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This issue on sale 26 October.

“Oh sweet God no, the bed bugs have infested the link!”

LONDON, FILMS AND festivals are all
indisputably good things. So when the three
are combined, in the form of the London Film
Festival, it’s always a magical time. This year’s
LFF was no exception, with my personal
highlights including the hilarious The
Holdovers, the truly wild Poor Things, and the
floods-of-tears-inducing All Of Us Strangers.
I was also lucky enough to get a seat at Martin
Scorsese’s Screen Talk, in which the great man
rapped with Edgar Wright about cinema for
an all-too-short 90 minutes. Aged 80, he had
more energy than the rest of the room put
together, reeling off film titles faster than one
could punch them into Letterboxd. Fun fact:
Scorsese has only seen Titanic once.
Equally thrilling was Empire’s special
LFF presentation: this year, we were
delighted to host a screening of Molly
Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex (pictured
right), an outstanding British film that tackles
themes of consent, friendship and selfdiscovery. Our Beth Webb spoke to Walker
and her team on stage, and the atmosphere
was electric. Make sure to seek the film out
when it arrives in cinemas in November. But
learn from my mistake — be careful when
typing that title into Google.
Meanwhile, if there are any film festivals
underwater, five fathoms deep and attended
mostly by scallops, chances are one will soon
be headlined by this issue’s cover story:
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom. DC movies
may be going through a major metamorphosis,
but James Wan is ending the era in style, with
an octopus-laden, go-for-broke bonanza that

promises to make major waves this Christmas.
Tom Ellen attached a Dictaphone to a trident
and headed to LA to meet Wan; you can read
all about it from page 48.
Enjoy the issue.

This month’s exclusive subscriber cover by Justin Metz
Winner of a 2022 D&AD Pencil and two ADC Silver Cubes,
talented illustrator Metz has become a renowned creator of
digital art, pouring (geddit?) his exceptional talents into this
issue’s super-cool and super-watery Aquaman subs cover.

TURN TO PAGE 8 TO LEARN HOW TO SIGN UP
FOR AN EMPIRE MEMBERSHIP
Empire, ISSN 0957-4948 (USPS 6398) is published every four weeks by H Bauer Publishing Ltd, Media House, Peterborough Business Park, Lynch
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DECEMBER 2023

3

BETH WEBB HOSTED OUR SCREENING OF
HOW TO HAVE SEX AT THE LFF
“I’ve been to many LFF screenings in
my time, but none have felt more
lively, rowdy and warmly received than
How To Have Sex, our sponsored film
at the festival this year. The two
standing ovations for filmmaker Molly
Manning Walker and star Mia McKennaBruce were a total joy to behold.”

Love me tender: Jacob
Elordi and Cailee Spaeny
in Priscilla. Below:
Billion-dollar big bad
Thanos (Josh Brolin).

10

ALL OF US STRANGERS

The first look at Andrew
Haigh’s new movie. Hankies
at the ready.

12

ARGYLLE

Matthew Vaughn on
how he turned his cat into
the star of his new spy movie.
Nepo pussy!

20

ON A ROLE

Jason Isaacs on
filling Cary Grant’s shoes,
and glasses.

22

DOCTOR WHO

The Doctor will see
you now. David Tennant and
showrunner Russell T Davies
on their unexpected return to
the TARDIS.

26

THE HOLDOVERS

Alexander Payne
tells us all about the
Christmas movie that reteams
him with Paul Giamatti
for the first time since
Sideways. “I am not drinking
fucking Shloer!”

31

PINT OF MILK

The Fonz himself, Henry
Winkler. Has Pint Of Milk
jumped the shark?

4

DECEMBER 2023

SALTBURN

Fincher. Fassbender.
Effin’ fantastic?

The Oscar-winning
Emerald Fennell writes for
Empire about her follow-up
to Promising Young Woman.
What a gem.

34

80

32

THE KILLER

LOKI: SEASON 2

They’ve given the God
Of Mischief a second series.
Better than ‘Monkey Tennis’?

41

MAY DECEMBER

Natalie Portman and
Julianne Moore are Todd
Haynes’ calendar girls.

48

AQUAMAN AND THE
LOST KINGDOM

Director James Wan on
making sure that the DCEU
goes out on a high (tide).

56

PRISCILLA

Another year, another
movie about Priscilla Presley
that ignores The Naked Gun.

62

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

The story of J.A.
Bayona’s survival drama.

68

WONKA

Paul King
swaps marmalade
for chocolate.

WERNER HERZOG

The legend
speaks. And no, we can’t
do the voice.

88

THE DEEP DIVE

Meet the raven
with more films than
Eric Roberts.

94

AMON WARMANN TALKED THE COLOR
PURPLE WITH BLITZ BAZAWULE
“Blitz had energy and passion for days
when we spoke on a sunny morning in
the Rosewood London hotel. He also
casually mentioned that he regularly
talked to Spielberg, Oprah and Quincy
Jones while working on the film. As
contacts go, he’s set for life. Hope he
never loses that phone!”

BEN WHEATLEY

The British indie king
on going full blockbuster with
Meg 2: The Trench.

98

POWELL AND
PRESSBURGER

Legendary editor Thelma
Schoonmaker on the equally
legendary filmmaking
partnership. Legends.

102

THE RANKING

Billion-dollar
movies. Sorry, Jumanji:
Welcome To The
Jungle, you
were just $45
million shy.

CHRIS HEWITT CHAIRED A Q&A WITH THE
CREATOR DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS
“I hadn’t seen Gareth in the seven
years since Rogue One: A Star Wars
Story, so I was delighted to host the
Empire VIP Club screening of his
comeback movie, The Creator. It was
like he hadn’t been away; he was
funny, candid, and filled with great
insights into the making of the movie.”

Craig Gibson/Still Moving, Alex Godfrey. Spine lines issue 420: Newsstand: “Boyfriend.
Killer. Boyfriend. Killer” is from Scream 2. Subs: “Killer Slinkys!” is from Monster House.

74

ON THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF
SONGBIRDS & SNAKES:
A Hunger Games prequel? Why isn’t it called
‘The Peckish Games’ — or ‘The Rumbly Tums’?

THIS MONTH WE A SKE D:
WHAT TITLE WOUL D YOU GIVE
A T HEOR E T ICA L ‘CH ICK E N RUN 3’?

PETER NORTHEDGE

HE’S JUST KEN

My bottom lip quivered at the Ken Loach interview
[issue #419], and him giving David Bradley’s
shoulder a squeeze after he announced they’d
been friends for 55 years tipped me over the edge.
Gutted that The Old Oak will be Loach’s final film.
RYAN GASCOYNE, SHEFFIELD

DESERT POWER

The latest Empire issue [issue #419] made
for great beach reading, particularly the double
feature on the upcoming Dune: Part Two and
the chaotic behind-the-scenes story of Lynch’s
version. The issue was made even better by how
good the subscriber cover looked covered in
sand. Thankfully there were plenty of places to
get a drink and I didn’t have to resort to
drinking my own… well, you know.
DAVY FALKNER, VIA EMAIL

The spice must flow! Enjoy this Picturehouse
membership, Davy — their cinemas serve actual
drinks so you do not need to resort to drinking
your own, erm, stillsuit run-off.
Empire’s star letter wins a Picturehouse
Membership, valid for one year at all
Picturehouse Cinemas across the UK, including
the flagship Picturehouse Central in London’s
West End. The Membership comes pre-loaded
with five free tickets, and gets you access to exclusive discounts on food,
snacks and drinks. And until 31 December 2023, enjoy the extra perks of
free entry for up to two curated films every week, plus free tea and filter
coffee weekdays before 5pm! When you write to us, please include your full
contact details so we can arrange delivery of your prize.

He’s a true legend. Thanks for all the letters about
this feature — it was a special thing to put together.

On a spooky Exorcist cinema date and the
Halloween III Silver Shamrock music was
playing. So naturally all I could hear
was @ChrisHewitt singing it on the
@empiremagazine podcast every Halloween…
@ODE_OLLIE

SPIT TAKE

Have to hold you responsible for a bit of public
humiliation. Having a drink whilst reading the latest
issue, I spat my drink across the room while reading
the words “a nincompoop in a cinema” in a (totally
accurate) piece by Alex Godfrey [‘The Platform’,
issue #419]. Don’t know why it tickled me so much.

‘Chicken Run 3:
The Fellowship Of
The Wing’

‘Chicken Run
3: Hell For
Feather’

@LIVAS_NIEKI

@CHADBOFFIN

‘Beginner’s Cluck:
A Chicken Run
Prequel’

‘Chicken:
Run — Roast
Protocol’

@JONSPAREY

@THEWILDPAUNCH

‘Chick3n Run’ is the
only option.
Normalise numbers
in film titles

‘Chicken Run
3: Never Say
Feather
A Hen’

@CHARLES29684035

@ELLIOTPERRY1

ROSALIE NEWTON-VAN DEN BERG, WAKEFIELD

To reiterate: anyone who records films in cinemas is
a nincompoop, a saddle-goose and a ninnyhammer.

AQUAMAN ISN’T THE first watery
hero to make a splash on an
Empire cover. Nearly 30 years ago,
we did a literal deep dive into
Kevin Costner flop Waterworld,
including a blow-by-blow account
of the unfolding cinematic
disaster, decorated with a curious
choice of pull-quote (“We love
Kevin Costner, he’s handsome
and nice” — Shopkeeper, Hawaii).
There’s a report on rumours
from the set (one suggests

Costner bought himself a
portable solarium to get an
all-over tan, “only to burn
parts of a sensitive nature”),
and then a somewhat testy Q&A
with the man himself, offering
some frank reflection. The film’s
reported $150 million budget
— the most expensive film ever
made at the time — was, Costner
acknowledges, “an embarrassing
amount of money to be spent on
a movie, in a sense.” Ouch.

CONTACT US VIA: EMPIRE MAGAZINE, THE LANTERN, 75 HAMPSTEAD ROAD, LONDON NW1 2PL
LETTERS@EMPIREMAGAZINE.COM / @EMPIREMAGAZINE (#EMPIRELETTERS) / FB.COM/EMPIREMAGAZINE

6

DECEMBER 2023

Davy Falkner, Netflix

WATERWORLD FEATURE , SEPTEMBER 1995

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Terms & Conditions: We can currently offer the Empire VIP Club Membership to UK customers only. Your magazine will start with the next available issue. Prices quoted apply when paying by
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MONTH 2023

9

DECEMBER 2023

|

EDITED BY BETH WEBB

The love story that
will break you
AND REW HAIGH ON HIS TENDER , TEAR-INDUCING ROMANCE, ALL OF US STRANGERS
WORDS OLLY RICHARDS

ANDREW HAIGH WAS hoping for an emotional
response to his latest film, but even he was not
prepared for the reactions All Of Us Strangers is
generating. When the film had its first public
screening at the Telluride Film Festival on 31
August, audiences were largely rapturous, with
five-star reviews from critics across the world
and countless social-media posts about the
enormous volumes of tears shed. “I would meet
someone in the street who’d seen the film three
days ago and they’d be talking and just start
crying,” says Haigh, seemingly delighted if slightly
Britishly embarrassed. “I just want the film to
have an effect, without being manipulative.” It is
not manipulative at all, and as for effect, it would
be shocking if All Of Us Strangers isn’t a major
contender come awards season.
Haigh has long been a director capable of
stirring emotions through his character work,
from Weekend, about an intense two-day affair,

10

DECEMBER 2023

to his Oscar-nominated 45 Years, about a longmarried couple whose happiness is shattered by
a secret from the past.
All Of Us Strangers is no exception. Very
loosely adapted from the novel Strangers by
Taichi Yamada, it follows Adam (Andrew Scott),
a 40-something writer who lives alone in
a brand-new tower block in London. Adam
resists intimacy, rebuffing an advance from the
block’s only other resident, Harry (Paul Mescal).
But everything changes for Adam when, while
writing a personal project, he goes to visit his
childhood home. Though his parents died before
he was a teenager, Adam walks through the door
and finds them (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell)
existing just as he left them, delighted their ‘boy’
is home. The film becomes a dual love story:
about Adam resolving his relationship with
his parents, who never knew him fully, and
a growing romance with Harry as Adam risks
putting his heart in the hands of someone else.
Haigh calls this a very personal story. While

his own parents are still alive, he says, “I had
a very complicated childhood, I suppose, so this
idea of a family falling apart — in this case with
a death — made a lot of personal sense to me.”
It was so personal that he even shot the scenes
of Adam’s childhood home in his own childhood
home, which his family hasn’t lived in for
decades. He hadn’t originally intended it, but
in preparing for the film he decided to try to
find the place where he grew up, to see what
feelings it brought up. He found it virtually
unchanged and decided he had to try to shoot
it. “We knocked on the door and the man
who lived there was like, ‘Okay, yeah, sure.
I love 45 Years.’ He was amazingly happy for us
to film there.”
The romance between Harry and Adam is
entirely invented — Haigh has been with his
partner for years — but it expresses feelings
Haigh knows well, about growing up in
a generation of gay men who felt love might
not come their way. Adam’s first experience of

Clockwise from above: Neighbours Harry (Paul Mescal) and
Adam (Andrew Scott); Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as Adam’s
long-dead parents; Love blossoms; Director Andrew Haigh.

genuine intimacy is brought intensely to life by
Scott and Mescal, actors who’d only ever met in
passing but show an extraordinary connection
on screen. “It was so clear that they had
chemistry early on,” says Haigh. “Paul so wanted
to work with Andrew, and Andrew with Paul,
that it felt like I was watching a love affair
happen. That’s what good casting is. You watch
a love affair blossom.”
As personal as it is to him, All Of Us
Strangers is no autobiopic (“Nobody wants to
watch a film about me”). Haigh’s intention
was that it would touch something in you even
if your life bears no direct comparison to
Adam’s. “I hope it’s going to speak to [all sorts
of people],” he says. “Because we all want the
same things. We want to feel loved. We want
people to be compassionate to us. We want to
be there for other people.” And sometimes we
want to see something that will so deeply
move us that three days later we’ll cry at
a stranger in the street.
ALL OF US STRANGERS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 JANUARY 2024

DECEMBER 2023

11

The cat that
gave Matthew
Vaughn paws
for thought
THE AR GYLLE DIRECTOR INTRODUCES TH E
FAM OUS FE L IN E W ITH FAMILY TIES
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

THE EARLY MARKETING campaign for Matthew Vaughn’s new
spy thriller, Argylle, is not what you might have imagined. It’s
not focused on Henry Cavill as the flat-topped title character, a
super-spy who makes Bond look like Bourne and Bourne look like
Bananaman; nor is it built around Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly
Conway, novelist and creator of said super-spy, who finds herself
entangled in an actual espionage plot and going on the run with
bona fide Bond/Bourne/Bananaman Sam Rockwell. It is, instead,
all about a cat. But not just any cat. This is Chip, who belongs to
Vaughn’s wife, Claudia Schiffer, and his daughters, and who has
found himself starring in one of next year’s biggest blockbusters.
It wasn’t the plan. For the role of Alfie, Elly’s cat who
accompanies her on her adventure, Vaughn had originally hired
a professionally trained feline. One of the best in the business.
“It was a very expensive cat,” says Vaughn. “But a) it wasn’t very
cute and b) was useless.” So Vaughn, with utter ruthlessness, fired
the cat, which meant he needed a replacement. Luckily, he had
one in mind.
“I went home that night, and went up to my daughter’s
bedroom where Chip sleeps in a little house that looks like a big tin
of tuna,” explains Vaughn, “and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me

UNTITLED MARTIN
LUTHER KING BIOPIC

Chris Rock is directing and
producing a biopic about the
revolutionary activist and
philosopher, with Steven
Spielberg as executive
producer. The film will adapt
Jonathan Eig’s celebrated
biography King: A Life,
which chronicles Dr King’s
lifelong public — and private
— fight for civil rights.

WORDS JORDAN KING

12

DECEMBER 2023

AZRAEL

Distribution rights have
been snapped up for
this high-concept actionhorror. Samara Weaving
is Azrael, a young woman
living in a world where
no-one speaks, who
finds herself fighting
for survival when
a female-led cult tries
to sacrifice her to an
ancient evil.

FRANKENSTEIN

Christoph Waltz is the
newest addition to the cast
of Guillermo del Toro’s
Frankenstein, a longgestating adaptation of
Mary Shelley’s classic
Gothic novel. Waltz will star
alongside Andrew Garfield,
Mia Goth and Oscar Isaac
in the Mexican fabulist’s
film, which starts shooting
in February.

Clockwise from far left: Bagpuss,
literally; Aiden (Sam Rockwell) and
Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard); Cat’s
entertainment — director Matthew
Vaughn with Chip, the family pet and
star of Argylle.

borrowing your cat for the next three months.’ I would literally
drive to work with a cat in the back of the car with me, and then the
cat would live with me in my trailer, and I would bring the cat to set
when he had a scene. I became an animal handler.”
Unlike the previous cat, Chip turned out to be a natural, really
getting his claws into the character. “I don’t want to be rude about
some of the actors I’ve worked with, but sometimes Chip was
easier,” says Vaughn. “He would always look at the right place,
which amazed me. If an actor was speaking, he would look at the
actor. If the camera was moving, he would look at the camera. His
eyelines were always, mysteriously, A-plus.”
All of this despite the fact that Vaughn, by his own admission,
is a dog person. “[Having both] German Shepherds and cats is
a really fucking intelligent combination,” he laughs. “But he’s
a cool customer, and I enjoyed spending that time with him.
I wouldn’t say I’m a cat lover, but I love Chip. I love this cat.”
The decision to put Chip front and centre of the marketing
campaign — complete with his little bubble backpack, which
Vaughn decided to incorporate into the film after seeing one in
a Taylor Swift documentary he watched with his daughters — was,
Vaughn admits, Universal’s. “They showed me the cat poster and
I said, ‘You know what? People are going to remember this!’ But
it’s meant that Chip has become something of a celebrity. “My
daughters think it’s hysterical.” And the celebrity won’t end there:
Schiffer — who also produced Argylle as Claudia Vaughn — is
bringing out a book in January called Blue Chip: Confessions Of
Claudia Schiffer’s Cat. “And we’ve got Chip toys,” adds Vaughn.
“He’s going to be the Natalie Portman of cats.”
Right now, Chip has returned to something approaching
normality. But if Argylle (which is actually about the humans) hits
big, Vaughn has plans apaw for more movies which might see Chip
called back into action. “Chip is definitely in the sequel,” he
promises. “As long as my dog doesn’t eat him.”
ARGYLLE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 2 FEBRUARY 2024

THE NAUGHTY NINE

UNTITLED VINCE
GILLIGAN SCI-FI SERIES

Better Call Saul showrunner
Vince Gilligan and star
Rhea Seehorn are headed
back to Albuquerque for
a new series. But ‘Better
Call Kim’ this ain’t.
“There’s no crime, no
methamphetamine,” Gilligan
has promised of the project,
which he describes as “mild
science-fiction”.

HEAT 2

Michael Mann has
confirmed his next film
will adapt the critically
acclaimed sequel novel
to his 1995 crime classic,
set both before and
after Heat. Adam Driver
— star of the director’s
latest, Ferrari — is in talks
to take over the role
of Neil McCauley from
Robert De Niro.

UNTITLED DARIO
ARGENTO MOVIE

Speaking at Lucca
Film Festival, Isabelle
Huppert confirmed
she will star in genre
master Dario Argento’s
next horror movie. Details
on the project are scarce,
but we do know it’s
a remake of a classic
1940s Mexican film, set to
shoot in Paris.

PEPPA PIG WEDDING
PARTY SPECIAL

With the 20th anniversary
of the Tarantino-approved
Peppa Pig fast approaching,
Orlando Bloom is the latest
star joining the show’s
upcoming three-part
spectacular. He’ll be voicing
jeweller Mr Raccoon, who
helps Peppa and pals.
Whether Tarantino will
cameo remains to be seen.

Getty Images

Ho-ho-hold onto your hats,
folks — Danny Glover is
playing Santa Claus in
Disney’s latest festive family
offering. Releasing this
Christmas, the film will see
Glover facing a band
of disgruntled grade-school
naughty-listers as they
attempt a daring North
Pole heist. ‘Snow-cean’s
Eleven’, anyone?

MONTH 2023

13

All busy on the
Western front

THE MULTIFACETED VIGGO MORTENS E N ON HIS MANY ROLES
IN BRINGING T HE DEAD DON’T HURT TO T HE SCREEN

TO CALL The Dead Don’t Hurt “a Viggo
Mortensen film” would be an understatement.
For his second outing as director, the man who
mastered Minas Tirith also wrote the screenplay
and the music, and appears in front of the camera
as hardy wanderer Olsen, too. Speaking to Empire
at the Toronto International Film Festival, where
the film premiered, he explains how he did it all.

WRITING

From the beginning, the heart of the story was
Vicky Krieps’ Vivienne, a steadfast woman
undeterred by the patriarchal dominance of the
time, inspired by Mortensen’s own mother —
whose pioneering spirit also influenced the
Western-frontier setting. “From the first draft,
[Vivienne] was central to the story,” says
Mortensen, “but she became more so. I started
trimming things away that had to do with Olsen
on his own.” That included his character’s time
fighting in the Civil War. “The woman — or,
whoever’s left behind — can become incidental.
You might cut back to them once or twice,” he
notes. “But this story is about her.”

DIRECTING

While Vivienne is a woman ahead of her time,
Mortensen’s directorial style was about tradition.
“The photographic approach,” he says, “is not
calling attention to itself by trying to do some
fancy, crazy, quote-unquote ‘new’ sort of shot.

14

DECEMBER 2023

It’s classically shot, with an unusual structure,
and unusually focused on a woman as the central
figure.” Working on both sides of the camera
took serious multitasking, though. “When I lock
the door, pick the boy up on the horse and ride
out, it’s all in one shot,” he recalls. “There’s lots
of little things that could go wrong. But if you’ve
prepared it well, it should look naturalistic.”

ACTING

In front of the camera, actor-Viggo got the
ultimate gift from director-Viggo: getting to star
alongside Krieps, as Vivienne and Olsen form
a tough but tender relationship. “It’s very
satisfying,” he says of acting opposite her.
“When she has a reaction or does something
really unusual, it’s different to just be outside
the scene watching the monitor. If I’m in the
scene, then I really can see everything.”
Mortensen found himself able to be truly
present. “Because I wrote it all, I know the lines.
I’m not worried about remembering what I have
to do. I’m more conscious of what she’s saying
and doing, and how she reacts.”

SCORING

Mortensen has an extensive relationship with
music in his movies, whether he’s singing a soulful
solo as Aragorn in The Return Of The King or
composing the score for his directorial debut,
Falling. He returns to creating music here. Rather
than composing the string- and piano-led score
towards the end of the filmmaking process,

Top to bottom: Writer-director-star Viggo Mortensen behind
the camera; The fiercely independent Vivienne Le Coudy
(Vicky Krieps); Vivienne was inspired by Mortensen’s mum.

Mortensen started it early on, using the music to
shape the movie. “It was helpful to plan how we
would shoot things, what the duration of certain
sequences should be, or transitions. And that
helped in the editing.” And yes — there will be an
Extended Edition of the soundtrack. “I wrote and
recorded more music than we ended up using,” he
says. “Eventually a soundtrack record will have
longer versions of some of the pieces.” Score.
THE DEAD DON’T HURT DOES NOT YET HAVE A UK RELEASE DATE

Daniel Anguiano, Marcel Zyskind, Getty Images

WORDS BEN TRAVIS

AN OUTBACK
THRILLER
DRIVING WOMEN
TO THE EDGE
T HE ROYAL H OTE L DIRECTOR
KIT T Y GRE E N ON THE TOILS
OF TRAVE LLING AND
T OXI C MASCU LINIT Y
WHEN KITTY GREEN speaks with Empire she’s
in Barcelona, where she’s travelling with a friend.
It’s a fitting setting to talk about The Royal Hotel,
her pressure-cooker thriller about two holidaying
friends (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick) who
take jobs in a pub in the Australian outback to
make some much-needed cash. “I feel like
naturally when you travel, someone has to take
charge and be more cautious, and the other person
can drink a little more and have more fun,” says
Green sheepishly, the latter in this instance.
The characters are out of their element,
a dynamic which is exacerbated by the pub’s
patrons, largely male miners, whose misogynistic
behaviour curdles from jokey asides into violence.
During a busy night, leering local Matty (Toby
Wallace) asks Liv (Henwick) for a “Dickens Cider”,
which when spoken quickly sounds like “a dick
inside her”. “That happened to me in a bar in
Australia,” Green remembers. “It immediately
made me feel like I didn’t belong in that space.”
She uses these moments to underscore the
girls’ early shifts with a creeping sense of dread,
drawing on small but uncomfortable interactions
she had while travelling around her home country
(she hails from Melbourne). She also references

Top to bottom: Too close for comfort: Hanna (Julia Garner)
and Liv (Jessica Henwick) meet the locals; Hanna, Macca

Hotel Coolgardie, a 2016 documentary about two
Finnish girls working in a similar Australian
pub, as a major influence. “I’d seen the outback
represented on film before, but I hadn’t seen
it through the eyes of some foreign women,”
Green recalls. “It [was] really interesting, the
way that the two of them navigated the space.”
Green is no stranger to transforming
mundane spaces into waking nightmares; her
fiction debut The Assistant saw Garner’s meek
employee working in the high-tension office of
an offscreen Weinstein type. Where that setting
was designed to swallow up its protagonist,
however, the claustrophobic pub in The Royal
Hotel puts its two leads uneasily on display.
Wake In Fright and Straw Dogs were
touchpoints for the film, but Green mostly
relied on her gut instinct when it came to
visualising the girls’ ordeal. And it’s her gut that
will continue to drive her into making stories
like this one. “A woman in the world? That’s
a scary place to be,” she says. A toxic trilogy
could be on the cards. BETH WEBB

(Adam MacNeill) and Kev (Nic Darrigo) are distracted; Billy
(Hugo Weaving) with Carol (Ursula Yovich).

THE ROYAL HOTEL IS IN CINEMAS FROM 3 NOVEMBER

TOM HANKS’ LUNAR LOVE LANGUAGE

A NEW E XHIBITION IS JUST THE LATE ST COLLABORATION BE T WE E N THE ACTOR A N D THE MOON

JOE VERSUS THE
VOLCANO (1990)

An early milestone
in Hanks’ long
journey with our
neighbouring
celestial orb, this
romantic comedy
sees his dying
character have an
epiphany under the
giant, glowing moon.
A telltale sign of
things to come.

APOLLO 13 (1995)

Hanks was cast as
astronaut Jim Lovell
partly due to his
space knowledge,
which stems from
childhood. “From
Apollo 7 on up, I lived
this stuff,” he said at
the time. “I got A’s
in physics, thinking
maybe I could be
one of those guys.
I was Space Boy.”

FROM THE EARTH
TO THE MOON
(1998)

Hanks hosted, cowrote and codirected this series
on US space history,
before pivoting to the
big screen with 2005
doc Magnificent
Desolation: Walking
On The Moon 3D,
about the first
humans on the moon.

ALAN BEAN PLUS
FOUR (2014)
The actor wrote
a New Yorker short
story about four
enthusiasts who
build a spaceship
out of Home Depot
supplies. The
tongue-in-cheek
tale is named
after the fourth
astronaut to walk
on the moon.

THE MOONWALKERS
(2023)

A NASA exhibition is
London-bound and
who’s behind it? Yes,
Hanks will fly you to
the moon with this
project, which mixes
NASA footage and
astronaut interviews.
Another small step for
man, another giant
leap for Space Boy.
BETH WEBB

THE MOONWALKERS: A JOURNEY WITH TOM HANKS IS AT LIGHTROOM FROM 6 DECEMBER

DECEMBER 2023

15

John
Waters’
treasure
trove of
trash
THE INFAMOUS DIRECTOR
NOW HAS HIS OWN MUSEUM
EX HIBITION. HE TALKS US
THROUGH SIX KEY ITEMS
WORDS IAN FREER

LIKE ’80S POPSTERS Mel and Kim, John Waters
was never going to be respect-a-ball. But, now aged
77, his career-long war against good taste and
decency has landed him an exhibition at the
prestigious Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
in LA. “It just means there’s hope for everybody in
the world that anything can happen,” he laughs
about the news. “I look at it very proudly. I don’t
use it as revenge or irony. I’m just thrilled it
happened and I’m alive to see it.” In light of Female
Trouble’s high heels now sharing space with
Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Waters shares the stories
behind some of the prized artefacts on display.

Exhibitionist: director
John Waters.

POLYESTER ’S ODORAMA CARD

BELL & HOWELL CAMERA

To create the snatch-’n’-sniff card for
1981’s Polyester, Waters drew upon the library
of smells created by company 3M. “We couldn’t
order a million farts,” he recalls. “We had to
disguise what the smell was, so we ordered
a million rotten eggs.” When Polyester was
reissued as a Criterion Blu-ray, it included
a card with the artier “essence of a fart”, he
laughs. “I kept saying, ’Let’s do the Criterion
library. Let’s do Bergman — what’s the smell
of depression? Cabbage?’”

Waters bought his first 16mm camera to shoot
1968 short Eat Your Makeup. “It was a silent
camera and you had to keep winding it up — it
would only last one or two minutes.” For the
Academy exhibition, the short itself has also been
restored to its former glory. “It looked a lot better
than it ever did, without losing the original quality
of the film — which is basically I didn’t know
what I was doing when I made that movie.”

SERIAL MOM ’S LEG OF LAMB

Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) using a leg
of lamb to bludgeon her latest victim is rooted
in a Waters family memory. “My mother made
a really good leg of lamb,” he levels. “We had
it every Easter and Christmas.” Before the
exhibition, the prop meat, made out of rubber,
had pride of place in Waters’ office. “I think
Serial Mom is my best movie,” he says. “I always
wanted my movies to look like Hollywood
movies. That’s one of the few that did.”

16

DECEMBER 2023

FEMALE TROUBLE ’S HIGH HEELS

“If you’ve a shoe fetish, they’re probably pretty
good,” says Waters about Edith Massey’s
footwear from Female Trouble. “They were
a big-budget item ordered from Frederick’s of
Hollywood. They might have been $50 even
then. They sat on my bookshelf for years and
years.” Also on display from Female Trouble is
the electric chair that fries Dawn Davenport
(Divine) in the film’s finale, which used to live in
Waters’ front hall. “It’s something we’d decorate
at Christmas, like the tree.”

A MONGOOSE FILM WITH
NO MONGOOSE?
NANDOR FODOR AND THE TALKING MONGOOSE PROMISE S
A SNAKE -ANTAGONISING CRIT TE R BUT DOE SN ’ T DE LIVE R.
WE VE NTURE D ON SE T TO FIND OUT WHY

NOTEBOOKS

Greg Gorman, © Academy Museum Foundation

The exhibition’s collection of Waters’ notebooks
reveals a little-known facet of his personality.
“I am overly organised to a fault,” he reveals.
“I think my father taught me about organisation
and running a small business.” Finding the ledger
that listed his receipts and box-office grosses was
a delightful surprise. “I forgot I had it and just
seeing it was touching to me. I turned in receipts
twice a week to my accountant. I still do that.”

BALTIMORE BUMPER STICKER

Baltimore is to Waters what New York is to Martin
Scorsese. “Baltimore is certainly a character in
my movies,” he says. “My outsiderism helped me
have a Hollywood career. If I lived there, I’d be like
everybody else.” Waters has managed to turn the
city into a tourist attraction. “They even tried to
put a statue up where Divine ate dog shit,” he
laughs. “One of the mayors was for it.” For now,
Waters will have to settle for a stunning exhibition.
JOHN WATERS: POPE OF TRASH IS ON VIEW AT THE ACADEMY
MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES UNTIL 4 AUGUST 2024

“MY AGENT SAID, ‘I don’t know if
you’ll like this: it’s about talking
animals,’” says Simon Pegg of the
moment when he first became aware
of his new movie, Nandor Fodor And
The Talking Mongoose. That agent’s
scepticism seems misplaced — Pegg, as
Narnia’s Reepicheep the mouse and
Ice Age’s Buck the weasel can attest,
is a man who knows his way around
a talking animal.
So, naturally, when Pegg read Adam
Sigal’s script, he signed on — but not to
star as the titular creature but as Nandor
Fodor, a real-life Hungarian-American
paranormal investigator who, in the
1930s, found himself on the Isle Of
Man, trying to confirm the existence
of a supernatural talking mongoose
called Gef which had, apparently,
rocked up on a local farm. “I read it and
really loved it,” Pegg tells Empire on
location, across a table in Leeds pub
The Victoria Hotel. He touches on the
film’s combination of faith, mythicism
and existential dread. “Gef was
obviously fake but made a lot of people
quite happy, and quite delighted to
believe that there was more to life,” he
says. “Nandor was in this really weird
place where he knows that’s not the
case, but he desperately wants it to be.”
Today, Empire watches as Pegg —
sporting an accent that has shades of
Christoph Waltz — runs a long dialogue
scene with Christopher Lloyd, playing
a fellow scientist. It’s towards the end
of the film, so we’ll spare you spoilers,
but they wax philosophical, laugh,
exchange wisdom and witticisms and
clink their glasses together. At one point,
Lloyd accidentally smashes his so hard
against Pegg’s that the latter’s drink

Top to bottom: Nandor Fodor (Simon Pegg) is on
the hunt; With fellow scientist (Christopher Lloyd)
in the pub; Writer-director Adam Sigal with Lloyd.

vessel smashes. Great Scott. But it’s a
scene that, for Sigal, captures perfectly
the tone he’s hoping to spread across
the movie: wryly humorous, but with
plenty on its mind. “It’s awkward to say
this with Simon sitting here,” laughs
the writer-director. “But the character
fluctuates almost crazily between
dramatic and comedic in the span of
a scene, and that’s one of my favourite
things about Simon. He’s been doing this
at such a high level for so long.” Then
Sigal returns to his monitor to watch
another take, not a talking mongoose
in sight. Or is there? CHRIS HEWITT
NANDOR FODOR AND THE TALKING MONGOOSE IS
OUT NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

DECEMBER 2023

17

Creating a new
rhythm for a
radical classic
BL ITZ BAZAWULE ON BRINGING HIS MU S ICAL ROOTS
TO A NEW ADAPTATION OF THE COLO R PURPLE
WORDS AMON WARMANN

ALICE WALKER’S SEMINAL 1982 novel
The Color Purple is a story that warrants
retelling. Following the trials and triumphs
of Celie, an African-American woman living
with an abusive husband in 1900s Georgia, it
was first adapted for the screen as a drama by
Steven Spielberg in 1985.
Now it’s the turn of filmmaker Blitz
Bazawule, who takes the story in a fresh,
new musical direction, with Spielberg on
producing duties alongside Oprah Winfrey,
Scott Sanders and Quincy Jones.
Bazawule recalls an early phone call
with Spielberg. “I told him, ‘We’re going to
give Celie a big imagination. She’s going to
see things like a 50-piece orchestra,” he
remembers. “He was just like, ‘Go make
your movie.’” Here, he tells Empire how he did
just that.

18

DECEMBER 2023

FINDING THE STARS

Bazawule sought out an eclectic mix of
performers for the film, from Taraji P. Henson
as flamboyant blues songstress Shug Avery to
Danielle Brooks as the bold, frequently hilarious
Sofia (played by Winfrey in Spielberg’s
adaptation). Then there’s Colman Domingo,
whose lengthy musical career has seen him
nominated for Tony and Olivier awards. His role
of Albert ‘Mister’ Johnson — Celie’s violent,
cruel partner — is a challenging one, but
Bazawule worked with the actor to make him
multidimensional. “When we first got together,
I said, ‘We’re going to make this character
human,’” says Bazawule. “In my opinion, he is
truly one of the greatest actors working today.”
Yet the breakout star is R&B singer Fantasia
Barrino, making her big-screen debut. “Fantasia
had never done this before, and to this day I can’t
believe this woman’s brilliance and genius,” says
Bazawule. “She’s truly a thespian. The small

“It’s time to start
seeking out new
high concepts”

choices she makes, from the body language to the
non-verbal scenes, are unmatched.”

FINDING THE MUSIC

The director inherited all the catchy numbers
from the The Color Purple’s hit Broadway
musical, which encompasses 40 years of African
music, from gospel to blues to jazz. For
Bazawule, who is also a rapper and record
producer, it gave him a chance to lean into his
musical roots. “I come from hip-hop, which is
sample culture,” he says. “So the blues, jazz,
funk, Afrobeats… these things are all just part of
the lineage.”
Making it all the more authentic is that the
Ghana-born director drew on his lived-in
experience. “My Africa goes to the heart of an
authentic, real tribe. So the thing that I know we
brought to this film was just knowing the nuance
of Black music, and its depth.”

