We spoke to Gal Gadot and Danny Huston from Wonder Woman, as well as director Patty Jenkins, about the real-life characters featured in the film, why Jenkins chose WWI for the setting, and what Wonder Woman’s greatest power actually is. Check it out!
If you flick through the celebrity pages of most British newspapers — particularly the free sheets — you’ll likely recognise Jaime Winstone. As Ray Winstone‘s daughter she’s part of that select set of star children — think Peaches and Pixie, Lily and Alfie, Kelly and Jack — with whom the tabloid press seem to have a keen fascination; especially when it comes to photographing them on nights out at hip London clubs. At 23 years old, it’s no surprise Winstone enjoys having a good time of an evening, but it’s her daytime activities which are becoming increasingly more interesting.
As an actress, she made her debut only 5 years ago, alongside Ashley Walters in powerful Brit drama Bullet Boy, and she’s been quietly building a solid body of work ever since. She played as part of the ensemble cast of Noel Clarke‘s Kidulthood, tried her hand at horror with Donkey Punch and Dead Set, and shared the screen with David Suchet in Poirot.
Her five favourite films reveal her passions, her upbringing and the steps that brought her into the industry, and her latest project, Boogie Woogie, released later in the year, promises to continue her quest to be taken seriously as an actress, not just a celebrity. Co-starring Gillian Anderson, Heather Graham and Danny Huston, Winstone plays a manipulative young British artist, and recently attended the film’s premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where RT sat down with her.
La Haine
The Big Lebowski
Lawrence of Arabia
Total Recall
Pulp Fiction
“It’s definitely up there because of the cinematography, the cultural references, the graffiti, and the art. It’s that kind of high-standard indie film and the French make such beautiful films anyway. They seem to be in a league of their own. All the references to the riots and the times and what was going on, that’s particularly why I love that film.”
La Haine
The Big Lebowski
Lawrence of Arabia
Total Recall
Pulp Fiction
“Jeff Bridges is amazing. The cast, the script; it’s written so well in terms of characters. It’s genius, it’s funny, and it’s wacky. It’s about a big stoner, man, and it’s just really great.”
La Haine
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Lawrence of Arabia
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“It was one of the first films I ever watched when I was young. It really had impact. The music just carries you while you’re sitting there watching it. I remember watching it with my dad, actually sat on my dad’s belly, and saying to him how much I loved it!”
La Haine
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Lawrence of Arabia
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“I’m a total sci-fi freak, particularly when it comes to Arnie and machine guns. It’s just brilliant — genius. ‘Give those people air,’ and all that. I just love it. I love the mutants too. It’s like an old comic book that’s been turned into a film.”
La Haine
The Big Lebowski
Lawrence of Arabia
Total Recall
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“I’m thinking of a bunch of gangster films I’d like to include, like Bronx Tale is a particular favourite, but my final choice is Pulp Fiction. It’s a film I never get bored watching. It’s shocking, it’s stylised, it’s clever and the soundtrack is kickass.”
La Haine
The Big Lebowski
Lawrence of Arabia
Total Recall
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Continue onto the next page for our exclusive interview with Jaime as she talks about spending time on sets with dad and how she got into acting.
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Jaime Winstone: I don’t really know, to be honest. When I was younger I never said, “I want to be an actress.” I always wanted to be involved in the production side — putting on a play or getting involved with the clothes or whatever — but I could never really see myself acting. I’d do creative stuff, in drama class, but I’d never be the one to say, “Oh, can I be up front,” because that’d make me cringe. But Des Hamilton, the casting director, got me in for Bullet Boy, and it just went from there. The illusion of being an actress and being completely dramatic and loving the attention is not that true, you know, there are a lot of actors I know who are extremely shy. And I sometimes fit into that bracket, when it comes to acting I love it and I take it very seriously. I knew as soon as I was in front of the camera that it was right and I was in my right shoes.
I grew up heavily into horror films. When I was younger, that was basically all I watched. And Lawrence of Arabia! [laughs] I was really into my Freddy Kruegers and my zombie films and I was always fascinated with moving image and movies. With the escapism you get when you go to the cinema, when you sit in your darkened room and watch a film. It can take you out of your world for a little bit, and I think that’s the extended passion of why I do it, because I get to become someone else for however long. You can experiment in another world and find what you can draw from a particular character. I think we’re very lucky to be able to do that for a career. Some might take it for granted, but I love it.
Winstone in Noel Clarke’s Kidulthood.
JW: Quite a bit, actually. When I was younger I remember spending a lot of time in theatres watching my dad, because he went through a bit of a theatre stage. I was completely on set throughout most of my dad’s career. I was heavily involved in Nil by Mouth and I was living with my dad and Gary Oldman while we were shooting that. It was a bit bizarre and weird and I didn’t really know what was going on!
I went to do a bit of work experience in Prague Film Festival and got a bit of a view on how the big machine turns and how films are actually made on set. How that runner rigs that certain light and how that light affects that certain area. I was educated when it comes to film. I think that’s why I’m so confident that this is what I want to do. I’ve been lucky enough to experience the full effect of filmmaking. Some people come out of drama school and think, “Right, I’m off to be a big star,” and hardly any of them have stepped foot in a studio before.
I guess I don’t really have that fear, you know. I did running on a Scorsese film, getting people teas and coffees. I spent time on the Indiana Jones set with my dad. You get a sense that on those giant films, the scale of it is so huge but it still ticks like any other films. It’s still a group of people getting together; it’s just that they have a lot more money, a lot more power and a lot more time, which a lot of films I’ve done haven’t. I’ve seen quick, short independent film sets with British money where the turnaround is very quick, and then watching a massive film with Spielberg planning two days for one scene.
I do feel I’ve had a lot of experience and influence that’s helped me, not necessarily get my foot in the door, but helped me understand what it is I want to do.
Continue as Winstone talks about her latest film, Boogie Woogie, and working with Hollywood’s finest.
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JW: Definitely. You’ve got to work, at the end of the day, and this year’s been tough for the industry I think, but it’s still going. In terms of making choices, I’ve always had that support from my dad and my family and my agent to stick to what I want to do and not sell out and take the next big film that comes along. Don’t get me wrong, that can be great, to do a really big film, but at the moment I think it’s time that I carve out my career and the make the films people will remember. I hope I’ve got a good body of work already.
It’s quite an important stage for me. I’m 23 and I’m making that transition from a girl to a woman and I want to have some good stuff under my belt. It means holding your breath a little bit and being a bit patient — going a bit insane — but it’s worth it because when you get that good job, you feel it’s right.
Everything that’s happened in my career up until now has been very organic and it’s happened naturally through meeting someone and really hitting it off and then going off to do a film with them. I feel my conscience is quite clear with that and I’m confident about the work.
JW: Boogie Woogie is about the art scene in London as a whole. It explores the lives of art dealers, art exhibitors, art buyers, art victims. It’s about the characters in that art world. I play a young artist, kind-of a Tracey Emin vibe. It’s a complete ensemble piece, so it goes through all these different people’s lives and the ups and downs of the fierce art world. It’s amazing how a piece of art is supposed to be moving and touching but when you get to the core of it it’s just fucking expensive.
I play a young video artist who self-documents her life and exposes everybody she comes across. She’s a fierce and completely sexual lesbian. She uses her sexual aura to draw people in and uses it as a weapon. Documents their feelings and her feelings and is looked upon as a dedicated artist. It’s quite clever and conniving of her. A lot of time art doesn’t have room for humanity, it just is. If it’s disgusting, that’s the art — it’s supposed to make you feel sick. Her pieces have a lot of those sorts of moments. She goes deep with it, exposes her girlfriend’s life, makes her look like a fool and sells it on and gets picked up by Vanity Fair. That’s the way it goes, usually. You know, the tough guys, the nasty guys in art tend to come out shining. It’s not like the real world.
With co-stars Alan Cumming and Jack Huston at the Edinburgh photocall for Boogie Woogie.
