie history. One of the most famous lines, too. “Mrs Robinson,” squeals Dustin Hoffman to Anne Bancroft’s older lady, “you’re trying to seduce me.” Then that agonising beat. “Aren’t you?” “Do you want me to seduce you?” she asks. In Mike Nichols’ film, the scene takes place in the bar area of the Robinsons’ modernist Californian home. A bar feels natural — filled with jungle motifs, this is Mrs Robinson’s lair. Bancroft will reveal a leopard-skin wrap beneath her dress. QED: she is the hunter, Benjamin her prey. The talismanic shot is framed through an exposed leg propped on a bar stool, looking onto a squirming Hoffman. “We would do whatever we could think of to express the mood, the…

THIS MONTH GARTH MARENGHI CREATOR AND POSSUM DIRECTOR MATTHEW HOLNESS DELVES INTO SERGIO LEONE’S ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICAFOR THE FIRST TIME AS A LIFELONG fan of his Westerns, I can’t explain why it took me until my mid-forties to watch Leone’s final film. Perhaps it was a distant memory of the film’s initial reviews; perhaps the intimidating (229 minutes!) running time. If I’m honest, these days I baulk at anything past the 90-minute mark, and if Empire hadn’t come knocking, my decidedly elderly copy would have remained in cellophane for at least another decade. What did I expect, going in? Nothing less than Leone’s unique, revisionist take on the classic Hollywood gangster film. Initial impressions were strong. The director’s trademark style was evident from the start, if muted…

IAN SHAW WAS around seven years old when he first watched his dad play salty fisherman Quint in Jaws . “I remember being very scared,” he recalls. “There were a couple of times when I had dreams I had sharks circling my bed...I would call out and my dad would actually come and save me. I somehow managed to separate the fact that he wasn’t Quint.” Fast-dolly-zoom-forward and Shaw has co-written and stars in The Shark Is Broken , a play examining Jaws’ tempestuous shoot, that was a hit at last year’s Edinburgh festival. Born from a literal moment of self-reflection (“I looked in the mirror and thought I looked like Quint because I had a moustache”), Shaw identified the behind-the-camera story’s potential for compelling conflict. “You had three actors,…

NETFLIX MAY HAVE lost the rights to produce Marvel TV shows, but that hasn’t quashed the streaming giant’s interest in comic-book properties. Among the slew of adaptations on their slate is The Old Guard , an original movie set to arrive later this year. WHAT IS THE OLD GUARD? It was originally published by Image Comics in 2017 as a five-issue miniseries by writer Greg Rucka and artist Leandro Fernández. A second series, The Old Guard: Force Multiplied , began at the end of 2019. Rucka is no stranger to screen adaptations: he’s the co-creator of Stumptown (now an ABC show starring Cobie Smulders) and is also known for his extensive work with DC Comics, which included the co-creation of the current Kate Kane/ Batwoman CW series. WHAT’S IT ABOUT?…

ON HIS CHARACTER IN THE LETTER FOR THE KING “Tiuri is an underdog. He’s a failed knight, an outcast in Dagonaut. He doesn’t fit in as he’s not originally from there. At the trials you can see how much he doesn’t suit all the attributes of a stereotypical knight, but I guess he does have this bravery and courage you need to become a knight; that sends him on his mission.” ON WIELDING A SWORD “Sword-fight training was the death of me, but also the best part of filming. We had a lot of rehearsals with the stunt team and we’d go over our fights so many times. When it came to filming, it was so fun that a couple of times I had to be told to stop laughing…

A NEW TWISTED WEB? After the success of the first film, master detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) will return. But, in true Poirot style, expect a new setting for the sequel, and a fresh set of supporting characters. “I’ll write the script, show it to Daniel and we’ll see what we see,” he tells Empire. “It’s a genre that has so many possibilities. If you think about the amount of books that [Agatha] Christie wrote, and how she didn’t repeat herself in terms of locale and theme, there are so many variables.” A NEW PROTAGONIST? Just as Marta (Ana de Armas) was the protagonist of the first film, so the sequel will be told from the perspective of a character wrapped up in the murder, not the detective himself. “I’m…

OUT 30 APRIL CERT M / 110 MINS DIRECTOR Ben Lawrence CAST Hugo Weaving, Andrew Luri, Hayley McElhinney, Bolude Watson PLOT Dan Fisher (Weaving), a war photographer suffering from PTSD, meets Sudanese refugee Sebastian Ahmed (Luri), who’s struggling with his own war-related loss and pain. A friendship is born through their shared experiences, but it’s sorely tested when both men are confronted by shocking revelations about their past. THE CLICHÉ GOES that a single photograph is worth a thousand words — there is tremendous power in a photo that mere words cannot come close to touching. In Ben Lawrence’s masterful feature film debut, a single photograph wields immense power — to destroy a friendship, a marriage, a life. A photo can also reveal the truth — which is what Dan…

OUT 23 JULY CERT TBC / 87 MINS DIRECTOR Kitty Green CAST Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh, Jon Orsini PLOT Jane (Garner) is a young graduate who has starting working at a film production company with the goal of ultimately becoming a producer. For now, she is an assistant — and on one crucial day she slowly realises just how much shady behaviour is running through the higher ranks. THE SKY IS dark and quiet both when Jane (Julia Garner) first walks into the office, and when she leaves. “First one in, last one out, right?” she’s reminded. Jane does everything, for everyone; taking calls, booking cars, cleaning floors, stacking bottles, washing dishes. Green spends the first 20 minutes or so showing this in real time —…