Alamy, Marco Vittur

FINDING THE MOVES

Bazawule studied as many musicals as he could
lay eyes on in preparation. The key to the ones
that worked? Synergy between the music and
the narrative. So when it came to the film’s
choreography, he made it so that every
foot-stomp and finger-snap had a purpose: to
serve the story, and to draw the audience in.
Take one riotous, juke-joint-set sequence
centred around jazz number ‘Push Da Button’.
“My big note to everyone was: ‘We are not going
to be voyeuristic. We’re going to be immersive.
That means you can brush against my camera,
because we’re in it!’” This may not be The Color
Purple that people are familiar with, but there’s
no denying that Bazawule went out and made
his movie.
THE COLOR PURPLE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 JANUARY

Clockwise
from main:
Fantasia

H E L E N O ’ H A R A ON WHY HOLLYWOOD NEEDS
TO MOVE ON FROM ENDLESS RE BOOTS AND
FIND SOME FRESH ID E AS

Barrino as
Celie; Sofia
(Danielle
Brooks) and
Harpo (Corey
Hawkins);
Colman
Domingo as
Mister; Taraji
P. Henson and
Barrino with
director Blitz
Bazawule
between takes;
Bazawule with
the cast.

THIS YEAR ALONE has seen action films
led by Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone
and Harrison Ford. You might have
watched Transformers: Rise Of The
Beasts, Super Mario Bros. or Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
in cinemas. Coming up, there’s a new
Ghostbusters movie, another Sonic The
Hedgehog, another Karate Kid. Director
Chad Stahelski is working on another
Highlander; Taika Waititi is trying to make
a new Akira; studios keep trying to make
He-Man happen. Even aside from the
regular attempts to reboot Die Hard,
Predator and Terminator, the ’80s seems
to exert an intractable hold on our
collective imagination — but it’s time,
maybe past time, to move on.
Some nostalgia is inevitable. Many
of the people bringing back these
characters, stars and franchises grew up
in the 1980s and have strong feelings for
those films, just as ’80s filmmakers often
harked back to the 1950s (see: Back To
The Future, Stand By Me, Dirty Dancing).
You might expect ’90s nostalgia to have
taken over, working on the same 30-year
gap, but that hasn’t happened because
the Boomers never retired, Gen X loves
their childhood films and elder Millennials
have yet to rise to the top. Cruise,
Stallone and Ford are still leading films
because we still turn out to see them,
even if not, judging by Mission: Impossible
— Dead Reckoning Part One,
Expend4bles and Indiana Jones And The

Dial Of Destiny’s box-office performances,
in quite the same numbers as before.
But a bigger reason for our eternal
backwardness is this: the ’80s were
a time when ‘high-concept’ filmmaking
ruled the Earth, stories built around
striking and original ideas, anchored on
characters cool enough to attract a big
star lead. And those original concepts
meant that the characters of that era
became tightly connected to the stars
who played them: no-one has had any
luck in recasting Indiana Jones, Pete
Mitchell, Sarah Connor or Rambo.
Of course, cinema has always
played with ideas that already worked
and is always going to reference its own
greatest hits, but the cultural dominance
that the ’80s still wields suggests that
we’re taking the wrong lessons from the
era. It’s not that these films, these ideas,
these stars even, are the only reliable
source of big-budget success. It’s that
these kinds of strong, original concepts
led by charismatic stars make for great
movies, and that is what we should still
be striving for. The ’80s still dominate
pop culture because that’s perhaps the
last time — at least on the big screen —
when there were so many fresh ideas
being given proper budgets and big
stars, and because we always want to
see something new. But it’s time to start
seeking out our own, new high concepts.
Apart from anything else, how else will
we have anything to reboot in 2049?

DECEMBER 2023

19

On A Role

differently.” Isaacs also learned that Grant had
his suits made to very specific instructions, with
extra-large pockets to put his hands in. “I have
my hands in my pockets all the way through this
show, because he did.”

JASON ISAACS AS
CARY GRANT

THE FACE

To morph Isaacs’ own fizzog into one of the most
famous faces in old Hollywood required hours
of make-up and prosthetics, ranging from
90 minutes in the chair to five hours, depending
on the era. “I play him in his eighties, so that’s
lots of prosthetics. When he’s much younger,
there’s lots of architectural things pulling me
up with hooks and strings.” They also added the
famous dimpled chin, but the most challenging
part was the contact lenses. “He had very
beautiful, big, milky brown eyes, and I don’t, so
some poor lady was hired to poke me in the eye
every morning. I saw the whole world through
a slightly dull sepia filter the entire time.”

THE ACTOR ON HIS
TRANSFO R MATION INTO THE
DEBONAIR HOLLYWOOD ICON
F OR BIOPIC SERIES ARCHIE
WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

Jason Isaacs was not a fan of Cary Grant prior
to being cast in Archie, an upcoming show that
charts the Hollywood leading man’s early life
as Archibald Leach. It was his deep research
that changed him. “I’ve been through quite
a journey,” he tells Empire. “The more films
I watched, the more I realised that the reason
he became the biggest star in the world was that
you couldn’t take your eyes off him.” Isaacs read
every biography available and had long, candid
discussions with Dyan Cannon, Grant’s ex-wife,
and his daughter, executive producer of the
show, Jennifer Grant, who gave him home
videos. “I’ve always found that you never get
a fuller picture of someone than by talking to the
people who love them, or who had their hearts
broken by them.”

20

DECEMBER 2023

Top to bottom: Suits you, sir: Jason Isaacs as Cary Grant in
Archie; Grant with wife Dyan Cannon and their daughter
Jennifer in 1966; Isaacs gets a touch-up between scenes.

THE SUITS

Grant’s suave Savile Row suits not only helped
Isaacs look the part through the decades, but
made him feel it, too. “It makes your posture
so much better. If you feel different, you talk
differently.” Isaacs pushed his knees out to
mimic Grant’s bow-legs, but more than anything
physical it was a mental trick to engage with
the world like Grant did. “Walking into a room
thinking, ‘Everybody wants me,’ just makes
you strut differently, and look them in the eye

Grant was born in Bristol, but had an
amorphous accent that changed from film to
film. Isaacs wanted to find out how the real
Archie Leach spoke, so he did some detective
work online, and found a man who had secretly
recorded an interview with him in 1986, as
a student. “Grant wouldn’t allow recorded
interviews. He didn’t want to give anything of
himself away in public.” The former student,
feeling guilty, had not played it for anyone in
37 years until Isaacs begged him. “It’s that single
recording that made me feel like I had heard
who he was, and the ghosts and demons that
continued to haunt him into his eighties.” You
can’t be a true Hollywood legend, it seems,
without a few skeletons in your closet.
ARCHIE IS ON ITVX FROM 23 NOVEMBER

Getty Images

THE VOICE

THE MAN

WHEN
HITCHCOCK
MEETS
HATHAWAY
WILLIAM OLD ROYD ON HIS
’ 60 S -SE T P SYCHOSE XUAL
T HRI LLE R E ILE E N

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that the driving force
in William Oldroyd’s psychological thriller Eileen
is named… Rebecca. Adapted from her own novel
by Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s set in 1964 Boston,
as downtrodden, wide-eyed prison secretary
Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) meets glamorous,
no-bullshit new counsellor Rebecca (Anne
Hathaway). Moshfegh’s book was inspired
by Hitchcock’s take on Daphne du Maurier’s
classic, and Oldroyd duly follows through — to
the nth degree.
“It’s funny, because a few years ago I got
a script through, a remake of Rebecca,” the Lady
Macbeth director says. “But would you ever
go near it? Would you ever want to remake
a Hitchcock?” Well, Ben Wheatley went there.
But horses for courses. “With Eileen,” says
Oldroyd, “I thought there was an opportunity to
make an original story in the spirit of Hitchcock.”
He did so on practically every level, with playful
self-awareness and attention to detail. “We
drew a lot of stuff from the early ’70s,” he says.
“I’m a big Alan J. Pakula fan, and Ari [Wegner,
cinematographer] is a huge Gordon Willis fan.
We actually took lenses from the ’60s. They’re
really scratched and battered, but we love the
imperfections in the glass.”

Above: Come on, Eileen: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne
Hathaway. Right: Director William Oldroyd with Hathaway.

The movie leans heavily into the filmmaking
style of the era, with cannily deployed zooms,
a killer freeze frame at the end, and a consciously
melodramatic score. Eileen never, though, feels
stuck in the past, because of the material itself.
“I needed the attitude to feel contemporary,
because Eileen and Rebecca are out of time,”
explains Oldroyd. Indeed, the men are stunned
by Rebecca, who scoffs at cultural norms,
and turns Eileen’s life upside down. “She’s
as rare to those men in that prison as she is to
Eileen, who’s never ever encountered anybody
like this in her life,” says Oldroyd. “It’s like an
alien lands.”
With this heady stew, he ultimately wanted
audiences to be thrilled. And to pay tribute to the
heyday of 1960s and ’70s cinema — with balance.

“It’s a fine line,” he says. “Because you’d never
want to fall into pastiche. How far can you push
it? How bold can you go with it? We really tried.”
Hitchcock wouldn’t want it any other way.
ALEX GODFREY
EILEEN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 1 DECEMBER

WE WISH WOO A MERRY CHRISTMAS

MASTE R OF MAY HE M J OHN WOO IS RE TURNING WITH FE STIVE ACTIONE R
SILE NT NI GHT. HE RE ARE FOUR THINGS WE ’D LIKE TO SE E …

HEROIC BLOODSHED!

A STANDOFF!

SLOW-MOTION!

FLYING DOVES!

In Woo’s Hong Kong
movies, his heroes
often put their lives on
the line for their beliefs.
Expect Joel
Kinnaman’s mute,
vengeful father
(pictured right) to lose
a pint of blood or two.
But if he’s wearing
a nice red Christmas
jumper, we
won’t notice.

Not a face-off (that’s
a different John Woo
movie), but a moment
where two guys —
diametrically opposed,
yet drawn to each
other — point guns at
each other and stare
intensely. Perhaps Woo
could stage one during
a blizzard, to make it
more Christmassy.

No Woo action
sequence is complete
without mayhem
unfolding at speeds so
fast that the maestro
simply has to slow
things down for our
benefit. (Also, it’s much
cooler.) Expect slo-mo
galore in Silent Night
— Christmas With The
Overcranks, if you will.

Woo does like his
understated religious
symbolism, and thinks
nothing of flinging
a dove or two into
action sequences to
symbolise peace and
the cost of violence.
But it’s Christmas, so
perhaps he’ll toss
some turkeys into the
fray instead. Gobble
gobble! CHRIS HEWITT

SILENT NIGHT DOES NOT YET HAVE A UK RELEASE DATE

DECEMBER 2023

21

Reuniting
the TARDIS
dream team
DAVID TENN A NT AND RUSSELL T DAVIES
ON A DOCTO R WHO COMEBACK LIKE NO OT HER

“IT’S LIKE THE band getting back together for
one last hurrah,” says David Tennant. The band,
in this case, led by Tennant himself as the
hugely popular one-time frontman of Doctor
Who, with backing from Catherine Tate as his
companion, Donna Noble, all orchestrated by
Russell T Davies, the returning showrunner.
The last time this particular trio worked
together was the hugely popular 2010 New
Year’s Day episode, which also featured a host
of cameos from Doctor Who seasons past.
Now this band of three Who legends is
reuniting for three special episodes to celebrate
the show’s 60th anniversary. “It was a very
casual conversation between us initially,”
Tennant tells Empire ahead of the SAG-AFTRA
strike earlier this year. During lockdown the
three of them took part in Doctor Who
‘Tweet-alongs’, watching old episodes together,
and according to Davies, it was Tate who was
the first to say, “Wouldn’t it be a laugh if
we made some more?” “I never thought
anything would come of it,” Davies says,
“but I had to email the BBC and let them
know David and Catherine were
up for doing something.” A few
months later, Davies was invited
to a Zoom meeting with BBC
Drama big cheeses, hoping
they’d commission a 60th
anniversary special. “The next
thing I know, they’re asking for

22

DECEMBER 2023

three specials and also if I’d like to show-run it
again,” says Davies. “But this time on a bigger
platform, working with a streamer. And much
to my surprise I said, ‘Yes!’”
Davies’ first big creative decision was that
Tennant would play the 14th Doctor, following
straight on from Jodie Whittaker’s number 13,
before Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor arrives this
Christmas. “That was the first exciting piece of
mischief that Russell created,” says Tennant.
“That I was going to be Doctor No. 14 rather than
Doctor No. 10 again. You’ll just have to wait and
see why the 14th Doctor is so much like the 10th.”
Intriguingly, the first of the specials, which
also feature Neil Patrick Harris in a villainous
role, is based on The Star Beast, a Doctor Who
comic strip from 1980 centred on a fluffy little
alien known as ‘The Meep’ (to be voiced in the
special by Miriam Margolyes). “I needed to
bring Donna back into the story,” Davies
explains. “Which meant setting it in
London, which meant something
alien landing on top of London, and
I automatically thought of Star Beast as
the best way to tell that story.”
Yes, Davies is so steeped in Who
lore, he immediately thought
of a 43-year-old comic strip as
inspiration for his first story as
returning showrunner.
“I was surprised,” admits
Tennant, also a Who fan since

Clockwise from left: Big returns: David Tennant as the
Doctor; Villain Neil Patrick Harris; Donna Noble (Catherine
Tate); New addition ‘The Meep’; Russell T Davies.

childhood, “when I saw what that first script was
based on, then I read the second script, which is
unlike any Doctor Who episode ever. These new
specials are Russell off the leash.” Expect a blazing
encore, then, for this band’s last hurrah.
THE DOCTOR WHO 60TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIALS WILL BE ON
BBC ONE AND BBC iPLAYER IN NOVEMBER

Alistair Heap and James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC STUDIOS,
BFI, Disney, Getty Images

WORDS BOYD HILTON

‘DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO
(HEARTBREAKER)’
THE ROLLING STONES
THE BIKERIDERS

A toe-tappingly good tune that is perfectly
synced to the first trailer for Jeff Nichols’
Midwestern motorcycle-club drama. Give the
editor a raise.

‘HUMBLE.’
KENDRICK LAMAR
DUMB MONEY

A catchy banger from a hip-hop great that goes
so hard, every significant character in Dumb
Money dances along in unison. You will, too.

‘GREATER TOGETHER’
JOHN PAESANO
MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2

Combining the Miles Morales and Peter
Parker signature musical motifs makes for
a seamless treat here, while the Venom’s
theme teaser is appropriately dark and eerie.

‘IGYAH KAH’
KEVIN KINER AND SARAH TUDZIN
AHSOKA

Andor had ‘Niamos! (Morlana Club Mix)’.
Ahsoka has this. Sabine’s perfect introduction
is set to this headbanging piece of space
punk, which slows down just enough to
incorporate the character’s theme.

‘GRAVITY’
STEVEN PRICE AND KATHERINE ELLIS
GRAVITY

Starting off peaceful before building to
a rousing conclusion, Katherine Ellis’
powerful vocals combine with the
percussive rhythm in this special track.
Worthy of its Best Score Oscar win and
just as powerful on its tenth anniversary.
LISTEN NOW! HEAD TO THE ‘EMPIRE’ SPOTIFY
ACCOUNT TO HEAR ALL OF THE ABOVE

THREE WOMEN IN A WORLD
OF PRIVILEGE AND PAIN
LULU WANG INTRODUCE S THE TRIO OF CH A RACTE RS
HEADING UP HE R NEW SHOW, E XPATS
“EXPATS” IS A tricky word, with many
thorny connotations. But it’s a word
Lulu Wang is determined to unpack in
her new six-part TV show. Expats is the
story of three American women living
in Hong Kong, part of a community
that’s been rocked by a child’s
disappearance. Wang tells Empire how
she wove together a trio of perspectives.

MERCY JI-YOUNG YOO

Mercy — a Korean-American central to
the story’s tragedy — was Wang’s entry
point into the story. Working odd jobs
and with a group of rich friends, Mercy
carries within her a “self-deprecating
darkness”, the product of guilt
stemming from her involvement in the
disappearance. To secure the right
actor, Wang searched for someone who
could bring an unreadable mystery to
the role. She landed on up-and-comer
Yoo. “As soon as I saw her, I knew
that she was the one, because I love
somebody where [when they’re acting]
you don’t know if you’re supposed to
love them or hate them,” she explains.
“I feel like that’s very true to life.”

HILARY SARAYU BLUE

Though Hilary is white in Lee’s book,
Wang cast Blue as she wanted someone
to represent Hong Kong’s large Indian
population. Hilary enjoys a life of
luxury, but also faces discrimination,
while feeling pressure to have children
in spite of her failing marriage. “It was
really great to be able to depict another
kind of privilege, which is motherhood,”
Wang explains. “It’s seen in our society
that if you’re a mother, that’s the Holy
Grail.” “Expat” may be a tricky word
to unpack, but Wang has found three
voices to help make its meaning a little
clearer. IANA MURRAY
EXPATS IS ON PRIME VIDEO FROM 26 JANUARY 2024

MARGARET NICOLE KIDMAN

Kidman, who also produces the show,
optioned Janice Y. K. Lee’s novel, The
Expatriates, after feeling inspired by
her sister’s life in Singapore. The actor
was torn between playing Margaret or
Hilary, but Wang (whom Kidman asked
to direct the series) suggested she take
on the former: a grief-stricken mother
who is extremely privileged. “She
was incredibly open to portraying
a character that [isn’t] always likeable,”
says Wang. “Margaret is the face of what
you think of when you think of an expat,
and she was game for that.”

Main: Clarke (Brian Tee) and Margaret (Nicole
Kidman). Above, top to bottom: Ji-Young Yoo
as Mercy; Sarayu Blue as Hilary.

DECEMBER 2023

23

Brace for a new
one-man army
EMPIRE SPE A KS WITH THE
F IL MMAKER BEHIND WILD SAM
RAIMI-PRODUCED THRILLER
B OY KILLS WOR LD
WORDS BEN TRAVIS

ALL IT TOOK was a director daring enough to
ask: what would happen if a knuckleduster was
also a gun? In Boy Kills World, the unhinged,
ultraviolent feature debut from German
filmmaker Moritz Mohr, the answer finally
arrives. “We call it the punch-gun. Which is
really not that great a name,” Mohr laughs,
after debuting the film as part of the Midnight
Madness strand of the Toronto International
Film Festival. “We were like, ‘We need to spice
up this fight.’ Guns are fun, knives are fun and
all that — but how about we create something
better? Something fresh?” And lo, the punchgun was born.
That kind of anything-goes wildness gives
Boy Kills World its unique tone — a ferocious
martial-arts revenge thriller set in a dystopian
world, with a huge dollop of surreal humour.

24

DECEMBER 2023

There is a trippy vision of bubbling eyeballs.
A pirate cereal mascot, Captain Frostington,
sponsors televised murder. A delicious macaron
is consumed hands-free mid-brawl. And battling
through it all is Bill Skarsgård’s deaf, non-verbal
‘Boy’, trained in the jungle by a mysterious
shaman (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian, “always
the reference [for the character] right from
the beginning,” Mohr notes) to take down
a nefarious family dynasty, soundtracked by
his own quip-laden inner monologue. “I’m still
waiting for somebody to write, ‘This fucking
tone is all over the place!’” the director admits.
“But that was really, really intentional.”
No wonder the combination of brutal
action and loopy Looney Tunes energy
attracted Sam Raimi, on producing duties
after being blown away by the Boy Kills World
proof-of-concept trailer Mohr and friends made
in Berlin seven years ago. “It was complete
insanity,” Mohr recalls of learning his hero
was about to watch his short. “I was showing
my phone to everyone around me. ‘You see
that?!’ Two hours later, we were all hanging
out at a Five Guys in LA. The email arrived
and it just said, ‘Sam flipped.’ It became
our battle cry for the next few weeks.”
Having snuck Evil Dead references into

Top to bottom: Bill Skarsgård’s ‘Boy’ versus Yayan Ruhian
as his shaman mentor; Boy set to go ballistic; The film also
stars Sharlto Copley, here with director Moritz Mohr on set.

his earliest shorts, it was all the permission he
needed to cook up something groovy, gross and
gratuitous. “Meeting him and getting to work
with him was just the absolute dream come true.
It was ridiculous, man.” Load up the punch-gun.
BOY KILLS WORLD DOES NOT YET HAVE A UK RELEASE DATE

THE DISNEY
SIDEKICK AIMING
TO BE THE G.O.A.T.

Top to bottom:
Goat Valentino
(voiced by
Alan Tudyk),
charming
the birds from
the trees;

WISH ’S DIR ECTORS BREAK DOWN
HOW THEY CR EATE D A NEW
MATINÉ E ID OL IN VALE NTINO

A welcome
support for
Ariana DeBose’s
Asha; Concept

DISNEY’S HALL OF Fame of talking-animal
buddies is vast. The pressure was on, then, for
directors Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn to
create a creature companion for Wish, Disney
Animation’s feature-length celebration of the
studio’s 100th birthday. They explain why
confident goat Valentino — furry friend to Ariana
DeBose’s hero Asha — is a worthy new addition.

art for the cute
caprine star.

“Then Alan said, ‘What about a gentlemanly
know-it-all? A sophisticated goat?’ We all
laughed, but something special had happened.”

HE’S A DISNEY HOMAGE

HE’S GOT PLUCK

The culture of Wish is rooted in the Iberian
peninsula, so a goat fitted Asha’s rural home — and
story. “Baby goats love to climb,” Veerasunthorn
says. “It’s a movie about pursuing your wish, so
it’s good to have a character who is not afraid.”

HE HAS A KILLER OUTFIT

What’s cuter than a baby goat? One in frilly yellow
pyjamas. “Valentino is very proud of his pyjamas,”
grins Buck. “At one point it was Asha’s mother who
we saw knitting them [and] we still assume that’s
where they came from. He had many different
garments, but that got whittled away.” Fingers
crossed for a fashion-montage spin-off short.

HE’S ONE SUAVE BILLY

Valentino doesn’t talk in the first act; he
simply baahs. But when he starts, Disney’s
lucky charm — Alan Tudyk, who has lent
vocals to Frozen, Wreck- It Ralph and
Encanto — emerges. Tudyk was
always first choice, but the voice
took some figuring out. “We tried
a small, cute voice because of how
he looks,” says Veerasunthorn.

“The best sidekicks support the theme; they’re
not just there to give one-liners,” claims Buck, and
the filmmakers went deep into Disney history to
seek inspiration. Buck mentions The Little
Mermaid’s cranky crab Sebastian as
a favourite, while Veerasunthorn loves
opinionated horse Maximus in
Tangled — and the DNA of both is
in the mix. “He pretty much knows
what’s going on in every situation, he
feels,” says Buck of Valentino. “But he’s
endearing.” And impossibly cute; seems
the year of the goat has come early.
HELEN O’HARA
WISH IS IN CINEMAS FROM 24 NOVEMBER

SOPHIE BUTCHER IS THINKING

ALEX GODFREY IS THINKING

BETH WEBB IS THINKING

A B O U T. . . G O N Z O P R S T U N T S

A B O U T. . . R O T T A T H E H U T T

A B O U T. . . G L E N P O W E L L ’ S D O G

The Nun II’s demonic sisters trotting about the UK
coastline? A giant hand made of fake cash with
its middle finger up to promote Dumb Money?
Masked figures on a gondola, roaming the canals
of Camden for A Haunting In Venice? Enough with
the creepy, real-world-invading film tie-ins, people!

I’ve been having bad dreams recently. Night terrors.
For Ahsoka has plunged me back to 2008’s The
Clone Wars: specifically the appearance of Jabba
The Hutt’s son, Rotta. A creature that can only be
described as a little penis slug. I want him banished
from my brain, but no go. Slither off, foul demon!

A Hollywood star isn’t defined by awards or
reviews but their dog. Chris Evans has Dodger
(with his own Knives Out jumper). Channing Tatum
made a film about his former pal, Lulu. Now there’s
Powell’s pup Brisket. If that cute face doesn’t see
the Hit Man actor hit the A-list, frankly nothing will.

DECEMBER 2023

25

An education in
Alexander Payne
THE FILMMA KING OUTSIDER
CHANNELS HIS LONG AND
WINDING ACA DEMIC JOURNEY
INTO THE H OL D OVERS
WORDS ALEX GODFREY

ALEXANDER PAYNE IS on-brand from the off.
He’s with family in Athens, which is a glorious
city, we comment. He fixes us with a deadpan
stare: “People suffer here, too.”
From the beginning of his career, with
1996’s Citizen Ruth and 1999’s Election, and later
taking in the likes of Sideways and Nebraska,
Payne has carved a wry and acerbic path. His
films chronicle desperate, broken human beings,
with hope always trying to break through the
cracks, and his latest, The Holdovers, follows
through. Pitting together an unlikely pair in
an all-male boarding school — unruly student
Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and the grumpy,
unpopular history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul
Giamatti) charged with supervising him over
Christmas — it’s set almost entirely in the
prestigious Barton Academy.
Payne has education in his bones. “I’m
so stupid, I was in school until I was 29. Like,
half my life,” he laughs. “Yeah, I didn’t get

26

DECEMBER 2023

out of graduate school with my master’s
degree ’til I was 29.” The idea for The Holdovers
came to him after he watched Marcel
Pagnol’s 1935 film Merlusse, which has the
same premise. Payne was excited about the
idea and, having let it percolate for years,
commissioned writer David Hemingson to work
on a screenplay, Payne inputting his own ideas
and rewriting it. His own experiences found
their way in.

“I didn’t go to an elite boarding school,
but I did go to an all-boys Jesuit prep school
in Omaha,” he says. “That Ancient History class
is a lot like my Latin class was. Those Latin
buddies are still my closest friends from high
school. So there are a bunch of in-jokes in there
just for them.”
The Holdovers is set in 1970 — it needed to
be a period film, as most prep schools are not
single-sex anymore. But the main thing that

Illustration: Russell Moorcroft, Getty Images, Sphere Entertainment

GET UP TO SPEED ON
DA R R E N A R O N O F S K Y ’ S SPH E RE MOVIE

excited Payne about setting it then was the formal
exercise. It genuinely feels and looks like 1970s
cinema. “That little parlour trick I was trying to
pull off... I wasn’t trying to make a period film,
I was trying to make a contemporary film set in
1970,” he says. “I’ve been asked, ‘Were you trying
to make it like Hal Ashby or Robert Altman?’
And I’m like, ‘No, I was trying to make it like
Alexander Payne, had I been working then.’”
He infused himself into the film, making it
as personal as he could. Did he allow the cast to
feed their own education experiences into it
too, or is the script done and that’s it? “The
script is done,” he retorts without hesitation.
“‘Please hit your marks and recite the dialogue
exactly as written.’ That’s my direction. ‘Feel
free to consult the screenplay.’” He’s not one
for improvisation, then.
Nearly 30 years on from his debut, it’s
heartening to see Payne still doing what he
does best and, arguably, better than ever. His
characters may be jaded, but he doesn’t seem
to be at all. “Well, I’ll tell you this, man — I’m 62
years old, and there’s nothing I like better than
making movies, and I feel so richly privileged
to be able to do it,” he says. “And as you get
older and you see darkness come a little bit
closer and closer, I just want to keep doing it.”
If he does, he’ll be in good company. “Kurosawa
used to say he wanted to be buried feet-first off
a movie set. He almost was. Then there’s Manoel
de Oliveira, the Portuguese director who was
making films until he was 105. I want to make
it to 106.” Time will tell, but he’s still going
strong. Maybe his extended period in education
paid off, after all.

IT’S HAPPENING
IN A BONKERS LAS
VEGAS VENUE

Clockwise
from main:
Not-so-happy
holidays for
rebellious

T H E M O V I E C E L E B R AT E S

student Angus

EARTH’S BEAUTY

Tully (Dominic

Some may dismiss 4D cinema as
a gimmick. But Aronofsky is taking it
deeply seriously. Postcard From Earth
is set in the future, seen through the
eyes of two humans, and use a mix of
fictional and non-fictional footage filmed
on all seven continents. He’s told the
Hollywood Reporter that he wants to
“pluck people from the bling and thrum
of the Vegas strip in all its humanconstructed madness and immerse
them as fully as possible in the wonder,
awe and beauty of the natural world”.

Sessa), head
cook Mary
Lamb (Da’Vine
Joy Randolph)
and cranky
history teacher
Paul Hunham
(Paul Giamatti);
Director
Alexander
Payne on set
with Giamatti
and Randolph;
Mary reaches

YOU NEED TO

out to Angus;

U N D E R S TA N D H O W

Payne gives
direction;
Student and
teacher
experience

THE HOLDOVERS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 19 JANUARY 2024

Seemingly bored with old-fashioned
rectangular screens, Darren Aronofsky’s
latest project is the first film to be
specially commissioned for new globeshaped Vegas venue MSG Sphere.
Postcard From Earth, which is part
narrative, part documentary, has been
made with experimental technologies to
fit the world’s largest high-definition
screen, which wraps both over and
around audiences. Totally tubular!

a cold front.

HUGE THIS PLACE IS

Okay, let’s chuck some stats at you. The
MSG Sphere is tall enough to fit the
Statue Of Liberty inside, and boasts
a 157-metre-wide LED display — that’s
more than six times bigger than the UK’s

BFI IMAX. It’s got a whopping 160,000
speakers, ready to create the ultimate in
surround sound. Plus, 4D bells and
whistles galore, including vibrating seats,
shifting temperatures, and even scents
to delight jaded moviegoers’ nostrils.
ANDROID USHERS WILL
GREET CINEMAGOERS

Human staff are so last century. Visitors
to the MSG Sphere are greeted by
what’s been billed as the world’s most
advanced humanoid robot, Aura. Five
robo-ushers provide directions and
answer questions. Apparently, they
also recognise guests’ facial expressions
and give lifelike responses, no doubt
transporting them to the darkest,
creepiest depths of the uncanny valley.
And they even help run MSG Sphere’s
social-media channels.
W H AT H A P P E N S
I N V E G A S S TAY S I N
VEGAS, RIGHT?

No. The MSG Sphere feels like the kind of
folly that could only exist in kitschy Vegas.
But proposals for a second building are
currently ruffling feathers in London,
meaning that Aronofsky’s flick could head
to the UK. Further programming is TBC,
but likely to be commissioned films only,
so thank your lucky stars that an
immersive 4D rendering of the vomit
scene from Stand By Me probably isn’t
heading our way. ALICE SAVILLE
POSTCARD FROM EARTH IS PLAYING AT
THE MSG SPHERE NOW

DECEMBER 2023

27

Clockwise from main: Summer Joy
Campbell, Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott;
Marshawn Lynch as Mr G; Edebiri,
writer-director Emma Seligman and
actor-writer Sennott on set.

EM MA SELI GMA N ON HOW HER
TEEN COME DY BOTTOMS IS
CRACKING SKULLS
WORDS BETH WEBB

A QUEER HIGH-SCHOOL fight-club
film influenced by everything from Shaun
Of The Dead to 1917 is certainly uncharted
territory for Hollywood. But for Emma
Seligman, the filmmaker behind American
summer hit Bottoms, this was the perfect
project to follow up the brazenly funny Shiva
Baby, which launched her career. We convinced
her to break the first rule of Fight Club and talk
about fight clubs (specifically, how she created
one for her movie).

28

DECEMBER 2023

Seligman originally wanted a heroic story for
her leading lesbian duo PJ and Josie, played by
Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott and The Bear’s
Ayo Edebiri. Yet Sennott, who co-wrote the film,
had other plans. “Rachel was interested in the
characters being really flawed and selfish and
deceitful,” the filmmaker remembers. And so
they landed on the girls kickstarting a fight club,
using a fake mission for empowerment to get in
with their popular peers. “They’re just trying to
look cool,” says Seligman.

ROUND 2: BOOT CAMP

PJ and Josie’s classmates take the bait, and
a crew of motley misfits and cheerleaders alike
unite over a desire to defend themselves. Ahead
of the shoot, the cast attended a week-long boot
camp. “It felt very much like the kind of fight

club that the girls were [pretending] to create
sometimes. They genuinely had a lot of support
for each other,” says Seligman. What started
with falling on gym mats ended with the girls
learning to throw and take impressive fake
punches. Yet with Bottoms being a comedy, the
fighting also had to be funny. Seligman cites
Edgar Wright’s movies as a major influence.
“The World’s End [was] a big reference because
of the way the fight sequences are designed,
[where] the camera goes back and forth between
mini-fights within a big overall fight sequence,”
she explains. “There’s a lot of humour and style
in the way that he does his fight choreography.”

ROUND 3: COMBAT

The fight club’s newfound skills were put into
practice, not least in a climactic sequence that
Seligman says was inspired by Sam Mendes’
World War I epic 1917. It was an ambitious step up
given that Shiva Baby is set almost entirely in one
location, and was met with reservations during
development, but the filmmaker fought to give
the group a grand, cinematic finale. “There was
a lot I died on a hill for [when it came to] that
sequence,” she laughs. It paid off, not just with the
film’s impressive box-office performance, but with
its dedicated Stateside fanbase, some of whom
turned up in costume to watch the film. “I snuck
in once or twice, and I had never seen such
a highly concentrated amount of young queer
people in a movie theatre,” the filmmaker says
happily. It turns out that Seligman has created her
own club. One with significantly fewer black eyes.
BOTTOMS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 3 NOVEMBER

Courtesy of 30WEST/Christopher Katsarov Luna

Welcome
to highschool
Fight Club

ROUND 1: INSPIRATION

FINN WOLFHARD
GOES HARD
T HE STRANGE R THINGS STAR
T URNS FILMMA KE R FOR HORRORCOME DY H E LL OF A SUMME R
FINN WOLFHARD’S CHILDHOOD was
largely spent around monsters and ghouls.
Demogorgons, Pennywise, ghosts — he’s
busted the lot. So, no surprise that his feature
directorial debut, Hell Of A Summer, which
he’s co-directed, co-written and stars in
alongside Ghostbusters: Afterlife actor Billy
Bryk, is a bloody affair — a summer-camp
slasher with tongue poking firmly in cheek.
“The energy was crazy,” Wolfhard beams
of the film’s Midnight Madness debut at the
Toronto International Film Festival. With
axes swinging, knives slathered in deadly
peanut butter (it’s an allergy thing), and
guitars used for more than just campfire
singalongs, the body-count is high. “We had
a lot of fun,” says Wolfhard of devising fresh
kills. “It was years of going over what should
be the ones to go in the film.”
From their first meeting — before being
cast together on Ghostbusters: Afterlife —
the pair found a shared wavelength (“It felt
almost like a camp friendship,” Wolfhard
explains), and soon began cooking up
screenplays together. Bryk thought their
first feature should be a slasher, something
with “a little bit of gore in it”, that was “fun
and spooky and funny”, while Wolfhard was
particularly influenced by Scream (“It really
changed everything for me”). “I was a big fan
of Evil Dead II, Night Of The Living Dead
— anything that Greg Nicotero did,” he adds.
“My mom showed me this documentary
called Nightmare Factory. It starts with

calling it “a horror-comedy, or comedyhorror, depending how you spin it”. The
result is a balance of fun and fear.
But with a story concerning Fred
Hechinger’s camp leader Jason, who’s
overseeing camp counsellors including
Wolfhard and Bryk’s happy-go-lucky pals
Chris and Bobby, realising he’s stuck around
in his youthful gig a little too long, there’s
substance there too. As Stranger Things
prepares to wrap for good, Wolfhard says the
film is “definitely, 100 per cent” reflective
of him starting to move beyond Hawkins,
Indiana. “It’s weird to think about it as being
such a personal film — but it is, because it’s
such a time capsule of where we were when
we wrote it, and when we were making it,” he
says. “I would say it’s the first evolution of
growth for me, and for Billy as well. It was
something that we talked about a ton.”
Beware: even stranger things are coming.

Top to bottom: Shining a new light on the summer-camp
slasher genre: Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard; Co-writers, costars and co-directors Wolfhard and Bryk between takes.

[Nicotero] as a kid making movies by
himself, and then goes into him meeting
George Romero. I’m very inspired by that
era of horror.”
The result is camp-based carnage,
delivering Gen Z-skewering gags while Gen
Z-ers literally get skewered. “The whole film
was just us trying to make each other laugh
over Zoom as we were writing,” Bryk says,

BEN TRAVIS
HELL OF A SUMMER DOES NOT YET HAVE A UK RELEASE DATE

ARE YOU TIKTOKING TO ME?