JW: Totally. To work with Danny [Huston] was pretty amazing. He’s got a great energy. He’s the main art dealer in town, Art Spindle. Amanda [Seyfried] is really sweet and very nice. I really got on with Heather [Graham], she’s a lovely, lovely girl and totally beautiful. Jack [Huston] was so funny and Gillian [Anderson] I just think is fantastic. She’s got such a great range. I was a huge fan of hers from The X-Files! To be on the same screen as Sir Christopher Lee and Joanna Lumley was just amazing. Alan Cumming and I are very close in the film, and we got on really well.
I’ve also just worked with David Suchet on Poirot, and yeah, when you’re working with people like that they draw you in and you draw from them. You’re in awe — they’ve been doing this for years and they still have the same passion. And they’re not, you know, thespians; they’re real actors. Just by watching the way they stand, they know what they’re doing, and it’s really inspirational. You have to up the standards, too. If you don’t know your lines and David Suchet’s standing there, you’re going to look like an absolute idiot! But, you know, I’m ready to meet that challenge now and I’m ready to up my game a little bit.
Boogie Woogie will be out later this year.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine marks the fourth film appearance for Marvel’s most popular mutant. By now, you should be pretty familiar with Wolverine and his super-powered teammates from the previous X-Men movies, but unless you’re a comics aficionado, you might not recognize some of Logan’s other compatriots, such as Wade Wilson, John Wraith, and Agent Zero. And although Sabertooth, Stryker, and Cyclops have been seen on the big screen already, there are new actors playing those roles this time around. That’s why we’ve put together this rundown of the major players you’re going to see in the upcoming installment of the X-Men saga.
Real Name: Logan/James Howlett
Played By: Hugh Jackman, the Australian actor/dancer/singer who rose to fame when he was cast as a then-unknown in 2000’s first X-Men film. Noting that Wolverine’s personality had mellowed in X-Men: The Last Stand, Jackman has been quoted as being excited about playing Wolverine during his most feral days, comparing the performance to that of Robert De Niro’s in the Cape Fear remake.
Powers: Super healing, regeneration, super senses, adamantium-infused skeleton, adamantium-infused claws and a berserker battle fury.
In the Comics: For the first 25 years of Wolverine’s publication in Marvel Comics (first introduced in The Incredible Hulk #181, November 1974), Wolverine’s true origin story was one of comics’ greatest mysteries. As in the first three X-Men movies, readers were given bits of the puzzle over the years, but Wolverine’s true roots weren’t revealed until the 2001-2002 mini-series Origin, which detailed the events of Wolverine’s youth and young adulthood. The comics have also now depicted in many different ways Wolverine’s time as part of the Weapon X program, in which both he and Sabretooth were used as part of a military program to use mutants as super soldiers.
In the Movie: X-Men Origins: Wolverine borrows heavily from several of the comics that have dealt directly with Wolverine’s origin story, but reportedly also has some new or different elements, especially in the Weapon X era. This is, of course, to be expected, since the first three movies very much departed from the comics, de-aging characters like Angel and Iceman, and having Wolverine join the X-Men by himself, rather as a member of a completely new team (with Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, etc).
Real Name: Victor Creed
Played By: Liev Schreiber, an American stage and screen actor who is not previously known for starring in action movies, preferring instead to focus on characters better known for being cerebral than brawny. Schreiber, however, threw himself into preparing to play Sabretooth, bulking up with an extra 40 pounds of muscle through an intensive diet and exercise regimen. Liev Schreiber has been for a few years now dating British-Australian actress Naomi Watts, with whom he has had two sons, Sasha and Samuel.
Powers: Sabretooth’s powers (healing, regeneration, super senses) are nearly identical to those of Wolverine’s, except that he lacks Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton, and his claws are actually just longer fingernails, rather than claws that pop out of his arms like Wolverine’s. Sabretooth is also physically larger and inherently stronger than Wolverine.
In the Comics: Like Wolverine, Sabretooth is a Marvel Comics character known to be much older than he appears, and his encounters with Wolverine go back as far as 1910. As in the movie, Sabretooth served with Wolverine in the Weapon X program, although he did not undergo the same extensive experimentation as Wolverine. After parting ways with Weapon X, Sabretooth spent the next decades working as an assassin, coming into conflict with Wolverine many times, until eventually (and controversially) becoming an X-Man himself.
In the Movie: The most obvious departure for Sabretooth from the comics is the rumor that in the movie he is actually depicted as being Wolverine’s half-brother. In the comics, Sabretooth is usually depicted as having blonde hair (as also depicted in the first X-Men movie), whereas Liev Schreiber has dark brown hair.
Real Name: Major William Stryker
Played By: Danny Huston, the son of acclaimed director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen), and the half-brother of Anjelica Huston. Although Danny Huston probably could have parlayed his famous last name into movie star status, he has instead focused on a career as a character actor in mostly supporting roles in movies like The Aviator, 21 Grams and Children of Men.
Powers: None
In the Comics: Before the release of X2: X-Men United, William Stryker was a relatively obscure character who had only appeared in the 1982 graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, as a Christian televangelist who has launched a campaign to destroy all mutants, who he sees as an abomination in the eyes of God.
In the Movie: Few X-Men characters were as changed from their comic book roots as William Stryker, who was used as the leader of Weapon X, the program responsible for giving Wolverine his adamantium skeleton, and the team that is central to much of the story of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Real Name: Remy LeBeau
Played By: Taylor Kitsch, a Canadian actor and model who appeared in Snakes on a Plane and is a regular cast member on NBC’s Friday Night Lights. Before Taylor Kitsch was cast, Josh Holloway (Lost’s Sawyer) had been in talks to play Gambit (and had also been offered the same role in X-Men: The Last Stand), but had to drop out in both cases due to conflicts with filming Lost.
Powers: Gambit has the ability to imbue physical objects with energy, that he can then throw, which then results in an explosion on impact. Gambit’s preferred choice of thrown object are playing cards.
In the Comics: An orphan who was raised by New Orleans’ Thieves Guild, Gambit took to travelling the world, using his mutant power to help him become a master thief. Gambit was eventually taken in by the genius geneticist known as Mr. Sinister, who helped Gambit better control his powers. In return, Gambit joined a group of mutant assassins called The Marauders (along with Sabretooth). Gambit eventually reformed his criminal ways and joined the X-Men, where he fell in love with Rogue.
In the Movie: Gambit’s portrayal in X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems to more or less match that of the comics, except that the timing suggests that he would be older than Cyclops, who in the comics seems about the same age as Gambit. There are also some pretty wild things that we see Gambit do in the trailer, like using his power on his staff to allow him to climb walls, and set off a devastating quake. Although most of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was filmed in Australia, the production moved to New Orleans for our Cajun mutant’s scenes. Gambit is also one of the two characters in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (along with Deadpool) who may also get his own franchise of solo movies.
Real Name: Wade Wilson
Played By: Ryan Reynolds, who has starred in many comedies as well as Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity. That was talked about at the time as a potential launch vehicle for Hannibal King, also a Marvel Comics character, but those plans have apparently been scrapped. Ryan Reynolds has also long been talked about as a possible star of DC Comics’ movie adaptation of The Flash.
Powers: In the comics, Wade Wilson was not an actual mutant with super powers when he joined Weapon X, although he was a masterful weapons combatant and mercenary. Weapon X give Wade amazing regenerative abilities, but they went wild, causing him to be scarred and disfigured, and since his regeneration also affected his brain, also certifiably loony. Deadpool also went on to develop the ability to realize that he was a character in a comic book, leading him to sometimes break the fourth wall, talking to the reader, and becoming one of the most popular (and hilairous) characters in Marvel’s pantheon.
In the Comics: Mercenary Wade Wilson joined Weapon X without being an actual mutant, but was also dying of cancer. So, Weapon X put Wade through an intensive genetic treatment which gave him super regenerative and healing powers, but at the price of his skin growing so fast as to be a permanent mass of scars, which is what led Wade Wilson to put on a mask and start calling himself Deadpool. In the many years since, Deadpool’s adventures have brought him into contact with (or into conflict with) nearly all of the major figures in Marvel’s world of mutants, and some others who aren’t mutants at all.