OUT 23 APRIL / CERT TBC / 106 MINS DIRECTOR Philippa Lowthorpe CAST Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Keeley Hawes, Jessie Buckley Keira Knightley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw headline this patriarchy-bashing would-be crowd-pleaser. Knightley plays Sally, a member of the new Women’s Liberation Movement, set on protesting Miss World 1970. Inside the contest, Jennifer (Mbatha-Raw) hopes to be the first black winner and become a broadcaster. Through her, we see a far richer narrative that sadly plays second fiddle to the feminist-by-numbers journey of the Movement. The trophy-like treatment of the women in Miss World 1970 is shocking by today’s standards, but too much time is spent spelling out what an audience could readily piece together for themselves. There’s a great story within Misbehaviour — we just don’t get to see enough…

1 ONE HARLEY QUINN Cathy Yan: There has been a long cinematic history of male anti-heroes or pure villains — Scarface, Taxi Driver... They are compelling characters, not because you like them but because you like watching them. There has not been a long history of women doing that. Maybe it’s the feeling of responsibility to portray women in a certain light. I actually loved how fucked up Harley [Margot Robbie] is and how fucked up a lot of situations are because, frankly, women are like that, too. I think they can be equally compelling characters even if they are not always being good. Christina Newland: Harley Quinn began in Suicide Squad as little more than a sexy, clownish girl sidekick to the Joker, but through the full-pelt movie-star charisma…

THE MARVEL CINEMATIC Universe is like a shark: always moving forward. As Phase Four begins, the next few films that Marvel has planned — the cosmic shenanigans of The Eternals, the mysticism of Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, the reportedly horror-skewed Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Thor’s, er, full-body Jane Foster makeover in Love And Thunder — all seem designed to push the envelope and drive the already-sprawling universe in new directions But sometimes, to go forwards, you have to go backwards. Black Widow, kicking off this new era, is reversing. Set between the Wars Civil and Infinity, Natasha Romanoff’s much-anticipated solo outing is an outlier: Marvel is turning back the clock after a major character’s death. This is not business as usual. This…

KITTY GREEN IS MOVED the most by the audience responses. At film festival Q&As and after screenings they queue to tell her what her debut fiction film The Assistant has meant to them. How they were, like the film’s protagonist Jane, stuck in a toxic work environment, carrying out banal tasks, shouted at, belittled, overlooked and ignored. “A lot of people respond strongly,” Green says. She’s in Berlin, where The Assistant has just been screened to rave reviews, an experience she has found almost overwhelming. “People really seem to get what we’re trying to say. I’ve had people grab my arm and want to touch me, which is very emotional, and others who have stood there quietly and then started talking about what it meant to them. I’ve had male…

MOVIE DIRECTORS, once in a while, can come to blows with their stars. Just ask Werner Herzog or David O. Russell. But when Jean-Jacques Annaud got on the wrong side of his top-billed actor while making 1988 wilderness adventure The Bear, he risked far more than a cut lip or bruised ego. His lead performer was nearly three metres tall, weighed more than 635kg, and was strong enough to snap him in half like a stale baguette. During one lunchbreak while shooting in the Italian Dolomites, Annaud’s on-set photographer pointed out that they didn’t have any good photos of the director with Bart The Bear, a raised-in-captivity Kodiak grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) cast by Annaud as a wild brown bear stalked by human hunters. The French filmmaker agreed and, reasoning…

Mean Streets TWENTY-NINE YEARS old, long hair lank around a still somewhat adolescent face, Martin Scorsese fidgets in John Cassavetes’ office on the Universal backlot. It’s 1972. Cassavetes has proved a powerful screen presence in The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby , as well as more-or-less invented the American independent film. Faces , his heart-rending depiction of a disintegrating marriage, was self-financed and took three years to make. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay in 1969, but he’s still swimming outside the mainstream, writing and directing movies only on his own terms. In contrast, young Marty has made one student feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door , been fired from planned Hollywood debut The Honeymoon Killers , and just finished Boxcar Bertha , an exploitation picture for…

MONOS , ALEJANDRO LANDES’ beautiful, brutal dreamscape about a group of teen soldiers in Latin America, is the real deal. Inspired by Colombia’s interminable civil war, Landes short-listed a gang of mostly non-actors, stuck them in a boot camp, whittled them down to the toughest of the tough, then shot the film at first up a mountain, and then in a remote and unforgiving jungle. That jungle was rough. That jungle was tough. Landes tells us how he pulled it off. FINDING INTEL For expert guidance, Landes hired Wilson Salazar, a former child soldier. “He had risen to the top of one of the most feared combat units and he had deserted,” says Landes. “So he had a price on his head. I asked him to come on as a…

Quentin Tarantino movies Chris: When you absolutely, positively have to rank every motherfucking Quentin Tarantino movie in the room, accept no substitutes. Now, we could wait for him to do his official tenth film, which could take years, or we acknowledge that Kill Bill is two films. Terri: Which it is. I know he insists that it’s still one film, but they were released separately. John: Also, one of the films is better than the other one. Terri: Only marginally. Depends if you have a heart and soul. Nick: I’ve flipped. I’ve changed my mind on it. For ages, I always said the second was my favourite and then I changed my mind. Ben: Did you think she shouldn’t have killed Bill? Nick: She should have killed him, but not…