MARTIN SCORSE SE : THE KING OF CINE MA AND SOCIAL ME DIA, AS RECE NT VIDE OS P ROVE

THE SLANG QUIZ

In early October,
Scorsese’s daughter
Francesca tested her dad
on modern slang via a
TikTok video. The director
brought his A-game,
guessing the definitions of
“tea” and “hits different”
while jumping on the term
“slept on” to talk about
The King Of Comedy’s
critical reception in 1982.
As Francesca put it, “He
low-key slayed.”

THE FLEA

A TikTok trend in
which one person tricks
another into holding an
imaginary flea’s invisible
jacket was turned on its
head when Scorsese
chose to believe that the
flea, and its jacket, were
real. And who are we to
argue with him? Rumours
suggest that the flea will
have a leading role in the
director’s upcoming crime
drama, ‘The Fleaparted’.

THE FAKE FILM

The internet’s love
of Scorsese peaked
when fans created a fake
gangster film by the
director on Tumblr,
called ‘Goncharov’,
complete with a detailed
synopsis and artwork.
Francesca took to
TikTok to share
her dad’s reaction to
learning about the faux
movie: “Yes. I made that
film years ago.”

THE SCRUNCHIE

Sure, he’s a master of
celluloid, but can Scorsese
name a “hair doughnut” or
nipple covers when he is
shown them as part of
a quickfire test on feminine
products? Apparently not,
because he thought that
they were a pillow and
earbuds respectively. If
you’re ever in need of a
bobbypin or an eyelash
curler, though, this guy’s
got you sorted. BETH WEBB

DECEMBER 2023

29

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Henry
Winkler
CAN THE FOR MER FONZIE KEEP
HIS COOL AS HE ANSWERS
EMPIRE ’S BURNING QUESTIONS?

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

When have you been most starstruck?
Every time I meet somebody who sings. I met
Elton John, and I said [mistaking his first name],
“John, I have all your albums!” And then I slunk
away. But then I took a selfie with him and his
husband at the Emmy Awards. Bruce Springsteen,
I go numb. Brandi Carlile, she’s a fellow fisherperson. She’s a fly fisher-person. Oh my God,
I love her. Bruno Mars, I was in the middle of an
interview in a glass room at Sirius radio in New
York City and Bruno Mars walked by. I said,
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am so sorry, I have
to go now.” And I immediately left and brought
him into the glass room, and I said, “I will take
a grenade for you.” What did he say? He said,
“I hope you do. You’re the man.”

Steve McQueen walking down Rodeo Drive. We
passed each other, acknowledged each other,
and kept walking. It bothers me to this day that
I did not stop him and say, “I love you. I think
you’re the greatest.”

How much is a pint of milk?
Well, a quart of milk, I want to say, is $3.15.

Who is the most famous person you could
text right now?
Adam Sandler. Ron Howard. Bill Hader. And
they would all text back. In weeks, but they
would text back, yeah.

Do you do your own shopping?
I do. Not often, but I love to go to the market.
I love pushing the cart, no matter what country
I’m in, up and down the aisle. Cheese would be
my favourite aisle. And here’s what I know —
if you go hungry to the market, you will buy
14 per cent more than you need. Go in with
a snack already in your tummy.
Which movie have you seen the most?
The Great Escape, Love Actually, The Sting, The
Godfather. I once met Richard Curtis, and the
man has not hired me. I just want to say that.
I don’t know what he’s thinking. And I once saw

Do you have a favourite member of The
Fellowship Of The Ring?
I think the ring itself. It would look great on my
finger. I don’t wear any jewellery, no watches,
nothing. But if I have to say someone, I would go
with the old guy in the beard with the white robe.
Gandalf.
Ian McKellen, yeah. I saw him do Macbeth here
in LA. He’s a very lovely man.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Garry Marshall [Happy Days creator], who was
a genius and I miss him every day, put me in my
place during the making of an episode. I asked him
to speed up what he was doing because I had to
leave to make my first personal appearance. He
was introducing the guest cast and I said, “Just
hurry up.” And then he put the microphone down,
grabbed me by the shirt, and put me against the
wall and said [adopts strong New York accent],
“Don’t ever interrupt me when I am introducing

the guest cast. They have every right to be
introduced like you.” I said, “Garry, I will never do
that again.” This gorilla that came out of him was
so unexpected, it was so shocking. But the bigger
lesson was how to be part of an ensemble, as
opposed to thinking that you might be important.
What’s the most memorable holiday you’ve
ever had?
Each one. I just came back from Idaho, where
I fished for trout. It is my passion, away from
my family and my work. It makes me so happy.
I’m just going to show you the brown trout
I caught… [holds up his phone to the camera; it is
a picture of Henry Winkler, beaming with joy,
holding a huge trout] But it’s catch and release.
I won’t even eat a trout in a restaurant.
Can you play a musical instrument?
I cannot. In my mind I play the guitar, and
I sound like Bruce Springsteen.
Which book have you read the most?
Here it is: I’m dyslexic. I am not a good reader.
I’ll tell you, the most difficult part of my entire
professional life is reading a book on tape. Now,
with Lin Oliver, I have written 40 children’s
books, and they were hard. But reading the
memoir, most people do a book in two days.
I was allotted 100 hours. It really is difficult,
but I’m very proud of it.
BEING HENRY: THE FONZ... AND BEYOND IS OUT AS AUDIOBOOK,
EBOOK AND HARDBACK FROM 31 OCTOBER

DECEMBER 2023

31

26 OCTOBER - 22 NOVEMBER 2023

Michael Fassbender as
ultra-focused hitman
The Killer.

32

DECEMBER 2023

|

EDITED BY JOHN NUGENT

THE KILLER
I AM JACK ’S COMPLE TE E LATION
AT A NEW DAVID FINCHE R FILM

★★★★
OUT 27 OCTOBER (CINEMAS), 10 NOVEMBER (NETFLIX) /
CERT TBC / 119 MINS
DIRECTOR David

Fincher
Fassbender, Tilda Swinton,
Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker,
Sophie Charlotte

CAST Michael

PLOT A killer-for-hire (Fassbender) lives his life in the
shadows. When a job goes wrong, he is forced
to take revenge on his employers, one by one.

Top to bottom:
Man on
a murderous
mission; Tilda
Swinton as
the enigmatic
Expert; Killing
as craft.

“WWJWBD.
What would John
Wilkes Booth do?”
THE KILLER
(MICHAEL
FASSBENDER)

DAVID FINCHER IS back on familiar terrain.
His last film, 2020’s Mank, felt like an unusual
left-turn: a deeply personal period passion
project, co-written with his late father, it was
as sweepingly romantic as it was slyly cynical —
but, with such a narrow focus and such niche
preoccupations, it held less mainstream appeal
than his usual fare. With The Killer (adapted
from the French graphic novel Le Tueur, by
writer Matz and artist Luc Jacamon), the
director returns to the kind of material that
cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most
singular, incisive, ingenious genre filmmakers:
bringing his unique artistic
rigour to familiar blockbuster components.
It’s thrilling to see him back in the thriller
world. A sweatily suspenseful opening sequence
(the film comprises six chapters, plus prologue
and epilogue; even the structure is neat)
establishes the universe with ferocious clarity.
As that prosaic title suggests, our focus is almost
entirely on one assassin, a hitman-for-hire
never named, and played with unblinking, icy
intensity by Michael Fassbender — his first
screen role in four years. When we meet him,
he’s in the midst of a job: to take out a wealthy
target in a luxury Paris hotel.
Through Fassbender’s coolly delivered,
dry-as-dust voiceover, which falls somewhere
between first-person novelistic narration and
the character’s own internal monologue, we
learn a little of what it takes to do what he does.
He is pure efficiency, methodical to the nth
degree; every scenario gamed, every outcome
foreseen. He practises yoga and repeats
meditative mantras (“Stick to the plan...
Weakness is vulnerability”), which would sound
like new-agey corporate motivation techniques,
if they weren’t in service of murder. He listens
to The Smiths to slow his resting heart rate,
Morrissey’s morose warbling penetrating the
film’s soundtrack throughout (and now,
hilariously, forever associated with sociopaths).
He is, in short, a well-oiled machine.
And then… something goes wrong. His

Parisian hit — a simple “Annie Oakley” job, as
The Killer puts it — goes awry, seemingly down
to a very human distraction, sowing the first
shred of doubt that this cold, heartless man is
as robotically detached as he claims. It sets in
motion a series of events that sees his stockin-trade violence seep into his private life,
initiating a jet-setting revenge yarn that recalls
everything from Death Wish to Kill Bill.
Though nothing quite matches that opening
salvo for pure cut-glass tension, some brilliantly
staged sequences soon follow. Particular
shout-outs must go to a staggeringly wellchoreographed fight with another man known
only as ‘The Brute’, played by Sala Baker (aka
Sauron from Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The
Rings), which could jostle John Wick: Chapter 4
for best fight scene of the year; and a more
cerebral stand-off with a fellow assassin, played
with typical intrigue by Tilda Swinton.
Throughout it all, as you might well expect,
Fincher’s filmmaking is immaculate. It is pure
pleasure to luxuriate in imagery made with such
obvious, deliberate care. You feel his precise
framing, his careful composition, his notorious
multiple takes. It seems, too, like Fincher is
drawing on his past strengths: you can recognise
the patient procedural plotting of Seven or Zodiac,
the nihilistic themes and sardonic narration of
Fight Club, the ruthless, unsettling violence of
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the outlandish
moral relativism of Gone Girl.
But what does it all amount to? To the very
end, The Killer remains something of a cipher,
a blank canvas of a human. We are welcomed
inside the head of this unthinkable perspective,
without ever truly learning the whys or the
wherefores. Is Fincher pondering the soul-cost
that such a vocation might bring, a theme even
the most recent Bond films have toyed with?
Is it another angry screed on capitalism and
masculinity? Should we even draw parallels
between The Killer’s diligent approach to
work and Fincher’s own fastidiousness (a lazy
comparison, perhaps, but one the director
seems to invite)? Or should we just take it all
at face value — simply a slickly made genre
exercise, enough on its own merits?
After such a strong build-up, the film’s
ultimate arm’s-length aloofness might feel
frustrating, especially in its muted finale. For
a director who crafted two of the best endings
in cinema history (Fight Club and Seven), The
Killer’s climax, ultimately, proves to be curiously
anticlimactic. David Fincher is unarguably
a master filmmaker, so with every new film of
his, fairly or not, you expect a masterpiece.
The Killer doesn’t quite reach that level — but
even then, most filmmakers would kill to make
something this good. JOHN NUGENT
V E R D I C T A riveting revenge riot,
with gobsmacking levels of film craft, and
a performance from Michael Fassender to
make your blood run cold. It’s not quite
top-tier Fincher, but it comes damn close.

DECEMBER 2023

33

Top to bottom: Mischief-maker Loki
(Tom Hiddleston) makes his charismatic
return; Loki’s variant Sylvie (Sophia Di
Martino); Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu
Mbatha-Raw) does some time-travelling.

LOKI: SEASON 2
T H E GOD OF MISCHIE F IS BACK —
A ND H E ’S ANYT H ING BUT LOW-KEY

★★★★
OUT 6 OCTOBER (DISNEY+) / EPISODES VIEWED: 4 OF 6
SHOWRUNNERS Michael

Waldron, Eric Martin
Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di
Martino, Jonathan Majors, Gugu Mbatha-Raw

CAST Tom

PLOT With the multiverse exploding and the TVA in
chaos, Loki (Hiddleston) starts time-slipping, and
seeks his variant, Sylvie (Di Martino), for answers.

IT’S FAIR TO say that Marvel’s sacred timeline
has had a little wobble. 2023 is the first year that
the seemingly unstoppable superhero studio has
looked vulnerable, after disappointments on
both the big screen (Ant-Man And The Wasp:
Quantumania) and small (Secret Invasion). What
a sharp intake of fresh Asgardian air Loki is, then,
the first of the MCU’s Disney+ shows to earn
a second run, and one that still feels distinctive, in
a multiverse sometimes in danger of feeling samey.

34

DECEMBER 2023

Loki’s first season — which included among its
delights an alligator Loki, a talking clock, and the
literal end of all time — proved one of the studio’s
better forays into the streamingverse. Season 2
picks up seconds later, dealing with the fallout
from Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and his stubborn
variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) encountering
the man behind the curtain, ‘He Who Remains’
(Jonathan Majors): the Kang variant who, it
turned out, founded the Time Variance Authority.
Sylvie’s decision to kill him set off a chain reaction
of events that could, in classic Marvel-sized stakes,
threaten the existence of the entire universe.
But Loki generally swerves those cookiecutter comic-book concerns. For one thing, this
is a gorgeously made piece of television, the
second season — largely directed by indie heroes
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead — retaining
the unique visual language established by
Season 1 director Kate Herron, with rich, grainy
cinematography and lush, retro-futuristic
production design. In a genre that can feel
increasingly homogenous, this show has forged
its own singular, solidly crafted identity, the
TVA’s Soviet-esque cosmic bureaucracy
remaining a singular pleasure to spend time in.
Time remains the name of the game, too,
with more Doctor Who-esque timey-wimey fun
across the centuries, along with an apt sense of

mischief for a show about the god of it, and
a propulsive story — a battle for control of time
itself — driving along at a breezy pace. With just
six episodes, there’s rarely filler. Some exposition
is lengthier than necessary — dialogue is
chock-full of sci-fi word salad like “throughput
multiplier” and “temporal radiation” —
but it’s generally delivered by new character
Ouroboros, played with such giddy, thrilled-tobe-here glee by the newly Oscar-winning Ke
Huy Quan that it’s hard to care too much.
In fact, everyone seems to be enjoying
themselves — most of all Hiddleston. Having
donned the green horns for well over a decade
by this point, his Loki remains endlessly
charismatic. Hiddleson still imbues him with
that delicious sense of playful moral ambiguity,
but there’s a clarity to the character at this point
that feels fresh: that somehow, by trying to
save the universe, he finally found the glorious
purpose he was looking for. JOHN NUGENT
V E R D I C T With the multiverse teetering
all around it, Loki is one strand of the timeline
that is sustaining its originality and intention
— and actually thriving. It’s about time.

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ALL T
S
U
J
R
FO

9
£1O.9
NTH!

AM

Above: A whole

SALTBURN

new world:
working-class
student Oliver
Quick (Barry

E M E RALD F E NNE LL IS BACK FOR A
SPOT OF BRIDE SHEAD REANIMATE D

Keoghan)
enjoys the high
life. Left:

★★★

Revising for

OUT 17 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 131 MINS

exams was
pretty tough.

Emerald Fennell
CAST Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie
Madekwe, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant,
Alison Oliver
DIRECTOR

PLOT Oxford University, 2006. Outsider Oliver
(Keoghan) becomes friends with the wealthy
Felix (Elordi), and assimilates into his world.

WITH HER FEATURE debut Promising Young
Woman, Emerald Fennell took a scathing swipe
at themes including rape culture, misogyny
and violence against women. Her follow-up,
Saltburn, sees the writer-director set her sights
on class, social mobility and the über-rich,
delivering a satirical thriller that leaves you
holding your breath and rolling your eyes in
equal measure.

36

DECEMBER 2023

Barry Keoghan is the brilliantly named
Oliver Quick, a working-class lad from
Merseyside heading to Oxford University on
a scholarship. A lone wolf, he immediately finds
himself shunned, skirting around the edges of
the central cliques, observing them from afar.
Once he connects with the most popular guy
on campus, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), Oliver
finds himself part of that elite world — and when

Felix invites him to stay at his stately
family home of Saltburn over the summer,
Oliver’s obsessions with Felix and his life take
a toxic turn.
Appropriately for such a decadent
setting, Saltburn looks divine. Fennell’s eye is
extraordinary, and alongside cinematographer
Linus Sandgren, she captures the grand beauty
of her architectural locations impeccably.

Here: Anyone up for
a Jigsaw? Below:
Shawnee Smith as
Amanda Young.

Top to bottom: Saltburn — just your one up, one down
stately pile...; Rosamund Pike as Elspeth, enjoying
a suitably decadent drink.

Reflections, overhead angles, kaleidoscopes and
more put you in Oliver’s fractured state of mind.
Intense close-ups quickly create an incredible
sense of intimacy. Fennell swings between
rapidly edited montages, static moments and
sweeping oners with ease. The direction oozes
confidence, and the noughties setting is brought
vividly to life by nostalgic pop bangers.
The cast is inordinately charismatic —
particularly Elordi (whose turn here, along with
the upcoming Priscilla, is sure to elevate him
from teen heartthrob to all-out
movie star) and Archie Madekwe, on
scene-stealing form as Felix’s snobby,
snarky American cousin Farleigh.
Rosamund Pike, playing vapid,
glamorous matriarch Elspeth, is
having a ball, firing off hilariously
“Oliver, I have
judgmental one-liners that make up
a complete and
the film’s funniest moments.
utter horror of
Where Saltburn ultimately
ugliness, ever since
falters is its writing. The
I was really young.
performances are great, but they’re
I don’t know why.”
working with paper-thin characters,
ELSPETH
and as the runtime ticks on, the
(ROSAMUND
energy and tension that Fennell
PIKE)
summoned so masterfully in the
first half dissipates into relentless
rug-pulls and shocks that feel inserted for the
sake of it. Scenes often build to reach the cusp
of something truly electric, but are let down by
clunky dialogue. There is innate satisfaction
in watching this group of unbearable people
come undone, but it comes at the cost of real
emotional connection to what’s happening
on screen, and the film’s musings on class are
befuddling by the end. There’s much to chew
on here, but it’s a shame something so initially
delicious eventually leaves you with a bit of
a bad taste in your mouth. SOPHIE BUTCHER
V E R D I C T Fennell’s second feature is
both evocative and provocative, with lashings
of style but questionable substance. It doesn’t
stick the landing, but the ride right before the
nosedive is a properly enjoyable one.

SAW X
DO YOU WANT TO PLAY (YE T
ANOTHE R) GAME ?

★★
OUT NOW / CERT 18 / 118 MINS
DIRECTOR Kevin

Greutert
Bell, Synnøve Macody Lund,
Shawnee Smith, Steven Brand, Renata Vaca

CAST Tobin

PLOT John Kramer (Bell), the ‘Jigsaw Killer’, is
dying of cancer. When he discovers a radical
new treatment is a lie, he exacts revenge on the
doctors behind it.

DEATH ISN’T THE worst thing that can happen
to you in a Saw film. Why, you can die and still
return again and again, like Tobin Bell’s original
bad guy here. Despite expiring in Saw III, he’s
back with more horrible traps in this tenth film,
a prequel, and if it should still be plenty gross
enough for fans, the horror is as tired as his
poor, cancer-riddled bones.
Set shortly after the events of the first film,
sociopathic moralist John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer
(Bell) is in his last months of life when he learns
of a hopeful new treatment over the border in
Mexico. After extremely cursory research from
a man known for his meticulous selection
of victims, he heads down to the remote
location and meets a friendly and apparently
professional medical and support team, who tell
him they have successfully treated his tumour.
Alas, they’re lying. When Kramer realises he’s
been duped, he sets about punishing all those
responsible. Gruesomely.
Cue the usual combination of self-surgery
and sadism in a series of grotesque traps
involving a novel bit of radiation therapy and,
inevitably, amputation. As with many of these
films, you may wonder how survivable these
traps are meant to be; a subject of ongoing
debate between Jigsaw and his even more
psychotic apprentices. These contraptions seem

overly reliant on delicate mechanisms, which
cannot have been subjected to extensive testing,
performing exactly as intended, but then, that’s
pretty much assumed in this franchise. There
are at least nods to the philosophical and ethical
gap between Jigsaw and his followers, even
if no-one mounts a serious challenge to his
hardline philosophy of moral corrective surgery
(and you really wish someone would).
Still, Kramer is a more compelling bad guy
than most of his later substitutes, gently
working from a demented moral core, and he
gets fiery opposition from Synnøve Macody
Lund’s formidable Cecilia, the unshakeably
confident head of the ersatz clinic. There are
even a few laughs at the absurd bad luck the
fraudsters had in choosing this patient as their
patsy. But beyond that, little here feels fresh or
new, apart from the decision to let Bell himself
dominate proceedings for once.
If only that didn’t lead to the film’s biggest
blunder. In a series of last-act turns, Kramer
is almost portrayed as a hero righteously
standing up for the little guy against a corrupt
establishment instead of a demented torturekiller. It makes this feel ultimately as though
the filmmakers, led by franchise editorturned-three-time-Saw director Kevin
Greutert, have drunk their own Kool-Aid — but
perhaps they were force-fed it by some awful
contraption, so maybe we shouldn’t judge.
HELEN O’HARA

V E R D I C T The blood and gore is all
present and correct, but the focus on
Kramer’s vulnerability and human side sits
at odds with his awful judgmentalism. Let
monsters be monsters.

DECEMBER 2023

37

Hurrah for Big Pharma!

PAIN HUSTLERS
SIDE E FFECTS MAY INCLUDE
DIZZINE SS, CONST IPATION AND A
DE SIRE TO WATCH SOME THING E LSE

★★
OUT 27 OCTOBER (NETFLIX) / CERT TBC / 122 MINS
DIRECTOR David

Yates
Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García,
Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy
James, Chloe Coleman

CAST Emily

PLOT Liza Drake (Blunt) finds security working as
a drug rep — only to be embroiled in a criminal
scheme at the heart of America’s opioid epidemic.

“I WILL MAKE my life count,” Liza (Emily
Blunt) tells herself at her lowest ebb — or at
least she thinks it’s her lowest; her car gets
towed the next morning. When we first meet
Liza in Pain Hustlers — a new drama from Harry
Potter stalwart David Yates — she lives in her
sister’s basement with her daughter Phoebe
(Chloe Coleman) and mother Jackie (Catherine

38

DECEMBER 2023

O’Hara). Her kid’s newly suspended from
school, and Liza’s just quit her job at the strip
club — but shortly before resigning, she receives
an offer from Pete (Chris Evans). He presents
Liza with an opportunity in pharmaceutical
sales, promising riches beyond her dreams and a
chance for the stability that’s always eluded her.
The film doesn’t seem interested in
exploring who Liza is beyond her desire for
money and her relationship with her daughter
and mother. She must have a life beyond
parenthood and work, but Pain Hustlers
never considers that, removing the humaninterest element this story desperately needs.
A rise-and-fall story about the opioid crisis,
which has had such a significant impact on
human lives, needs to connect through its
characters, but the screenplay by Wells Tower is
so concerned with pharmaceutical companies
and vague power structures that it loses sight
of Liza, and everyone else. The characters
feel more like thin sketches than real people,
which makes the whole experience feel cold
and distanced.
Blunt does the best she can to breathe life
into Liza, a fictional character in an inspired-bytrue-events story. But around the halfway point,
it becomes clear there’s no space for her to add
any dimension to her character — though she

still delivers the strongest performance. Chris
Evans has done well playing jerks in the past
(see: Knives Out), but Pete is detestable to the
point of unbearable, and Evans is unable to find
any nuance in the role.
Pain Hustlers plods along through an entirely
rote interpretation of the opioid crisis. The
visual majesty of director Yates’ Harry Potter
films is nowhere to be found here — everything
is shot with logic but devoid of style. It’s a film
that badly wants to be the next Wolf Of Wall
Street, with one scene in particular coming
across as a hollow carbon copy; unlike Scorsese’s
film, though, Pain Hustlers plays things
frustratingly safe. It’s not raunchy enough,
not devastating enough, and not willing to tell
us anything new. There have been so many
compelling stories about this subject in recent
years, from the documentary All The Beauty And
The Bloodshed to miniseries like Dopesick and
Painkiller. Unfortunately, Pain Hustlers isn’t
creative enough to stand out from the crowd.
BARRY LEVITT

V E R D I C T It offers the bones of
a compelling story, but one-note characters,
riskless storytelling and creaky pacing
prevent this film from making an impact. This
is a prescription best left unfilled.

M O NA R C H: LEGACY OF MONSTERS
★★★
OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 5 OF 10
SHOWRUNNER Chris

Black
Russell, Wyatt Russell, Anna
Sawai, Kiersey Clemons

CAST Kurt

You’ve seen Godzilla Vs. Kong. Now there’s
Russell vs. Russell. This TV take on the
kaiju mythology takes a more humanlevel approach, headlined by the inspired
casting of father and son Kurt and Wyatt
Russell, both playing Monarch military
man Lee Shaw at different ages. While its
occasional deep-cut references demands
a familiarity with a franchise most audiences
are ambivalent about — who remembers
Godzilla: King Of The Monsters? — its
ambitious time- and globe-trotting
storytelling makes the most of the
universe’s giant canvas, even in smallscreen size. Some characters feel like filler,
but the kaiju, when they come, are
satisfyingly epic. JN

Here: “Will you please
stop talking about Fight
Club?” Below: Cheer up,
you two.

BOTTOMS
THE SHIVA BABY TEAM ARE BACK —
AND THEY ’ VE COME OUT ON TOP

★★★★
OUT 3 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 91 MINS
DIRECTOR Emma

Seligman
Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Havana Rose
Liu, Kaia Gerber, Ruby Cruz, Nicholas Galitzine,
Marshawn Lynch

CAST Rachel

PLOT Sick of being the school losers, PJ (Sennott)
and Josie (Edebiri) start a ‘self-defence’ club to
get close to their crushes.

T H E E XO RCIST: BELIEVER
★★★
OUT NOW / CERT 15 / 111 MINS
DIRECTOR David

Gordon Green
Odom Jr, Lidya Jewett, Olivia
Marcum, Ellen Burstyn

CAST Leslie

Having completed his Halloween trilogy,
David Gordon Green turns his attention
to The Exorcist, another masterpiece
tarnished by a trail of mostly unworthy
sequels. It’s a mixed bag, full of interesting
ideas that don’t always develop into
cohesive, satisfying conclusions. It begins
well, with a creepy set-up about a single
father (Leslie Odom Jr) whose daughter
(Lidya Jewett) and friend (Olivia Marcum)
go missing in the woods, then re-emerge as
hosts to something terrible. Green creates
a mood where everything seems just slightly
off. Then Ellen Burstyn arrives, reprising her
role as Chris MacNeil. As good as Burstyn
is, her appearance feels gimmicky — more
cheesy tribute than franchise reinvention. OR

THE FIRST RULE of Fight Club is that you
do not talk about Fight Club. The first rule of
Bottoms, the sophomore feature from director
Emma Seligman, is to not take it too seriously.
This is a film with barely a sincere moment in its
91-minute runtime, instead focusing on building
an off-kilter, heightened high-school world, and
having a helluva time playing with it.
PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri)
are outsiders, looking to level up their social
status. They’re pining after hot cheerleaders
Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia
Gerber) — both seemingly into boys, and way
out of PJ and Josie’s league. After a bizarre and
hilarious incident involving Isabel’s boyfriend
Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and Josie’s car, she and
PJ launch a female fight club, ostensibly to teach
girls self-defence — but in actuality, to try to get
lucky, and shed their reputation as the “ugly,
untalented gays”.
But plot isn’t really Bottoms’ main concern.
While you’re still trying to figure out just how
exactly setting up a fight club saves the girls
from expulsion, the film has moved on to
another sequence, another joke, another
piss-take. In her stress-inducing debut Shiva
Baby (which also starred Sennott), Seligman
masterfully ratcheted up tension — here, she
seems to delight in undercutting it, maintaining

a propulsive pace and energy. This makes the
narrative mechanics hard to keep track of at
times, and there’s not much by way of character
development to keep you grounded — but once
you settle in to Bottoms’ eccentric vibe, you
won’t care much either.
In an all-round brilliant cast, The Bear’s
Ayo Edebiri is the standout. Unleashed in
her full comedic form, she amps up Josie’s
awkwardness to almost unbearable levels,
as well as making the more dramatic moments
ring true. Rachel Sennott, also on co-writing
duty alongside Seligman, delivers her usual
spiky, sarcastic persona, and the pair’s chemistry
as long-time best friends is the glue holding
Bottoms together. Special shout-out to
Nicholas Galitzine as man-child jock Jeff —
often seen playing the leading man in the
very type of movies that Bottoms is poking fun
at, he commits entirely as a handsome,
privileged idiot.
As wonderfully daft as most of Bottoms is,
there is a strange catharsis to it, too. Seeing
the girls figure out how to throw — and take —
a punch, deriving giddy glee from bloody noses
and black eyes, feels fresh and subversive, as
they indulge in a kind of rage and violence that
women are typically expected to shy away from.
It sets up a brilliantly batshit action ending, the
influence of Quentin Tarantino and Edgar
Wright evident. Plus, stick around for that
much-loved, mostly forgotten movie sign-off —
a blooper-reel credits sequence. SOPHIE BUTCHER
V E R D I C T An incredibly silly, sapphic,
gloriously weird high-school satire. Bottoms’
ultra-knowing tone might be a struggle for
some — but it’s hilariously rewarding.

DECEMBER 2023

39

Iron Man brings it in
2012’s Avengers
Assemble.

MCU: THE REIGN OF
MARVEL STUDIOS
T H E RE WAS AN IDE A … TO GATHE R
A GROUP OF RE MARKABLE PAGE S…

★★★★
AUTHORS JOANNA ROBINSON, DAVE GONZALES,
GAVIN EDWARDS / OUT NOW / 528 PAGES

NOW 15 YEARS young, the
Marvel Cinematic Universe
encapsulates 32 films (and
nine Disney+ series), whose
combined worldwide box office
tots up to just under $30 billion.
Its fans are legion, while its
most vocal detractors include
Martin Scorsese (“not cinema”) and Francis
Ford Coppola (“despicable”). It is a massive
subject with a cast (and crew) of thousands, but
writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and
Gavin Edwards have taken it all in with this
hefty yet breezily written studio biography.
While bagging north of 100 interviews
with an intention to create “the most thorough,
authoritative history of Marvel Studios to date,”
these Writers Three aren’t simply putting out
some official puff tome. They note in their intro
that after about a month of interviews, Disney
started “asking people not to talk to us”. So, as
they pick at Marvel’s knotty corporate origins, the
irresistible rise of nerd-done-well Kevin Feige,
and the astonishing way a troubled, bankrupt
outfit became the dominant force in mainstream
cinema, they don’t gloss over the warts.
Marvel Studios’ origin as a subsidiary of Toy
Biz, for example, receives much scrutiny, in terms
of how a push to make the movies “toyetic”

40

(a truly egregious word) continually stymied
their creativity, and resulted in a focus on more
testosterone-driven heroes, where for years
female characters couldn’t lead films because the
perception was their action figures wouldn’t sell.
The patchy expansion into streaming
services with the advent of Disney+ is also
covered in some detail: “When asked a few years
earlier why no other studio had been able to
match Marvel’s track record, Joe Russo said,
‘Simple. They don’t have a Kevin.’ In the Disney+
era, Marvel didn’t have enough Kevin to go
around.” There are also some shocking incidents,
such as CEO Ike Perlmutter’s alleged assertion
that nobody would care about the casting change
of James Rhodes between the first two Iron
Mans because “Black people ‘look the same’”,

and Jeremy Renner’s off-colour joke about
Black Widow during an Age Of Ultron junket.
But Robinson, Gonzalez and Edwards are
clearly themselves fans, so while the book —
even at this girth — doesn’t give them space to
really dig into the movies themselves, it is
buoyed by an appealing and measured sense of
affection. Whether you love Marvel 3000 or
you’re a Scorsese sympathiser, MCU is worth
your time, being a pacy, lively account of — for
better or worse — the single most important
studio of the century so far. DAN JOLIN
V E R D I C T Less about the movies, more
about the people and mechanisms behind
them, this account of Marvel Studios offers
a wealth of insight even for the superhero nut.

E V E R Y M A N FOR HIMSELF AND GOD
AG A I N ST A L L

SPI E L BE RG: T HE FIRST T E N YE ARS

PA NDORA’S B OX

★★★

★★ ★ ★

★★ ★ ★

AUTHOR LAURENT BOUZEREAU /

AUTHOR PETER BISKIND / OUT 11 NOVEMBER /

AUTHOR WERNER HERZOG / OUT NOW / 368 PAGES

OUT 24 OCTOBER / 256 PAGES

368 PAGES

“The lamentations ended about noon.” So
begins Werner Herzog’s first memoir, a book
impossible not to read without hearing the
director’s famously grave German accent in
your head. Philosophical and eccentric, it
sees Herzog’s hot takes on everything from
ski-jumping to prehistoric building methods.
A unique account from a unique mind — one
best consumed, perhaps, on audiobook. JN

This Spiel-book by a long-time chronicler of
the director is heavyweight: John Williams
and George Lucas offer forewords, and the
centrepiece is a huge film-by-film interview
with the man himself. Bouzereau knows his
stuff, and it crackles along, but many of the
stories will be familiar to fans. Also, it’s
technically the first 11 years covered — but
hey, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage. NDS

Best known for Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,
a juicy account of cinema’s ’60s and ’70s
mavericks, Peter Biskind’s latest details
the era of ‘Peak TV’, exploring the rise of
the streamers and unstoppable splurge of
‘content’, from Breaking Bad to The White
Lotus and beyond. The emphasis on the often
gnarly relationships between showrunners
and execs is both fun and enlightening. BH

DECEMBER 2023

Elizabeth (Natalie
Portman, right) channels
Gracie (Julianne Moore)
via ‘I’m A Little Teapot’.

Todd Haynes and
composer Marcelo
Zarvos borrow

MAY DECEMBER
A NEW TODD HAYNE S ME LODRAMA;
E XPECT HE AV Y WE E PING

★★★★
OUT 17 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 113 MINS
DIRECTOR Todd

Haynes
Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles
Melton, D.W. Moffett, Piper Curda, Elizabeth Yu

CAST Natalie

PLOT Years after embarking on a scandalous agegap affair, a couple rakes up the past when an
actor arrives to research a film based on their lives.

IN TODD HAYNES’ bitingly camp new film, two
acting titans play manipulative women desperate
to get what they want at any cost — all under the
guise of polite respectability. It’s an intriguing
approach that, initially, feels at odds with a serious
plot that involves child sex abuse and longfossilised trauma. Between spiky silences and
lashings of droll humour, May December follows
actor Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) as she
researches a role and visits a couple, Gracie

(Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles
showy piano score, comical zooms
some of the score
Melton), 24 years after they faced
and outrageous, near-cringe dialogue
from Joseph
a scandal — and Gracie prison time
(“You seduced me,” Gracie says to Joe,
Losey’s 1971 film
— for their relationship, which began
straight-faced), the entire thing
The Go-Between
when Gracie was 36 and Joe was 13.
teeters towards a telenovela. What
— another film
The trip is meant to be mutually
elevates May December above
about the loss of
beneficial: Elizabeth can study
an episode of The Real Housewives is
a young boy’s
Gracie’s mannerisms and peek
Haynes’ careful balance of the film’s
innocence.
behind the curtain to add
soapy elements with an icy core of
authenticity to her performance,
sadness. Joe lives in Gracie’s shadow
while Gracie and Joe can try to curry favour in
like an obedient, shell-shocked child, while
the hope Elizabeth will give them a sympathetic
Gracie is stuck in her own state of arrested
portrayal. Though they’ve spent the last two
development, garbed in frilly, pastel dresses and
decades pretending that everything is peachy
speaking with a breathy, lisping little-girl voice.
and that they have never been happier, the
Not everything works, with some symbolism
actor’s arrival, and habit of asking pointed
perhaps a little too blunt. But it’s the performances
questions, causes the couple to erupt like two
where May December shines, and opposite two
shifting tectonic plates. Purring one moment
acting powerhouses, Melton is particularly
and sneery the next, Portman plays Elizabeth as
impressive: his shrewd, small performance is
Machiavellian, arguably just as much of a mess as
the film’s emotional nucleus, breaking us out
her subject; when the two women interact, their
of the salacious stylings and exposing us to the
battle of competing hauteur powers the film’s
damage these two women — wolves in sheep’s
strange, sizzling undercurrent of black comedy.
clothing — are inflicting upon him. STEPH GREEN
Haynes has already exhibited his flair for
V E R D I C T Surface-level funny but with
Douglas Sirk-style melodramas with Carol and
a well of deeper meaning brewing, May
Far From Heaven. Here, he keeps the structure
December is not just a skilful satire of
but strips out the sumptuous colour and heady
suburban propriety; it’s a unique and uncanny
atmosphere found in his back catalogue, hewing
affair about the nature of performance itself.
to the antiseptic vibe of his 1995 hit Safe. With its

DECEMBER 2023

41

“Do you feel lucky,
cyberpunk?”
Government agent

CYBERPUNK
2077: PHANTOM
LIBERTY

Solomon Reed
(Idris Elba).