In the Movie: How Wade Wilson, AKA Deadpool, is being depicted is one of the hottest topics of discussion for Deadpool fans. There are rumors that Deadpool has been given powers that he does not have in the comics, but there are just as many rumors and speculation that the character in the trailer seen doing all that (watch out for Cyclops-like eye beams) is not actually Wade Wilson at all. Hopefully, whatever happens to Wade in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he will come out of the movie with the potential to become the same “Merc with a Mouth that fans love in the possible spin-off Deadpool movie that has been in development for several years already.
Ryan Reynolds Talks About Playing the Merc with a Mouth
Real Name: Kayla Silverfox
Played By: Lynn Collins, who has appeared in over a dozen movies, including playing Portia in the 2004 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Collins’ TV appearances also include True Blood, Supernatural and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Powers: In the comics, Silver Fox, like Wade Wilson/Deadpool, did not apparently have any mutant abilities before she was given super healing and regenerative abilities by the Weapon X program.
In the Comics: In the 1910s, Wolverine encountered a small community of the Blackfoot Indian tribe, where Sabretooth was also living at the time. Wolverine fell in love with the woman now known as Silver Fox (her real name unknown), and they shared a cabin in the woods. Sabretooth, however attacked, raped, and apparently killed Silver Fox, and causing Wolverine to leave town in grief. Silver Fox, however, had actually survived the attack. Years later, Silver Fox joined the Weapon X program, but because of the memory alterations done to her, Sabretooth, and Wolverine, it is unclear how much they remembered of their past conflicts. Eventually, Silver Fox reunites other members of Weapon X, including Wolverine, Sabretooth, Wraith, and Maverick to investigate the scientist who gave them their false memories, but the encounter ends with the scientist controlling Sabretooth, who kills Silver Fox.
In the Movie: The trailers for X-Men Origins: Wolverine hint quite heavily that Silver Fox’s story in the movie is quite similar to that of the comics, intimating that Silver Fox had died many years earlier, and that Stryker suggests that his treatments will remove Wolverine’s painful memories of her death.
Real Name: Frederick J. Dukes
Played By: Kevin Durand, who at a muscular 6′ 7″ often appears in movies and TV shows as a dangerous tough guy, has appeared in movies like Walking Tall and 3:10 to Yuma, and in Lost‘s fourth season as the vicious mercenary Martin Keamy. Durand is also currently in England, filming Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood movie in which he costars as Little John.
Powers: In the comics, the Blob is an extremely heavyset gentleman who has the mutant abilities to use his massive weight and rubbery skin in a variety of creative ways, including being an immovable object, being able to bounce bullets off his skin and enveloping the fists and weapons of anyone who tries to attack him.
In the Comics: The Blob is one of the X-Men’s oldest enemies, first appearing in Uncanny X-Men #3, all the way back in 1964. The Blob was a member of the majority of the incarnations of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants for the next 25 years. That also included being a core member of the semi-heroic Freedom Force, which was members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants actually working for the U.S. government. However, in the 2006 House of M event, the Blob was one of the mutants who was de-powered by the Scarlet Witch, which left him with deformed body covered by the draping skin that his had previously covered his mutant fat.
In the Movie: The biggest difference between the comic book Blob and the movie Blob is that we see scenes of Fred J. Dukes when he is not super fat. It’s not yet known if Dukes is able to “Blob out” and become his larger version, or if in the movie, his super fat form comes from sort of Weapon X treatment.
Also Known As: Maverick
Real Name: David North, Christoph Nord
Played By: Daniel Henney, a Korean-American actor who, before X-Men Origins: Wolverine, has mostly worked as an actor and model in South Korea.
Powers: In the comics, Agent Zero’s initial mutant ability allows him to absorb kinetic energy, so that he can take punches or fall great heights without suffering any injury. After joining the revived Weapon X (a second time), Agent Zero is also given some limited healing abilities. Agent Zero is also a skilled marksman.
In the Comics: Born Christoph Nord in East Germany, the character known as both Maverick and Agent Zero started as a rebel agent fighting against Communist rule in the 1960s. His efforts were noticed by the CIA, who recruited him to join the Weapon X program. After leaving Weapon X, Nord eventually took the code name of Maverick, working as a mercenary. In the 1990s, Maverick was one of the several mutants who contracted the deadly Legacy Virus, which led Maverick to ask Wolverine to kill him (Wolverine refused). Years later, he was recruited into a second version of Weapon X, which gave him the additional power of super healing, allowing him to recover from the Legacy Virus. At this point, Maverick then took the new code name of Agent Zero. Agent Zero was one of the many mutants who lost his powers during the House of M event, thanks to Scarlet Witch. Reverting to the Maverick alias, he was last seen residing at a special home for former mutants recovering from the loss of their powers.
In the Movie: Agent Zero has two distinctive differences in the comics. First of all, the film portrays him as Asian, not German. Secondly, in the original Weapon X era, the character was more often known as Maverick. The reason for these changes may be that there were actually two characters in the comics known as Maverick, and that other one, AKA Bolt, also appears in the movie. It was not until North/Nord joined the revived Weapon X program that he became known as Agent Zero, which, in the Marvel Comics timeline, is many years after the period depicted in this movie.
Also Known As: Wraith, Kestrel
Real Name: John Wraith
Played By: will.i.am, best known as the founder of the group The Black Eyed Peas. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is will.i.am’s second movie appearance, following a voice role in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa as Moto Moto. That makes this movie his first live action appearance.
Powers: John Wraith has the ability to disappear and teleport, similar to the ability of Nightcrawler, of which will.i.am is a big fan, and the reason he took the role of John Wraith. Wraith is also often depicted using explosive devices, which he is able to places on his enemies and then teleporting to safety. In the comics, Wraith was also able to teleport other people with him (such as the entire Team X), but it is not yet known if he has this ability in the movie. As a member of Weapon X, Wraith was also given a special anti-aging ability.
In the Comics: John Wraith was a member of the original Weapon X program. Unlike many of the more high profile members, Wraith is a relatively obscure character, but he did appear later, when he found that his anti-aging mutation was not working correctly, and teamed up with the former members to investigate Weapon X. Wraith was recruited years later into the revived Weapon X, and was sent with Sabretooth to recruit Maverick, but was killed by Sabretooth in the ensuing fight (even though Maverick eventually joined anyway). John Wraith also has the distinction of being a character who was much more active in the Ultimate Universe than he was in the actual mainstream Marvel Universe.
In the Movie: The movie version of Wraith appears to be quite faithful to the Marvel Universe version of John Wraith, including the cowboy hat that he is often seen wearing. What is not yet known is whether the movie version of Wraith can also use his power to teleport his entire team, or whether he also uses explosives the same way the comic version does.
Also Known As: Maverick II
Real Name: Chris Bradley
Played By: Dominic Monaghan, who is most famous for playing Merry Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings movies, and for subsequently starring in TV’s Lost as the doomed druggie rock star, Charlie Pace.
Powers: In the comics, Bolt is a mutant with the ability to absorb ambient static electricity, which he can then release as electric bolts or as a protective shield.
In the Comics: Chris Bradley was a young mutant who was taken in by Charles Xavier’s school for mutants, where he was diagnosed as having the deadly Legacy Virus. Chris’ parents withdrew him from the school, and he eventually met the original Maverick (AKA Agent Zero), who befriended him, as he also had the Legacy Virus. Taking the code name of Bolt, Chris eventually joined the team of young super heroes known as the New Warriors. When Bolt believed that the original Maverick had been killed, he took on the Maverick identity himself. However, this led him to come in conflict with the original Maverick, then using the identity of Agent Zero, who ironically killed Chris in his guise of Maverick II, not realizing he was his friend.
In the Movie: Thus far, very little has been seen of Dominic Monaghan in character in the trailers and images from the movie, including no images of him using his electric powers. A very interesting footnote to this character is that Monaghan’s role was initially said to be Barnell Bohusk. In the comics, Bohusk is also known as a mutant named Beak with bird-like physical features (feathers, etc), but not the ability to fly. Unlike most of the other characters in the movie, Bohusk/Beak had no history of any connection to Weapon X, so the use of Bohusk’s name was always peculiar. The revelation that the character is actually Bolt makes a lot more sense, thematically.
