Innholdsfortegnelse for Total Film Annual (2024) - Vol.6 i Total Film

After more than a decade of superhero domination, this was the year when the tables well and truly turned on Marvel and DC. While the likes of Ant-Man 3 and The Flash dramatically underperformed at the box office, it was Greta Gerwig's Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer that captured the imaginations of audiences craving a break from superhero saturation. There's no question that the dual release of Barbie and Oppenheimer, aka Barbenheimer, was the movie event of 2023, putting cinemas at the centre of the culture for the first time in years as audiences turned out in droves to this unlikeliest of double bills. Barbie was a phenomenon, appealing to a drastically underserved audience (ie. women) while delivering a subversive take on IP moviemaking. That Oppenheimer could outperform the likes…

I start really early with Chris, because, quite often, he wants to talk about the process and the methodology that he wants to use, really quite a long time before actual pre-production starts. It's always better to start early for me. Traditional computergenerated visual effects are really off the table with [Nolan]. That's really a last resort. Because I come from a background that's practical, and I now work in a visual-effects capacity, I quite often bring that combination of practical effects and visual effects to a project, which is quite a useful thing. It was a really interesting brief for me, because rather than challenging, it was much more exciting. Because basically, what he proposed was he wanted to make a film about nuclear physics and the event of…

In the weeks leading up to Greta Gerwig's Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer – both of which hit UK cinemas on 21 July – anticipation reached nuclear levels. Dubbed collectively as ‘Barbenheimer’, the pair set social media ablaze with everything from frantic debates to memes, fan art to commemorative T-shirts. Joyously, that excitement translated to box office, with the films contributing to the UK and Ireland's biggest seven-day box office on record while also breaking records stateside and right across the world. This success saw Hollywood legend Francis Ford Coppola weigh in during a Q&A on his Instagram story: ‘The fact that people are filling big theaters to see [these films] and that they are neither “sequels” nor “prequels”… is [a] victory for cinema,’ he enthused. ‘SUMMER 2023 BEGAN WITH…

THE KILLER 1989 John Woo's hugely influential Hong Kong actioner sees Chow Yun-Fat's assassin and Danny Lee's cop gun down dozens of gangsters in a church before coming up against Shing FuiOn's triad for one final shoot-out, as the latter grabs a damsel for a body shield. Pistols in both hands… Nobody does stand-offs better than Woo. THE DUELLISTS 1977 Ridley Scott's acclaimed debut, set in the early 19th century, boasts more duels than you can shake a bayonet at, though none better than the classic face-off between Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine's rivals in the grounds of a ruined chateau. Tricked into discharging both his pistols, Keitel's Feraud is left alive by Carradine's character, but with his honour permanently tarnished. BARRY LYNDON 1975 Set in a tithe barn, pigeons…

Q & A Who is Tess? I would say Tess is a little bit of a mystery. She is part of the Agency, but she also goes rogue and edges more towards the family side, but that means she has a lot to prove. When Dom gives her an impossible task that's going to require a lot of thought and effort and also is putting herself at risk, she doesn't question it. I think that shows who she is, that she's willing to go to those lengths. She agrees to do it because she wants to show up for this family the way that her father did. She's also really intelligent. Tess plays the game well. She's not afraid of going on her own mission to do what she feels…

Introduce your character, Klaber… For me, in terms of why this person is the way they are – that was just the time and era, and what was going on in the country and the world. I think, really, he's a very confused individual who doesn't know who he is. There's a sense of him wanting to at least belong to something, which lands him in this predicament. Do you see parallels between Dial of Destiny and Logan? You know, Jim is a fantastic director, and he really is honest. In approaching the subject, he's not going to try to fake it. He's really going to play with what he has. We see you on a motorcycle in the trailers… I mean, just to pull that off was extraordinary. You…

DRUNKEN MASTER 1978 Director Yuen Woo-ping and Chan redefined the kung fu genre with this landmark fusion of balletic martial arts and slapstick comedy. POLICE STORY 1985 Not only a stunt-tastic, franchisespawning (eight films and counting) action classic, but one Chan has declared his own best movie. ARMOUR OF GOD 1986 A fun Indiana Jones-style adventure… albeit destined to be forever remembered as the film that almost killed Chan when a stunt went wrong. RUSH HOUR 1998 Teaming with Chris Tucker for some buddy-com kicks, Chan scored his first bona fide Hollywood blockbuster. Rumours of a four-quel persist……