FRO M GAMING’S B IGGE ST LE TDOWN
TO ITS GREATE ST RE DE MPTION

★★★★★
PC / PS5 / XBOX / OUT NOW

THE LAST THREE years have been a long road
to recovery for Cyberpunk 2077. The game’s
disastrous 2020 launch, in which it arrived
littered with bugs and barely playable on console,
still haunts the memories of those who had been
expecting great things from CD Projekt Red’s
follow-up to The Witcher 3. Thankfully, the studio
has performed a long-haul course-correction
by squashing bugs and streamlining gameplay.
The game’s redemption comes to a fitting
conclusion here with Phantom Liberty, 2077’s
first (and last) paid expansion.
Accessible early on during the base game’s
main campaign, Phantom Liberty brings players
to Dogtown, Night City’s lawless badlands, in
search of a downed plane carrying the President,
who may be willing to help the player character,
V, get rid of the implant manifesting Keanu
Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand as the anarcho-punk
devil on their shoulder.
This high-stakes opener sets the stage for
a rich and knotty spy caper, one crammed with
plot-twists, hard choices, and world-shifting
repercussions that can even impact the ending
of the main game, all fuelled by a fierce sense
of momentum which the original campaign
struggled to cultivate until its later acts.

42

Phantom Liberty’s 20-hour story is elevated
further by Idris Elba’s government agent
Solomon Reed, whose earthy charisma belies
a mercurial moral compass. Elba wasn’t motioncaptured for the role, but it’s a testament
to both the gravitas he brings to the voice
performance, and CD Projekt Red’s facial
animation tech, that you could easily spend every
interaction with Reed believing that he was.
Another star of the show is Dogtown itself,
a pell-mell playground that’s dynamic and
dangerous in equal measure, continually revealing
new layers to itself as you ascend its skylines
and plunder their secrets. Luckily, Phantom
Liberty provides V with plenty of new weapons
to match their new surroundings, many of
which liven up 2077’s combat thanks to unique,
gadget-like tricks.

Phantom Liberty also launches alongside
Update 2.0, a free patch for all Cyberpunk 2077
players that represents a sweeping overhaul of
the game’s core systems and mechanics, such as
a streamlined progression tree, all of which are
exploited by Phantom Liberty to showcase 2077’s
rebirth as the sophisticated role-playing game that
CD Projekt Red had always intended to make.
In this way, Phantom Liberty presents the
definitive Cyberpunk experience you probably
imagined playing three years ago. Spend a few
hours exploring Night City again, and you’ll soon
discover why it’s been worth the wait. ALEX AVARD
V E R D I C T Phantom Liberty is the
perfect invitation back into Night City,
cementing 2077 as a must-play RPG finally
worthy of its developer’s pedigree.

LI ES O F P

MORTAL KOMBAT 1

STA RFI E LD

★★ ★ ★

★★★

★★ ★ ★

MAC / PC / PS4 / PS5 / XBOX ONE / XBOX

NINTENDO SWITCH / PC / XBOX SERIES X|S / PS5 /

PC / XBOX SERIES X|S / OUT NOW

SERIES X|S / OUT NOW

OUT NOW

Talk about high concept — Lies Of P casts
you as none other than Pinocchio, traversing
the steampunk city of Krat, where rampaging
clockwork puppets have wiped out humans.
The gorgeously Gothic setting is as much
a character as the cast of Carlo Collodi’s
classic fable, reimagined here in inventive
ways. A unique, if unforgivingly difficult,
take on a familiar fairy tale. MATT KAMEN

Mortal Kombat 1 reboots the outrageously
violent fighter series’ continuity, but with
yet another interdimensional conflict
threatening Earth, and overly familiar
gameplay mechanics, it can’t quite escape
its past. New and returning Kombatants
afford plenty of brutal moves to master, but
as a competitive game it’s let down by
unstable online play. MATT KAMEN

DECEMBER 2023

Bethesda’s latest offers you the freedom to
explore the universe — even if it rarely tells
you how. This vast, cosmic epic is packed
with genuine awe as you hop star systems,
traverse alien worlds, battle space pirates,
and chase down mysterious artefacts,
though it does frustrate with fiddly controls.
Nevertheless, its ‘NASApunk’ aesthetic is a
delight, and for those with the time to learn its
intricacies, Starfield truly soars. MATT KAMEN

Left: John David
Washington’s
Joshua is faced
with a dilemma.
Below: Friend or
foe? Madeleine
Yuna Voyles as
Alphie. Bottom:
Ken Watanabe
as Harun.

drawing from Vietnam classics as well
as obvious touchpoints: Apocalypse
Now and Platoon are as much a part
costuming was
of the fabric as District 9, Blade
created entirely in
Runner and Akira, while its lived-in
post-production,
bringing death from the sky. And
environments teeming with battered,
director Gareth
then, the bomb droids, frenetically
beaten-up vehicles are indebted to
Edwards didn’t tell
waddling towards you like suicidal
1977’s Star Wars. This cocktail works,
background actors if
dustbins before blowing up.
though, Edwards massaging it all into
they were playing
Gareth Edwards’ distinct vision
his own tactile, earthy vision of the
humans or robots, to
permeates every frame of The
future, which is somewhere between
elicit more human
Creator, and how exciting it is to see
genuinely convincing and also just
performances.
a big genre blast that feels free of
unapologetically kickass — and never
interference. Above and beyond all
without purpose. As America rains
the futurism, this is thoughtful sci-fi, with
down missiles on New Asia, and its massive,
ethical conundrums and moral mindfucks,
hulking tech tanks indiscriminately mow down
a story that asks what it is to be human in a world
villages, the fact that Edwards has managed to
where robots often have more humanity than
get $80 million of financing for an indictment of
people. The plot — in which a formidable AI
American militarism feels like a coup.
weapon, a sensitive young ‘Simulant’ kid (played
It’s all visually flawless too, which is all the
emotively by seven-year-old Madeleine Yuna
more surprising, considering that budget —
Voyles), is shepherded through war zones by
there are movies that cost three times more and
a conflicted US sergeant (the ever-compelling
look like crap. The Creator makes you realise
John David Washington) charged to kill it —
that there really is little excuse for blockbuster
twists and turns, beginning more binary before
dross. And while this doesn’t quite hit the
diving into shades of grey. Written by Edwards
heights of those that inspired it (it is at times
before further drafts from Chris Weitz, it blends
blunter and broader than it needs to be), it’s
its mechanical explorations with Eastern
a big reach, with heart and soul to spare. It’s
philosophy, aiming to question and provoke
uplifting on every level. ALEX GODFREY
rather than simply dazzle and thrill.
V E R D I C T An inspired, soulful piece of
Edwards has said that the reluctant-fathersci-fi, the stunning visuals all in service of a
figure narrative was inspired by the 1970s Lone
heartfelt, sensitive story. Gareth Edwards is the
Wolf And Cub manga novels and films, but The
real deal — this is fantastic, enveloping cinema.
Creator wears many influences on its sleeves,
As the ‘Simulant’

THE CREATOR
IF A MACHINE CAN LEARN THE VALUE
O F HUMAN L IFE , MAYBE WE CAN TOO

★★★★
OUT NOW / CERT 12A / 133 MINS

Gareth Edwards
John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna
Voyles, Gemma Chan, Allison Janney
DIRECTOR
CAST

After a nuclear bomb is set off in Los
Angeles, America bans artificial intelligence. The
super-continent of New Asia, meanwhile, is all for
AI. And so war begins.

PLOT

THERE IS TECH to die for in The Creator. On
every level. Boasting some of the best sci-fi design
in years, there is personality to match each
invention — most of which is programmed to kill.
We have robot cops, 50 per cent humanoid, 100
per cent total bastards, running amok, stumbling
about witlessly when sliced in half. There is
the NOMAD, America’s mammoth spaceship,
a foreboding, godlike presence, a bird of prey

DECEMBER 2023

43

Clockwise
from left:
Tara (Mia
McKennaBruce), angel
in holiday hell;
BFFs?; Hotel
neighbour
Badger (Shaun
Thomas).

in particular occasionally verges on
toxic, with Skye’s clear jealousy at
the influx of male attention towards
on location at the
Tara clouding her ability to be there
infamous ‘Malia
when she’s needed most.
Strip’, the main
this should be an incredible trip — but
Sexual assault as a plot point
thoroughfare in
when things start to heat up between
on screen is so common, postMalia, Crete. It has
them and hotel neighbours Badger
MeToo, it can feel like we’re
been seen on
(Shaun Thomas), Paddy (Samuel
becoming numb to its impact. But in
screen before —
Bottomley) and Paige (Laura
How To Have Sex, the murky nuances
most famously in
Ambler), it takes a turn for the worse.
of assault are more than just inciting
The Inbetweeners
Within minutes, the pure energy
incidents — they’re woven through
Movie (2011).
of this film reels you in. The girls head
every second, every shot. The film
straight from the plane to the beach,
takes on these topics in a stark and
to their hotel, to the bar, barely stopping for
affecting way without ever veering into
breath in their search for a good time. Firstexploitation, performed impeccably by the
time filmmaker Molly Manning Walker taps
young cast — especially McKenna-Bruce, whose
into all the senses she can: blasting the eyes
tiny stature and big, soulful eyes emphasise her
with neon, moving between the deafening
vulnerability. This film asks tough questions:
booms of nightclubs and the sleepy silence
about the line between coercion and consent;
of the morning after. You can practically feel
about men who know their friends act
the sun beating down, the alcohol-induced
inappropriately and do nothing; about the
headaches, the adrenaline of young lust. The
pressure young people feel to lose their
immersion veers into sensory overload at times,
virginity. It doesn’t offer any clear answers,
the girls’ excitable squealing and choppy
but its very existence will leave audiences
camerawork just starting to grate before the
reckoning with their own experiences.
second half’s darker narrative kicks in.
SOPHIE BUTCHER
Walker’s script gets the fraught nature of
female friendship at this age absolutely spot-on.
V E R D I C T As enthralling as it is
important, How To Have Sex neatly
There’s undeniable glee shared between the
depicts the joy and pain of teenage girlhood.
main trio, as we see them singing at the top of
A scrappy but impressive directorial debut —
their lungs in the sea at sunrise, and chatting
and a strong showcase of breakthrough
shit while chomping on post-rave chips. It’s
British talent across the board.
complex, though; Skye and Tara’s relationship
The film was shot

HOW TO HAVE SEX
NOT ACT UALLY A H OW-TO GUIDE —
MO RE A STORMING BRITISH DE BUT

★★★★
OUT 3 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 98 MINS
DIRECTOR Molly

Manning Walker
McKenna-Bruce, Shaun Thomas,
Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Samuel Bottomley,
Laura Ambler

CAST Mia

PLOT Three teenage friends go on their first
holiday abroad. As peer pressure intensifies, the
less-experienced Tara (McKenna-Bruce) begins
to struggle.

STROBE LIGHTS. SWEAT-drenched skin.
Head-pounding hangovers, treated with hair
of the dog. On a holiday like the one in How To
Have Sex, the air hums with possibility. It hangs
on every particle, increases with every drink
you down, seeps into every stolen glance across
the dancefloor. For pals Tara (Mia McKennaBruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis),

44

DECEMBER 2023

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Here: Roderick Usher
(Bruce Greenwood), father
of seemingly doomed
offspring. Below: Maybe
skip dessert?

TV

THE FALL OF THE
HOUSE OF USHER
★★★★

FI NGERNAI LS

OUT NOW (NETFLIX) / EPISODES VIEWED 8 OF 8

★★ ★ ★

Mike Flanagan
CAST Bruce Greenwood, Carla Gugino, Mary
McDonnell, Carl Lumbly, Kate Siegel, Henry
Thomas, Mark Hamill
SHOWRUNNER

Near the end of his life, Roderick Usher
(Greenwood) recounts how his six children met
their horrible, supernatural deaths.

PLOT

IMAGINE IF SUCCESSION were not a prestige
drama but a daytime soap, and for some reason
it had a Halloween episode. That’s the kind of
tone you’re in for with The Fall Of The House Of
Usher, Mike Flanagan’s bloody, OTT and highly
entertaining take on Edgar Allan Poe. This is no
reverent Poe adaptation; instead, it’s more an
interpretation of his themes of selfishness and
regret, used as the foundation for an entirely
invented story.
The Usher dynasty is dying. As we open,
Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), head
of a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical
empire, is burying the last of his six adult
children. At the sparsely populated funeral,
ravaged ghosts of the dead, seen only by
Roderick, outnumber the living. Shortly
after, exhausted by tragedy and terrible visions,
Usher sits down with investigator C. Auguste
Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to relate the stories of his
offspring’s bizarre, horrible ends, and his own
litany of awful crimes.
Each child’s grim tale is loosely inspired
by a Poe story. In ‘The Masque Of The Red
Death’, the youngest Usher sibling plans an
invite-only warehouse orgy, with very unsexy
consequences. In ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’,
a surgeon is haunted by her obsession with her
work. Flanagan weaves them together so that

each story feeds into the others, with an
ever-changing supernatural figure (Carla Gugino)
stalking through them all, testing each child’s
morality and finding them wanting. It’s very
smartly done, making for a cohesive epic rather
than a disconnected anthology.
After four series for Netflix, including
The Haunting Of Hill House and Midnight
Mass, Flanagan has really found his confident
groove. He’s as adept as ever at creating a spooky
mood, but his storytelling is defter than it’s
been before. Past projects have had a bit of
sentimentality about them, but Usher doesn’t
allow itself huggy endings or nice guys to
root for. Instead, it has the harder job of
reckoning with apparently irredeemable
people, asking what brought them here and
how monsters are created. The answers are
often interesting and complicated. The
Ushers may not elicit much sympathy, but do
(mostly) earn some understanding. Flanagan is
assisted by a cast made up of regular collaborators,
all well-versed in just how close to ridiculous to
pitch their performances. Greenwood, who
previously starred in Flanagan’s adaptation of
Gerald’s Game and stepped in here after Frank
Langella was dismissed during production, is
excellent as the family patriarch, as charismatic
as he is dreadful.
This Poe reimagining marks Flanagan’s last
Netflix series before he jumps to Amazon, and
he’s certainly departing on a high. His work was
nevermore impressive. OLLY RICHARDS
V E R D I C T Before the House Of Usher
comes crumbling down, Mike Flanagan builds
a towering, dark-hearted horror story that’s
horribly good fun.

“Cut from the same cloth as Yorgos
Lanthimos’ The Lobster, Christos Nikou’s
sophomore feature earns its heartbreak
through vulnerable, all-in performances from
Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed.” ELLA KEMP

EXPEND4BLES
★★
“In one of the most convoluted zingers of
the year, Statham’s Christmas is likened
to genital warts; like the STD, he is not
welcome and refuses to go away. The
observation could well be applied to The
Expendables franchise.” IAN FREER

FRASIER
★★ ★ ★
“Frasier is greyer now, and a little paunchier,
but he’s lost none of his passion for
pretension. As he proclaims, ‘I feel
amalgamated with the hoi polloi,’ only
a true grouch would deny that he is still
delightful company.” NICK DE SEMLYEN

CAT PERSON
★★
“Adapting a relatively uneventful short story
was always going to be tricky, and despite
some strong performances, Cat Person’s
disastrous ending takes everything else
down with it.” LAURA VENNING

DOCTOR JEKYLL
★★ ★
“The hook is Eddie Izzard in diva outfits as
Jekyll and Hyde, who look identical but
have different personalities. Only Izzard
could get a laugh with the line, ‘Crunchy
nutty cornflakes, mmmm?’” KIM NEWMAN

DECEMBER 2023

47

OF
HE DID N’ T KNOW IT AT FIRST, BUT JA MES WAN’S

AQUAMA N A N D TH E L O ST K I N G D O M
WOULD BE THE DCEU’S FINAL FILM. T H E DIRECTOR TALKS
NAVIGATING CHOPPY WATERS, AND GO ING FOR BROKE WITH HIS
DRUMM ING OCTOPUS

WORDS TOM ELLEN ▶

48

MONTH 20232023
DECEMBER

THE

DECEMBER
MONTH 2023

49

OVER ICED TEA and tortilla chips at
a Bel-Air hotel, James Wan is talking Empire
through arguably the most significant scene
in Aquaman. The one sequence, the director
says, “that really cemented in people’s minds
exactly what the film was all about.”
Is Wan perhaps referring to the
emotional moment when our titular hero,
played by Jason Momoa, reunites with his
long-lost mother Queen Atlanna (Nicole
Kidman)? Or maybe the heart-thudding
climax in which Momoa’s aquatic vigilante
finally wields King Atlan’s legendary trident
to become ruler of all seven seas? Guess
again. In fact, he’s talking about a six-second
shot of an octopus playing the bongos.
“Yeah, Topo the octopus is pretty beloved
from just that one tiny scene,” laughs Wan of
the tentacular tub-thumper that launched
a thousand GIFs upon Aquaman’s 2018
release. “I think when people saw that shot
— an octopus playing the drums — they were
like, ‘Okay — I get what this movie is. They’re
embracing the absurdity of the comic books.
They’re not afraid to just have fun.’”
Five years ago, “fun” was precisely what
the DC Extended Universe needed. 2013’s
Man Of Steel had set the franchise’s bleakly
realistic tone, channelling post-9/11 paranoia
and showing us Superman handcuffed in
interrogation rooms or brutally snapping
enemies’ necks. Batman V Superman: Dawn
Of Justice picked up the dark-and-dour
baton and ran with it, alienating critics and
audiences alike, and by the time the lumpen
first iteration of Justice League arrived in
2017, there was already a sense that this
particular extended universe was imploding.
Then came Aquaman. When Wan’s movie
surfaced, in a blaze of surrealist sub-aqua
colour, it felt like a breath of fresh, erm,
seawater. Largely unmoored from the
previous DCEU outings, the movie shone

50

MONTH 20232023
DECEMBER

a spotlight on Momoa’s hard-drinkin’
wisecrack-disseminator Arthur Curry and his
spectacular sunken kingdom of Atlantis, its
cities teeming with giant crabs, skyscrapersized krakens and cephalopod percussionists.
The film was, as its director proudly states, “an
old-school action adventure — a swashbuckling
pirate movie”. It was big, bold and
unapologetically silly — and audiences lapped
it up. To this day, it remains the DCEU’s most
commercially successful outing, having
notched up $1.148 billion globally.
On release, it seemed like a potential
defibrillator for a flailing franchise. Five years
later, its sequel arrives as that franchise’s
final breath. The combined effects of a highprofile DC regime change and endless
schedule rejigging means that Aquaman
And The Lost Kingdom will now represent
the DCEU’s closing chapter, ahead of new
bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran
relaunching the whole shebang as the ‘DCU’
next year. There have been reports about Lost
Kingdom’s supposedly ‘troubled’ production
— rumblings of costly reshoots, disgruntled
actors, internal conflict bubbling away
throughout the shifting studio dynamics.
Yet amid all the gossip and uncertainty, Wan
has remained focused on making this second
film bigger, bolder and unapologetically
sillier than its predecessor. How on Earth to
achieve that after the eye-popping weirdness
of the first Aquaman? A squid playing the
xylophone? A cuttlefish on cowbell?
A duck-billed platypus with a didgeridoo?
We’ll get to all that. Right now, Wan is in
an upbeat yet contemplative mood as he sips
his iced tea in the LA mountain breeze. “I’ve
been on this movie for four years now, and
I’m so happy for it to come out,” he tells
Empire. “In many ways I think it’s even more
fun than the first one. But it’s been a long,
exhausting process. It is definitely,” the
director admits with a tired smile, “the
noisiest movie I’ve ever worked on.”
Both beneath the water — and above it.
Fittingly for a pair of films set largely in
a world of currents and tides, the first
Aquaman was designed to flow directly into
the second one. “It’s like they’re one big
movie,” Wan explains. “If you watch them
back-to-back, they roll right into each other.”
At the end of the first film, Momoa’s parthuman-part-Atlantean hero has managed to
defeat his nefarious half-brother Orm (Patrick
Wilson) and officially become ‘Aquaman’ —
ruler of the seven seas. “Arthur is a reluctant
king, though,” Wan says. “He’s only taken the
job because he’s trying to stop the Atlanteans
attacking the surface world. Plus, the
Atlanteans don’t trust him yet — they’re not
sure if he’s on their side or the surface’s.”
To make matters more stressful, as the
sequel opens Arthur is enduring not just one

Clockwise
from above:
Making a splash:
Jason Momoa
returns as
Aquaman;
Director James
Wan on set with
Patrick Wilson
(Orm); ‘Buddies’
Orm and
Aquaman; Black
Manta (Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II)
and his
devastating
weapon, the
Black Trident;
Orm with a Ray
Harryhauseninspired Octobot;
Black Manta is
out for revenge.

major life change but two. Having married his
love interest from the first film — Atlantean
princess Mera (Amber Heard) — Aquaman
has now become a father. “Aquababy!” Wan
chuckles. “We’re pulling a lot from the ’60s
‘Silver Age’ comics in this film. They had
Arthur marrying Mera, and then the birth of
‘Aquababy’. Those early comics were really
the adventures of Arthur and Mera.”
While the first film was absolutely an
Arthur-and-Mera adventure, the sequel
reportedly sees Heard’s character make only
a fleeting appearance. Indeed, her cameo in
the first trailer is very much a blink-and-youmiss-it affair. In her very public court battle
with ex-husband Johnny Depp last year, Heard
claimed her role in Lost Kingdom was a “pareddown version” of what she was initially
pitched, and that Warner Bros. “didn’t want
to include her” following her divorce. “It’s fair
that [Heard] said that [about the character
being pared down],” says Wan, “because she
wasn’t in my head as I was working on this
movie. Actors don’t necessarily know what

we [directors] behind the scenes are thinking
about. But this was always my plan. From
the start, I pitched that the first film would
be a Romancing The Stone-type thing — an
action-adventure romantic comedy — while
the second would be an outright buddy
comedy. I wanted to do Tango & Cash!”
The unlikely ‘buddy’ stepping up for this
underwater Tango & Cash (‘Tango & Splash’?
Anyone?) is none other than the first movie’s
antagonist, Arthur’s power-hungry half-sibling
Orm, played by Wan’s frequent collaborator
on his Insidious and Conjuring horror
franchises, Patrick Wilson. Languishing in
sub-aqua jail ever since the end of the original
film, Orm is called on by Arthur when another
returning villain, Black Manta (Yahya
Abdul-Mateen II), re-emerges brandishing
a powerful new weapon. “Jason plays Arthur
larger-than-life; Patrick plays the straight
man,” says Wan of the duo’s chemistry. “It’s
not unlike what Will Smith and Tommy Lee
Jones did in Men In Black — like Tommy,
▶
Patrick plays it dry, but very funny.”

DECEMBER
MONTH 2023

51

As well as a new wingman, Arthur also
has a new villain to bump heads with, in the
form of Indya Moore’s Karshon. In the comics,
Karshon begins life as an anthropomorphic
shark — but any Suicide Squad fans
wondering whether the DC universe really
needs another one of those can rest easy.
“This Karshon is not a shark character,” Wan
notes. “It’s different to the comic books in
that sense. One of the things we wanted to do,
now that Arthur is king of Atlantis, is give him
barriers within the political world. Karshon
comes from the High Council, and is like
a political roadblock for Arthur.”
Roadblocks aside, Abdul-Mateen’s Black
Manta is the sequel’s ur-Big Bad. He and
Aquaman have unresolved business from
the first film — the former holding the latter
responsible for his father’s death. In the
interim between films, our old pal Manta
has happened upon the fabled ‘Black Trident’
— effectively the Mario Kart ‘Blue Shell’
of the ocean, gifting its wielder god-like
powers. All of which spells bad news for Mr
Curry. “In his quest to find ways to destroy
Arthur, Black Manta... stumbles onto
something,” Wan teases.
And not just something. Somewhere.
For those whose Atlantean geography is a tad
rusty: a short recap.
According to the comics’ lore, when
Atlantis sank into the ocean several millennia
ago, it broke off into seven separate kingdoms.
In some of these kingdoms — such as Arthur’s
Atlantis or Mera’s Xebel — the inhabitants
have remained ostensibly human (albeit with
the whole ability-to-breathe-underwater
upgrade). In other realms, like The Brine or
The Trench, the population has evolved into
various races of cool-looking but not-overlyfriendly Lovecraftian sea monsters.
And then there’s the Lost Kingdom.
Referred to briefly in the first film as a colony
that disappeared below the Sahara Desert
when Atlantis first sank, this mysterious
seventh dominion has remained uncharted
for aeons. Until now. “This particular story
allows us to explore that lost nation,” Wan
says. And while Arthur and Orm’s new Thor/
Loki-esque dynamic gives the director the
chance to inject some comedy into this
sequel, the Lost Kingdom lets him fully
embrace his first love.
“There was an element of horror in the
first film,” says the man responsible for the
spine-chilling Saw and Conjuring universes.
“But this second movie definitely has more
of that.” Wan and his writer, David Leslie
Johnson-McGoldrick, pored over “old-school
sci-fi and horror” like 1965 Italian-Spanish
shocker Planet Of The Vampires, and the
work of stop-motion monster maestro Ray
Harryhausen. “That became the design
foundation,” the director says. “The Lost
Kingdom has a very retro, ’60s horror look.”

52

DECEMBER 2023

Right:
United front:
Orm and
Aquaman.
Far right:
Black Manta is
all dressed up
and ready
for war.

Case in point: Black Manta’s “lair” (Wan’s
word — and a word that positively screams ‘’60s
retro’), which is set deep in the Lost Kingdom,
inside a refinery... inside a volcano. “That
one’s less Harryhausen, more James Bond,”
Wan chuckles. “Very Blofeld. One of my
favourite sets was the interior of Black Manta’s
hideout. We have this huge action set-piece
where Arthur and Orm fight his henchmen,
using the ‘Octobot’ — this mechanical squid
thing. That was really fun to shoot.”
If you’re wondering whether Wan is still
“embracing the absurdity”, there’s your
answer. Last time it was drumming octopi;
this time, mechanical squid in volcanic lairs.
And speaking of which — after his showstealing cameo in the first film, Topo the

“THIS FILM IS AN
OUTRIGHT BUDDY
COMEDY. I WANTED TO
DO TANGO & CASH!”
JAMES WAN

bongo-slapping octopus is also back for the
second round.
“Topo is a real character in this one!”
Wan laughs. “In the comics, he’s a big part of
Arthur’s life — a sidekick, pet, friend. So, we’re
leaning into that. I love the relationship Jason
has built with this octopus. It was really fun
to watch him ‘act’ with Topo. Sometimes
[since Topo is a CG character] we would have
an actor standing in by ‘muppeting’ a goofy
stick puppet — watching Jason play off that
was so funny. I think people are going to
enjoy Arthur and Topo’s relationship.”
It’s when Wan is riffing on topics like this
— the gleeful absurdity of “crafting these

characters, creating these worlds” — that
he especially comes to life. Growing up in
Malaysia and then Australia, he spent his
childhood immersed in the fantastical
undersea tales of Jules Verne and H.P.
Lovecraft, so the chance to construct his own
sunken societies has been a blast — even if
most of that construction was done via
blue-screen. “I’m a big fan of practical effects,
and if I could practically build an underwater
kingdom then I would fucking do it!” he
laughs. “Unfortunately, it’s not realistic. But,
still, this really was a fun shoot. Everyone
came in already knowing the tone, so it was
a much easier film to make than the first one.”
If getting the film in the can was fun and
easy, though, getting it out into the world
would be anything but.
“Like living in a house that’s being renovated”
is how Wan has described the process of
completing Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
during what has been a highly uncertain past
year at DC HQ.
Ever since October 2022, when James
Gunn and Peter Safran were announced as
co-chairs of the newly formed DC Studios —
scrapping the existing DCEU for a rebooted
‘DCU’ — rumours have been circling about
the effect on Wan’s sequel. There have been
reports of studio interference, extensive
reshoots and schedule shuffling; all of which
appear to have conspired to make Lost
Kingdom something Wan could never have
predicted when he was shooting it — the final
film in the DCEU franchise.
“I’ve had to learn to be more Zen in
dealing with all the noise around me, for
sure,” Wan says today, drawing lengthily on
his iced tea. “I’m a pretty private person.
I don’t get on social media and have fights,
but it’s difficult because this narrative has
emerged that is not the reality. The noise
is fun to write about, and it gets clicks, but
people don’t know the truth.”

Left, top to bottom: Momoa and Wan ponder their
progress on set; Aquaman with his prized magical weapon,
the Gold Trident; Rider on the Storm: Aquaman on his trusty
sea horse, plus ride-or-die pal Topo the octopus.

So, Gunn and Safran weren’t looking over
the director’s shoulder at points, making sure
that what he — and Arthur Curry — were
doing fit into their new plan? “Look, I’m
a collaborative filmmaker — I welcome
people’s thoughts and opinions,” Wan says,
diplomatically. “But ultimately, I feel I have
more than proven myself. So, it was like: ‘This
is the movie I want to make.’”
Part of the reason he was able to steer
clear of any major-scale studio tinkering is
that the Aquaman universe has always
existed largely in its own space. “I’m so glad
I didn’t hook the first film into the bigger DC
universe,” Wan says. “My feeling was: we
already have so many characters in this
world, why bring others in to complicate it?
With the sequel, too, it didn’t matter if it was
[under] the new [DC] regime or the old one:
I was just making my own movie.”
As to the reshoot rumours, he says, “We
probably did seven or eight days — which is
nothing for a movie of this size. It was just
spread out because it’s so hard to get your

actors back once you’ve finished the initial
shoot.” He also points to the strange
perception, in some corners of the media,
that reshoots must be a negative thing.
“I built an entire franchise from a reshoot!”
he says of The Nun, his horror juggernaut that
has grossed $550 million and counting, and
whose titular antagonist was born entirely in
last-minute additional photography on The
Conjuring 2. “I’m not the kind of person that
says, ‘This movie has to turn out exactly how
I planned it on day one.’ Your art will never be
organic if you’re locked into that mentality.”
One rumour there is truth in, though,
is that additional scenes featuring Batman
were shot for Lost Kingdom. Says Wan, “I was
asked to look at Batman stuff during that
point where we weren’t sure which movie
would come out first — ours or The Flash [in
which various Dark Knights pop up, played
by Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck and George
Clooney]. So, yes — I did shoot Batman
scenes.” Can we ask which particular Batman
these scenes featured? “I’m going to say,
‘No comment,’ on that,” Wan smiles. He’s
remaining equally tight-lipped as to whether
these scenes may still surface in the film. But
signs point to, ‘Probably not’: “All I’ll say is
those scenes were just to have something in
the bank in case we needed to explain time
continuity if we came out first. But it ended ▶

DECEMBER 2023

53

up with Lost Kingdom coming after The Flash.”
So with Lost Kingdom now the final
official DCEU film, how does Wan feel about
ending this particular slice of comic-bookmovie history? “Ours is the last movie
designed under this umbrella, so in that sense
we are closing it out,” he shrugs. “But it’s
funny... In the comic-book world, nothing
ever feels closed. Look how many actors have
played Batman. It’s always just the next
iteration.” All of which is to say that Wan’s
Atlantean adventures may not be over just
yet. “I haven’t directed a third movie [in a
series] before, so I’d be open to doing another
[Aquaman] if I got the same freedom I’ve had
on these first two. I’m not sure what direction
[Gunn and Safran] are going in, though, so
who knows?” He pops a chip in his mouth
and grins. “I’ve learned to never say never.”
Of course, even if Aquaman — and Wan — do
wind up featuring in Gunn and Safran’s DCU
masterplan, it’s not certain the director’s
schedule would allow it.
The man’s fire is currently chock-full
of irons — two major horror franchises
bulldozing the box office (Saw and The
Conjuring), not to mention a “passion project”
adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Call Of Cthulhu,
which he and Johnson-McGoldrick have been
“quietly working on for two years, just for
ourselves”. And there’s much-hyped killer doll
sequel M3GAN 2.0, on which Wan will return as
producer. “It’s early yet, but M3GAN is coming
back in a big way,” he teases. “The first film
came out just at the right time [when concerns
about AI were mounting], and we’re definitely
leaning into that on the next one. We’re
exploring the AI universe even further.”
Also on the horizon is the merger
between Wan’s Atomic Monster production
company and fellow horror stalwart Jason
Blum’s Blumhouse. The deal is, Wan says,
“getting there slowly — we’re dotting the i’s
and crossing the t’s. The landscape is shifting
so rapidly in our industry that it felt right to
combine our strengths. It allows me to grow
my company, do things I’m not yet big enough
to do on my own — like video-games and other
areas of multimedia. We’re really excited.”
Rightly so — the future looks bright.
At present, though, Wan is just elated
that his Lost Kingdom is finally ready to be
discovered. As we meet in LA, the first trailer
has just landed, and the director is “so happy
that people are reacting to the film itself
rather than the noise around it. That’s
the biggest thing I’ve learned from this
experience,” he adds. “To filter out the
negativity and focus on the film. Because
that’s what will live on — in 20 years, no-one
will remember the noise. Only the movie.”
And the bongo-playing octopus.
AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM IS IN CINEMAS FROM
20 DECEMBER

54

DECEMBER 2023

1
2

SEA
WORLD

VIA SOME EXCLUSIVE CONCEPT ART,
THE FILM’S DESIGN TEAM TAKE US
ON AN ATL ANTEAN DEEP DIVE▶

1 THE SEAHORSE

A Storm is a-coming. Notably, the Aquaman comic
fan-favourite of the same name — a giant seahorse,
the hero’s noble steed. “In [Lost Kingdom], Storm
gets saved by Arthur and becomes his loyal friend,”
says production designer Bill Brzeski. The creation
of this 25-foot sub-aqua sidekick required some
complex CG wizardry. “When he leaps out of the
water, Storm is in his albino, white state,” explains
VFX supervisor Nick Davis. “But underwater, he
turns this beautiful, bioluminescent blue —
Aquaman’s light source.” There was also the issue
of how Momoa would perch on Storm. “If he sat too
upright he looked like he was on a merry-goround,” laughs Davis. “We had to get that balance
to make him look natural — and suitably kingly.”

3
3 THE NIGHT MARKET

Located in an area of Atlantis we’ve not seen
before, the spectacular Night Market is based on
the ‘floating market’ of Bangkok, and “has these
beautiful jellyfish ‘lights’ strung between the
stalls,” says Davis. It’s also the setting for one of
the movie’s most eye-popping action sequences.
“There’s a scene with Aquaman chasing Black
Manta through the whole city,” explains Brzeski.
“We went back to classic car chases from movies
like Bullitt or The French Connection and thought:
‘How would you do that underwater?’” As
well as thundering through the Night Market,
this chase will also lead us through Atlantis’
parks, freeways and even the “undersea version
of Times Square.” Hold on tight.

4 THE OCTOBOTS

Director James Wan cites the work of specialeffects maestro Ray Harryhausen as a big
influence on the look of the Lost Kingdom.
And nowhere is the Kingdom’s tech more
Harryhausen-esque than the aforementioned
Octobots. “We wanted them to look retro and
simplistic,” says Davis of the tentacled machines.
“Whining motors and belching fumes — very
muscular, solid and steampunk. Underwater they
act like submarines, on land they walk around like
spiders. Oh, and they have machine guns too.”
These multi-purpose bullet-spraying beasts are
an original creation. “They aren’t from the
comics,” says Brzeski. Bring on the eightlegged robo-freaks.

2 THE WHALE HARBOUR

Lost Kingdom will show us “much more of the
[Atlanteans’] day-to-day lives”, says Davis. And
since your average Atlantean doesn’t possess Arthur
Curry’s underwater hyperspeed, they require another
method of navigating their hometown. Namely:
the local whale service. “The Whale Harbour is the
public-transport hub,” continues Davis. “Whales
are parked up, loaded, unloaded — it’s like any
big-city train station.” Look closely at this image, and
you’ll see two yellow, squid-like machines weaving
nefariously through the ‘parked-up’ whales: “Black
Manta breaks into Atlantis to steal something,”
Brzeski teases. “Those Octobots are pushing along
a [vessel] full of... let’s just say, stuff you don’t want in
the ocean.” Exactly what, we’ll have to wait and see.