Also Known As: The White Queen (though presumably not in this movie)
Real Name: Emma Frost
Played By: Tahyna Tozzi, an Australian model/singer/actress who is best known down under for starring in the 2005-2006 Australian TV series Blue Water High, and is making her American mainstream debut as Emma Frost in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s also interesting to note that director Bryan Singer had wanted Sigourney Weaver to costar as Emma Frost in X-Men: The Last Stand, but after Singer left the project, the idea of including Emma Frost in the film’s story was dropped.
Powers: In the comics, Emma Frost is one of the mutants who has actually had a second mutation following the development of her original powers. Emma Frost was originally a powerful psychic, able to read minds, project her thoughts into others, project psychic power bolts that inflicted pain and the ability to put people to sleep. Her second mutation, conversely, was strictly physical, as she gained the ability transform her body into indestructible living diamond, except that in this form, she cannot use her psychic abilities.
In the Comics: Emma Frost is a member of the older generation of mutants, first being known as one of the leaders of the Hellfire Club, a group of manipulative mutants who also trained young mutants, in competition to Charles Xavier’s school. After years of competing with Xavier, Emma Frost eventually agreed to join his Academy as an instructor and member of the X-Men, where she eventually became the co-headmaster of the school (in Xavier’s absence), along with Cyclops, with whom she had a romantic affair following the death of Jean Grey.
In the Movie: As we see Emma Frost in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, she is a teenager, but given that the movie is set many years ago, this does not necessarily suggest a drastic de-aging of the character as was done with Iceman and Angel in the previous X-Men movies. What is particularly interesting is that Emma Frost is depicted as having her ability to transform into a diamond-hard form, even though in the comics she did not acquire this ability until much later. What is not yet known is whether the movie version of Emma Frost also has her psychic abilities, or if the suggestion is that what is her primary ability in the comics will be her secondary ability in the movie(s).
Real Name: Scott Summers
Played By: Tim Pocock, a newcomer to acting apparently, with no other credits known. In the previous movies, set when Scott is older, Cyclops was portrayed by James Marsden.
Powers: Cyclops has the mutant ability to emit powerful force beams, which are often confused as being heat waves because of their bright red color. Scott wears special glasses that allow him to control the beams. Without them, he is often forced to emit the destructive beams with disastrous results.
In the Comics: Cyclops is one of the original members of the X-Men, and over the years has often taken on the role of leader of both the team and Xavier’s school for mutants. A natural born leader, Cyclops has often come into conflict with the rebellious Wolverine.
In the Movie: The trailers imply that Cyclops is an apparent target of the Weapon X team; he’s seen being chased by Sabretooth, and also held prisoner along with many other young mutants, including the young Jason Stryker (seen in X-Men: The Last Stand) and Banshee, the super-sonic mutant whose daughter Siryn was depicted as an Xavier student in X-Men: The Last Stand. This is perhaps one of the movie’s greatest departures from the comics (in addition to the rumors about Deadpool); before joining Charles Xavier’s academy, Scott Summers never had any known contact with the Weapon X team. The only significant character that Scott is known to have encountered in his pre-Xavier youth is the geneticist known as Mr. Sinister, who inhibited Scott’s abilities through mental blocks.
RT Obscura, the exclusive column by renowned critic Kim Newman, sees the writer plumbing the depths of the RT archive in search of some forgotten gems. In his 16th column, Kim revisits Mike Figgis’ star-studded film-within-a-film vampire flick Hotel.
Shot fast and cheap in Venice in 2001, Hotel is even looser than director Mike Figgis‘s earlier Timecode. That had to keep four images in some sort of sync and thus could ill-afford sloppiness, but this improvised effort (Figgis’s background is in jazz, which says a lot) is lopsided, wilfully strange, not always coherent and feels as if lost hours of ‘deleted scenes’ might explain things.
The 24, mostly-excellent ‘web shorts’ included as an extra on the DVD don’t actually help with the story, but at least give actors who barely register in the actual film a shot at getting a laugh. They don’t seem to be online as of this writing, which is a shame. Despite everything, Hotel is a fun watch, has a freewheeling feel, is full of good jokes, and stretches to unusual creepy or erotic sequences. Even viewers who reject it out of hand (and there will be a lot) will find some scenes sticking in the memory — though I’d worry about anyone who tries to copy the kinkier stuff.
In the opening, guest Omar Johnson (John Malkovich) joins the staff of the Hungaro Hotel in Venice in a meal, which he partakes in from behind bars in a basement. The fare on offer turns out to be prosciutto made from human flesh. It seems the manager (Danny Huston) and his observant, odd staff — not to mention a huffy tour guide (Julian Sands) — are some variety of vampire, and they lurk in the background or around the margins, waiting for the unwary to wander into their clutches (Figgis consigns several of his most loathesome characters to their larder).
The guests are filmmakers working on a loopy-sounding Dogme version of John Webster‘s Jacobean The Duchess of Malfi. The nearly covert plot involves an assassination attempt which puts flamboyantly difficult director Trent Stoken (Rhys Ifans) in a coma so that sneaky producer Jonathan Danderfine (David Schwimmer) has to take over the film, a process which involves getting close to Stoken’s girlfriend-star Naomi (Saffron Burrows).
We get a few scenes from Malfi, as adapted by Heathcote Williams (who also plays Boscola), and glimpse what Burrows (“I am Duchess of Malfi still”), Mark Strong and other talents could make of the text; the play is so grotesquely violent and demented there has to date been no serious attempt to film it. There are sly send-ups of the Dogme film movement (“it means it will be badly-lit”), though the film-within-a-film scenes are actually slicker than the surrounding stuff. Salma Hayek shows up as the monstrous ‘Charlee Boux’, a catty cable TV documentary host who comes on like a feral version of the Geraldine Chaplin character from Nashville and enjoyably gets into a hissing fight with a rival (Lucy Liu) which echoes the animal snarling director and producer do at each other. Ifans is a lively, powerful, funny presence as a director who might be either a genius or a total idiot, and the film’s energy level sags notably when he’s in a coma.
There’s an entertaining if queasy emphasis on weird sex — with Stefania Rocca as a red-dressed call girl who dips her breasts in champagne glasses of milk for the benefit of a crass movie financier (George DiCenzo), quarter-of-the-screen vampire lesbian business, a peculiar sequence from Malfi in which Burrows takes the male role in a doggystyle sex scene before giving birth to twin baby dolls and Trent’s return from coma when his nurse (Chiara Mastroianni) uses him as a ceremonial sex aid.
Given that this is a movie which trades a lot on connections, note how many of the cast have been in vampire movies (admittedly, some made after Hotel): Malkovich (Shadow of the Vampire), Huston (30 Days of Night), Sands (Tale of a Vampire), Rocca (a 2002 made-for-TV Dracula), Liu (Rise), Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn), Burrows (Perfect Creature); then again, maybe there are so many vampire movies around that any large-cast film will have a simialr record.
Also floating about are Valeria Golino as an actress who complains all her lines have been cut but she still has two nude scenes, Jason Isaacs as an Aussie star who quits when he gets a Ridley Scott film (guess who this is a jab at?), Burt Reynolds (!) as the spokesman for a flamenco troupe (if he really improvised his terrific, double-edged big speech, we’ll have to reassess him as a writer), Valentina Cervi as a maid and Alexandra Staden (who played Modesty Blaise in the direct-to-DVD My Name is Modesty) as a p.a. (barely visible in the film, but very funny in two of the ‘web-based shorts’ inclduing a wonderfully sustained phone routine about ordering drugs for the wrap party).
If Timecode was one movie occupying four equal screens, Hotel (which uses the Timecode splitscreen for several sequences) is more like four films which occupy the same screen — a Player-ish filmbiz comedy, that Dogme Duchess, the vampire picture and a sex/assassination conspiracy thriller. Perhaps predictably, this took a critical pasting; though, frankly, it’s got far more going for it than the ‘proper’ movie (Cold Creek Manor) Figgis made at about the same time.