INTERVIEW ARI ASTER Writer/director Ari Aster exploded onto the scene at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, his domestic drama Hereditary drawing comparisons to such masters as Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman even as it pivoted into becoming an occult horror movie, and a truly terrifying one at that. His 2019 follow-up, Midsommar, was a sun-drenched folk horror that torched toxic masculinity to the ground. Both films were instant classics. And both exhibited a vision that was personal and uncompromising. But now Aster is going for broke with Beau Is Afraid, a three-hour ‘nightmare comedy’ that fixes its twitchy eye on paranoid, superanxious Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) as he journeys to his mother's funeral. Already dividing critics between the ‘masterpiece’ and ‘self-indulgent’ camps, Aster's third feature veers from discombobulating to discomfiting…

It was my sixth film with Chris. Compared to a lot of the other ones we've done, it was definitely not as rigorous with day-to-day filming. He said, ‘There's not as much stuff for you on this as the other one, but there's a couple of things we do have to cover.’ And that was, of course, the Trinity explosion, and some prop builds, and elements of different things that we had throughout the film. Working with Chris is kind of funny. He's a totally different director. In modern filming, when you read a script, you think, ‘Oh, that's going to be CG.’ But with him, you have to think, ‘This is what we're probably going to end up doing, or some version of this.’ It is like an old-school…

‘There's nothing that we put as much effort into as Dom's Dodge Charger. Obviously, it's the most important car in the film. The designs always vary a little bit [from film to film]. If you've seen the trailer for Fast X, there is a shot of a car that looks very much like the Charger from the first movie doing donuts in a parking lot. We tried to recreate the original car, and when we go and see Dom's act-two and act-three Charger, that one we tried to really make something new that we haven't seen before. ‘Now, I will say this: I did reel it back quite a bit. If you go back, in Fast 9, we had the mid-engine Charger, which was very extreme, a very wide body.…

Introduce your character, Voller… He's a mathematician. His love for that craft oversees his political ideologies. But if you can combine them, eventually that will be enormous for him. Was there much in the way of research to do? It's a fantasy world. I mean, I'm a history buff, so I know quite a bit about history. But I didn't use it specifically for the character. We looked at a lot of pictures to get an idea of where to go with his looks. Voller and Indy are kind of stuck in their own period. The 50s and 60s are going over their heads somehow. So they're kind of ancient people in 1969. So they have that in common, and that's about it – and a love for archaeology, obviously.…

Introduce your character, Helena… She comes and turns everything upside down, basically. But she was a lot of fun to play, and they really nailed a humour and wit that is already in the DNA of the series. They created a really fresh character to carry that through again. Does she have any literal or spiritual counterparts from the previous films? I think they really achieved something extraordinary: she fits into the canon, and she feels like there is certainly an energy that she shares with all the characters that have come before, especially with the female parts, but she is unique, and she has a fresh voice. She was somebody who was mysterious from the off. I think [Indy's] often been the mystery to those characters before, especially his…

In Atlanta prepping for Gavin Hood's suspense thriller The Test, in which he'll play a behavioural psychologist confronted by far-right terrorists in a near-future fascist state, John Boyega is a busy, focused man. But he's happily cleared a window in his schedule to talk to Total Film about his career, saying, ‘Love the magazine, I'm looking forward to this…’ It goes both ways and there's much to talk about, starting with Boyega's new film, Breaking, the true story of how Brian Brown-Easley, an ex-Marine working two jobs and living out of a hotel room, walked into a Wells Fargo banks in Marietta, Georgia clutching a note that read: ‘I have a bomb’. All he wanted was the $892.34 owed to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs – without it,…

 I, ROBOT ‘Gareth wanted to come away from principal photography, and then choose different characters to be simulants, and to be robots. We knew, obviously, Alphie and a couple of the other principals. But for other characters in the background, there's sometimes ones that get elevated to simulant status, and they were just shot normally.’ OK COMPUTER… ‘So, the way we do that is, we do a scan of our actors and actresses, and then we come out of that scanning process with a model – you know, a physical computer representation of them. Then we fit that model head to our actor, in the computer. So, those things are lined up and then we animate our CG representation to match as much of the performance of our actors as…

1. SPINNERET AND ANNA-MAY PARKER (EARTH-18199) Peter Parker's wife and daughter who fight alongside him in their timeline, going by the aliases of Spinneret and Spiderling. 2. SPIDER MONKEY (MARVEL APES) A valued member of the Ape-vengers. This isn't a metaphor; he really is a monkey. 3. SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #700) A terminally ill Otto Octavius swapped brains with an unsuspecting Peter Parker and became determined to be a better hero than his predecessor. 4. MANGAVERSE SPIDER-MAN (EARTH-2301) A trained ninja and member of the Spider Clan, he tragically lost his sensei Ben to Venom. 5. SPIDER-JOCK (WHAT IF? #7) One of the earliest in the What If series saw the creation of Captain Spider, when Peter's high-school bully Flash Thompson was bitten instead of him. 6. LADY SPIDER…