4
DECEMBER 2023

55

C A U G H T
56

I N

PRISCILLA PAINTS A PORTRAIT OF A LONELY YOUNG WOMAN IN AN ABUSIVE
DECEMBER 2023

A

T R A P

WORDS CHRISTINA NEWLAND

RELATIONSHIP. DIRECTOR SOFIA COPPOLA TAKES US BEHIND THE CURTAIN
DECEMBER 2023

57

walks down her high-school hallway. In languid
slow-motion, she’s soundtracked to Tommy
James & the Shondells’ sinuous, seductively
repetitive ‘Crimson And Clover’. This young girl
is not yet the famous wife known as Priscilla
Presley, signified by the lacquered black beehive
and ’60s cat eyeliner: she has lighter brown hair,
swept to one side, and she looks her age, a whole
15, for one thing. But she has met — and kissed
— Elvis Aaron Presley. Ergo the besotted smile
and snagged-a-dreamboat stare.
Sofia Coppola knows a thing or two about
the interior daydreams and external trappings
of girlhood. From her debut feature The Virgin
Suicides through to Lost In Translation and
Marie Antoinette, her films are often about
teenage girls — or teen girls trapped in women’s

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DECEMBER 2023

P

RESLEY WAS AN EXECUTIVE
producer on the film, convening with
Coppola often on the screen depiction
of her. “She still looks on this as the
great love of her life,” says the director.
“There are a lot of loving aspects there for her
in their story, among the other turbulence.”
Combining Coppola’s aims with depicting
the real life of a living person, though, was
a considerable task. “It was a challenge for me
to balance my creative freedom and expression
with being respectful of how [Priscilla] wanted
her story to be told. I wanted her to feel
comfortable and respected. And at the same
point, I wanted to be sure I was expressing
whatever I connected to. In the end, [watching
the film] she said she felt she was watching her
life, so I felt really glad to be able to do both.”
Finding an actor to bring that life to the
screen was a daunting task. The 25-year-old
Cailee Spaeny, Coppola says, was perfect. “We
had to find someone believable to play 14 to 29
with accuracy. And Cailee has the talent to show
her emotional state on her face without doing
much. Her variability as an actress can convey so

Sabrina Lantos/MACK Books, Sofia Coppola/MACK Books

Priscilla
Beaulieu

bodies — who spend time in isolation, consumed
by loneliness and fantasy.
“When I first read her story, I thought it
would be juicy and interesting,” Coppola tells
Empire of reading Priscilla Presley’s 1985
memoir Elvis & Me. “She was such a glamorous
figure. But it surprised me how deep and
touching it was. I didn’t think I could relate
to it, but she really revealed her emotional
experiences and I was surprised to learn it has
everything in it that a girl goes through, just in
a heightened way. She talked about her first kiss,
the first time in a boy’s bedroom, or becoming
a mother in ways that were universal.”
Priscilla Presley’s story was one of girlhood
fantasy which bled into something far more
toxic — a relationship with a famous man
a decade her senior who whisked her from her
parents into secluded luxury, and increasingly
controlled her every move. Yet it also details the
complex pleasures and appeal of the situation.
“It has so much to do with romantic ideas and
the fairy tale that turns into something else,”
says Coppola. “I wanted to get her point of view
of how it was romantic. Until it wasn’t.”

Clockwise
from top left:
Burning love
— Cailee
Spaeny as
Priscilla and
Jacob Elordi
as Elvis; The
actors on set;
Priscilla’s teen
doodlings, as
imagined for the
screen; Director
Sofia Coppola
outside the
Graceland
gates.

much; you say one little thing and her whole face
would change.” It’s a role that requires an actor
to have a certain amount of passivity, but to react
beneath that doll-like exterior.
It wouldn’t have been possible to portray
Priscilla without letting us into Elvis’ world too.
That required careful balancing. “I think it’s
interesting to have the flip side, looking at
Priscilla’s perspective on the same experience,”
says Coppola. “But I do have sympathy for him,
and an understanding where his frustrations
and vulnerabilities came from. And it really
was a different time, of how a macho man was
supposed to act, the roles of women, everything.”
The film also provides an unintended riposte
to the adoring portrait of a flashier Elvis in Baz
Luhrmann’s biopic last year: Coppola delves
into the private Elvis, focusing not on his career
trajectory so much as his own vulnerabilities.
“No-one looks like Elvis. He was such
a beauty,” explains Coppola of her search for an
actor. “But Jacob [Elordi] has the charisma and
the kind of animal magnetism I imagine Elvis
having [had]. That was so important, because
❯
you have to fall in love with him the way that

DECEMBER 2023

59

she did, to be able to kind of put up with his
darker side and see he was also lovable and
vulnerable. I knew that Jacob could also convey
sensitivity and that vulnerability.”
This casting dynamic works emotionally
and physically: the 6’ 5” Elordi towers over the
petite Spaeny, a manifestation of Elvis’ long
shadow of charisma over her and others in any
environment. That power, combined with a raw
sexiness, is not always put to good use: Elordi’s
Elvis is both ineffably charming and prone to
adultery, dark moods, tantrums, and bullying.
Perhaps it wasn’t hugely surprising, then, that
the famously protective Presley estate did not
approve of the less-than-hagiographic depiction
of The King, refusing Coppola access to use any
of his music. Thus ‘Crimson And Clover’, and
not, say, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
“I always knew that we might not get
permission,” Coppola says. “So I wasn’t counting
on it. I did have a couple of Elvis songs that
I wanted to use that we weren’t able to, but the
creative opportunity to work around it was
interesting.” Coppola’s husband, Thomas
Mars, and his band Phoenix worked on the
arrangements for the film’s soundtrack instead,
and as she points out, taking a more glancing
approach to Elvis’ musical career only further
suited Coppola’s focus on Priscilla’s cloistered
world. “I didn’t want it to be too much
about performance, but to just show, in an
impressionistic way, the sense that he has
that whole other life outside.”
And then there’s the aesthetic — as her
husband becomes increasingly volatile and
bombastic on and off stage, Coppola wanted
to contrast that with Priscilla’s soft, cosseted
domestic world.

P

RISCILLA GOES IN FOR THE KILL
right at the start: from the very first
frame, we see her on a plush-pink
shag rug, applying delicately inky
liquid liner, a cloud of hairspray,
painted fingernails: the trappings of glamour
that the real woman would be both enthralled
and perhaps entrapped by for much of her life.
Elvis was finicky and particular with his young
partner, about what she wore and how she
appeared, fashioning her into his own personal
ideal. Costuming and cosmetics were not just
key to Priscilla’s idea of herself, but also to
Coppola’s nuanced mix of the pains and the
pleasures of femininity.
“It’s such a big part of her persona, all these
images of her from her different phases,” says
Coppola. “So they were our key, how we worked
out what stage she was at. There are some really
heightened ones in the ’60s, with the black hair
and eyeliner. And then in the ’70s, she’s more
natural, kind of coming back closer to her
original look. So we were trying to show these
different stages based on all the photos of her.
Hopefully you see her evolution.”
In one memorable sequence, Priscilla
lovingly applies her false eyelashes while she’s
in labour before leaving to go to the hospital,

60

DECEMBER 2023

entering the building in an impeccable get-up,
with go-go-boots. We see no childbirth, no
physical struggle, only the camera-ready
emergence of the couple from the hospital with
baby Lisa Marie, and Priscilla looking lovely
in a pink suit. The film’s implication about
obsession with appearance is two-fold — both
material pleasure and dangerous pressure.
“I loved their commitment to dressing up,”
explains Coppola. “Priscilla said Elvis would
never come downstairs without a full outfit,
matching shoes. They were so committed to
their look.” She points out the film’s shopping
sequence, in which Elvis and his all-male
underlings watch as a teenage Priscilla tries
on a bevy of expensive clothes in a boutique.
“There’s an element of the fun he’s showing her,
and all this glamour she doesn’t know about.
But then, there’s this pressure on her to be his
ideal woman. Priscilla told me that she didn’t
even know what her taste was until after she
left him. Then she could figure out her taste
outside of his.”
Coppola’s film is that rare combination
of form and content in perfect lockstep. She
slows and speeds up the very rhythm of her
editing and sound when Elvis is — well — in the
building. “The sound is different. We have all
this energy and light when he’s around, and when
he’s not around there’s a kind of stillness,” she
explains. The way a teenage girl lights up around
the object of her affections — never mind if that
object is Elvis Presley himself — is imitated

by the filmmaking, sweeping us along on the
dreamy sighs, and then the crushing loneliness,
of its protagonist.

P

RISCILLA IS ABOUT GIRLHOOD
romantic fantasies and toxic macho
reality. About the ways we fall into
unhealthy dynamics in relationships,
and how women try to survive them.
“I suppose with my kids’ generation, this
might be less so, but I was raised with that
idea of, ‘What do men like?’” says Coppola.
“I remember in my early twenties, having a crush
on a guy, and part of it was just wanting to not
have to figure out my own identity. I could just
be with them in their world.”
Given the time period, there was no
contemporary vocabulary to describe some of
the worst experiences of Priscilla’s marriage to
Elvis. Today, we might describe it as degrees of
grooming, gaslighting, and abuse. But the fact
that this era did not have terminology for it also
gives a certain nuance to the situation. “I think
we can all learn from the generation before ours
and what it was like,” says Coppola. “And what

Clockwise
from top left:
Idol dreams: the
teenage Priscilla
in her bedroom;
Spaeny in the
make-up trailer;
Enjoying
the ’68
Comeback
Special with
Elvis and his
pals; Spaeny
rocks one
of Presley’s
iconic looks;
Dedicated
follower of
fashion: Priscilla
was committed
to getting her
outfits just right.

would you do in that situation? I was trying to
show how she experienced it without judgement
or putting today’s lens on it. I wanted, visually
and emotionally, for people to put themselves
in her shoes.”
From Priscilla’s time in high school in
Memphis — where everyone knew who her
boyfriend was — to motherhood in the carefully
patrolled Graceland, she was both surveilled and
left curiously lonely by the conditions around
her. Coppola can relate.
“I know what it’s like to be the new kid
at school and to have people looking at you. Or,
when she has a baby, and the guys go off to work,
and they’re gonna have fun and get to do their
work. And she’s expected to stay home with the
baby. I think so many of us will relate to that
moment where you’re like: ‘Wait, I’m supposed
to stay here?’ There are stages of womanhood
that are universal.”
The idea of Priscilla’s identity melding into
her husband’s, or her lack of sense of self, is
indicated throughout the film. “I was interested
in looking at my mother’s generation and how
much things have changed — and it wasn’t that
long ago. But then, some things haven’t
changed,” says Coppola. She does not elaborate,
but the passing mention of her mother can’t help
but to call to mind her parents: certainly a case of
handling a marriage to a famous and lauded man,
if ever there was one.
Real person though Priscilla may be, her
screen iteration is very much a Coppola
protagonist. Alienated even from herself, young
and unformed until an identity is foisted upon
her by the intoxicating romance she finds herself
in, Priscilla is another girl in a gilded cage in the
style of Marie Antoinette. Here, though, Coppola’s
long fascination with suspended girlhood is
unfurled: in 1972, Priscilla left Elvis, aged only 29,
and began her delayed onset into independent
womanhood. In spite of the darkness, isolation
and romantic fervour of her past, Priscilla has
a beautiful note of optimism to it.
“I was always going to tell the story of her
arriving [at] and her leaving Graceland. We know
she is going to find herself in a new chapter of her
life. It was about their relationship that she rode
through and left, and I knew that I wanted to show
her leaving Graceland and the emotion of that,”
Coppola explains of where she leaves Priscilla.
“I was really impressed with her strength, too,
because it was really hard for a woman with no
income to leave a powerful man at that time. She
had the inner sense and strength to know she
had to find her own identity.”
That’s a perfect summary of her film’s
pampered viewpoint from within — and without
— the palatial marital home. Priscilla captures
both the despair and the beauty of womanhood’s
travails and the journey to self-realisation. If
Sofia Coppola’s work has long explored the
tension between the exterior and interior lives of
women, Priscilla not only languishes in that grey
area, but finds hope there too.
PRISCILLA IS IN CINEMAS FROM 26 DECEMBER

DECEMBER 2023

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DECEMBER 2023

63

OU DIE, AND YOU DON’T
notice that you’re dying.”
Nando Parrado remembers
very little of the plane crash that
changed his life on 13 October
1972, but he does remember that.
As the airplane — Uruguayan
Air Force Flight 571 — that was
carrying him, his mother, his
sister, his teammates in the Old
Christians Club rugby union team, and several
other passengers and crew members, suddenly
found itself struggling for speed and altitude in
the Argentinian section of the Andes, Parrado
found himself confronting his mortality. “It’s
so fast,” he says. “From the moment I realised
that there was something wrong to the moment
it crashed, it was maybe two seconds, three
seconds. It’s incredible how many things you
can record on your mind in the last tenth of
a second of your life. There was this huge
metallic sound, and instantly, everything went
black. I died.”
Of course, Parrado didn’t die. He should
have — he had a fractured skull and lay in
a coma for four days before awaking to find that
the crash had killed his mother and his two best
friends, and his sister was dying. But 51 years
later, he is telling Empire the incredible story
of how he, and 15 other passengers — his
team-mates, his brothers — not only survived
the disaster that day, and later the incredibly
inhospitable frozen wasteland that greeted
them, the avalanches that loomed out of
nowhere to smother unsuspecting survivors,
and the aching hunger that threatened to kill
them all until they made a choice that helped
them keep alive. They somehow found the
will and the strength to find a way out after
72 days, long after the world had given up on
them. Theirs is a story that has entered into
legend. It is a story J.A. Bayona has been waiting
over a decade to tell. It is a story that is, quite
frankly, impossible.
WHEN BAYONA FIRST read Pablo Vierci’s
book, La Sociedad De La Nieve (Society Of The
Snow), which tells the story of the crash and
its aftermath via testimonials from the 16
survivors, all of whom knew Vierci as kids,
something occurred to him. “In the first or
second chapter, there was this long paragraph
where you can read the word ‘impossible’ seven
times,” the director tells Empire.
From that, Bayona took two things. First,
a name for the movie he was then working on
— another tale of survival against all the odds,
this time focused on a family’s attempts to stay
alive after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
“I thought, ‘This is a perfect title,’” he says of
the film that became The Impossible. “I found
myself reading sections of the book to the actors,
to Naomi Watts and Tom Holland.”
The other was a desire to turn Vierci’s book
into a movie, although it proved a difficult nut to
crack, partially due to the scale of Bayona’s vision,

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DECEMBER 2023

partially due to his desire to shoot it in Spanish.
“It took us ten years to find the financing,” he
says. “Finally Netflix were able to let us shoot the
film the way we wanted to shoot it: grand-scale,
Spanish-speaking, with unknown actors.”
During that decade, Bayona developed his
reputation as a director capable of marrying
spectacle and high stakes with an emotional kick
that never feels sentimental or mawkish, on
A Monster Calls, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,
and The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power.
All of those, to an extent, are concerned with the
concept of the impossible, and with invoking
a feeling he has had ever since he saw Richard
Donner’s Superman as a kid. “It’s very difficult
to separate cinema from that sense of awe that
I had when I saw Superman flying,” he explains.
“And it doesn’t matter if it’s a fantasy or a horror,
or if it’s a true story; there’s a sense of awe in
seeing your life turned upside down in one
second. I’m not that attracted to disaster movies
in terms of the disaster itself, but in terms of the
reaction of the characters to it.”
If the story of Flight 571 seems familiar, it’s
because it’s been well-documented over the
years, most famously in Frank Marshall’s 1993
movie Alive, in which Ethan Hawke played
Nando Parrado (who also acted as the film’s
technical advisor). The same Frank Marshall
who produced Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
for Bayona. “Frank was very nice to us,” says
Bayona. “He said, ‘These [the survivors] are great
people. You’re gonna have the time of your life.’”
Society Of The Snow is not a remake of Alive.
While Bayona has respect for Marshall and his
movie, he was very keen to cover new ground.
“We ended up recording 600 hours of material,”

he says. “And we kept rewriting the story in
editorial because it wasn’t just about telling the
facts. Actually, every time we got to a scene that
I saw in other movies, I was rejecting it because
it felt familiar to me.”
One way of breaking new ground was
shifting the focus from the likes of Parrado
and other characters who were heavily featured
in Marshall’s movie, to Numa Turcatti (Enzo
Vogrincic), a young legal student who was,
essentially, just one of the background players in
Alive. “The moment I knew how to tell the story
was when I knew that Numa was going to be the
narrator,” says Bayona. “Numa comes from a very
traditional family, and to me it was all about this
story. It’s all about getting into that plane and
comprehending, understanding and forgiving
what they did. And that forgiveness had to come
from the inside.”

Clockwise from
main: Shellshocked:
the cast amid the
recreated wreckage
of doomed Flight
571; Enzo Vogrincic
as the film’s heart
and soul, Numa
Turcatti; Director J.A.
Bayona shouts
instructions on the
inhospitable,
snow-covered
location; Desperately
seeking help.

SO, WHAT DID the survivors do that invoked
the very concept of forgiveness? Well, one aspect
of their experience is why this story continues
to fascinate, enthrall and even appal. With their
meagre supplies quickly gone, the survivors
quickly found themselves with no food and,
thanks to their surroundings, no means of
obtaining any. As their bodies began to consume
themselves in order to try to meet a caloric quota
exacerbated by the high altitude, starvation
loomed. Eventually, the survivors decided to stay
alive — barely — by eating the flesh of their
deceased friends and family.
For many of the passengers, who were
Roman Catholic and deeply religious, it was the
most awful, most sacrilegious, most unforgivable
choice. But in the end, it wasn’t a choice at all.
When rules no longer apply, you write new ones
that do. “I can assure you that in a situation like
this, anybody who reads this magazine would
have done the same thing,” says Nando Parrado.
“It was like being on Venus, or Mars, or the
moon. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
We didn’t have any food. Not knowing when
you’re going to eat again, and there’s no food, is
the worst fear that a human being can have.”
In the wrong hands, a lurid, sensationalist
sheen could be applied to this story — see

DECEMBER 2023

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65

Yellowjackets, which was ‘inspired’ by the crash
and its consequent cannibalism — but that was
never Bayona’s intention. “It’s about fitting
the audience into the plane and making them
understand that there was no other choice,”
he says. “The audience needs to be there to
understand, and needs to accept and be part of
the ritual.”
Bayona was intrigued by the implications,
physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual,
of the decision taken not just by the survivors,
but in certain cases by the dying, who gave
their permission for their friends to use their
bodies in order to stay alive as long as they could.
“When you know you’re not going to make it, it
gives you the freedom to give yourself to the
other ones,” he posits. “And that’s what they did.
It’s so extreme — that level of emotion in that
decision is so transcendental that it’s never
really been on the screen.”

Impossible, has also popped by, and is embraced
warmly by Bayona and his producing partner,
Belén Atienza. For them, Belón is something of
a good-luck charm, and her presence is a welcome
one as the production enters its final week with
the shooting of the plane crash. Empire watches
as Bayona’s cast file onto an airplane set,
perched on a gimbal, which is then — over the
next hour or so — shunted and shaken around.
Later, the crash itself calls for special-effects
and stunt people. In Bayona’s video village,
Empire looks on as one actor has her head
repeatedly smashed into the seat in front of her
(all perfectly safely, of course). It’s all harrowing
to watch; less so, strangely, to act. “It was like
being in a theme park,” laughs Enzo Vogrincic
later. “We barely had to act because the plane
was moving so much. We filmed that scene right
at the end, having gone through the difficult
parts, of becoming very thin, of going hungry, of

NOVEMBER 2022, AND Empire has flown to
Madrid to visit Bayona on set, just outside the
city in a giant studio Netflix has custom-built to
house its Spanish-language output. We’re not the
only visitors on set that day — María Belón, the
real-life model for Naomi Watts in The

Clockwise from top left: Cinematographer Pedro Luque and Bayona frame an intense close-up on Vogrincic; Numa
and fellow passenger Roberto Canessa (Matias Recalt); Gazing out at their terrifying mountainous trap; Subdued
downtime at the crash site.

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DECEMBER 2023

feeling extreme cold. So this was just really fun.”
Vogrincic isn’t kidding about the previous
months of the shoot (at over 100 shooting days,
it was the longest of Bayona’s career). A lot of
directors would simply have set up shop on a
nice, warm, safe soundstage. Not Bayona. For
him, veracity was incredibly important. He wanted
a sense of claustrophobia (from that would come
a sense of community and camaraderie as the
survivors formed the society of the snow), and
a sense of cold that could only come from
recreating the aftermath of the crash on an
actual mountain.
Which is how he, Vogrincic and the other
members of the cast and crew found themselves
shooting the film chronologically (to allow for
realistic weight loss, with their diets supervised
rigidly by nutritionists), shuttling between three
sets in a Sierra Nevada ski resort on which the
devastated fuselage of Flight 571 had been

meticulously recreated. One of them was outside,
at high altitude, roughly 10,000 feet up. “Every day
we had to carry the whole crew up there,” says
Atienza. “It was very slow, and there was always
a little bit of uncertainty about shooting up there.
If there were winds above a certain speed you
couldn’t go up there. But that was super important
for J.A. — that was an obsession, actually, that the
conditions that everyone was working in were
similar to what was felt there [on the mountain].
And the actors had a really hard time with that.”
They weren’t alone in feeling it. Bayona’s
quest for authenticity took him, before filming
began, to the crash site itself. “I wanted to know
what it was [like] to sleep there,” he says.
“Nothing will prepare you for the height of those
mountains, the sense of loneliness. There’s not
a single thing alive up there. I had to go there in
order to know what I had to reproduce in Spain.”
It wasn’t to be his only visit — at the start of
production, he went back there, with a skeleton
crew and, crucially, Vogrincic, to film a scene
where Numa has a moment of reflection out there
in the bleak, beautiful valley of desolation. “I was

filmed walking alone in the Andes as a helicopter
filmed me. I felt like Tom Cruise,” Vogrincic laughs.
“We were there for two nights and then we woke
up in the morning with everything frozen. But
that scene for me was like a gift. It was wonderful.”
JUNE 2023, AND Bayona is as far away from that
godforsaken place as it’s possible to get. He’s in
the control room in Abbey Road’s Studio One,
where the film’s composer, Michael Giacchino,
has Zoomed in (he’s getting married in a week
in LA, and so can’t be in London) to oversee
recording of the score by a handful of players
(“Even I couldn’t go up that mountain with my
full orchestra,” laughs Giacchino later). “Michael
is a fantastic storyteller,” says Bayona. “He used
a chord that felt sometimes like a horror film.
But the feeling for the survivors was fear. Fear of
not going back, fear of not having anything to eat,
and Michael understood that.”
As with so much about this story, a fine line
has to be trod with the score. A wrong decision
could easily lead to a schmaltz overload. “It’s about
listening to the movie, really,” says Giacchino. “But

it was really emotional writing music to these
moments. I found myself, even as I’m writing,
crying, because you always want to put yourself in
the position of the people you’re writing for. You’re
forced to embody those awful, awful feelings, but
it’s the only way, I feel, to get to that truth.”
Today, though, catharsis is near. It is no
spoiler to say that, eventually, the authorities
were alerted and a rescue mounted. And the
sequence that is being scored today shows that.
We won’t go into detail, save to note one
incredible — maybe even seemingly impossible
— thing. During the sequence, when news
reaches Montevideo that some of the passengers
are still alive, one man makes a phone call and
starts repeating the names of the survivors.
When he reaches one — Carlitos Páez — he
pauses briefly and says, “mi hijo”: Spanish for
“my son”. That man was Uruguayan artist Carlos
Páez Vilaró, the father of Carlos ‘Carlitos’ Páez
Rodriguez. And when Bayona was looking for
someone to play him, he didn’t have to look
very far. “Carlos Páez had a very famous face,”
explains Bayona. “I was thinking, ‘How can I find
somebody that looks like Carlos Páez?’ So I asked
Carlitos, ‘Would you mind playing your father?’
So he’s repeating his own name on that list.”
In terms of survivor involvement, that was as
intense as it got. Nando Parrado spoke to the actor
playing him (Agustín Pardella), and was in frequent
contact with Bayona, but otherwise didn’t wish to
visit the set. “I didn’t want to go to the shooting
of the movie in the mountains,” he says. “I had
enough in my life of snow and mountains.” But
he is more than happy with the finished film,
which he has seen three times. “People will
now understand what we went through,’ he says.
“And when I saw the film for the first time, I went
back to that place, to the fuselage and to the
avalanche. For the first time in 50 years I recalled
every single second and minute I spent there.”
For years, the accident and its aftermath
have been referred to as either the ‘Tragedia de
los Andes’ or ‘Milagro de los Andes’. And that
question — tragedy or miracle — is posed
throughout Bayona’s deeply felt depiction of
events. Parrado — perhaps better placed than
anyone bar his comrades to speak on such
matters — has his viewpoint. It’s neither. It’s both.
It’s everything in-between. “I’m more practical,”
he says. “I pray like everybody, but if you pray
and you are sitting down, nothing happens.”
Now, half a century on from the moment he
heard a huge metallic sound and his life changed,
he has more than come to terms with what
happened on that mountain. “I don’t live with the
story every day,” he says. “I have had a fantastic
life. When I came back I said, ‘I’m going to have
a life. I am so happy to be alive.’” And then the
man who said, “When you die, you don’t notice
that you’re dying,” echoes that statement in the
most beautiful and profound way. “When you are
happy,” he says, “you don’t realise that you are
happy. I’m happy that I’m alive.”
SOCIETY OF THE SNOW IS IN CINEMAS IN DECEMBER
AND ON NETFLIX FROM 4 JANUARY

DECEMBER 2023

67

AS PADDINGTON’S PAUL KING SPRINKLES HIS MAGIC ON WONKA, HE REVEALS
68

DECEMBER 2023

WORDS
CHRIS HEWITT

THE SECRET INGREDIENTS HE’S USED TO WHIP UP A CHOCOLATEY CONFECTION
DECEMBER 2023

69

ilm directors and
chocolatiers have a lot
in common. And not
just because we need
them to have a lot
in common in order
to make this intro
work. Both are in charge of incredibly complex
confections, where the slightest misjudgment —
a dash too much sugar here, a touch too much
bitterness there — can render the whole damn
thing indigestible. So, when Paul King — director
of both Paddington movies — took on the task of
bringing Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka back to the
big screen in a prequel called, simply, Wonka,
he had to blend his vital ingredients just so.
Starting with…

THE HEART OF A BEAR

Not literally, of course. That would be awful.
Especially when the bear in question is the
kindest, gentlest, noblest ursine to ever don
a duffel coat. King was, in fact, putting the
finishing touches to Paddington 2 in 2017 when
his producer, David Heyman, whispered sweet
nothings in his ear. “We had just done our last
visual-effects review,” recalls King. “We got into
a taxi together and he went, ‘I do have a vague
idea for something next.’”
That was, of course, Wonka, the origin story
of the eccentric recluse who, in Dahl’s original
novel, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, and
Mel Stuart’s 1971 classic film, Willy Wonka & The
Chocolate Factory, was renowned as the world’s
greatest chocolatier, despite being several
wafers shy of a Kit-Kat. It had been quietly in
development at Warner Bros. almost since Tim
Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
(2005), in which Johnny Depp’s Wonka was
decidedly wonky. Yet it had never quite picked
up the golden ticket. Perhaps there was inherent
scepticism about a prequel filling in the blanks

70

DECEMBER 2023

Clockwise from
above: Pile in! Willy
Wonka’s chocolate
dream is a go; The
eccentric confectioner
(Timothée Chalamet)
and young sidekick
Noodle (Calah Lane)
channel Up; Soaring
above the rooftops;
Olivia Colman
embraces her inner
villain as Mrs Scrubitt.

of an unpredictable character who, it could
be argued, worked precisely because we knew
little about him. If King ever felt that way, it
was only fleeting. “When David said, ‘Young
Wonka,’ I went, ‘Oh, that sounds good,’” he
recalls. “It sounded like the sort of film I might
want to see.”
Very quickly, it turned into the sort of film he
might want to make, and he decided to pass on
directing Paddington 3, resulting in a slew of
hard stares directed his way. “I feel enormously
loving and protective of the character, and
I would in many ways have loved to do it,” says
King. “But also I spent eight years making
Paddington movies and thought it would be
good to try something else.”
Anyone who watched either Paddington
will know that King doesn’t shy away from an
emotional climax (there are hordes of fully grown
adults who cannot hear the words, “Happy
birthday, Aunt Lucy,” without immediately
sobbing). The director finds joy, he says, in
“taking you somewhere that makes you laugh
and makes you cry and hopefully sends you back
out into the world feeling a bit more positive

about it.” And when he and his co-writer
Simon Farnaby (another passenger picked up
at Paddington station) sat down to plot their
Wonka story, in which a young Willy takes his
first fumbling steps as a confectioner, porting
across the bear’s beautiful, warm, open heart was
top of their list. “By the end of [Dahl’s] book, it’s
really emotional, which I had forgotten,” says
King. “It’s set in a storybook London, and it’s got
these heightened villains, but a kind of emotional
truth. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is where it all came
from; this is what I’ve been subconsciously
stealing my whole life.’”
For King, connecting Wonka’s story to that
emotional truth “possibly was harder” than
Paddington, but in the end, he and Farnaby
found inspiration, aptly, in food and another
Paddington chum, in the form of Sally Hawkins,
who plays Wonka’s mother. “Everyone thinks
their mum’s cooking is the best,” says King.
“I always loved my mum’s roasts, back when I ate
animals. And to me, that’s the taste of childhood.
And so I really liked the idea that there was
a germ of childhood in that childhood chocolate.
That was key for me to get into. I felt that Willy

was after the taste of childhood, in a Proustian
way, and after the taste of happiness.”
Marmalade sandwiches need not apply.

WONKA-VISION

At one point early during the Wonka shoot, King
stepped on set at Leavesden Studios, and looked
around in awe at the world he had built. And kept
on looking, because that world extended as far as
the eye could see. “We built a city,” he says. He
built this city on choc Swiss roll. “It was Covid,
and I thought we were gonna go on location
and find all these things. And then it was just
completely impossible to travel. And God bless
the Hollywood studios, but I go, ‘I don’t know
what we’re going to do,’ and they go, ‘Well, just
build it.’ Thank you very much indeed. I shall
build it. I shall enjoy building it. I shall call it
Paul’s Land.”
This was all very much new to the 45-yearold Brit, who has spent much of his career as
director working with purse strings so tight
they threatened to cut off the circulation. His
early days in TV and theatre were spent on the
likes of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The
Mighty Boosh, shows that demonstrated visual
spark and imagination beyond their means.
On the big screen he started off with the
micro-budget weird-out Bunny And The Bull
(starring Farnaby), and while both Paddington
movies had budget enough to make sure their
CG title star was convincing, he’d never been
given the keys to the Kingdom to this extent
before. “The sets were quite extraordinary,”
he says of Wonka. “There was a sort of great
Golden Age of Hollywood vibe to it because
of the musical aspect of the film. So you go,
‘There’s a dance studio, and there’s a
songwriting area,’ and, as you walk through the
studio, ‘There’s the dancers...’ It was exciting.”
Oh yes: to further complicate the recipe, Wonka
is a musical. Kind of.

SWEET MUSIC

During its long stint in development hell, the
idea that Wonka should be a musical was always
floating around. When King came on board, that
very quickly became his favoured approach. “For
me, the Gene Wilder movie was the Willy Wonka
movie,” he says. “And because that movie was
a musical, or had songs in it, it always seemed
perfectly right.”
In fact, Wonka features two of the 1971
movie’s best-known numbers: the Oompa
Loompa song sung repeatedly by Wonka’s tiny
orange assistants (of whom there is only one
in Wonka, played by Hugh Grant), and ‘Pure
Imagination’, a dreamlike ode to the wonders
of making shit up, speak-sung nicely by Wilder.
“Why wouldn’t you when they’re so good?” says
King. But the other songs in what King cautions
is not so much a musical, more “a film with
songs, really”, had to be original. And so, to
augment his divine comedy, he turned to
Neil Hannon.

DECEMBER 2023

❯

71

Fans of The Divine Comedy will know
that the band’s Northern Irish frontman has
been writing songs fit for the West End stage
or a big-screen musical for decades now, across
albums like Casanova, Absent Friends or
Foreverland. “I think his songs do what Roald
Dahl does, in that they’re very, very funny,
but he’s also a great storyteller, and they have
this deep emotional heart,” says King. “There
aren’t many songwriters who can make you
laugh and cry.”
In the screenplay, when it came to the songs,
King and Farnaby would write lyrics in verse, “to
make the script readable; a bit like Roald Dahl.
And then Neil would throw all of that away and
start again. We got a few lines here and there, but
it was virtually all him in the end.”
If there’s one abiding lesson that King has
taken from his experience on Wonka, it’s that
finding words that rhyme with “chocolate” is
exceedingly hard. “We found them all,” he
laughs. “I mean, we use ‘pockolate’, as in, ‘Put
your hand into your pockolate.’” This soundtrack
is going to rockolate. Not least because the guy
King hired to play Willy Wonka has got a great
set of pipes.