Like Michael Winterbottom, Takashi Miike, Fassbinder or even Jesus Franco, Figgis is so prolific that he can afford to turn out experimental movies between more mainstream efforts, and seems to be more interested in stretching himself and playing with new toys (he designed his own camera rig for this) than turning out a consistent oeuvre. Like all of the above cited directors, he takes the risk of dashing off an indulgent exercise which befuddles more than it delights. And it is a risk — Alex Cox did one of those larks, Straight to Hell, and self-destructed a promising career.
Though it scores high on the “oh come on, now” meter, there are things in Hotel that repay repeat visits. And don’t miss the shorts — if only to see Danny Huston and Saffron Burrows doing what amounts to a Monty Python routine about the hotel bell and a marvelous standalone scene in which the producer has to bail his director and an actor out of an Italian jail before the show can go on.
THE SMURFIEST SMURF SMURFIE EVER SMURFED IN SMURFEATERS
News of a all-CGI Smurfs movie made the news cycle a few years back, but I think it was quickly dismissed as one of those curious announcements that we would never actually see made into a movie (like say, a live-action Transformers movie. Oh wait…). Well, the thing is actually happening, and footage of it from some big Smurfs shindig in Europe has appeared online, in French. The CGI imagery mostly appears at the end of the clip, and the guys at Coming Soon have done some screen captures for your browsing ease. Obviously, this is very early work, but right now, the Smurfs sort of look like VeggieTales characters, but that could just be a symptom of the work not being done yet. Maybe they’ll look like Smurfin’ Beowulf by the time they’re done, heh.
TIM BURTON’S ENTIRE MOVIE CAREER HAS BEEN BUILDING UP TO THIS
Walt Disney Pictures announced a revamping of their release dates for the next few years, and the list included a date (March 19th, 2010) for Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton‘s take on the Lewis Carroll classic, which will combine performance capture (think Beowulf), live action and the wonders of digital 3-D. Linda Woolverton, who wrote Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and cowrote The Lion King is adapting this second Disney adaptation of Alice. In a sense, Tim Burton already made his own sort of Wonderland movie in Nightmare Before Christmas, with its wide variety of holiday-based fantasy characters. The funny thing is that if you try to imagine a “gothic” take on Alice, like what you might think Tim Burton would do, there already exists something like that, which is American McGee’s Alice, a video game from several years ago, which is perhaps slightly dated (graphics wise), but is still visually stunning and sort of awesome. There is not just the game, however, but also Universal Pictures’ plans to adapt McGee’s game into its own gothic-hued Alice movie, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as an all-grown-up Alice who returns to Wonderland to find it even more twisted and disturbing 20 years later. That Alice project has been bubbling through development for nearly a decade now, but I suspect the allure of beating Burton’s movie to the punch might just get it started again soon, with Burton’s movie 23 months from release.
COMIC BOOKS, VIDEO GAMES, ACTION FIGURES… AND NOW BOARD GAMES
Universal Pictures and Hasbro announced a deal this week to adapt at least 4 movies based on Hasbro properties in the next six years, with the goal of the first one coming out in 2010, and there being at least one a year every year after that. Hasbro’s properties are quite vast, and apparently at the top of their target list are Monopoly (already announced as a project for director Ridley Scott!), Battleship, Ouija, Clue (a new movie, not a sequel), Stretch Armstrong (at one time in development as a Jackie Chan movie) and Magic: The Gathering. The possibilities are quite extensive, as you’ll see if you follow the subidiary links on Hasbro’s Wikipedia page. For example, in addition to Magic: The Gathering, Hasbro also owns Dungeons and Dragons, and all of those great campaign settings, like Dragonlance, Planescape and Ravenloft. The Milton Bradley board games also have several concepts that are as good for big budget movies, I suppose, as say a Disney theme park ride or Jumanji (Candyland and Hungry Hungry Hippos, in particular). Of course, we’ll probably just end up getting a Mr. Potato Head movie starring Tim Allen that opens in late August and is forgotten by Labor Day.
AKIRA: AN ANIME MOVIE SO AWESOME IT HAS TO BE REMADE WITH REAL ACTUAL PEOPLE… HUH?
These days, whenever I hear about movie remake projects that were (A) pretty good the first time around and (B) claim to be truer adaptations of the original material than (A), the first thing that pops in my head is Stephen King‘s The Shining TV mini-series from about 10 years ago (it was that long? wow.). Now, admittedly, it was Stephen King’s novel, and I guess he felt like his original vision warranted getting made, but this new thing of his was supposed to compete in some way with Stanley “Freakin” Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror? And so, Leonardo DiCaprio is producing a two-movie live action adaptation of the original six Akira manga books, the first half of which was adapted in the late 1980s as arguably the greatest sci-fi anime movie ever, ever, ever. We know Akira is the greatest because of what they say about imitation and flattery, and 20 years of anime movies and TV shows have flattered it A LOT. It’s unconfirmed whether DiCaprio will actually act in the movies (although there is a well-reported rumor that he would play Kaneda, the sort-of main character, the leader of a motorcycle gang). What is confirmed is that the setting will be “Neo Manhattan” (Americanizing the “Neo Tokyo” of the books and anime movie), and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be playing Tetsuo, the young man with the ca-razy, big-exploding-bubble-at-the-end-of-the-movie, psychic powers who is the other sort-of main character (the titular Akira is important but not a protagonist/antagonist in the traditional sense). The director (Ruairi Robinson) and writer (Gary Whitta) are both new to Hollywood feature films, and Warner Bros hopes to release the first half of the adapation in the summer of 2009, possibly right around the same time Joseph Gordon Levitt will also be seen in theaters as Cobra Commander in G.I. Joe.
2012: THE END OF THE WORLD AS ROLAND EMMERICH KNOWS IT
As 1999 gave way to 2000, and then 2001, etc., it seemed like all the paranormal “experts” out there started adjusting their doomsday scenarios a bit. Now the world wasn’t supposed to end last week, it was just a few more years yet. A favorite target is 2012, which is reportedly the end of the Mayan calendar, and therefore, the target date for all sorts of big bad mojo, hocus pocus, allakhazam, etc. And so, Roland Emmerich, who has built his big budget blockbuster career around various doomsday scenarios (aliens in Independence Day, big lizards in Godzilla, global warming in The Day After Tomorrow, etc), announced this week that his next project would be called 2012 (which Internet people pretty quickly figured out was connected to the Mayan calendar… thing), and it was up for sale to the highest bidder. That studio turned out to be, not soon after, Columbia/Sony, which will release it sometime in the summer of 2009, giving us about two and a half years to prepare for whatever terrible fate Emmerich predicts for us.
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Roland Emmerich isn’t the only high profile type director in the apocalypse game, though. M. Night Shyamalan‘s new movie, The Happening, comes out this June 13th, 2008, and the first trailer recently appeared in theaters and online. The slightly hilarious thing, though, is that about a week before *that* trailer, a completely different trailer appeared online, which basically gave away the “twist” of the nature of the big bad apocalyptic thing that’s “happening.” You have to imagine that Shyamalan probably had a mild heart attack when he saw the big reveal given away in the trailer, and hence, the yanking. Anyway, if you want to watch that trailer with a knowledge of what the movie is about, here in spoiler space (click and scroll) it is: Some sort of a new biological life form is spreading, causing people to be obsessively compelled to commit suicide, sort of a “Lemming Effect”. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel‘s huge, gorgeous eyes star.