When I wrote my Howard Hughes script, it was the first time I'd taken on a real-life figure, and tried working from a book, and tried to find a structural approach and a cinematic approach that would give you the experience of this guy's life. I was very happy with that script. Obviously I did not get to test the theories, because I didn't get to make the film. But in my mind, I go, ‘OK, I do know how to do this.’ In some ways, Oppenheimer was easier because nobody deserves this, probably, more than this individual. This is the guy who has defined our future for us – literally. This is a guy who needs to have a film made about him. That drives the writing. From certain…

Expected to release in 2024, though officially undated, Ballerina is the first big-screen John Wick spin-off. Directed by Underworld's Len Wiseman, it stars Ana de Armas (pictured above in No Time To Die) as the titular, classically trained assassin, and is confirmed to feature an appearance from one J. Wick. It's a cool story,’ says Reeves. ‘Len Wiseman has a vision, but is also embracing, affectionately, the world of John Wick. Ian McShane is in it as Winston. So I felt that there was a cool handoff of stewardship, and it was fun to put the suit on again, however briefly. There's a reason for [John] to be in Ballerina; it's very organic. And working with Ana was great. She really loves action, and she's really good at it.’ Writer…

‘That's not my goal on movies [to set up spin-offs], I am really old-fashioned. I'm very classically minded, and I think Steven [Spielberg] is, too. I make the movie very conscious about the movie being its own self-contained, functioning work of art in any way I can. ‘If I feel pressure that I'm supposed to spin off or start to lay Easter eggs or track for some other enterprise later, it feels like a violation to me. Like I can't focus on telling a cohesive story with integrity. I'm making a TV show, is what I feel like at that point. ‘I never came under any pressure to do that. The feeling for me was really simple: Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. And as Harrison Ford grows old, the Indiana…

When Sigourney Weaver strides into the Hollywood Celebrities Lounge at the Venice Film Festival, there's no ceremonial entrance. She may have been on our screens for well over four decades, but she's learnt how to separate the glitz from the grit of real life. ‘I'm just another goofy person trying to get along,’ she says. The red-carpet mania that's just a few feet away? ‘I feel quite divorced from it. I feel like that's over there. My life is over here.’ Wearing a peach blouse, beige slacks and white flats, gold earrings decorating her very recognisable face, the 73-yearold Weaver may be utterly down-to-earth, but there's no escaping that career of hers. Breaking through in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic Alien as Ellen Ripley – a role she replayed three…

Rita Moreno burst on to the scene in West Side Story, making history by becoming the first Latin actress to win an Oscar for her performance. She's had a long and distinguished career (The King and I, Carnal Knowledge, HBO's Oz), but don't expect the 91-year-old star to be announcing her retirement just yet – she's the latest addition to the Fast & Furious family. How did you get involved with Fast X? I met Vin [Diesel] a number of years ago at a Hollywood do. He let me know that he was an admirer of my work and I was flattered. I stayed in touch with him. I thought of inviting him to the premiere of our new West Side Story and happily he said yes. We got together…

‘Honestly, I think it's a terrible thing to try to make a film with the idea of a sequel in mind. This was designed to be a single story with a beginning, a middle and an end. And that's it. ‘That said, I do really love the world, and there are so many things you see in the movie where you go, “Who's that? What are they doing? What's that thing?” That's what I love about films like Star Wars. They don't answer those questions. You know what I mean? They let your imagination go a bit wild. So, as a result, I would love to play in that sandbox again, but I don't want to, because I think the film should be a standalone story. ‘I don't watch TV…

My responsibility is for all the fights – with swords, or without swords. I was a professional martial artist back in China. I've done stunts since 1999. I doubled all the Asian actresses in Hollywood. And in the past 10 years, I doubled Ming-Na Wen on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And, of course, she did The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. That's how Dave [Filoni] and Jon [Favreau] know my work. I read the script, and try to understand the story. Each episode, we'll be given fights. There's multiple fights. There's heavy, heavy action on this show. If I knew, I'd probably be like, ‘I don't think I can do this!’ There were so many fights. Dave knows what he wants. He's very organised. We go read a script,…