WINNING CHARISMA

Ordinarily, the search for an actor with all the
requisite tools to play Willy Wonka — charm,
good humour, a great singing voice, an edge of
eccentricity and just enough of a hint of madness
to suggest that this person could become wilder
and Wilder as he gets older — is the sort of thing
that could consume months, with thousands
of actors parading past King and his casting
directors. But after King saw Timothée Chalamet
in Call Me By Your Name, the search was already
over. “I was blown away by him,” says the
director. “He’s completely brilliant.”
Call Me By Your Name — in which Chalamet
does things to a peach that would have the
Food Standards Agency up in arms — also
showed that the actor was already au fait at
experimenting with food. All the Wonka boxes
were being ticked. Well, almost all. “As the film
evolved, I was aware that there was going to be
song elements, and little bits of dancing here
and there,” expands King. “And I thought,
‘I wonder what he’s like on that?’ And what’s
hilarious about fame in the 21st century is that
not only is Timothée Chalamet very good
at singing and dancing, but his high-school
musical performances are on YouTube, and
have been viewed by hundreds of thousands
of people. Thank fuck my school plays, there
is no record of!”
Dahl’s dips into Willy Wonka essentially
gave Farnaby and King carte blanche to do what
they will with his youth. “He didn’t really dig into
his past at all, so there was definitely room to
explore. The Willy you meet in the book and
the movies is a damaged soul who’s retreated
from the world, and he’s pulled up the
drawbridge. But he’s got to get there somehow.
It can be a danger that you go, ‘Oh, it’s all about

72

DECEMBER 2023

how a nice person becomes horrible!’ Doesn’t
sound like a great afternoon at the pictures.
I think we’ve avoided it.”
In the 1971 movie, Wonka is still inventing
new sweets and new flavours, but his best days
are behind him. In Wonka, as Willy tries to break
the chocolate ceiling of an industry that looks
down its nose at him, we will meet a man at the
height of his powers. There is no chocolatier
chocolatier. Speaking of which…

WORLD-BEATING
CHOCOLATE

“There’s obviously a lot of chocolate in this
movie,” says King. Understatement of the
year. Not only is Willy pumping out chocolate
at a rate of knots, but his competitors
Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt
Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton)
are the undisputed champs of choc when
the movie begins. You couldn’t throw a stone
in this world without hitting a cat. Made
of chocolate.
“I just assumed that it would be a prop, and
taste like cardboard,” adds King. “But they went,
‘Oh, meet Gabriella [Cugno], she’s our chocolatemaker.’ And they look incredible because this
woman is a genius. She’d go, ‘I’ve put a little
twist of pomegranate in there to just cut through
the sweetness.’ You really don’t need to, but
thank you.”
King also admits that he and Farnaby had
a whale of a time coming up with their own
spins on sweets and chocolates worthy of the
Wonka name. The bar was a high one, and
usually made of chocolate. “I think my favourite
one is the ‘Silver Lining’,” he explains. “We
thought you could make a silver lining of
condensed thunderclouds and liquid sunlight

and when you eat it, it makes you see the positive
side and see that glimmer of hope beyond the
darkness and despair. It’s the sort of thing you
can do in a Willy Wonka movie.” It’s also the
sort of thing you can do in a Paul King movie.
Which brings us to, perhaps, the most important
ingredient of all…

A BIG DOLLOP OF
PAUL KING

King, as you might expect of an English
gentleman, is the king of self-effacement. He’s
a delight to talk to — witty, smart, polite — but
when you ask him to describe the element that
links all his film and television work together,
that binds the Boosh to the bear and beyond, he

Clockwise from
top left: Willy has
big plans; Sally
Hawkins as his
dreamer mum;
Rowan Atkinson —
again at one with the
Holy Spigot — laughs
with director Paul
King on set; Willy
chats with Hugh
Grant’s very orange
— and green —
Oompa Loompa.

laughs. “Incompetence,” he demurs. “Even
though we spend all this money to make it
look polished and professional, it still never
looks like a proper film that a grown-up
would make. I keep trying to erode all traces
of my personality.”
But they don’t just peek through. They are
the work. As Wonka (via Shakespeare) himself
once asked, “Where is fancy bred — in the heart
or in the head?” With King, it’s both. His
sensibilities — that warmth, that wit, that blend
of wonder and whimsy, combined with a keen
eye for a composition that has seen him
compared to Wes Anderson — are precisely the
reason why the Paddington movies made such
an impact. And Wonka may be as personal and
idiosyncratic as you can get from a movie costing

over $100 million. “It’s not a wilful attempt to
build a brand or a style,” he says. “I want to make
films that have, hopefully, some visual fun, and
that take you on a ride. I’m not very interested in
the real world.”
He is a man who wears his influences on
his sleeves. For Wonka, there’s Dahl, of course.
But there’s also Fred Astaire (“In the days I’d
read Roald Dahl, and in the evenings I would
watch Fred and Ginger dancing around the
place”), who might just be the subject of his
next movie, with Tom Holland tapped up for
the tapping. There’s the photographer Bill
Brandt, “who did these incredible foggy cities
and seemed to make the cities feel very
storybooky and magical and dark”. And there’s
the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. “I’m

always thinking about Delicatessen, my
formative movie,” says King. “Having
comprehensively homaged Amélie in the
Paddington movies, I’m now homaging
Delicatessen. One day I must write a letter
of apology. ‘Cher Monsieur Jeunet…’”
But all of this comes together in a way
that’s utterly unique. Yes, there are bits of
Burton in King’s work, and the odd aspect of
Anderson (Wes, not Paul W.S.), and a splash
of Jeunet. But King is very much his own
creation, scrumdidilyumptious in every way.
And when he starts fussing over another
fantabulous confection, it’s time to start
licking those lips.
WONKA IS IN CINEMAS FROM 8 DECEMBER

DECEMBER 2023

73

FOR HER

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
FOLLOW-UP, DIRECTOR
EMERALD FENNELL WAS
INSPIRED BY THE SCORCHING
DRAMAS SHE GREW UP ON.
WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR

EMPIRE , SHE EXPLAINS HOW
SHE BUILT SALTBURN

WORDS
EMERALD FENNELL

74

DECEMBER 2023

DECEMBER 2023

75

“The past is another country: they do
things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
“You can put it anywhere.”
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Cruel Intentions

THE BURNING HOT SUMMER MOVIE WAS
the genre that obsessed me as a teenager.
Bertolucci’s hazy, devastating, erotic
masterpieces Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers
blazed through our school like a fever: the sole
DVDs had passed through so many hands that by
the end of term you could barely even get to the
Good Bits for the scratches. François Ozon’s
Swimming Pool gave us all chronic, lifelong
crushes on Ludivine Sagnier, Jude Law’s bottom
in The Talented Mr. Ripley nearly finished us off,
and Cruel Intentions, our North Star, brought
about the immediate loss of virginity of an entire
form. Craig Armstrong’s ‘This Love’ on MiniDisc
(RIP) has a lot to answer for.
I was also a pathological reader of Gothic
fiction and poetry; Angela Carter’s stories, du
Maurier’s Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights: if there was sex, murder and an
enormous house, I wanted to be there. And
there was nothing that I loved more than that
very specifically British Gothic genre: the
Country House Story. Where the twin national
obsessions of class and sex collide.
Like all Gothic tales, Saltburn starts with an
outsider — in this case Oliver Quick. I had seen
Barry Keoghan in The Killing Of A Sacred Deer
and had wanted to work with him ever since.
We never leave Oliver’s side, and so we needed
someone as singular and compelling as Barry;
someone who could bring both the vulnerability
and the dark sex appeal Oliver requires.
Felix, the Golden Boy, could easily have been
a cipher, but Jacob Elordi came in to audition
and made him so devastatingly real. The thing I’d
been looking for was someone who looked like
a god, but was actually just a fairly straightforward
disappointing mortal — a lot of people were
tempted to lean into a more arch, Sebastian Flyte
style of audition, but Jacob’s Felix felt like the
sort of boy you’d do anything to snog in Freshers’
Week. Alison Oliver [as Felix’s sister Venetia]

76

DECEMBER 2023

and Archie Madekwe [as his provocative
American cousin Farleigh] floored us all with
two of the best auditions we’d ever seen.
Rosamund Pike is one of the greatest comic
actresses of our time. Her work in An Education,
Gone Girl and I Care A Lot is so funny, SO dark,
that there was never anyone else who could
possibly play Saltburn matriarch Elspeth Catton.
When she read the lines at the read-through you
saw a room full of people immediately fall in
love. And Richard E. Grant — one of the all-time
greats — is another comic genius, and his
performances have this compelling mixture
of a poignancy and madness which Elspeth’s
husband Sir James needed. Lastly was Paul Rhys,
who plays the butler, Duncan. When I met him
I said, “Duncan IS the house.” And I wasn’t
speaking metaphorically. Duncan might easily
be 1,000 years old, Saltburn in human form, and
is perhaps the most outwardly Gothic of the
characters. Paul, rather than laughing in my face
as he probably should have done, immediately
understood, and his performance as Duncan
is one of the most unsettling and tragic parts of
the whole film.
The most difficult casting problem was
finding the film’s other character: the house itself.

THE PROBLEM WAS WE WERE LOOKING FOR
something that didn’t exist. Or rather, it was so
rare that it might as well not have existed. Most
houses the size of Saltburn have been given

Clockwise from main:
Elspeth (Rosamund
Pike, far left) and Sir
James (Richard E.
Grant, far right) lead
dinner; Barry Keoghan
as alluring interloper
Oliver; Sir James:
“poignancy and
madness”; Director
Emerald Fennell with
Keoghan and Jacob
Elordi on set in Oxford.
Felix (Elordi) smoulders.

to the National Trust. They are beautiful but
preserved in aspic, and we needed somewhere
that felt lived-in, alive, in spite of its grandeur.
Other similar houses had been converted into
hotels, or were falling to rack and ruin, or had
been filmed in many times already. Saltburn
needed to be completely unseen, a revelation to
both Oliver and to us. And to make it even more
impossible, I wanted a place that we could film
everything in. I hate wasting time (and money)
and moving location is always killer for both, but
because of the long, Shining-style shots through
the house, we needed it all to be in one place. We
didn’t want to fake it.
And after a lot of investigation we were lucky
to come across one such place. A house that had
been lived in by the same family for hundreds of
years, which had never been photographed, let
alone filmed — in fact, part of our deal with them
was that we never disclosed the name or location
of the house. The moment I stepped into it
I knew it was Saltburn.
When Linus Sandgren and I first spoke,
he asked me which words I thought of when
thinking of Saltburn. I said, without thinking,
“wet” and “vampire”. And because he is the best
person in the world, as well as being the world’s
greatest cinematographer, he was in. We talked
a lot in the beginning about how we wanted it to
feel. For both of us, the cinematography has to
come from an emotional place.
We wanted to shoot the house like a sex
symbol, like a fetish object, which it is. Whether
it’s Brideshead, Manderley, or Gosford Park,

the country house itself is always as much of an
object of desire as the people inside it. A place
that is both vast and claustrophobic. Where
empty rooms have eyes, where invisible hands
wipe away last night’s mistakes, where doors on
all sides, secret passages, mirrors and enfilades
make voyeurism not only possible but inevitable.
We wanted always to have the feeling of looking
into a Pollock’s toy theatre, of stealing private
moments, the disconcerting thrill of watching
and being watched.
Suzie Davies, the incredible production
designer, and her team were given the go-ahead
to rework parts of the house, turning Felix’s suite
of rooms into something darkly, almost surreally
sexy. Red lacquer, marquetry walls, mahogany
and marble. But always a rubber duck, a lurid
green bottle of Head & Shoulders, a pair of pants
on the floor, to ground us.
As always, I’d made psychotically intense
mood boards. Peter Greenaway’s colour
saturation and Hitchcock’s voyeurism, the use of
silhouette in Merchant Ivory. The use of negative
space in The Servant and Women In Love. And
close-ups: sweat, armpit hair, pores. The beauty
had to have a stink to it, a vital-ness. Linus and
I talked a lot about chiaroscuro and Caravaggio.
We wanted it to feel like a painting, like an
extension of the house. This was why we chose
the 1:33 aspect ratio — it served a practical
purpose as the rooms are very tall and square,
but it also worked much better for the more
formal framing we had in mind. A party scene
might at first glance look like a painting, the

saturated colour, the use of shadow, the
characters composed as though for a portrait,
but the light is coming from a karaoke machine.
During prep, each department had a floor
of a strange, empty skyscraper in the London
suburbs, so I spent each day running between
floors, looking at fabric and wallpaper samples
with Suzie and Charlotte [Dirickx, set decorator],
or marvelling at the horror of the mid-’00s shoeboot with Sophie [Canale, costume designer],
or trying to work out the most embarrassing
gap-yah tattoo for Felix (“carpe diem”) with Siân
[Miller, hair and make-up designer].
The bulk of the film is set in 2006/7. The
classic Gothic framing narrative required it
to be set in the recent past, but it also had the
crucial effect of undercutting the glamour and
humanising everyone. 2006 was the time of
sideburns, patchy fake tans, bad hair extensions,
BlackBerrys and tiny glittery scarves — no
matter how sexy or rich you were, it was hard to
pull off. It was also the last year you could smoke
inside — nothing makes something feel more like
a period drama than seeing someone light up
in a pub. Each department fell on the period with
delicious enthusiasm, toeing the line between
Barry Lyndon and ’00s indie sleaze.
By the end of production, the art department had
what they called ‘Emerald’s Shit Table’ because if
a shot looked too artful, it would usually require
the addition of a packet of Nik Naks or a poster
of Kelly Brook.
The only thing we needed to make at
❯
Saltburn was a maze. Suzie and I, in a moment

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77

of spooky morphic resonance, texted each other
the same New Yorker article at the same time.
It was a profile of a man named Adrian Fisher,
who is the world’s foremost (maybe only) maze
designer. We wanted our maze to feel real, not
just physically but emotionally another part of
Saltburn. Saltburn is a film about getting to the
centre of things, of places, of people, of bodies,
and so I asked [of ] Adrian that there be two ways
of solving the Saltburn maze: the main path,
which should be the most fiendishly difficult
route he could think up, and the other route: the
cheat’s route, a hidden path which leads directly
into the centre. If you pause the movie you can
do the maze yourself!

Clockwise from right:
Archie Madekwe as
American cousin
Farleigh; The elegant
Elspeth in her elegant
grounds; Venetia (Alison
Oliver), Gucci Envy just
out of shot...; The
imposing Saltburn —
an undisclosed stately
pile in real life; Fennell,
Keoghan and Elordi
confer; One hell of

THE SENSE OF SOMETHING BEING ‘MADE’
is important to me. I like to feel the hands that
have made things, to know that even if a world
is not real, it is nevertheless substantial. That
making a film is a human endeavour.
Playing with suspension of disbelief,
acknowledging the audience’s familiarity
with certain genres and story beats, creating
mises-en-scène that act as metaphors as well
as story devices: these are all the things a film
can allow better than any other art form. The
opening credits to Saltburn were hand-drawn

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a hangover; Chin-chin!.

by our graphic designer Katie Buckley and her
assistant. Hundreds of painstakingly handpainted frames that were then scanned in and
animated in stop motion. There were more
than a few conversations (arguments) with the
higher-ups about doing it this way — it was
extremely time-consuming and much more
expensive than simply having a computergenerated font which I was assured would “look
the same”. It didn’t look the same, but more than
that, it didn’t feel the same. The detail of Katie’s
work, the diligence, the time, each frame shows
the hand that drew it, in all its obsessive detail.
In the opening credits I think you can feel the
relentless, sadomasochistic obsession with
beauty: both mine and Oliver’s.
The world needed to feel real to all of us
working on it, too. When the cast arrived we decked
out their trailers like it was 2006. Nuts calendars
from that year, Cosmo, shag bands, iPod nanos,
Gucci Envy for Venetia, Issey Miyake for Felix.
Which was for the best, since it’s important to
me that everyone has the same bog-standard,
unflashy two-way trailer. This weird culture
of the super-trailer is so strange to me — they
seem designed to alienate and to set people in
competition with one another. It’s so important
to me that the cast and crew are together on
a film. Everyone eats lunch together — if there’s
downtime, cast can hang in the green room or
on set rather than alone at base. Making a film
is a huge exercise in trust for everyone, and
also extremely physically and emotionally
demanding, often most especially for the people
who are there the longest and paid the least, like
the set PAs and runners. So we have to be in it
together, not just to make it more equal, but to
make the work better.
I’m often looking for something not-quiteright, whether it’s a prop or a performance;
something that gives you pause. Everyone —
including me — needs to feel safe and happy
and among friends if they’re going to suggest
something that could be construed as “bad”.
To really push the envelope and do something
special, everybody needs to be comfortable going
to those places. When your cast and crew are as

talented as ours was, you’re often asking them
to do something that goes against their own
perfectionism in some way — something silly
or ugly or vulgar or unsubtle. That requires
a lot of trust.
I think subtlety is an immensely overrated
quality. We as humans are not subtle; watch any
episode of First Dates and it’s painful to see how
transparent we all are, even when trying our very
best to conceal our feelings. I always want to give
the actors the opportunity to do the “bad acting”
— I like to get the “good acting” in the can first,
the subtle, subtextual, instinctive performances
that will almost always make it into the film. But
once you have those, once you have the dead certs,
then you can get into the mucky business of the
bad acting — usually it’s fun but not usable, but
sometimes you get something truly delicious.
Something strange enough that it feels even
more real.
The post-production process was wonderful.
The incredible Victoria Boydell edited the film
and I think early on was a little disconcerted by
my refusal to use any music at all for the first few
cuts — I need to see the film naked and bald the
first few times, just to be sure that the emotional
and story beats are working in their own right.
To be fair to Vic, when you have ‘Zadok The
Priest’ and The Cheeky Girls on the soundtrack,
it is fairly devastating to have to put them on mute.
Victoria is masterful, with a wicked sense of
humour, which meant the tonal work of the edit
was much easier. The tension between horror
and comedy, of sincerity and cynicism, of real
and un-real is always some of the more delicate
work, and it helps enormously that the person
you’re working with also finds the most
diabolical moments the funniest.
I feel incredibly lucky to have made this
film with so many extraordinary people. We
spent every day pushing each other, daring
each other, and trusting one another to make
something singular. I think their passion and
commitment can be seen in every demented,
beautiful frame.
SALTBURN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 17 NOVEMBER

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81

The filmmaker has travelled to the frozen ends
of the Earth where the sun only sets in winter;
he has battled Klaus Kinski’s wild ego in the
oppressive heat of the Amazonian jungle. He has
staged operas, dragged a ship over a mountain,
and descended into a pitch-black cave to film
prehistoric paintings in 3D. He has stood inside
a volcano as it erupted, emerging sooty and sweaty
but alive, and eaten his own shoe after losing
a bet. There is no one like Werner Herzog — his
existence attracts parodies of a number usually
reserved for American Presidents. But what is
Werner Herzog like, as told by Werner Herzog?
At 81, he has published his memoirs: Every
Man For Himself And God Against All. He’s
a busy guy. He recently self-funded and released
Family Romance LLC (2019), a drama about
a rent-a-family business in Japan. In 2022 he
published a novel, The Twilight World, about
Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who
surrendered 29 years after the end of World War
II. And his latest documentary, about brains
and neurotechnology, Theatre Of Thought, is
currently doing the festival rounds.
His new book is a hypnotic series of
recollections and visions that you cannot help
but read in that iconic voice. He writes about his
newborn-self surviving a bombing in Munich in

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1942, his cradle filled with glass and rubble.
He remembers growing up in extreme poverty,
and of carrying his comatose friend on his back
to the hospital, having just heard the sound of
his skull hitting rocks far below a ski jump.
There are vivid dreams of weasels. The book
stops at the moment he sees a hummingbird
at his window, thinking it’s “a stray enemy
bullet”. It’s a journey through the heart of
Herzog, with Herzog at the wheel. Just don’t
call it an autobiography.
Let’s start with your autobiogra–
— I have to interrupt you. It’s not an
autobiography, it’s memoirs. There’s a real
distinction because autobiography would be
more events, things like this. My memoirs are
pure literature.
Why did you decide to write your
memoirs now?
I had just finished a short novel, The Twilight
World. My wife saw me looking out the
window for two days and she said, “Why don’t
you continue writing?” And I said, “Write
what?” She said, “Why don’t you write some
memoirs? Because someone else will come and
do it otherwise.”

Clockwise from main: Werner Herzog with Claudia
Cardinale and Klaus Kinski during the filming of Fitzcarraldo
(1982); Kinski in Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972); Herzog
and Christian Bale on the set of Rescue Dawn (2006);
Herzog with Ryan Andrew Evans in Encounters At The End
Of The World (2007); Nicolas Cage and Katie Chonacas in
2009’s Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans.

Some might worry that a book like this
signifies an ending.
There’s a chapter towards the end about
unfinished business with at least half a dozen
film projects and writing projects. And while we
are sitting here, my next book is being printed,
The Future Of Truth. It’s furious storytelling,
most of it my encounters with truth, and one
chapter goes in detail into what I have coined
the term “ecstatic truth”.
So not an ending at all. On the subject of
truth, in a memoir or a documentary, can
you ever be objective or is the storyteller
always looking for the best story?
I think we never are objective, but that’s fine.
And memory is not completely reliable. For
example, I write about a furious family that
threatened to kill me. There were four

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83

brothers of my girlfriend at home waiting for
me, and all of them were big Bavarian guys.
Then I immediately say, “Probably my memory
makes the threat bigger than it was — it was
probably only three brothers.” But I point it
out. We shape our memory — history itself is
a construct of the human mind. But it’s good
that we have this possibility to delete things
from memory, and that we embellish our
memory. I try to be stark, and without much
mercy for myself.
Is it more important to put across the
feeling of something rather than the pure
fact of it when you’re writing a memoir?
Well, if you’re really interested in facts,
I recommend you read the Manhattan phone
directory. Four million entries, all correct.
What about your public self ? When you are
writing these memoirs, does the idea of you
that other people hold play into how you
present yourself ?
It would be too crazy because there are too
many crazies out there claiming to be me.
Nowadays, you have to understand that the

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presentation of self is not what it used to be.
I appear on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter — all
complete forgeries. I don’t even have a cell
phone — I don’t want to have a cell phone, for
cultural reasons. But if you find my imitated
voice giving you advice for decisions of your
life, it’s 100 per cent forgery. I made a film in
Antarctica [Encounters At The End Of The
World]. Before I was finished shooting, when
I was still in Antarctica, there was already
a parody of my film under my name out on
YouTube. So “self” is not what it used to be.
Do these fake Herzogs annoy you?
No, they are my unpaid stooges. They are my
bodyguards. Let them do battle out there. I’ll
do my work.
The book finishes in the middle of
a sentence. How do you feel about death?
You can’t plan when you’re going to die, you
will probably be in the middle of something.
Only if I were on death row — that would give
me the privilege to know the exact minute I’m
going to die. But no, we don’t. We have to accept
it as it is.

In your teenage years you were briefly
intensely religious, and your new
documentary, Theatre Of Thought, goes into
the workings of the mind. Do you think that
consciousness continues after death?
Nobody knows what consciousness is. And all
the scientists with whom I had conversations
had no clue to even explain what a thought was.
I don’t find it alarming that after I’m gone,
I’m gone. I don’t even find it alarming that
our species is not very stable; that as a species,
we are very, very vulnerable and prone to
disappear. We will probably fairly soon be one
of the next that disappears. And the universe
couldn’t care less.
What did you learn about brains that has
just changed how you feel about this thing
in your skull?
Well, there are more questions than answers
that I could give. I think we are totally
unprepared for what is coming at us in terms
of research, and how we could be manipulated.
And, like with artificial intelligence, we have to
be aware that it can turn against us. Warfare is
already using artificial intelligence. But the

Clockwise
from main:
A bite to eat:
Klaus Kinski and
Isabelle Adjani
in Nosferatu The
Vampyre (1979);
Land ahoy! The
steamship SS
Molly Aida on its
perilous journey
in Fitzcarraldo;
Herzog ponders
life in Lo And
Behold,
Reveries Of The
Connected
World (2016).

Back to dreams: they recur a lot in your
movies and also your novel. In Lo And
Behold you asked if the internet dreams of
itself. Why the interest in dreams?
The strange thing is that I do not dream.
I feel the absence of dreams like a void in the
morning. Maybe this void is something I’m
filling with poetry, or films, or images, or
dialogue, or sometimes maybe some wild things
that I’m acting.

main question for me is, when much of what we
are doing is performative: who is the ghostwriter
of this? At the very end, I have some military
guard of honour outside the Greek parliament
doing steps into the air that are completely
grotesque. Who is the ghostwriter of this? How
does it happen that we do these things?
Does it make you feel vulnerable?
No, I’m doing alright, I have my defences. But
the species is vulnerable.
In Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans,
Nicolas Cage’s character asks, “Do fish have
dreams?” This question comes up again
in Theatre Of Thought. Have you settled
on an answer?
I know that I won’t get an answer. That scene
was not in the screenplay. I had the feeling there
has to be something with Nicolas Cage at the
end, something mysterious, something that
puzzles him. There was an aquarium nearby and
they allowed us to go in off-hours. So I have him
leaning against the glass and he said to me,
“What should I do?” And I said, “Think for
a long time and then ask, ‘Do fish have dreams?’,

because I see them floating behind you. And
then you take a very long time, and something
makes you chuckle.” We shot it only once.
You didn’t write the screenplay for
Bad Lieutenant, so that was a very
Herzog addition.
About 30 per cent I rewrote. Everything that
you remember: the iguanas, the crocodile in the
road accident, the hallucinations. The silver
spoon that he found once and can’t find it
anymore, from a treasure of pirates, and he finds
it for his girlfriend. It makes him much deeper
and more human than the screenplay originally
sounded. It was drugs, sex and violence and that
was it. But now it’s a much more stratified
volume of inner life.

Not a single dream, ever?
Once a year. Twice a year if it’s a very, very good
year. But it’s just banalities.
What kind of banalities?
The last, which was more than a year ago,
I dreamt I had a sandwich for lunch. [Herzog
is giggling now]
What kind of sandwich?
It was a boring one. It was one of these pale
Styrofoam-looking, bread triangularly shaped,
like you get at fast-food delis.
Some people have the opposite and
dream too much, acting out their dreams
in sleepwalks.
I had some furious episodes of sleepwalking,

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85

but that was much earlier. It has stopped
completely. But I was outside and among people,
waking people up. When I finally woke up it was
very embarrassing because I didn’t know where
I was or what the hell was going on. I was just
hopping around in my sleeping bag.
In your memoirs you say you don’t like
introspection. Are you interested in dreams
because they’re a window into truth,
without conscious introspection?
I should be a little bit more specific about
introspection. It’s more what you would
encounter when you’re with a psychoanalyst.
There’s something not right about it. That kind
of indiscretion I don’t like.
Is it the supposed navel-gazing?
The egotism?
It’s many things. It’s something to do with the
20th century and the quest for illuminating the
very last corners of your darker existence. The
darker recesses of your souls. Leave them dark.
Leave the corners in your home dark, because if
you illuminate everything with brilliant light,
your home becomes uninhabitable. Try it. Live
like that for a month.
Would you agree that the overriding theme
of your documentaries is a feeling of awe at
something bigger than yourself ?
It’s everywhere, all my feature films. When you
look at my writing, primarily it’s the awe that
comes across. And then of course a sense of
style, a sense of poetry. Open the book: there’s
a chapter called The Ballad Of The Little Soldier.
I was with a commando unit and most of them
were child soldiers between eight and 11. And
I’m describing in very condensed, very stark
prose, the death of one of the soldiers. And I’ve
been there — it’s not a figment of my fantasy.
I do not know of any other filmmaker who has
been on a commando unit with child soldiers,
or has been shot several times or shot at several
times, or has moved a ship over a mountain.
So I have lived a life that is different. And my
prose is different. In other words, when you
look at the text, there’s no-one who writes as
I do. There’s no-one.
Do you think a deep obsession or a devotion
to a subject is necessary to make a film
about it?
For me, it’s not obsession — I’m a quiet,
professional man. But things come at me with
great vehemence. And when something really
big is coming at me, I don’t duck into the
trenches. Then you can throw anything at me
you want — I will face it.
What about when things go wrong? Do you
thrive on chaos?
No, I like a quick orderly shoot of a film, but it
doesn’t happen very often because cinema itself
is facing obstacles all the time. A film like Les
Blank’s [Fitzcarraldo documentary] Burden Of
Dreams shows difficulties, but I do not speak

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DECEMBER 2023

Clockwise
from main:
He’s behind
you! Herzog in
Grizzly Man
(2005); Yuichi
Ishii and Miki
Fujimaki
in Family
Romance, LLC
(2019); The
Fire Within:
A Requiem For
Maurice and
Katia Krafft
(2022); Michael
Shannon in My
Son, My Son,
What Have Ye
Done (2009).

about them because they are irrelevant.
Fitzcarraldo, I shot half the film and then
it had to be stopped because my leading actor,
Jason Robards, became ill and was not allowed
by his doctors to return to the jungle. Mick
Jagger, who was in a big role in the film, had
only three or so weeks left on my contract. So
I wrote his part out of the screenplay because
he was so unique and so good. You have to
respond to the cataclysms. You have to have
an answer. You have to be inventive. That’s life,
and that’s movie-making.
But you’re willing to put yourself in danger.
Sometimes, of course, I knew it was going to be
difficult. And sometimes I knew it was going
to be dangerous. But I did not allow it to be
dangerous for people with me. I would test the
rapids, which you see in Aguirre, The Wrath Of
God, before I took some actors and extras and
crew-members with me. And they were all safe
at the end. It looks dangerous — and it was

H E R ZO G TALKS U S T H RO U G H
A U N I Q U E ACT IN G CA R E E R

THE CLIE NT IN T HE M ANDALORIAN
“Jon Favreau was deeply moved by my films.
Once he made a remark that he wanted many,
many people to know the face of the man who
made all these films that he likes. We should
not dismiss Star Wars: they are new
mythologies and a new way of seeing our
role in the universe.”

ZEC CHE LOVE K IN JACK REACHE R
“I have only my voice, no fingers left or hardly
any fingers left. One eye blind, and only a quiet
voice, and I spread terror. Some of it is
improvised dialogue. I sensed the team
was cringing so I knew it was good and I gave
even more.”

Alamy, Photofest, Shutterstock

dangerous — but it was a good assessment of
risks. But sometimes I was in situations where
things were not in my control anymore. I think,
rightfully so, the cover of my book has me at the
edge of a volcano. I was down at a lower level, at
a second deeper crater, with a very good expert,
a volcanologist, Clive Oppenheimer. Lava was
ejected, and it came down in glowing lumps,
1,000 degrees hot — some of them the size
of a car. Then there was an unexpected,
very violent eruption that hadn’t happened in
weeks or so. Of course, we withdrew as fast as
we could. But what it did was not just show
bravado — we got footage that only Katia
and Maurice Krafft [the couple from his
documentary The Fire Within, who perished in
an eruption in 1991] shot through their lifetime.
But they almost methodically went too close.
There was a certain folly in them.
Let’s talk about your drama, Family
Romance LLC. It’s a strangely timely film
because loneliness, connection, truth and
artifice are all themes that are becoming
more urgent.
Every single thing in the film is a lie, is
a performance, is an illusion. And yet the
strangest of all things is that there’s one
component that is truthful: the emotions.

It’s one of my deepest films. But strangely,
it hasn’t really sold. I feel a little bit like with
Aguirre: nobody saw the film. I was invited
to a theatre in Frankfurt, where there was
one of the very few good reviews of the film.
It was a large theatre, 450 seats or so, and
I came out on stage and there were seven people
there. I say it again: seven. As a filmmaker,
you have to absorb this. I had a wonderful
discourse with these seven people. And
I remember I told them, “You are the first ones.
You are the seven that will grow. Nobody will
ever make a film like this again. So it will find
its audience.” It took a decade until it really
found its audience. And I believe that Family
Romance LLC will find its audience. I will not
be around, but it’s okay.
Do you think of yourself as a filmmaker or
a writer?
Both. I have a formula I can give you which
explains it easily: my films are my voyage, and
writing is home.
Is that because you have to go out when you
make a film whereas you can write at ho–
Don’t ask any further. We mustn’t examine it.
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL IS OUT NOW

KE N JEGGIN GS IN
PAR KS AND RECREATION
“I said to the filmmaker, ‘Can I add something?’
And I say to the camera, ‘You know, I lived 47
years in my home here. But I’m selling it now
because I want to move to Orlando in Florida to
be close to Disney World.’ I was absolutely
serious. The longing in my voice.”

VA R I OUS I N T HE SIMP SONS
“I asked ‘How cartoonish does my voice have
to be?’ Matt Groening said, ‘No, your voice is
good enough.’ I said, ‘You mean cartoonish
enough.’ I’ve been on three times now. Such
wild anarchy of humour! I think they wanted to
have a real wild human being out there with the
wildest of accents.”

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87

I N OU R R EG U LAR SE RIE S, WE E XPLO RE
A SLICE OF CINE MA LORE

JIMMY
THE RAVEN
WORDS AMELIA TAIT
THE RED DRESS

STARS CAN BE found in the unlikeliest of places. Marilyn Monroe
was noticed at a munitions factory and Haley Joel Osment was
scouted in Ikea, but the 20th century’s most prolific actor was
discovered on a cactus. In the mid-1930s, ex-cowboy Henry Wagstaff
Twiford was walking across the red rust of the Mojave desert when
he stumbled upon a baby raven in an abandoned nest. He took him
home, named him Jimmy, and reared him on boiled eggs, eggshells,
and milk. Over the course of the next two decades, Jimmy became
a star that needed no surname, billed alongside Bette Davis and
Judy Garland during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Before he died, the
raven was said to have appeared in more than 1,000 films.
That is the extent of what most people know about Jimmy —
if they’ve heard of him at all. Despite his vast back catalogue, no
biopic has ever been made about Jimmy’s life, and his passing was
not marked by a single obituary. Who was this feathered thespian?
Was he, as some contemporary accounts suggest, a supercilious
virtuoso with a roster of unreasonable demands? Or was he in fact
simply mischievous, misrepresented — and even misgendered?
Henry Wagstaff Twiford was better known as ‘Curly’ thanks to
his mane of tousled hair. A former cowboy and a wounded World
War I veteran, Curly ran a gasoline station near Hollywood between
the wars. Bored when business was slow, he began training his dog
Squeezit to carry parakeets on a stick. One legend has it that a movie
executive stopped at the station to fill his tank and, enamoured by
the critters, hired Curly to train a squirrel to do a stunt. Less than
a decade later, Curly was an in-demand animal trainer capable of
getting a lion to lie down next to a baby, but Jimmy the raven was
always top dog. Curly said it took him a year-and-a-half to train the
bird to “do anything an eight-year-old kid can”. Jimmy could type out
his own name on a typewriter, pick flowers, open a zipper, unlock a
padlock, turn magazine pages, and deal a hand of poker. Arguably, he
could do more than most eight-year-olds, as he was also able to light
❯
a cigarette, fly backwards and ride upon a miniature motorcycle.

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The avian auteur made his Hollywood debut in
Frank Capra’s 1938 romcom You Can’t Take It
With You, about a rich man who falls in love with
a woman from a family of eccentrics (hence
their pet raven). Jimmy was filmed helping
to manufacture illegal fireworks and letting out
the occasional “caw”. Co-star Jimmy Stewart
described him as “the smartest actor on the set”,
adding that, “They don’t have to make as many
re-takes for him as for the rest of us.”
Perhaps because of this, Capra became
a big fan of the bird — he began offering Jimmy
a role in most of his movies, even writing the
raven into the script of the 1946 Christmas
classic It’s A Wonderful Life. “Capra don’t want
no inexperienced boids in the pictures,” Curly
succinctly said. By the 1940s, studios were
allegedly paying Jimmy $500 a week for his
services, and Twiford netted another $200 on
top. Adjusted for inflation, this $700 weekly fee
would be worth almost $9,000 (£7,400) today.
Still, fortune was hardly the most remarkable
thing Jimmy found during the war. While the
bird’s bank balance grew, so did his brain. By
1948, Jimmy could talk.

S

mart raven pecks out a living on
typewriter,” read a May 1939 newspaper
headline about Jimmy’s skills. The
light column referred to Jimmy (then
‘Jim’) as a “feathered Einstein” and marvelled
at his ability to type with his beak. Yet the
report ended with solemn words. Curly, it
claimed, “insist[ed] that a raven cannot be
taught to speak”.
Nine years later in 1948, Lloyds of London
wrote an insurance policy for Jimmy, protecting
against a “loss of memory”. At the time, Curly
claimed that Jimmy knew “53 usable words”
(plus, he joked, a fair few unusable ones). The
trainer argued that, “If he ever forgets them,
I’m out $700 a week.”
Although they don’t have vocal cords, ravens
can mimic human speech. A two-pronged organ
known as a syrinx sits at the bottom of their
windpipe — its vibrating walls allow birds to
produce sound. On YouTube, you can watch one
raven ask, “What’s up now?” and another say,
“Hello, Terry” (to himself, because his name
is Terry). Curly claimed that it took roughly
a week to teach Jimmy a one-syllable word,
and a fortnight of training was required for
two-syllable offerings. In March 1941, papers

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DECEMBER 2023

reported that Jimmy would have a five-word line
in the screwball comedy The Bride Came C.O.D.
— but by the time the film was released in July,
no such line appeared in its final cut.
Could Jimmy actually speak at length?
A year before Curly claimed the bird knew over
50 words, producer and director Irwin Allen
claimed Jimmy had “a vocabulary limited to just
one coarsely muttered word — ‘caw’.” While it’s
unclear whether Jimmy had the gift of the gab,
it’s abundantly clear that Curly did. In 1941 he
claimed Jimmy had appeared in 200 films and
a year later, he said that it was 600. By 1950, the
“1,000 films” claim was cemented in print. On
IMDb, Jimmy is credited in just 28 films —
although many of his known credits are missing,
such as 1938’s Spawn Of The North, 1939’s Tower
Of London, 1946’s Courage Of Lassie and 1947’s
The Red Stallion. Whatever the exact truth, Curly
clearly knew what to say to get reporters to
listen. Eight years before he claimed to have
found Jimmy in an abandoned nest, he told
a much less exciting story about studying ravens
from a pit mine before deciding to train them.
In fact, Jimmy’s origin story sounds a lot like
that of Curly’s pet dog Squeezit, who he claimed
he’d found “starving” in an abandoned building

“with a brood of half-dead puppies”.
Meanwhile, the trainer was also fond of
claiming that Jimmy would live to be 150 years
old, despite the fact that most wild ravens die
between the ages of 10 and 15. While birds in
captivity can live longer, the oldest raven at the
Tower Of London died at 44.
Curly may have liked to spin a yarn, but most
of Jimmy’s abilities were caught on camera.
When filming 1942’s True To The Army, Jimmy
was able to not only pick a card but also hide it
under his wing. In 1944’s Gypsy Wildcat, Jimmy
can be seen handing out playing cards in his role
as a fortune-telling bird. In 1939’s The Wizard
Of Oz — perhaps Jimmy’s most famous role —
he lands on Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow, caws on
command and picks hay out of Bolger’s costume
before flying off. Photos from newspapers also
show Jimmy combing Curly’s hair and putting
a cigarette in his mouth. Just like his owner,
Jimmy knew how to impress reporters — he’d
take a handkerchief out of one’s pocket before
hiding a five-cent piece in the cuff of the human’s
pants. Most remarkably of all, Jimmy even found
Curly a wife. In the midst of World War II,
a mother and daughter came into the pair’s
railway carriage when they were on their way to

Clockwise from top
left: The Enchanted
Valley (1948); Two
Jimmys, raven and
Stewart, in 1946’s It’s

A Wonderful Life;
The bird could type
his name; 1942’s
True To The Army;
‘Curly’ Twiford with
his son and Jimmy;
On the set of You
Can’t Take It With
You (1938) with
Edward Arnold; With
the Scarecrow (Ray
Bolger) from The

Wizard Of Oz (1939).

set. Jimmy landed on the shoulder of the
daughter and Curly promptly apologised,
sparking a romance that resulted in marriage.
Jimmy didn’t just perform tricks, though —
he really acted. Actor Buddy Mason was
impressed by the bird’s skills, noting that, “If
Jimmy swipes a key from a villain’s pocket… he’ll
cock his head to one side, displaying the key to
the camera, and appear to be thoroughly elated
with what he has done.” Other birds, Mason said,
couldn’t compare.