WOLVERINE AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS
X-Men Origins: Wolverine lit up the movie news sites nearly every day this week, as a large ensemble cast was trickled out in dribbles and spurts. What we’re left with a week later is a cast that looks more and more like the movie should be called Weapon X or even X-Men 4, as it includes nearly every character ever connected in the X-Comics in any way to Weapon Plus or the Weapon X program, and a few that weren’t. Where to start? Well, first off, there is Danny Huston, who will be playing the younger version of Stryker (Brian Cox) from the second movie (keep in mind that in the comics, Stryker wasn’t even involved with Weapon X). And then, there are the many, many Weapon X characters: Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber, replacing Tyler Mane with someone who is more “actor” than “wrestler/stuntman”), Silver Sable (Lynn Collins), John “Kestrel” Wraith (Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas) and Agent Zero (AKA Maverick) (Daniel Henney). Not part of Weapon X (traditionally) but also included in the cast are Gambit (Taylor Kitsch from TV’s Friday Night Lights) and “Barnell” (Dominic Monaghan, who played Charlie on Lost, and also played a recurring midget in a few movies back in the early 2000s. I KEED.).
The confusing thing about Monaghan’s character of “Barnell” is that the trades are saying that he has electricity powers, but the only Barnell in the Marvel universe is a mutant named Beak, who is a sad sack with the physical features of a bird (beak, chicken feet, feathers all over, the whole thing), without the expected ability to actually, you know, FLY. Beak is miserable and very sympathetic in a “zero to hero” way that Monaghan would be perfect for (let me admit right up front that Beak is one of my favorite new X-characters introduced in the last 10 years). So, why they’re saying he’s got a completely different M.O. is mildly bizarre. If they’re going to fake us out, you have to wonder why they would bother using the “Barnell” name. And, oh, yeah, there are also rumors that an extra has been seen sporting a huge fat suit as The Blob.
With all these potential enemies (or team mates of a sort) being announced, Wolverine’s biggest threat was also announced this week, in the form of the daughter of that “Achey Breaky Heart” guy, and the unstoppable juggernaut that is The Hannah Montana Movie. If her B.O. beats Wolverine’s B.O. on the 5/1/09 weekend, it will be a sort of generational milestone, I suspect. I would give Hannah Montana her own story, but ummm… I don’t really have much to say. I’ve seen commercials for the TV show, and it appears to be about a teenage girl who is secretly a Britney Spears type pop star. And it’s very popular with girls who were born after I received my Masters Degree. Oh hey, look, I actually did write a paragraph about Hannah Montana. So… NEXT!
WOULD YOU RATHER BE REMEMBERED AS EBENEZER SCROOGE, OR FRASIER CRANE?
Comedy director David Zucker (whose filmography started with Airplane! and most recently includes Scary Movie 3 & Scary Movie 4) has set his particular style of movie satire on tackling the Christmas genre, apparently, with plans of doing a modernized, Americanized adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, called An American Carol. Kelsey Grammer starred in a TV version a few years back as Ebenezer Scrooge, and so he’s been picked by Zucker to star in this version as well. I’m sort of reminded of how many times Patrick Stewart has played Scrooge (in a 1999 TV movie, and in several stage versions), and to this movie’s detriment (before it’s even made), of how great Stewart was as Scrooge. I’m pretty sure Patrick Stewart probably would not have signed on for Zucker’s movie, so… yay for Frasier.
WOULD YOU PREFER STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT… AGAIN!?
With the “chapter closing” movies for both Rocky and Rambo actually performing fairly well at movie theaters (as opposed to being double-packed as direct-to-video DVDs, heh), Sylvester Stallone appears to be setting his sights on repeating the magic with other movies he starred in 20 years ago. Next up? I don’t remember the character’s name, and I’m not inspired enough to look it up, but whoever he played in Cliffhanger? That guy. The sequel will be called The Dam, and I’m guessing it involves a dam.
WHY FIGHT THE STREETS? WHAT HAVE THEY EVER DONE TO YOU?
With lots of other fighting games (Tekken, Mortal Kombat, etc) getting live action movies going, a new Street Fighter movie is also on the way, with Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang on Smallville) being cast as the main character as Chun Li, and Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile), Chris Klein (American Pie) and Rick Yune (Die Another Day), also costarring. After a game gets already adapted as a movie that includes those four sacred words (Jean. Claude. Van. Damme.), can a second movie, even with a completely different cast and look for a new generation, ever hope to be as… well, whatever that movie was? Andrzej Bartkowiak (Exit Wounds, Romeo Must Die) is directing.
SHAKING OUT THE REST OF KETCHUP IN THIS WEEK’S BOTTLE
And that, as they say, was the week that was.
Greg Dean Schmitz
Do you have a scoop for Greg? You can contact him at http://www.myspace.com/gregdean88
Now that filming has finally begun on the first X-Men prequel, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, details of who will be joining Hugh Jackman on his latest trip down Adamantium Way are starting to come to light.
Details like, for instance, JoBlo‘s report that Danny Huston (30 Days of Night) is playing William Stryker, the U.S. Army colonel with an axe to grind against mutantkind. This news kinda-sorta adds weight to earlier reports that had Liev Schreiber playing Wolvie’s arch-nemesis, Sabretooth.
And that isn’t all: Not to be outdone, IESB has shared the news that Lynn Collins (The Number 23) has signed on to play Silver Fox, the hard-to-kill object of Wolverine’s affections. If you’ve been paying attention to the rumors, Collins as Silver Fox comes out of left field; other reports had Maggie Q or Michelle Monaghan tabbed to take the role.
But wait, there’s more! According to a member of SuperheroHype’s message board community, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) has joined the cast, too — as Gambit, the card-throwing, stick-wielding Cajun anti-hero. The scooper claims that Kitsch has signed a three-picture deal.
Even Ain’t It Cool News has gotten in on the Wolverine casting rumor fun, speculating that none other than Ryan Reynolds has been chosen to play the “merc with a mouth,” Deadpool.
A final bit of Wolverine-related info comes from Film School Rejects, where “a very reliable source” has passed along an interesting, albeit spoilerish, piece of information about one of the film’s possible villains. We’re not going to share it here, but if you just can’t resist, follow the last of the links below!
Source: Ain’t It Cool News
Source: SuperheroHype
Source: JoBlo
Source: IESB
Source: Film School Rejects
In this week’s Ketchup, Sam Raimi discusses possible options for a fourth "Spider-Man," the cast of "Iron Man" is looking rather sharp in the first cast photo, and the Disney brain trust makes a wise business decision.
Also, "Transformers" unleashes a slick TV spot for those not already excited enough, and "Kill Bill" may have two more sequels on the way. Read on.
This Week’s Most Popular News:
Sam Raimi Discusses "Spider-Man 4" Villains
A whole bunch of new bad guys might be on their way … but still no love for The Lizard?
First "Iron Man" Cast Photo!
The guys who are in charge of early marketing for Marvel’s "Iron Man" have been keeping us pretty busy over the last few weeks. And now comes a rather cool new cast photo.
Disney Halts DTV Sequels! Hooray!
Good news all around. Plus, get this: Disney CCO John Lasseter has called the upcoming Tinkerbell movie "unwatchable." Ouch.
Powerful New "Transformers" Ad
You guys know I’ve just recently come around on this "Transformers" flick. I was pretty skeptical at first, but with each new trailer and promo spot, I’m getting just a little more geeked for the movie…
Is Tarantino Preparing Two "Kill Bill" Sequels?
Well, according to one source he sure seems to be … maybe.
A little more of this Kiddo wouldn’t hurt.
In Other News:
Stephen Woolley is one of the UK’s most successful producers, with a string of credits to his name that include titles like "Interview with the Vampire", "The Crying Game", "Michael Collins" and "Little Voice." As a director he most recently delivered "Stoned", the Brian Jones biopic. RT-UK caught up with him recently at the Cannes Film Festival where he gave us the latest on the soon-to-shoot "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" based on the book by journalist Toby Young.
"The book is Toby Young going to New York in the nineties, getting this plum job at Vanity Fair and then just screwing up," Woolley told RT-UK, "it’s very funny and very self-deprecating. He doesn’t blame anyone except for himself, he realises that he just didn’t know how to behave in New York."
The cast includes Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst and Jeff Bridges, and we spoke to Woolley about his choices. "[Toby’s character Sidney] is obnoxious and if you’re going to cast an obnoxious character you want to find someone you quite like," Woolley said, "So when they do something bad you sympathise with him; you want to like him. Simon’s so likable that you really want to like him.
"Kirsten Dunst then came on board and she’s going to be really great for Alison, who’s kind-of the less glamorous person around in this world of glamorous celebrity."
Woolley also mentioned that the film would include a number of celebrity cameos. "It’s about how the tail wags the dog. The whole idea behind the book and in turns behind the film is that Sidney’s character thinks that they should rule, that the stars should be pandering to them, not the other way around," he told us, " It’s not about Julia Roberts wanting to be interviewed by Rotten Tomatoes, it’s about you needing Julia Roberts, you know. That’s the whole thing that Sidney doesn’t quite get.
"We’ve got loads of celebrity cameos in the film. None that I can tell you now because they’re all interchangeable and we’re out to lots of different people at the moment, but as we go on we’ll be able to release names and let you know."
The film goes into production this month, and RT-UK will be sure to keep you updated on the shoot. For now, though, you can read our full interview with Woolley below:
RT-UK: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People; for someone who’s unfamiliar with the book could you maybe explain what it’s all about?
SW: Basically the book is Toby Young going to New York in the nineties, getting this plum job at Vanity Fair and then just screwing up. He didn’t deliberately screw up, he just did, and the more he tried to conform the more he basically lost friends. He was at the top and he just slid down the pole.
It’s a great read; it’s very funny and very self-deprecating. He doesn’t blame anyone except for himself, he realises that he just didn’t know how to behave in New York. He was arrogant and deluded and he thought, "I’m from London. They’re all going to know who I am, they’re all going to respect me, I’ll just go out there and be the cock of the walk." They just took one look at him and said, "Who are you? This isn’t going to work."
It’s a very funny read and we got it about four years ago and we hired a writer, Peter Straughan, to write the screenplay. We realised that the book was really a series of anecdotes – there was no through-line – and for a movie you really need something to hold onto.
I read a script of Peter’s called Three Bad Men, which was really funny, about three serial killers who get together and decide that they’re going to stop killing. And then, of course, they come across people they really want to kill! It’s an hilarious script but it never got made. I loved it and I thought it was just the right kind of humour for the film. Peter wrote a terrific script which introduces a little more of a romantic-comedy line but in a slightly less formulised rom-com way.
I sent that out to a bunch of directors and Bob Weide, who does Curb Your Enthusiasm, really loved the script. I met with him and bought him on board. And Simon Pegg came on board because I thought he was absolutely the right person to play Toby’s character. Simon’s got brilliant comic timing.
RT-UK: He’s also got that self-deprecating thing down pat…
SW: Yeah, the guy is obnoxious and if you’re going to cast an obnoxious character you want to find someone you quite like. So when they do something bad you sympathise with him; you want to like him. Simon’s so likable that you really want to like him. That was really crucial casting for us, casting Simon, and the rest fell into place after that.
Kirsten Dunst I worked with on Interview with the Vampire and Bob Weide did a film called Mother Night with her, which he wrote and produced. When Kirsten’s name came up we realised we both knew her. She came on board and she’s going to be really great for Alison, who’s kind-of the less glamorous person around in this world of glamorous celebrity.
RT-UK: Really? She’s always struck me as rather glamorous.
SW: I think in Spider-Man she’s always played a kind-of much more ordinary character and I think she’s great at that. She’s not a supermodel; Kirsten’s quite attainable. She’s not the girl equivalent of those six-foot-five guys you see walking down the Croisette that you look at and think, "I’ll never be that. I’m never going to have a suntan like that, I’m never going to walk like that, I’m a nerd." She’s like us, which is great, and I think that’s part of her appeal.
RT-UK: She gets a bit drowned, I think, by the scale of Spider-Man. She doesn’t get the time she deserves.
SW: Nobody really does, do they? They’re just all crash-bang-wallop special effects. Spider-Man 2 was great, I thought Sam really pulled that off.
RT-UK: They’re great movies, but actors are often part of the scenery in them. I loved her in Elizabethtown, where she really gets to explore the character she’s playing.
SW: I actually really loved her in Bring it On, my kids made me watch it and I thought she was really great in that. I love Kirsten and I think you’re right, she doesn’t get enough time in the Spider-Man series. But what she does do and what she symbolises is not an extraordinary person, just someone that you can relate to, and I think that was very important for our script. You get someone like Keira Knightley, who’s great and a brilliant actor, but she’s otherworldly. She’s not in our world.
RT-UK: How does Jeff Bridges fit into the cast?
SW: Jeff was always our first choice to play this part. Clayton Harding is the character, based on Graydon Carter. He was always our first choice but wasn’t available when we were originally ready to go. We went to a whole host of actors from Robin Williams through to Michael Douglas, you know, all these actors. Robin Williams loved the script but we couldn’t make the dates work, and it all went round and round in circles. Finally we said, "What about Jeff? Is he still busy?" He was doing Iron Man when we originally wanted to go and he’d finished so we went back to him, he read it and loved it and said he’d do it.
The reason Jeff was our first choice was because he has gravitas, he has the ability to play humour, and plus he has that twinkle in his eye. You know that, at some point, he would have been the rebel and now he’s the conformed guy who’s Mr. Straight. At one point you know he’d have been as rebellious as Sidney, Simon’s character. It’s important that you understand why he employs him because it’s weird to employ this Brit guy to come to Vanity Fair, or Sharps as it’s called in our film, and work there. You have to have a sense of mischievousness there to understand why he does that. Jeff is ideal for that.
RT-UK: All the pieces fell into place in time.
SW: Yeah, it was great. Danny Huston’s playing another guy in the office and Gillian Anderson is playing a PR woman.
It’s about how the tail wags the dog. The whole idea behind the book and in turns behind the film is that Sidney’s character thinks that they should rule, that the stars should be pandering to them, not the other way around. It’s not about Julia Roberts wanting to be interviewed by Rotten Tomatoes, it’s about you needing Julia Roberts, you know. That’s the whole thing that Sidney doesn’t quite get. He thinks it’s the Algonquin Club where you’ve got Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Groucho Marx, writers as Gods and actors as cattle.
Whereas of course PR is now so strong that you can’t get to touch the hem of Keira Knightley’s dress without having to go through a string of PR companies and be there at 3:10 on the dot and if you say the wrong thing you’re out, you know. It’s control and it’s about that kind of celebrity. There’s a real truth in the film and it’s not necessarily a truth that the general public will understand, and it’s not what we’re hammering home because in a sense it’s a romantic comedy, but the underlying satire is very strong and it’s very real.
I think the closest films for us are the films of Billy Wilder. Films like The Apartment, where you’ve got these characters who are caught up in something they don’t quite understand. They’re railing against something which they realise is really nonsense.
RT-UK: Is it set during the same period of the book in the nineties?
SW: No, we’ve updated it completely. Nothing has changed!
RT-UK: You’ve changed the names of the characters and the magazine, are you using real stars as reference points?
SW: Yeah, we’ve got loads of celebrity cameos in the film. None that I can tell you now because they’re all interchangeable and we’re out to lots of different people at the moment, but as we go on we’ll be able to release names and let you know.
If you like your action westerns extra gritty and a little on the Australian side, you’ll want to be sure to check out John Hillcoat‘s excellent "The Proposition." But since it’s a limited release title, you might just need this trailer to hold you over until the DVD release.
"Australian Outback, 1880s. Set against the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the Outback, THE PROPOSITION is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, revenge, and the quest for justice in a land without rule.
The film opens in the middle of a frenzied gunfight between the police and a gang of bushrangers. Charlie Burns and his brother Mikey are captured by the British law enforcer Captain Stanley who makes Charlie an impossible proposition."
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Equal parts Sergio Leone, Walter Hill, and Sam Peckinpah, "The Proposition" stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt, and David Wenham — and it’s got an 85% approval rating on the Tomatometer, which isn’t too shabby.
Director John Hillcoat had a big ambition when he undertook "The Proposition": a Western with a truly Aussie sensibility.
"It’s the Australian West," he said. "We’ve tried to reclaim it for ourselves."
"The Proposition," opened in limited release in the U.S. on May 5 after an enthusiastic response at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals.