M

any celebrities pretend to be down to
earth, but Jimmy was never afraid to
fly high. By the time he was filming
1941’s The Bride Came C.O.D., he had
already become somewhat of a diva, refusing to
continue a scene until he got six “gobbets” of
meat, instead of his usual three.
Like all stars, Jimmy also required a stand-in
— a substitute on hand for the boring or
dangerous work. The most regular bird for the
job was Koko (sometimes styled Coco), who was
said to take Jimmy’s more “tiresome scenes”, as
well as any risky ones. In The Bride Came C.O.D.,
Koko was involved in five mock explosions while
Jimmy watched from the sidelines, nibbling on
apples. Koko commanded just $75 a week. He
was also struck by a conjunctivitis-like condition
in 1938, ‘Klieg eyes’, which was caused by
exposure to excess light on the set of the crime
thriller Arrest Bulldog Drummond. (This film
is another one missing from Jimmy’s IMDb.)
Koko’s normally ink-black eyes turned green
and he had to be treated with boric acid.
Despite Koko’s difficulties, Jimmy was
known to be jealous of the bird, growing
contemptuous when he had to wait in the wings.
In 1939, Jimmy flew up to the corner of the
Tower Of London sound stage and refused to
come down after watching Koko in rehearsals.
He only relented when his rival was locked away
in a cage. Koko wasn’t the only co-star that
Jimmy quarrelled with. The bird was ostensibly
“supercilious” on the set of 1949’s The Secret

DECEMBER 2023

❯

91

Left: Louise Allbritton
with Jimmy in Son
Of Dracula (1943).
The bird’s role was
‘Madame Zimba’s
Crow’. Right: With
his co-stars, Dean
Stockwell, Margaret
O’Brien and Brian
Roper, in The Secret

Garden (1949). Below,
top to bottom:
A poster for 1949’s

Call Of The Forest,
another Jimmy starrer;
Jimmy perched on
Johnny Weissmuller
(aka cinema’s
definitive Tarzan)
in ’50s TV series
Jungle Jim.

Garden, believing himself to be superior to
co-stars Baa the lamb, Captain the fox and
Rascal the squirrel. Indeed, these actors would
often gorge themselves with warm milk and raw
meat on set, leaving director Fred M. Wilcox
fearful of continuity errors as they grew in size.
Captain and Rascal were known to fight for the
same tree, but Jimmy would croak at Captain to
settle him down.
Actor Jerry Colonna also fell out with
Jimmy on the set of 1942’s True To The Army, as
he got tired of carrying the bird around on his
elbow and considered him “careless”. Though
there’s no indication they didn’t get on, Jimmy
Stewart had to start going by ‘J.S.’ on the set of
It’s A Wonderful Life because the raven would fly
in front of the camera whenever the name
‘Jimmy’ was called.
Jimmy was in fact particularly fond of
antagonising his human co-workers. The raven
nibbled at the yarn in Wilcox’s socks and was
regularly witnessed trying to steal food from
the lunchboxes of workmen. Jimmy was even
known to mock his fellow actors by imitating
them. Curly once called him “a great egotist”.
In his downtime, he allegedly enjoyed operating
gum dispensers and burying bright objects in
the ground. Instead of investing in an Aston
Martin, Jimmy’s preferred mode of transport
was riding around on the back of a Boston
bulldog. Jimmy was also “money mad” — Curly
often witnessed him picking up stray coins and
saving them for later by swallowing them. The
raven opened his own savings account with the
Hollywood Building And Loan Association in
April 1940, releasing a dime in a deposit box.
Jimmy’s growing bank balance meant that he

92

DECEMBER 2023

would regularly receive letters begging for
money, with most people telling him their
sob stories and others asking him to invest
in oil wells.
Despite his sometimes curmudgeonly
behaviour on set, Jimmy was known to be
charitable in private. During the war, the
raven regularly visited wounded soldiers
in hospital, and spent a total of 200 hours
entertaining them with his tricks. In 1947, the
American Red Cross awarded him a medal in
recognition for his services.

J

immy the raven does not have a star on
the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, but by 1949
his talon prints had been immortalised
in cement and displayed in a pet shop
nearby. In April 1956, his owner Curly passed
away aged 60. Not much is known about what
happened to Jimmy, whose last film appears to
have been 1954’s comedy 3 Ring Circus, in which
he has a caw-ing conversation with Dean Martin,
before using three caws to tell him (off camera,
in what sounds very, very much like a dub),
“You’re in love.”
While Jimmy’s death remains mysterious,
so do many aspects of his life. In 1941, one
newspaper report claimed that Jimmy was
in fact a female raven, and was regularly
misgendered because she was “cast in roles in
which the male characteristics of aggressiveness
and courage were dominant”. The articles also
claimed that Jimmy was “in the throes of a torrid
love affair with Coco, her stand-in”.
In subsequent reports, Jimmy went back to
being described with “he” and “him” pronouns,
but this is another hint that when it came to the

J IMMY THE RAVE N’S
VITAL STATS

21

Stand-ins Jimmy had when filming
It’s A Wonderful Life, leading one
paper to nickname him “the most
spoiled actor in Hollywood”.

2 MONTHS

The age Jimmy apparently was
when he starred in his first picture.

$10,000

Amount MGM insured Jimmy for
when filming The Secret Garden.
Left, top to bottom: Another comfy shoulder — this one
Byron Foulger’s — in Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940);

Alamy, Getty Images, Mary Evans, Moviestore
Collection, MPTV, Photofest

In uniform in 1950; The poster for 1948’s Bill And Coo.

raven, the truth was as free as a bird. Regardless
of his or her gender, Jimmy may possibly have
been a parent. Animal trainer Moe DiSesso
claimed that, “In 1944, I was given two raven
eggs by a friend” — he placed them under a hen
to hatch and one became ‘Jim Jr’. Reports differ
as to whether Curly gave Moe the eggs — it is
more likely that Jim Jr was simply named after
the great bird.
Either way, Jim Jr went on to become
a movie star in his own right — by 1961, he had
starred in over 30 films, and was able to grab
cigarettes, croak on cue, and even load a gun.
Jim Jr was a veteran of TV — he can be seen in
the 1950s shows The Cisco Kid and I Married
Joan, as well as ’60s sitcom Bewitched. In 1957,
a raven named Jimmy — it’s unclear which —
was witnessed demanding sugar on his meat
on a set. “Sugar! Sugar!” yelled the bird as he
was served his dinner on a “raven-sized banquet
table”. Like father, like son? Curly, at least, most
definitely was a father — his son, 70-somethingyear-old Greg Twiford, is now head of an animal
trainers’ association and spent the summer
walking the picket line in support of the actors’
and writers’ strikes. A placard he carried read,
“Animal actors are starving.”
When he was alive, newspapers called
Jimmy “one of the hottest actors in pictures”
who “has stolen every movie scene
in which he has ever appeared”. Curly’s wife
once described the trainer with the words,
“Even bees won’t bite the guy.” Together, this
unique pairing made movie history — and
both live on in classics that are still watched
regularly today. It’s an undeniable legacy. Quoth
the raven: forevermore.

95

Per cent of animals in movies that
belonged to Curly Twiford in 1947,
according to one newspaper.

1

Painted portrait commissioned of
Jimmy. Curly and his wife
displayed the “high-priced” image
in their living room.

20,000

Number of ants Curly once had to
procure for a movie. He captured
them in glass jars in the desert.

16

Years Jimmy starred in the movies.

DECEMBER 2023

93

DECEMBER 2023

|

EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT

B EN WH EAT L EY TELLS EMPIRE HOW H E WENT FROM LOWBU D GET INDIES TO TAKING A BITE OU T OF MEG 2: THE TRENCH ,
AND LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

MEG 2: THE Trench (to be said aloud in the
same way you would say Step Up 2 The Streets)
stands out on Ben Wheatley’s CV like a… well,
not exactly a sore thumb, more a 75-foot
giant shark. Prior to this summer’s gleefully
preposterous Jason Statham-starring sequel,
the British director tended to stick to smaller
British films, often with short shooting
schedules and tiny budgets, that allowed him
to indulge his darker sensibilities and mordant
sense of humour. Those films included his
micro-budget debut Down Terrace, Kill List,
Sightseers and A Field In England and, even when
big names like Tom Hiddleston, Cillian Murphy,
Brie Larson and Lily James began to show up
in the likes of High-Rise, Free Fire and Rebecca,
Wheatley stayed on this side of the Atlantic.
But, after toying with a Tomb Raider sequel
written by his wife, Amy Jump, he finally got
his feet wet on Meg 2, and took time out from
shooting his Channel 4 zombies-versuspensioners TV show, Generation Z (lower
budget, check; darker sensibilities, check;

94

DECEMBER 2023

mordant sense of humour, check) to talk
to Empire about needing a bigger boat.
Now that we’re a few months down the
line from Meg 2’s release, how do you
look back on it now, stepping into this
massive arena?
I feel like it’s nice to have some distance from it,
but it also feels like a wild fever-dream now. It
was a big chunk of time. It was two-and-a-half
years, or something, I was on it for, all in all.
You’ve shot films in two weeks. So when you
realised this was going to eat up the next two
years, was there any trepidation involved?
Only on a very basic, ‘would I have enough
energy for it?’ level. But after the first couple of
weeks it was clear what it was gonna be like,
and it was fine. Life will come into the movie
in a way that it doesn’t in a three-week or
four-week shoot. You literally get older as you
do it, you have shifts in perspective, you change
as a person as you’re doing it, and that was

something I hadn’t quite thought about. You
have to keep reassessing what you’re doing, and
concentrating on it, otherwise you can kind of
meander off in your mind.
You’d directed a couple of episodes of
Doctor Who, but your movies aren’t exactly
effects-heavy.
I had another life as an ads director. And I’d
worked on shows with a lot of effects, so that side
of it wasn’t too daunting. But the challenge of it is
the weird scheduling. You have to make decisions
that are impossible to change six months
beforehand. So you’re making decisions on things
and it’s getting delivered back to you and you look
at it and go, “Oh, that’s what I was thinking back
then,” and if you want to change your mind it’s
a lot of frowning faces because it’s very expensive.
So keeping your nerve doing that is quite difficult.

Above:
Director Ben
Wheatley at
the London
premiere
of Meg 2:
The Trench.
Left: Jason
Statham goes
toe-to-tooth
with the film’s
gargantuan
star.

Huge swathes of the movie are set in and
around the Mariana Trench, and you have
this really bizarre, pulpy, sci-fi world. But
you didn’t actually go underwater, so that
must have been an interesting challenge.
There was some underwater shooting, inside of
air locks and stuff filling with water, and then a
lot of Statham swimming about underwater. You
couldn’t do that in CG because the body reacts
in a different way. But the dry for wet along the
trench, no-one thought for a single second of
doing it for real. There’s no Nolan-ing about on
The Meg, you know. To film down that depth
would have been suicide, and we would still be
filming it now, having replaced half of our cast
through several difficult legal battles. [Laughs]
What were your conversations like
with Statham? Had you crossed paths

DECEMBER 2023

❯

95

Left: Statham
plus jet ski
outrun the Meg.
Below left:
Wheatley checks
a shot on set.
Below: 2016’s
Free Fire.
Below right:
Wheatley’s
debut, Down
Terrace (2009).
Bottom: The
Stath and
Sophia Cai
in Meg 2:
The Trench.

with him before?
No, I hadn’t. I think he knew a lot of people
that I knew. I was thoroughly checked out
beforehand. But the first conversations were
quite bizarre. You’ve got Statham on the end of
the phone, and the first time it’s odd. But I had
lunch with him and we got on from there.
Is he a big Ben Wheatley fan?
His favourite film is A Field In England. I was
as surprised as you are about that. He watches
it regularly.
Genuinely?
No. [Laughs]
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I thought we’d uncovered
something here.
It’s a scoop!

But he was very much aware of
your background.
He does his due diligence, so yeah.
Did you do yours? You must have been
worried about being swallowed up by the
machine on something like this.
Well, I don’t know. I’ve been moving towards
doing a big studio picture for a while, and
I fancied it. It’s one of the food groups of being
a filmmaker, isn’t it? I did a TV show a couple
of years ago [Strange Angel] that was shot on
the Paramount lot, and that was amazing. We
were shooting that on the same stage that Rear
Window was shot on. We were going around in
a buggy, and because Paramount also includes
the RKO Studios, that’s the stage Citizen Kane
was shot on. So yeah, I wanted to do a studio

96

DECEMBER 2023

film. I read a lot of books on film production
and I knew there was a potential for things
to be difficult. But Lorenzo [di Bonaventura,
producer] is a really straight-up guy, and the
studio were really cool as well. I wanted there
to be no surprises in terms of what we were
going to make. It wasn’t like I was making my
own film and then they’d discover it and then
there’d be a massive fight. We were always
pushing towards the same goal, which was to
make a big, kick-ass shark film.

Yeah. Thinking about it, for years I’ve been
making movies that were basically aimed at
punishing their audience as much as possible.
I started with quite a high bar of Kill List,
a film that people were actively angry about
in cinemas. And as much as I loved the film,
you respond to that. And so, [it was a case of ]
moving gently away from that over a series of
nine movies to get to this, where it was more
out-and-out fun. And the audience seems to have
responded to that.

There are some moments that feel more
Ben Wheatley than others. But by and large,
you said, “I’m making a blockbuster with
its tongue crammed deeply into its cheek.”

There is a progression in your career.
There’s Down Terrace and Kill List and
Sightseers and A Field In England, but you’ll
also do something bigger like a High-Rise or

Alamy, Getty Images

He’s got this weird arthouse side to him at
times. I can imagine him of an evening
sitting down with a double bill of Kill List
and A Field In England.
Yeah, with a big jug of mead.

“If I’d written
Meg 2, they’d
all have been
dead in about
30 seconds.”
B EN WHEATLEY
a Rebecca. Was that something you
were thinking of as a filmmaker, that
increased scale?
The fact I’ve gone back and forward and done
stuff at a lower budget should show that the
pattern isn’t a linear progression. The thing I’m
doing at the moment is effectively three feature
films back to back to back, with zombies and
mad, violent gags and satire and comedy. It’s
a kind of a Sightseers/Kill List cross. So I would
never say that that was the absolute plan. If it
was the plan, I’ve an extraordinarily slow way
of doing it. Most people just slam out an indie
movie and then go straight to a Marvel film.
I didn’t make my first film until I was 40, so it’s
the same slow route.

Top to
bottom: Smile!
The Meg,
ready for its
close-up; Lurid
larks in the
Lake District
in Sightseers
(2012); A Field
In England
(2013);
Wheatley, Lily
James and
crew making
Rebecca
(2020).

But you’ve been flirting with movies of this
scale for a while. You’ve been attached to
things like a remake of The Wages Of Fear,
or an adaptation of Frank Miller’s Hard
Boiled, and then the Tomb Raider sequel
that came very close to getting started.
I’ve been writing scripts for studios for
seven years, on and off. Stuff that’s been in
development and never got made. That
relationship has been there for a while. It’s
taken a long time, mainly, much to the irritation
of my agent, because I’m always working.
They’ve lined stuff up for me to do in the States
and then I’m like, “Oh, I’ve already got a film to
do this year.” That’s why it’s taken a bit of time
to do something like this.
What was the appeal of Tomb Raider for
you? And how close did it come?
Well, I’d worked on a version of Gauntlet,
a video-game which, ironically, got cancelled
because of Dungeons & Dragons, many years
before this version came out. I just love tunnels
and traps, and Tomb Raider came along. I was
like, “Of course! There are tombs!” I wanted to do
something like a dungeon crawl but in enclosed
spaces and with lots of action. That was a project
that had all of those things. But I really got
offered it because Amy Jump had written it, and
it took them about a year or so to get round to
asking me after she’d written this really brilliant
script, which I really wanted to do. And then the
pandemic fucked everything. But it wasn’t just
Tomb Raider that got screwed by that. We felt the
whole industry was going to be screwed.

So that goes away, and then Meg 2 swims
towards you. What was the grabber for you
with that one?
I liked The Meg, so that was a starter. I was like,
“Oh, that’s fucking interesting.” And I like Statham,
and then I read the script and what I liked in the
original movie was the effort the characters went
to to survive. It wasn’t a given that they were going
to survive, and that seemed like a breath of fresh
air. And in this version, the thing that grabbed
me was the idea of dealing with a problem and
going on to the next one. That’s like life, that’s
like filmmaking. And they’re relentlessly positive
in the script. Everything can be sorted out —
“Let’s go, guys!”, and all that stuff. If I’d written
it, they’d all have been dead in about 30 seconds.
So I thought it was an antidote to my pessimism.
How much did Down Terrace cost, roughly?
It cost £6,000 in 2009. And to complete it so we
could sell, we had to have another 20 grand put
into it because we put a Karen Dalton track [‘Are
You Leaving For The Country?’] on it. Which
was, looking back on that, quite naive. We put
it in twice as well. So we paid twice for it, like
idiots. But yeah, the actual film cost £6,000.
Spread across credit cards?
There were only three of us, two grand each. I got
it back the other day. I finally got it back after
11 years. I mean, I didn’t get the interest on it, so
I made a loss there.
How did it take 11 years?
That’s the industry, you know. We got minimum
guarantees at the time when we sold it, so we
got about 40 or 50 grand, but with that we paid
all the cast and crew, and the estate of Karen
Dalton. And that was it. That was all the money,
and given the way deals are structured, it’s very
hard to get any cash out.
That’s wild. But with that, Kill List, Sightseers
and A Field In England, we’re talking about
films that the catering budget on Meg 2 for
one day, for one lunch hour…
One sandwich!
... would outstrip in terms of cost. But
there must be common ground between
those movies.
Of course. Because they’re made by the
same person. There’s someone essentially
in the middle of them making aesthetic and
performance decisions. I think there’s a definite
link between Meg and Free Fire in terms of how
the storyboards were done and how the planning
was done for it. But it’s a different kind of thing.
People look at the films and see darkness, they
see that kind of cynicism in them, and I think
that’s the common thread. But there’s also an
aesthetic common thread and a line of action
that’s similar to all the movies, and a type of
editing. You leave your fingerprints all over
something, whether you like it or not.
MEG 2: THE TRENCH IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL

DECEMBER 2023

97

A matter of
Powell and
Pressburger
THE GREAT EDITOR THELMA SCHOONMAKER ON WHY
THE LEGENDA RY FILMMAKERS STILL E ND URE
WORDS JOHN NUGENT

THELMA SCHOONMAKER IS one of the world’s
most celebrated film editors; her shelves creak
with awards from a decades-long collaboration
with Martin Scorsese, dating back to his directorial
debut, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door.
But she has another, parallel career: as unofficial
custodian of the legacy of Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger, the British-Hungarian
filmmaking duo behind Technicolor masterpieces
like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.
Schoonmaker’s story is uniquely intertwined
with Powell in particular. “Marty was training me
to look at the Powell and Pressburger films, back
when we were working on Raging Bull,” she tells
Empire, speaking from her edit suite in New York.
“He would send me home with the VHS tapes.
I was falling in love with their films.” Eventually,
Scorsese acted as an unlikely Cupid. “One day, he
said, ‘Michael Powell is coming for dinner. Do you
want to meet him?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ That’s how
it all started.” Schoonmaker and Powell married
soon after in 1984, and remained so until Powell’s
death in 1990. “I have the best job in the world.
And I had the best husband in the world,” she says.
Schoonmaker’s love of both Powell the
filmmaker and Powell the man continues to this
day; she even recognises their romance reflected
in his and Pressburger’s films. Take, for example,
the gorgeous 1946 wartime-romance-sciencefiction epic A Matter Of Life And Death, in which
a character is willing to sacrifice her life for
love, nobly stepping onto a celestial escalator.
“That moment when Kim Hunter steps on the
stairway to give her life up — that is so Michael
Powell. I would have done it for him, and he
would have done it for me. I always burst into
tears when we get to that point. It’s so beautiful.”
A Matter Of Life And Death was part of an
astonishing run of classic films by Powell and
Pressburger, what Scorsese has described as
“the longest period of subversive filmmaking in
a major studio, ever”, which included One Of Our
Aircraft Is Missing, The Life And Death Of Colonel
Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m
Going!, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Those
films, and more, are being shown in ‘Cinema

98

DECEMBER 2023

Unbound’, a retrospective of the filmmakers’ work
by the BFI across the UK and Ireland, in which
Schoonmaker — now an important ambassador
for their filmography — is deeply involved.
But their legacy has not always been so
passionately embraced by the film community.
Powell’s fetishistic 1960 thriller Peeping Tom
(made without Pressburger) was so shocking to
pearl-clutching critics of the time that his career
never truly recovered. “The period after Peeping
Tom was terrible,” says Schoonmaker. “He fell
into a terrible financial state. He couldn’t
afford fuel for his cottage. But thank God that
television had shown these movies to people
like Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and
Brian De Palma and George Lucas.”
The New Hollywood generation kept the
flame alive, and the pair remain huge figures
for a legion of filmmakers (zombie king George
A. Romero cited their 1951 opera The Tales Of
Hoffmann as his favourite film, and would tell the
story of how he kept being frustrated in his efforts
to rent a print — only to find the person who kept
getting there ahead of him was a young Martin
Scorsese). Few have been more vocal than
Scorsese, who, with Schoonmaker, has overseen
multiple restorations. “We’ve restored six of the
Powell-Pressburgers now,” says Schoonmaker,
“thanks to Scorsese’s Film Foundation. George
Lucas is one of the big funders of that, by the way.”
Schoonmaker remains totally driven by this
mission. “Michael left a little furnace inside of
me burning, to preserve his legacy. So, as much

as I can — because my job is very wonderful and
all-consuming — I do everything I can to help.”
The restoration process, going back to the
“original three-strip negatives”, involves watching
the films dozens or even hundreds of times. It’s
a laborious job, but Schoonmaker doesn’t mind.
“The thing about these films is I never get tired

KARINA LONGWORTH,
BOB DUCSAY AND
ODESSA YOUNG
WHY THEY GE T A ME N TI ON AT THE
E ND OF FAIR P L AY

Clockwise
from main:
Moira Shearer in
The Red Shoes
(1948); The
celestial
escalator of
A Matter Of Life
And Death
(1956); Martin
Scorsese,
Michael Powell
and Thelma
Schoonmaker
on the set of
The Color
Of Money in
1986; Emeric
Pressburger
and Powell
making Black
Narcissus in
1946; Carl
Boehm and
Anna Massey
in Peeping

Alamy, Allstar, Getty Images, Martin Scorsese
Collection, Netflix, NY, Studiocanal/BFI

Tom (1960).

of looking at them,” she says. “I could look at
some a hundred times and still enjoy them over
and over again. I don’t know how they did it!”
It’s the films’ eternal rewatchability,
surviving even those wilderness years, that keeps
people coming back to Powell and Pressburger,
Schoonmaker says. “Michael was once asked
about the British film industry, and he said, ‘Why
should there be a British film industry? We should
make films for the world.’” The universal themes
behind their work, and the beauty with which
they were made, continues to entrance audiences
well beyond their original borders or eras.
Schoonmaker remains astonished at how
new generations keep discovering them. She
attended a recent screening of an early 1930s
film by Powell and was stunned to find that she
was the only grey-haired attendee. “It used to be
when I went to these things that it was just older
people — film historians, that kind of thing. Now
they’re so young! The appreciation just keeps
growing. Which Michael would just love.”
The legacy of Powell and Pressburger, in their
films, and in the memories of those who knew
them, is unabashedly positive. “[Powell] was
an optimist,” Schoonmaker remembers. “He
had a love of life. It was an amazing
thing to live with. He had me
put on his grave: ‘Film director
and optimist’. Which I did.”
Somewhere, on a celestial stairway,
someone is smiling.
PEEPING TOM IS RE-RELEASED IN
CINEMAS FROM 27 OCTOBER, AND IS
OUT ON 29 JANUARY 2024 ON DVD,
BLU-RAY AND UHD. ‘CINEMA
UNBOUND: THE CREATIVE WORLDS
OF POWELL + PRESSBURGER’ IS

AS IS OFTEN the case with a debut film, the Special Thanks section
for Chloe Domont’s savage relationship drama Fair Play is packed
with names. Some particularly stand out. There’s Karina Longworth
(below centre), for example — host of the excellent movie podcast
You Must Remember This, and wife of one of the film’s executive
producers, Rian Johnson. “She was one of the first people we showed
the cut to, once I was halfway through my director’s cut,” says Domont.
“She was someone I was really curious to see what they think, and
her notes were invaluable. Some stuff was very small and specific,
and some of her thoughts were more about the last couple of scenes.”
Later in the process on the movie, which stars Phoebe Dynevor
and Alden Ehrenreich as a couple working at a hedge fund whose
relationship is tested when she gets promoted, Domont reached
out to noted editor Bob Ducsay (below left), who’s worked regularly
with Johnson. She wanted to see “from an editor’s perspective if
there’s anything that wasn’t working for him... He said something
very important which was, ‘You always have to question
how much time you want to give to something on screen. If
you’re putting too much emotional weight on something too
soon, it deflates some of the tension later on in the act.’”
But both Longworth and Ducsay were Johnny-comelatelys, giving their advice after the film had wrapped. Odessa
Young (pictured here on the right), the star of mini-series
The Stand, was an early adopter. “She was the first
woman I sent the script to, for her opinion on it,”
says Domont. “And the fact that she felt on the
edge of her seat reading it, that it felt like a ticking
time bomb of a film... hearing that feedback was
incredibly important.” Fair play. CHRIS HEWITT

PLAYING AT THE BFI SOUTHBANK AND
UK-WIDE UNTIL 31 DECEMBER

FAIR PLAY IS ON NETFLIX NOW

MONTH 2023

99

The Transforming Man
TRANSFORMERS PRODUCER LORENZ O DI BONAVENTURA
ON THE FRANCHISE’S PROS AND (DEC E P TI)CONS
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

OVER THE COURSE of 16 years, Lorenzo di
Bonaventura, producer of all seven Transformers
movies, has had a front-row seat for one of the
biggest franchises in Hollywood history, and
has been able to chart its ups and downs,
evolutions and — yes — transformations.
“I couldn’t imagine anything going on this
long, honestly,” he laughs. With Transformers:
Rise Of The Beasts performing something of
a soft reboot for the series, di Bonaventura
sat down on Zoom with Empire to discuss the
series with admirable candour.

TRANSFORMERS (2007)

Produced by Steven Spielberg (along with di
Bonaventura), directed by Michael Bay, the first
Transformers remains for many the best in the
series. Its combination of cutting-edge effects and
Shia LaBeouf ’s funny turn as a nerdy hero gave it
the AllSpark it needed.
“When I first approached Hasbro about the
rights, they said, ‘You’re too old to have watched
it.’ But I had friends who had younger brothers
and sisters who watched it avidly. And at the
same time, Steven was chasing the rights, and

100

DECEMBER 2023

Steven understood it from a play level. He
really got the fascination of something that
can transform. What was interesting about
the process was that Paramount passed on it,
I think, five times. But I kept coming back.
I understood how capable the visual effects were
of creating something astonishing. And when
we saw our first movie preview, we knew we
were gonna have a sequel.”

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE
FALLEN (2009)

That sequel, released just two years after the
original, is much-maligned and very messy, but in
its defence was produced in the middle of — stop
us if this sounds familiar — a writers’ strike.
“That really screwed us up. I’ve had this happen
to me a few times. The problem is you don’t get
to evolve your script. At the time, Paramount
felt very strongly that sequels should come
out every two, max three years. They didn’t
have a lot of other assets at that time, so the
decision was to plough forward. I think a strike
doesn’t affect the bigger ideas or the visuals.
What’s hard is the characterisations, the
emotional relationships. That’s where it takes
a lot of writing.”

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON
(2011)

By now, cracks were beginning to show in the
Bay Sturm und Drang template, but the
astonishing last act boasts the action highpoint
of the series, with its set-piece inside and outside
a collapsing skyscraper.
“That’s certainly
a marquee moment. I’m not
meaning to slam other franchises,
but I don’t like the fact that they
don’t feel real, that you can feel
the visual effects in a way
that’s very different
from what we do. And
for me, and for Bay,
there’s a certain
amount of pride
involved in how
well executed it
looks. When we
saw the set and
the way it tilted,
it was really
fascinating. It’s
really hard to keep
your balance. You
couldn’t go past a
35-degree grade — it
was too dangerous. It
was crazy.”

“Paramount
passed on
the first film
five times.”
TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (2017)

Bay’s final Transformers movie, an utterly
batshit-insane exercise in maximalism, which
throws everything but a transforming kitchen
sink into the mix. If you’re wondering how
batshit-insane it is, Stanley Tucci turns up as
Merlin. Yes, Merlin. It was an underperformer
at the box office. Perhaps even something of
a wake-up call.
“There are, like, five different plots going on.
I don’t know if it’s a mistake, but we made
a choice, and the choice ended up being, ‘Wait,
what plot am I in?’ Anytime you don’t do what
you expect, you’d definitely better pay attention.
Michael felt like he’d done it now, but it led all
of us to say, ‘We have to find a new path.’ I won’t
say we were getting bored, but we weren’t
getting as stimulated as we wanted to be. And
Bumblebee gave us that chance.”

BUMBLEBEE (2018)

A response to the excess of The Last Knight,
another Knight — Travis — directed this
charming, lower-budget, lower-key, Hailee
Steinfeld-led, ’80s-set love-letter to Amblin
movies. It was critically loved, but didn’t connect
with audiences the way the Bayhem had.
“Bumblebee is its own beast. In some
ways, it’s the closest to the first movie, but it’s
still not the same. We had to go for a different
magic with Bumblebee. It was warmer, it
was softer, it was more endearing. Even if
Michael had directed it, we needed to have
a different direction because we’d kind of
played out, in my opinion, the direction we
had been going in.”

TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION
(2014)

The first reboot, with Mark Wahlberg coming
in to replace Shia LaBeouf as lead, while other
aspects also received something of a makeover;
it grossed over a billion.
“Mark is underestimated as an actor because
it seems so natural, but he does embody the
everyman. And I loved the moment when
he picked up a gun and shot at them [the
robots]. It was the first time we’d had a human,
in a way, fight back. I remember when we
first saw that, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what
we do in action pictures — we have humans
fighting back!’”

TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS
(2023)

Clockwise from top left:

Transfomers: Bumblebee
in action; Optimus Prime
in Revenge Of The Fallen;

Dark Of The Moon: Shia
LaBeouf and Rosie
Huntington-Whiteley;
Cade (Mark Wahlberg)
Alamy, Getty Images

on the run in Age Of

Extinction; Optimus Prime
in The Last Knight; Charlie
(Hailee Steinfeld) makes

Steven Caple Jr’s ’90s-set movie introduces
giant robot animals, and attempts to blend
the Bay-ian bombast with the heart and
emotion of Bumblebee. It’s the lowest-grossing
Transformers movie to date, but di Bonaventura
is hopeful that there’s more to come.
“The feedback on Bumblebee was so consistent,
which was, ‘Love the movie — where’s all the
action?’ So when we set out to make this movie,
there were two pillars of determination. One
was, ‘Let’s not give up the territory we’ve gained
on the emotional level, and let’s give them
what they want.’ And that led to the decision to
give Optimus an arc, because we’d never done
that before. It didn’t take a while to understand
that he was important — it took a while to
understand how.”

a friend in Bumblebee;

Rise Of The Beasts.

TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS IS OUT NOW ON DVD,
BLU-RAY, 4K AND DIGITAL

DECEMBER 2023

101

Billion-dollar
movies
THE 53 BIGGEST FILMS OF ALL TIME . FOUR EMPIRE
WRITERS. LOADSAMONE Y

JAMES
DYER

His favourite TV
show (starring Paul
Giamatti) is Billions.

CHRIS
HEWITT

His favourite Michael
Caine movie is the
Billion Dollar Brain.

HELEN
O’HARA

Her favourite
Terence Hill movie
is Mr. Billion.

BEN
TRAVIS

His favourite dessert
is billionaire’s
shortbread.

102

Chris: Fifty-three films have
grossed over a billion dollars
worldwide. Now, some would
argue that crossing this
threshold means that you have
to cater to the lowest common
denominator, and that these
films must therefore, by
definition, be empty tributes
to the gods of IP. So, can
a movie that appeals to the
great masses be a great movie?
Helen: I don’t think a movie’s
audience has to be limited
for it to be good. If you
reverse it, it sounds ridiculous
— what, a great movie can
only be appreciated by
a few? A great movie can be
appreciated by everybody.
James: If these films weren’t
good, with, say, five exceptions,
they wouldn’t be on this list.
They’ve made this money for
a reason, by and large.
Chris: Are you sure about
that? There are 53 films on the
list. Quite a lot of them, I would
say, are absolute stinkers and
shockers and clunkers.
Ben: A film that speaks to
the masses can be a really
powerful thing, and a real
force in the world. But
sometimes it’s a bit of
a head-scratcher to see some
films that hit with a big
audience in a big way and are
not, objectively, good films.
Helen: When Alice In
Wonderland passed a billion
dollars, I said, “That’s it —
the billion-dollar mark
doesn’t matter anymore.” It
used to denote something
extraordinary before that,
something that had struck
a cultural nerve.

DECEMBER 2023

Chris: I would agree with
that to an extent. But it’s been
fascinating watching the way
the billion-dollar club has
bloomed over the last few
years. Titanic was the first
one to do it, and then James
Cameron did it again,
spectacularly, in 2009 with
Avatar. He’s the first
filmmaker to appeal to five
quadrants. And let’s put this
into context: three of the top
four movies of all time are
directed by James Cameron.
That is extraordinary. Why has
he cracked the code?
James: It’s worth noting that
the films Cameron has on this
list aren’t just in the billiondollar club; they’re in the twobillion-dollar club. Avatar is
a Na’vi hair away from being in
the three-billion-dollar club.
It’s insane. He’s gone for
four-quadrant appeal, he
makes films for everyone. And
it’s repeat visits, too. Avatar
was an event because you’d
never seen anything like this.
And people went again and
again. Titanic was similar. You
had to experience this thing.
Ben: I think something that
speaks to all three of those
mega Cameron movies is the
big, unashamed, sincere
romance. Cameron is a master
of action set-pieces, he delivers
insane visual spectacle, but
with those films he really
makes you feel something.
Helen: He’s a great storyteller.
The billion-dollar club vastly
over-represents on spectacle.
But the good ones have
a story that you come away
from satisfied.

Chris: Cameron has three
movies on the list. Let’s turn to
the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
which has ten. Avengers:
Endgame was the biggest film
of all time for a spell, and
there’s a run between 2014 and
2019 which I think is the most
brilliant run of sustained
blockbuster filmmaking in
history. Now, there are those
who would say that this is
symptomatic of the decline
and fall of Western civilisation.
I don’t subscribe to that.
Helen: Again, it’s stories. I’ve
called the MCU the world’s
most expensive soap opera,
which is not untrue. They’re
telling a story about a group
of characters who have
heightened adventures, in
whom you invest and who
you relate with.
James: In that run-up to
Endgame, people knew
something big was coming.

Then, after Endgame, it
probably didn’t feel quite
so essential.
Ben: And they were so careful
in how they did that for a long
time, of never giving you the
same thing twice in a row. They
were their own competition
for so long, because they just
continually improved upon
what they were doing.
Chris: What’s the best one?
James: Infinity War, by
a substantial margin. It has
the perfect ending. The
audacity of ending it that
way was extraordinary.
I remember stumbling out
of the cinema going, “I can’t
believe they did that.”
Ben: It has the best action as
well. Endgame is incredible, but
Infinity War has so much colour
and energy. People were really
hooked in on these characters.
Chris: Part of the reason we’re
doing this now is because of

Portraits: Marco Vittur

SELMAN HOŞGÖR

Barbenheimer — Oppenheimer
isn’t going to make it to
a billion, but it’s close. But
Barbie did, and then some.
And in doing so, not to put
too fine a point on it, they,
and movies like this, help to
save the experience of going
to the cinema. Also, some of
these billion-dollar movies
have given me the greatest
moviegoing experiences of my
life. I will never forget seeing
Endgame for the first time, or
Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Helen: I felt that way during
Barbie this summer. I had the
same rush in the cinema, and
that sense of discovering
something unexpected while
surrounded by other people
making the same discovery
at the same time.
Chris: The thing about
Barbie’s success that
flummoxed me is that it’s
such a fucking weird film.

Ben: I remember coming out of
the first screening of it going,
“I can’t believe in a world where
we get a film based on the IP of
Barbie, this is the film that we
got.” It feels miraculous.
Helen: I actually think Barbie
is the future of this list. I think
the model we’ve seen over the
past 25 years is fading, and so
Barbie and weirdness might
genuinely be the way forward,
as well as catering to
underserved demographics
and taking seriously an
audience that has not seen
themselves, like Black Panther
and Captain Marvel.
Chris: It’s not easy. If it
were, everyone would be
doing it. And yes, Barbie has
a huge marketing budget,
but it appealed to people
organically and naturally.
People cannot be told what
to go and see and when to
see it. They have to want it.

Helen: It’s not just as simple
as dazzle; it has to have weight
behind it. It’s an alchemy
which is magical when it
happens, which makes me
think of Top Gun: Maverick.
Chris: Tom Cruise’s only
billion-dollar movie. And, in
fact, this whole thing is grist for
the ‘movie stars are dead’ mill.
It’s all about the title and the IP
now. But that movie succeeded
because of Cruise, and the
incredible action sequences,
and because it was precisiontooled to appeal to the largest
number of people while not
feeling cynical in any way.
Helen: It’s about getting
people to the cinema who
never go to the cinema. That’s
the real trick.

James: And it’s repeat visits as
well. This is the kind of film
you don’t see once, you see it
twice or three times.
Chris: A lot of the best billiondollar grossers have directors
of vision and vigour. Take
Christopher Nolan; The Dark
Knight is an astonishing piece
of filmmaking. He’s not
making movies by committee.
Peter Jackson has two movies
on the list, including a Hobbit
movie we shouldn’t dwell on
and The Return Of The King.
James: That’s comfortably the
worst of the original three films.
Helen: That’s not really the
word to use.
James: You’re right. The least
brilliant of the three. But those
films are magnificent. I think
of The Lord Of The Rings as
a single cinematic journey in
a way that I don’t with Star
Wars or Marvel films.
Helen: The reason that
crossed the billion and the
other two hadn’t is because it
had the headwind behind it. It
was the culmination.
Chris: One filmmaker who
you might be surprised to
learn only has one film on this
list, given that he’s arguably
the greatest commercial
director of all time, is Steven
Spielberg. And even then,
Jurassic Park didn’t get there
on its initial release in 1993.
But my God, what a movie.
Talk about cultural impact.
Helen: It’s the origin of this
blockbuster model of massive
spectacle put in the trailer.
Ben: It’s handy that the best
film ever made also happens
to be a billion-dollar movie.
James: Aliens didn’t gross
a billion dollars.
Ben: It’s just the epitome of
cinematic magic for me. It’s
Spielberg magic, it’s movie
magic, it’s dinosaur magic all
in one. I will never, ever get
bored of it.
Chris: It has such a huge
cultural footprint.
Ben: And an actual gigantic
footprint, too.
Chris: Right, enough
squabbling. Let’s vote!

JURASSIC PARK
(1993)

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
(2018)

AVENGERS: ENDGAME
(2019)

THE DARK KNIGHT
(2008)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE
RETURN OF THE KING (2003)

TITANIC
(1997)

7

BARBIE
(2023)

STAR WARS EPISODE VIII:
THE LAST JEDI (2017)

AVATAR (2009)

TOP GUN: MAVERICK
(2022)

DECEMBER 2023

103

Freaks
TOD BROWNING’S
MISUNDE RSTOOD MORAL DRAMA
CONTI NU E S TO PROVOKE

WORDS ALEX GODFREY

THE MOST SHOCKING thing about Freaks
— the film so supposedly disturbing its own
studio tried to shut it down; the film that
caused an audience-member at a preview
screening to have a miscarriage; the film that
with its own marketing campaign boasted of
“pure sensationalism” — is that it really isn’t
sensationalist at all. From the start it makes the
extraordinary ordinary, contextualising the
so-called abnormal as normal. As people. Its
true subversion lies in the way it challenges our
own prejudices, flipping horror on its head,
taking society to task. Freaks was — and to
some extent still is — ahead of its time. It’s
hard to think of another film that has been
so staggeringly, wilfully misunderstood.
Even its status as a horror is something of
a red herring. Tod Browning had certainly
served his time with ghouls, and only the year
before had directed Bela Lugosi in 1931’s
Dracula. But Freaks’ true monsters are the
non-disabled bullies fleecing and exploiting the
circus sideshow’s more interesting inhabitants,
the film only leaning into terror during its final
few minutes. Up until then it’s an often convivial
peek behind the curtain, introducing us to
a fascinating found family of performers.
Browning was 16 when he joined a travelling
circus in 1896, criss-crossing America with
carnival folk, working as a clown, contortionist
and carny barker, enthusiastically embedding
himself in the community. It was a formidable
experience. He went into filmmaking in 1915,
establishing himself as a chronicler of outcasts
and outsiders, and with 1932’s Freaks he
wrapped it all into an unapologetic tribute to
fringe society. Hollywood didn’t want that.
In the midst of the genre’s golden age —
James Whale’s Frankenstein had also hit in
1931 — MGM’s head of production Irving
Thalberg asked Browning for “the ultimate
horror film”. Instead, Browning delivered the
Freaks screenplay, by Willis Goldbeck and
Leon Gordon, loosely based on Tod Robbins’
short story ‘Spurs’. “Well, I asked for
something horrible,” said Thalberg, head in
hands, having inhaled the grim dénouement.
Freaks would be a celebration of the

104

DECEMBER 2023

The friends gather as
The Bearded Lady (Olga
Roderick) gives birth.

shunned. Harry Earles, the 3’ 2” German
entertainer who had played a murderer
disguised as a baby in Browning’s 1925 crime
drama The Unholy Three, played Hans, the
`
immaculate gentleman infatuated with
conniving trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga
Baclanova). Earles’ 3’ 4” sister Daisy is Hans’
fiancée Frieda, broken-hearted at Hans’
wandering eyes, and crushed by his increasing
gullibility. There is Johnny Eck, who has no legs
but bright eyes and a winning grin; conjoined
twins Daisy and Violet Hilton; intersex
performer Josephine Joseph; and Prince
Randian, ‘The Living Torso’, who we see
opening a matchbox, taking one out and
lighting a cigarette, all solely with his mouth,
filmed matter-of-factly by Browning.
He presents them all as such, his neutral
gaze never leering or recoiling, as you’d expect
from a guy who spent his formative years with
circuses. He invites us into their lives. So here
they are, getting by, fending off insults from the
non-disabled people who deride them. Alas, as

production began, life mirrored art, with some
MGM employees so disturbed by the cast, they
were forced out of the commissary so as not to
put people off their lunch, instead made to
eat in a separate tent. All the more reason for
Browning to soldier on.
Freaks bursts into horror at the end, as
the gang, now wise to Cleopatra’s murderous
scheming, plot revenge: the shot of an only
partially lit Prince Randian on the ground
behind the wheel of a cart, peering from the
shadows as Cleo carries the poisoned Hans into
her carriage, is as indelible as any iconic frame.
As the circus leaves town at night, rain smashes
down, lightning striking, the horse-and-cart
convoy dramatically crashing. As chaos takes
over, so do the freaks, switchblades in hands, in
mouths, wading through the sodden mud, Cleo
screaming for her life as they chase her through
the woods. Brief as it is, this sequence, so Gothic,
so primal, is enough to make Freaks a genre
classic, its challenging social commentary
complementing its nightmarish aesthetic.

Below, top to
bottom: Lovers
Hans (Harry
Earles) and
Cleopatra (Olga

CHOSEN BY NICK DE SEMLYEN

Baclanova);
Prince Randian;
The scheming
Cleopatra,
turned into a
duck lady by the
vengeful freaks.

1

HOUSEBOUND

(OUT NOW, DVD/BR)

Everyone knows M3GAN, but director
Gerard Johnson’s first film remains
underseen. Inspired by a viewing of
Ghostbusters, it sets a woman under house
arrest against... Well, you’ll see. Peter
Jackson, no stranger to Kiwi horror-comedy,
called it “bloody brilliant”. We concur.
2

PANDORA’S BOX

(30 OCTOBER, BLU-RAY)

Not be confused with a double-pack of Avatar
Blu-rays (that would be ‘Pandora’s Box Set’),
this 1929 German film still hypnotises.
Following the intoxicating Lulu (Louise Brooks)
as she leaves tragedies in her stylish wake,
it’s strange, sultry, and iconically coiffeured.
3

SCROOGED

Alamy, Mary Evans

(6 NOVEMBER, 4K BR)

After that, Browning flashes forward:
Cleo is now one of them, performing in a pit,
clucking and squawking, a human duck, padding
about on her hands, her legs removed. There
was originally more context in which, as we
meet Cleo the duck woman at this freak show in
a London music hall, somebody calls her name.
“For a moment, there seems to be a glimmer of
intelligence, of recognition in her eye,” reads the
screenplay, “but this passes at once.” Meanwhile,
her co-conspirator, malicious strongman Hercules
(Henry Victor), castrated by the freaks, is now
a tenor. He sings on stage as Cleo quacks along.
This went, along with a whopping
30 minutes of footage, after disastrous test
screenings in which distressed audiences ran
out screaming. Thalberg cut the footage himself,
and ordered a new, happier epilogue, leaving
us with the 64-minute film we have today —
a shadow of its deeper, darker self. Yet it still had
power. Upon release, Freaks garnered mostly
hysterical, hand-wringing reviews by aghast
critics. The film bombed; MGM withdrew it; the

Making it was, apparently, grimmer than
getting a lump of coal in your stocking. Bill
Murray himself doesn’t like it. But the truth
remains: Scrooged is a hoot. If you like your
spins on Dickens to feature Carol Kane
wrestling moves, look no further.
4

TALK TO ME

(OUT NOW, DVD/BR/4K BR)

UK banned it for 30 years.
Even with the film itself castrated, it stands
apart, a classic shorn by its own studio, but still
towering enough to cut through. And amid all
the spectacle, beyond the headlining acts, and
despite the controversy, it’s the sweetness
that makes it endure — Browning’s humble
compassion, the film’s sadness matching its joy.
A broken heart pulsates through it. Let alone
its unabashed ode to the maligned. And in
a 2023 where many Hollywood villains are
marked by disfigurements, Freaks is still taking
us to task. For a 1932 film, it doesn’t seem
outdated at all.
FREAKS/THE UNKNOWN/THE MYSTIC:
TOD BROWNING’S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS IS
OUT NOW ON CRITERION BLU-RAY

By now, you know the deal: freaky tattooed
hand, incantation, demonic possession,
yada yada. 2023’s most instantly iconic
horror film (expect sequels to join the already
rushed-out merch), it’s a fist of fury that can’t
be stopped. Watch it. But best not talk to it.

GHOST DOG: THE WAY
OF THE SAMURAI

5

(OUT NOW, DVD/BR/4K BR)

In which Forest Whitaker wields
a samurai sword to take on Itchy
& Scratchy-loving gangsters. Jim
Jarmusch’s crime
drama is weird as
hell but oddly moving.
And it’s a career apex
for Whitaker: his oneof-a-kind hitman barks
and bites.

DECEMBER 2023

105

Elemental
D IRECTOR PE TE R SO HN ON
T H E E MOTIONA L HIGH POINTS
OF H IS PIXAR MOVIE

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

106

DECEMBER 2023

PETER SOHN’S ELEMENTAL, which takes place
in a world populated by anthropomorphised
versions of fire, wind, earth and water, is one
of the feel-good stories of the year: not just
because it turned things around at the box office
after the slowest start for a Pixar movie, but
because the movie itself is a charmer, packed
with some of the animation studio’s most
beautiful sequences. Here, writer-director Sohn
talks us through the film’s key moments.

THROUGH THE MIST

Elemental is about many things, but it’s certainly
concerned with the immigrant experience (Sohn’s
parents came to America from South Korea),
as seen in the opening shot where the camera
pierces a sea fog to find a nervous immigrant
couple, the Firish Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen)
and Cinder (Shila Ommi), huddled together as
their boat arrives in Element City. “The idea of
following the parents coming to a new land was
in most versions that we had of the film,” says
Sohn. “The concept of light coming through
water was always a visual metaphor that hung
through all the different versions of the movie.”

WATER MEET CUTE

It wasn’t marketed as such, but Elemental is,
unashamedly and unabashedly, Pixar’s first

romcom, detailing the burgeoning relationship
between Bernie and Cinder’s daughter, the
fiery Amber (Leah Lewis), and the watery
Wade (Mamoudou Athie), who we meet when
the latter comes crashing into the former’s
basement through her water pipes, and then —
because he’s so in touch with his emotions —
immediately starts crying. As meet cutes go, it’s
got Harry and Sally licked, but Sohn says there
were concerns. “This idea that this character
would come out blubbering and feel sort of
weak right off the bat was something very
purposeful,” he says. “But some people are
shocked by his crying — they were like,
‘I don’t care for him.’ Part of me was excited
by that. Could we start off in this place, and still
fall in love with him?”

WE NEED A MONTAGE

Every good romcom needs a montage in which
its lead pair begin to fall hopelessly for each
other, and Sohn delivers with a fun sequence,
soundtracked by Lauv’s ‘Steal The Show’, in
which Wade and Ember go to the cinema, play
in the park, and generally swoon hard for each
other. “That was one of the first things I had
[storyboarded] early on,” says Sohn. “This
version of the montage was about cracking
through Ember, where Wade is slowly winning

through and she’s falling in love with the city
and with him.” Any similarities to a comparable
sequence in The Naked Gun, by the way, are
completely coincidental. “I have never made
that connection,” laughs Sohn. “I love that
montage. Oh my God, why didn’t anyone on the
crew say anything?” This is a job for Police Squad.

THE CRYING GAME

Don’t worry, parents: Elemental isn’t a remake
of the 1996 Neil Jordan movie. Instead, the
‘Crying Game’ is something played by Wade and
his family, who, despite being easy gushers, try
to make each other cry. Sohn is very open about
how the loss of both of his parents during
production affected him. “There’s a version of
the movie that was really dark because I was
going through grief personally,” he admits.
“Pete Docter, my EP, was like, ‘Was this always
the thing that you wanted to do? I remember
your original pitch with heart.’ And so after that
I went on a little vacation and drew all these
ideas.” That’s where the Crying Game, a way of
openly pouring out your heart without fear or
embarrassment or judgement, was born.

EMBER BEGINS TO SPARK

When it comes to the Crying Game, though, the
closed-off Ember is a tougher nut to crack than

Wade’s family. But crack she does, when Wade
reaches her with a heartfelt speech about how
their love has transformed him, leading to
a beautiful, impressionistic visual flourish in
which Sohn changes animation styles to take us
inside Ember’s mind’s eye. “We didn’t want to
make it feel like Wade was gaming Ember to
make her tearful,” says Sohn. “We were hoping
that it felt that the world sort of disappears from
them.” Sohn credits story artist Anna Benedict
with the idea. “She had tried this experiment
out, and quickly sketched it out in an evening,”
he says. “And we all felt it.”

WADE RETURNS

Pixar has never been shy about bringing
audiences to the edge of the emotional precipice.
Just the very mention of Toy Story 3’s furnace
scene can reduce grown adults to sodden
messes. But Sohn goes a little further with Wade
in his dramatic finale, in which the character
sacrifices himself, by turning into steam, so that
Ember may survive a flood. And just when there
isn’t a dry eye in the house, Wade cries himself
back into being when Ember repeats his Crying
Game speech. “A big death is so sensitive and it’s
such a risk, because you could throw your whole
audience out,” admits Sohn. “But this idea
formed to have our cake and eat it too with the

sacrifice that happens for Wade. It wasn’t like,
“Let’s fool everybody.” It was a real, sincere
moment for Ember to feel the loss.”

PUT A BOW ON IT

“The event that had triggered this whole
movie was, I got invited to a ceremony in
New York, because I was from the Bronx
and they wanted to honour that,” says Sohn.
“I brought my parents and thanked them
in front of a lot of people, and it was very
emotional. And so a big part of the film early on
was Ember, on stage, thanking her parents, but
it wasn’t working. It felt so cold.” Which is why
the film now ends with Ember mending her
somewhat fractious relationship with her father
by bowing to him, just before she and Wade
leave Element City on their own immigrants’
odyssey. “When my dad left his country in the
late ’60s, he did this big bow as a sign of respect,”
explains Sohn. “And Ember’s bow was meant to
be gratitude towards her father, but it became
so much more — a sign of love, a sign of respect
— because it was done culturally. It was from
a personal place, but it was something that felt
like it meant more.”
ELEMENTAL IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY, 4K, DIGITAL
AND DISNEY+

DECEMBER 2023

107

movie marketplace

southwellsculpture.uk

please call Imogen Jackaman 01733 459278

FrightFest

FR IGHTFEST
SINCE THE TURN of the century, I’ve spent
August Bank Holiday weekend at FrightFest,
arguably the UK’s flagship horror festival. One
reason I risk screen blindness to see so many of
the 65-ish films scheduled is to get ahead with
the review slots of this column. Some FF films
turn up on various platforms, formats or in
cinemas immediately… others creep out over the
months (and, sometimes, years) to come. A few
are never heard from again — which means
they’re possibly terrible, though occasionally
luckless. Several I sometimes think I imagined,
only for other festival-goers to confirm that, yes,
there really was a Snoop Dogg’s Hood Of Horror…
or a riffle through my shoebox of check discs*
reminds me that someone remade The Banana
Splits as a robots-on-the-rampage slasher film.
Inevitably, we focus on one-offs… outstanding
achievements in horror and ‘go-straight-to-moviejail’ disasters which creep through. But a festival
programme can just drop you in a morass of
movies, so you can spot connections or ongoing/
coming trends. Every year, FF is a health-check
for horror, a genre which is obliged to track what
we’re worried about or afraid of and show it back
to us with the addition of a giant, tentacled being
from the beyond or a masked slasher lurking
outside the cabin in the woods. In the last few
years, for obvious reasons, there have been a lot
of lockdown-set pandemic-paranoia movies.
Now, we’re getting the first what-lessons-didn’twe-learn? horrors, as the world opens up but we

THE LEGE NDARY AUTHOR AND
CRITIC BRINGS US HIS UNIQUE
TAKE S ON CULT CINE MA
MATTHEW BRAZIER

Top: Otto Baxter’s allegorical The Puppet Asylum.
Above: Pandemic-paranoia movie The Moor.

remain terrified — two solid films about the
claustrophobia of wide-open spaces are The
Seeding (set in a Utah desert crater) and The Moor
(set in Yorkshire). It’s great to see more than just
lip-service being paid to diversity, with films by and
about a wider range of people — see Paris Zarcilla’s
Raging Grace, Clare Cooney’s Departing Seniors,
Alice Miao Mackay’s T Blockers, Ariel Vida’s Trim
Season and Otto Baxter’s The Puppet Asylum.
Longtime readers will be glad to hear about
new (excellent) work from filmmakers I’ve
flagged before: Onur Tukel (Poundcake, about
a killer rapist targeting straight, white rich guys
in New York and the rainbow coalition of New
Yorkers who don’t really care); horror collective
the Adams Family (Where The Devil Roams,
about a strange family of carnival performers in
the 1930s); Sean Hogan (folk horror To Fire You
Come At Last); Graham Hughes (low-budget
multiversal trip Hostile Dimensions); and Junta
Yamaguchi (whose Beyond The Infinite Two
Minutes follow-up River features another,
wholly different two-minute timeslip).
Also a word for the festival’s commitment
to documentaries, with three outstanding looks
at arcane stretches of film history — Sarah
Appleton and Jasper Sharp’s The J-Horror Virus,
David Gregory’s Enter The Clones Of Bruce
(remember the post-Bruce Lee careers of Bruce
Li and Bruce Le?), and Jake West’s moving
Mancunian Man (about extraordinary
Manchester-based VHS megastar Cliff Twemlow).
* We focus-grouped ‘Kim’s Shoebox Of Shriek’
as a column title and went with the Crypt
one instead.

DAMPYR

THE KNOCKING

HERD

THE BEST MAN

(DIGITAL)

(DIGITAL)

(DVD, DIGITAL)

(DIGITAL)

Italian comics company
Sergio Bonelli Editore start
a possible Bonelliverse
with Dampyr — about the
super-powered son (Wade
Briggs) of a vampire who
battles the undead during
the 1990s Balkan Wars.
David Morrissey models
a heavy-metal haircut and
lashes out with CG tendrils
as the bloodthirsty big bad.

In this Finnish horror, three
siblings return to their
childhood home in a remote
woodland to sort out
their inheritance... and one
taps into a darker legacy
connected with local
legends about forest spirits.
It’s mostly subtle chills
and character beats, but
a bark-skinned woodwitch
shows up with an axe.

Though it has a familiar
sense of apocalyptic panic,
Steven Pierce’s Herd is
a very different zombie
picture. An uncomfortable
element is characters who
have seen too many movies
going full ‘shoot-’em-up’
before establishing if the
infected are a) dangerous
(they only react when
threatened) or b) incurable.

If you hired an out-ofseason resort hotel and
fed AI a prompt to come
up with ‘Die Hard At An
Upscale Wedding — But
Cheap’, you might come
up with something as
utterly generic as The Best
Man. Giving Dolph
Lundgren some baddie
heads to crack helps a bit
— but not much.

SYMPATHY FOR
THE DEVIL
(DIGITAL)

Joel Kinnaman parks by
the Las Vegas hospital
where his wife is giving
birth when Nicolas Cage
— red hair, demonic beard,
gun — slides into his car
and tells him to drive into
the desert. Threats,
violence, a lot of chat,
character revelations and
a carnage climax ensue.

DECEMBER 2023

109

Tom
Courtenay

THE SEASONED BRITISH ACTOR
ON HIS FILM (AND PANEL
SHOW ) LIFE IN PICTURES
WORDS IAN FREER

HAVING RECENTLY WRAPPED on Queen
At Sea with Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay is
taking a well-earned break, doing crosswords,
going for walks, training his puppy Nelly and
watching sport (“It looked at one time we might
come unstuck,” he says about the Ryder Cup).
So, to mark the Blu-ray release of his excellent
1964 World War I drama King And Country, it’s
a good time to talk through his glittering career
in key images. “I saw the pictures you sent on
my wife’s computer,” he tells us. “I don’t have
a computer anymore. Let’s try this.”

JUST DESERT
KING AND COUNTRY (1964)

110

DECEMBER 2023

THE RUNNING MAN
THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE
RUNNER (1962)

“This was shot at Ruxley Towers but called
Ruxton Towers in the film. I still see the location
[when] coming back to London along the A3. It
was a very low-budget film. The camera was on
a car and if you look closely, you can see the tyre
marks on the grass. Sometimes I just ran past
the camera. I did some tests before actual
filming. They didn’t have to pay me for the tests,
but then they put a lot of those shots in the film.
They diddled me there.”

MILKING IT
BILLY LIAR (1963)

“I’d played Billy Fisher on stage where I took
over from Albert Finney. Billy is choosing
between going to London with Liz (Julie
Christie) and staying with his fantasy life in
Bradford. Ironically, this scene was shot at
Marylebone Station in London. Billy gets off the
train to get some milk. People always say to me,
‘Why the hell didn’t you stay on the train with
Julie Christie?’ The script said: ‘Billy doesn’t get
on the train.’ So what was I going to do? Get
them to change it?”

Alamy, Getty Images

“I’d done two other films, but I was still
young when I did King And Country. I bought
this little tiny house in Chelsea and was having
some Norwegian wood — like the Beatles
song — put on the wall. So this carpenter, an
old boy, came round. He saw I had this huge
tape recorder that I was using to learn my
lines from this scene, which is where Arthur
Hamp is giving testimony about what makes
him desert the army in World War I. So
I played this story and this old boy had to sit
down. He’d been in the trenches and it just
overwhelmed him. It was a wonderful moment.
I’ll never forget it.”

AN EARLY BATH
THE DRESSER (1983)

“This was my and Albert Finney’s first shot.
I don’t know why we chose that. My hair was
going the wrong way so I did it myself after that.
That’s all I remember. I had done the play so
I knew it backwards. Albert was not in the play
but I’m jolly glad he did the film because that’s
how we became best friends. When I was in
drama school, we were always talking about
Albert Finney. Sometimes at dinner during
The Dresser, after I’d been winding him up,
I’d say, ‘I used to be in awe of him,’ and Albert
would say, ‘He still is!’”

PRIVATES ON PARADE
DAD’S ARMY (2016)

“This parade, for the end of the film, was shot
in Bridlington. I’m from Hull but we lived in
Bridlington for a while. It wasn’t much of a part
— I couldn’t do an impression of Clive Dunn
— and my wife didn’t think I should do it, but it
was up on the coast, staying in Scarborough, and
it was quite enjoyable. I worked with the lovely
Alison Steadman although our scenes were cut.
It was very amiable and I liked Oliver [Parker],
the director. It was quite a pleasant experience.”

HAPPY IN HATS
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965)

“Somebody sent this picture for me to sign
a couple of years ago and I had never seen
it before. It’s Julie Christie [who plays the
enigmatic Lara, the female lead] and I having
a laugh off-set. It was really nice because
Pasha [Antipov, Courtenay’s idealistic
character who marries Lara before going
missing in action] is quite a grim part,
especially later on in the film. You can’t really
tell from this image, but I can remember Julie
started to feel the pressure that she was in
such a big film. But this is just a nice, jolly,
friendly picture.”

PEERS ON THE PIER
LAST ORDERS (2001)

“This is Raymondo [Ray Winstone], dear David
Hemmings and dear Bob Hoskins — both gone
— and me delivering Michael Caine’s ashes on
Margate pier. We were a little band of brothers.
I remember trying to give Ray elocution lessons.
We used to make each other laugh so much,
Fred Schepisi [director] had to tell us off for
buggering about. After Fred had given us
a lecture, they went off and I thought they’d
gone out of earshot. I said, ‘Fred. It’s not me.
It’s them. But I don’t want them to think I’m
a miserable sod so I’ve got to join in.’ Then we
did a few days at Pinewood and this lady comes
up and takes her coat off. She’s wearing very
little underneath — bra, pants — and she starts
rubbing herself against me. She said, ‘I hear
you’ve been a bit miserable. So I’ve come to
cheer you up.’ They worked it on me.”

PANEL (SHOW) BEATER
WOULD I LIE TO YOU? CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
(2016)

“I’ve never seen this but people said I was very
funny. David Mitchell was very nice. Rob Brydon
has become a friend since then. I remember
I did an impression of Maggie Smith doing an
impression of my dog Stanley, who sadly passed
last November. I became friends with Maggie
on Quartet. Stanley used to cross his paws so
Maggie would cross one hand over the other and
go [does pitch-perfect Maggie Smith impression],
‘Oh, Stanley.’ I was dreading doing the show
because I was so nervous and then, when we
started, I was fine.”
KING AND COUNTRY IS OUT ON 6 NOVEMBER ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

DECEMBER 2023

111

MERYL STREEP

7
8

She appears, uncredited, as herself in
which Farrelly Brothers movie?

Her 1988 film, Evil Angels, is known
by a different title here in the UK.
What is it?

9
10
11

Her highest-grossing movie posted
a worldwide total of $694 million. Name it.

1
2
3

How many Oscars has Streep won so far over
her career?
Name the movie that she won her first Oscar
for, in the Best Supporting Actress category.

How many years separated her second win,
for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and her
third, for The Iron Lady?

4

Streep holds the record for the most acting
Academy Award nominations. Is that: a) 17,
b) 19, or c) 21?

5

In 1977, she made her feature debut. What
was the name of her first film? A clue: it shares
a name with another film Streep made in 2009.

6

Streep has played a character with the
surname ‘Orlean’ in two different movies.
Name them.

In which 1990 film does she perform the
song ‘I’m Checkin’ Out’?

In The Devil Wears Prada, what is the
name of the magazine Streep’s Miranda
Priestly edits?

12
13

Which Streep film ends with the line, “Do
you remember where you parked the car?”?

Streep made one movie with her thenpartner, John Cazale, before he died in
1978. What was that film?

14
15

The Bridges Of Madison County is adapted
from a novel by which writer?

Where does Florence Foster Jenkins’ final
performance take place in the 2016 film of
the same name?

16
17

She’s played a President and a Prime
Minister. But in what film is Streep a queen?

She worked with Steven Spielberg on The
Post, but prior to that lent her voice to A.I.
Artificial Intelligence. Who did she play?

18
19
20

Meryl is not her real name. Is it a) Sophie,
b) Mary, or c) Susan?
Which British music producer is Streep’s
son-in-law?

Who directed Streep on film in Silkwood
and Postcards From The Edge, on TV in
Angels In America, and on stage in The Seagull?

ANSWERS 1. Three 2. Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979) 3. Twenty-nine, from 1983 to 2012 4. c) 21 5. Julia 6. Adaptation and Don’t Look Up 7. Stuck On You 8. A
Cry In The Dark 9. Mamma Mia! 10. Postcards From The Edge 11. ‘Runway’ 12. Death Becomes Her 13. The Deer Hunter 14. Robert James Waller
15. Carnegie Hall 16. The Ant Bully 17. Blue Mecha 18. b) Mary 19. Mark Ronson 20. Mike Nichols
112

DECEMBER 2023

1

2

3

4

5
6

7

8

9

10

11
12

13

14

15
16
17

SIX BRAND-NEW
CRITERION
TITLES

18

19

20

21

22

23

1
7
9
10
11
14
15
17
18
21
22
23

Jude Law and Nicole Kidman star in this
Anthony Minghella drama (4,8)
Role played by Leonard Whiting and Leonardo
DiCaprio (5)
Zoe, who is Nyota, Neytiri and a Lioness leader (7)
Could be Cassie, Lana or Clubber (4)
“The crash was only the beginning” warned the
tagline (5)
National Lampoon’s — House (John Belushi
movie) (6)
Certain to be at Cannes — or Carry On with
less? (6)
Wright, whose micro-budget first feature was
A Fistful Of Fingers (5)
She’s a young witch with a delivery service (4)
See 5 Down
Maybe director Lubitsch, maybe Blofeld (5)
Person who manages the day-to-day logistics
on a movie (4,8)

AKA Captain Marvel (5,7)
Rebel — (Sofia Boutella) (4)
The Little Mermaid villain played by Melissa
McCarthy (6)
4 It describes Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley (8)
5/21 Across He made Twins and the original
Ghostbusters (4,7)
6 Playwright who adapted The French Lieutenant’s
Woman for the big screen (6,6)
8 Pom Klementieff character with antennae and
empathic abilities (6)
12 His name is Jean-Claude (3,5)
13 This links Psycho, Raiders and John Wayne (6)
16 Juno’s Jennifer or The Great Escape’s
James (6)
19 Multi-Oscar-winning musical with Leslie Caron
and Maurice Chevalier (4)
20 If you’re watching The Cincinnati Kid, then it
must be Tuesday! (4)
1
2
3

It’s always a pleasure to have Criterion in
Crossword Corner, and this month we have
not one, not two, but six typically brilliant titles
that are coming to the Collection in November
and December. First up is After Hours, Martin
Scorsese’s romp through nighttime 1980s
Manhattan; next, Tod Browning’s Sideshow
Shockers, including 1932’s unique Freaks;
then 1992 crime thriller One False Move, with
Billy Bob Thornton; Peter Bogdanovich’s
sultry classic The Last Picture Show; 1928’s
The Circus, Charlie Chaplin’s last silent picture;
and finally Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the
Mexican maestro’s new take on an old tale.
We’ve got a copy of all six on 4K or Blu-ray
for ten winners. So crack the crossword, solve
the anagram and follow the instructions below.
THE CRITERION COLLECTION IS AVAILABLE FROM
SELECTED RETAILERS

COMPETITION ENDS 20 NOVEMBER
HOW TO ENTER Take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange them to form the name of an actor, director or character. Visit
www.empireonline.com/crossword and fill out the form, along with your answer, in the provided field. Entry is free and closes at midnight on
20 November. Winners are selected at random. See below for terms and conditions.
NOVEMBER’S ANSWERS ACROSS: 1 Duffer, 4 Grodin, 9 Angel, 10 Seconds, 11 Stan Laurel, 14 Malick, 16 Gollum, 18 Black Widow, 21 Cheadle,
23 Dooku, 24 Nature, 25 Gawain. DOWN: 1 Drax, 2 Fight Club, 3 Ellen, 5 Ricardo, 6 Don, 7 Nostromo, 8 Isaac, 12 La Llorona, 13 American, 15 Chandor,
17 Akeem, 19 India, 20 Dunn, 22 Eat. ANAGRAM BEN AFFLECK
TERMS AND CONDITIONS: One entry per person. Entries are free. Entries must be received before 21 November or will not be valid. The Competition is only open to people aged 18 and over who live in the United Kingdom and are not a Bauer employee

or their immediate family. One winner will be selected at random from all valid entries. Competition promoted by H Bauer Publishing t/a Empire (“Empire”). Empire’s choice of winner is final, and no correspondence will be entered into in this regard. The winner will
be notified, via email, between seven and ten days after the competition ends. Empire will email the winner a maximum of three times. If the winner does not respond to the message within 14 days of the competition’s end, Empire will select another winner at random
and the original winner will not win a prize. Empire is not responsible for late delivery or unsatisfactory quality of the prize. Entrants agree to the collection of their personal data in accordance with Empire’s privacy policy: http://www.bauerdatapromise.co.uk/.
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DECEMBER 2023

113

Merrill is asleep on a chair in the den. The
television is playing. We hear a female newsreader’s
(Rhonda Overby) voice. As she speaks, Merrill
wakes up and starts watching the TV.

THE A LIEN REVEAL

Signs
CHOSEN BY BRIAN DUFFIELD

Then the camera tracks the kids as they run to
another door. The cameraman runs with them.
On the soundtrack, eerie music begins to build.

Newsreader: The startling footage we’re about

Watching the TV, Merrill — fully caught up in the
footage — waves his hands at the set.

to show you was photographed by a 42-year-old,
Romero Valadares.

Merrill: Move, children! Vamonos!

As Merrill rubs his eyes and sits up, the camera
pushes in on him.
Newsreader: This video was taken yesterday
afternoon at his son’s seventh birthday in the city
of Passo Fundo, Brazil. It was sent to the local
news bureau there and sent to us via satellite just
a few minutes ago.

Back on the TV, the cameraman now trains his
lens on the side of the house, and an alleyway
with the hedge at one side.
A young kid starts talking to the camera, in
Portuguese… but there is one sentence in English.
Kid: It’s behind!

(DIRECTOR)

Now we cut to the television, and see the
newsreader’s face.

BRIAN DUFFIELD [director, No One Will
Save You]: “One of the best scenes ever in
movies is Joaquin Phoenix in Signs, watching
the news, and the news plays a pre-iPhone
recording of a birthday party, and all of
a sudden a tall green alien emerges from
the bushes and walks by, Bigfoot-style, and
Joaquin loses his mind. I don’t know if I’ve
ever seen a bigger jump scare in a movie.
It’s so effective and cool, and it’s such an
impactful, amazing exposition scene. The
alien’s clearly CG, and you don’t care. It’s my
favourite Shyamalan scene. It’s everything
he’s perfect at.”
INT. CUPBOARD UNDER THE STAIRS — DAY

After his family has been plagued by what
appears to be extra-terrestrial activity, Merrill Hess
(Joaquin Phoenix) has fashioned a makeshift den
under the stairs in his brother Graham’s house.

114

DECEMBER 2023

Newsreader: All initial opinions are, this is
genuine. What you’re about to see may disturb you.

We cut back to Merrill, who leans forward as
we hear sounds of children playing at a birthday
party. He stands up, and moves closer to the
TV, bringing his chair with him.

The camera zooms in, the music builds… and
then a giant green figure, clearly not human,
walks out from behind the hedge, looking directly
at the camera. The kids scream.
Back in the farmhouse, Merrill clasps his hand over
his mouth, his eyes widening. But he can’t scream
— there are kids in the house and he doesn’t
want to scare them. So instead he settles for:
Merrill: Oh!

Now we see the TV, which is playing footage
of a group of children at a birthday party. They
are shouting excitedly, but with a note of fear.
A dog is barking.
We see that they are all indoors, but the party has
been set up outside. The children are all at the
glass doors, hollering about something. Something
that appears to have sent them scarpering inside.
The camera zooms in on the hedge, but sees
nothing but cake and balloons.

He gets up and staggers back towards the wall,
placing his hand over his mouth again. On the
screen, the footage rewinds and starts to replay.
Merrill steps forward, aghast.
On the TV, the figure appears again, and this time
the footage is paused, leaving us with that image
of what seems to be a giant green alien, staring
directly at the audience.
SIGNS IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL

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