In the film, set in the Outback in the late 1800s, Charley Burns (Guy Pearce) is captured by the authorities, and given an ultimatum by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone): if he slays his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston) within a week, his younger brother Mikey will be set free. If not, Mikey dies.
"The Proposition" is filled with sharp supporting performances by the likes of Emily Watson and John Hurt, as well as some startling cinematography, a haunting score by Nick Cave (who wrote the screenplay), and fascinating characters, whose capacities for good and evil deeds shift convincingly.
Guy Peace in "The Proposition"
Australia’s colonial history leant itself to a lot of potential for drama, from the harshness of the climate to the settlers’ condescending, often violent attitudes toward the Aboriginal population. Hillcoat said he wanted to make a film that was true to history but also worked dramatically.
"It’s been a dream to do a film out in the elements like that and trying to tackle that part of our history because it hasn’t really been seen on the screen like that," he said.
Hillcoat said he was inspired by revisionist Westerns of the 1970s, and films that displayed a realistic, sometimes harsh frontier, like Robert Altman‘s "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," Sam Peckinpah‘s "The Wild Bunch," and Terrence Malick‘s "Days of Heaven."
"What I loved about Peckinpah and Altman and Malick is there’s a link to reality, and what the times were, a kind of truthfulness about what it would have been like back then," he said.
For years, Hillcoat had wanted Cave to do the score for such a Western in an Australian setting. They agreed that Cave would have a go at the script, but Hillcoat thought it would be a loose outline that would later be fashioned into a screenplay. Over a matter of a few weeks, Cave came up with the scenario.
"Once he started, out it came, the story of the brothers and the central conflict that we could hang all this stuff on," he said. "Nick surprised me and himself."
Nick Cave and John Hillcoat
When Pearce got the script, he thought it was something special.
"It was so beautifully written," he said. "It was so poetic and so evocative, which is very rare. It was very easy for my imagination to be fueled and to get a sense of what it was they were trying to tell."
Pearce was also attracted to the moral complexity of the story.
"Obviously the scenario is quite extreme and rather harrowing," he said. "It almost seems like an impossible task to contemplate how one might choose one brother over another or one family member over another, particularly when it comes to having to kill [someone]."
The moral ambiguity and violence in the script, as well as the plan to shoot the film in the Outback, made the film a tough sell, Hillcoat said.
"It was incredibly hard to finance because of the tone and the script," he said. "The financers knew it was a logistical risk to go out there and build sets in that kind of territory. By the time the money got together and we finally had everyone ready to go, we had slid into the beginning of the summer."
Trouble struck early when Hillcoat and several members of the crew were involved in a serious car accident, in which their vehicle hit some rough terrain and rolled over three times.
"They’d thought I had broken my neck," he said. "Twenty-four hours later, I greeted the key cast that had arrived on a charter flight. I had a neck brace and black eyes. That was just the beginning."
Guy Pearce and Danny Huston
The environment posed many serious challenges; temperatures reached well into the 100s, and many scenes were shot at night because the cameras were too hot to touch. The week after production, fierce winds leveled the majority of the sets. So as rough as the conditions were, things could have been worse, Hillcoat said.
"Luck has a major part when it has to do with the developments," he said. "Those strong winds could have come at any moment when we were shooting, so we were lucky."
And the difficulty of the shoot created both a sense of camaraderie among the cast members and a greater feeling for the material.
"All that stuff adds to what you’re doing," Pearce said "The environment really informs what you’re doing. The environment and the world that these people live in and the level of survival is far more extreme than what we know it to be today, [although] certainly [it is] for some cultures, not for others. It was a real fascinating sort of journey to enter into that."
"It was one of those situations where everyone knew it was going to be quite extraordinary," Hillcoat said. "Everyone kind of bonded rather than tore each other apart."
Much of the good feeling on the set came from Hillcoat’s method of directing, Pearce said.
"He really knows what he wants, and what he wants is very true and honest performances," he said. "He’s very open to having you find that very true and honest place. He certainly doesn’t limit you in your honest interpretation of the work. He’s my kind of director."
Guy Pearce and John Hurt
And in getting to the truth of the material, the film often depicts some very graphic floggings, shootings, and spearings. But Pearce said it’s the tone of the film, the sudden but inevitable flare-ups, that make the violence seem more shocking.
"Some say, ‘Oh, the film is violent.’ I think on some level, people are inadvertently complimenting the film by saying that, because we’re talking about the fact that it actually is effective," he said. "There are plenty of films out there that are violent, where people run around with machine guns and shoot the hell out of everybody, and there’s no aftermath. To me, that’s disrespectful in film. It’s just like a video game.
"To me, this feels complete in the addressing of violence: You have the lull before the storm, you have the really horrific storm, and you have the cleanup afterwards," he continued. "There’s probably less violence in this film than in the majority of other films. It’s just that when it happens, it feels real."
The violence feels more real because of the setting, Pearce said.
"It’s kind of a looming violence," he said. "We know that this world is a harsh and dangerous one, and it’s one that’s fraught with all sorts of difficulties in regards to surviving. You feel quite troubled at the idea that potentially anything violent could happen. It’s that looming violence that adds up for people when they watch it."
Regardless, Pearce said he feels American audiences will find a lot in the story that will resonate.
"I feel it should particularly appeal to Americans because on some level, there’s a similar frontier environment, [with] people really being out of place and trying to make a home in such a harsh environment that’s not their own," he said. "And really, the story’s about human emotion rather than necessarily a historical document."
Emily Watson
Those complex emotions are in some ways incongruous with the idea of the Western in film, with exception of the 1970s anti-Westerns, Hillcoat said.
"Your sympathies keep swinging between some of the characters, and that’s very unusual because normally the American West is put into very black and white terms," he said.
And Hillcoat said he feels that dealing in black and white is a problem in today’s political climate, one that "The Proposition" refutes.
"Life isn’t like that," he said. "I know Bush is trying to tell everyone life is like that. Part of the mood of all that in a political context [is] empire building and the consequences of violence. I’m hoping it will ring a chord here [in the U.S.]."
And it has certainly made a big impression on Pearce; he said the film, from the cinematography to the music to his co-stars’ performances make "The Proposition" a particularly special film for him.
"It’s by far my favorite film that I’ve ever been in," he said. "Look, that’s not to take anything away from ‘Memento‘ or ‘L.A. Confidential,’ because I think they’re both extraordinary pieces of work. But there’s something about this that moves me in a way I haven’t felt before.
"I have to be fair, because I haven’t watched the other [films] for a couple years," he continued. "[But] there’s something so raw. Maybe it means more to me because it’s an Australian story."
Still, Pearce said, "It’s a story about human emotions, so it doesn’t really matter where it’s set."
They’re not exactly blockbusters but we couldn’t resist sharing the new photo galleries for "Stick It," "Wassup Rockers" and "The Proposition."
From the creators of that modern classic, "Bring it On," comes another flick about girl athletes that don’t get enough respect: gymnasts. Starring Missy Peregrym as the punkish, rebellious teen protagonist, "Stick It" promises lots of flipping, twisting, tumbling action for the family crowd.
Writer-director Jessica Bendinger must have channeled both Busby Berkeley and taken a cue from star Jeff Bridges‘ dream sequence in "The Big Lebowski" to get this memorable shot.
The Larry Clark fans out there might be interested to peek at the American Apparel-esque stills from his latest pseudo-doc drama, "Wassup Rockers." This tale is set in South Central LA and follows a band of Latino skater-teens (all first-time actors, using their real names) as they voyage out of the "safety" of the hood and into the uncharted territory of Beverly Hills.
"Wassup Rockers" screened at this year’s Slamdance, and is set for limited release June 23, 2006.
Another festival film with some indie buzz was Australian western "The Proposition," starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson. First Look Pictures will distribute in limited release May 5 in New York City.
An ultra-violent, starkly beautiful pic, "The Proposition" was written and scored by none other than Nick Cave; if you know Cave’s music, you can guess what the film’s vibe will be like. For Tim’s Sundance capsule review, click here.
